Beerspit Night and Cursing

by Charles Bukowski

  Who is this 23 yr old ear chewer? was it intelligent? can it be elevated? To be spittin’ fire at the Elders at 23 shows a mind at work…& to spit at Webb instead of The New Yorker or Nation shows a selective mind at work…may be dedicated…not ambitious…who was it?

  he’ll write I guess he’s busy with type set/

  Gramps don’t know that in a way I am painting—I’m studying those on the wall for their final solution…It takes 5 years sometimes of study to know what subtle touch will complete the work & I must know every colour in the thing—and shape…as they stand they’re done but I know they aint yet complete.

  And one is drawing Ernie all the time—it is just that one wants to do The Psyche for Ernie’s old age—when I’m not here & he is an old man I want him to go see my Psyche at Yale in the collection & I want to torment his mind with my memory—a fiendish female…you see there is such a mess all over the floor of paper that one wd need another house to paint in…I got to set up the easel/ & buy a small table to move about & paint as I eat—when I pass the table! only way to do it…the mirror is set up for beginning the Psyche/ she has got to be so beautiful that memories will pierce him—like waves & waves of thorns…made of rose petals…I love that dear child…he is the only Knight that saw it is necessary for a male voice to sass Ezra for causing me to ‘lose face’…isn’t that curious—that Ezra has one handle he can be caught by…he shd never have allowed his nervous system to take over in the presence of true art; most especially in an age when his race is being destroyed because it lacks art of sacred nature—It wd be like God tossin’ out Lord Jesus because he’d had a vinegar smell to him & was a bit shook up

  Ezra had a stand of love art & artists…I am not a female—I am an artist/ my tao is art/ it shows in the cooking even…I see it…So the Gods sent a son of the Jews to love Ezra’s PoundKake & he alone was sent to sass Ez & grab him by his one handle…and she was penniless & female…she had her name smeared on account of ez/ there were such circumstances as to make it an international scandal for all time…and as usual only the Jews knew enough to DO…how Ernie found me is a miracle & it is curious that his initials are E. P. Walker…his way of fighting aint my way & I see his pattern is sly & stealthy/ toward Ez—“another poet” (in new A & P cover you’ll see) but Ezra will receive it like a Florentine dagger…he will know the thrust & he’ll see straight off the pattern of the Jew & he’ll have to think of something to DO instead of going silent like that on us/ & helping the English set/ Ernie is a man that the Gods gave me just before my wings fell into the mud—Gib’s it because his manners are quiet & good but he’s cruel just like his ancestors & when I lost face…he did too with his friends & he’d rather I’d died…

  Ernie knows my value/ he saw it immediately—not just worldly value but he saw HER just the same way Ezra did…saw clear into the psyche…& I trust him because I trust myself & know my head is clear…but to me it sure is a strange tale…that a Jew will come bearing Ezra’s magic initials & joust King Arthur…It provides me with new insight…a noble Jew—as noble as Ezra—that’s going to be something & this kid has an intelligence & a profound understanding of humanity…he aint a flash…He can draw & he can write…I am not saying he is another Ezra Pound but all the material necessary for a King are present in Ernie/

  And he is so pretty—that one did not realise he was not a german boy…it wasn’t until I gave a race speech that’d fired a german (a test of my own making) & Ernie fled & left me with Dr. Einstein or Pavlov & then I knew for certain that I was in contact with a foreign spirit but by then I knew him as my own brother & part of my fate life…preceeding my speech was a hair cut which brought out something that I knew was not nordic or aryan/ it was something different—he is pure bred for living in this nordic (once) land—but the full fantastic out-rageous intelligence of the Jews is packed solid in his beautiful head/ I do believe that Ernie cd outsmart anybody in this world except a Seeressa/ she who can see Gawd—first one went to NYC & the communists/ then to d.c. & the fascists…then one got smeared as a antisemite—then out here to the anarchists & then Ernie gets here to joust with Ezra/ it has the look of a plan to me…all that cdn’t be an accident—I know from experience everybody’s political life & their romantic life—those who matter one means/ it is like being in a dark room filled with broken glass & knowing where each hunk of glass is

  Ernie is the Son of Godtttt…he will save us…he is absolutely the first of all my fellowcountry men who has on his own taken Ezra to task for what Ezra did to a female Botticelli after Ezra wrote a whole book about how lousy people were to the artist…he committed a crime in his own book and Ernie is a Sacred God who will cause them to regret/

