Screams From the Balcony Read online

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  January 10, 1964

  [* * *] Don’t remember writing a long letter but if you got one, fine. Sometimes when there is plenty of beer and cigars and the electric light hits the white paper and the chopper chops and that whore downstairs doesn’t bang on my floor I go on and on, a little cracked, kind of hypnotic, smoke and cold beer and PAP PAP PAP PAP PAP, and this, too, is good for what is left of the soul. [* * *]

  * * *

  “Frances” is Frances Smith, who had recently become pregnant with Bukowski’s daughter, Marina.

  [To Ann Bauman]

  January 23, 1964

  Frances says she will write in a couple of days.

  Little here. New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski? the bitch!!

  Cold here and the life force drags on within, dull, putrid, limping. The job is white light, heat and madness. But then, starvation is a bother, and with either course I feel the coward.

  Blighted god damned roaring stinking world.

  Cheer up, dear.

  the works,

  * * *

  [Unknown Addressee]

  January 28, 1964

  You knock on my floor when I type within hours. Why in the hell don’t you keep your stupid t.v. set down at 10:30 tonight? I don’t complain to managers, but it seems to me that your outlook is very one-sided.

  H. Bukowski

  Apt. #303

  * * *

  [Reply to Above]

  [Sir:

  It is not my T.V. set you hear, I don’t have it loud at any time.

  I was told you work from 5:30, but your machine is going day night and Sunday. It is like living beneath an arsenal.

  This is an apt house not a business establishment. You have had your television on loud until midnight and later. It sounds as if you have all kinds of machinery up there.

  You would not be allowed all that noise and racket in any apt house where people live for peace and quiet.

  I have been in this house 26 years, and have inquired from many people, and you are out of line.

  apt. 203]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  February 5, 1964

  Thanks for sending the review. On the review: I don’t think I am “tough” but if the poetry appears that way it is only because they are used to a different content and style. I am more tired than anything and if I refuse to get heated-up over a Sunrise or the blooming of a peony, they think this is tough. Rest of review pretty much on stick, though, and does your printing achievement some justice, and should move some copies. Whoever wrote the article seemed to enjoy the book, and that’s all we want, that, and to get down off the cross.

  Sorry on your finances on #4. You put so much time and $$ into book that you smashed yourself, and yet that you got carried on this wave, you must know, is not all loss. What happens to people when they see it, the incredulous wonder and awakening…I am not speaking of the poetry but of the book, the makeup…Frances’ daughter wrote to her and she said when she got book she just held it in her hand for an hour, looking through it, at it, not even reading the poems. It is this awakening of the people with beauty in a world where beauty hardly exists anymore, where we are all too “tough,” this kind of thing, just looking and wondering, it’s still in people, somewhere, but it takes an act like yours to bring it back.

  * * *

  “Purples” were special colophon sheets for a more expensive issue of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands. The letter to Tibbs mentioned here is reproduced as an illustration in this volume.

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  February 7, 1964

  [* * * ] I stole 2 excerpts from letter to Ben Tibbs tonight for purples. I hope he does not think me a zero for this. Wrote letter first without thought of anything—then got “purples” on mind. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Ann Bauman]

  February 18, 1964

  Mind all clogged with useless things—can’t get straight—but glad book did something for you—but as you know—it’s only the next poem that counts, and, then, it hardly counts.

  Depressed and jammed-up against small things forever, that’s the way if works. 4 day cold. other scratches.

  The book itself is a kind of small miracle to rest against—temporarily.

  Looks like you’ve got a good typewriter. Don’t get robbed again.

  Mothers are particularly painful because the world has rubbed most of them down to small utterings of inanity. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 1, 1964

  [* * *] I am getting a little drunk, a good wall to hide behind, the coward’s flag. I remember once in some city in some cheap room, I believe it was St. Louis, yes, a hotel on the corner and the gas fumes of traffic going to work used to come up and choke my sick lazy lungs, and I’d send her out for beer or wine and she was trying to get me straight, trying to mother me or hang me or figure me, as all women will try to do, and she gave me this old bit: “Drinking is only escapism.” Sure, I told her, and thank old red-balled God it is, and when I fuck you, that is escapism too, you may not think it is, to you it might be living, now, let’s have a drink.

  I wonder where she is now? A big fat black maid with the fattest biggest most loveliest legs in the universe and ideas about “escapism.” I wonder if she’s thinking of me now, sitting here 20 years later growling about stolen microphones and that the human race is garbage?

