Screams From the Balcony (24 page)

[To Douglas Blazek]

June 12, 1965

well, I gotta figure you aren’t dead but I’m drunk mainly…listening to Dos Passos on radio, my god, he sounds like an englishman! a fop! umm, ummm. they’ve gotten to him, he’s soft and sly and addled, christ, I mean he’s gone back on everything, if you know what I mean. I feel shame for him. his whole speech and thought garbled; here you are an unknown kid in Illinois with more clean and feel and real than a world-famous what????? god, life rakes the shit out of us! now I turn to a little dark Bach organ work, better. Bach was supposed to be a man of God but I always get the idea when listening to his organ works that the devil is talking to me, giving me the straight deal on what is—am I mad? hell yes, maybe so. [* * *]

so I write you a poem:

 

DRUNK AGAIN AND WONDER, WONDERING, AND SO SIMPLY

DETERRED THAT THE BUCKLE OF MY BELT SNAPS LIKE A FART

IN THIS FROZEN SNOW OF LIFE
—

horsefeet down the window’s way

is it real? where am I hell,

drunk again? curtain like the

sadness of a Garbo film

or people climbing into lifeboats

in a shitty swine-like

effectual sea. old songs like

bats in the dark

kissing my nose.

the characters in Camus and

Genet (I guess a lot get into

Genet)

are almost

right—they hardly

try.

 

 

why?

it seems to me that

man is rising up to meet God

man is disgusted
at last

disgusted

with his waste and

disgusted with God always being

Right—

it is time for man to be Right and

for Man to be the perfect image of Man.

 

 

God’s ways may be perfect and good

but for me

I’ve seen enough hurt

and if I am being tested beyond my reason

then what reason I have

can only resent this.

 

 

I remember much:

men in unemployment lines forever

good men

frightened and laughing and real

nothing wrong with them

hardly as much wrong as with those who were

sullenly and righteously

working.

I remember much:

old women living with me

who had once been beautiful

and who resented me because I was never

beautiful. God forgot

me.

 

 

in jail the last time there was a

blonde boy on the floor

laughing

holding his arm:

“I think my arm is broken. Christ,

they worked me over

but I know if I tell the judge I will only get more

days. I want to get

out.”

 

 

there it was. so much real seems never true

or thought of as true. they have a trick—

they hold us all down to

stone—

we presume that what we want is beyond us always

and that

as men we must eat turds and smile

 

 

yet I feel that someday

God be damned

the turds will fit the mouths of the

killers

and the rose will grow out

saying softly: it will be

SO.

crist, rlly blasted out now [* * *]

 

 

[To Tom McNamara]

June 16, 1965

 

Yes, I am getting the idea Stuart is less than lovable, rather a businessman in spite of his liberal paper, but he did finance
Crucifix
when nobody else would take the $ gamble and that’s something no matter how you turn it.

yes, some of our best and worst stuff in the music business, the musicals, and I have an idea
Guys and Dolls
, the good oldie, will hang in as a classic…many of the songs have not gone stale which is what so quickly happens to so many of the pieces from the boards.

the job is killing me true and here’s this kid running on the floor hollering hollering and the radio is on and the woman plods around in her pajamas and my back and neck and balls hurt and it looks like rain and the men with the shovels will soon be coming for me.

o, the men with the shovels will be coming over the mountain

the men with the shovels will be coming and

I’ll be coming

too.

Jon and Louise Webb the pros who did
It Catches
and
Crucifix
swinging onto a train out of New Orleans and looking for a city that doesn’t make them sick but I don’t know what to recommend having been around the handle many times and coming up with nothing myself.

all I have left is hoping for luck at the racetrack and getting drunk and trying to stay out of the jails. by the way, one line left out of a poem in
It Catches
, in “Dinner, Rain and Transport,” just before the line “with the force of a jackhammer” should be the line “I can prophecy evil,” but little matter, they did a miracle job, these 2 not any longer young people, in a small room with a small press and broke and tired…

the baby is screaming so loud I can’t think. have got to wait for better times. no sense in getting angry or going the self-pity bit, just work on, somehow. now I get off the table so these bums can eat. I’ve been standing up here screaming.

