Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski
but not writing letters doesn’t cure much. I mean, I walk around like say, thinking of that very good poem you sent me—it’s in the bookcase now, somewhere, about madame somebody and that one fuck. one of the best poems I’ve read in 4 or 5 years, and I kept thinking I’ll write Lou about it when I feel better but I’ve never felt better. then your letter this morning about Richmond so now I must answer. I wrote Kyrass telling him I can’t do the Richmond. Cryass? Kryss? anyhow, I don’t know Richmond. I mean, I’ve been drunk with him, seen him 4 or 5 times but I don’t know him. there’s nothing you can write about him. he holes up pretty much by himself, won’t let people know where he lives. not that I give a damn, I’m a loner myself. but others complain that when they do find him, show at his door, he tells them, “go away, I’m busy.” and he is, and that’s his business. he usually has some bitch in there that has wandered into his bookstore, or whatever it has now turned out to be. he is covered with hair, fucks a lot, and I believe he is on the acid. also has dollars from family. told me once he is coming into a million or half million when he is 25. he was drunk, so I don’t know. anyway, the thing with Richmond is that very few people know him; I’m one that doesn’t. I wrote a foreword to a book of his poems, and that’s about it. Richmond is just a certain type. I don’t believe he wants anything written about himself, nor would he want me to write it. I did the foreword to his poems and that’s about as far as I want to go. book called Hitler Painted Roses.
frankly, I get a little tired of the Kryss books on these poet cats who get busted. I take it that this one is to be the 3rd. shit, a lot of people get busted who aren’t poets, or when they do they don’t think the bust is so special. plus too many of the bust-poets can’t write a cat turd. or when they do write, it’s all about busts, the nazi-state, so forth so forth. they become neurotic and closed-in. at least Behan, Genet, those, made a logical literary form out of their incarcerations. these other boys cry too much in mama’s hanky.
like I say, I haven’t been feeling good. maybe cranky, maybe cancer, maybe insanity. only God knows and He’s jacking off. but no Richmond. o.k.? fine. and thanks for the very good poem about Madame somebody.
[To Carl Weissner]
August 8, 1967
[* * *] christ, shit, broken stick—I will be 47 on the 16th and it won’t be long before they are dumping me, and it’s not death flapping down like that, it’s just that I haven’t been able to BREATHE properly. it has been like living inside a sardine can and then somebody comes along and hits me with a hammer. no fair. although, granted, I’ve helped them kill me, done almost everything possible to hurry along the process; and given a choice of walking through a gateway or ramming a wall, I have always seemed to ram the wall. but it’s not entirely stupidity. there’s a lot of sensible well-worked disgust resting within me too. why walk through the gateway when there’s a guy on the other side waiting with an ax? and these carbonated waterlumps who are my fellow man, how did they get here?
I haven’t written a poem in 4 or 5 months but I refuse to worry. it is not my idea to walk down the streets with poems glued to my forehead. the concern of the poem is to form itself—too many fellows pull them out with ganglia attached, no eyes, no feet; just dull puss and putty put-together. I have done it myself—worried about shadows and axes and the human face. something on paper—a bit of snot—it appears to help but it does not. now sometimes I just climb in bed and waste the few good hours—listen to sounds—the burbling turds of the city—the lost cunts—the flash false happiness flowers—what a machine we’ve built! this way I can work it out pretty good, in a kind of black cave of my mind, making little quiet measurements like a tailor. it is when I get drunk and then drunk and then drunk, and then the dank screeching hangover in steel collar and chains and dementia, worst kind of chicken-shit fears, real, but chicken-shit anyhow. my whole bedroom walls are glued with quiet experimental screams. I have them framed in blue and grey and green and red and yellow and whatever, and even when the dive bombers come and the city shakes and the electric light blinks on and off and the cat puffs up in anger under the palm tree, even then the screams hold their places, like places on a map yes, like tatoos. [* * *]
* * *
Delpino worked in the Philadelphia post office. He had recently had part of his drum set stolen.