  They made his Love lose face & he is like my husband; my son; my brother…he acts from all these positions…yes Po Li is a marvel to let me know him…I think Po Li is relieved to see a male who loves me in truth…there were so many who’d like to say they slept with me…I told all of them “oh just say you did anyhow…everybody else does…” to solve the problem as I don’t do anything I don’t madly love to do

  I love Ezra & I know Ernie wont be-head him—he is just going to put that Florentine dagger in so many times that everybody around Ez will get uneasy that he might get killed—Ernie is a capricorn & he will never give up once he gets a notion/ like me…we must provide that this never happens again to any of us anywhere & Ernie is our Son of God—nobody else wd dare sass Ez for a hunk of silly female…none but this bright shining child

  I wonder who wrote my life for me? I think I’ll perfume the paint I use for that Psyche so Ernie can smell her as well as see her/ he likes cloves…He gets alcohol & mixes it with oil of cloves & rubs it on me & I smell of cloves like Helen for Ernie & he makes me take a bit & swish it in my mouth & spit it out & I smell of cloves for him—he is the most sensual animal I ever met/ so I’ll paint with oil of cloves & pigment/ it cd work/ & it sure will hang on/ & crush cloves to work in any texture effect…let us say flowers…or leaves…

  I want to make a Psyche for Ernie that will be a little Botticelli venus…Some of my husbands who travel’d to Italy write & say the resemblance to Bott’s Venus & their wife is…breathtaking…so I got the correct equipment to operate

  Only true Love can move us to create Art…that other stuff is Self Love & that’s a consolation…sort of…I loved Ezra so much I’d even paint for him…and Ernie also…all I want to give us are 2 more…the Pan & the Psyche…that Eros loved…

  it is fun sitting here by the south window…the sun hot on my back/ in a sun dress—herman out there rollin’ herman the ocean…Every once in a while I lean back & ask Our Sun “what is the secret of this world?” I’d like to know/ he said “tell Buk yr supposta grow”…Is that its meaning & secret?

  have a drawing here one did of Ernie/ he looks like Endymion the Gold/ son of the Sun/ soon’s foto will mail you…hell that’s the hangup with me being a female…otherwise it’d be a broad one wd talk about to you/ sometimes with Ernie/ he will say something & a thought flashes across my mind that the cloak & dagger A.D.L. read my mail & Ernie is here fully aware of each private sentiment/ or he’ll use an expression that Ezra made up for the family or one I did/ I tell him but usually not at the moment as I’m too busy trying to fathom just how in the hell did this 19 yr hick kid know that! He has no special education but he has a complete Ezra paideuma in him/ do not know HOW it got there—my A.D.L. suspicion is silly of course but if they HAD sent him…that is the way he’d come…

  he is a completely destined spirit/ with his life work beginning at 19…and he has Sheri Martinelli for his mistresswife&-mamma/ that aint a handicap…Capricorns love to death—they never forget a kindness or a love

  He is terrible too Buk/ my god what a cleverness that never abandons him—example/ I told him that he wasn’t a german & I realised it & that he was a Jew & ought to be proud of it…He emphatically denied it—yet all the time he denied he was a Jew he stood in that typical pose with t
he fingers all held together in a loose point & touching that hollow in the shoulder…His entire physical presence was speaking the truth while his tongue lied…He wont lie—if he cant speak the truth he acts it out…a fantastic intelligence…I trust that I am being still our Sheri in polishing this boy to perfection. I trust I do no wrong or harm…the signs were so strong—that he was to arrive/ and he did…I garrrrs it wuz arfttter dot Pidgeon caught me that Ernie sprung full grown into our life…my divine babe

  I can live with him for I always speak the truth & see what he is doing & no bull shit & I love him with every degree of love known to mankind—for his own good & often for his own bad too! I don’t think I’m letting a Trojan Hoss into our Temenos—even if the pagans & the Jews go on fighting another 23 thousand yrs—this child shd know us—I don’t know who made him afraid to be a Jew but one will restore his pride for him—anything as intelligent as he is shd have no fear/

  Ernie will love me all my life the way I love Ezra because he SEES me totally/ He drives me screamingly mad with his Yiddish house manners—I am his mamma I cannot refuse him anything…am I eating a cooky then Baby wants 100 to stuff in his little mouff—am I having eggs & bacon…then Baby wants some…do I have a new book? Baby must have it—Baby must have mamma’s Ovid in Latin & baby must have his Cantos with notes like mamma & mamma must prove she loves Baby by following him about constantly & picking up after him—I am beginning to be a Yiddisher Mamma & see into their psyches—also I see why they make their husbands & sons so fat—I discovered it when I contemplated marriage with Ernie & I knew in a flash/ I’d feed him & he gets so fat on what I do feed him without trying to make him fat…but I’d hide that beautiful beauty under fat & only I’d know it was there & it wd always belong to me…so I knew why/ I’d be a typical Jew if I went off with Ernie

