Screams From the Balcony (41 page)

[* * *] like any individual with individual experiences I have impaired vision. the capitalist goes by his experiences and instincts. I am afraid I would make a
very
good rich man and I am
AFRAID
I would keep my money. I would build walls. I would create a Greecian Art from the souls of my slaves. I would fuck young girls until I got tired of fucking young girls. I would not worry about the lettuce pickers of Salinas. I would feel pretty good: I would feel pretty brainy; I might still even have a soul.
THE WHOLE THING NEEDS TO BE CLEANED UP BY FUCKING WELL REALIZING EVERYBODY
. you see, your boy Dan gets me to thinking about these things. I think of Norse standing up at a table when you walk in. I think of Norse sick sick dying cornered, I think of the good men everywhere being swallowed by the iron sky. and it just isn’t government and capitalism and
MAN BEING VICTIMIZED BY OTHER MEN, IT IS MEN BEING VICTIMIZED BECAUSE THEY WERE BORN TO DIE
. all this is basic, all these things are basic—yet I have never read them anywhere. why? I suppose it is in the libraries somewhere, but
IT IS SO DILUTED AND TRICKY AND ARTY
that it flips off like a live fish out of the hands. truly, there has been very little good clear plain and true Art created within the life of Man. in Music, yes; in Painting yes—but in the written word, no no no NO!—the written word is till sucking its own tits, crying for mama, posing. let’s take a case. Burroughs. all right. he is reaching, shuffling into a
NEW DIMENSION
. he is bored, mad, pissed with the ordinary product. rightfully so. any sane man is, any sane insane man. but Burroughs in mixed and mixing new paints, combos, finds flicks, colors, discoveries…. surcharged with butter and fire, much of it not bad Art. fine. but still he is sliding off the horizon. in trying to discover a New Reality he is losing the actual
REALITY
. this is his failure. let me illustrate—the only true forward-moving art is an art that discovers new form by still retaining actual reality—perhaps the best example of this is
Finnegans Wake
by Joyce. he moved the word out of the concept of the word but still gave us the actual world. the instance came not by
accident
but by the force of innards and the lonely madness of luck and the way. Burroughs pasteups of the clipped-up London
Daily Heraldor
whatever, or standing on his knees upside down reading the bible through a film of boiling skimmed milk is often entertaining and REAL but more often a trick, a falling together of an insignificant world by tricks and a lot of glue. now it is possible to get a
FREE WORLD WORD, a REAL SHOT FROM THE SKY BY WORKING THE TRICK
, but down in us we know, finally, that the only way is to slug it down the river. not because our masters and schoolteachers taught us this but because the masters and schoolteachers must go, and Burroughs is only pasting their dry canine flicks upon our murdered brows
IN DIFFERENT ORDER
. not enough. we need new blood, new miracle—not the mixing of old soup. and now that I have killed Burroughs, enough of that.

god, enough of that. this is a short letter to explain that I did not mean to call you a girl. [* * *]

I am still listening to Bruckner 9th. do you think I am cultured, little girl? I like this stuff. if I weren’t so poor I’d make a beautiful snob. even now I think I could be a music critic for the
New York Times
if they’d let me. but they wouldn’t. before I was finished they’d burn the
Times
down or some music lover would assassinate me. let’s get the pawnshop owners first. then, me. yes, I’d make a terrible snob. I just don’t like most people’s faces or the way they walk or the sound of their voices or anything they say. the people make me physically ill. shut me in a room with 5 people for 40 minutes and then ask me if I had a chance whether I’d save them or burn them. Dostoevsky wouldn’t agree. somebody from some middle class mag was over to interview me last Friday night, no, the Friday before. but he just kept the tape going and I got drunker and drunker and I finally said,
FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, MERCY, JUST ASK ME A DIRECT QUESTION AND I WILL GIVE YOU A DIRECT ANSWER
. but he wouldn’t. he was wiser than I. or more frightened. not both. there are very few, if any men, more wiser and more frightened than I am
AT THE SAME TIME. I MEAN I FEEL TERROR CONTINUALLY
. they have built me a little image shit thing of a brave and tough man. I will not buy it. I am a skunk thing, always turning, not knowing. I don’t know where I am at. incomplete, nothing full. his friend, John Bryan, kept saying, “Bukowski, you are a bitter old man!” and he meant it but I did not know what he meant. I am not bitter, nothing like that. I am mixed. I mean half the time I want to kill myself and the other half the time I am angry because I have almost no means of staying alive in a society that asks for turret lathe operators or experts on Space, the stock market, so forth. I don’t know their game. I am these
TWO HALVES AND NO HOLE
. a good piece of ass would fix me for 3 or 4 nights but where is it?

