Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  now here I sit in this place with woman and child and I am not any different than I was then, I wonder if they know this? the girl-child simply does not care, they have not gotten to her yet—she is sweet honey on the side of my hot brain. but nothing much helps. Mac says, “write a novel.” “just for me and Blaz and Richmond and Want-ling…”: well, look, I don’t believe much in this groupism, but I do BELIEVE I COULD WRITE A NOVEL FOR 4 people to read??? maybe what kills the novel is that you are writing into a tomb-mouth. think of it, the title and the atrocity: A Novel Written for 4 People to Read. I ought to do it.

  Stravinsky, Percy Grainger, hell, Mahler, the world was is and remains full of good men who fall dead across the doorsteps, and if they don’t kill themselves some son of a bitch will do it with a mail-order $12 rifle, or like with Gandhi, or like with Christ, let’s laugh, it is not a game to win, it will never be a candy christmas forever, and sometimes the guy with the $12 rifle belongs, we no so little we know so little of how it works, and now believe me I do not mourn Kennedy anymore than I do Caesar because it seems that to get to the SO-CALLED TOP, it is most evident to me that you have to kill a lot on the way to get there. but I am speaking more or less of the working sadness of everything—how everything never seems to work. and why should it? we’ve been given minds and bodies and a love that will not last. how long can a man try before he gives way to death? why does Want-ling discourage me when he becomes so drab about capital punish.? shouldn’t I expect the drab? now they give me Madame Butterfly by Puccini. where are the people? where are the beautiful women? all these women reach up into their asses and wipe away shit. I am discouraged. I can figure it out. it is the education, the lore that this society has yoked me with and the things that I have found out do not fit with what I was told. and, please believe me, it is not just the female race who reaches up into shit, it is EVERYTHING…and, I cry too much like a disturbed man, but what do I hold onto?

  now that, hell, you’ve told me this, and, now, that I am so very much here?

  well, kid, they’ll soon be back from reading their poetry to each other, and so I’d better think of hauling in the string, shit, I am like at the bar in the old days, really gone but my fingers insisting on the keys for the hell of the lonely blues and hacksaw evidence…. my god, umm. [* * *]

  wanted to see and I lolled and I saw

  and I didn’t see anything like

  what Whitman saw

  I only saw the most terrible horror

  that made me a drunk for ten years and

  a half-drunk for the rest of my

  life:

  not what they want to save or what

  they want to KILL—

  but that they can’t see that there isn’t anything here

  that they have lied to me for so long

  and expected me to be thankful for

  it.

  let them

  wait.

  [* * *]

  * * *

  John Logan was editor of Choice: A Magazine of Poetry and Photography. Two poems by Bukowski appeared in issue no. 5 (Summer? 1967: Dorbin C384-385).

  [To John Logan]

  Early June, 1965

  christ, have finally gotten around to some letter of telling you I got the o.k. on the two poems and although it is now past the midnight of sobriety I type on. why do drunks always like to brag upon their deaths? it’s getting tiresome and I’m very tired of myself. [* * *]

  2 people have so far told me that Rexroth has written an article for Harpers called “The New American Poets,” and so I guess I can take the ribs being 45 and tough and having only written ten years, it is substantial nevertheless that I was always outcast everywhere I went, schoolyards, whorehouses, jails, I always got the foot in the face, there was always the subnormal whom I only tolerated telling me his troubles, through the factories, through the hells, and there was always ALWAYS somebody else making it, which I didn’t mind as long as I was lifted. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Al Purdy]

  Early June, 1965

  [* * *] yes, I fucked up in New Orleans but will always remember your letter “to hell with remorse”! and this wuz big help, baby, I am such a butcher, I guess the headshrinkers would say I am trying to hide some weakness while drunk or so forth, that I am really a homosexual or once fucked my mother, or burned a snail with a match and that I can’t face all this, really. the trouble with headshrinkers is that they have never lived—they take it from the white rats and the hand-job Freuds and then change it a little, but essentially if they saw enough men in jails and factories and wars and riding lime-burning boxcars, they’d know that what bothered us was lack of life, being hounded and poor and pissed-on and marked on down to the grave [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  early June, 1965

  stinking hot, night, just took a good crap and somebody whaling the shrieking guts outa a violin on the radio, dropped 30 or less at track (I am improving) but there’s whiskey here and I have been drinking for a good 2 hours but feel very little except empty washtubs and the snoring of lambs, look, Purdy wrote, and part of it:

  “had intended to type new poems or ones I wanted to save in case anything happened to me in the north, so use carbons to send along to you so you can pick out any you think Doug Blazek might want. One was published, “Hunting Season,” but much changed from then…”

  well, kid, I’ve read the poems over and can’t separate them and so am sending them all on to you for a look-see. Like Norse, Purdy is a pro, and what I mean by a pro is a man who has lived enough and is still alive. you’re the editor and I don’t want to shove anything on you and it doesn’t mean a damn to me whether a man has a rep or not so long as he can lay it down. the trouble is that when they get reps they soon stop laying it down, most of them. [* * *]

  further from Purdy: “I mean, we’re all shits in facets or aspects, our only hope being the sum total of life doesn’t amount to being a shit.”

