Beerspit Night and Cursing

by Charles Bukowski

  · 1963 ·

  L.A. monday, mid Jan. 1963 [dated by SM 28 January 1963]

  Dear Sheri:

  My thanks for returning the poems. I had forgotten them, and as you know, I do not keep carbons. Looking at these old poems, tho, I’d say they were too involved and I’m glad I’ve dropped a lot of the clutter. The way I write now may not be the best for THEM but it’s best for me and I’m the one who’s hemmed in with the wallpaper.

  Pearson sounds pretty much like a University and that’s to be expected. The idea that a poem must have a certain “charge” is an old one, and is no more relevant than the fact that a streetcar should be 69 feet long. I cannot be bothered with poem-rules, as outside this door they fuck me up pretty well with their jails and ways and traps, and so I make the poem mine—any way I want it.

  As to writing a novel, if I live to be 60 (which is doubtful) I MIGHT try a novel. Then I will be wide enough—if a little thinned out. Right now, I don’t want to waste the paper.

  You are going to have a good chance to hate my guts. Webb giving me a big spread in upcoming Outsider #3: photos, excerpts from letters, words from editors, a few poems and so forth. I have been named The Outsider of the Year, and I think, even my picture on cover. On top of this, he’s bringing out a selection, a book of my poems 1955-1963. The gods have me up for test: if I snivel or look at my bellybutton in this limelight, I am finished.

  William Corrington writes me that he has heard from you in regards to one of his poems. You prob. did not know that I know Willie, and regard him as one of the better living writers of our age. There are some holes to fill where Ernie and Robinson J. and E.E. left, plus Faulkner, and Willie might do it, big order or not. He is a good man to begin with and has the talent too. These 2 factors do not always run together.

  I hope that whatever pressure is upon you lifts. I will put a hex upon all lambasters, detractors and noisemakers, gloom purveyors, takers of time, pricks, fools, and so forth. Consider yourself in the clear for a while…if I have any pull with the heavens.

  Now, princess, be good, sit still, very still, sense the air and the hours and the crawling of ants…and soon all will be clear.

  LOVE,

  Buk

  Lost acres of hell called L.A.

  Feb. ten? 1:11 p.m., afternoon, some sun up, water running downstairs, ladder on grass 3 floors down, woman walking in brown skirt and mauve blouse, suddenly turns and walks back toward corner, Frost is dead but Frost was always dead, and my red radio gives me a piano that is not too interesting…

  deer Sheereeeie…

  I hearby put into combat on your good side

  upon the opening of this letter

  one more god damn good hex-lifter

  and my oh my

  you may feel free this evening and maybe an afternoon or 2 until it rubs off. The message today being mainly

  TO THINK OF RAINPIPES HANGING TO THE SIDES OF DRY HOUSES EVERYWHERE, and this will do it, this will free you, and you may think I am bullshitting you and I may be to an extent, on the other hand I am not…because I never will or ever quite say anything I do not mean, and in essence it is mainly in thinking of a stone or a frog that the rays of the long-toothed gods are deflected FROM YOUR MIND TO THE STONE OR G.D. FROG, or, as I would suggest today: rainpipes. The rays bounce upon you and off of you and cannot be taken because you are thinking rainpipes and the rainpipes take the knife and since they are dead (or seemingly dead) we get the edge on the game. Please do not think I am insane. In simpler terms this is called physchology, but in physchology they become lost in words and phrases until they no longer no what the hell they damn well are doing. Now, enough of that.

  My thanks for your drawing of Sheereeie, you good baby, and now the sun is coming up bolder and the snails and plants climb up toward their death, and the bad piano is gone from my red radio and I lift my cold yellow beer like a golden heart and drink.

  You are right: the Webb thing is only fateful to suckers who buy their own shadows. I will outluck—with guts and calmness—a few flashlight flickers. If you want a copy of me dancing the fandago before the admiring eyes of the imps, let me know and I will mail. Will be out in week or 2, and when you see you will know the inherent dangers of fathead involved. I have been a very lucky man in that they have allowed me to live quietly and unbothered and I have carved small chips as it pleased me to carve. I intend to go on doing this.

