Tales of Ordinary Madness

by Charles Bukowski

  but old mossbacks, you can’t help thinking, just what ARE you doing? then you switch across the page to APARTMENT 3-G where a college professor is discussing with a very rich and beautiful girl her love for an idealistic and poor young doctor. this doctor has shown very nasty flairs of temperament – ripping tablecloth and dishes off of cafe tables, throwing egg sandwiches in the air, and, if I remember, beating up couple of boy friends. he gets angered because this beautiful rich lady keeps offering him money but meanwhile he has accepted a fancy new automobile, a lavishly decorated office uptown and other goodies. now if this doctor were a corner newsboy or a mailman he wouldn’t get any of this stuff and I’d just like to see him go into some nightclub and rip dinner and wine and coffeecups and spoons and so forth onto the floor and then come back and sit down and not even apologize. I’d sure hate to have THIS doctor operate on my case of recurrent hemorrhoids.

  so when you read your comic strips, laugh laugh laugh, and know that that is partly where we are.

  a professor from a local university came by to see me yesterday. he didn’t look like Dorothy Healey but his wife, a Peruvian poetess, did look pretty good. the object was that he was tired of the same insensible gatherings of so-called NEW POETRY. poetry is still the biggest snob-racket in the Arts with little poet groups battling for power. I do suppose that the biggest snob outfit ever invented was the old BLACK MOUNTAIN group. and Creeley is still feared in and out of the universities – feared and revered – more than any other poet. then we have the academics, who like Creeley, write very carefully. in essence, the generally accepted poetry today has a kind of glass outside to it, slick and sliding, and sunned down inside there is a joining of word to word in a rather metallic inhuman summation or semi-secret angle. this is a poetry for millionaires and fat men of leisure so it does get backing and it does survive because the secret is in that those who belong really belong and to hell with the rest. but the poetry is dull, very dull, so dull that the dullness is taken for hidden meaning – the meaning is hidden, all right, so well hidden that there isn’t any meaning. but if YOU can’t find it, you lack soul, sensitivity and so forth, so you BETTER FIND IT OR YOU DON’T BELONG. and if you don’t find it, KEEP QUIET.

  meanwhile, every 2 or 3 years, somebody in the academy, wanting to keep his place in the university structure (and if you think Vietnam is hell you ought to see what goes on between those so-called brains in battles of intrigue and power within their own little cellblocks) brings out the same old collection of glass and gutless poetry and labels it THE NEW POETRY or THE NEW NEW POETRY but it’s still the same marked deck.

  well, this prof was evidently a gambler. he said he was sick of the game and wanted to bring out some force, some new creativeness. he had his own thoughts but then asked me who I thought was writing the ACTUAL new poetry, who the boys were and what the stuff was. I couldn’t answer him, truly. at first I mentioned a few names: Steve Richmond, Doug Blazek, Al Purdy, Brown Miller, Harold Norse, so forth, but then I realized that I knew most of these men personally, and if not personally then through correspondence. it gave me kind of a shit-twinge. if I tabbed these then it would be a kind of BLACK MOUNTAIN thing all over again – a grouping of another “in” type of thing. this is the way death begins. a kind of glorious personal death, but no good, anyhow.

  so, say you throw these out; say you threw out the old glass-poetry boys, this leaves you what? a very energetic work, a very lively work of the young who are just beginning to write and appearing in little magazines put out by other very energetic and lively young. to these, sex is something new and life is fairly new and war too, and this is all right, it refreshes. they have not yet been “gotten to.” but where is the follow-through? they give you one good line and then 14 bad ones. at times they even make you wish for the careful sparwork and constipation of a Creeley and they all sound alike. then you wish for a Jeffers, a man sitting behind a rock and carving the blood of his heart between the walls. they say don’t trust a man over 30, and percentage-wise this is good formula – most men have sold out by then. so in a sense, HOW AM I GOING TO TRUST A MAN UNDER 30? he will probably sell-out. with Mary Worth picking her nose in the background.