  I’ll write him that I sent the poems to you and that the little ax is in your hands. all right? [* * *]

  McNamara has somebody who steals his mail. he found one of my letters in a garbage can with words written all over it like “shit,” “fuck,” and so forth. a bad situation. the worst sin in the world is when the poor try to rob the poor. the enemy is fairly obvious, why weaken our ranks?

  hope I have not pissed you in not going overboard on the Want-ling but long ago decided to play it straight (corny, what?) and so I say whatever I say. or like there used to be a cartoon where this guy would say: “I am Popeye the Sailor Man and I am what I am.” It used to cost him a lot of times until he got hold of a can of spinach; me, I use scotch and/or beer, just much beer. [* * *]

  * * *

  On Richmond Bukowski notes: “Reclusive, strange poet, has lived in little house by the beach for decades. Published various magazines and sheets, which included Earth, Earth Rose, and Hitler Painted Roses.” In 1966 Richmond was arrested for distributing an “obscene publication”; the case was not finally dropped until 1971.

  [To Steven Richmond]

  early june, 1965

  gagging on too black coffee. bad image. I am supposed to be dunking my head in a vat of beer. fuck it. I don’t like images. won’t have them. Webb works on the image bit. I enclose a clipping from the Courier. he even has me six feet six. I’m 5 11 and ¾’s. I did drink 30 beers at one sitting but this is the only thing to do when people are talking and looking at each other. it’s the only thing to do. If I drink whiskey I have a tendency to reach over and rip off somebody’s shirt. I don’t care for the interview; it’s juvenile and standard, written by a rich young man right out of college but this is the type of thing that goes in those papers. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Steven Richmond]

  June 11, 1965

  [* * *] I don’t mix too well with people, I am now so old and have this old woman too and we have gotten this unexpected child, and she�
��s art, I love her every bone, but it’s all kind of foolish, I am almost done, tired, and I just don’t know what to say to young men, I am not a talker, Webb found that out when I went South, I just sat on a chair, and a couple of profs came down from the University and yammering and I couldn’t say anything, shit, I felt foolish dumb and in many ways am, they were so bright, they came up with a lot of jazz and action and life and I liked them but I could contribute nothing, too many factories, too many drunk tanks, too many women, too many years, too many park benches, too much everything, and that is why I do not invite you over, you’d think I was stale or cheese or freezing you. really, hell, there’s nothing to say. I guess I’m what is known in the terminology as a “loner.” even at work I catch it. old man walks up to me on coffee break. I am sitting on a truck in corner, dark corner, while they talk baseball and so forth, and he walks up:

  you mind, he says, if I ask you something?

  no, I answer.

  you’re kind of exclusive, aren’t you?

  yeah.

  I mean, you don’t mix with people.

  I guess not.

  you don’t like people, do you?

  most of them I don’t.

  you’re anti-social then.

  I suppose I am.

  You’re miserable! he screamed at me and his face, as they say, contorted, almost tears and he walked away.

  Steve, that I’ve gotten a couple of books published has nothing to do with it. I could now get broad and easy imagining that I have scope or some damn thing. it won’t work. I’ve never felt good with the crowd and it started in grammar school, I sensed that they touched each other, understood each other, but that I did not belong. and now, 45 years old, I find I still do not belong, fuck dramatics, but the worst part is that I do not even belong with the best ones, the living ones, I seem sliced off forever by some god damn trick, either my imagining or some type of insanity, but even the good ones leave me dangling and I feel like a fool, and I know that I am a fool for I feel what I know, and my ex-wife used to get mad at me because I laughed at my stupidity and my mistakes, and this is not well: laughing when you fall and she quickly got rid of me when the man did not seem as good to her as the poems, and yet she must have read the poems wrong for the man and the poem were the same thing. so she took her million dollars and married an eskimo. god fuck that. [* * *]

  * * *

  [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.