Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  I have to read these sentences several times to make sure that Zukofsky is not pulling my leg, my ears, or any part of me. The writing is not clear; it is stodgy but I get the message. Poetry is for us, the special ones—and it’s of life (almost) and yet divorced, finally, and fixed and pleasurable. To sight, sound, intellection. Well, intellection is the catch-word, the out.

  Yet once I thought poetry was to keep me alive, to keep everybody alive; other people’s poems, my own, paintings, stories, novels, I had thought that these things were to help me get on through so that, when I went into the cabinet to get a razorblade, I shaved carefully with it instead of going for the throat with the big slash. A Test of Poetry was first published in 1948 and reissued in 1964. We are living in strange and violent and unusual times. I am afraid that life has caught up and extinguished such as Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky. We will no longer accept dry and safe bread. Poetry is going into the streets, into the whorehouses, into the sky, into the picnic basket, into the whiskey bottle. The fraud is over—certain people will not be allowed to live while others die. At least not from this typewriter, and the action is heavy too at the universities, the alleys, the beer-halls. This type of primer is not going to fool anyone any longer. There are some well-chosen poems but we will not let them be put into their little cages of mechanistic and prissy explanations. Some of the explanations, let me say, are thoughtful and even make sense in the limited way of a charming circle. But I can’t imagine handing this book to a man doomed to go to the chair in a month.

  The true test of poetry is that it fits every man everywhere.

  There are some poems like this in this book but Zukofsky talks about everything else. There goes another idol. There go another 165 well-printed pages that might have crawled with love and blood and laughter, that might have gone good with beer and salami sandwiches, that might have made the next morning better instead of that trained slippery nostalgia of horror slipping through the curtains to fall upon me like a mother-axe and make me close my eyes again and hold the mean in my belly and wonder when the living will arrive??

  Bukowski On Bukowski

  Notes of a Dirty Old Man, Essex House, paperback, 255 pgs. with an introduction by the author. $1.95. Written by Charles Bukowski, reviewed by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

  I drank with a friend the other night who said or maybe it was I who said, “It is terribly difficult not to like the smell of your own shit.” We spoke of staring down at our turds after an accomplishment and feeling, somehow, proud of our deed.

  Now, an opener like this will give the hackers, the poison-ivy boys, the university-ivy boys all that they need, so I give it to them early in order to feed them first. Let us get the suckerfish off of our sides and begin to speak decently. I’ve already had enough Creeley-University nightmares to last me 44 lives and dream-lives to go.

  All right. Kirby sent me a couple of advance copies. So you get the thing out of the mailbox and you look at it.

  I got into bed—I like beds, I think that the bed is Man’s greatest invention—most of us are born there, die there, fuck there, jack-off there, dream there. . . .

  I am somewhat of a crank and a disbeliever, so I clambered into my jack-off sheets, alone, expecting that Kirby and Essex House had taken out the best, not that I knew anything about Kirby or Essex House; I was only speaking of my experiences with the world—man, I flipped on through and they had left in everything—the rants, the literary, the unliterary, the sex, the no-sex, the whole bag of warty screams and experiences.

  It was honor.

  I like honor. And it was cleanly set with immaculate cover, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, 0115.

  I got into bed and read my own stories or whatever they were and I enjoyed them. Once I have written a poem and go back to it, I only get the sense of vomit and waste. And people quote lines to me, verily, from back poems and I don’t know what the hell they are talking about. It’s like when they tell me when I am in hangover, “You chased 23 people out of my house and tried to fuck my wife.”

  You know, it seems like a bunch of shit.

  But the stories, as I laid there in bed, I rather liked. Rotten thing to say, what? I do suppose it was the gathering of experience between covers ghostly which cuckolded me. Reading the life-days and nights of my life I wondered how I could possibly still be alive and walking around now?

  How many times can a man go through the thresher and still keep his blood, the Summer sun inside of his head? How many bad jails, how many bad women, how many sundry cancers, how many flat tires, how many this or that or what or what or what? . . .

  Frankly I read my own stories in easy wonderment, forgetting who I was, almost almost, and I thought:

  Ummm, ummm, this son of a bitch can really write.