  Corrington I will have a word with. He is a good man of honor but perhaps…careless…because his mind…being fairly young…is turning quickly, and he is drawn into too many corners and cannot cover them all. He must perhaps…be told a little…not too much, for he is grieviously clean and unusual, albeit slack, at times, when he should be taut. It takes many bricks and many years and many knives and many nights. We draw into our moulds slowly and most of our moulds are misshapen.

  You’ve got to forgive Pearson. He is honed into a kind of logic by learning out of other men. This is called education. Take a good education and a good mind and you get a pretty good sort of man. If he thinks poetry should be thematic instead of dramatic (essentially, that is) that is only his loss because of learning. Poetry is anything I care to make it. This is my pleasure and my way of walking. Changes are wrought out of climbing. I don’t give a nickel’s hedgehog’s belly of a damn whether my changes are accepted, only I know I’ve got to go this way or I will be sicker than I am now, and it has been tough lately, twice this week my horse has thrown the jock at the gate…once with a beautiful long-legged grey called Triumph V. and agin wit something I don’t recall. They are tearing up the streets now and a crippled climbs out of the side of his little celluloid machine and stares up at me.

  Death is a bug. I am ready for death. I will take it into my arms like any whore. What can it do that it has not already done?

  Maybe you laugh. I went to organic foods down there at place you told me. 4 or 5 months ago. But food all dried up. Carrots dry and rotting, celery brown, everything sitting there. Not fresh. Freaks walking around, poking. Either real old people or young health faddists, idiots with bulging ugly muscles, or homosexuals, bad dream day there, did not feel well, threw things into my basket, WANTING OUT, got home, threw in refrig., forgot, never ate the lettuce, the celery, carrots, etc., forgot and later threw in garbage—maybe would not have, if I had oh only not seen those PEOPLE in there, did not want oh to BECOME those people, those homos, those muscles, those aging wrinkled things, tho I did eat the RADISHES AND THEY WERE GOOD, they tasted like radishes, sharp and true, tang, and that might have been worth the whole trip. But actually there is something very shabby and depressing about the store and I figured it is better for me to eat badly and drink badly than to suffer going in there.

  Now the sun has gone away and a blue car comes down the street like nothing and I am suddenly cold and old, be 43 in August, but often feel more like 24 or onehundred and four at same time, and red radio has fairly jazzy but not too deep tune from musical comedy and I pause and

  go get another beer

  and I will put this into envelope

  and go to bed and sleep

  sleep

  o sweet christ sleep

  1, 3, 2, hours

  everything gone past

  and I will be like an old carrot

  stretched out in a rack in a health food store,

  and they will yawn

  and walk

  past.

  love, love, love,

  Buk

  [postcard dated by SM 23 February 1963]

  Dear Sheri:

  Feeling much better now. Hope C[orrington]. has written.

  Cosmic warheads have moved off. Even wrote a poem—bad one—the other night. Got in new supply of vitamins, beer and comic aspecti.

  The poppies grow and nod like devils and the flies look for webs.

  L.,

  Buk

  Los Angeles Feb. 26, 1963

  Dear Sheri:

  Got your last good letter,
and have been sometime getting around to this…a couple of weeks of drinking, ya know, and it ripped me up. Now just tired old man looking out of a window. Some bleeding and torn parts but believe I will mend.

  I appear to make my own hexes.

  Would not advise attaching yourself to 6 acre lot wit attendant hoorors—as notated in yr last—but this is your business. I could not do it. I would be wacky within a week, or wackier.

