Beerspit Night and Cursing

by Charles Bukowski

  A woman must give me BOTH flesh and spirit, and unless I am drunk, I will not take less than both.

  Pascin wanted to bring the picture-frame women, the blasé pure untouchable nudes not only down to the end of his cock but down to the end of his vulgar (so-called) brush where he could say you bastards make me sick this motherly white god awful balloon blob surrounded by angels, is not it…this is it and this is love this is love that modern man shall know love running and sloppy and unglorified and still for it all when it happens love or sex or fire just as GOOD az yours your Greek white banana love without come or after-effect, this is us sloppy and lazy and filthy and real this is us loving the only way we know how.

  No matter that he couldn’t draw hands and feet! He wasn’t looking for hands and feet.

  Degas ok. just going to get him a little longer to slip into the banana world, just as any new of insight against Greek-Romano Classical tradition which you seen to uphold, and which I admire but cert. can see the cracks forming in—

  the profane is the beautiful and the sacred is yesterday. You must bury your h.d’s and yesterdays; only pop pound seems strong enough to advance with us…t.s.eliot a string of beans, wallace stevens just the stringing of a name across an autographed copy…only Jeffers a real buk-boy throwing on a log and saying “fuck ’em. I made a god outa crap, but they’re making crap into a god.”

  Woman dialates from her love of man into the love and extension of man into another man (son, offspring), and original man is singular and therefore jealous until he sees part of his own image…then all blunts because the image has been broken into three…

  I took the olib. you sent me and rolled it into newspaper and smoked it. Not bad. got a vision and headache and blood-spitting. Vision mostly I was drinking water from trough. Long head and ears. I was either rabbit or donkey.

  and you tell Gib that a little leaking on old car ok. It only save you oil change worry. However, if she come out too fast, valve-grind or piston-heads may be worth more than car. Rings or plugs won’t help. Best deal I know is to work in a little sawdust (very fine) into crankcase, sift it down oil-fill while listening to engine work and as sounds better and better keep adding but when starts to choke burn engine awhile until you get true soft sound

  and if too much smoke from ass add proper smokeless additives, and then drive whole mess down to salesman on yoused car lot, n act prop. naive so he won’t pull crankcase plug.

  I only say these things because the fucking guy took my coat while I was trying to nurse a 3 to one shot in with 50 on the nose.

  No more drawings for a moment, Shed.

  Big vultures come to pick my eyes.

  love as truly as I can make it,

  Buk

  L.A.

  May 1, 1961

  Dear Sheri:

  They have found me a boy to read my lines, and now the gods allow me to go ahead and do what pleases me.

  L.,

  Buk

  Los Angeles, Calif.

  May ?, 1961

  Dear Sheri:

  Enclosed more Kaja. This a little better, I think, than the others.

  Also, enclosed photo Buk. You may got crows to scare away.

  Love baby,

  Buk

  [note on bottom in SM’s hand:] She emotes at the lowest conceit heat—

  14/maggio/61 pobx 756/ half moon calif

  buk/ your foto is just what yr letters say: hermit of sort; poet & man of many adventures;

  that kaja lowest yet/ quote from local newspaper: “A recent New York State police report on the typical check forger published in NY Times described him as a native white male, older than other criminals, with high intelligence & residing in an acceptable residential area. He is personally likable attractive & ingratiating & has a knack of convincing others that he is painfully pure in heart. He likes to live well & is a past master in fooling workaday merchants & well to do widows”

  sounds JUST LIKE the “kaja” female’s totally UNpoetic dyed in wool, pidgeon hole mind soft shit & cold cream spew/ no thank you buk/ when we finally pin her down she’ll be a runt with thick glasses on & an overly active pituatary gland/ oh shit ever since ezra pound did “portraits” via word; every crab louse that learned to write is doing them;

  well, today is peaceful darling…been in a storm pressure since ester day; this day is what ester shd have been…easter; yes that howspell/ the state bldg inspr. had the rotten elec current removed & now the cots are unlit & the suburbanite next cot cant drag our ass any more; so since the goody-goody went out of it…one is left in peace now as long before when first came here; oh kid yr magic worked like a BEWteeful charm! thanks my man/ removing the electricity was THE unique solution/ it made only nature left; & we alone down here love the true place & not just sitting in with the t.v. set on & vaguely feeling “down in th’ country”; darling!

