so, it’s o.k., the war is forever. [***]
[To Lafayette Young]
July 12, 1970
[***] you know, I almost go mad sometimes, like this year, total days fucked away and torn up. but all and all, it is better than it has been. I’ve gotten more writing done this year than any 3 years previous. it has to happen without a job in the way. now I get in the way, but it’s realler, I can’t blame any boss any wife any job any kid for ripping me up. I am the enemy, and it’s good for laughs—sometimes. and the luck is good. like last night I was going to write myself a kind of grade b quicky short story for one of the underground papers that pays me 20 bucks a story. they are good people, so I don’t try to write them shit. let’s admit it, my grade b stuff is not too bad. so I rolled a cigarette and brought out the beer and turned on the radio to some symphony music and said, well, it’ll take about an hour, I’ll take it easy, enjoy it and get it in the mail. so what the hell happens? halfway through I see that I’ve got a grade a story and that makes the rest of the writing better too. so the undergrounds will have to wait—it’s off to Evergreen or one of the sex mags and Bukowski is lucky again. It’s called “All That Pussy.” so all I need is beer and smokes and half a swing and I’m a writer. [***]
[To Neeli Cherry]
July 12, 1970
[***] so feel good picking your apples even if they are fucking up your head; at least you don’t have to worry about foreclosure, all that shit. even I seem to be surviving, although there was a frightening dip in reserves a while back, it made me dig in, write a half dozen immortal short stories and a hundred new poems, almost all of them quite good. get me near the cross I SCREAM LITERARY. now Sunday, drinking beer, rolling smokes, sitting in this dirty place, barefooted, gut hanging out, watching the dead Sunday people walk by. I even eat at Norm’s now and then when I am too lazy to cook, get that dollar thirty-five special and watch the waitresses’ asses joggle about in their sweaty panties and the cook sweating and dazed and trapped over all that hot tin. found best to go in about 3 p.m. I feel like a millionaire. I don’t drive but walk down and walk back, slowly in the sun, feeling like a jr. league Hemingway, spitting shreds of tobacco out of my mouth from that first cigarette, and watching the people rush about here and there in panic. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
July 23, 1970
[***] read at Long Beach State College at noon yesterday, sober, with the sweat running down the arms. hard money. $50. they don’t pay a man a damn until he leaves the state. also threw a young guy off my front porch a couple of nights ago. he was standing there pissing, a huge swath of curved piss right into the bush out there, and I get very tired of guys pissing on my porch—women never piss out there—so I picked the guy up and hurled him over the bush and into the night. he didn’t return. [***]
yes, Martin has me worried. I’d prefer Post Office in its original raw form. of course I was a little bit out of my head when I wrote it, but it wasn’t sloppy or lazy writing; it was written as it fucking well came out, and that meant turds and blood and the rest of the wash. I’m told that parts of it are in the present tense and parts in the past. that’s all right with me. I know most of the rules of grammar but I’m not interested. he has inferred that he doesn’t want to detract from my style, so there we are on the merry-go-round. he’s a nice guy but he does treat me too much like an idiot. he admits I’m his best seller but at the same time he’d rather I wrote more safe shit. what the hell. well, maybe I worry too much. I’ll go along with the single tense, but I feel the rest must stay. we’ll see. I get depressed writing about it. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
August 8, 1970
[***] The novel will be issued in the Fall, says Martin of Black Sparrow, which prob. means Winter, if I know publishers. Martin has done some good things for me and one thing he is worried about is that the Germans might get hot pants and bring out Post Office in Germany before it gets out here in America. He wants to be first. So I said, “O.k., we’ll simply tell them that the novel can’t be released in Germany until it is released here. O.k.?” When I talk like that it gives me a feeling of immense power, as if I were some 1970 Hemingway instead of an old fuck who is trying to keep off of skid row. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
August 20, 1970
[***] these people are on me again for the sound of my typewriter and I’m a little pissed tonight—not at you, old buddy. they make all kinds of shitty noises but a typewriter is verboten. was drunk one night and cussed them back—“Yeah! You and your fucking dogs! Calling your dogs all the damned time! MICHELE! HERE MICHELE! Why don’t YOU shut up all that shit noise!” I’d been drinking about a week, trying to forget my 50th birthday.