[To Louis Delpino]
August 12, 1967
jesus, I sure as hell don’t want to start any tedious correspondence but I am down to my last beer, and thot I’d drop this is the box on the way up to the liquor store. I’ve just beat out my weekly column for Open City. something about bullfights on t.v. and Ernie H. [* * *]
I pity your ass in the post office. I’ve been there 10 years. each night is more hell than the preceding one. they put in an air-conditioner that doesn’t work. we can’t breathe. people fall off their stools. the supervisors are hatchet-men, hand-picked. everything is graced with fear and stupidity. there and everywhere. try to get your drums back, for Christ’s sake!, they’ll murder you.
hot hot here. the beer the beer, that’s all there is. all of me is a big fat mound of beer. awakened several times in the night with nightmares. I don’t know where I am going.
Neeli Cherry by. I showed him The Sparrow and the Cock.
“god damn, this is good writing!”
“yes, it is.”
“who is he?”
“just somebody who lives in Philadelphia.”
well, man, I am down to the bottom of my beerbottle and there is no keeping me in here. sorry on the Richmond. just got a special delivery from Kryss who says he doesn’t believe I can’t do some writing on Richmond. well, it just isn’t there. you can’t set up a bank shot unless the run is proper.
be good to your wife. she probably thinks you are crazy.
Kryss writes that he is going to do a book of poems by WILLIE. that’s more like it.
like you, the mousy little mag scene is beginning to become less and less with me. I think because it is manned mostly by the very young, who then fade and some more very young replace them. which is all right in a way but in another way neither grows bones or heart. the poetry has this blithe lively sameness, the newness of sex, the terribleness of evil and so forth. all right for a while. then as it keeps being said you begin to yawn and yawn and yawn and YAWN. what’s new for the new is old for the old, and what is needed is darker earth and an almost plausible way. I am not speaking of religion; I am speaking of a movement forward from the same old crap. and I don’t think we are going to get it. The Sparrow and the Cock was pure literature. I am tired of propaganda. now I’ve got to get me some more beer. [* * *]
* * *
Michael Forrest was the first author other than Bukowski that Black Sparrow Press published.
[To Michael Forrest]
Sunday August 20, 1967
forgive me for not answering sooner. I have been in a real fucked-up state. still am. health gone again. dizzy spells. fever. hours, nights, days, years of DEPRESSION. dark gauze stuff. no sense. just a haning [sic] hanging there. I make up words. why not? I am fucked. tried work tonight, the spells came over me, worked 3 hours, could go on longer no longer aye, grabbed side of case to keep from falling. and all around me, those FACES (faces? feces!) looking. no air. I left. they have been counseling me that I miss too many days. I get warnings, warnings. they think that I am faking it. the doctor thinks that I am faking it. “there’s nothing wrong with you, Bukowski! next patient, send in the next patient, please nurse.” I walk out and make it down the steps and the whole area of the boulevard is like a roller coaster. I can’t see. everything is sunlight. then shade, like dropping right into hell and being kissed by a smelly face like a toaster. like that. not exactly. something. I guess a man has to go to hell 90 times to see heaven once. for me, they can forget heaven. and hell too.
o, shit, it’s hot, the fever, the heat. I have this fan on. no good. I am afraid to drink. and the refrigerator is frozen solid into a block of ice. I h
meanwhile, I have not written, have not answered letters, have not written poems. [* * *]
John [Martin] probably will do my book of new poems—if I am here—next Spring. I think Webb and I have fallen out. I wrote a column for OPEN CITY PRESS about my visit to Tucson and I think he saw it. I no longer hear. that’s o.k. I don’t think it was a dirty column. only factual. I have been doing a weekly column for Open City and if you want to see some, let me know and I’ll ship you a few. they let me write anything I wish. might stop doing the damn things soon. poems first, or living first, hell yes. [* * *] applied some months back for a grant from the Humanities Foundation. submitted what I have done of my novel, The Way We Dead Love. say they, I will hear in October. I asked for a year’s worth of money—$6,500 to live on while I go the damn thing. it’s true, I probably won’t get it, but what hell of a hell of a shot of life that would be; it would add 20 years to my life!
