Beerspit Night and Cursing

by Charles Bukowski

  L.,

  Buk

  I am asleep on the rocks. Wow. Wow. You tell Pound u know good kid. He smile big, so O.K.—I leave. Stop now. O.K. O.K.—

  [postcard dated by SM 11 October 1960; typed around a drawing of CB passed out on bed with bottle of liquor on floor]

  Hi ho, Shed:

  Gezus, I think I been stung by bee somewhere or mebe bad whiskey…ol’ woman over, cooked slab of meat, drank mah wine, robbed Buk a prcous manhood. Dropped earlier coupla hundred on horsething race, ended up playin’ poker fa paper clips. Really livin’, Shed baby. Wish u was here to wash the dishes, throw out tha trash, sing to me ok ok ok ok ok, this is a virtual wonder land in the latest trends in dying. Hello to Po Li. Wang. San Francisco in general. list. to Lizst. not impressed. L., Chas the Buk.

  Chas B—

  [undated postcard]

  if yv nvr ridden ina bean u don no wat livin means n to hell with Vivaldi, n if uv never been in a room wit Sheri M while she’s tossed her beercans against the walls or talked abt Gramps and Cantos 90 and 92, well, the hell with—Vivaldi, if u’ve never seen Sheri rip the phone frum the wall or Po Li get the bowl ’n roach ready, y’ve wasted yr time, friend, listenin’ to—Vivaldi, or if u’ve neva gotten letas frum Shed tellin’ y that u build a-hole palaces and that Sherman’s gona cross t Jordan, well ok, and too bad, n if U’ve neva eaten tha cakes n cookies that gassed Pound, ok, man, or formulas for sea-water to make u stan up after 40, well ok, man; I sent her a photo a me in full topue, waterin the lawn; she sen bak a dog’s leg frozen n orange gelatine…wal, t nex mov iz up t tha Dutchess…I got 35 colored boys workin for me heah, each ona em carryin a razor sharperin Krusekev, an me…I’m a listening to Vivaldi.

  yes,

  BUK

  Aiee, Oct 12, won nine 6ho los the angels sing in dishwater

  Lookie hear Sherryone:

  beer ’n soda crackers for lunch, I have new ribbon but two dragrat tired to change, Grit Dark, symphysis of snails and fire.

  …can’t you guess that all this boil,

  the mace and census,

  the crank and suspicious dismemberment

  show disorder of felon gusts?

  we are no part perfect,

  hysteria could be our trained harpy,

  and look…the walls, the guards,

  armour, nothing festival,

  what haze in lieu of this?

  a man is either a genius

  or nothing at all, and I have had

  to accept a nothing

  I break primitively to pieces

  to foreshadow the gutteral,

  the halloween mine.

  —Buk, portion of poem

  Our Bread Is Blessed and Damned, now out in the hands of the makers.

  Yes, Sheri, seawater infected with temperate distillers of decay; I would say, however, that boiling creates a palimpsest and breaks the back of magic. magic being anything larger than us that we do not understand.

  Po Li has filament part of broken hand straight, tho this more difficult for woman, although woman has 3 filaments: spiritual, mental and physical—these listed in their proper order. What I mean by spiritual, I can’t quite say and that is why numb one.

  Webb, at this moment, most rancorous, dedicated, humane, human editor to come along since the bottle took the Whit outa Burnett. Frank Brookhauser once wrote me, “Don’t trust Whit Burnett.” A course, this only had reverse affect and I sent Whit 36 short stories a month until he finally got tired and took one. Webb a little taken in by NAMES but he will get over this when he realizes that a man can be a poet on Tuesday, and the next day, Wedns., get up and be something else because he did something not wrong but poetry deadening on Tuesday nite or las month or las year and it finally added to a thrown away burnt out light globe, and there is nothing you can do but crash it against a wall, glass and ripped tires in sunlight and somebody talking about nothing

  as I may be doing and people being kind and telling me nothing, and having never been a name not helping

  as being a name is to an extent the meddling of audience who

  almost without fail

  over-rate or under-rate their contemporaries.

