Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski
* * *
[To Ann Menebroker]
April 7, 1967, 3:45 a.m.
Have been drunk for several many hours. trouble controlling pen. [* * *]
Your voice always sounds young as clear rivers crying clear things, no matter what you say, no matter what you say, I feel ice-joy cry in your voice.
But please don’t feel sad. I think that I am something that has just gotten into your head. I am neither that way or that true.
if you could see me now, baggy-bellied in torn shorts, old, drunk, trying to answer a letter in the half-light of my life, then you would know.
there is hardly anything literary about me nor many either, so there you go.
writing poems is such a chicken-shit game! if we were only more alive like they are more dead! then, sweets, we could finally write.
* * *
About this time Bukowski began his series of columns for Bryan’s new underground paper, Open City, under the series title “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.”
[To Carl Weissner]
April 28, [1967]
[* * *] right now I guess you are hurting worse than I am, but you we ARE ALL JUMPY, cool and tired and hardly caring but at the same time—AT THE EXACT SAME TIME—jumpy. I mean when I did not hear from you, I figured first that
a; you were sick
b; you had injured yourself
c; you had killed yourself
then I figured second that the tape was bad, that I had insulted you with the tape or that I had insulted you with some criticism of your tape, that I had TOUCHED SOME SPOT ON YOU AND THAT YOU WERE PISSED. the reason this type of thought-trend mangles me is through the experience that it has happened very often. so the brain cells say—“oh, there it goes, it has happened again.” there were you with your head cracked like an ostrich egg with a sledgehammer and I am sitting around sticking false needles into my hairy ass ego. even in a long three page letter to Greg the Dan I explained how this so often happens to ME in this world. poor pure ivory me. like it even went on when I was a kid in school.
“WIPE THAT SHIT SNEER FROM YOUR FACE AND GO STAND IN THE HALL! DAMN RIGHT, AND FOR AN HOUR, NO LESS, NO MORE, YOU WILL STAND IN THE HALL!”
I never knew what those teachers were talking about. really. to me my face just felt a little blank. I was not much interested in what was being said most of the time, but who was? to be sent out into the hall because of something about my face made me feel monstrous, inferior, spat upon. excluded, and STUPID STUPID STUPID. and I would get up and walk out into the hall and all the faces would turn, all those good acceptable faces and they would watch me talk to the door, open the door, close the door and stand in the hall. that hall was always very dark and empty. and it didn’t feel good. no, no. and it kept happening, through grade school, high school, those couple of years in college. of course, by college I had toughened up and when they layed on me I layed back and they soon found it was better to ignore me than have me slice them open with 5 or 6 words. but even in high school I was not ready. I remember once getting passing grades in this class, English, I think, and on the last day of class, in the middle of something else, the teacher, a female suddenly leaped up from her seat behind the desk and pointed at me and with tears on her face, actually sobbing and in some kind of rage, she said, “Henry, I am going to FLUNK you!” (Henry is my first name, I use Charles my middle name when I try to write but that is another long story I might explain sometime.) and after class, after the others had left and I asked her what the reason was for flunking me, she wouldn’t give a reason just that sobbing as if I had INSULTED her. I don’t think it was love because I was a rather ugly fuck with a blank personality, and I still don’t get it. I mean, these things keep happening and I am puzzled. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, only to say the letter to Dan never got mailed because there is a new newspaper starting here in town—OPEN CITY PRESS—and the editor wanted something of mine to print, essay, letter, so forth, and since I don’t keep carbons I just handed him 2 or 3 letters I had written.
anyhow, I am glad YOU haven’t turned…yet…but I am sorry it was your head in enfoldo smash that gave me time to pinprick my self-pity. forgive me, but understand that I am suffering from shell shock years. leave it up to me to fuck up everything. I am very good at it.