  well, it may be a matter of the times. so far as poetry goes (and this includes one Charles Bukowski) we simply, at this time, we simply do not HAVE the ramrods, the fearful innovators, the men, the gods, the big boys who could knock us out of beds or keep us going in the dark pit hell of the factories and the streets. the T. S. Eliots are gone; Auden has stopped; Pound is waiting to die; Jeffers left a hole never to be filled by any Grand Canyon Love-In; even old Frost had a certain spiritual grandeur; Cummings kept us from sleeping; Spender, “ either this man’s life dying” has stopped writing; D. Thomas was killed by American Whiskey, American admiration and American woman; even Sandburg, long since dimmed of talent and walking into American classrooms with his uncut white hair, bad guitar and addled eyes, even Sandburg has been kicked in the ass by death.

  let’s admit it: the giants are gone and there have not come up any giants to replace them. maybe it is this time. maybe it is this Vietnam time, this African time, this Arabian time. it could well be that the people want more than the poets are saying. it could well be that the people will be the final poets – with luck. god knows, I don’t like the poets. I don’t like to sit in the same room with them. yet it is hard to find what one does like. the streets seem lacking. the man who fills my gas tank at the corner gas station seems the most heinous and hateful of beasts. and when I see photos of my president or hear him speak, he seems like some big fattened clown, some dull and putty-like creature given my life, my chances, everybody else’s to decide upon. and I do not understand it. and it is as with our president, so rides our poetry. it is almost that with our lack of soul that we have formed him, and therefore deserve him. Johnson is pretty safe from an assassin’s bullet, not because of increased security precautions but because there is little or no pleasure in killing a dead man.

  which gets us back to the professor and his question: who to put in a book of truly new poetry? I’d say nobody. forget the book. the odds are almost in. if you want to read some decent strong human stuff without fakery I’d say Al Purdy, the Canadian. but what’s a Canadian, really? just somebody way out on the limb of some kind of tree, hardly there, screaming beautiful fire songs into his home-mixed wine. time, if we have it, will tell us about it, will tell us about him.

  so professor, I am sorry I could not help you. it would have made some kind of rose in my buttonhole (EARTH ROSE?) we are at loss, and that includes the Creeleys, you, me, Johnson, Dorothy Healey, C. Clay, Powell, Hem’s last shotgun, the grand sadness of my little daughter running across the floor toward me. everybody feels this godwigawful loss of soul and direction more and more, and we are trying to build more and more toward some type of Christ before Catastrophe, but no Gandhi or EARLY Castro has stepped forth. only Dorothy Heaey with eyes like the sky. and she’s a dirty communist.

  so, the fix. Lowell turned down some kind of garden party invite from Johnson. this was good. this was a beginning. but unfortunately Robert Lowell writes well. too well. he is caught between a kind of glass-type poetry and a hard reality and does not know what to do – hence he mixes both and dies both ways. Lowell would like very well to be a human being but is deballed in his own poetic conceptions. Ginsberg, meanwhile turns gigantic extrovert handsprings across our sight, realizing the gap and trying to fill it. at least, he knows what is wrong – he simply lacks the artistry to fulfill it.

  so professor, thank you for calling. many strange people knock at my door. too many strange ones.

  I don’t know what’s to become of us. we need a lot of luck. and mine’s been bad lately. and the sun is getting nearer. and, Life, as ugly as it seems, does seem worth 3 or 4 more days. think we’ll make it?

  ONE FOR WALTER LOWENFELS

  he shook the hangover and got out of bed and there they were – woman and child – and he open
ed the door and in ran the kid and there followed the woman. all the way from New Mexico. although they’d made a stop first at Big Billy’s, the lesbian. the kid threw herself on the couch and they played the game of meeting each other again. it was good to see the kid, it was good as hell to see the kid.

  “Tina’s got an infected toe. I’m worried about it. I was kind of in a daze for 2 days and when I came out of it she had this thing on her toe.”

  “you ought to make her wear her shoes in those outhouses.”

