whiskers
talking about
war
talking about the
wars
talking about the brave
fish
the bullfights
even about his wives.
the people
come into the
bar
night after night
for the same old
show
which he will one day
end
alone
blowing his brains to
the walls.
the price of creation
is never
too high.
the price of living
with other people
always
is.
friends within the darkness
I can remember starving in a
small room in a strange city
shades pulled down, listening to
classical music
I was young I was so young it hurt like a knife
inside
because there was no alternative except to hide as long
as possible—
not in self-pity but with dismay at my limited chance:
trying to connect.
the old composers—Mozart, Bach, Beethoven,
Brahms were the only ones who spoke to me and
they were dead.
finally, starved and beaten, I had to go into
the streets to be interviewed for low-paying and
monotonous
jobs
by strange men behind desks
men without eyes men without faces
who would take my hours
break them
piss on them.
now I work for the editors the readers the
critics
but still hang around and drink with
Mozart, Bach, Brahms and the
Bee
some buddies
some men
sometimes all we need to be able to continue alone
are the dead
rattling the walls
that close us in.
death sat on my knee and cracked with laughter
I was writing three short stories a week
and sending them to the Atlantic Monthly
they would all come back.
my money went for stamps and envelopes
and paper and wine
and I got so thin I used to
suck my cheeks
together
and they’d meet over the top of my
tongue (that’s when I thought about
Hamsun’s Hunger—where he ate his own
flesh; I once took a bite of my wrist
but it was very salty).
anyhow, one night in Miami Beach (I
have no idea what I was doing in that
city) I had not eaten in 60 hours
and I took the last of my starving
pennies
went down to the corner grocery and
bought a loaf of bread.
I planned to chew each slice slowly—
as if each were a slice of turkey
or a luscious
steak
and I got back to my room and
opened the wrapper and the
slices of bread were green
and mouldy.
my party was not to be.
I just dumped the bread upon the
floor
and I sat on that bed wondering about
the green mould, the
decay.
my rent money was used up and
I listened to all the sounds
of all the people in that
roominghouse
and down on the floor were
the dozens of stories with the
dozens of Atlantic Monthly
rejection slips.
it was early evening and I
turned out the light and
went to bed and
it wasn’t long before I
heard the mice coming out,
I heard them creeping over my
immortal stories and
eating the
green mouldy bread.
and in the morning
when I awakened
I saw that
all that was left of the
bread
was the green
mould.
they had eaten right to the
edge of the mould
leaving chunks of
it
among the stories and
rejection slips
as I heard the sound of
my landlady’s vacuum
cleaner
bumping down the
hall
slowly approaching my
door.
oh yes
I’ve been so
down in the mouth
lately
that sometimes when I
bend over to
lace my shoes
there are
three
tongues.
O tempora! O mores!
I get these girly magazines in the mail because
I’m writing short stories for them again
and here in these pages are these ladies
exposing their jewel boxes—
it looks more like a gynecologist’s
journal—
everything boldly and clinically
exposed
beneath bland and bored physiognomies.
it’s a turn-off of gigantic
proportions:
the secret is in the
imagination—
take that away and you have dead
meat.
a century back
a man could be driven mad
by a well-turned
ankle, and
why not?
one could imagine
that the rest
would be
magical
indeed!
now they shove it at us like a
McDonald’s hamburger
on a platter.
there is hardly anything as beautiful as
a woman in a long dress
not even the sunrise
not even the geese flying south
in the long V formation
in the bright freshness
of early morning.
the passing of a great one
he was the only living writer I ever met who I truly
admired and he was dying when I met
him.
(we in this game are shy on praise even toward
those who do it very well, but I never had this
problem with J.F.)
I visited him several times at the
hospital (there was never anybody else
about) and upon entering his room
I was never sure if he was asleep
or?
“John?”
he was stretched there on that bed, blind
and amputated:
advanced
diabetes.
“John it’s
Hank…”
he would answer and then we would talk for
a short bit (mostly he would talk and I would
listen; after all, he was our mentor, our
god):
Ask the Dust
Wait Until Spring, Bandini
Dago Red
all the others.
to end up in Hollywood writing
movie scripts
that’s what killed
him.
“the worst thing,” he told me,
“is bitterness, people end up so
bitter.”
he wasn’t bitter, although he had
every right to
be…
at the funeral I
met several of his script-writing
buddies.
“l
et’s write something about
John,” one of them
suggested.