meanwhile, while you were jamming your head into wolfgang ersatz zero sludge I too was trying to kill myself but did not quite bring it off, maybe not kill myself but tinker with the limp edges of the thing a bit, a tendency I have when high, and maybe some day they will give me my gold star on head for being a good kiddy and bringing it off, but like now I am fucking that up too. I was up at Thomas’ place and I am the only one drinking heavily, I have brought my own stuff and am slamming it down as fast as body will hold, sensing only electric light and faces, everybody else very calm and kool but I am going crazy quietly, my health has been bad very and there is a kind of delight in ramming it through with surfboards and elephant tusks, and everybody is so CONTENT they are like stems of flowers, not the flowers, just the stems, and finally it comes time to leave, I am with this editor (OPEN CITY PRESS; Notes from Underground) (John Bryan) and we go out to my 11 year old car and somebody walks through my side mirror to begin with and I get in with Bryan and I let the car roll, very steep down one lane two way street cars parked everywhere, and I think I ram something, Bryan very excited, “Jesus, make it out, make it!” we are going again, down sliding, I have foot on gas for sound of engine trying to pull the strings up and together in me so I can hold and go, and then we are running along out of the hills at last, on the way out, and suddenly I turn left and we are heading steep UP into the hills again SOMEWHERE, very steep, and Bryan is hollering at me and I find a nice cliff, no houses too near and I take the car and run the 2 wheels along the edge of the cliff seeing how close I can get, I just hear Bryan’s voice and ignore it, placing the wheels close to the edge and going at a good clip, and it seems a SENSIBLE thing for me to do, a very logical thing, a very good thing, really, but Bryan can’t see it, and I pull off from the cliff to think of the next good thing to do but when I hit the street again he opens the door, leaps out and starts—running running away from me and the car. my first THOUGHT IS TO RUN HIM OVER, but I am rather disgusted with his lack of LOYALTY so I let him go. if he had been more loyal I probably would have run him over, but probably no German blood in him, poor chap. anyhow, I got home all right but of course don’t remember driving there, and Bryan is still alive too. he walked all the way home, 5 or 6 miles at 4 a.m. in the morning. well, that’s a nice time of the morning to walk—hardly any people you have to look at, no shock in belly as you pass the usual sucked-out corpses. [* * *]
it’s raining and I think I’ll walk up through the rain, drop this in box and buy one of those horrible newspapers. I enjoy the comic strips by inverting/ reversing the meaning. and really, all you’ve got to do with almost any man’s speech, thought, action, is reverse it entirely and you get some kind of truth. it comes out very clean. [* * *]
* * *
[To Carl Weissner]
May 13, 1967
[* * *] some collectors over last night thumbing through my bookshelf, took some of my early books which I am pretty much down on, plus a few other items, broadsides so forth, a painting I didn’t want, and when the guy asked me what I thought—he had quite a bundle, 15 or so objects, I suggested $50 and he wrote me out a check for $100—INTERNATIONAL BOOKFINDERS—and if the check doesn’t bounce, it should finance my trip to Tucson, Arizona where Jon and Lou Webb are working on a record of mine—not poems—but talk mostly, drunk stories of my past. I’ll try to mail you a record if it ever gets out. also handed the guy with the book collector a chapter from my novel, I am going slowly, chapter 7, I really don’t want to write the thing but he keeps pressing me, and the novel may be good because I don’t want to write it. it’s like trying to run through cement, and I often wonder how people can think of themselves as writers? it is pretty near impo