  SIR BOT MAL: baseball games and frogs.

  If you present Pound as male the world has fresh material.

  No, my face is scars, I have to get under certain light or no light so things will not show, although what was once shame for this is now nullity. From 14 on face broke out (plus back) in boils large as peaches; charity ward at county hospital decided for worse case in history to simply take electric drill and drill drill drill drill drill, it was no so good although I picked the winner of the Kentucky Derby under the drill in 1934 because the sound of the name (Omaha?) came to me clearly under the rivets, a damn good longshot, and I think the year is right. Somewhere in there, it had to be. I fell in love with a nurse who must have been 45 because she saw that under all the sores and ugliness, the silence, sat a human being. One of the docs said he’d never seen anyone go under the needle like I did, but I think he told that to all the boys to keep the place down to a concocted cotton scream.

  I read plntya classics then while the young boys were buying corsages and dancing while the young boys were kissing and what

  Buk met Shelley and threw him out and Keats and threw him out

  and Shakey out and the Romans and Greeks out

  and Brahms out and Bee in, and Chike in and Bach out (except for organ works), and Li Po in and Villon and Rachmony and Pound

  and early Eliot and early E.E., and Jeffers in

  and A. Huxley and D.H.L. and Schopenhauer and Spender

  and James Thurber and Van Gogh and John Dillinger and all the RUSSIANS, all the Russian writers and composers and poets, and Fred N[ietzsche]. and others who have slipped out of grip or moment’s recall.

  This is not a confessional except to xpress that I did my reading when it counted, when the words and sounds stood out between real hell and simple survival. An’ if u want to slip me some classics in tha insides a cookies to take lak a pill, well, Martinelli, that’s ur business. I forgive you.

  There is this: there is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP fk trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass. There is too much competition and slickness and formula. There is only one thing to be patriot of and that is the guideless will growing in its own mud, ripping out leaves and sounds, in spite of what it has been taught. We are growing more and more toward what is being thought of as formlessness at the moment, that later will only be the measuring rod of fools. And so it will go: the upward spurting of a few things until we end.

  What was good for Pound is not good for me. I do not WANT a “map of the world in my head”, I do not want any such clutterings; the words I use will be mine because I know they will, and it’s as simple as that.

  Christ, not a cig in the house, ah, here’s a butt unner a bacon rind! Sir Francis Bacon I salute you, ass…. Sheri, I enjoy ur stuff even tho u rack me and protect Sherman, an I may be rong on Jory, Christ am rong mos a ma life, but Sherman really seem AWFULLY AMBITIOUS and could make good door to door SALESMAN, an he may have thot I was somethin’ an’ in ur terms he is “innocent” but the innocents are more patrons of hell than the enemy, I dunno I dunno I dunno…if he would only sit still for a minute and keep his god d. hands off the telephone. I must stop knocking Jory, tho—for some reason I do not feel good doing it.

  Well, I don’t know what the hell.

  …of course the horses are bad, filled with gasoline and bad dreams,

  and the women too…wear claws that shred your back through kisses of candy-fire, and the whiskey crawls with crazy moths,

  and when I open a can of beans…shrimp jump out and nip my fingers;

  the thunder pokes holes in my brain tonight, and I dial odd numbers

  on the phone asking questions on the classics and the size of the moon,

  and I get out the foil
and dance before the mirror crashing splints

  into my body and face; I oil the clock and the cat, sing Carmen backwards,

  eat the shell and throw away the egg…history is upside down,

  and love and breakfast, and look…the poems of Sandburg…

  who is he trying to fool? I’ve seen Dante in an opera hat,

  walking thru the snow, poisoned on bad beer…

  —Buk, portion of poem

  Old Number 9, Rommel, Nininsky, What Have You?

  now out in the hands of the blessed makers.

