More Notes of a Dirty Old Man: The Uncollected Columns Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  MORE NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN

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  SOURCES

  AFTERWORD

  NOTES

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  MORE NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN

  God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last. Then, too, the hippy foundation or diving board or resting place or whatever you want to call it does suck in its fair share of fakes, promoters and generally vicious people trying to overcompensate for some heinous psychological defect. But you have these everywhere—hippy and non-hippy. But, like I say, the few people that I know are either a bit on the side of the artistic, the pro-hip or the understanding-hip, so I have been generally getting more of this slice of cake and it has seemed a bit SWEET.

  But, lo, the other day I got the OTHER bit and I think I’d rather eat sweet than shit. Being locked into a large building where 4,000 people work at dull and menial tasks has its compensations but it has disadvantages too—for instance, you can never be sure who is going to assigned to work next to you. A bad soul makes for a worse night. Enough bad souls can kill you.

  He was balding, square-jawed, mannish???, with this look of hate-frustration upon his face. For months I had sensed that he had wanted to talk to me. Now I was hooked—he was assigned to the place to my left. He complained about the air-conditioning and a few other things, then worked in a question about my age. I told him that I would be 47 in August. He said he was 49.

  “Age is only relative,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you are 47 or 49, it doesn’t make any difference.”

  “Umm,” I said.

  Then the speaker screamed out some announcement: ALL THOSE QUALIFIED ON THE L.S.M. MACHINES REPORT TO . . .

  “I thought they were going to say LSD,” he said.

  “Umm,” I said.

  “You know,” he said, “that LSD has put a lot of people in madhouses—brain damage.”

  “Everything puts people in madhouses.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “I mean the LSD brain damage scare is probably an exaggeration percentage-wise.”

  “Oh no, leading doctors and laboratories and hospitals say so.”

  “O.K.”

  We worked away without conversation for awhile and I thought I had escaped him. He had one of those easy mellow voices that drowned and warbled in its own conviction. But he began again:

  “Are you for LSD?”

  “I don’t use it.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a passing fad?”

  “Nothing that is against the law ever ceases to exist.”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “Forget it.”

  “Whatcha think of the hippies?”

  “They don’t harm me.”

  “Their hair stinks,” he said. “They don’t take baths. They don’t work.”

  “I don’t like to work either.”

  “Anything that is unproductive is not good for society.”

  “Umm.”

  “Some college profs say that these kids are our new leaders, that we should listen to them. HOW THE HELL CAN THEY KNOW ANYTHING? THEY DON’T HAVE ANY EXPERIENCE.”

  “Experience can dull. With most men experience is a series of mistakes; the more experience you have the less you know.”

  “You mean to say you are going to listen to what some 13-year-old kid tells you?”

  “I listen to everything.”

  “But they aren’t mature, they aren’t MATURE, don’t you see? That’s why they’re hippies.”

  “Suppose they got jobs? Suppose they went into industry, went to work turning bolts for General Motors? Wouldn’t they still be immature?”

  “No, because they’d be working,” he said.

  “Umm.”

  “Furthermore, I think a lot of these kids are going to be SORRY that they didn’t go to the war. It’s going to be an experience they’ll wish they hadn’t missed. They’re going to regret it later on.”

  “Umm.”

  There fell again the peaceful silence. Then he said, “you’re not a hippy, are you?”

  “I’m working, damn it. And I told you I was 47.”

  “The beard doesn’t mean anything then, does it?”

  “Sure it does. It means, at the moment, I feel better wearing a beard than I do the other way. Maybe next week it will be different.”

  Silence, silence. Then he switched his stool, turned his back to me as much as possible and continued working. I got up and walked to the men’s crapper and stuck my head out the window for fresh air. The guy was my father all over again: RESPONSIBILITY, SOCIETY, COUNTRY, DUTY, MATURITY, all the dull-sounding hard words. But why were they in such agony? Why did they hate so much? It seemed simply that they were very much afraid that somebody else was having a damn good time or was not unhappy most of the time. It seemed that they wanted everybody to carry the same damn heavy rock they were carrying. It wasn’t ENOUGH that I was working beside him like an idiot; it wasn’t enough for him that I was wasting the few good hours left in my life—no, he also wanted me to share his own mind-soul, to sniff his dirty stockings, to chew on his angers and hates with him. I was not PAID for that, the fucker. And that’s what killed you on the job—not the actual physical work but being closed in with the dead.

  I got on back to my stool. He had his back turned to me. Poor, poor fellow. I had let him down. He’d have to look elsewhere. And I was white and he was white and most of them were black. Where ya gonna find a decent white man in a place like this? I could sense him thinking.

  I suppose he would have gotten around to the Negro question if I had sent out the proper rays. I had been spared that.

  His back was to me. His back was broad, American and hard. But I couldn’t see his face and he didn’t speak any more. What had hurt him worst was that I had neither agreed with or argued with him. His back was to me. The remainder of the night was peaceful and almost kind.