I am sorry for Norse in his suicide knot, and I have been in my little suicide knot off and on, off and on, and it’s funny, if and when one does break out of the suicide knot, one feels stronger, better, a hell of a lot tougher, can take almost anything. the suicide thing may even be a process of growth—you fall back almost to zero, then lift back. it’s a kind of rebirth process. I imagine it would even be good for flies. do flies think of suicide? just think how easy it would be for them to get their dirty work done for them. a nice little bloodsucking web with eyes and fangs and suck suck, held there, no backing out. all we’ve got is the tops of buildings for no-backout, and we change our mind 6 times on the way down and are insane by the time we hit the pavement. I like to work in more lively elements of variable choice and chance: sleeping pills, gas, the garrote. I tried gas once. turned on all the burners and laid down on the bed. it almost knocked me out, I was on the way, but something about breathing in all that gas, a kind of a grey-yellow feeling, and it gave me a headache, a terrible headache and the headache woke me up. and I got up laughing with the headache, YOU DAMN FOOL, YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE! and I kept laughing, it seemed very very funny to me and I walked in and turned off the oven and all the jets on top of the stove and I went out and bought myself a good bottle of whiskey and some very expensive cigars, and that night I ended up balling with a woman but I didn’t tell her she was fucking an almost-dead man. these whores have a way of lecturing like a mama and it can get very boring. you really can never tell a woman anything—they will always reshape and distort the thing out of perspective because the woman is the babbler of rebirth and responsibility; they really love us, the best of them do, and they care, but their way of caring is somehow unsatisfactory, it’s as if they want to cut the warts off of us instead of understanding the warts. they hope to clean us up to a big round zero, a kind of penitentiary happiness, a kind of in-jail happiness that cuts the balls quite off of clean feeling-being. a de-balled smiling cuntsucker, that’s what they want, and that’s why I can’t make it with any lady very long—I get this feeling that I am being stuffed into a drawer with the handkerchiefs, and they have such heinous ways of subjecting you to their love—like walking into the crapper while you are shitting and standing there humming, fixing their hair in the mirror, what hell, they love it, they love you, us, the stink of our turds, they are practicing the ultimate pain of childbirth and childrearing, it’s tough and they must practice it, the cape movements, you can’t blame them, but I wish they wouldn’t practice on me, I wish they wouldn’t make me the baby, the child, the blood, the screams, the bravery. I just want to be let alone; I just want to look at them awhile, their bodies walking across rooms or sitting in chairs, I want to notice the color of their dresses, the spikes on their shoes, I just want to eject a little semen, then forget it, hell. but they want to put me into their cage. fortunately, for me, I thrive on ISOLATION, hours days of being alone do fatten me. this sounds like bullshit to most. if I dared to tell them that I AM NEVER LONELY they would never believe me. I am a shit: I grow upon myself; I diminish in the company of others. I don’t like to diminish. it’s true that I have this fucking or non-fucking string between my legs that creates problems. this is why the true whore is my heroine.—she takes care of my string and leaves off. the harder the whore is, the more pleased am I. they will leave. then I can begin again. [* * *]
* * *
Jon Webb had probably solicited a tribute to Patchen to be published in the “homage” section of Outsider 4/5 (1969).
[To Jon and Louise Webb]
May 17, 1967
[* * *] On the Patchen thing, I don’t know. you jumped me pretty hard once for a semi-direct statement on Patchen in the foreword to the Harold Norse Ole issue, but really, in a sense, the statement meant that all men with bad backs should be cared for; but P. seems to be a pretty delicate subject to discuss. I suppose it’s easier to discuss Patchen than to be him. I suppose that if I were flat on my back I wouldn’t be whistling Hearts and Flowers either. but still doesn’t seem morally right to take the issue from you and suddenly go new directions. but how the hell did I get shooting my mouth on this? insomnia? that’s no excuse.
* * *
[To Carl Weissner]
June ending 1967
I am on the edge of brain-hammer, that is, I have to pass this test in glass cage in order to hold chicken-shit job that is killing me. have to memorize these little numbers exactly, know them off the top of my elbow, like tab: blackburn wlb 61, briggs 79, coolidge, rancho 22, griff 27, marV 31; san fernando rd.N., 1 linc., glass 5, Griff 47-West…so on, so on. pages and pages, and I wait wait wait and wait to study until the thing is upon me like a tiger. I read it while going down the escalator to the scheme room, I read it while I sleep, while I fuck, while I eat an orange, while I shit. it is a trick to eat the remainder of my brain and they know exactly what they are doing. but enough to that, just to let you know if I sound a bit strange, not quite like me—this is the reason.