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[Mid-] June, 1965

 

you asked to look at a nature poem and I have enclosed one for you to look over. you’ve got to realize that they ran the nature poem boys out a little before 1914, and it’s a little late in the day; in fact, it’s about 11:47 p.m.

yeah, the mother-humping emergence of
Crucifix
has somehow shut off the stream and the typewriter has turned on me like a tiger leaping at his trainer, to hell with whip and chair and just having
had
dinner. it is a curious situation, something like a broken neck, maybe worse. yes, I was hoping Webb would let me illustrate the book myself but guess he didn’t want to take the chance—I sent him some early drawings which haven’t been returned—and then all of a sudden he whipped in this pro with long line of credits. but maybe Time will prove Webb right. [* * *]

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

June 24, 1965

 

fly on curtain, woman scrubbing pot, child stopped hollering, the air of the world filled with gray and blue and me, and it’s Thursday, 2 more days nights at the pits and then a long drunk, the horses, same old bit, but somehow a climb-out, a fulfillment, at least away from machinery and stone-glazed bosses of this democracy of this freedom they tell me I have and that we should fight for.

listen, I’ll send you
Notes from Underground
if you want to read the story but send copy back when you get a loose dime as it’s my last copy, all right? will send by crawl mail…book rate.

I had a grandmother who used to pray for my infidelity, she’d come in while I was asleep and make these big-ass crosses over my body and mumble her incantations, she bugged me sure, but she was mostly senseless, life-drained, and it would not have been any victory to rip her arm off. I mostly had visions of her pissing, the yellow whirling fluid corkscrewing from that ancient blob of warted body. [* * *]

the lights keep going on and off here, might be a bombing, or the enemy working on the wires, or might be some of these big crosses old grandma made over me fucking each other in the air…. body trouble? mostly I get stiff as a board, pains all through, sweet sweet stuff, and mostly during this time the woman is talking some utter drab zero nonsense and goes on and on and I lay there and listen listen and then
I
pray: Jesus, I pray to thee, please make her be
QUIET
just a little while, I can’t breathe, it is like a
STEAMROLLER
, big daddy God,
TAKE IT OFF ME
!, but he doesn’t and she talks on, spilling it all over me, a neurotic chip chip chip of sound without sense, all twisted up with her poetry-meeting Unitarian Church world-saving complex. then the kid crawls in and:
WHHHHAAA
!!
WHAAAA
!!! it’s hardly any good for me most of the time, and during all the sound sound, these pains shooting through my body, ah…. and I had to be a wise guy and think: this one is too old to get pregnant. [* * *]

 

At Bukowski’s instigation, Purdy had sent poems to Blazek for
Ole.

 

 

[To Al Purdy]

July 5, 1965

 

yes, I wouldn’t have wanted your poems for
Ole
if I didn’t think the mag was a kind of powerhouse, and that’s why I like to stick my stuff in there when I can…I guess you read the essay I wrote about a part of my youth for
Ole
#2; it was kind of a loose thing, but have gotten more comment on that than on anything I have written, and I doubt that any other mag slick slim or snobbish would have run it. They are also going to bring out a booklet thing, prose I wrote.
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
, which I also don’t think anyone else would publish, and christ, if you don’t have outlet, you choke. I believe that rejection is good for the soul if you are not a quitter, but my soul has had plenty of that. [* * *]

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

July 8, 1965

 

[* * *] a small sparrow in the bush outside the window, ream-beaking his feathers in the 4 p.m. sun, and I’ve got to take a shit. just got a tune-up on my ’57 plymouth and the thing runs worse than ever. what the fuck? well it’s good to have a car like that. once in a while somebody’ll say, “why don’t you come over for dinner?” and I can just say, “Car won’t make it.” I don’t have to tell them that time is scarcer than young pussy around here. and I don’t mean time to write
POETRY
. I mean time to lay in bed, alone, and stare up at the ceiling and not think at all, not at all, not at all…. [***]

 

William Want-ling contributed to many of the same magazines as Bukowski and had a book published by Douglas Blazek. An ex-convict who had spend five years in San Quentin, he took an interest in matters such as capital punishment and penal reform (see
Hank).

 

 

[To William Want-ling]

July 9, 1965

 

no, haven’t made a dime on poetry but am supposed to get 10 cents a copy on all
Crucifix’s
sold and there were over 3,000 of them printed but I don’t know if I can trust Park ave. I never saw the contract. Also supposed to get 10 percent from
Poems Written Before Jumping from an 8 Story Window
and am supposed to get 50 percent from a
BORDER PRESS
book of drawings, both of these supposedly to be issued this Fall. but, after all, I’ve only been writing poetry since I was 35—about ten years ago, and I figure about ten cents a year would be very good pay. hell, that reminds me, I did get $2 for a poem once, a horrible thing in
Flame
. and Garner of the extinct
Targets
sent me checks of $10 or more 3 times for large groups of poems—so shit, I did make my dime on poetry. and when I was young and used to go the short story—$25 for one from
Story
and ten bucks for one from
Portfolio
. so I’ve made around $80 writing and no end in sight except the a-bomb.