  Tucson, Arizona, 6-29-67

  Sitting in a country store that went broke, sitting at last after getting out Henry Miller’s Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel, one year’s work, putting the thing together piece by piece, magic by magic, held up by lack of funds and a praying, quivering, shaking 8x12 Chandler & Price, 50 or 60 years old, that fell apart on the last page; sitting there a moment, moulding their next move, hoping there is enough money for a next move are Jon and Louise (Gypsy Lou) Webb, who wrought the miracle of this third book out of LOUJON PRESS—which already has won awards in Typography, Type Direction & Design in TDC’s 13th annual awards show in New York City.

  Sitting here now behind an abandoned store front of crumbling adobe—they call it their “desert workshop printery”—they ar
e almost broke.

  It is Tucson and I am down here interviewing Jon Webb in 105 heat, and you know that Art can come from anywhere: the center of hot hell and the ghosts of old bean cans. I begin the interview:

  “Both of you are great editors and bookmakers. Loujon Press is up there with the gods with your books and the Outsider Magazine. Your Miller book is perhaps the most revolutionary piece of bookmaking in the past several hundred years. My question is, do you think that you will be able to survive or will the walls fall in and eliminate you?”

  Jon: We’ll survive, but the walls suddenly will fall in, they always do, same as they did on Alan Swallow—tho we don’t put ourselves up in his area of greatness, we’re far from it.”

  Buk: “O.K., so, well where did the idea ever begin to become editors of this sort?”

  Jon: “I gave up writing after two or three million published words because I felt that I’d never make it creatively, that I’d never get published without making compromises of some sort. Of course, that could have been an excuse for laziness or inadequacy—but I’m convinced I made a good move, from writing into publishing. I think I’m a better editor than I was a writer. If I keep going, tho, I’ll only get into a morass of rationalizations.”

  Buk: “Fair enough. Let’s leap into something else: the inflation spiral on paper, ink, type, everything from hamburgers to paperclips has, in a sense, become ridiculous. Don’t you feel that after finishing one project that the next one has become almost priced out of reach?”

  Jon: “I was pretty ignorant at this business when I started but I learned to become an honest con-man, meaning I’ve given in to developing cordial relationships with businessmen—the ones who sell me these things at such high prices. I simply con them into thinking my small order is only a sampler, the first part of a huge order, and in so doing lay the groundwork for a deal, which in business parlance means getting a cut in price. In other words, I talk in carloads until they quote me carload prices. It’s a dirty approach, but the fact I have to wear a starched collar and conservative necktie to put the approach over sort of cancels in my mind the dirtiness out of it.”

  Buk: “I agree. Now, all of your work is done by the two of you. Breaking down your total profit and dividing the hours worked, what do you judge your hourly wage, per person, to be?”

  Jon: “If it turns out there is a profit—we call anything above cost profit—our net income for hours worked so far has never exceeded 8 cents an hour.”

  Buk: “Is it worth it? Wouldn’t you rather be picking beets or selling Fuller brushes door to door? And how about those editing and design offers from New York publishers? Don’t you ever get tired of the hard road?”

  Jon: “No, we work out of a compulsion, same as I always did when writing. It’s a love that’s transferred, that’s all. Just like when a loved one dies, the idea of writing died too. I simply transferred the love for writing to the love for publishing. I could go on but I would only get increasingly flip. Because the reason any of us are in a work that is economic suicide can’t logically be articulated upon without getting into a bragging—like calling oneself an artist. I think we’re artists, but it could be everything we’re doing that’s good is just accidental. We’ve still a long way to go.”

  Buk: “All right, fair enough. But now let’s talk about ‘angels’. Where are the angels? I know that they DO exist. For instance, there is a poet in Europe, an American exile, not overly exceptional who is supported by some rich folk who rarely ask questions or slug him with demands and he is simply not that good. Frankly, I think you deserve an angel or 2 or 3. Do you think that yours will ever appear?

  Jon: “Everybody who buys our books are angels. But getting back into the meat of it, you have to go after angels and we haven’t had the time. We will eventually put on a big promotion for an angel. A good angel. We’ve had lots of offers from bad angels, the ones with strings attached. Like the rich widow in Louisiana who owns 4,000 acres of bottom land that’s zooming in value because the Northern manufacturers are coming in. She offered us 40 acres plus a plantation house if we published her True Story Magazine style book under our Loujon Press imprint. Book was about her discovery after her husband’s death that he once had a mistress. This book she wrote was an unending lambasting of him, hoping to turn him over in his grave. Broke our hearts, but we had to turn her down.”

  Buk: “Is the Miller book moving?”

  Jon: “How could a Miller book not move?”

  Buk: “I mean fast. How can we let people know that if they see these books with their eyes they will buy them? How can we let people know that these books you do will be collector’s items selling for 5 or 10 times their publication price in 4 or 5 years, or less?”

  Jon: “We’re not much interested in selling to those people, the ones we have to let know these books we do are eventual collectors’ pieces. But a lot of those people buy our books, and without knowing it are angels of a sort. So we love them, they help us keep going.”

  Buk: “Very true. But these formats you use that scream collectors’ item at one look, what’s behind them?

