Screams From the Balcony (29 page)

my god, did I cry that you didn’t like my poems?? I musta been drunk. this is really amateur, old ladies’ sewing, circle tears. it’s as silly as walking in dogshit. forgive me. we all stumble, even old iron-head here. [* * *]

[To Jim Roman]

August 28, 1965

[* * *] it seems like everybody and his grandma’s dog now own a mimeo machine and is putting out a magazine, and most of them are bad, but a few are good. I yearn for the old days when everything came out in clean print and we knew where everything was. some of the mimeo boys put out faded half-hearted almost unreadable pages, and some of the big boys drop off their crap in here—stuff they can’t get to go elsewhere. and the little boys too. I tend to do it. yet there are a few good mimeos and there are some many bad print jobs, and the essence, the secret, is content. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

September 7, 1965

I had 5 days off (Labor Day + 4) and a hell of a five, and I’m glad I wasn’t with you because my mind drew a blank and I fell all over myself, drunk in the streets, I am now lousy bloody bruised—each knee and elbow a blash and scab of blood where I landed each time, drunk, dumping myself like damn keen garbage—what a mess, and no sense to it, I know. my new system seems to work but no good because as soon as I make it I blow it, give it away on the streets, burn it burn it, my god sometimes I think I am truly crazy, but hell, here I sit, trying to shape up for tomorrow to go back in if the job is still there, and I never know—I have a habit of showing in places like that and raising a lot of shit. lost my job at the Biltmore hotel that way. no matter. and it’s my teeth too, I’ve got a half dozen them aching and I can’t sleep—but why all these complaints? I bring on my own woe. I keep thinking of Crane jumping off the back of that ship. of course, Crane was a homo, but he was also human. I don’t think anybody but a drunk can understand the terrible the horrible horrible
BLUES
!!! a hangover can bring! of course, I am no longer hung now, am fairly high, and even enclose a half-dozen poems I batted off tonight. not that it matters that they are good or not; what matters is a little juice is flowing, good or bad, there’s a little flowing again. I had a hell of a period, it was like steel walls built all around me. but now a little song and dance. it’s not excellence we want, it’s a kind of going-on, a clown’s gesture. it took some deciding to come to this. I think we are all too careful. fuck reputation. if I have a reputation it’s only the dirty work of others. I have a right to go on. nobody has the rights to rope and bind me. fuck ’em.

so the eagle came over the San Marcos mountain like a horse and I sat under a busy and rolled a cigarette just like in the old days with Minnie and Mary and Jane in the cheap rooming houses, and it’s cigarettes like this and comic strips and radios that work badly and a clean pair of stockings and something to laugh at that keep a man going—even something like Joe Conrad or Tolstoy and they are pretty bad; even something like Faulkner and he’s horrible. an eagle over the San Marcos. a cup Hem drank coffee out of. a photograph of your father shooting golf in knickers. Herbert Hoover, alive, without wrinkles. victrolas you had to pump. Icemen with leather shoulders. God on the dole. Mickey Rooney in a tent getting whipped by Wallace Beery. so the eagle came over the San Marcos. the san marcos. and I read where India and Pakistan are fighting, something about a border. but it’s not something about a border. it’s something about us. we don’t make it. I don’t make it. I stink. I am ashamed of myself. I am not ashamed of you, I can never be ashamed of you. a cigarette. bad writing. more bad writing. Jane told me that I couldn’t write. when Burnett wrote back—“all your people seem to die in their own excrement,” dear Jane thought this was wonderful criticism. “That
RIGHT
, that’s
RIGHT
!” she screamed, “
ALL YOUR PEOPLE DIE IN THEIR OWN SHIT
!” I only told her, “For Christ’s sake, drink your wine and shut up!” I had always thought that all people died in their own shit; it wasn’t until Jane and Burnett told me that I thought there would be an alternative?? and the eagle came over the San Marcos and stopped to shit and was killed by a most agile wildcat, looked something like me.

as bad as I feel sometimes it comes pretty close to the end but I remember reading a Norwegian somewhere??? I was much younger. something called the suicide.
The Suicide
. This Icelander could write much better than I; married 3 or 4 times, born children, plowed the land, gone crazy, sucked up years of the sun, I think he finally died an old age, maybe in prison or embarrassment for being a political dupe—became so because he went to the underdog, what was his name? his name? no matter. the
SUICIDE
wanted to live so badly that given the final great and stereotyped chance, he wouldn’t buy it. but this isn’t any secret. many men who want to kill themselves only wish to do it because they are tired of being born in an age that will not let them live. I fall in love with my own limbs, my head ugly as it may be, my cock, my balls, my writes by merely being around them, by being with them, awake and asleep, my head, my breathing, my sense of the sun and walls; but when these things become too greatly violated by outside forces I will make the choice, and then finally the choice will not be now when but how?

