Read Screams From the Balcony Online
Authors: Charles Bukowski
Screams From the Balcony (33 page)
• 1966 •more beer. shit, maybe I will pick up. if you don’t hear from me until after Xmas, please understand—the hours, and my health is bad; pain pain in throat back chest shoulders, sick stomach, weakness. sometimes I am working and I get faint. it is all I can do to keep from falling to the floor. it is very embarrassing. but after a while it passes. and after the tenth or eleventh hour you longer no longer give a shit. it is like being drunk, almost. you say
exactly
what you are thinking because you no longer care. senselessness. that most of my fellow workers seem to like their jobs and even like each extra call of overtime hours…is what?? disheartening, at least, when I think of the future of the human race. I was sitting next to a fairly sensible fellow the other night and when the screws weren’t watching I said to him, “You know, it would be nice if they let each man work the number of hours he had to in order to take care of his needs. you know, when you get tired of working, just get up and walk out.” “It wouldn’t work for you,” he told me, “you’d starve to death.” like I said, he was a sensible fellow.Frances and I have split. she and the little girl are over in a place on Carlton. it costs me something, but hell, I blow every paycheck anyhow, so what’s the difference? I see the little girl every day so she’ll remember me. I am soft in the head for her, Marina. the other day Frances brought her over and I was in bed asleep and she crawled on my chest and looked at my face and smiled smiled like crazy and then she kissed me on the mouth. little wench. and then she laughed. she’s all full of this kind of love and she makes me remember somehow how it once was.
lighting up a Corona. fuck, I am a big money man. the boys on the opera on the radio laugh at me. [* * *]
Norse has not sent me his poems. I wrote him. now, Blaz, I just can’t write this guy a blank check. I’ve got to see what you are printing. I realize that he is some sort of overlooked master craftsman with a master heart, but I’ve got to see the poems you are publishing or, I can’t say a word towards or against him. he has an
instinctive
way with the word; he makes a man feel
good
reading him. the line is clear and specked with blood. I suppose what worries me about him is that he never throws the bomb or screams. but this is the danger point: it is hard to scream or bayonet and still retain the vindictive and cool Art-form. this was my trouble with
Crucifix
. everything was bothering me at once. I was stumbling all over the place and my blood was real, except for a few jokes, but the bull was making me look bad. it’s best when you look good and say good. not rules, shit, no, but a way to do things like the wind or the trees or some gal at the track just showing you enough leg to make you forget God and his peashooter. fuck it.Now you asked what I thought of
Ole
3. please understand that, first of all, almost everything I read anywhere or anytime disgusts me. I mean—newspapers, billboards, poetry mags, poetry, poetry…. I mean, I just cannot hardly read anything anymore. I have backed up. choked off. whether this means ego or madness or stupidity or whatever, I don’t know. so please, when I rate this stuff, understand my mind-state. this is important or else you are going to think I am telling you you print a lousy magazine and it isn’t so. a new
Ole
is like new sun, only better because you can open its eyes and talk to it. I rate the littles in the following order:1.
Ole 2. The Wormwood Review 3. The Outsiderafter that, there’s a hell of a drop.
anyhow, if you have an
Ole
#3 there by you I’d like to go through it page by page with you and instead of doing a lot of talking I will simply rate the poems as they affect me. you see what this machinery and factories and all these x-wives have done to me? all right, for kicks, I will rate the stuff percentage-wise as it affected me, and remember—like I told you—my head is hard, the upper one. if you want more of a definition of the following ask me sometime, only now I am too tired, the bosses’ goggling dry-sinking eye-of-skin death-faces monkey-swinging in my brain. overtime, overt-time. now, they are playing
WAGNER
. good. there is a man who never wrote a bad note. what I mean is, it all came from the
GUT
. your heart can trick you but that little bit of underlay under the bellybutton sends it on home. all right. let’s take it this way. 100 percent means the thing is immortal. zero means it is shit-death glued to paper. I will rate each piece, like some bigshot critic, on the following lines:Style
Clarity
Meaning
Interest (force)
Originality
now I am the first to realize that these are just words and perhaps a further breakdown is needed but I am tired like I said and Wagner is dead. getting a bit drunk but that will help. [* * *]
[To Douglas Blazek]
December 31, 1965
have taken woman and child to their small place 8 or 10 blocks away and I wait to sweat out the New Year with the jackass horn blowers who will attempt to blow the snails out of their minds and butts, erect the skeleton of the the soul and try to make it dance make it sing make it do something…but it won’t work. maybe not for any of us.