  Of course, passant poems tire and I am tiring of them but I must be tired enough so that a new expressive medium is just not another conclamation, but hell, all this wiring and writing down is not only stupid but tiring. It is in doing—and in another way, not doing—that we renew? The seasons are not stupid, the days and the nights, can we ever beat them? Need we? I think so. You, Sheri, dislike Buk disliking cat-killing birds, but I do and must face myself with lackings in the face of so-called normal intelligence that accepts the inevblty. of NATURE. I can only accept what the animal BUK says in the unlearning. Too much has been taught. We must be UNTAUGHT. I believe that is why I enjoy the company of slaughterhouse workers, boxers, whores, Communists, queers, jockeys, waitresses—their knowledge is SPINAL.

  …soon’s I get poem or something I will send on up.

  Rite now you tell Po’ Li my head feels like burnt-out lite gobble.

  L.,

  Buk-thing

  [postcard dated by SM 13 October 1960, written around drawing of CB being chased by several women]

  Deer Sheri: “leveret” is a hare in the first year of its age…still trying to clean this place up: met animal in bathroom this morning the size of sick camel—I left and went down to gas station. Still no word on 15 or 20 pomes I sent to S.F. Review so nothin’ to show u for possible A&P. much jitter life: editor pro. usin’ pomes to wipe windshield—or worse…basta! basta!…and so we scratch for a name and a way.

  L.,

  Buk

  Los Angeles, Calif. Oct. 19 or 20 or wot, 1960

  Dear Sheri, muh:

  beast-time passing of scars through closed windows, and a senseless sun, peine forte et dure, the cuckold of unreason, a Samson hesitates in the fine web of quiver and titan spires, and no Samson at all—say the buprestid beetle or ordinary man can only grin esperanto hurricanes closer to coma. and if beetles grin, men wear hairshirts to cover their wisdom. looky, baby, what I mean here: splendid then: the caprification and the didactic load, but what are you going to do for passion when there’s only India and only India can amend the spare revenge, the sparrow-lovers, si vis me flere dolendum est primum ipse tibi, the oxen are as golden as the sun through golden eyes, but now the tablets sit in morphia, and hear hear!!, doctrines and deductions curd into a leaf and die, not because we fail ourselves, but other certain empires we shut away with a mouldy and indelicate, stucco, pontifical nay.

  Sure, old friend, I’ve read Pound and Eliot and Cummings and I can toss the words fancy, see here: the spathic lameness of reverie in metempirical phrases is the catch-crotch of the high bulgarians, and I am the last to blot or censure the mystery and high-dove go of the language, it is simply that coming out of the slaughterhouses and whorehouses wilted and impugned with foretaste,—the placenta must go, and the intortion and the divine bullshit, and also…the eunuchs, the civets, the cloisters of footmen, the lavender founts, oblique sirens, everything dastardly sirroco and weeping

  must go

  must go

  must go

  and the wergild price is not enough, nor the fancy getaway run of rabbits or rats or genuii—

  look here: the game is over:

  let’s trim the fat,

  and die.

  …the drunker one gets the more mountains appear in the hill of the head, and barking like cats and snarling like gods, and all the puppies in the boot with tap-root smiles and the lion chewing off my left leg and belching blue sparks, ya gotta have a forest and colza and perch and reverie, and letters from Spain and a bag of wet walnuts; and really love, or thinking about love, or getting ready for love—or hate, which is the same thing in a smaller way. the welt of living is so hackneyed, let me luxuriate and mull over the junk of death, puffing through my simple lungs, my spiral brain twisted and decayed as a rotten tooth; the jocund blood rattles in its simple sack, spying on Time, ah ha, but what can be said? It has all been said. We are a sub-species, a sub-species of saving and doing, well-read, inbred, half-wit, constipated roar, rabbit-roar…o, beg in the roads wet with perfume and palsy, oh shit! these soft-hearted sounds—would that I could drum alive the granite gods! would that this rip of red across my eyes mean the voices and sounds and figures, that the full haze of the iguana/—oh christ, how do you say it say it say it drunk and not-drunk, ignorant in the high-seas of death, a gutter-guy scratching for a comb in catalysis of peaches and tigers and beer, can you tell me that frogs are less a manoeuvre than our leap beyond the lycée of breathing?