  Jon: “Behind them is the fact that all rules of book publishing have come to a deadend, especially in design. All we’re doing with our mixed-up formats is fumbling for a way out of that deadend, or past it. If we don’t get past it we’ll get out of this work, same as I got out of writing—and into something else. Like maybe underground filmmaking.

  “But getting back to design, I believe with McLuhan that the medium is the message. And it has been our good luck, so far, to publish writers who will let us dress them up in our particular types of format, our packaging. So far, in the books we’ve done it hasn’t hurt either of us.”

  Buk: “Have basic type styles changed? How do you select your types?”

  Jon: “By eye. The more you pore over books of typefaces, type samples, so forth, the more type you might tend to like, and after weeks of studying you end up picking a certain typeface, cable some far-away country and you get a reply that that particular typeface has not been cast for 20 or 30 years, so you begin all over again. This happens mostly because, in our opinion, type design has also come to a deadend. So you start going back into time to find something good. You can’t do that with book design, because you can’t create new book design by copying the old masters at it. But type is okay to copy. It’s merely one of the tools you work with to create.”

  Buk: “How do you decide on publishing a book?”

  Jon: “It’s rough, but mostly it’s a case of love, of the work to be published, and the writer too. Because around that work, also the writer, you have to work months creating a format which fits that writer. Not one that fits us, that’s silly. The whole format has to be an extension of both the writer’s personality and the work of his we’re publishing. And you’d get nowhere there without a love involved for the writer embodied in his talent. People say we must love our work. We don’t. Work always is pretty drab, if it isn’t just plain hell. But we love what comes out of the work. And when it’s done, there’s another hell in which we have to transfer the love for a book just done to the next one in line. To the next writer in line. Queer, eh?”

  Buk: “Hell, no. But go on, what is the ultimate you would like to do in book design?”

  Jon: “Well, if I’m constantly mulling over an elusive idea, Gypsy is too. It’s to put out a book of great beauty and original design with which the buyer immediately falls in love and which is certain to become a top value collector’s item, but which on opening and reading to the last page suddenly falls apart in the reader’s hands, virtually disintegrates, and can in no way be put back together again.”

  Buk: “I get you. The buyer will buy another book at once to see if the same thing happens with the second copy.”

  Jon: “That isn’t the reason for it, no. But you’ve given me an idea—thanks.”

  Buk: “Whatever the reason, seems like a dirty trick on the writer. All his work and yours too shot
to hell forever.”

  Jon: “Oh, I’d first find a writer who didn’t mind, be sure of that. Like you maybe.”

  Buk: “Come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t mind. Might be fun writing for a posterity that disintegrated in the reader’s hands instead of his brain. But space is running out. Any final good word to the reader of this column or any readers anywhere?”

  Jon: “Well, even the broadside announcement on the Miller book, printed on Parchment paper, 19 by 25 inches, is now a collector’s item. But we’ll mail one to anybody who sends us a postcard, and we’ll go the postage. Our address is 1009 East Elm, Tucson, Arizona 85719. LOUJON PRESS.”

  Buk: “How come it’s so damned hot down here in June and July?”

  Jon: “I don’t know, but it’s the next best thing to hell. That’s probably why we’re here.”

  Buk: “I think this interview is over.”

  Jon: “Me, too.”

  Buk: “You got anymore beer?”

  Jon: “We knew you were coming by.”

  Bukowski goes out into the kitchen of the Desert Workshop Printery and gets one. The interview is over. The great poet Bukowski and the great editor Webb sit across from each other, looking in and out and over with glazed and perhaps? immortal spirits. Life goes on anyhow.

  I was going over my old Racing Forms, having a beer and a smoke, really hungover, shaky, depressed; gently thinking suicide but still hoping for a lucky angel when there was a knock on the door, a very light knock, I barely heard it. I listened and there it was again. I hid my bag of Chesterfields under the fireplace and opened the door just a slit. “Bukowski?” said the voice. “Charles Bukowski?” and there was this woman standing out in a light rain, in the 9 p.m. rain between 2 dying plants on the front porch of the front court in which I lived, badly, among beer, and mouse-shadows, and old copies of Upton Sinclair and Thomas Wolfe and Sinclair Lewis, and I looked out looked out looked out and IT WAS A WOMAN and WHAT a woman in that 9 p.m. rain—long red hair all down the back, jesus: tons of red miracle. And the face, open with passion, like a flower ripped open with the fingers from the bud, a kind of fire-cheating, and the body, the body was nothing but SEX, sex standing still jumping singing looking flowing humming in the 9 p.m. rain saying, “Bukowski, Charles Bukowski?” and I said, “Come on in,” and she did, she came in and sat on the chair in front of the fireplace and the walls of the room began to weave in and out like on a trip, and the rug said, what the hell oh my god oooh oooooooooooh, and she CROSSED HER LEGS and the skirt was high and I looked up the thighs, boldly, jesus, I was out of my skull, thighs knees high heels long tight stockings flow and flesh oh lord and she kicked her foot, turned on ankle, ow ow ow, mercy! And the red hair the red hair flocked all along the back of the chair, the red hair on fire in the lamplight, I could barely hold on I could barely understand, I did not deserve to even LOOK, and I knew it.