Living on Luck

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Living on Luck Page 6

by Charles Bukowski


  The girl-child is Marina Louisa Bukowski and I am a sucker for it. Very large mouth and eyes and when that mouth opens and spreads into the big grin laugh, all sunflowers and sun, and I break in half, she has me. [***]

  The book Veryl Blatt had written about is Crucifix in a Death Hand, published by Loujon Press.

  [To Veryl Blatt]

  May 27, 1965

  my thanks the good letter on the book. now that the book is over it seems a very strange thing, an almost non-happening, except now I am glad I went down there and saw those 2 people put it together out of matchsticks and starvation and (as you said) love. they battled rats, roaches, hurricanes and my drunken presence. I did manage to sign 3100 pages, some of them with message and/or drawing, but outside of that I was in the way. this book was a little harder than It Catches in that I had to write directly into a waiting press. that’s good and it’s not good. I mean, it’s like coming up with the bases loaded all the time. yet I imagine any poet in America, in the world, would have been most glad of the chance. my luck all came late and there is only so much they can do to me now with these two books behind me. I’m glad you’re keeping the 2 books, your kids, your typer and yourself. it is difficult for people like you and I to live out the day, and I too have been through the bloody divorce thing, and christ I can’t figure it all—the breaking up, the looking again, the not-looking again. If I could only sleep for ten years but maybe by then the Chinese will have called our hotshot bluffs. if I do not hold the trend of thought here—been to track all day, worked an hour in pits, said to hell with it and came in. played with Marina [***]

  Veryl Blatt, together with her husband Jean Rosenbaum, was planning to gather and edit a collection of Bukowski’s letters.

  [To Veryl Blatt]

  November 9, 1965

  [***] It’s too bad Corrington and Webb won’t let go of their letters—the bulk of everything is here—but I felt from the beginning that Corrington would hold out. he has changed very much in the last 2 years—ever since getting his doctorate and writing his first novel. He has stepped up out and away from me. I got worried about him near the end when he said, “I am going to use your letters to help send my son through college.” Through college for what? we are trying to live now. It’s strange how cold things can become and how, basically, so many poets are like real-estators, holders of stock, investors…C. has plenty of money; he ought to loosen his grip; he won’t. the fact is, that I was writing to the wrong man. [***]

  [To Veryl Blatt]

  l.a. of course

  thanksgiving

  o lord you are so good to me you

  Fucker!

  [November 25,] 1965

  veryl, you lovely baby of blue-eyed hurrah:

  I have written Blaz for o.k. on intro and of course we’ll get it. the most crazy thing on these letters, almost all of them drunken, is that most of the people have kept them. I don’t write so many letters anymore and maybe that means that I am dying, and that’s the way it works. but the letters where [sic] a BLAM! a typewriter somewhere, an electric light, something to drink…who needs more? anyhow, even I am curious as to what I pumped out into the vacant air. [***]

  so listen, this Linda West c/o KRMG radio, I may have her other address, I think I do, but sure there is time, I am weary and drunk now and out of cigars and smoking these chickenshit little g.d. female cancer cigarettes. But Linda West only laughs anyhow, I doubt she saved anything. she read It Catches and here came this letter, so far as I can remember it:

  “Dear Mr. Bukowski:

  I have read It Catches My Heart In Its Hands and hear you have a new book out. I will gladly review your new book over the air here. I have always liked your poetry. I imagine the kind of man you are and I also enclose a few poems of my own that I thought you might be interested in.

  (then more drivel talk)

  (then)

  I often wonder about you. are you tall and slim with burning eyes? or are you short and fat with a waddle and a slur out of the side of your mouth? are you cruel? do you live in a Villa? is your maidservant more o more beautiful than a cloud?”

  and I answered her, as well as I can remember, only probably answered her better:

  “Dear Linda West:

  I am short and fat and oversexed and I live alone except with a female dog. I think that your poems are very beautiful and I can’t see why anybody doesn’t publish them. I am cruel by nature, almost vicious, although not quite. I don’t have any education but I love to fuck fuck fuck, especially young girls who work at radio stations. I even like to fuck old girls who work at radio stations, who work anywhere and who would be willing to submit to my laying upon my ass and writing while they did whatever they had to keep their souls and more, importantly, my soul, alibe, and if not alive, alibe.