  This just a note…& write more when get re-settled…nobody can live here anymore…just week end cabin so we all dithered on that/ anyhow note to say kaja the bottom bucket scum & that yr foto very handsome…sort of beautiful monkey face thing…

  love/sheri

  L.A. May 16, 1961

  Shed mama:

  much short, today. tied to rocks of all sorts but will escape.

  kaja can’t be all that bad, although I agree she prob. pigtail pidjin toe stumblefoot; it is the destiny of these young ladies, when unable to go to bed with a man to go to bed with a poem. reverse it and you get much of the male-half. much of the Art-world infested with the weak instead of the strong, that is why so much of it is bad…

  knock on door yesterday; young man with scrabby goatee, young man simpering like tea was at door. let him in. “Mr. Bukowski, I heard your work read at radio station…we are having a reading at our church, and although I understand you are against reading your stuff, we thought…”

  “I’m afraid I don’t have anything that pale,” I told him.

  “Oh no, we’re not like that. We want it strong. In fact, the reading is entitled Voices in Rebellion…”

  Well, I let him wade through a stack of rejected poetry and through some magazines, and he stood in the doorway quite pleased with his little mass of stuff.

  “Will you be our honored guest this Sunday?” he asked.

  “Hell no!” I said, “and don’t get caught in a strong wind.” and that was that…

  He’s lucky he didn’t catch me drunk and surly. I don’t think it’s fair, these bastards knocking on doors, and if only they weren’t so fkg raw and tender, I’d let them have it. I don’t see why I don’t tell them, and some day I must, to clear the boards both for myself and them. It must be, it will simply have to be…

  Got a letter from Sherman; made me a bit ill. Everytime he lies or is proud, or mentions a new “in” or “contact”, he begins a sentence with an offhand “O”, as if it didn’t matter. For example:

  O I have been made advisory editor of another New Orleans magazine, Outcry…or

  O I heard from Thorne (editor Epos) other day; nice letter; she sent me name of new mag. thought I’d pass on to you…it’s

  O O O O O O O O O O, OO OH oh god damn yes OOOOOOOOO!!!

  …good, I turned off T.V. with my hex, didn’t know I was that good. Is still original hex, must be getting weak-kneed by now. Let me know if they give any more trouble and I will reinvoke full strength. I really meant it, in spirit, chicken feathers and blood at full moon, and glad it worked. I believe in everything, gods mythical and actual and unactual, Buhda, buggods, tree-gods, devils, angels, anything that has ever crossed the mind of man, good or evil or fanciful, is there. And you are there, my good gal Sheri, and I am very sad now that I did not drive up to see you when I had the chance. But I have failed before. So well.

  Love,

  Buk

  18/ may/61 pobx 756 half moon calif

  buk/ yew hopeless romantic/ “pigtail pidjin toe stumblefoot kaja”—man don’t yew know a bedbug or a blood sucker when you ‘SEE’ one?
???? & yew all wet kidttt—girls only go to bed with males because they cannot take a delight in writing poetry/ one can have any male close enough to knock down; because males will fk ANY body/ thing/ any time anywhere/ they are mere fk hops & no earthly pleasure…& one has more than a sufficient knowledge & eggsperience with pleasure…but no earthly pleasure is equal to the spasm of the mind/ not the brain but the mind/

