Blaz fucked-up again—this time not strike but something worse, I can’t tell you; maybe he will, and it’s really none of my horse, but I keep thinking that he is the Great Romantic Caught in the Spider Dream, and worse yet the kid has got to begun believing that I am some source of wisdom or Life-long Kool, you know, and I think he expected me to o.k. his latest, but Christ, I can’t walk a straight line most of the time myself, and if I had to straight-talk him I’d say 2 things at the same time:
a) take what you want, take what’s good for you, take what keeps you alive
b) but don’t kill anybody ever in the process in this process who has ever loved you depended on you or saved your
life.
if you take a without b you don’t make it and whatever you take will kill you because you are as phoney as that which you wish to overthrow. the weakest men take that which seems immediately better; the strongest men hurt themselves (if hurt has to be), and wait. I’d never say this if I were sober, of course, but I’m seldom sober, of course. [* * *]
* * *
[To Jim Roman]
July 23, 1965
I really believe that Cold Dogs will be issued [* * *]
No, I didn’t see Jonathan Williams when he hit town. I have a reputation as a vicious and nasty drunk (not entirely unfounded) and somebody gave him the word prob. when he asked. That’s all right. [* * *]
oh yes, Stuart hung with 3100 copies of Crucifix but he’ll unload and at $7.50 too. now I am fairly high on beer, typing this in the kitchen while the woman and the ten month old girl sit in the front room listening to Russian poetry on the FM radio. I can’t listen because almost all poetry is bad for me; it irritates; me makes me twitch and have spasms. I don’t understand it, I feel as if I were being reamed in a pig pen. [* * *]
p.s. Finally reading Celine and it’s about time. A master, no doubt of it.
[To Jon and Louise Webb]
July 26, 1965
[* * *] Did Corrington show before you left town? if so, I think we gotta give him points. I think I have g.d. been too hard on too many people. to hell with KNOCK CORRINGTON. to hell with KNOCK SHERMAN. this is small and I am sick of myself. I can disagree with some of their principles and ways and manueverings, but, hell, no man knows when he is right and when he starts thinking he is always right and that the universe is his apple, then he might as well either start a whorehouse or become a preacher. he’s got rocks. [* * *] I am still growing up and I’m very much afraid that when I reach full size that I will be dead.
Marina keeps yanking at me and I lift her up and she sits here in her yellow pajamas
banging at the typewriter
grabbing for my cigar and beer
tiny hand sea-blue eyes
she thinks me a monster of heroic proportions,
my god such a sweet DOLL!!!
she breaks me and breaks me up again and again
as I peer at her out of my
evil face.
the faucet drips. and on and on I write, it’s so easy when drunk. the poems are flowing again, poems, poems, and good or bad they may be, I am now easier to live with, I’d suppose. those 2 books, they almost froze me. It’s like somebody wrote me, “Well, you might as well kill yourself now and go out clean.” I know what he means. but what about Marina? I think she likes me very much, she does seem to, so suppose I left now? a dirty trick I’d think. you should see her eyes. what eyes what eyes what eyes!!! [* * *]
look here, if Henry Miller liked Crucifix that’s good enough for me, that’s the best critic there is—a man who has lived that hard that long just can’t learn to lie and also has no need to. Christ, Jon and Lou, isn’t life really strange??? that a man like Henry Miller would be speaking about all of us? we are truly lucky, we are in touch with the gods, and I am happy for us all. god damn, that was a good phone call, you LIFTED ME RIGHT UP WITH YOUR HAPPINESS and that is why I keep drinking and write on and on. Frances has fixed me something to eat but I keep saying no no, I am busy, to hell with food! oh shit, everything is so strange; it’s so good to know the good people, but do you know what else??? we must be wary, we must be careful, we must follow our own guts…or else the poems will quit, we will quit and we will forget where we are. look, the world is still, I think (so far), a very horrible place filled with horrible people (am I snitching?) (I keep opening beers and drinking them and lighting cigars like a madman), look, look, it’s only next poem or the way we walk or the way we act or respond to the next situation. all we’ve done beforehand DOESN’T COUNT IF WE WASTE IT! and this is what gets me: so many writers, artists, people, begun well who turn to shit when in the beginning they knew what SHIT was. but all it takes is a letter from the editor of The New Yorker. and they sell. thank god I still had the nerve to tell an editor of some big publishing house, last year or so, that I simply did not feel like writing a novel upon his request. I keep thinking of Corrington (I’m snitching again), and thinking of death. look, I am crazy with everything, I am confused but it seems to be quite simple to me—the line is drawn, either you’re on this side of the line or that. they say any man can be bought. I deny this. they say that any man, any man has his price. I don’t have a price. it may be the biggest laugh of the century. they may buy me with a lollipop. poverty is bad enough but poverty that you drag others into beside yourself is what makes them win, what makes you sell out. yet I believe that this beautiful little girl with the beautiful eyes would become less instead of more beautiful if I sold out. that’s the way it works. backwards. it really takes more than 2,000 years of Christianity or anti-Christianity for a man even to get a half decent bearing. and 65 or 75 years of life are not enough. hardly a beginning. I began at 35 which leaves me nothing, and the way I drink and have lived, certainly less than half, perhaps. not even another lousy Summer or 2. well, I have talked long enough. [* * *]
* * *
[To Ruth Want-ling]
August 10, 1965
[* * *] the heat has me goofy too. and I get these pains in my neck and back and chest, I feel like screaming, “oh Christ, let’s start the bloody Crucifixion!” I don’t know what I’ve got. but last night I sat there working with a black foreman glaring at a spot at the back of my neck and the human race went down like lumps of gravy mixed with dung and spittle. I played a little game last night—each person I saw I asked myself, IF YOU HAD THE POWER TO ORDER THE DEATH OF THIS PERSON, WOULD YOU DO SO?