  yours,

  buk

  look Veryl, that sheep may safely graze I better cut it off (ow, I mean, this letter)

  · 1966 ·

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 21, 1966

  [***] doorbell just rang and here was a little boy in the dark…”Sir, I am working in competition with 5 other boys…” He has some magazines and newspapers there. I tell him as gently as possible that I cannot buy anything. god, they get to them EARLY!!! what? competition. a discouraging word. when I write a poem I don’t think about shit competition. but christ I guess I am in competition with Ezra and Shake and Jeffers or, if not that, then with Judson Crews, Carl Larsen and Peter Orlovsky. yet, I am a hundred times more unhappy to see this kid this way, begging his papers under the lamplight. [***]

  [To Veryl Blatt]

  April 2, 1966

  [***] listen, I know that the book of letters a long way away but if it ever happens, run what you wish. only there is something I’d wish to strike out in reference to Sheri Martinelli. I don’t know if I did, but I might have mentioned her in other letters as “Pound’s x-whore.” she’s a fine woman but don’t think she’d understand. In a sense, I am a romantic; I mean when I call a woman a whore, I mean, in my language, a woman who loves one man and one man only and I use the term in fondness to depict faithfulness, and there is no derogatory intent involved. I know that this turns around the standard concept, but damn standard concepts. I also use “whore” to mean “death” which is also, in a sense, “love” to me. so you see, I am mixed-up. yeah. anyhow this is all I would want struck from the letters [***]

  Joseph Conte was the editor of a racing journal called American Turf Monthly.

  [To Joseph Conte]

  Late April, 1966

  sure if you can ram the #6 poem through, I’ll take a year’s subscription, I’m hooked on the horses but rather mathematically, playing with odds and systems, experiments. I’ve found that the further away you can get from a racing form the better chance you have. one system is based ENTIRELY UPON INDEX NUMBERS and shows continuous profit. the other is based entirely UPON THE ODDS LISTED IN THE RACING FORM AND THE ODDS ON THE TRACK PROGRAM. both systems work, in short, because they reverse to an extreme everything the public does or wants. the only problem is getting up your guts to play the things. [***]

  [To Joseph Conte]

  June 12, 1966

  [***] got July issue and #6 poem, looks fine, and think it will fit some of your readers. but the horse-poems just don’t come anymore—just the madness of the crowd, that whole body of many-legged, headed, cocked and cunted, wailing and greedy and angry animal. also suicidal. a hell of a gang. and the insiders shove it to them and collect—deliberate 5 pound overweights, first time starters, fillies against colts, bandages, bleeders, class jumps, the works. they jam it to them like bayonets and take away the money. whatever the crowd has learned changes and no longer becomes true—first they ruin the price and 2nd they are manipulated against. enough lecture. [***]

  your magazine can help the stabbers, although it can’t help me, I like to read it, sometimes to reverse the information and play the opposite, or ingrain it in my thought cells.
I’m not knocking your mag; it’s a way of making a living, and I like the photos—there is something in the photos working on me—not a method of play, but a fucking art process. I have made a painting of horse and jock, a bit obscure and heavy with color, perhaps comic, oil pastel, and maybe some day I get the bigheart or drunk or find something to mail it in and I mail it on to you. then, maybe not. I don’t like to make tasks.

  [***] tell Torregian I said to go to hell. I don’t think he has read over 4 or 5 of my poems. If he thinks I am “pragmatic and social conscious,” tell him to read my article in Earth 2: “In Defense of a Certain Type of Poetry, a Certain Type of Life, a Certain Type of Blood-filled Creature Who Will Someday Die.” I do think that what he means in his criticism is:

  one: first, he hasn’t been published enough; which is not a crime but which sometimes puts the blinkers on the open mind.

  two: I write too clearly, therefore there must be something the matter with me:

  a: not sensitive

  b: not poetic

  c: not there.

  this is age-old fallacy stuff and I can’t be bothered with it.