down at work they have worked me to the point of insanity. I have scratched both of my legs raw with my fingernail. and the damage to other parts is, of course, unrepairable. the schedule board still says
WORK
but I can’t keep making it. they now have a new idea to work the cruds on holidays and give them 2 days pay. most of the cruds love this but I can’t bear it. I don’t need all kinds of money; I need time and just a small bit of money to keep me alive. but Christ, it either works one way or the other always—either I’m sleeping out in an alley without a job or I have a job and I work 7 days a week, 11 hours a day. both of these ways kill a man, finally. if I only had myself I could live on $20 a week, easily. just because I am 45 does not mean I don’t like to pull the shades down and stay in bed 3 days and 3 nights like a slug like a maggot, and then to walk out into the sun, walk along the sidewalks, feel the whole city rocking and stinking like an old whore’s ass. but I cry too much. each inch we get I guess we are lucky to get. a professional writer over today—I mean one who makes his living by writing. he left me his inscribed photograph in a picture frame. very nice, very nice. he talked about how everything fell into place for Hemingway. Hem had a nose for climbing up and he had the nose up, up Scott F., Sherwood A., G. Stein, various editors, others, and like a good American he dropped them when they were no longer of any use to him. he even got fired once from his newspaper and came back the next day like he hadn’t heard. these are not admirable qualities. but all of us have holes. maybe he figured he had it and the only way to get through, finally, was to justify certain side actions? yet, how many millions of men think the same way today? well, balls. [* * *][To William Want-ling]
December 31, 1965
[* * *] I understand there is going to be another article on capital punishment in
Spero
TOO
, this time by somebody else. I must have a frozen soul for these cap punish articles are short-hairing me to a much earlier imbecility than I ever expected. I guess what I figure, mainly, is that almost the whole structure of everything is wrong so why pick at the parts? I mean, let’s sink the whole ship. the ship of state, the ship of the world. A-Bomb? anyhow, what I mean is, take even jail. we don’t need jails. we don’t need morals. all we need is a common working sense and easiness and instinct. society kills more men than it saves. in fact, society kills everybody. none of us are truly alive. all we do is fight to save the last inch after we have given them 40 miles. religions senseless. morals senseless. so-called decency senseless. laws senseless. a fucking cop pulls me over because I am driving 80 miles an hour while drunk. the theory is that I don’t know what I am doing and that I am endangering other members of society. bullshit. he doesn’t know what he is doing. he is a wooden pigeon with a badge.
WE CREATE AN ACTUAL
MONSTER
ON THE
THEORY
THAT WE
MIGHT
PREVENT A
POSSIBLE
MORAL AND SOCIAL WRONG
. get it? you were jailed for getting caught using drugs. they were worried that you were getting something that they didn’t have. it’s a hell of a society when you are told it’s wrong to use drugs but it’s all right to kill yourself in a factory for a pitiful and demeaning wage.
