The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  What I have seen evolve in the littles with most new and fresh talent is an interesting first splash. I think, ah, here’s finally one. Maybe we have something now. But the same mechanism begins over and over again. The fresh new talent, having splashed, begins to appear everywhere. He sleeps and bathes with the goddamned typewriter and it’s running all the time. His name is in every mimeo from Maine to Mexico and the work grows weaker and weaker and weaker and continues to appear. Somebody gets a book out for him (or her) and then they are reading at your local university. They read the 6 or 7 good early poems and all the bad ones. Then you have another little magazine “name.” But what has happened is that instead of trying to create the poem they try for as many little mag appearances in as many little magazines as possible. It becomes a contest of publication rather than creation. This diffusion of talent usually occurs among writers in their twenties who don’t have enough experience, who don’t have enough meat to pick off the bone. You can’t write without living and writing all the time is not living. Nor does drinking create a writer or brawling create a writer, and although I’ve done plenty of both, it’s merely a fallacy and a sick romanticism to assume that these actions will make a better writer of one. Of course, there are times when you have to fight and times when you have to drink, but these times are really anti-creative and there’s nothing you can do about them.

  Writing, finally, even becomes work especially if you are trying to pay the rent and child support with it. But it is the finest work and the only work, and it’s a work that boosts your ability to live and your ability to live pays you back with your ability to create. One feeds the other; it is all very magic. I quit a very dull job at the age of 50 (twas said I had security for life, ah!) and I sat down in front of the typewriter. There’s no better way. There are moments of total flaming hell when you feel as if you’re going mad; there are moments, days, weeks of no word, no sound, as if it had all vanished. Then it arrives and you sit smoking, pounding, pounding, it rolls and roars. You can get up at noon, you can work until 3 a.m. Some people will bother you. They will not understand what you are trying to do. They will knock on your door and sit in a chair and eat up your hours while giving you nothing. When too many nothing people arrive and keep arriving you must be cruel to them for they are being cruel to you. You must run their asses out on the street. There are some people who pay their way, they bring their own energy and their own light but most of the others are useless both to you and to themselves. It is not being humane to tolerate the dead, it only increases their deadness and they always leave plenty of it with you after they are gone.

  And then, of course, there are the ladies. The ladies would rather go to bed with a poet than anything, even a German police dog, though I knew one lady who took very much delight in claiming she had fucked one President Kennedy. I had no way of knowing. So, if you’re a good poet, I’d suggest you learn to be a good lover too, this is a creative act in itself, being a good lover, so learn how, learn how to do it very well because if you’re a good poet you’re going to get many opportunities, and though it’s not like being a rock star, it will come along, so don’t waste it like rock stars waste it by going at it rote and half-assed. Let the ladies know that you are really there. Then, of course, they will keep buying your books.

  And let this be enough advice for a little while. Oh yes, I won $180 opening day, dropped $80 yesterday, so today is the day that counts. It’s ten minutes to eleven. First post 2 p.m. I must start lining up my horse genes. There was a guy out there yesterday with a heart machine attached to himself and he was sitting in a wheelchair. He was making bets. Put him in a rest home and he’ll be dead overnight. Saw another guy out there, blind. He must have had a better day than I did yesterday. I’ve got to phone Quagliano and tell him I’ve finished this article. Now there’s a very strange son of a bitch. I don’t know how he makes it and he won’t tell me. I see him at the boxing matches sitting there with a beer and looking very relaxed. I wonder what he’s got going. He’s got me worried. . . .

  Small Press Review, Vol. 4, no. 4, 1973

  TALES

  A Dollar for Carl Larsen

  dedicated to Carl Larsen

  owed to Carl Larsen

  paid to Carl Larsen

  . . . it was a lazy day and a lousy day to work, and it seemed that even spiders hadn’t thrown out their webs. And when I got to the railroad yards I found out that Henderson was the new foreman.

  The old Mexican, Al or Abe or somebody had retired or died or gone insane. The boys were matching pennies down by the barn when Henderson called me over.

  “Gaines,” he said, “Gaines, I understand you’re somewhat of a playboy. Well, that’s all right. I don’t mind a little horseplay now and then, but we’ll get our work done first and then we’ll play.”

  “Just like recess at school, eh, coach?”

  Henderson put his face real close to mine. I put mine real close to his.

  “Or haven’t you been to school, Hendy?”

  I could look right down into his red mouth and his frog jaws as he spoke: “I can tie the can to you, boy.”

  “Proving what?” I asked.

  “Proving you are out of position.”

  Which was a pretty good answer, and a pretty good criticism: I was always out of position.

  I took a nickel out of my pocket and flipped it to the cement where the boys were lagging to the line. They stood back stunned, looking from the nickel to me. I turned and walked the hell out of there.

  II

  I lay up in my room and studied the Racing Form for a couple of hours and knocked off half a bottle of leftover wine. Then I got into my ’38 Ford and headed for the track. . . .