I don’t know about this anarchist handbook, I really wouldn’t know who to burn or who to put in if I tore down the works. the way I see it you ream out one piece of shit and substitute another for it. in the human mechanism—soul, balls, brain—there simply isn’t enough there; it’s a bad party, good guys in or not…. [* * *] everything here sags. now toothache. out of beer. car stalls in streets and they honk honk honk and I push it to the curb and think it’s time they dropped the god damned hydrogen bomb and got everything over with. there’s your anarchy—it’ll come from the top and they won’t know it. except the few big fat fuckers who get away on that space ship to another planet. I hate teeth. shit’s all right if it’s yours, but teeth, no, soulless shirks of things, fangs into brain center pulling…puking. [* * *]

 

[To Tom McNamara]

July 14, 1965

 

yours was a good letter in courage but no more than I would expect from a guy like you living on the edge of hell, you’ve got it, and I could no more give a damn whether you were a latent or an unlatent homo or a desk drawer—although one always gets a little touchy about this subject and feels as if he were saluting the flag, and if you talk enough about it somebody points a finger at you and says, “you are a homo yourself!” same with Shannon—what he is as a sexual weapon or tool or plant doesn’t matter to me—he writes a good letter and had a beer with me, and to hell with it.

bad day at track today, hot sweaty hot crotches of whores and maidens and men and jocks and newsboys stank and I made some bad plays against my reason, feeling my 45 years jumbling in my balls and getting a little down with
EFFORT
, the old death-wish assuming its effrontery, and I drank too much out there and sun came down and the whole world stank.

I guess it works like this in Spain too, or The United Arab Republic, and I have some sketches to make for a book of sketches drawings due in Nov. and I can’t get rolling, I think of ants and garters and wire of cheese, and madmen dicing up committees of kangaroo, wawa, didn’t d. h. lawrence write a bad one about a kangaroo? a novel? well, who cares? he hadda eat, I hadda eat, I do things I do not like to do either but not yet on a typing machine although I guess there’s not much difference if you hold it under strong glass…. christ, I’m tired. think of all the piss pissed away today; not the shit, just the piss. momentous. think of all the poems written today, then if you want to, think of all the shit. I donate. when the cat comes home-in the morning I’ll have 3 pears on my head.

I am pretty well on the way and listening to some Beethoven; (on radio)—with music I like what I care for, and sometimes it’s jazz or whatever or sentimental or sound that strikes against my arms under electric light just right, awwha, you ever get that guy fucking with your mailbox?

Find a way to survive that does not cut too much of a hole in you or anybody else, said the holy man, and then he lifted out his palm and I dropped in the pecan shell and the lighted cigarette butt, and victory is not what you capture but rather what you don’t want to capture, and I’ve wanted to be a monk but the robes are hot and they itch and I’m afraid I’d meet the same men there too—dressed differently. conch auszieh tusche schwarz! this is a dull one! like I told you, I am on the way. and the woman’s in the bathroom and the baby fell,
YAAAH
!!! more death on a fork. by midnight I will know no more; I will be sitting naked on the edge of the bed spitting invective out of my broken teeth out of the m.g.’d psyche, slabs of fat rolling like bread dough white and gummy over my gut, my face hacked with the bad years, my eyes sucked out by the snakes, I will be sitting on the edge of the bed…mumbling, twitching, shading myself against the walls, shading myself against my self, the elves, the whores, taxes, love and demolition, it will be a more drab-plink night than the one before and finally it will be a little while safe in the barbwire of sleep. sweet picture of groveling snail can’t breathe.

I used to lean slightly toward the liberal left but the crew that’s involved, in spite of the ideas, are a thin & grafted-like type of human, blank-eyed and throwing words like vomit. essentially they are
very
lonely. the secret is really that they have not put society down but that society has put them down and so now they gather and handhold through ¼ souls and play at tinkertoy games with
¹
/
₈
minds. there’s nothing left to do except admit that they are slugs, worms, and they are not going to do that. I do not say that these people do not sometimes do things for the betterment of mankind; I only say that they give me a pain in the ass when I have to sit in the same room with them. I am essentially a loner and now that I’ve got hung with child and woman a lot of people are coming through my door (her friends) that I would never have to look upon. christ, this is a bitter letter. maybe it was the phone call. she’s still talking, “yes, the writer needs to make such a thing
vivid
, give it
vividness
….” it’s the same old swill I heard on campus so long ago. god damn, Tom, am I insane? it seems to me as if everything is the same mouth saying the same thing over and over again from all these bodies and faces that also look the same. sometimes I feel sick, sick, disgusted. you get your faith up again and again; then it’s like trying to climb a mountain for a good hot piece of ass or a fifth of good scotch at the peak, and what do you find? a basketful of worms.