A FREE SOCIETY SHOULD ALLOW EVERYTHING THAT MAKES A MAN FEEL ALIVE AND GOOD
. what then, you ask me, would you do with a man who rapes your little daughter whom you profess to love very much? well, the idea is, that under present conditions, this can happen anyway. the idea of a
SOCIETY OF TRUST
, not holy trust or church trust, but simple easy feeling, no jails, no war, no punishment…this man would come to
THINK
while walking down a sidewalk
FREE
that there was no necessity for his act, not in a sense of
taught
morals but simply in a sense of sense. things would take time to work free. I would say, don’t even lock up the madmen, the perverts, the deerslayers, the sadists…shit, it’s just now 12 a.m. happy new Year and my love to you both [* * *] what I mean is: we must
give
chance a chance. what the hell else. I can work out all the lack of rules. trust me. shit, I
must
be getting old. musing of a better world. I guess this capital punishment article thing caught a hair in the brain and started the sawmill going. well, we can’t eliminate so much. the pain, the accident, the death. the tottering clay of us and our big mouths. your wife lost a kid. my first one did too. right in the crapper. afterbirth, afterbirth. an early fish flushed away like a turd. I was not much of a man. I was so insane that time, and years before that that I couldn’t think of what to say, do. I don’t blame my first wife for divorcing me. I was of very short stuff of soul. still am. I mean it. this is not theatrics. I am forever disgusted with myself. I am not even as good as my shit, my shit is better than I am. more man, more rose, more real. Barbara, I am sorry forever that my mind was tied-up with chicken-shit nerves and dull crossword puzzles. [* * *]Pound’s x-girl friend Martinelli trying to cough up my whore-O-scope. stars, something. I suppose this puts me somewhere near the Master. just think, somebody Pound went to bed with is now writing me, has been for years. my, my. I know all about myself: I am the Original Hard-Luck Story of the Universe. Job only got tickled. [* * *] I can’t make it into heaven now. burn this letter. maybe I can sneak past. could be I am in heaven now only I don’t recognize it or could be I am in hell and I do. [* * *]
[To Walter Lowenfels]
January 9, 1966
o Walter: thanks word on
Confessions
. no, nothing else like that have I written, and prob. won’t. prose bit to shape up shit a bit and wonder where I’ve been. so that’s that.
I understand Jon and Lou Webb have come across hard times-broken press and the like. I’d like to see them get into #4. a Patchen issue, but things are not working right.
well then. we all move on. flowers in the air. gaslight. drunken birds. paradise is a cold wet stocking dripping on the back unexpectedly. I get sicker and sicker. little men outside sharpening their spades. to hell with them: I have 5 bottles of beer left and a bottle of india ink that sits here and says on its side:
TINTA CHINA A LA PERLA
.
the world is very good. I am sure of it: I keep gaining weight.
[To Douglas Blazek]
January 9, 1966
[* * *] word in from Norse, damn fine letter, and perhaps he has more style and touch than any of us, young snip. anyhow, he has been laid up in some Greek hospital unable to stop shitting, which is a hell of a way to go, what? anyhow he is getting better and jumped out of bed in Hydra and escaped to Athens, where he is feebly typing up a batch of poems for me to look over to see if I think he can write or not write. for Norse—
Ole
issue. maybe I am being cruel? but I can’t say anything about a man on 2 or 3 poems. the few things I have seen of his are clearly very good but I would like to see more for my own good and for his. I do not judge poems as a critic out of learning but as a human being out of my own experience which must nec. be limited but which nevertheless contains truths and instincts and flowers and spiders and snakes and dreams and stinks which may apply to any man living anywhere, anytime. and sometimes the way the “learned critics” talk about poetry and/or Art, I sometimes think I have even read
MORE BOOKS
and junked them down better. lot of ego to say this, yes, but you know as a man walks down a sidewalk or takes a piss or breaks an egg into a pan, strange thoughts enter the head and walk around, one of them being that the critics are my Aunt Sarah. [* * *]
[To Steven Richmond]
January 27, 1966
[* * *] still down with this flu or whatever it is and couldn’t get to work again tonight. maybe keeping this flu is deliberate? do you think that going down to the liquor store in my bare feet is lengthening the case? or sitting up in that cold grandstand watching them run? I sit way in back by myself and they’ve got 40 sparrow ups there in the eaves, singing, chirping, shitting, but they have, so far, been very nice and have not shit on me. found a dead one on the pavement other day. didn’t know what to do. couldn’t touch it. couldn’t move away. just sat there looking at the dead bird and feeling very sad for it, for everything, the works, and kept telling myself, you shouldn’t you shouldn’t, that’s the mathematics of it, you ought to know by now. but that god damned bird hung in the center of my mind and I missed a couple of good plays. went down and had a couple of drinks, looked at some of the flaxy piss-dead women and drove on in. 25,000 people at the track and they had to show only me the sparrow. tough shit.