I have met garbage men with more soul than President Johnson; and this is not sad, this is the way it should be. Johnson is trying to stir alive the soul of Franky D.—which was War and Economic Justice. well, that’s the same chapter. I am not much on these history-makers, these killers; but I’d like to see just one pop up: non-war and economic justice. but this is the hell of too much thought. I sit here writing you tonight with 6 teeth aching the living christ outa me and only 2 beers left and the landlord will want his $85, even tho once a week she or he will come down and get me and ask me to get drunk with them and so I’ll get drunk with them, we’ll talk, and then we’ll sing corny songs, songs of their choice, and I’m glad to see them happy but they don’t help my happiness much except that they drink and I drink and we sit there in their breakfast nook until Frances brings the kid and the kid cries and Frances says, “come home, come home!” so I come home, fuck it, and it’s a beautiful little girl, tho, and I think she loves me. that’s hell. [* * *]

[To Ruth Want-ling]

September 11, 1965

in response to your last letter, which I realize was a lot in jest but not entirely—yes, I prob. do carry around my little wooden cross of pain and wave it a bit too much, and even feel foolish defending it…for it’s up to a man to create art if he’s able, and not to talk about it, which, it seems, he’s always more than able. I’m nuts, yes, reamed-out and sick; a lot of it shows in the poems. I am an anti-man, pretty sick of the show, yet I have not killed myself, so you have me there; but if you think my way is bad, you ought to try the other—I mean the life-is-good, God-is-good, life-is-beautiful crew. Mostly midwest with names like Irma Tremble Stockholder or Bobby Poots West. they vomit continual Affirmation at a sickening rate, and just because you don’t see the magazines around (I doubt Bill reads them) doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. don’t get the idea that everybody writes like Want-ling (they can’t) or Bukowski. they don’t. just for a laugh to jack-off the fleas I once sent a couple of poems into one of those golden hymn singing outfits. they took them. but I had to pay the price. a long letter came along: “I know your type, brilliant but a drunkard, a gambler, unhappy, disbelieving in God…” (so on, so on). “I awaken every morning to the sound of birds outside my window and I have birds inside too, my canaries, and I have joy and peace, and my magazine pays for itself.” the letter was 4 or 5 pages long in the handwriting of an old woman. I took all her guff until she mentioned that was her policy to make contributors pay for their issue. I wrote back an ass-scorcher and got my issue free. full of hundreds of 3 or 4 lines poems. a photo of a man (poet?) in airforce uniform on cover. so this is the way it works: she thinks I’m sick and I think she’s dull. how do we know who’s right as I sit here listening to E. Power Biggs pound out Handel?

then, too, there’s something else. In America, everybody’s supposed to be making it. if you don’t make it, that’s all right too—only
play
like you’re making it. riots are accidents. refuse to think. you know how it works. somebody will pass you on the sidewalk, say a neighbor, and he’ll say (sure, he will), “Good morning, nice day, isn’t it?” and you’re supposed to say, “yes, it is a nice day,” and that ends it. but if you say, “no, it isn’t a nice day,” or the answer to the other question (how are you today?) with “I don’t feel so good,” he will act as if struck across the face. you aren’t playing the game, and this is
not
just a little voice game, it extends all up and down and across through life. phonies, galore, phonies walking around under the same sun that makes roses, that makes wheat. now, I am not a mad seeker after
TRUTH
, god damn all that; but I can and do get a bellyful of phonies, and although I don’t care to machine gun them down I’d like to get away from them but I can’t because I must live with them, work in their factories, fuck their women and drink their booze and kick their dogs and eat their beans. about the only chance a punk like me has to say anything is on a piece of paper called a poem, someplace in between sleeping, eating, batting a woman off what’s left of your soul and turning a screw in a factory. so if it comes out as a scream sometimes it really is because the pinch is too tight, the Bastard keeps tightening the vise and smiling and you’re supposed to sing The Jelly Roll Blues or say a couple of Hail Marys, but it doesn’t work. we are dying inch by inch, being chopped-up and killed by the minute by the hour. I keep looking at that clock, doing the same dull things over and over and over again with my hands, looking at the clock, and doing the dull thing over and over much faster than I want to in order to keep up with production so I can keep my job and die some more, and I keep looking up at the clock, and I die a minute at a time…
ALL THOSE MINUTES THAT I COULD BE SHIT SHIT USING FOR MYSELF
!!!…never to be gotten back again, and all around me my fellow-workers laugh a continual hysterical almost female laughter while bragging on their virility as
MEN
!!!, or there’s the tough type full of hatred, nothing but hatred hatred and not even knowing why, swaggering to the latrine thinking he’s cool, cool, but what a face on this type of job—a kind of flat shiny deadness with 2 little piglet eyes peering out. and everybody
TALKING TALKING
about…nothing. sports lifts them. they can talk baseball all night, getting fighting mad, or insane, and still not knowing anything about the game. jabber, jabber; my hands moving, moving, the clock hands stuck like arrows in the wall. self-pity? why not? but if we could only do the job quietly without the neurotic jabbering, the fear, the lies, the back-stabbers, the swine, the slickers…and I watch the clock and it finally gets there, and if I am lucky they do not call one or 2 or 3 or 4 hours overtime. the only time I am free is driving from the job to where I live in the early a.m. all other times somebody is getting at me. so I get home (home? 2 rooms? a woman, man and child in the same bed?) (I want riches! I want to fuck Elizabeth Taylor’s maid!) so I get home and I can’t sleep, I can never sleep. I just lay there and listen to the woman and the kid snore. it’s beautiful. and I watch the light change from black to gray to red to orange to yellow and finally it’s morning and I still stay in bed like an invalid and about noon I go to sleep and about 4:30 p.m. I have to get up again and go to work. nuts? sure, I’m nuts. what do I care about sending kids off to school if the world does not fit around them? President Johnson looks like all the idiot and unfeeling men I’ve worked for and quit from and been fired from. bombs like walnuts on a row of trees. the clock, the clock, death riding me home in the car repeating the little dirty jokes of my fellow working man. and some x-whore operating a poetry magazine in the Midwest and giving me a lot of jazz about sparrows singing, the angels of God awakening her. if I don’t crash through with a poem now and then, I am finished. drink alone is not enough. staring at the ceiling is not enough. my little wooden cross. sure. and yours,