  [To Joseph Conte]

  June 27, 1966

  o o o o, listen, the poem by Lottie Adler is not for me, a rhymer and “Life is Beautiful” type of thing. you’d be surprised how many of these I get in the mail—mostly from women. I guess it’s the mother-instinct, wanting to save the no-good boy from the bottle, the jail, the alley, madness. also much of this comes from reading Keats, Shelley, a kind of wilted and nice romanticism, but they don’t even need this. just the thought of what poetry should be, what they think it is, out of a movie or out of a highschool English course. the whole thing’s basic and I don’t mean to pick. the poem is lousy. the only way this woman can save me is to throw me some pussy and she isn’t going to do that. tell her to read the Artaud Anthology, $3, c/o City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, Calif. or at least send for my review of the book picked up and reprinted by Ferlinghetti out of local liberal rag. Artaud wrote the iron line, like reaming fire through cement. he’s been dead since March 4th, 1948, so Lottie won’t have to send him a poem.

  Artaud one of the few writers I look up to. Artaud, Dostoevski, Celine…read Celine, Joe, this guy was laughing while they were killing him. The Stranger by Camus. there simply hasn’t been a hell of a lot of good writing done—too much talking around corners, too much airy bullshit, too many lies. [***]

  [To Joseph Conte]

  July 18, 1966

  ow, you ask an opinion and I cannot give you one because I would not want to be responsible for putting you into a jail cell or an army, either one. in a sense you are asking me whether it is better to eat hot shit or cold. your decision will have to be yours. in world war II (see Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts) I lucked on through or insaned on through, one leg in jail, one arm out, ass in between, but whether I knew what I was doing subconsciously or whether I was all jacked-off in the head I’ll never know, but it was probably a little bit of each. but for all I went through there is not much that I can say to help you. [***]

  talk with your girl friend or close friends. most men figure that the easy way out is to go and hope that they don’t have to kill anybody or be killed or mangled, but it doesn’t always work this way. once they get hold of you they point you about the way they wish to. and a jail cell can seem pretty final; you would have to battle both the screws and your own mates in another type of power play. like I say, it’s yours. my sympathy, but god damn if I can tell you anything.

  [To Joseph Conte]

  Early October, 1966

  [***] I can’t write any system articles, Joe. I wouldn’t tip my hand on the good ones that I know. I know, I know, I am working for a living at an impossible job. if I know so much about the horses what am I doing cleaning the shithouse? I don’t know, Joe, I don’t know. maybe the Anita meet will get me over. I have developed what I think of as my 4-ply play; in other words, there are sometimes 4 bets in a race, but usually 3 fall on one horse and one on the other, or it goes 2 and 2. I’d like to think I’ve got the whole thing in a box and I think maybe I have: the horse the stable is shooting with; and the logical overlooked overlay, and my overlay may read 8 on a morning line of 8, or even 9/2 on a morning line of 5, because I use my own rating not the trackman’s. I also have a weirdy called my overlay-underlay, plus one other juicer. the morning line fools most people and it’s meant to; it is deliberately jacked out of line to draw the money in from players who take the line as God. sounds like madness, I know, but almost everything is, so why can’t I join the crowd? [***]

  Printed verbatim in its entirety. Holograph.

  [To Joseph Conte]

  Hey Conte!

  Oct. 20, 1966

  Fairly drunk.

  3 fairly good days—$70 average—trotters & pacers, maybe luck, but fairly new-old insight. Fairly, fairly.

  Kid, I consider myself a pretty good fucking horseplayer (poetry is like taking a shit)—horses are the Empire (like fucking) (see Frued’s pupil) (but nothing that simple) Fruedy’s are too obvious, much too much college mother-boys & unlived.

  It seems like anything anybody else does that you don’t do—then that’s caused because you wore shoes a size too small and you wanted to fuck your mother. Right?

  Actually, the so-called most well-balanced individual usually ends up in some useless & dry position such as President of the United States of America and ends up fucking (up) a lot of mothers & everybody else too.