when I go out on the street Michele barks at me. “Chew his leg off,” they tell the dog. I ignore that. bastards own the highrise next door and are afraid the sound of typer will disturb their dear tenants. I dress in old clothes, need shave, red-eyed and hungover. they dislike me and my sounds and my looks very much. they like to see a man vanish at 6:30 a.m. then come back in in the evening, eat, flip on the tv. they have hours of leisure but all they do is sit on their steps and walk their dogs around and collect rents. I don’t know what they are waiting for, what they want and I don’t care. they want me. that’s one place I would like to see burn. those people are completely dehumanized by their jobs and their walls. this society is unbelievable; they all do the same things, talk the same way, share the same hours, look alike (MY GAWD!), like and dislike the same things…never seen drunk in the streets, or in anything but freshly-laundered clothes. and they don’t like my typewriter! what precious rum dum shit! what snail slime! what framed turds they are! they may have bellybuttons, elbows, assholes and all that…but they’re completely DOWN THE RIVER, out of it, useless, worse than useless, not as good as a dead sparrow…may their asses rot on burning spiral points in hell FOREVER!!! fuck. [***]
[To John Martin]
August 25, 1970
hope you’ll keep filing my stuff for me—I’ll put you on salary some day—yeh. I have a rough first draft which I sometimes keep and which I sometimes lose, and also many poems sent out are never heard from again. so it’s for the good of the Cause. my Cause.
I miss the horses—they kept my juices stirring and also put a little money in my pocket. Del Mar is just too far to drive without auto insurance. Garden Grove, where Marina is, is far enough. I just don’t want a bunch of litigation on my neck for a freeway crash. that’s not my idea of living. [***]
haven’t heard from Weissner yet—wrote him at his Spanish address. I hear he’s busy translating Warhol’s “a”. maybe I should have mentioned something about Carl’s (that’s Weissner) novel. his publisher sent it to me. I didn’t. it’s one of those cut-up Burroughs things and I’ve always been bored by those things, I can’t help it. the publisher asked me to review it but I couldn’t review it and be honest without hurting Carl’s feelings. so there’s always some shit. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
August 31, 1970
[***] sitting here with a busted mouth after a week’s drunk. really feel freaked-out, sick, pitiful. the blues, the depressive fits. I even wept, soundlessly. it’s so much trouble just going on and a man gets tired of being brave.
anyhow, your letter cheered me. you have a way of saying kind things without bullshitting, and then your stuff is funny too, you know. anyhow anyhow I must guess that you are as desperate as I, only you take it better. fucking recession over here—god damned crap asses just don’t want to let go of the buck. they sit on manuscripts now and when they finally accept them they delay payment until eternity. I’m speaking of the short story field. [***] so anyhow, this old rat’s not dead yet. and the poems and stories keep popping out of my ears. this year I must have written 150 new poems, a novel and maybe 30 short stories. now all this stuff is not excellent but some of it is—sometimes I think I am just fucking away everything but the typer keeps doing it. and it
comes out easy. tons and tons of shit. my machinegun sure—tattattattat a tattutuetutuetattutattu…[***]
[To Neeli Cherry]
September 1, 1970
[***] I may have to go to Greece and beg in the streets. recession here, everybody hanging to the buck. mags that used to pay right off don’t anymore. one outfit has owed me $175 for 3 months. now they owe me 175 for a later acceptance. I can’t live on OWE. all the other mags just sit on manuscripts for months—Evergreen, all of them. It’s a real tight frightening situation. [***] lately people have been telling me I’m famous. a shit hell of a lot that does—the money’s slipping away and I’m on the skids. I’m still hustling the poetry circuit—around here—for pennies. even read at a coffee house in Venice—$55. christ, I’m sweating raw pure blood. [***] my novel, Post Office, will be out in Nov. hope I get an advance. Black Sparrow. man, the post office wasn’t too bad. I thought the life of the writer would really be the thing. it’s simply hell. I’m just a cheap twittering slave.