“I don’t think I can,” I
told them.
and, of course, they never
did.
the wine of forever
re-reading some of Fante’s
The Wine of Youth
in bed
this mid-afternoon
my big cat
BEAKER
asleep beside
me.
the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.
Fante’s pure and magic
emotions
hang on the simple
clean
line.
that this man died
one of the slowest and
most horrible deaths
that I ever witnessed or
heard
about…
the gods play no
favorites.
I put the book down
beside me.
book on one side,
cat on the
other…
John, meeting you,
even the way it
was was the event of my
life. I can’t say
I would have died for
you, I couldn’t have handled
it that well.
but it was good to see you
again
this
afternoon.
true
one of Lorca’s best lines
is,
“agony, always
agony…”
think of this when you
kill a
cockroach or
pick up a razor to
shave
or awaken in the morning
to
face the
sun.
Glenn Miller
long ago
across from the campus
in the malt shop
the juke box going
the young girls perfectly in tune
dancing with the football players
and the college bright boys
Glenn Miller was the big thing then
and everybody stepped
almost everybody
I sat with a couple of disciples
we were supposed to be outlaws
the explorers of Truth
but I liked the music
and the laziness of waiting
as the world rushed toward war
as Hitler speechified
the girls whirled
graceful
showing leg
that last bright sunshine
we warmed ourselves in it
shutting away everything else
while the universe opened its mouth
in an attempt to
swallow us all.
Emily Bukowski
my grandmother always attended the sunrise
Easter service
and the Rose Bowl
parade.
she also liked to go to the
beach, sit on those benches
facing the sea.
she thought movies were
sinful.
she ate enormous platefuls of
food.
she prayed for me
constantly.
“poor boy: the devil is inside
of you.”
she said the devil was
inside her husband
too.
though not divorced
they lived
separately
and had not seen each
other
for 15 years.
she said that hospitals were
nonsense
she never used them
or
the doctors.
at 87
she died one evening
while feeding her
canary.
she liked to
drop the seed
into the cage
while making these
little
bird sounds.
she wasn’t very
interesting
but few people
are.
some suggestions
in addition to the envy and the rancor of some of
my peers
there is the other thing, it comes by telephone and
letter: “you are the world’s greatest living
writer.”
this doesn’t please me either because somehow
I believe that to be the world’s greatest living
writer
there must be something
terribly wrong with you.
I don’t even want to be the world’s greatest
dead writer.
just being dead would be fair
enough.
also, the word “writer” is a very tiresome
word.
just think how much more pleasing it would be
to hear:
you are the world’s greatest pool
player
or
you are the world’s greatest
fucker
or
you are the world’s greatest
horseplayer.
now
that
would really make
a man feel
good.
invasion
I didn’t know that
there was anything
in the closet
although some nights
my sleep would be
interrupted by strange
rumblings
but
I always thought
these to be
minor
quakes.
the closet was
the one
down the hall
and
was seldom
used.
the curious thing
for me
was that
the cats
(I had 4 of
them)
appeared to be
leaving
large
droppings
about
(and
they were
house-broken).
then
the cats
vanished
one by
one
but the fresh
droppings
kept
appearing.
it was one night
while I was
reading the
stock market
quotations
that I
looked up
and
there stood
the
lion
in the bedroom
doorway.
I was
in bed
propped up
with a
couple of
pillows
and drinking a
hot
chocolate.
now
nobody
can believe
a lion
in a
bedroom—
at least
not
in a city
of any
size.
so
I just kept
looking at the
lion
and not
quite
believing.
then
it turned and
walked down the
stairway.
I
followed it—
a good
18 feet
behind—
clutching my
baseball bat
in one
hand
&
nbsp; and my
4-inch knife
in the
other.
I watched the
lion
go down the
stairway
then walk
across the front
room
it paused
before the large
plate glass
sliding
doors
which faced the
yard and the
street.
they were
closed.
the lion
emitted an
impatient
growl
and
leaped through the
glass
crashing through
into the
night.
I sat
on the couch
in the
dark
still unable
to believe
what
I had
seen.
then
I heard
a scream
of such utter
agony and
terror
that
for a
moment
I could
neither
see
breathe nor
comprehend.
I rose,
turned to
barricade myself
in the
bedroom
only to see
3 small
lion cubs
trundling
down
the stairway—
cute
devilish
felines
as the
mother
returned
through the
night and the
shattered glass
door
half dragging
half carrying
a bloodied
man
across the
rug
leaving a
red
trail
the cubs
rushed
forward
and the
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense Page 7