  The pyschiatrist (spell?) is the high-paid fuzz that makes up (lies) excuses for individuals who cannot understand a decadent & horrible & useless society (govt.) & a dec. & whore & useless life. He is paid to call these people crazy (insane) (physchotic—spell?) instead of the life & the way surrounding them.

  The pyschiatrist is the pretty-boy liar of a stabilized hell.

  As you must guess, I am drunk—but mean what I say.

  Then too—the poet as preacher is a dishonest & copious extension of his normal function—see Pound, Ginsberg, so forth.

  God damn…where am I? can you read this???

  Answering your question—the newspaper bought by the largest % (percentage) of horseplayers entering local tracks (Santa A.) (Hollywood) (Del Mar) (Los Alomitos) (Pomona) is not an L.A. paper but The Independent (published in Pasadena). This is the one that “moves”, the horse-addicts suck them up. The whole front page is covered with horserace bullshit information, so much so that one of their handicappers are squeezed over onto another page. The larger metro LA. papers (Times & Examiner) merely blow up the print on their one or 2 handicapers in an attempt to cover the page. In fact, the largest circ paper (the L.A. Times) does not even bother to reset type in order to blank out SCRATCHES!! except in the case of harness races where scratches are by rule not morning scratches but overnight, prob. before midnight???

  The Independent advt. rates are undoubt. much lower, babe. So don’t say old Buk never done your rag any good, what? But would prefer you check with some other horse in this area to make sure I am not bullshitting you. And so, Aunt Jeriamiah fucked a burning duck.

  By the way, most of the articles in your mag sound good but are basically unsound as is most horse-info—

  like most bologna—

  A) horse must have had race within 14 days

  B) 2 year old and maiden races are bad plays

  C) handicap races are bad plays

  and on & on.

  The people who own & run horses take advantage of public information & education on horses to invert all possibilities for their own profit.

  Furthermore, overlay & underlay winners are caused by 2 concepts:

  A) public misconceptions, greed & fear.

  B) the track handicapers’s deliberate distortion of the line in order to confuse & bring in the most possible betting $$.

  Hang in, kid,

  Buk

  William Hageman of Pasadena was the editor of The W
illie, published from 1967 by Manic Press, San Francisco.

  [To William Hageman]

  November [?25], 1966

  [***] when I said there were only 4 or 5 poets in the world who could put down a line or 2, I meant 4 or 5 poets who could DO ME ANY GOOD. the rest of them flatten my spirit, it’s like swallowing sad sawdust, like being tricked again and again. the only way we are ever going to move the world a notch is through PURE ART, and baby, not much of it seems to be around, and I include myself. the best thing about mimeo is that it takes the pressure more and more away from THOU MUST SUCCEED IN ORDER TO PAY THE PRINTER. and it usually eliminated 8 or 10 hands in the pot, all printing their own stuff.

  · 1967 ·

  William Wantling contributed to many of the same little magazines as Bukowski and had a book published by Douglas Blazek’s Ole Press. An ex-convict who had spent five years in San Quentin, he took an interest in matters such as capital punishment and penal reform (see Hank, p. 164).

  [To William Wantling]

  oily Febru 1967

  [***] saw headline in paper: CONGRESS VOWS FIGHT ON CRIME. and I almost sat down and wrote a mother essay, 8 or 9 pages on what crime IS and what it APPEARS to be, how our whole social structure houses and pardons and builds laws for everyday sanctioned robbery and crime against each other, whereas a direct and HONEST CRIME is punished by police, judges, juries. the difference says our society is this: you can take a lot and give a little, but you can’t take everything and give nothing. this is the essential difference between Capitalism and the Gun, and the reason why all judges, juries, cops are finks. the dope bit is all the same—it isn’t the dope that matters to them; it’s how you get it, who hands it to you. if it’s in the doctor’s handwriting it’s all right, he is supposed to know whether you need dope or not, that’s why he is so well-paid. but who knows better than I DO WHETHER I NEED DOPE OR NOT? who knows whether I need oranges or eggs or sex or sleep or dope? I do. Who knows whether I am sick or not? the doctor? who is more IMPORTANT? why is everything twisted backwards? but you know all this. [***]

 

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