  “THAT DOESN’T MATTER! THE WHOLE WORLD’S AN OUTHOUSE!” she said.

  she was a woman who seldom combed her hair, wore black in protest of the war, wouldn’t eat grapes because of the grape strike, was a communist, wrote poetry, went to love-ins, made ashtrays out of clay, smoked and drank coffee continually, collected various checks from a mother and x-husbands, lived with various men and loved to eat strawberry jam on toast. children were her weapons and she had one after another in order to defend herself. although whatever could get a man in bed with her was beyond him, although he had done it, evidently, and intoxication was a shitty excuse. but he could never get that drunk anymore. basically she reminded him of a religious fanatic turned inside-out – she could do no wrong, you see, because she had these splendid ideas: anti-war, love, Karl Marx, all that shit. she didn’t believe in WORK either, but then, who did? the last job she’d had was in World War II when she joined the WACS to save the world from that beast who put people in ovens: A. Hitler. but intellectually, that was the good war, you know. and now she was putting him in the oven.

  “christ, call my doctor.”

  she knew the number and the doctor: that’s one thing she was good for. she got that done. then it was coffee and cigarettes and talk about the community living project down there.

  “somebody pasted your poem MEN’S CRAPPER in the outhouse. and there’s an old drunk down there, Eli, 60, he’s drunk all the time and he milks the goat.”

  she was trying to make it sound human to him, to trap him in with the flies and get his ass cut off from any chance of solitude or racetrack or the quiet beer, and then he’d have to sit around and watch the brain-damage cases hump her, and there wouldn’t be the jealousy for him, just the simple pasty horrors and doldrums of mechanical people in a mechanical act, trying to tickle their cement souls back into life with a spurt of come.

  “naw,” he said, “I’d get on down there, look over a dusty hill and the droppings of chickens and go screaming out of my head. or find a way to kill myself.”

  “you’d like Eli. he’s drunk all the time too.”

  he flipped the beercan into the paperbag. “I can find a 60-year-old drunk anywhere. if I can’t, all I gotta do is wait 12 more years. if I can make it.”

  having lost that, she got at her coffee and cigarettes in a kind of hidden and yet, at the same time, a rather blank fury, and if you think that there isn’t such a thing, well, you just haven’t met Mrs. Pro-Love, Anti-War; Mrs. Poetry-writer, Mrs. sit-on-a-rug with a circle of friends and talk shit ...

  it was Wednesday and he went to WORK that night while she took the kid down to the local bookstore where the people read their stuff to each other. Los Angeles was vile with such places. poeple who couldn’t write worth a cat’s ass reading to each other and telling each other that they were good. it was kind of a spiritual jacking-off when there was nothing else left to do. ten people can suck each other’s asses and tell each other what good writers they are but sometimes it’s all hell finding the 11th and, of course, there’s just no use sending to PLAYBOY, THE NEW YORKER, THE ATLANTIC, EVERGREEN, because they don’t know good writing when they see it, right? “we read better stuff at our gatherings than all the big and little magazines combined ...” a little scrub had said to him ten years ago.

  well, fuck my dead mother’s bones ...

  that night when he got in, 3:15 a.m., she had all the lights in the place on, the window shades all up and she was sleeping on the couch with her naked ass showing. he walked in, switched off most of the lights, pulled the shades, went in to see the kid. the girl had a lot of spark in her. the old woman hadn’t killed her yet. 4 years of it. he looked at the kid sleeping, Tina, and she was a miracle, sleeping, living through the hell of it. it was hell for him too, but it was also simple and obstinate shit that he couldn’t stand the woman. and it wasn’t entirely the woman; there were few women he could bear, and there was plenty wrong with him too – they’d run the corkscrew through him good, real good; but the kid, why were the kids usually the ones who got it in the ass? two feet tall, no trade, no passport, no chance. we started killing them the minute they came out of the cunt. and kept it up, straight down through to the other hole. he leaned over and kissed her as she slept, but almost shamefully.

  when he walked out she was awake. coffeewater going. cigarette going. he hit on a beer. what the fuck, everybody was mad.