[To William Want-ling]
January 28, 1966
[* * *] you know, baby, I think that the cleansers are the jails and the hospitals and the new whores, and without these Time seems to take it in the choppers—as waste. I think that unless a man is in constant realignment with himself he must die. the women might be good to us and actually love us as we trot off to our factories with our little gay lunch-buckets but that’s because they are not dumb. they know that we walk into and are chewed by the very teeth of death, for they see us when we leave and they see us
WHEN WE COME BACK
. a hot bath, a meal and good night’s sleep, even a good fuck does not return everything. listen, don’t put me down as against women—I’d hate to be one and I know that they have their own personal world of horror. but life keeps chewing us up and how often can we keep getting up off the deck, and what for? me, I’ve just gone limp all over and let them punch. down at the coffee break area they call me,
HANK THE PLANK
(my first name in Henry, middle name Charles),
BIG TIME, MONEY
!, etc., but they don’t know that when I go home in the morning that I comb agony and poems out of my hair. but to hell with that. [* * *]
I like your photo and will send you one of mine if I can steal a
WANTED
ad from the local post office. you look like a rough baby, kid, and I’d hate to meet you coming down any dark (or light) alley. but actually, in the 50’s and 60’s a different type of poet has evolved through the dense brutality of our age. we’ve had to be tough enough to live and at the same time to save the soul. the university boys are merely soft and tricky and clever but they don’t know even what a wall
looks
like or a cat or a fish or a landlord or a policeman or a blade of grass, unless they attempt to imagine these things and they do attempt, and, of course, the mockery of our age is that these safe and clever and dead men are published everywhere. this is why the audience for poetry is so small—the masses know that most of it is fake—has nothing to do with lives, their or anyone’s, has nothing to do with Life. [* * *]
[To Steven Richmond]
February 2, 1966
[* * *]
LSD
, yeah, the big parade—everybody’s doin’ it now. take
LSD
, then you are a poet, an intellectual. what a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.
All
the death does not lie lay ly with the academics or the poetry workshops or the pawnbrokers…[* * *]
[To Douglas Blazek]
February 3, 1966
[* * *] our boy MacNamara has quit his job and now I seem to get a letter a day from him. that’s nice. nice and frightening. I don’t know quite what to say, finally. I mean, the thing can get kind of religious. but whatdy you do when ya lose yore bible?
I guess I told you the woman and I split, she has the girl with her. finally it was her poetry workshop and church group that turned my gut. christ, you know I work nights, and after being pissed all over with the overtime bit, take me hours to fall asleep and then I’d be awakened by the shits giggling and making dull jokes in the other room. they just can’t get together
enough
and talk talk talk, and, baby, complaint is bad, I guess, but if you could only see the
look
of them, the flat cardboard soul stink of them, maybe you’d know. if they had only had the decency to wait until I was at work…to discuss their freedom marches, peace marches, civil rights bits, poetry readings…how can you be made sick even by cardboard people who seem to want to do everything right? ah, christ, sometimes I think I
am
crazy! maybe it was simply that they were
FORMULA
people, even down in the shitpit where I dragged my ass to work I found a people more
real
and even they were nothing, but still a relief in comparison. there wasn’t any argument; don’t ever remember cussing her gang, although might have done so while drunk. now she has them and I have me and we can all die separately. [* * *]
but look here, how can you find things out, feel things, even have a chance to yawn or look at the wallpaper if your jaws are going all the time? I guess we all feel badly enough and I have felt plenty of times like going to bed and crying for a week (Hemingway is far from my ideal, or, at the other end, Camus either) but what I felt like crying about I was not certain—it could not be worded or spoken, not over a telephone or not even to myself exactly, and maybe that’s the reasons for this fucking thing called Art, Creation, whatever, sometimes we hang it in
just
RIGHT
—we get it all, the dizzy broads on the phones, the flunky fired from his shithouse job, the guys like me wanting to cry in bed, the cat run over, the empty beer cans, me writing a letter to you and me being ½ nuts with old airplanes running through my brain, ah. [* * *]
[To Steven Richmond]
February, 1966
[* * *] yes, the sickheads will think
Earth