  & buk yew innocent lamb—if you’d only read a few political maz you’d know WHY a kid from a ‘church’ wd want to read yr poetry in church/ why didn’t you tell him to read ezra pound’s usury canto???? if he wanted a voice in rebellion/ the low disorganised honolulu type baptist churches have been used for a long time by the Party to help bust up the eggixting order/ yr poetry is a NATURAL to be used as such; 1/ yew aint saying anything DANGEROUS 2/ you destroy the old idea of the female being sacred & turn her into a fuck cow which is just right for the Commie boys who are operating thru yr skinny church-goer who finally feels he is livin’ it up 3/ yr protests are blind stabbings out against a system which don’t work for you/ IF yr poetry were employing race & its meanings; economics & its effects; true historical facts…baby they’d not show up…be aware of WHY they are using you; also you have a most interesting way of putting things & they NEED REAL artists & creators/

  buk you are too conceited/ also you are in the big sleep/ the ego sleep/ i don’t blame you/ it takes total lack of fear to believe that one can effect any change; i don’t think i got it/ i keep trying but there are some areas i do not enter…& i KNOW enough to debunk them…but so far i have not found one single person of my own race or gods worth the trouble it will make to speak out…also what can you do???? if i sent you an american mercury it wd shake you to yr roots…but not being able to DO anything—it wd be more evil than good to wake you up

  what you can do is not co-operate so well with yr female word portraits…being just what they want/ if he had knocked at my door; I wd have enlightened him as to WHY he’d been put up to hold poetry readings about pimps, whores etc (aint objectin’ buk as is my subject matter at times since it is my life at times BUT why wd a church want it???? who put them up to that???) instead of a lecture or reading of some solid facts on the federal reserve system & our present economic plight…anyhow you are UNreasonable…

  darling if you gonna have yr work read OF COURSE yr door will be knocked upon/ leave dear jory to his worldiness; he is only a lost little boy wanting pop to pat his head for good conduct…all he has is the world; the dream has not taken root in him; anyhow jory is being used as a goy out front…keep telling you you dumb pollack but you wont listen to me…jory is the nice sweet honest voiced little boet type christer they can stick out front & use to make like big art scene…meanwhile they rake in the bucks…behind der back/ jory don’t see nothing but der honorary committee seat/

  jory is a lackey for the party boys due to his ignorance & i cant help him…he is not worth saving; he has a scheming character/ i’d rather save the party boys as they have the better characters/ at least they are working for a dream & the kremlin/ whereas jory is out for jory/ he don’t even know the united states exists/ let alone the fed res sys/ when you wake up to the fact that a race & religious & political & economic war is going on & has been going on for the past 23,000 yrs kid…then we can talk/ then you’d see jory as i see him/ a pawn/ & yr church-goer is another pawn/ a move on the board in the game…

  when you get a chance to be able to speak why don’t you hand them a stick of DYNAMITE instead of mere excitement verbally?????? they aint reading ezra in no watermelon communistic churches (green on outside/red on inside)…you should read the facts on them choiches…well it will all turn out somehow…it cannot be outside of nature—

  yes yr hex worked swell; now please send out a charm to get clarence major down here/ i need him as a sexratary/ & i am trying to get the landlord to give him a hovel to dwell in & we’ll feed him & he can run a & p & so on…I am backlog’d with work & maj wants to come out here & i NEED him plus wanting one of us to be safe of course/ gib don’t mind/ he grew up over on 7th & T streets THE street in wash d.c. & he understands the coloured paideuma/ and maj is hot to come/

  ernie is back in town but we cant connect yet due to some weird circumstances…we will…he cd visit this hotel room & gib’s right down the street…we cd have dinner or wotever…ernie is such a filthy beast that i already know he will want to use this room to sleep off th ship in & there goes my work shop & he is so beguiling he will find some way to make me give in & let him stay here…oh he is a bitch…but i love him…he is so intelligent…

  don’t be sad buk/ you’ll be up sooner r later/ landlord is thinking of making me the caretaker down there soon’s the bldg spr mess blows over…then we cd have a real visit/ now moi glam/ i got to go & get zum woirk done/

  lov/

  shed/

  Sheri

  L.A.