  I wrote the morning line down on my program and walked over to the bar where I noticed a big blonde about 35, and alone—well, about as alone as a big babe like that can get in amongst 8,000 men. She was trying her damnedest to burst and pop out of her clothes, and you stood there watching her, wondering which part would pop out first. It was sheer madness, and every time she moved you could feel the electricity running up the steel girders. And perched on top of all this madness was a face that really had some type of royalty in it. I mean, there was a kind of stateliness, like she’d lived beyond it all. I mean, there were some women who could simply make damned fools out of men without making any type of statement, or movement, or demand—they could simply stand there and the men would simply feel like damned fools and that was all there was to it. This was one of those women.

  I looked up from my drink as if it didn’t matter and as if she were anybody else, and as if I were a pretty jaded type (which, to tell the truth, I was) and said, “How you been doin’ . . . with the ponies, I mean?”

  “All right,” she said.

  I’d expected something else. I don’t know what. But the “all right” sounded good, though.

  I was about half-gone on the wine and felt I owned the world, including the blonde.

  “I used to be a jockey,” I told her.

  “You’re pretty big for a jock.”

  “210, solid muscle,” I said.

  “And belly,” she said, looking right above my belt.

  We both kinda laughed and I moved closer.

  “You want the winner of the first race? To kinda start you off right?”

  “Sure,” she said, “sure,” and I just felt that big hip-flank touch the upper side of my leg a moment and I felt on fire.

  I smelled perfume, and imagined waterfalls and forests and throwing scraps to fine dogs, and furniture soft as clouds and never awakening to an alarm clock.

  I drained my drink. “Try six,” I said. “Number six: Cat’shead.”

  “Cat’shead?”

  Just then somebody tapped me. I should say—rapped me on the back of one of my shoulder blades.

  “Boy,” this voice said, “get lost!”

  I stared down into my drink waiting for her to send this stranger away.

  “I sa
id,” the voice got a little louder, “run along and play with your marbles!”

  As I stared down into my drink I realized it was empty.

  “I don’t like to play marbles,” I told the voice.

  I motioned to the bartender. “Two more—for the lady and myself.”

  I felt it in my back then: the sure, superior nudge of a peerless and no doubt highly efficient automatic.

  “Learn,” said the voice, “learn to like to play marbles!”

  “I’m going right away,” I said. “I brought my agate. I hear there’s a big game under the grandstand.”

  I turned and caught a look at him as he slid into my seat, and I’d always thought I was the meanest-looking son of a bitch in the world.

  “Tommy,” I heard her tell him, “I want you to play a hundred on the nose for me.”

  “Sure. On who?”

  “Number six.”

  “Number SIX??”

  “Yes: six.”

  “But that stiff is 10 to 1!”

  “Play it.”

  “O.K., baby, O.K., but . . .”

  “Play it.”

  “Can I finish my drink?”

  “Sure.”

  I walked over to the two-dollar win window.

  “Number six,” I said, “once.”

  It was my last two dollars. . . .

  Six paid $23.40.

  I watched my horse go down into the Winner’s Circle like I do all my winners, and I felt as proud of him as if I had ridden him or raised him. I felt like cheering and telling everybody he was the greatest horse that had ever lived, and I felt like reaching out and grabbing him around the neck, even though I was two or three hundred feet away.

  But I lit a cigarette and pretended I was bored. . . .

  Then I headed back to the bar, kind of to see how she took it, intending to stay pretty far away. But they weren’t there.

  I ordered a double backed by a beer, drank both, ordered up again and drank at leisure, studying the next race. When the five-minute warning blew, they still hadn’t shown and I went off to place my bet.

  I blew it. I blew them all. They never showed. At the end of the last race I had 35 cents, a 1938 Ford, about two gallons of gas, and one night’s rent left.

  I went into the men’s room and stared at my face in disgust. I looked like I knew something, but it was a lie, I was a fake and there’s nothing worse in the world than when a man suddenly realizes and admits to himself that he’s a phony, after spending all that time up to then trying to convince himself that he wasn’t. I noticed all the sinks and pipes and bowls and I felt like them, worse than them: I’d rather be them.

  I swung out the door feeling like a hare or a tortoise or something, or somebody needing a good bath, and then I felt her swinging against me like the good part of myself suddenly coming back with a rush. I noticed how green her dress was, and I didn’t care what happened: seeing her again had made it O.K.

  “Where’ve you been?” she said hurriedly. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  “What the hell is this?” I started to say, “I’ve been looking—”

  “Here comes Tommy!” she halted me, and then I felt something in my hand and then she walked out, carefully, slowly to meet him. I jammed whatever it was into my pocket and walked out toward the parking lot. I got into my car, lit my next-to-last cigarette, leaned back and dropped my hand into my pocket.

  I unfolded five one hundred dollar bills, one fifty, two tens, and a five. “Your half,” the note said, “with thanks.” “Nicki.” And then I saw the phone number.

  I sat there and watched all the cars leave, I sat there and watched the sun completely disappear; I sat there and watched a man change a flat tire, and then I drove out of there slowly, like an old man, letting it hit me, inch by inch, and scared to death I’d run somebody over or be unable to stop for a red light. Then I thought about the nickel I’d thrown away and I started to laugh like crazy. I laughed so hard I had to park the car. And when the guy who’d changed his flat came by I saw his white blob of a face staring and I had to begin all over again. I even honked my horn and hollered at him.