  Of course one cant do that to him—he is a baby & both Gib & I must help him grow…one must not snatch & grab just because it is a life time dream of a female to be loved as Ezra loved & as Ernie does…They deliberately made it tough for me to succumb to being a real wife to anyone…if I had found Ernie at 19/ you’d have lots of talented kids instead of a Paradisial Spirit that has come to guide you to Paradise…Ernie is my Paradise & so was Ezra…and once this love hits you where you see clear into the other’s spirit—no earthly thing matters—it is like a spring of water running through the mind…one don’t see age or youth or race or sex…one sees that delectable spirit…that Ezra wrote “delecta…” I can truly write to Ernie…“delecto…” my deliciousness my fun…I am enchanted for sure—spell held—but I don’t know why…

  I am ridiculously in love with Ernie as Ezra was with me—if he is outside shooting the 22 being beautiful & manly for me to watch him…I take food & feed it to him at intervals…he don’t even have to use his hands…mamma feeds him by hand & oh he smiles like a kitten purrs—the cookies my maw sent us for xmas…one stood & fed Ernie the whole box…he is a piggy pig for sure but I think it’s adorable…Buk I must be plumb crazy…or madly madly wildly loving of this young Jew who came via the spider webthread path…

  What an anti-semite! or is it the Gods of the Jews torturing me with Ernie? What can be the meaning of all these strange contradictions? Gilbert gets mad as hell because I feed Ernie because I know the ghetto insecurity & that they are supposed to “eat them out of house & home” & after Ernie leaves this house is bare—if we ran out of food I’d feed Ernie my own self/ I am mad. He’d eat me too with that beautiful self-conscious smile of perfect contentment at having something that belongs to him like that like a mamma—I adore him/ his ways are adorable/ Gib is so sensual himself that it fascinates his bored oriental spirit…& of course one deals no hurt ever—he gets mad if ernie whispers to me too much—ernie likes to whisper like children do to their mammas & Gib don’t like that but he endures the hugging & kissing & it rather faintly excites him—I see that…I completely ‘spoil’ Ernie just like Ezra ‘spoiled’ me/ he made a brat out of me—he thought I was so damm’d cute & adorable just like I think Ernie is…and I am—& so is Ernie…so are you & so’s Gib…we are cute & adorable…that means we are artists…now by this love for Ernie I see how much Ezra loved—and because Ernie is such a pest & brat too…I see why Ezra cd toss BirdLet out of the nest & if one adds Po Li to that…but one is sensible…one hopes—and Ernie is too smart to bring any Suzi Wongs to meet me! I shd have hidden Po’ Li but I am not clever only truthful

  It is an interesting problem to love 2 male spirits at once…I don’t prefer it…I prefer 1 male spirit at a time…one gets more done

  We shall see what comes of it all…20 yrs wd give us enough view…and we’ll have our “30 yrs” “I need 30 more years” I need 150 more years to get something done right/

  Now so long buk & I’m out to the point for a sun bath/

  Love

  Sheri

  · 1961 ·

  Jan 3-61

  [postcard]

  Sheri—

  It is naturally the diminishing of a poet when he goes to the essay, critiques and manifestos, as Pound, T.S.E., so forth;—men who broke into being through the poetic word, and troubled for more power, the dominance of power, lost it in laying down the law. It is a natural human frailty, a boil upon Emperor, Kaiser, Poet, traffic cop, house-wife (so forth), all bubbling up out of a natural source into a source of definite form and definite hardness.

  …an’ now have a spur upon my dmnd heel and can hardly walk, but does not really trouble my drinking. Thank you for Leoun but there are some bad lines, and I don’t know how Cocteau ever made it, or his cheap movies either: the backs of his couches leaping out on halloween masks with skid-row wires of fancy. I believe Jean read Shakespeare 3 times daily when he wasn’t admiring himself in the mirror. (I will write Sunday—some disagreements)

  Charles

  BUKOWSKI

  dreams of eves and arbors,

  Jan. something into ’61

  Sheri, goddess-thing, what:

  Your jumping altar keeps the midnights fine. Why I’ll bet even the coffee-beans ha ha in the lowly hair-grass.

