Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  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. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  March 8, 1966

  back, still stupid with spinals, knives, shots, people, gowns, noise, stink, the o big ass load of pain, hurrah, I am sitting here (barely) on a fat red pillow trying to make my mind think down to the keys…not much luck. I feel rather upside-down. get up continually and go to can and there are little snake turds without eyes, cut somewhat like death, and each bowel movement about a childbirth, gripping elbows, saying, “wwoowoo! sweet son of a bitch, mother, sing to me, sing to me!!” that shit sliding past the incisions of 15 years’ worth of hemorrhoids and distorted intestine chopped loose…. when you think about poem, poems, or stories, about this time, all that doesn’t make much sense. I’m afraid the poem has never quite come up to the actuality and certainly hasn’t solved it, althought I don’t suggest we throw our rusty guns away.

  [* * *] managed to get out to old ’57 Plymouth and start it last night, let it run, and so that’s still alive. I was laying flat on my ass in the dark of night, moaning, my foot on the accelerator, charging the fucking thing. 2 old women came by and stared at me laying in there, they thought I was nuts, but strangely strangely I didn’t even care what they thought. I stared at their moth-dry, white-pigment, chalky, room-for-rent, casket faces; their bodies like sticks of hardened shit, even the moonlight seeming to vomit away from them…it didn’t matter, and they moved on creaking and chirping nothings of waste. to think, they might even once have been half-decent fucks, but now more stupid than armies, less clean than dirt. anyhow, I think the car is ready to go, and with a little time, I am going to be around some more, as indecent and imperfect and vulgar as ever. you think you can remove this old German-Polack like a bathtub ring? hah, they gotta rub me harder than that! [* * *]

  [P.S.] [* * *]—have been reading Camus (off and on)…3 books’ worth that I haven’t got to. stories not so hot, rather common and ordinary, standard. essays contain good brain matter and have quality but the style is so dull! why do they have to put us asleep to teach us?

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 8, 1966

  back couple of days but first day I’ve had strength or guts to reach typer. I don’t know how long it will take me to shape up. just about out of vacation time and sick leave shot. sad song.—hope you got package o.k. with mags and tapes. keep tapes away from machinery or they will fade.—each bowel movement here a real crucifixion; but operation I’m told was simply for removal of an extreme (15 year) hemorrhoid condition, plus, I believe removal of part of intestine pushed out of shape with strain. not very pretty what,??? nothing like a good clean heart attack—it seems so much more honorable, but, of course, it’s not truly so. (Doc examined my innards with snake: what an invention!) would like to get a couple of new and fresh tapes to you but am simply in no shape to do so now. I do hope that we have a little more time. the $$$ situation looks bad; my pay will stop Monday and all operation will not be paid by my insurance. also have payments to Frances. various other things. but believe all will work out and I will be rolling again. god, it looks like we are all broke this time, TOGETHER!!

  it’s good, tho, to be alone again, out of the hospital, near the typer and the radio and Camus, and the sun and the sound of things flowing together. all will work, and easily, our luck is strong. health and love to you. Marina is so BEAUTIFUL!!!

  * * *

  [To William Want-ling]

  March 9, 1966

  when you consider all the men born who are now dead, and when you consider the remaining living, these remaining living seem not only some miraculous mathematic, but also seem something to get done with: like a pruning or a picking or an ultimate road-end. would it be too precious to say that we live almost with a sense of shame, as if we were getting away with something? I would hardly regard my upcoming death as anything sorrowful or tragic—just the removal of garbage and a hacking voice that talks too much of too little.

  —Bukowski, 3-9-66

  [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Ann Menebroker]

  March 11, 1966

  “green,” new trend? “green, green, I want you green!”—Lorca. the use of “green” is now mostly an ultra-poetic Romanticism. of course, the word “green” is not outlawed but it is generally used by the pretenders and most poetry is written by pretenders. the living are busy doing something else.

  To give talks on Poetry it is best to have a captive audience. Get them where they can’t walk out—say a hospital, a jail, an insane asylum…school auditoriums are not safe—those with guts will leave. you can’t blame the masses for disregarding poetry—it is pretty dull stuff & obtuse & unreal in direct regard toward what is actually happening to them. In the Atomic Age they don’t have Time to waste or to be wrong.

  * * *

  This letter was printed in Congdon’s Magazine, no. 3.

  [To Kirby Congdon]

  [ca. mid-March, 1966]

  if this letter is detached and punchy, understand, at least. I’m out of the hospital, and these couple of dark hollering rooms are mine to divide, to throw myself on the springs and wonder about how I keep getting it in the ass. (don’t misinterpret…or do, who cares?) (which reminds me of a guy in a place I just worked, I mean used to work. he had this reducing machine which he put his girlfriend on and fucked her. “we turn it on every night about 3 a.m. and it sounds like a washing machine. people wonder what I am doing washing my clothes at 3 a.m. but it’s a great machine; you just lay there and it does all the work. you and I ought to try it?” “you and I?” I asked. “yeah,” he said. “but who’s gonna get on top?” “what the hell difference does it make?” he answered.)