  burn there greater things than poems or blondes in nylon and garter, crst, I mean the young blondes, Sheri, of beerspit night and cursing; burn there greater things than fighting for your life in a 4 rounder, the gloves bombing your guts when you only want love?…or people who think you are a bastard because you can sit in a room for 3 weeks, the sick shades down, without the desire to look upon the face of your brother? tell me, is this madness? burn there greater things than when the music claws and crawls like ants from the floor, up your arms, your chest, your ass, and sings in your head, sings words, crazy words and love, and all the walls are forests of burning music and you laugh drunk-weird and move to the typewriter and all the crazy blondes and all the crazy gloves, Shakespeare as close as the pepper shaker, Beethoven in your wallet along side the hock ticket and the name of a whore, the blood of 4-rounders coming like an aria, and out the DOOR (the typewriter can wait) into the jails, the dives, the fox-crazy traffic, the torn signs yelling names of old lovers through the malaria of breathing, and see see see BANG, already the bartender marks you with his scientist’s eye and the old whores preen in the mirror, and the night is fine by god by god by god, juke boxes and screaming and the deer marching on the windows, and you begin talking through your scarred unholy face, you lie about the last 4-rounder you won in ’53, or you remember the time you were in the same magazine with Lorca and Sartre and everybody else. well, shit. it’s old stuff. but so are magnolias and wars and mountains and bullfights, and everywhere the sound comes on and a woman calls your name and you laugh and it doesn’t matter, and the bartender comes on like God, heaven in a bottle, the cash-register of hell, and purgatory until 2 a.m., so drink to the dead bull, the dead poem, dead love, everything dead in the face of morning, your fingers slowly closing about the lie and tossing it down your throat.

  …there is nothing subtle about dying or dumping garbage, or the spider, and this fist full of nickels and the barking of dogs tonight when the beast puffs on beer and moonlight and

  asks my name

  asks my name

  asks my name

  and I hold to the wall not man enough to cry

  as the city dumps its sorrow in

  wine bottles and stale kisses,

  and the handcuffs and crutches and slabs

  fuck like mad

  got yr letter: awright, the classics are a condition, ok wit me. I don wanna make a romantic outa ya, u stay sprung out and yet set tha weigh ya r…. Wang I heard frum another source, tell me he can no make his mind up w. he prefer man or woman. I dunno, I don care, but seems ¾ of Art world homo.

  Ya see wot heffect y has got ona me? Yos gut me rritin’ Martinellies jaw haw rite, a rite, a rite…da stars are thick wit sickness, bad-time sickness, vury, an I jus knock pounda coffee on floor, all over, n ahm toooooo sick to pick up wit hit and high sit shit and looky upon it, the crumbs of coffee coffeeeeee-effeeeee sittin lookin at me wit all its I’s, an nobody wins…I must out and mail this.


  sheri muh deer,

  Buk goin now—

  Buk

  L.A., Oct. 21

  Dear Sherelli:

  More list a “Yankee names”. Your boys Ginsburg, Sherman, McClure…

  Your last letter a real swath of sythces, but why do you blame ME? Not sythces, sickles—what is it you cut wheat down with? I got a dictonairy but I am sick today, bleeding.

  What Wang does to his contemporaires they may enhohjoy but am no contemp a Wang’s—women for me, and not too many.

  I am still pickin’ up coffee, whata life.

  Don eat that lobster or what.

  wen I say seawater infected with gentle distillers of decay—that me that a little of that in you…will eat out the pestilence and impurity. I don’ see why I am so hard to get across to u.

  on the utter hand I UNDERSTAND YOU PERFECTLY.

  it is one hell of a situation.

  anytime u are in L.A., stop by, preferably alone—I will not rape you. now do not get angry because I invited you through the door. this—from Buk—is a rarity. unlisted phone: NO. 1-6385.

  good day at track yestiday, could do no wrong. No, it was day before yestiday, beer waitress blew me a kiss.

  no pomes no nottin now, sick sick sick