  Yes, god, I know the ART FILM. The broken statues, arms shooting out of sofabacks from springs, men walking through mirrors, white-bellied jackasses painting with their shirts off, people trying to QUEERLY ACT SENSITIVE…The art film. I saw a couple in the Village and came away sicker than this drunk I am coming off now. No sunlight could clean that ill away. Now I just look out my window and the sun comes in with the dull sounds of the city, I hear an airplane, I even hear some god damned birds, and I mend. I will live. But I am only allowing to mend what I TORE with a weapon they gave me (the bottle), but when I walk into one of their weapons (the art film) or one of their crowds or faces or looks or factories, it does not mend so easy because it is done mostly without my o.k.—like getting hit by a car. Somebody wrote me, a Sacramento woman with 2 children and an unhappy life, her motto is now: “Forgive them, for they know WHAT they do.” Which is astute enough. But I don’t think of forgiving or not forgiving. I just want to AVOID them. Which is not easy. So we make it, AVOID them as much as POSSIBLE. I have seen enough of the mob to draw conclusions from and about them for 10,000 years. That’s why solitude is easy for me and graceful. I know that there is nothing out there in that light and sound that can help me, I mean a human help. The roads are good, the side of a hill, a bridge, I even like to look at the buildings they live in. But to search out in that mass of flesh for either love or reason is senseless.

  I bade Corrington write you, and you should have heard by now.

  This letter is somewhat like myself today: a soft probing and mending. Not much energy. Compared to yours, nothing. You are lit by enough flames to burn us all…Webb writes Outsider 3 out next week. Which means 2 weeks. I will mail you a copy.

  Pound read in order to find out WHAT NOT to write. Not the subject matter but the matter of approaching the subject matter. He read too much: this is a hammer upon the mind. All this work is done for one by his contemporaries. By reading them, one gleans ALL OF WHAT NOT TO DO. And it doesn’t take much reading, for they all write alike. Things are quite easy. When they tell you, “you are writing badly”, then you know that you are writing well, for you are not writing as THEM. Grass is them, and although the ego is often sick, nobody wants to be grass: we will be under it soon enough.

  LOVE,

  Buk

  Wed. night April 17, 1963 11:10 p.m.

  Hello Mama Sheri:—

  good u are not pissed and only suffering the cruxifiction bit, which is bad enough, only when we stop getting nailed

  and become agreeable to the ways of the bastard masses

  then, baby, we’re done.

  You know this.

  Why you keep sending my stuff to Pearson? I want you to have it. You are more than Pearson.

  When you coming to see me? I will keep you out of letter or verse or spoken word. If that’s what you want. I have good honor.

  Webb writes my book has good advance sales—Director of Metropolitan Museum of Art ordered a copy. I am getting into high places with my crap. They are probably bored with safety. Good, good.

  plenty of my love to you, princess…

  Buk

  [typewritten note with large drawing dated 5 July 1963]

  Dear Sheri:

  As much as you can believe me, I must tell you that the old shadows are dead, not forever, but for our lives for a certainty, and that the essence and the flower and the fire are only felt by those mostly…alive…now.

  sad, yes, also,

  Buk

  p.s.—Love, Bukowski

  [at top are mock Chinese ideograms and, in formal letterhead style, “Chinese Slave’s Association of East Los Angeles”; undated, but written shortly after preceding letter.]

  Sherrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryie:

  don’t like to talk in riddles but I guess what I meant drunk when I said “old shadows are dead”, I was ref. to communication between people who once had communication, and essentially HARDNESS takes place in one individual who either feels over-worldly or bored with it or sick of it or taken up with something else and then the flower dies. But all this is nec. of course: one flower must die so that another may grow. So much is always nec. and I grow sad among the necessaries.

  There is a horse called Yin and Yang.

  My collection of poems via Webber will be out about Sept. first, and I have seen the dummy copy, and even without the poems the book would be worth 2$ because of the paper and the way he’s hung it together, the design, the love, the taste of good steak and avacado, he has put his gut into the work and it is like a bell ringing or water running or stretching out on the bed and looking up at the ceiling. When Madison Ave. sees what a poor man can do with nothing they are going to learn that magic does not grow at request; it must be thought about and prayed and gambled toward.

  If you see the book you will know what I mean.

  It is really a time of NOT WRITING and not-doing si, so I have not persisted upon you with letters

  I am waiting for the sun and the object

  to make a new shadow.

  I got out the paints the other day and the tubes were so hard I could not use them; boiled them in water but no good. Finally got a little green and scarlet and did a pic. of twisted leg man with bug eyes swimming along a candle with some christ bleeding thing in upper left, the red coming down to page bottom pool. Not all that dramatic but done more in the cool half-joke, but sad. Folded in half and mailed somewhere.