  Poor devil: he had no soul.

  Like me and one or two others. I thought about Carl Larsen down at the beach rubbing the sand from between his toes and drinking stale beer with Curtis Zahn and J.B. May. I thought about the dollar I owed Larsen. I thought maybe I’d better pay it. He might tell J.B.

  Unpublished

  Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb

  He felt tremendously bored and disgusted; his back ached from being in bed all morning. He folded the paper and threw it into the cubbyhole behind his desk. He tried the second best thing: he got up and opened all the drawers, took the papers out, and spread them on the bed. Sometimes on things you started and couldn’t finish, sometimes you took two or three things like that, put them together, and by knocking off the edges you could get an unusual story—they’d never know, they’d think it was the same thing straight through. As long as the lines had blood in them. . . . Sometimes you could take all the lines that had blood in them . . . or you could get away from subjectiveness by making the musician a barber, and your lines of bemoaning would be forgiven because they’d think it was he instead of you.

  He lit a cigarette and began to read the various sheets. There were dozens of them—wild scrawlings, neat printing, pencil, ink—and he’d forgotten most of them, and reading them again, there was something hellishly funny in them—one grows, you know, gets over extravagances. The drawers were always full because he was afraid to throw the stuff into the wastebaskets, and when he did, he tore the papers into very small sections and then swirled them all around with his hands:

  . . . there’s no telling when something will break. You can’t believe the voices, or the faces of the voices . . .

  . . . I said, automatic profusion

  . . . I lit a cigarette but found it was an ember bud and threw it away.

  . . . I cower before the look of eyes . . . this fat whore says, I’ve had nine glasses of port since this morning . . . the whore turns away, a little frozen . . . I shake my beer and look down into the glass . . . I phone my father from the Culver City Courthouse. I understand I am in the judge’s chambers. The operator gives me the wrong number. A well-dressed woman stares at me. My hands tremble. I have a three-day beard and a hole in my pants . . .

  . . . sickened, in a rage . . . rattle of glass . . . water pouring . . . her cough . . . footsteps . . . winding clock . . . washing dishes . . . eating . . . frying things . . . opening, closing drawers . . . vacuuming . . . strange sound, like a spray . . . night . . . snoring . . . her goddamned room, her pot lids, her spoons . . . that doesn’t matter. She’ll be dead by the time they get there. I don’t want to wait till she’s asleep . . . this is a thing to be done now . . . Rain. It rains. You’ll see them hurrying in the rain . . .

  . . . too often a brilliant mind makes a brilliant face, alas, alas. (These lines were underlined.)

  . . . the guitar has been played too violently . . . lost another job drinking . . . 55 cents left . . . it’s snowing and the want ads look terrible . . . Christ!—to be a fat, rich bastard with bullfrog eyes! . . . end product of American industry: the dead end: fear. 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937 . . . fear, fear, fear! . . . everything (march, boys!) to the job: the body, the voice, the soul . . . this type and nothing else . . . a suggestion of weariness . . . Hell yes, the hydrogen bomb! Break the tables, as N. said . . .

  . . . Saroyan . . . didn’t speak the truth . . . reason he didn’t burn his 500 books in a tub when he was freezing in San Francisco was not because he saw value in the cheapest, most false book, but because he was afraid the fire would make the room too damned smoky and the landlady would raise hell . . . if he had 500 books and did think of burning them . . .

  . . . Christ, what time is it? My feet are asleep!

  . . . Iron Curtain, politics in Art . . . I, and them, and all, at last with pinch-
bud faces, lost count, seeking electric altogether . . . brain suspends spirit like a hoyden insect . . . when waitress drops a plate I cry . . .

  . . . he’d evidently had an education of some sort, and when I saw him there eating, I walked over and sat down across from him, “What are you doing in a dump like this?” . . . frightened, wild, unsteady eyes . . .

  . . . Say words. Volcano. Interim. Daze.

  . . . Battle plans

  Sat. Sun.—$1.33 peanut butter 4.50 rent

  bread

  knife

  newspaper leave—3

  Thurs.—Dishwashing, anything. Gloves—75 cents.

  Suit $8.00—Food—carfare—if money comes, keep suit.

  Nxt. Wk. Fri.—1.00 (save 12 cents)

  Sat.—Try Harry’s credit

  Sun.—Skip rent

  Mon.—(Social sec.) get $20.00?

  If not—finis

  . . . drink goes well in novels . . . or in magazine advertisements . . . wrote home and asked his mother for money . . . stood before the mirror . . . posing wise and profligate—not quite bringing it off.

  . . . too much electric altogether . . . hoyden insect . . . politics in Art . . . politics in Science . . . politics in breastplate . . . asphalt, people, tracks . . . Eve’s infinite copulation . . . say that Birdie told you so.

  . . . easy does it, Charles. I am bored, a little dull and rather dissatisfied altogether.

  what the hell’s that noise?

  a pipe

  She always dreamed of lilies and loved Strauss (Blue Danube Strauss) quite so much