and as they walked by, man and woman, I’d say to myself:
that one, sure!
and that one, MOST SURELY!
and look at that pig, that gross manure, runs through with conceit! death to that!
and look, that one thinks it’s pretty! ugg.
and that one must go and that one, and that, and look at THAT ONE—a sore in the eye of the sun, kill him!
anyhow, nobody got by. it was very sad. no nobility. no grace of walk. not a flower. not a leaf. not even a water spaniel. just bugs, pigs, worms, ant-eaters, gorillas, monkeys, pageboys, so on so. on.
I hope it’s a better night tonight, I hope that I see somebody whether the pains stop or not.
you go easy now. not much sense to anything, of course. your husband writing better as the years prop him up, but hope he does not get too well-known. this usually flips them over the side and does them in. [* * *]
* * *
The books by Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Burroughs that Bukowski lists below were in fact in print in 1965. Carl Larsen’s Plot to Assassinate…was published by Seven Poets Press in 1962.
[To Jim Roman]
August 14, 1965
[* * *] my god, I know, I know little about Patchen, I know the name, and that’s all. this is the hell of it with people who come out in small chapbooks, small books of poetry, editions of 200-500. they are soon swept up and the years go by, and then there’s just the sort of a ring of a name somewhere. I’d like to see some publisher reissue some of these—Howl, On the Road, Gasoline, the Naked Lunch, The Plot to Assa
ssinate the Chase Manhattan Bank, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands…I don’t have any of these myself except the last one. and then there’s Patchen. and what he has written, drawn. Maybe Outsider #4 will throw some light where it’s needed. [* * *]
it’s been searing hot here for a week running, between 95 and 100. race riots in the streets. stores burning and looted, automobiles burning; whites and police beaten. whole blocks on fire. fireman shot at. all hell. I guess they’ll clean their area out and then come up here looking for me. I’ve got my black face ready, ready. “Mammy! Mammy!” “motha-fucka!” of course, I’ve got nothing for them to steal except a couple of books of poetry but I’m surrounded by a lot of white meat they’d just love to beat on. hell, I know they’ve had it rough; I have too. the only difference being that they want a lot of things that I don’t want. anyhow, it’s hot and there’s FUN in town. they caught a white guy the other night and beat him, beat him until one of his eyes was hanging from a thread out of the socket. I keep thinking it’s a good thing the whites didn’t do this to a BLACK or there’d be a national uproar. the whole thing, I think, is just the human monster showing teeth, shitting upon itself every chance it gets. the social workers and professors can talk about conditions and background and all the big glib vacant words, but it’s just the human-thing with hands and feet and bloody flat brain and soul letting go in another direction. shit will always find a direction out, and if it doesn’t, they’ll operate or blast it out. I mean black shit, white shit, brown shit, yellow shit. I need me a wall, oh, I need me a 12 foot wall. with beer inside, with me inside. oh, I need me a 12 foot wall.
well, like I said, it’s hot and we’re all a little off in the noodle today. [* * *]
* * *
[To Douglas Blazek]
[August 15?, 1965]
[* * *] this is Sunday. I’ve drunk about 2 six packs tall and still feel quite sober although I am gradually growing deaf. will be 45 years old on the 16th., my god my god my god. don’t think I don’t remember being young—the bars, the fights, the alleys, everything—refusing marriage, work, country, culture, literature, the sum total. now I sit trapped in a little by everything; the heart got soft, I slipped here and there, finally. and that’s how they trap the fox and the madman.