I am now drunk beyond the meaning of my saying but go on. ??????

Kennedy was a half-man, hardly that, but a hero of the little punchy guy who wanted class and used K’s seeming class to fill the hole. I’ll always remember the day of Kennedy’s assassination, how all the people seemed
HOLLOW
without impluse or guide. as if they had been scooped out. me, I felt the same. but I got this terrible feeling as if the beehive had been raided and the
QUEEN BEER BEE
taken out forever. even their faces had no anger.
WITHOUT THEIR LEADER THEY COULD NOT EVEN GET ANGRY AT AN
(seeming)
INJUSTICE
. this was the day I really read the human race down, realized that each man must be
HIS OWN QUEEN BEER BEE
. and that they could not ever be stuffed with the apple pie of political fairytales to save their dull asses. you can kill one man. it is a little more difficult (tho possible) to kill a worldful. let’s try for a worldful. (Carl do you know any woman in los angeles who could come over and throw me a hot piece of ass? if so, tell her to wear high heels and a tight tight skirt, and my phone number is NO. 1-6385.) oh shit, it’s past ten p.m. and according to the rules I must stop typing. how can I make it? I am just getting warmed up. (Carl, do you know any woman in los angeles with a
NOISELESS TYPEWRITER
. if you do, tell her to bring it over. tell her to wear high heels and a tight tight skirt, and my phonenumber is the same.)

this is a short letter and I am sorry if you are a girl. wear high heels, etc….

you know, it is amazing the ugly number of people in the lit. world hate me. no, don’t send me to headshrinker. no complex. thing in present
The Smith
.
AN INTERCEPTED LETTER FROM CHARLES BUK
, something like that.
*
but really the parody does
NOT WRITE LIKE I WRITE
. impossible. maybe I do write too many letters. maybe I do write too many poems. but it is simply a matter of energizing into the
INCOMPLETE ABSOLUTE
, you follow? yes, you do. it may be a flowing of shit, and yet within all the turds I feel is some tiny flower. you might have to look pretty hard. I have had a lot of hard days…drunk days, days in jail, days of madness, days without cause or form, and the university boys take heed, they don’t like to hear back alley talk.
THE MAN IN THE BACK ALLEY IS SUPPOSED TO DAMN WELL KEEP QUIET
! no, I ghostly damn well throw out the mangled butternut skulls of myself, the sucked-out flies, the cardboard faces of Jesus, Saroyan at Malibu, James Dean & Bob Dylan inflated Dylan Thomas inflated, the inflated fucking raft, Bogey the dull picture hero, myself spitting out my teeth and my life without a chance to breathe. they want the straight-lace picture. novels about the Civil War. novels about daring sexuality within the daring and lovely rich. the
UNIVERSITY IS THE THUNDERHEAD OF DEFEAT
. the young know this. so they get sucked away from this and they get sucked into other cesspools: Bukowski, Thomas, Dylan, Ginsberg—anything except by going into that lonely room and finding out
WHO THEY ARE OR WHO THEY ARE NOT
. it’s too hard. and milked and slugged and smiled at by parents and grammar schools and high schools, they are already robbed by the time it is ready for them to THINK. think becomes a dirty word. because they have been
TAUGHT THAT THEY WERE THINKING ALL ALONG
. not so, of course. but if a man can recover, if he has the bounceback, the miracle, he will find that the first 30 years were wasted in fighting off, regrouping before
HE CAN BECOME EASY. THINKING OR LIVING IS NOT VERY HARD AT ALL
; it is the other thing that they are doing that is killing them. [* * *]

[To Steven Richmond]

February, 1967

yes, the whores with one or more children will generally treat you more human to begin because their circumstances are more desperate but once they figure they have you hooked in against the pussy, lo, the more than trouble begins. there are about 3 women looming on my horizon, eager-eyed, trying to act like kool-true dolls, but I’ll be damned if I think I am going to play buck-antler deer with a hard for them. I am tired of the whole gory scene and think I will remain a hermit of an old man behind pulled curtains—say, peeking at schoolgirls as they walk by, whistling through my broken teeth, then running for my paper and crayons and drawing the tower of Pisa, or the Eiffel. [* * *]

—yes, Georgakas strong stuff, not the usual textbook Marxist, neurosis-anarchist, Black Romanticist, bones-of-Trotsky, they-shot-Lorca, let’s listen to a folk song type. he leaps from a kind of hammer forge energy purpose of his own invention, he does not hum the same old shit and is man enough to know where he is and where they are. and not introvert enough to let them overpower him with his
own
logic. he leaps like a wild and hungry monkey in a cage, but screams a seeming very good sense and livingness. if all his breed had the same living faculty, I’d throw in with them, start by setting Yorty’s hotel on fire and so forth. but I am leery of his club membership, am afraid they are a bunch of hand-stamped farts, and so I sit at the typer, go down to the postoffice, go to the race track and write letters on windy afternoons to Steven Richmond.