  I remember other writers. Being very discouraged with Chekhov, G.B. Shaw, Ibsen, Irwin Shaw, Gogol, Tolstoy, Balzac, Shakespeare, Ezra Pound, so forth. They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself. In other words, or perhaps more clearly, each of these men condescended that life itself could be evil but that it was all right so long as they could get by and say it in their special literary way.

  Which is all right. If you like playing games.

  And I do think that the professors are finding, now, that the students themselves are tired of game-playing.

  All right, let’s get back to Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

  Re-reading them, stories and fantasies, I found them wondrous and flaming. I thought, Jesus, there hasn’t been a short storyteller this good since Pirandello. At least since then.

  It’s crappy to say, but I think that the book is worth reading. And that the unborn librarian virgins, 200 years hence, will come in their flowered panties, recognizing the power, after my damned dumb skull has become a chickenshit playground for subnormal worms, gophers, other underworld creatures.

  Oh, one other thing.

  In ten years your $1.95 copy will be worth $25. And if you live long enough and the Bomb doesn’t do it, you may be able to pay a month’s rent with the book.

  Until then, read your nuts off and

  Gobble and grow what you can.

  Notes of A Dirty Old Man

  OPEN CITY, DECEMBER 8–14, 1967

  In the Dec. issue of Evergreen there is a small poem by one Charles Bukowski far in the back pages, and all through the magazine there is an interview of LeRoi Jones, poems by LeRoi Jones, ads for LeRoi Jones’ latest book, plus a speech by the departed Malcolm X—“God’s Judgment of White America.” Evergreen was beginning to look like Ebony. I read on through.

  Later in the day, the woman came over with my 3-year-old child. We sat down to dinner.

  “I think I’ll write a poem called ‘WHO’S AFRAID OF LEROI JONES?’”

  “You’re afraid of LeRoi Jones” the woman shouted. She was a very liberal white liberal liberal liberal.

  “Who’s Afraid of Leroi Jones?” I asked again, looking at my little girl.

  She pointed an arm at me over her ground round and french fries. “YOU ARE! YOU ARE!”

  The woman was meanwhile pantering and bantering, her voice neurotically high-pitched, explaining to me the meaning of black America and LeRoi Jones, in the way that only a very liberal white liberal female can do. I was not attacking LeRoi Jones but I had somehow stepped upon sacred ground and he was being defended, almost violently. It was nice—for LeRoi. Hell, I remembered him when we were both scratching to get our poetry into the little magazines; now I was still scratching. I was still the better poet. His plays had put him over. The fat dull whitey wives no longer getting their sex got it through Jones’ black violence in his plays. “Oh Lord, honey, that man frightens me, but I’d like to see one of his plays. Oooooh, let’s go see one of his plays!!!” The old man, after a hard day at the ballpoint pen office, would take her to the play. Anything, rather than try to get his dick hard.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Hitler told me that the white
s were the superior race and now Jones turns around and tells me that the blacks are the superior race.”

  “Well, who do you think is the superior race?”

  “It depends upon who you are; if you are white, then the white race is superior; if you are black, then the black; if you are yellow, then the yellow; if you are mixed, then the mongrel. . . .”

  She went on some more, sentence running into sentence. She must have spoken ten minutes without pause. A little of it was good stuff. Most of it was just religious sacrifice at the altar. Hot white liberal liberal female air. Even Jones wouldn’t want to hear it.

  “How many blacks have you known?” I asked.

  This is always a good stopper in a religious argument. Being a common laborer all my life at poor and underpaid jobs, I had worked with more black men, known more black men, drank with more black men, fought with more black men than any theoretical liberal with books jammed between the ears. Coming up through the back streets of New Orleans in a light rain with my paper suitcase, a high yellow sitting on her porch showing leg had named me. She laughed and shouted, “POOR WHITE TRASH!” I put down my paper suitcase and looked up her legs. “Come on!” she said. “Come on, poor white trash, and get yourself a little!” I saw a curtain move just a little and behind it this black male face, eyes beautiful with murder for my 2 dollars and 20 cents. Then I laughed, feeling good in the early sun, picked up my suitcase full of poems, and moved on down the street.

  “Jones got out on 25,000 dollars bail,” I threw at her. Money only represents evil to the white liberal ladies—until you stop giving it to them.

  “Well, you got out of jail. In ten minutes, you had bail!”