I wonder about you out there and I know that you have been going through your own particular type of HELL, the Blatt thing, the factory, everything, and that I have been very little use to you. I am sorry; mostly I only write poems, and many of these—as you know—not so good. Want-ling tells me this and you tell me this about Crucifix, and I know that it is true. I knew that when I was down there in New Orleans, I knew I sensed that old man Webb wanted more and better poems but I couldn’t do it. I just kept wandering the streets a drunken jackal of self, wandering drunk, and I could not come up with it. and then they charge $7.50 a copy; well, they had their makeup and format and their artist—only the poet dipped between the slabs. so fuck it. I’ve died before. why lift me upside-down? why strain at me? I think that what might have held the pages down was a more clever poet, practiced. I only mourn and dip within my own ink tears. I don’t know the rules. and I get the side whispers around here from the woman’s poetry-group finks who slip in through the doors while I am asleep? “he’s slipped.” “urn, this is really not as good as It Catches.” so, what the hell do they want? we all slip. we slip all the way into the grave and then we stretch out straight and no more vomit no more bluebirds no more busrides to East Kansas City and a blow job by a maid with a lisp and a big ass for 3 dollars. the woman now in here sliding a big knife into a mayonnaise jar, clank clank clank, smiling a sunlight smile and not realizing that I am writing to the great Blazek. hello to Alta, by the way, and that I’d suggest that she hang close, you’ll make it, hell, you’ve got to, jolly old chopper, I’d like you at my funeral, don’t you see? a few sharp mad words. are you still there? all right, I’ll no longer ask you to “hold” but you must have known what I meant when I said it. the other night, coming out of the slave pit, here was this long freighter load behind an electric motor dragging this body, one ball here one ball there, cock sliding into the moon, asshole like a gnome, fingers and arms spitting at the sky, a letter to mother in the back pocket like a dirty sex picture, some bum had gotten caught and dragged beneath the wheels…blood of course, the human body is mostly blood and mystery and sadness…a dirty game…and a voice shouted out: STOP THE TRAIN!
later, after they examined the shreds, they found it was o.k. “Just a transient,” they said.
just think if it had been a United States congressman. or president Johnson. but to my mind this man could have easily been a better man than any of them. and probably was. and this is the insaneness of our times: that only what you KNOW or are TOLD ABOUT can be hurt. all else is either shit or the enemy or useless. says who? what the fuck is this? I am getting tired of it. [* * *]
I almost never think of suicide anymore. what would be the sense in killing this cuckold, this fat demented flabby body, this distilled eye, this color of YELLOW. I’ve got a yellow streak running up and down my back that would make the Sahara Desert look like a children’s sand pile. else I would have killed myself long ago.
so here I sit like a shit
writing a 23 year old kid I never met
and I get drunkeran drunker
and jam the beer down down
the sunlight is all gone
and the cigars too
I go to the woman’s cigarettes
and light one after the other
like a jackal imbecile
and I don’t know where I am
and a small light burns over my head
a touch of endurance up there
and it makes me almost smile
but the world’s out there humming
and the world’s not right for me
which makes me a de-balled oxen in the
poverty of myself
and that’s sweet enough for me
and I lift the beercan and
drink.
what I mean is, kid, where do we from here? relief rolls? the bloody razor blade? Eartha Kitt, that voice, through a foggy radio? that foreman’s face like God, cut from wood, from glass, seeming to know but knowing nothing nothing…and so, such poor fuckers as you and i? you and I? we turn to the immortals and the immortals hand us a hot turd, the smell of shit. what a sweet mad game! tricked all the way.—and the most famous poets of our Age, they appear in the pages of the New Yorker, silk white, and you read the poems again and again; and the poems say
NOTHING.
except they are kinda nice. eyow eee yes. how they work the word. this takes training and culture. not everybody can do this. the slip of the word like the knife into Caesar.
let me make up a New Yorker poem as drunk as I am I asshole may not get it, anyhow—
mass effusion darkens my brain—
Clymentia, where are you—
with the silver goatherd
or emptying the glass of
me?
swish, swish the coattails of the
Ark, never by god gone never gone
by god, sweet please, Clymentia,
the dark boys coming over the hill
into a machinegun fire
that would moon-strike gorgeous
teacups from
Georgia to Abeline.
and so on. this they consider poetry because it’s pretty and it’s a con game and they think that we CAN’T write it, but we can, we simply refuse to, we simply refuse to give more to an Age that already stinks like an old garbage can, and that after Pound there has to be somebody and after Eliot there has to be somebody, and it’s a shame but—Ginsberg, Corso, the rest have been sucked in playing their entrails across the applause of the crowd, and they are dead and they know that they are dead, it’s useless, they’ve skipped across listened to the applause of half-drunk freaks too long too long, too long have they taken the bait, and I think of one of Corso’s
poems: “I Hate Old Postmen!” this sounds nice, but I predict that when Corso reaches the age of 45 he won’t be writing at all. of course, I will be dead so it won’t matter. but the Ginsberg, Corso crew (and they write well) will die because they can’t resist the delicacy of being forever known forever touched forever heard NOW before 20, 18, 45 people applauding their stuff. they are weak and lack STEEL GUT. I learned in barrooms of the world who the men were. those who spouted the worst were the lousiest fighters. the quiet man was always another kind of job. I don’t want to talk like Hemingway, but my face is not only scarred because of disease. I’ve caught some good ones.
I am an ugly man, surely, but I’ve also learned that there other kinds of ugliness; and that some beatings that I have taken in alleys, or from a friend across the room, these do not diminish me.
Blaze god damn it, I am SORRY SORRY I could not help you in the Blatt thing. fuck poetry. poetry makes me vomit. and I am tired of fights on the front lawn. I’ve had enough of that Hemingway stuff to last me 300 years, 2 men on the front lawn punching the living shit out of each other, blood going, we should be punching Johnson right into his fat Texas map for killing us all, for trying to be a shadow of Frankie D. what a tent show we put on, eh?
Screams From the Balcony Page 21