  Frances pregnant, looks as if I’ll have to move from here, looks like marriage (again) and disorder but hoping for more suave luck and grace to help me this time, I would not hope to be cruel to either woman or child, god give me grace for I am weak and sad and do not feel good, but if any disorder happens…let it be in my life, not theirs. [* * *]

  Frances is a good woman, she gets a little snappish and churlish at times but they all do, and I pretend I am asleep or I do not hear and it soon passes over…She kind of has this coffeehouse attitude, appears determined to save and understand all mankind, and this is a kind of obvious and tiring nobility, the other night she fell asleep reading The People’s World, and then she goes to a writers’ workshop, which, of course, is kind of obnoxious to me, always has been; but, then, I have my racetracks and beer and my nice beer drinking friends…It all comes out fairly even, depending upon whose head you are looking out of. Like, I imagine the guys who burned Joan of Arc had some strong ideas of why they were doing it. Ah?

  I still feel good that Genet liked the book. He is one of the few geniuses of our flat age, moongone stealing immoral unimmortal cheap age. There seems so little; it is like being locked in a tin room that they are heating up and it gets hotter hotter and then you are just finally a flake of black shit. I speak not of death but of the wearing qualities of our age, the gross similarities. You can speak with a leader of nations or with a cleaner of spittoons and they will tell you the same things, they will look the same. We need more light than this or it gets too dull or drab to go on. Genet does this. He’s like a flower in a coal pit.

  Haydn’s symphony #99 on now. I guess I haven’t heard all of Haydn’s symphonies; I guess few men have. It is good to have workmen like this around. It does damn well get hard to move on now and then, to open a door, to get dressed, to take your clothes to the laundry, to think of a way to get money, to try to sleep, to try to love to listen, everything gets hard, it gets harder, and I will not scream when death comes I will look at it like the little faint green lace vines they spread between flowers of large bouquets, and I will go without damage of transition, like a man taking his dog out to walk.

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 2, 1964

  [* * *] Frances says you should come to Los Angeles but I do not agree. This is one big town full of phonies, a
s you realize. Arizona has such nice little lizards and horny toads running through the hot sand or sitting on top of big rocks looking at you. You can’t get that here. I remember once walking out of a small Arizona town, the sun came down like magic, all yellow still, I kept going out into the desert, there was nobody around, not a human in sight. I almost didn’t come back. But as you see, I have. [* * *]

  By the way, in case you do do the book, I still, at this moment lean to the title For Regions Lower than Crying, although I may come up with a later preference, I could go with this one without being hurt too much; the title fits the series of edgy sequence of my titles, makes sense thru the looking glass…. Although I realize this title might bear a first similarity to A. E. Housman’s “Brooks Too Broad for Leaping,” but whereas Housman’s title relates directly to death, the impossibility of escaping it, mine relates to the utter sadness, the almost unbearability of existence. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 11, 1964

  [* * *] Two people down at the mill think I have cancer. Maybe I am starting to smell? Anyhow, feel god awful weak and only feel good in bed, but probably only the cause of too much drinking and gambling and working at the same time, and down where I am getting it you have to work and sweat and bleed for it, I do mean. The people are half wild with fear and something they know not of; they tremble and jerk with work neurosis, all cackling flat laughter of the deserted innards, and I am beginning to feel that way too; it is contemptuous what we have done to life and the living and ourselves. I was hoping for luck and skill in the gambling to free me but this too appears only another trap where they throw sand on the living. All the traps, and I walk into all the traps, every one that’s there, I spread myself with olive oil and ointment, with hemorrhoid salve and I say whoops, LET’S GO, BABIES!!!

  It’s a hell of a juncture to bust loose and I guess I’ll never bust loose, not writing poetry, and it appears I can’t even do that anymore, and I sure can’t go the novel, not the way I feel, the novel seems like nothing but WORK, a grandiose concept of saying a lot of nothing, and I guess the idea of the poems, good or bad, is to keep me from going crazier. I could pay money to hear some psychiatrist tell me this, and then we’d both feel better; only he’d feel better than I because he’d have my money and a nice secretary to look at walking around the room and to fuck. ah, wilderness, my wilderness. [* * *]

  I reread Camus’ The Stranger the other night and once again this appeared to me to be the perfect antidote for what was essentially wrong with the resolve in Crime and Punishment. It is so good that others do this work for us so that we do not have to do it ourselves.

  Children outside gyrating, seeing grass and mystery and freedom, and parental tyranny too; but they (the holy children) will be melded down, they become me: an old man at 4 o’clock in the afternoon writing tea-leaf thoughts in a vestibule that smells of bacon and frogs and tumbling silence.

  From now until the end of the book, the letters all bear the new address given in the following letter.

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  May 1, 1964

  We have moved to—

  5126 ¼ De Longpre Ave.

  Los Angeles 27, Calif.