  “It took 6 or 7 hours. The bail was between 20 and 30 dollars. I had it in my dresser but it took me a long time to find somebody who would trust me for it. Jones got up $2,500 in cash, if you want comparisons, plus 2 houses, friends of his parents. I don’t know anybody who owns a house. I don’t even have parents. I’m still poor white trash.”

  “Jones’ house doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to the Negro community.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. So there it was, haggling over LeRoi Jones over the french fries. To find out who owns a man’s house, find out who is shitting in the crapper and who is fucking in the bed. You can bet he owns part of it. Also, if you have to ring the bell to get in, you don’t own any of it.

  I decided to let the conversation go but she had hold of it.

  “Suppose you kept walking down the street and getting punched in the nose and told you were getting punched in the nose because of the color of your skin, how would you feel? You can’t blame them for wanting Black Power. Black Power isn’t anything because they don’t have any power. . . .”

  She went on and on and on. I didn’t have any particular argument with her. She only presumed that I did. But I knew that if the blacks ever got total power, they would kill her long before they got around to me. So I listened and listened and then kissed the little girl goodbye and drove on down to work.

  Down there, 9 out of 10 of them are black but you forget this as the years go on. It’s nothing special until the female white liberal liberals make it so. We worked away. Then I said, “LEROI JONES!”

  The one next to me turned, and here was the finger again. “YOU BETTER NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT LEROI JONES!”

  “My little girl says that I am afraid of him.”

  “YOU ARE! YOU ARE! YOU BETTER NOT SAY ANYTHING ABOUT LEROI JONES!”

  “What will happen if I do?”

  “You’ll be taken care of, that’s what will happen.”

  “You mean mentally or physically?”

  “We don’t care about the mental. His boys will handle you the other way.”

  “You mean I can’t have freedom of speech?”

  “You just be careful what you say! LeRoi Jones is an INTERNATIONALLY-RENOWNED PLAYWRIGHT! Who are you? You just be careful!”

  “Give me a cigarette.”

  “Hell no, buy your own. They sell them in the machines.”

  His friend walked over. “Hello, brother,” he said.

  “Hello, brother,” I answered.

  “You gonna invite me over to your house for breakfast?” (We work nights.)

  “Sure. We’re having grits and beans. Only I don’t have a house.”

  “You got a front door?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m comin’ to the front door in broad daylight and ring your bell. I’m not comin’ to the back door so’s people will think I’m some servant or trashman or delivery boy. I’m comin’ to your front door!”

  “Brother Roy, my front door is your front door as long as the rent is paid.”

  “Good, and I’m gonna grow me some of that shit like you got on your chin and I’m gonna get me some young hippie girl and we gonna walk down Sunset Boulevard hand in hand, right down Sunset Boulevard.”

  “I’d like to get me one of those nice young blonde hippie girls myself,” I told him.

  After some remarks about Gov. Reagan, he walked over and sat down. We worked away, while back at my place the mother of my child got ready to go to a communist party meeting. Of all white members.

  A pretty fucked-up scene.

  Eh, LeRoi?

  Brother?

  The Absence of the Hero

  Having earlier tried to pick up a very young whore whose stockings wrinkled down like stiff skins around her dirty ankles—she didn’t want me—I grabbed her ass in the alley, she farted, a fart that sank my soul from Singapore to Mt. Ganges, she farted and left with a wonderfully subnormal sailor. I walked out into the street and the green trees stuck their yellow teeth out at me. And their rubber cocks. I was a dead gagging finger in a sexless sky.

  Sadness. Sadness becomes so much, then it becomes something else—like a beerglass. Sadness is one thing, madness another. So you go to your place, towel the shit out of your ass, decide to go mad . . . what happens?

  THE DOORBELL RINGS! A woman in a dusty black hat that flops down over her half-face. She wears a green cape and you can smell her underwear . . . probably a very big pussy that always emits this kind of white mulch, I don’t mean come I mean mulch, and she says, Would you like to donate to the starving children of Bionbiona? No, mama, no, please. . . . Oh, you were asleep? I’m sorry. . . . Be sorry. But I wasn’t asleep, mama.

  She goes away.

  —the people are better than I

  the stones are better than I

  the dogturds on somebody’s lawn are

  better than I.