is another dirty mag. they do not realize that the cuss word is used only as explosion of fury-agony when nothing else fits that space. but you are still a good enough human to tell a real poem from an unreal one, and I think that
Earth
one, #1, was right in there, right up there, alive and burning, as good as
Ole
and
Wormwood
, maybe better. you got rights to be proud of your baby, baby. and that damn cunt in Sacramento who wrote me that
Earth
was shit, she still writes me as if all were sweet. I have not answered. the
Promethean Lamp
made me heave and I threw it into the trash but I did not bother to get highly vindictive with the editors, to show them my hot prong because I figured they were dead anyway and that in the machinery of the human affair such things as the
Lamp
were expected in my nightmares. yet these sisters who sit at home in their gardens and piddle with poetry while their husbands are out there being chewed-up by the world, these piss-pure sisters have always got to let us
know
what they
think
they think from inside their sea-dead skulls. fuck em. I want to congratulate you sweetheart on putting out one of the most vibrant bouncing searing jumping living of the littles and I am honored and proud and scared and sick-dizzy that I had a poem or something for you that you could use. [* * *]
[To Jon and Louise Webb]
February 28, 1966
well, as zero hour approaches and the rat of death spins on the knife, I have bought myself 3 books today to read in there if read I am able—Camus:
Resistance, Rebellion and Death; The Fall
&
Exile and the Kingdom; Notebooks 1935-1942
, and now my radio gives me Brahms’ First—apropos, for I was listening to this one when the F.B.I. walked in on me in Philly and threw me on in. I have told Frances I am feeling better but I am really not feeling so good, but shit. shit, yes. saw Marina almost all day today, she’s a joy doll and when I leave them at their place and go to leave she screams, “no! no! no!” and I hear her crying as I get into what’s left of the car, as what is left of me gets into what is left of the car. hell of a life. got to take castor oil Tuesday night and then get up at 7 a.m. and give myself enemas—shit is right—so he can probe through the tunnels for rot at 10 a.m., then I enter hospital at 3 p.m. that afternoon. god damn fuckers. started reading Camus tonight, a chapter called “Create Dangerously” but I had read no more than 2 pages and he pissed me off, had me pissed off and disgusted. I too have been guilty of throwing statements around with abandon—whatever pleased my mind—whatever sounded right and strong and entertaining, but I hate to see a man like this building such cases, and then giving it at a lecture—University of Uppsala, Dec. 1957. [* * *]
in a sense, I feel it will be too bad if they cut my candle now. I have never told you but I always thought that my best writing would come after the age of 50. I have felt this slow fattening inside of me, the gradual thing, so gradual, a strange warm presence…well, shit, fuck the dramatics. [* * *]
About Henry Miller—print him if it will keep you afloat; he wants the wondrous Loujon format and you can’t blame him. you’d like it yourself, for yourself, wouldn’t you? Of course, Henry has slipped a few steps down, but he’s still a good name and doubt he can ever
forget
how to write unless they kill him with a bomb or a stone or a hammer. Odd that I’ve read so little of him. in a bus station once in Texas, I think, and he too, like Camus, pissed me off. yet I realize that they both think, and write well, with force, I mean, there is just something in my brain that will hardly let me enjoy anything at all. I don’t mean that I am an automatic crank or that I am bitter with the success of a Miller or a Camus; it’s just that I’d rather not read. looking at the sun or a woman’s legs or a horse race, this fills me; reading just fidgets and burns and flops across me…dead grease, print, the coffin-lid down. [* * *]
[To Douglas Blazek]
March 1, 1966
I enter the Queen of Angels hospital tomorrow. dear doctor wants to probe a bit more tomorrow a.m. to see if he can find anymore worse, but so far just surgery for hemorrhoids which have gotten so damned bad I can’t function anymore. I am hoping, of course, that he doesn’t find any dirty words like “cancer.” anyhow, if you don’t hear from me in some time you will know that I am sparring around a few rounds…and if you don’t hear from me at all, finally, you’ll know I lost the damn fight. This would be a time, I’d think, when I should be sitting down and pounding out immortal poems…anything I haven’t said, anything that I should say. but I am disinterested. no desire at all. I believe Webb is pissed at me because I cannot make trip—I promised—to come down and cut more tape. But he gets so
tied
in his projects that he doesn’t realize that things can happen to people. I mailed him 3 tapes yesterday, old ones, and now the machine is dead…the sea rolls in. [* * *]