Univ. of Chicago writes they want me to read there in the fall. well, that’s something. I’m fighting a slow desperate retreat, my mind, money, resources slipping away. [***] I have to write a lot of poems to keep from going crazy; I can’t help it. I often write ten to 12 poems a day and then top the whole thing off with a short story. I may be going crazy but it has been all hell on production. I just hang on top of this typer and scream it out. wrote the novel in 20 days. 120,000 words, 30,000 of which I pulled out on the re-reading. one outfit in Germany tells me that they will buy the novel “unseen.” Notes of a Dirty Old Man out in Germany, translated in the German. got a good review in Der Spiegel—equiv. to Newsweek here—one million circulation. photo and all. only they had me down as a native of Bavaria or something. poor Andernach. anyhow, for all this shit, there isn’t any money showing.
meanwhile there’s great violence in the streets here. men shooting each other, bombing each other. a guy tried to run me over in an empty parking lot last night. I just leaped aside in time. the stuff is catching. much hatred, confusion. [***]
Robert DeMaria was editor of Mediterranean Review, published in Orient, New York, to which Bukowski had submitted some poems.
[To Robert DeMaria]
September 2, 1970
“How come my x-wife thought Robert Graves was the greatest man alive?” Well, you see, my x-wife was a snob and she touted Robert Graves and other such cumbersome creatures because then people would think (she thought people would think), surely this little blonde creature must have BRAINS. Got it? O.k.
Definitely a pain to send poems to such places as Spain or England or hell because you have to get those International Reply Coupons and the clerks don’t know what they are or how many you stick in, and I won’t ask them. You know.
Will try you with another batch of poems soon. Your remark, on your last rejection, that my work was not carefully worked-out left me on high dry ground. Of course my work is not carefully worked-out and hastily written. that’s the point. I write down what I need. poetry has long ago dulled me with its tricks and mechanics. or maybe the poems I sent you were just lousy. I write a lot of those.
[To John Martin]
September 4, 1970
like you know, you’ve been a big help to me, allowance, the Univ. of Santa Barbara thing, typewriter, paints, many things. And I can’t expect you to worry about me day and night. don’t want you to. you’ve got a one-man operation going that takes all your energy, and you’ve just finished straightening out my novel and mailing it off, so to bug you or put an extra weight on you is not my point. but it has been a real frozen mailbox lately. I don’t know what the hell is going on out there (the magazines), and the bankroll is dipping, I’m far from starving to death, but can’t help feeling concerned. I know how fast money goes when it’s not coming in—the allowance is a lifesaver, of course, but I can’t help thinking—and here I am bugging you—that the Blazek letters have been out about a year. It does seem an overlong time for no results. We had such a hell of a battle getting them from Blazek in the first place, if you remember. Also Dorbin told me he got paid his royalties on the Buk biblio. Didn’t you tell me that I was also to get royalties on this? I know that there are answers to all this and that you are an honest guy, so I’ve hesitated. I realize that you are so damned busy with everything that you can’t worry about my precious little irons in the fire—like I say, night and day, but hell, that mailbox worries me, and if you don’t ask you don’t find out. yeah, I know, I worry too much and I’ve got it made. o.k.
now I suppose I’ve spoiled your day. I’m Carol Bergé. writers are a shitty lot, I guess.
so here’s another short story. don’t rip it up but file it away as per usual, o.k? Celebrating Marina’s birthday tomorrow so she won’t have to come over on Labor Day. She’ll be 6. good god. well, I’m doing a lot of writing but it’s any good or not, I don’t know. anyhow, I feel like writing and when I feel like writing there’s some bit of warmth in the words. meanwhile, don’t be pissed…
[To John Martin]
September 7, 1970
I WORKED labor day. see enclosed.