  Old 1623 is gone and it was a magic number and a magic place, but after 6 years there is some wear and tear especially after no repairs or replacements of any sort. However, the landowners and their serfs (managers) always holler, charge too much and feel as if they were doing you a favor. Narrow-minded bigots that you have to sneak women past and not be seen drunk and not do this and not do that etc. etc.; all this time you are sharing the place with rats and bugs and old churchly women who poke and grovel and skitter and clog the halls of your brain, ugghg. They even called the police on me one night (a couple of years back) and I held them off through the door chain and talked them away. Anyway, don’t send any mail there as it may never reach me. They are pissed because I threw a few glasses of whiskey against the walls, bled on the rug & almost died several times and because the water pipes broke continually in the walls and they had to rip their walls open and I was there, usually in bed hungover sick unhappy with their pipes and their bodies their intrusions upon my tiniest of moments. May those whore-hating finks rot before they reach hell. I have spoken. [* * *]

  I don’t know where to get a Village Voice; if you manage to get an extra copy do send on—this address. It is more difficult, I suppose, to be a discovered poet; you’ve got to carry the load on your soul-back and when you sit down to a typer you are supposed to do it. I’d rather be loose, even bad-loose. The name in lights thing is good, of course, especially when you’re feeling down—you let yourself taste a little, like a drink, only you know that it doesn’t change the living life…a few more door-knockers, but these soon go away when you don’t walk upside down from the ceiling. [* * *]

  I tried to make a tape of poems a week or so ago. Started o.k. but got too drunk and started talking too much between poems and I didn’t care for it when I played it back. [* * *] I think it best to “talk” the poems instead of poeticizing them, make them “natural” as you suggested. [* * *]

  The bookseller Jim Roman also published some books of poetry, among them Corrington’s Anatomy of Love.

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  May 4, 1964

  Got Corrington’s Anatomy of Love today. very very fine stuff in there, what I’ve read, he’s come along a lot, and it’s all much better than his novel and it seems a damned shame we can’t keep him always with the poem; the novel may eat him up—I hope not.

  Very little today. The cats still walk around. One of them ate a bird the other day. I won’t talk to the son of a bitch for a week. As you know, I am sometimes not a realist. I can’t take it. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Ann (Bauman) Menebroker]

  May [6, 1964]

  good on the marriage.

  yes, those long-distance calls tho’ they cost us dearly in $$ were MORALE, and very odd and yet a fulfilling strange thing.

  I am not married but might as well be. I am in strange country, fairly unhappy, dismantled but no need to be cruel. You can only save what you have left and if that is very little then to hell with it. The flowers die too.

  Take care as they say around town, und don’t forget ye Muse.

  * * *

  The review by Frances Smith under the name S. S. Veri appeared in Chat Noir Review, vol. 2, no. 3. The Webbs’ new address was in Santa Fe, but they moved back to New Orleans after less than a week (Hank).

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  May 12, 1964

  aw right, I shoot you something pomes?? to yr new address to shew u I am still putting my socks on and also enclose knew chat noir revue wich Frances ast me to en clothes shee is part ed. and wrote review a It Catches wich mite bee pred. but so? und also she writes under name of S. S. Veri I think some quite good poems but some other stuff by other peeple in thair I don’ kare 4. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  June 12, 1964

  [* * *] I think the oddest thing I have ever heard, I could call it funny but I have been drinking too much tonight today, was a woman editor-poetess, they were putting out a special issue or something of convict poets or what the hell, and she was disturbed because “these men could not rise, seemingly, above their circumstances…all they seemed to write about was wanting to get out of jail, and why they should not be there…”

  my god, her pretty pussy should some night some years sit there not getting out, not even for the moon, not even for a walk down to the corner for a dull newspaper, does she know what it means to walk back and forth a certain space and only that space and that no matter what you say, no matter how you SCREAM, that that space will not widen except through death or pardon or insanity? and even then? fuck it. Jon, you know. when I by god get letters from cunts like this I near vomit, I look to the sun to make me well. that it grows these blind children.
>
  * * *

  [To Jim Roman]

  [July 1, 1964]

  yes, by god, no one is more pleased than I to be the victim of another magic book of the starving Webbs’ gutwork and pure glad madness. I don’t know about the poems. I know they could print a cookbook that would bring tears to the ears. (and eyes too!) Rexroth was right (in review) when he said my press was too good. but it’s like a beautiful woman asking to go to bed with you—what are you going to do? turn her away? ah no, not even at my age! [* * *]

  I don’t hear any more from Willie [Corrington] and I guess he’s shipping in from England, all lost and hooded in the pages of his second novel. I just hope he doesn’t get too efficient about turning them out, but I’m a crank and a puritan and a nut this way: always carrying what’s left of my soul in a little glass jar in my pocket like a fishing worm. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Kay Johnson, preceded by note to Jon and Louise Webb]

  Dear Jon & Lou:

  Letter I wrote to Kaja some time back. Forwarded all over

  Europe, then came back to me.—B.

  [handwritten:]