  My guess is that it’s Gib…with carburaters and Ernies bilking and boiling the landscape of his mind. Although Pan might be bothered about something too.

  No, I didn’t listen to the broadcast because it meant going out to buy an F.M. radio and some lady had just bought me a new A.M., and she howled when I mentioned another radio, and so she wouldn’t feel bad, I didn’t bother. But I would like an F. M. because of better music and less gnarl, but also if I HAD WRITTEN THE POEMS FOR RADIO (or the manifesto or whatever part they used) I would have been interested, but since it was just the work of climbers, I mean those trying to push poetry out in the open like a streetcar transfer, it didn’t matter to me. It was a tape that had been earlier broadcast in New York, and now it’s sitting somewhere and everybody’s asleep and it still doesn’t matter. Very little matters in the broad coarse except what we do or say or think toward ourselves, the “I”—how we treat its calls and how we answer them. Ez wants to ed. the masses. He is right because he is Ez and the Ez says so. I don’t care about the masses. I am right because I am Buk, but I would be wrong if I became Ez. This is all basic and simple, but how involved we sometimes get, like an essay in the Kenyon Review, talking large fancy circles, interesting circles, but missing the meat. Enough about the radio. Except there was some editor in N. Yawk who wrote me he was reading something of mine now and then in the Bizzare Cafe and he hoped it was ok and he wd continue to do so unless I sued him or wrote him a nasty letter. I told him, go ahead, I write the poetry and if somebody wants to do something about it or with it, I am not going to hit it over the head with a stick. What I object to is standing there MYSELF and reading my own bilge and waiting for applause or some ass to come up out of the audience, beret and goat, shake my hand and say, “I dig you, dad, from way out.” I don’t want to rub dicks with the ill; I may be insane, but I am not ill. The blood I spit out is good blood and the
beer I drink sets the hills of hell on fire.

  And each day I grow some more like a small cactus sticking those thorns up out of the dryness.

  I once said, If I can live to be 40, I can write something. So I didn’t write for ten years…waiting, and then I began 5 years early. I think now I must possibly ask for ten more years: I need to be 50 or 55. I am still not strong; I can feel large gashes of impossible light, intruding!

  Oye, Shere, as I write this, my beer can to my left, sitting in my old yellow bathrobe, same old thing: hair in my eyes, 4 day beard, just had 3 scrambled eggs and some rye-krisp and pears, and I fried the eggs in warm butter like a Van Gogh yellow, and I put in a PINCH of leaf oregano…oye, those eggs tasted like the left leg of God roasted at 250 degrees for 18 hours…try it…LEAF OREGANO, a pinch. Get it at most any market. I bought it for another purpose that didn’t turn out so good: red beans and 2 pounds of handburger (ham, yes) (hamburger) and tomatoes and onions, celery salt, garlic, and chili peppers. Tasted not bad but I made too much, lasted too long and I gained 5 pounds and threw it away.

  But what I’m trying to say, she’s gone now, but while I was writing this—I live on the 3rd. floor and from my kitchen table where I write I see nothing but sunshine and 4 red flats and an apartment house and a blatch of the Hollywood hills, but as I write I see things, and there is this girl: they live in the front pink flat, all women, 3 or 4 or 5 women, no men at all, and a small dog without sense, and they are Europeons of some sort, Armenian, Rumanian, Polish, some lowly defeated race, but they are strong because they have not been Americanized, and they are angry too because there are no men, and they are all beautiful from the youngest to the oldest because nature and themselves is keeping them ready in case a man enters. Oye, there is one. 19. Big, oye, big, strong as a horse with brown hair down to her big ass. It’s Sunday. She empties the trash, back and forth, back and forth, and they speak, I believe in some Europeon lingo most of the time; and she is in purple, and outside of a man she desires nothing, and she feels little pain outside of a belly or a toothache and she seldom has either, although some day a mailman or a truckdriver or maybe even a garage mechanic will marry her and her belly will bloom and breathe with the snake turning into man, being born, and turning back, spiritually, to the snake. But now she empties trash. oye, this strong thing in purple. A church dress. There is a four foot tall fence partially covered with vines. And she’s still emptying trash while the rest of the woman-family walks down the sidewalk toward church. So then the oldest one, Europe from way back, speaks the command, a harsh command that cannot be disobeyed, and I interpret it to mean: wtz takin u so fucking long wit da trash? We’s going to church. CHURCH! GOD! Idiot, idiot child!