Marina had a nice cake Saturday, 6 candles but asked that we didn’t sing Happy Birthday To You. the kid has some sharp. mama packed off to Synanon and we played for 8 hours. mostly she was Batman and I was Robin. then we painted, went for a long walk. then I played dummy. a familiar role.
where are your eyes? she asked. (I think of that sometimes too.)
and I’d point to my ears. my eyes? dose are my eyes.
no, no, Hank, those aren’t your eyes! your eyes are here! (poking fingers into my skull)
hey, hell, kid, that hurts!
now, where are the pockets on your shirt?
pockets? shirt? well, I’m a pocket, you see…
no, Hank, look…
anyhow, it was a nice birthday, for Marina and for me.
and you’re 40 and I’m 50 and my landlord’s 60 (and built like a bull) and we’re all going to die, and that’s o.k. too. that gives us whatever beauty and power and grace we might have now. you know this. and, also, that this has been the most magic year of my life. it came late, but it will never be forgotten—even the horror of it. that’s why I hang in now, fighting for a bit more horror. it may be beyond the imagination but by living carefully—fighting the slow retreat—I hope to squeeze out 3 or 4 years more before I have to get a job as a janitor or a dishwasher or go on relief. I’m sure you understand the picture, big Jawn, and even when the end comes down and I’m swinging that mop in the lady’s crapper or facing some unloving creature across a desk in the frig. relief office, that the 2 or 3 good years will reside within me and they can’t take those back. it’s been a beautiful ball and a beautiful hell, and I’m talking too much.
when that brush gets too smooth in the tape machine, might as well replace it, you’re going to get nothing but water on the tape and the frig. tape won’t stick to the box. also when you’re cutting a box down to size, cut up from the inside so you don’t damage the merchandise.
the old shipping clerk, Henry.
[To Carl Weissner]
September 8, 1970
[***] I am coming out of about a month of deep black pure depression. one day I had to actually hold on to the mattress with my hands to keep from going into the kitchen where the butcher knife was. mixed-up situation, what? I’ve been in this court too long. stir-crazy. got to get out, walk somewhere, drive somewhere, do something. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
September 18, 1970
[***] maybe I’m going crazy but I’m thinking of writing another one, The Horseplayer. a novel, I mean. don’t know where I’ll be able to dump it, but I guess write it first is the idea. in The Horseplayer though, once I write it, I will insist that all the bad grammar be left in and past and present tense be left in at the same time, if that’s the way it happens to be. Martin claims that very few changes were made grammatically in Post Office, and I beli
eve him, but I wish the few changes had not been made. everything counts. But I’ve read Post Office twice and even liked it better that 2nd time. that’s a good sign. well, like I said, we’ll see.
yes, most revolutionaries just love to talk and talk and talk. yes, there’s a bomb now and then but sometimes I wonder which side plants those. my revolution is a one-man revolution and almost everybody is the enemy. I may not be doing a great deal of damage, but at least I’m not bullshitting. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
September 21, 1970
[***] After a bit of a dry spell, things are looking up over here. A few sales to the mags for stories and even got paid for some poems. jesus. also doing a series of columns, short, called “Hairy Fist Tales,” for Fling, a Chicago sex rag. [***]
You know, I’ve tried the starving writer bit. I guess it works with many. I write better with a few bucks in my pocket. Give me a half mile lead on the wolf and I’m tough as hell. I call it STAYING ON TOP OF THE GAME. This doesn’t mean that I write for money; this means that I’ll have money so I’ll be able to continue writing. Of course it’s going to end, but since I gave away the first 49 years of my life, this part is very strange. Indeed. this morning I stood on the front lawn, sun coming down, I was barefoot, nobody around, all these highrises, everybody off somewhere on their fucking crosses, and I stood there in the sun, haven’t shaved in two weeks, hair uncombed, ripped shirt, 4 buttons missing from the fly of an old pair of army pants somebody had given me, and I smoked a cigarette and grinned into the world, knowing its shit and its blood and its plan, but I was in this special space somewhere for a moment, and it was quite good, quite. by god. of course, the butcher knife is still in the kitchen and I keep it good and sharp on the stone steps and that’s part of it too. STAY ON TOP OF YOUR GAME, BABE, STAY ON TOP OF YOUR GAME. and a little bit of luck is nice too, but don’t look for it.
Living on Luck Page 10