  3:24 A.M. I had gone someplace, evidently, and had come back. When I opened the door, I had the feeling that there was somebody in the room. I turned on this old lamp and stood there. Then the closet door with my paintings on them, pasted to them with snot and come and gum, that closet door opened and out came a man with a face that was almost yellow; hair that was both yellow and grey; ugly teeth and he smelled like hay and barndung, old chickencoops. He ran out and hit me in the face. As he tried to run out the doorway I got a hammerlock on his left arm, bent the damn thing almost up to his neck. He began to cry and he still stank terribly. “Franky Roosevelt is dead,” he wept. “Listen, ass, who gives a motherfuck?” I asked. “I do, oh, I do!” “You STINK!” I screamed at him, “TAKE A BATH!” I booted him in the ass and pushed him out the door. I heard him run down the street. I looked into the closet and there was this little pile of turds, fresh turds. I looked at them and vomited. Then I took yesterday’s newspaper, some dull shit about men landing on the moon, and I gathered the whole mess together and threw it into the garbage can.

  Then I went to the refrigerator, made a bologna sandwich, drank two beers, then began on the wine. Then I went to my blackboard, a large one which hung from the center of the room by ropes and was weighted with brick anchors, and I found some chalk and wrote:

  THIS ONE HAS A CLUBFOOT

  THIS ONE WANTS TO SUCK MY DICK

  THE THIRD HAS A HEAD-TICK
>
  THE FOURTH WEARS A WIG

  THE FIFTH IS A COMMUNIST

  THE SIXTH IS THE GRANDSON OF HITLER

  THE SEVENTH READS DICK TRACY

  THE EIGHTH CLAIMS I OWE HIM TWO PACKS OF CIGARETTES

  THE NINTH IS A WOMAN WHO ONCE DANCED WITH A 9-FOOT COBRA BUT SHE WON’T FUCK ME. NO, IT WAS A BOA CONSTRICTOR! ANYWAY, SHE WON’T FUCK ME.

  The doorbell rang. 4 A.M. DeJohns.

  Sit down, DeJohns.

  Milk-red eyes, tits enough for both of us, but, of course, no cunt.

  We need the hero, DeJohns. There’s nothing. Everything has dried up. What can we hang to?

  Hehehehehehehehe hehehe.

  He was looking at the rope that held up the blackboard.

  Hehehehehehehehe hehe, tough, nothing but shit. Little boys playing games now. Hehe. Pretense. And no humans anywhere, hehehe. Birds, cats, ants, all right. Sure. We remain drunk. Jam pills. Hehe. I remember you, Bukowski, hehehe, when you were a man instead of that bag o’ sick shit you are now, hehe.

  Go suck a water faucet, DeJohns.

  He, hehe, the time you ran round the block one morning, twice, 7 A.M., completely naked—your balls, cock, ass bouncing in the clear air. No sound. Just your feet, bare feet: pat pat pat! We clothed, 3 of us, trying to catch you. Hehehe, the time you hung by your ankles out the window of that fourth floor of that hotel. The whores in that room weeping, begging you to come back inside. Promising to suck your cock, lick the hairs of your asshole, anything. Hehe, that was good.

  Go suck a hot spoon, DeJohns.

  That was funny. But funnier was when you tried to lift yourself in and your legs wouldn’t pull you up. You had your ankles wrapped around the wooden separator that made two windows out of one. Then you got real funny.

  Yeah?

  Yeah. Hehehehe. You said, o o, if I don’t pull up on the next one, that’s it. I’m getting weak. Whores ran up and you screamed, DON’T TOUCH ME! And how you ever pulled your whole body up by the ankles, I’ll never know. You became a snail, a centipede, something inhuman. Hehehe, when you got in the whores ripped your pants down, licked your asshole, balls, cock . . . hehehhe. Then the knock at the door and you opening the door with that hard cock, YEAH? and the landlord saying, WHAT THE HELL YOU DOING HANGING OUT THE WINDOWS BY YOUR FEET? Hehehe. And you saying, JUST TRYING TO PUT SOME LIFE INTO THIS GODDAMNED PARTY! Hehehehe. And the landlord saying, ALL RIGHT. YOU DO THAT ONE MORE TIME AND I’M GOING TO CALL THE POLICE! Hehehe.