THERE IS
ANOTHER
HIGHRISE APT. GOING UP DIRECTLY ACROSS THE STREET
. I am now completely surrounded. I see all these beehives. I see people more and more living stacked on top of each other in a kind of demented high-priced luxury that they pay in a kind of fear and a kind of love of the stink of each other behind those shiny walls decorated with mass-produced artwork and sexfilm paint. luckily I can’t afford to die in such voluptuous candyshit; I will end up in a cardboard box in the hills. I have discovered the last green hills in town—it is just before you hit Huntington Drive on the way to Santa Anita, a turn left off of North Main or North Broadway, I don’t know which, anyhow the streets end there, and there it is: these slices of high green hills, tall, and nothing on them, no terrible houses, no terrible people, and I always feel like stopping the 57 and getting out and climbing up there, walking around in it, laying down in the weeds, but no guts, the city has me, the track calls me, but those hills ride inside me as I drive past, and looking at them, it’s like vomiting up a whole sick metropolis and I feel better. there used to be a space like that on the way to Los Alomites but they found it, the developers, and they put their mass-produced houses there and the mass-produced people came running and leaped in and mortgaged their souls to somebody, banks, builders, could make 450 percent profit.

someday when I get rich on the horses you and I will start a colony. there is still desert land somewhere. we put up these houses, rustics, made entirely of wood and unpainted. houses far apart, lots of sand between them. no police force. people can scream or drink or sing or take dope all night or all day or have lions in their backyards. only no rich, no literary pretenders, no Malibu, no Village, no Carmel. we interview those desiring to live there. “lemmee see your paintings, your poems.” we look. we are snobs. we are pricks. we are selfish because we want to stay alive. “no, no good, you can’t live here.” of course, we take in a lot of stupid women because there aren’t any other kind. then when it all gets
too
bad, we
SELL
…for 450 percent profit and
LEAVE THEM THERE
. (this is the way I talk after 2 good days at the track. last Friday and Saturday; when I lose I am much more humane and carry an etching of Karl Marx in my wallet.) [* * *]

2 p.m., 2:05 KFAC symphony now coming on, hope they give me something to lean against this highrise across the way…not bad, something offbrand by Haydn, who was a kind of a kool suckass in his time but managed to save some juice. there is much of him that I haven’t heard—the masses, Mass in Time of War, so forth. but prefer Mahler, Bruckner, Wagner without words, Stravinsky, Shostakovich. shit, so what?

some guy at work met me on front steps, a small hard Negro with little cap pulled down over his ears. “God damn, Hank, you’re really full of
BULLSHIT
!” “whatcha mean, Roy?” “I saw that magazine.” “what magazine?” “I dunno the name of it, but I saw it. about you being a
POET
! what a bunch of
BULLSHIT
! and your photo with the little beard.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Roy.” “no, you
KNOWS, you KNOWS WHAT EYE’S TALKING ABOUT, DON’T BULLSHIT ME
!” It appears he saw a copy of
Dare
when he went to his local barbershop. this is the poem I got the $50 for writing. easy money but if it’s going to get these jabberwockies on my back it isn’t worth it.—some guy over other night to interview me for the
L. A. Times
magazine
West
. I was very drunk and think I insulted the guy on principle. he wouldn’t even phone me for further details on article but phoned Frances. if this ever comes out in about a month or a month and a half they are really gong to try to rip the meat from me down at the bastille. but I think I can handle them. they don’t call me The Hammer and The Barber for nothing. all else aside, the fact remains that the only battle is to remain as alive as possible and to continue to create the poem or knit stockings or whatever you are doing or have been doing or want to do. anybody can go the way of Dylan Thomas, Ginsberg, Corso, Behan, Leary, Creeley, just sliding down that river of shit. the idea is Creation not Adulation; the idea is a man in a room alone hacking at a stone and not sucking at the tits of the crowd. [* * *]