  I have been vaguely unhappy, bored, disgusted with poetry for years, for centuries…I sometimes try to tell people why—not in the involute & secretive and voca
bulary-deadened style of a Creeley or an Olson, but really, what the HELL ISN’T going on and what the HOAX is. Of course, the best way to point out is to create, but sometimes I can’t resist a few beerhall speeches. It is not so much in telling people how to DO things but in letting them know how the trusted kingpins have managed to slice an inch or two off the peckers of their souls and make them smile and say thanks. I’m 45 now; have only been in the game ten years but the way the body is falling apart I thought it would be best if I left some word. I hope I do not talk too much like a con-man. I’m sick of that; I’ve seen enough of that. anyhow, nothing.

  the review on Corrington in Steppenwolf—the editor wrote me asking, “if I send you Corrington’s latest book, you mind reviewing it?” a free book is a free book. hell, no, I don’t mind, I told him, send it on in. I thought it might be something along the lines of his last book, The Anatomy of Love & Other Poems, and that I could say a few good things and then go to the racetrack or the mill or the rack or wherever. however, Lines to the South didn’t have it, and since I had stuck my neck out I had no other choice but than to chop Willie’s off. (Corrington’s). he hasn’t sent the Klan up yet so I guess I can put this rusty luger back under the hotwater bottle. Corrington had me worried when I met him and Miller Williams down there. the talk was all University-power talk, intrigue; talk about degrees and all that very drab shit. evidently it didn’t take long the for the talk to catch up with the poems. but if you think I just write adverse reviews like a vulture trying to strengthen his own flight with dead meat, see evidence number 9. I do a review entitled “The Corybant of Wit,” a look through at Irving Layton’s The Laughing Rooster. I am afraid that Irving L. writes very well. when I can read a man without lessening the electric charge within me, I know that man is a writer. to hell with iambic p.’s and spondees, I go on kilowatts!

  I keep getting stuff in the mail from people about my review of Corrington. the odd thing being that they all agree with me, which worries me. there was some Roman ruler, I believe, who said: “The people applauded. I must have said something wrong.” I know what he meant. then too, it tickles their twats that after Corrington befriended me I jammed him. well, fuck it all. being a reviewer is too easy. I am afraid that if I reviewed my own stuff there would be blood all over the floor and walls. I know there would.

  Corso? Ginsberg? maybe I am jealous of the big cats? they’ve got one thing I got—clarity of style, but they’ve got a little too much the sweet tooth for their own soul (soul-importance) and they suck up a lot of bait. Camus said we’ve got to be a part of History and get out with it, but I am not sure he meant on-stage bellowing to the idol-lovers. still, I am full of too much complaint, I guess, but I have turned down some offers to prance on stage for $$$, good place to sleep, food, drinks, fare, that bit. I’d have to be pretty hungry. (see Behan, see D. Thomas, see Christ.) the come-on is only a softener so they can rope you, kill you. I go with Jeffers—the best friend is a rock wall. (see Capone.) people do come to my door and I open it and treat them nicely, mostly because I don’t have the guts to do otherwise, and also because they can easily have more than I. but then, too, these people are mostly peekers and the whole thing has nothing to do with CREATION or slamming the keys down, crackcrackcrack vapvap. I’ve got to be a loner because most of the time I am shoved into factories and places I don’t want to be, and in order to get out of the spaghetti I have to crawl under the rug. I am not a snob and I am not precious and I am not playing genius; but where were these people when I was starving and freezing in a shack in Atlanta, when I was living in a cardboard shack without light, heat, water, food, toilet, hope, for a dollar and a quarter a week? where were these people when I was in jail, or on the park benches? where were these people when I turned the gas on one night and tried to kill myself? in Los Angeles? in hell? their sweet knocks, their quips, their stares…who wants them? if I fail to write any more poetry, they will be the first to say…“he’s lost it. he’s finished.” I don’t need their judgements. all I need is a sheet of paper, a typer, some food and some rent. win or lose, talent or no, age or death…I am, I was a human being. I never had a desire to look at a writer, to knock at his door, maybe because most writers never did me any good; maybe because I figured what they wrote was all they owed me,—if they owed me that. so, I’m just a crank who has had surgery of the asshole. fine, then.

