Screams From the Balcony (25 page)
Read Screams From the Balcony Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski
I’m going to get something to drink. you slam through that novel.
the realest part of the leg is
where is ends, like the mind
becoming soul or an apple thrown into
the sea
p.s.—christ, don’t get me wrong. I’m no John Bircher or am I for the power boys at all. nine, nine, I only like time to lay around and stare at the ceiling for a while without voices around or bodies with voices. like that.
The following letter is printed entire and verbatim
.[To Douglas Blazek]
[July 14, 1965]
July 14 in 1965 in Los Angeles in America in a kitchen drinking beer and smoking a Dutch Master panatella, and lost $8 at the races today, and listening to Schumann I think…
aye, Blazer:
you’re right, I have been feeling down
DOWN
and almost did the Big Thing last Sunday, but that’s talk, Krist, I’m still here with 14 half-quarts of beer, stocking feet, red-eyed, misty of brain, gaga fk goofy, and the man on the radio asks me:“Have you made your will yet?”
I don’t answer him.
MORE THAN THE BLUES, MORE THAN A SPIDER CRAWLING NEAR THE CORNER OF THE WALL
:quite quite quite
quit quit quit
I want to quit
I am not brave
I do not want to fight
I want to stay under the covers and
cry cry cry.
I
don’t want to see ahuman
I want to sleep
I will stay here until they come and
get me
or the meat disappears from the
bones and I am
beautiful
again
this is a free poem to hang in your bathroom in case you run out of paper.
I will send the letters I will send the letters I will send the letters, it is only that I have been a little goofy and some things going wrong—no need a list—I am being chewed to pieces by everything, and if I were a smooth gentleman I would not admit this—but I eat hash, hate policemen, baseball, squaredances, nuns, factories, goatees, barbers and old women who want respect only because they are old women. I will send the letters, only like I said most of them are not so good, god damn it. yours, Purdy’s, and then that’s it. I will send yours in seperate envelope so as not to defile their good guts. it’s a matter of getting to a postoffice and I will be very haappy when i get up the verve to seeit done. I am half-assed weak or something lately. how about death by cannon, Blaz? shit. great, eh man? completely blown apart in the public square, in the park on a Wednesday afternoon under a statue of Grant or Lincoln or Beethoven or Lee! in the sunshine! poems blown to pigeons. I’ve never seen a statue of Christ in the park, any park, I guess they don’t want the birdshit on his brain, I saw one once in a glass case and I was drunk and felt like getting up in there with him, it was night and he was undera small blue light but I didn’t get in there with him (Him, I mean). I was too much in a hurry to get to my place and knock off a piece of ass from this longlegged wino whore I was living with at the time, she’s dead now, poor slit. which reminds me—once I was drunk in Inglewood and I was walking down the street and I saw this mortuary, it was 2 a.m. in the morning and you know how mortuaries are out here, the big ones, those long flat steps leading up to a kind of white colonial granduer and they keep the bright big lights on all night, and I climbed up on the top step and stretched out and passed out on those mortuary steps until thepolice came and got me. and when the judge sentenced me he not only sentenced me for drunkenness but also for
BLOCKING TRAFFIC
!—ain’t that the shits? you know there aren’t many cars at that time of the morning but so many of them stopped to look at the body on the top step that it caused a jam. I guess they thought I was dead and that’s what I wanted them to think, chop up the smooth jugular vien of their sleep-within-Life, the fuckers. I don’t do this so much anymore because
To Douglas Blazek. October 28, 1964.
To Jon and Louise Webb. January 26, 1964.
To Jon and Louise Webb. January 26, 1964.
To Jon and Louise Webb. January 26, 1964.
To Jon and Louise Webb. [April, 1965?].
To Douglas Blazek. June 2, 1966.
To Carl Weissner. March 3, 1967.
To Jon and Louise Webb. April 19, 1967.
there is this ten-month old kid as an excuse, and I shouldn’t use it; but you know I used to conk out everywhere. there was one of my favorite hills, I believe it was Westview street just above 21st. and the hill was very steep a dark steep street going straight down without lights, and I’d get drunk and just lay myself down in the center of the street right near the top and pass out. a car never got me. although once a woman came by and screamed when she saw me out there and it brought me to and I lifted my head and looked at her and said, “Don’t worry, baby, I don’t want to
FUCK
you, you are too ugly, you are a shitty ugly looking human being because you live like a roach!” she disgusted me so much that I got up and staggered after her until she ran into a house. then there was an alley behind a bar in Philly, I think the bar was at 16th. and Fairmount, a real piss hole and I ran errands for sandwiches and begged for drinks and shook the pinball machine for drinks and talked for drinks (I
used
to be a good talker) and about noon I’d go into my first phase of drunkeness and walk out into the alley and lay down, and I knew these trucks used the alley to deliver and pickup stuff from the warehouses but since it was noon or one p.m. they had some chance to see me, and they had little houses in there that the blacks lived in and the kids would come out and throw rocks at me or poke me in the back with sticks, and I’d hear the mammy’s voice finally, “Now you chilrens leave dat man alone!!” and the truck didn’t come by. I am writing you now and I have 12 beers left. I been thinking about Want-ling. got a rather (what?) knifey postcard from him today because I had told him in a letter that I was rather disappointed with anarchy and revolution because the way I saw it shit was only replaced with more shit. he inferred that I was getting old and—“that terd yr carrying in your pocket, throw it out. somebody might throw you back a diamond.” I don’t intend to argue with him; yet it’s true that I don’t have much hope. I don’t disrespect either his hope or his energy, or his work. I give money to people on the streets. a woman stopped me the other night. I know I shouldn’t. it doesn’t help. maybe I should have fucked her. I am tired of pain. mass anarchy is more pain, more error. I don’t know what to do. shit, I know about the corruption, the lie of office and govt., but these are only men and if we put them in different jars with different labels they will remain only men, and the process is slow, most surely almost 2,000 years wasted, but I don’t know if i could kill a man or even say that I thought I was right about anything.