  Don’t let them hang you, baby.

  Not yet.

  love,

  Buk

  [handwritten postcard dated by SM 27 August 1963]

  Dear Sheri—

  can’t write with these g.d. post office pens.—Book soon out. Webb up to page 82. If you have not made arrangements—let me know and I will send one when out.

  In the workhouse now and must get back on their clock. Let me know on the book.

  L.,

  Buk

  · 1964 ·

  10. Feb. 64 La Mart pobx 1044 pacifica calif

  open that goddamm’d door Bukowski—the Princess is home again! Lemme IN—

  Gotcher book & you must be unconscious with love—it is a bewt babe & I thank you with heart / loaned it to Layde of Arts & Letters next cot[tage] & she cant live without one—hope Webb’s got a copy left & wrote him to ask—

  Been very soul sick lamb & cdn’t write—cdn’t do aught but weep—terrible fit of self-pity—cdn’t see the pattern for the warp & woof—it do hurt so when they warp & woof you—but at last—it cohered for 5 minutes so I let up yawlin’—Jez Xt what a fit of woe—you’d have been weeping with me—Ollie (our Layde above) says “do Y E W know HIM?” / “who” sez I coiyoily to drag out the moment soupreme after the rest of the treatment of claw barb—“OH HHHHmmmmmmm…oh of KOURSE” (wotd else)

  My god—buk you doll—she is now a tame tigress—and yr poetry will make her drawers wet again—if you ever came to visit—she’d fall apart—but darling YOU would RUIN the effect—she is seeing A HollyWoodttt Version in her mindtts eye—wait til she reads yr work!!

  I was painting as I wept—that also prevents writing—but I got yr book & I loaned yr book out & it got a customer—and I hope you can supply her a copy / what is the price $5. ??? she is still reading my copy & I don’t know.

  Write thou—and what is this abt you refusing to admit one Hunter Ingalls to yr workshop sometime a while back?? Sir O Sir—this is a good man // and he can SEE La Mart without gazing through her Ezra Pound recording—

  Write me darling—I MISS your touch! What is going on down there??? O my Carrot lying on the
Super Mercado shelf of der Health midtt joy shop???

  All good tidings—all great joy—with you Buk love from your Princess Ra Set / i.e. La Mart

  Sheri

  [an illustrated, scroll-like letter dated 14 February 1964; CB had sent SM some of his drawings.]

  O Colourful One:

  I quote:

  “You mention Bukowski. Once C. B. accepted (& published?) a ½ story of mine, plus some bridge bits, in Harlequin, which I never saw. Which I assumed hadn’t ever published me, except once someone said so. I bugged C. B. because, after acceptance, I happened to be going to L.A. on what was then business and wrote suggesting a meeting, and got a highly-defensive negative back.”

  Hunter Ingalls

  Did you Sir upon above occasion deliver yourself of a “highly-defensive negative”?

  “Workshop”—even the toilet is a work-shop. The apologists have terms but it is still a work-shop.

  Your BED, Charles, is a strong, non-union, over-time, moon-lightin’ second-fronted W O R K - SHOP.

  The word was employed to raise yr general cultural level. Your place of work IS your work shop.

  Please do NOT shout at me in flaming red or apple green.

  Li: “look at the two little dogs under his bed.” S.M.: “IF I know his mind-state they are two little mice or mayhap rats.” Po’ Li: “wow” sez he “even his mice are horses…”

  Yr letter is putty as D[orothy].P[ound]. says pretty.

  Yr drawing of yrself in bed is good; shows u got hold of yrself now / yr other drawings vibrated too much. Also your mountains are too point-y.

  Where did you get yr black pen. I NEED a black pen like that. Where did you get yr colour pens. I need colour pens like that.

  NOTHING in this world is worth ANYthing except a good conversation. We are all dead down here—dead & condemned—this is Hel—none of us know it except me’n you.

  You MEAN yr head cant get any FATrrrrrr dontcha?