  bit of race rioting in Watts last night—not much—a Mexican and Negro killed, 25 injured. not much? I hear you laugh. I thought so. some writer, a guy who makes it professionally via the sex and nudey bit, phoned me last night. “I’ve got my gun loaded! I’m ready!” he said. this guy doesn’t even live in Los Angeles. highly sensitive sort. then his doorbell rang and he just about zeroed out. I think I heard the safety catch go off. “gotta go,” he said. “see you.” he probably shot a Western Union boy with a dark tan. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  March 22, 1966

  the dog poisoners are legion and slinky and seldom get caught, and we don’t have enough death, they have to play dirt with the little we have left. I was supposed to go to WAR to save such creatures as these? the dog poisoners are usually members of long standing in the neighborhood, respected, churchly, own their own homes, and are often childless or their children have grown and tend not to see them anymore. the dog poisoners are usually between the ages of 55 and 70. most of them loved animals as children but American society and what it extracts from the body and the mind and the soul can grow very special monsters of its own. most of them are concerned with property and “property rights” as they like to call them. and since they have nothing else to hold to, this becomes everything. not so long ago there was a doctor out here in one of the suburbs who clubbed a puppy to death with a pistol butt. it was not even a grown dog. and he did it in the open, on his lawn, with children and people watching. (I was not there.) but his excuse was that the puppy had no right on his property. being a doctor and fatted with the worship people tend to give doctors and fatted with $$$, he was simply bolder and more insane than his brethren dog-killers. the case came to court but I didn’t hear how it came out. they didn’t print it or I missed that edition. probably case dismissed or a fine, say $15. property, property. I had a beautiful hound once (half-wolf, half-collie; but gentle, gentle) and I was walking him down the street on a leash and he stopped to piss on a plant outside a real estate office on Beverly Blvd. I had him trained to crap in vacant lots. but he pissed on this bush and this real estator leaped out of his office, he screamed at me: “HEY! GET THAT DOG OFF THAT BUSH! HEY! HEY! HEY! PISS IS POISON! HE PISSED ON MY BUSH!” you could hear this guy all the way to Bensenville, Illinois. I just looked at him, looked at his acid face and his eyes and his body dangling there. “I can’t control my dog’s piss,” I told him quietly. “Well, let him piss somewhere else! move him off!” I didn’t move off. either the dog or I could have killed him if we had so chosen. “Your chicken-shit bush won’t die,” I told him, “and if it does, I’ll pay you for it.” “Get that dog outa here!” we stood there until he went back inside to count his blood chips of profit. sometimes I think that these people almost know that they are dead, ugly, wasted, and they don’t want to see anything or anybody happy and careless and easy; they don’t even want to see anybody unhappy in the way we tend to get unhappy—it has to be their way. my wolf-collie got killed by a car when I split with this woman. I had left the dog with her. pets seldom die of old age. how I hate the fucking world and their special ways and values! Blaz, you’ll get over the dog (dogs) but you’ll never get over what did it: The American flag. money. property. the dead citizens in cities of horror and madness and fear. christ, christ.

  good that All the Assholes and Mine went. writing it so soon after, I didn’t know if I was caught in the stream or could see it go by. and yet maybe too much objectiveness tends to let the air out of the tires. that’s the trouble with most literature: everybody’s so cool and superior to the action
that it becomes a word-game, a chess game—and the King is asleep and the Queen wears kotex and the Knights and Castles stumble and the Pawns, well, they don’t matter, do they? [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Douglas Blazek]

  April 4, 1966

  [* * *] of course it would be sweet if you could get hold of a printing press; it would add to what is already there. Ole has so much more lifeblood than the others that it’s…no contest, riot, runaway. I hope that a press will not delete the beautiful madness from your silly head. I don’t think it will. as much as you hate it and know that it is killing you, that factory, without wanting to, is also keeping you alive—to this extent: that those few moments given to you—you realize that here the god damn sun gotta finally shine, no lies, no bullshit, words cutting into paper like flowers, like swords, like screams, like paint. your family too, as much as you love them, will sometimes think you are mad, think you are cruel, because you will want to cop some moments from them too. but they ought to know that without your writing and without your editing, without your crazy colored paper and your crazy debts, you would REALLY BE A TERRIBLE FATHER, you would be the average American citizen male breadwinner and he is a horror to behold, he is a sight to make one vomit blood and gut and hope all out, for even when he smiles even when he is kind even when he is a winner a lover a father a playboy a champ, he stinks he is rot, he is a flower without a head, a plant without a root, a slab of meat butchered and dressed in clothing. I’ve got a hunch your family senses some of this, senses your need to hold to walls, to cry at night, to go down in your basement and play with silly piles of papers. so, I’m not scared of you getting a press, I am not scared of you dying. I am scared of me dying. so many of my poems are coming back. one guy told me, “I also rejected Allen Ginsberg.” fine. but means little to me, for I have also rejected Allen Ginsberg. but worse, I read the poems, and it was true—they weren’t any good. mainly because one line didn’t even relate to the other. I’d say one thing, then jump right off into space with something else. and I wasn’t even drunk. maybe that was the trouble. yet, it’s good to fail. I don’t say I had a belly laugh on myself but I did see that the way is curious, thorny and never clear. I am lucky too—to fail a lot. if you fail 40 times, 41 is not so bad. keeps the bowels loose, keeps you human enough to hope, and the miracle becomes mainly that you have typewriter and paper and that something does come out. umm, how I remember the hospital; operated on a Wednesday, didn’t shit until sometime Sunday afternoon. shit is important too—as long as it’s your own. what? [* * *]