book of poems coming, Black Sparrow Press, they are old poems that somebody found in a bag in a closet, to be called At Terror Street and Agony Way. editor coming over tonight, wants me to illustrate book but when in the hell can I illustrate book?—eastern-e.l.a., 1 n, haz 9 n, els 17n, Is-e.l.a. ????? I have thousands of lost poems, lost books gather that never came out; these are just some that happened to show up. also may get grant to do my novel, if I am lucky and am able to fill out the papers by July and mail them in. I’ll know by October. shit, it would be sweet to get paid to write! to just sit here and bang bang bang, and get paid to do what I have to do anyhow—like getting paid to shit or fuck, what? too much but worth a try. and prob. will not happen. just like the Pulitzer; I got nominated but they gave it to some woman. I got beat by a slit. well. what’s all this prize and grant shit, anyhow? for the profs, for the goody-goodies. I ought to know better. [* * *]
* * *
John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, was a Bukowski enthusiast from the start. The Press’s first four publications were Bukowski broadsides, followed by two booklets, 2 Poems and The Curtains Are Waving…, in 1967, and then in 1968 the full-length book At Terror Street and Agony Way, which was accompanied by a tape recording of the author reading from the book.
[To Jon and Louise Webb]
Saturday night, June 24, 1967
dear Jon and Lou:
[* * *] got by scheme, 98 percent, but no pride there—only workhorse death. anyhow, now on my 4th beer, must fill out application on attempt at that grant tomorrow [* * *]
John Martin, BLACK SPARROW PRESS, just over [* * *] I don’t care for Loewinson, nor the poet he is going to do after me, Robert Kelly, they are from the excellent school of snobs, I mean they are snobs but they seem to write well, almost real, certain shots of their writing lifting me, but then again it’s all so well-worked and seemingly perfect that if you are not in too good a mood you get disgusted and throw the stuff in a corner. I guess that most of these boys are working centuries ahead, thinking how it might look in an English class, 2067 a.d., but they might get fooled—there might not be an English class then, or if there is those left might be able to sniff the strain of careful begging. I’m here now and the electric light is on over this typewriter and that’s all I know. if some whore uncrosses her legs and has an orgasm 100 years from now over my stuff my bones won’t light with neon. not where they are going to dump me anyhow. well, Mozart had a pauper’s grave but he had some strange and glowing creatures at the handles. well, that’s what counts: give me 4 good pall bearers carrying a cheesebox and let the president of U.S. Steel block traffic. [* * *]
* * *
[To William Want-ling]
July 31, 1967
[* * *] I’ll be 47 in August and maybe the same energy isn’t there:
Bukowski’s old, Bukowski’s old
he we
rolled.
[* * *] some small press guy has been harassing me to write a novel. so in a moment of weakness, and after 4 or 5 beers, I shouted at him: ALL RIGHT, I’LL WRITE THE GOD DAMNED THING FOR YOU! I got the first 6 or 7 chapters done. title: The Way the Dead Love. then some prof who teaches at Loyola suggests I apply for a grant. I did. I turned the novel in and applied for a grant. I asked $6500 for a year’s time to write the thing. that got me off. I won’t get the grant but meanwhile I tell the small press guy that I am sitting around waiting for the grant and can’t do the novel because then I’d have nothing to use the grant on. [* * *]
* * *
Louis Delpino was a fellow contributor to the little magazines. The Sparrow and the Cock was a long poem that he typed up and bound as a booklet dedicated to Bukowski as a thank-you for a recent phone call. The projected book of tributes to poets recently arrested was edited by T. L. Kryss (who had edited the tribute to Jim Lowell of Asphodel Bookshop) with Delpino and Douglas Blazek. It was published as Forever Worship the Second Coming (San Francisco: Black Rabbit Press, 1968).
[To Louis Delpino]
August 2, 1967
almost every day I get a piece of mail from somewhere from somebody saying, “hey, fucker, how come you ain’t answered my letter?”: it’s all right to be a good guy and to send 12 page drunken letters to 40 different people but after a while there just isn’t enough Bukowski to go around any more. then too, like other people I’ve got my troubles—job eating me up, car that won’t run, days of depression, sickness, so forth. have been real sick, job is hanging, I’m about finished there, and no trade, 47, no way to make it. not even writing poems anymore. meanwhile my little girl runs through here like all is sweet, climbing on the back of my neck and all that.