  “they liked my poem tonight,” she said, “I read them my poem and they liked it. it’s right there if you want to read it.”

  “listen, kid, they’ve beat my brains out on the job. I don’t think I could give it a fair reading. tomorrow, o.k.?”

  “and I’m so happy. I know I shouldn’t be but I am. you know that poetry mag we put out of our group’s readings?”

  “yeh?”

  “well, Walter Lowenfels got hold of a copy and he read it and he wrote asking who I was!”

  “well, that’s nice, really nice.”

  he was glad for her. anything to make her happy, to pull her out of the fucking snake pit.

  “Lowenfels has good taste; of course, he tilts a little left but maybe I do too, it’s hard to tell. but you’ve written some powerful shit, we both know that,” he said.

  she glowed in it and he felt glad for her. he wanted her to win. she needed to win. everybody did. what a cunt-smeared game.

  “but you know your problem.”

  she looked up. “what?”

  “the same 8 or 9 poems.”

  she packed the same 8 or 9 poems to each new poetry group she discovered, meanwhile looking for another man, another baby, another defense.

  she didn’t answer. then she said, “what are all those magazines in the big cardboard box?”

  “my next book of poems. all I need is a title and a typist. the advance is all lined-up. all I have to do is to type up my own poems but I can’t stand to type up my own poems. it’s a waste of time and a going back over the same road. I can’t stand it. that box has been sitting there 6 months.”

  “I need money. what’ll you pay me?”

  “20 or 30 bucks, but it’s a terrible job, hard and boring.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “o.k.,” he said, but he knew she’d never do it. she’d never done anything. 8 or 9 poems. well, like they say, if you write only one or two good poems in a lifetime, you’re in.

  into what?

  clap pussy, he thought ...

  it was the kid’s birthday, 2 or 3 weeks late, and a day or two later he drove around with Tina – the doctor had taken the nail off her toe and given her little bottles to drink every 4 hours – doing the chickenshit errands that eat a man up while he should be singing drunk – he got off 4 or 5 of them trying to keep the boat straight, then made the bakery, picked up the birthday cake, they had done it nicely, and they took the cake, Tina and he, in its pink box and made their way into the market for toilet paper, meat, bread, tomatoes, god knows what, icecream yes icecream, what kind icecream you want, Tina? while the Richard Nixon steel sky falls upon our heads, what kinda, huh, Tina?

  when they got back the Walter Lowenfel poetess was in a snit, sniffling, cussing ...

  she’d decided to type the book of poems. but what? he’d given her a new typewriter ribbon.

  “THAT FUCKING TYPEWRITER RIBBON DOESN’T WORK!”

  she was very angry, sitting in her black anti-war dress. she looked ugly. she looked uglier.

  “wait a moment,” he said, “the cake
and all that.”

  he took it into the kitchen and Tina followed.

  thank christ for this beautiful child, he thought, which came out of this woman’s body or I am afraid other than that I would have to murder this woman. thank god for my luck or even Richard Nixon. thank him, or even anything: the blue machines which never smile.

  he and Tina went back into the typewriter room and he lifted the lid of the typer and he’d never seen anybody thread a ribbon like that. it was impossible to describe. what had happened was that she had gone to another poetry reading the next night and something had not come off so good; what it was, he could only guess: somebody she had wanted to fuck wouldn’t fuck her or somebody she hadn’t wanted to fuck had fucked her, or somebody had said something bad about her poetry or somebody after listening to her speak for a while had called her “neurotic”; whatever it was, it was a thing with those types, set off either internally or externally and they were either shining and full of phony love or they were crouched and leaping and terrible with hate.

  she was off now and there was little he could do. he sat down and put the typewriter ribbon in the way it should be.

  “AND THE ‘S’ STICKS TOO!” she screamed.

  he didn’t ask her what went wrong at the other poetry reading. no Walter Lowenfels’ note at this one.