Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  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 Outsider

  after 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. [* * *]

  * * *

  • 1966 •

  [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 a
ll 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. [* * *]