[P.S.] my god, it’s all so terrible: all our self-importance; we’ll all soon be dust, and that’s not news, not news. less even than the smell of shit.

[To William Want-ling]

September 11, 1965

as ya can see, I’ve burned myself out writing a letter to your wife (enclosed) when I should be out building little bird-houses for the approaching winter and those little bastards too lazy to leave this Goldwater territory.

where the riots have just about said quits and the committees are in dividing govt. poverty program funds among contractors, engineers, bullshitters and companies to train janitors—or as they now are called Floor Engineers. I was a janitor for a while but I can never imagine a man calling himself a Floor Engineer when he has to walk into the woman’s crapper and clean up what they leave behind. I couldn’t get a hard-on for a year after working in that place. what they leave behind. and on the floor. and in that little compartment behind the seat. or alongside of it. or wherever it was.

knives, guns? you’re one deep beyond me. I can understand drilling wood with a bit, tho. that’s fetching. your problem, of course, is not that you’re insane but that you are entirely too sane. through war, jail, dope, woman you’re still twitching to find something to hang your hat onto and you probably don’t wear one until it snows. I guess, if I can guess, that what hurts is that no matter what men go through, little changes them. they may change an inch for a moment, then snap back, then snap to. the centuries and the training are too jesus much for them. you want victory now, not in your grave where it doesn’t count. I’m too tired for victory. I fight a slow withdrawal. I can’t make it. if your wife only realized that while you are drilling into that ladder that what is left of your soul is falling back into place. I can see you out there now in the middle of the night, a small light bulb like a crazy sun hanging near your ear and you are smelling the wood and the burning oil from the bit, jesus, what sweetness, nobody around, not even people you love, and if the people you loved would leave you alone you’d come to them with eyes shining in your head so beautiful they’d cry cry cry, but the average woman and no matter how good she is, is only more or less average and the Art they help create is the child and that is enough and too much for me; the average woman wants a constant reminder of love and fuck, and from their angle, I can’t blame them—they figure we’ve been off to a big ball game in hell, tough, yeah, but how about that long cock now, daddy? you haven’t told me you loved me since I burned my hand making strawberry jam in 1961. yet, love is confining if you hold it too close to your own belly. I read somewhere a week or so ago that the food America throws into its garbage cans could feed two-thirds of a world and that two-thirds of the world is starving. think how many lovers have thrown their garbage to the pits. love is, in a sense, only a form of selfishness, a form of recognition, usually between 2 people. I do suppose when you are drilling that wood in the middle of the night that all this has occurred to you, but just to let you know that I have thought of it too, and that you are not insane, and that the faces you’d think of machine-gunning on the boulevards are only dead and you only want to bury them bury them, not kill them, for it can’t be done, even tho y’d be charged with murder. Your problem, our problem, of course, has been faced before most strongly in the 3 novels (I hesitate to use the world great, they are more than that, for they are beyond the Bible, man’s saving little stamping ground)
Crime and Punishment
via Dos, and Camus’
The Stranger
, and, I think, the strongest of them all: Celine’s—
Journey to the End of the Night
. where the hell was I?