  May what what [20], 1961

  Deah Shed:

  large head this morning, sick…

  baby, I can’t get with the race war, church war, state war kick. I know that getting my balls in the wringer would give me a feeling of usefulness but usefulness is often a pancrea of setting down the tableknife you have been hacking away a new face you have been chipping into a stone you found in the street. Hell, I am a horseplayer, and I can smell action and manipulation, and my innocence is chosen, not thrust upon me. I know the church-boy’s game. But here is the fact. I have written some poems. These poems may be used for other purposes than I intended, but whatever the purpose, what I have said in them remains to me true as creative fact, and if the words of my poems want to breathe in radio stations and in churches, besides the magazines, well, that is their act and their walking around and I cannot destroy them, cut their heads off. What I can’t do, is get behind them and push them out, speak them on stages like a salesman, like a jory playing with his ego-cock.

  I can’t get a hard-on over what the Pope brushes his teeth with or how the Kremlin rattles the dice, or the basis of the monetary system. I have been in the economics classes and I have sat with Jewish tailors and Italian pharmacists over candlelight and plotted the overthrow of a tottering dynasty. It all creamed me well in my twenties and meant something, as the tanks coming down the road in the middle of the butterflies means something, as 30 dogs and twenty men on 20 horses chasing one fox…means something. Everything means something, and if you think you alone Sheri Martinelli have your sights cocked directly on TARGET you are not alone. I met a man in a Gardena poker parlor the other night who thought the same thing.

  I am going to carve my pure innocence, I am going to carve as the tanks come down the road and they will blow me to hell and my carvings to hell and they will laugh, but I will have carved what I needed to carve and sop from the Kremlin will not have ordered the laughter of my knife, or say the dictates of some halfdead facisti order hidden in some mountain-side like a tick on a hunk of capitalist cattle…

  I know that men are fucklunks and will fuck anything they can get their hands on, but some women do not know how to put themselves into the hands of these fucklunks, and hence the kajas, who take it out on the poem, and not all poems are “spasms of the mind”, some of them are just pieces of paper moaning for fucklunks and talking about something else in order to assume importance.

  No, I can’t bring you Major. Major is a dribbling ass, a weakling dribbling in poems and talking about poems and worried about being a nigger and worried because he is not famous, and he would really like nothing better than to write a best-selling novel, no matter how bad, so he can have some money and have people KNOW who Clarence Major is. Your boy Ernie another jerk with fuzz on his cheeks and very thin concepts. You surround yourself with decay and then try to tell me the score. Shed, baby, I love you most of the time but a lot of the time you are on some rummy road and do not know it, and it’s odd, because you see clear down through sometimes; other times you just make up magic to suit your purpose and to fill the
void. The latter will not do; it is not suitable; no more than the Pope in a game of craps. Love,

  Bukowski

  1/june/61 half moon p.o.bx 756 calif/

  buk/ re-reading a letter yrs—waiting for gib come home; grey day…never any sun this fkn calif/ yew saying people’s next life already coming out in them; very amusing; usually i see 2 things in their beings; no h.d. didn’t start wrong; ez thought that h.d. wd be better, they WERE only kids yew know…15 or so when they met & it was ez who made the initials not h.d.—but royalty is represented by initials…

  Pascan or Pascin howhellspelled cd not give us any other art but ghetto art because he lived there; the greeks gave us the heroic…my dear buk the purpose of Art is NOT to bury one’s opinion in but to serve as a model to uplift the human animal…a world where the young ladies gazed upon his ghetto whores wd only produce more of ’em…his work is PIGnoble…you are looking at the pictures from a poet’s point of view…he just plain wanted to DEgrade the female…to the jews we are there to gratify every degree of desire (not that the jews have an edge on this but ezra’s conversation between ardour was higher than ernie’s for ex.) and he did not love the form of the female just the parts that to him meant satisfaction of his lust; that aint even showing good character let alone fine art; it is as important to love her feet as her arse/ he was a bad artist, a good jew & not a gentleman/

  that is wonderful; smoking frankenscence (olibanum) did you really get a vision??? did you get high from it??? you are the best buk; got the most love in you; gib has it but it’s in a tough shell; ernie is pompous & wind-y on paper; his most valuable asset & characteristics stem from his yiddishness & he is ashamed or frightened to face being a jew; makes me mad