well, I am feeling a little better now. I guess it’s the sound of the typer. it’s the sound in my blood. what a way to get hooked! “Doctor, sir, I am sick. please let me type.” [* * *]
* * *
Blazek moved from Illinois to San Francisco in 1967 and en route stopped to meet Bukowski. The mutual readjustment of mental images produced by their exchange of letters was apparently disillusioning for both correspondents: afterwards, “there was no lasting warmth between the two men,” reports Neeli Cherkovski (Hank).
[To Douglas Blazek]
September 5, 1967
ah shit, what a birthday caaard! I am taken. great, old man. thanks.
I suppose the days of long letters, the long-letter days are quits between us, but they did their work; both reading them and writing them was beef and roses and wine and clean socks, good things.
Landlord and landlady standing out there, gibbering gibbering gibbering, I can’t think. the fuckers stand around and shoot mouth night and day.
dogs barking through the gibbering. why don’t they go in the back? they live in the back. everybody gotta stand around Bukowski’s window, make his nuts jump and whirl in agony, ah. reminds me, book coming out, working now, Black Sparrow Press, At Terror Street and Agony Way. that’s where I live. a friend, a kind of friend I have in the hills says the title is corny. well, it’s corny if it’s not happening to you but if it’s happening to you, then it’s not corny. too many people are afraid to say the obvious, or they have to be just a bit cute and in the shadows, playing it out. see Creeley’s latest title: Words. now there’s a man who has never considered a butcher knife. well, for all that, editor asked me if I would do 50 original colored drawings for 50 editions plus 5 inch tape for some of the editions, and I said yes, and so my ass still up in work, not just the common drag work that kills, but working with the minutes I have left when I am not at the track when I am not drunk when I am not playing with Marina when I am not sick when I am not crazy, anyhow have done 12 drawings so far and that’s part of the way there. anyhow, he pays pretty fair royalties, and Evergreen took one of my poems, so maybe I will not be swept under the rug—$28 drunken phone bill, gas, lights, car breakdown, dentist bill, doctor bill for sickness of the 3 of us—hell, you know the act. it’s like a war. you sit in a room and outside there—there are all these factors working gearing sharpening to chop you down. all god’s children got troubles, what? I can’t even renew my driver’s license. can’t read god damned book, dull, may need glasses. mental block. all god’s children…my hemorrhoids are back. coming back. coming back. all that operation. finger up the bloody ass. hems coming back. must get off the beer for a couple of months, if I can. also same old dizzy spells, fits of depression, missed days at work, broke, clothes shot, same old shoes…. everything crazy and lumbersome and getting worse. shit, shit. then I go into work, make it, the LONG LONG LONG HOURS, people just sitting there WORKING, pissing their life-hours away and not feeling a thing, even feeling comfortable. oh, captain, let’s blow my fucking brains out and be done with it. [* * *]
* * *
Penguin Books published selections by Bukowski, Norse, and Lamantia in their Penguin Modern Poets series (no. 13), but the book did not appear until 1969.
[To Carl Weissner]
September 26, 1967
hello, Karl: god damn it, I mean, hello, Carl Carl Carl:
[* * *] heard from Nikos Stangos, PENGUIN BOOKS, I think it is some of Norse’s dirty work. anyhow it appears Norse und myself and one other, maybe Lamantia, will possibly appear in their next poet’s series of 3-in-a-book. which would feel very strange to me. now I am trying to put Stangos on Al Purdy. I consider Purdy and Norse the two best living poets, and it would make me feel strange, good, godly, golden to run in a book with these 2 magicians. Stangos is a new editor and he’s had his fill of the run—Olson, Creeley, Dorn, Whalen, Snyder, so forth, who, for me, are too architechial [sic] and mathematic. but, shit, it could probably fall through, and I am ready for that too. or maybe not, because hearing from Stangos he feels very warm and real and ready to take the flyer. he does not appear to be the backout type. I sense that he ready for the gamble. Norse and I have been in the underground cobwebs for so long that I feel that any type of good luck will not now destroy us or make us careful writers—that is not too careful to keep taking shots in the dark dark dark. I think we are now too old to think of anything but the days as they are, with us hanging there, drawing these things, and waiting. no school, ho, no politic, just the typer and the walls. [* * *]
* * *
[To John Martin]
October 18, 1967
been meaning to write. your special delivery royalty check bounced me out of bed at 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning. almost didn’t answer door. but the enclosure was well worth it. people who have seen the Curtains drool over it. I mean, the printing, layout, so forth.[* * *]
* * *
[To Thomas Livingstone]
October 18, 1967
have been fucked-up, drinking, so forth, general decline of the psyche, so forth, and so late answer. yes, I liked your writing in Nothing Doing in London, they just sent me your pages. the part with the guy in the phone booth, the whole phone booth bit was an immense and startling piece of writing. the pages sent me had laid around on my battered coffee table for a couple of weeks, and finally one day in a fit of depression, I though I was going cuckoo, real deep blues and no way out except all the way, and then I picked up your work. when I got to the phone booth I started laughing. real good writing makes me laugh; if not out loud, then kind of inside, but yours had me laughing outside too. I’m crazy this way. let me say that your writing saved the day for me. that day, anyhow. what luck. what’s going to save the future days, if anything, I don’t know.
on books. frankly, Purdy’s last book was not as good, and maybe the one before that not as good…. I mean, if you’re going to get Purdy, try to get Poems for All the Annettes. 2$. the publisher is CONTACT PRESS, 28 Mayfield Ave., Toronto is the address listed and I think Toronto is in Ontario, Canada. the book may be sold out, tho. might be better to write Purdy [* * *]
my own stuff is out of print and I am out of copies, so hell. but have just corrected first proofs on something to be called At Terror Street and Agony Way, a bunch of poems somebody had handed to somebody and somebody had stuffed in their closet and then later somebody had put them on tape, and there I heard them in a place up in Silverlake hills, and I said I wrote those poems and the guy said hell yes, John gave them to me when he was running his magazine, and I said, so that’s what happened to them. meanwhile a guy bugging me to do a book, so I took the lost poems to him, threw in 4 or 5 new ones and he had, we had, the book. I’ve got about 500 poems out there missing. I mean people don’t return them. I never see them again. fuckers. real shits. so well. a book of new poems will
I hope some of this helps you out. now the clock hands dig into my back. how’s that for corn? anyhow, time running out, game must go on, all that shit. so, here I go. [* * *]
[To Douglas Blazek]
October 30, 1967
[* * *] yeah I’m still writing columns most of the time for Open City and I’d clip and mail some of these to you but I am tired, TIME TIME TIME slugs me up the side of the head, saying old man, you got nerve. lay down.
give it up.
admit you’re dying
so if I get out the scissors and start clipping the things I’ll feel pretty damned silly, like I am being watched.
[* * *] your problem is the same as mine—difficult to transmit the living juice from gut to outside speech, almost impossible. and. not to pat our broken backs, but I think that’s the way the good guys fail. watch the fluid-speech, interesting boys—they have coconut brains. anyhow, you ever hit town, mother, phone. I will never forget the old long letter days, the days of Confessions and Assholes. them was good daze, babe. you in your factory. me where I am now. both being burned alive and not a fucking thing to do about it. bung-holed, axed, knifed, smeared in our own bloodshit and then told by an eyeless rat with a tin badge that we were not doing well enough, missing too many mondays and spitting out blood into the urinals. your letters got me through some days. it was a time. [* * *]