Storm for the Living and the Dead Read online

endure; I must learn to give way, that is not a

  suspicious thing.

  we are far too serious, we must learn to juggle

  our heavens and our hells—the game is playing

  us, we must play back.

  our shoes walk along, carrying

  us.

  when it gets at its worst, nothing should be

  done.

  the exactitude is the freedom: one hundred

  thousand walls or more

  and more

  of nothingness, your bones know more than your

  mind.

  the only life

  I was like one of those nuts from centuries past, I was

  Romantically mad with my fixation—ha, ha, to be a

  writer, I wrote night and day. I even wrote when I was

  asleep

  and most often I wrote when I was drunk, even when I

  wasn’t writing.

  ah, those dozens of cheap rooms, my belly flattened to

  my asshole, I became 133 pounds on a 6 foot

  frame. I STARVED. haha, so I could write.

  (this is a true story) (aren’t they all?) and

  all my writings came back and I finally had to

  throw them away because

  there was more space of paper than there was space of

  me

  and I continued to write new works which continued to

  come back and I thought

  Schopenhauer, Van Gogh, Shostakovich, Céline, Dos-

  toevsky

  and I continued to write and it came back

  again

  and I thought

  Villon, Gorky, Turgenev, Sherwood Anderson

  and I wrote and wrote

  and still nothing happened

  and when I finally did EAT

  you have no idea how

  BEAUTIFUL FOOD CAN TRULY BE, EACH BITE LIKE A MIRACLE OF

  SUNLIGHT TO THE STAGGERING SOUL, haha,

  and I thought,

  Hamsun, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot

  but nothing happened—

  all my typewriters to hock and gone I

  printed the pages in ink

  and they came back

  and I threw them away

  and wrote some more and starved some

  more.

  oh, I had an apprenticeship, I did, and now I’ve had a bit of

  luck, some are beginning to think that I can write, but

  actually only the writing is the thing, now as it was then,

  whether yes or no or in between, it’s only the writing, it’s

  the only go when all else says stop

  and some of it still comes back now and I think

  Nietzsche, e. e. cummings, Robinson Jeffers, Sartre, Camus,

  Hemingway

  the sound of the machine, the sound of the machine, words

  biting into paper, there is nothing else, there can be nothing

  else, whether it comes back, whether it stays and when

  it ends, ha

  ha.

  stomping at the Savoy

  now look, Captain, I want the walking wounded at

  their posts, we can’t spare a man, if these

  Huns knew our ranks were thinning they’d

  eat us alive and rape our women and children

  and, god help us, our pets

  too!

  out of water? have them drink their blood!

  what do you think this is, a fucking

  picnic?

  I’ll give you your picnic up your

  ARSE! get

  that?

  now look . . . we lure them in, outflank them,

  they’ll be gobblin’ their own shit in

  panic!

  we’ll have their bones for picket fences!

  you’ll be heroes to our ladies, they’ll

  lick your balls gratefully into Eternity!

  got that?

  quitters don’t win, and besides that, any

  man I see retreating, I’m gonna blow a hole

  in him big enough so you’ll be able to see

  your grandmother’s asshole picking daisies in

  Petaluma!

  hear me?

  oh shit! I BEEN HIT! get the doc! get all

  the docs!

  cocksucker! whoda guessed? lucky shot!

  those Huns couldn’t hit a wet dream at

  3 paces!

  Captain! you’re in command! you blow this

  thing and I’m gonna twist your legs and stuff

  ’em up your stupid rear! got it?

  I don’t want those Huns finger-fucking Melba

  on the veranda!

  God’s on our side! He told me once, “Listen,

  those Huns gotta go! they don’t wash under

  the armpits and they comb their hair with

  peach jelly!”

  Captain! I think I’m going! get a nurse

  here, I need some head! and hurry! this

  war ain’t got all day!

  the glory days

  the dead rivers run backwards into nowhere,

  the fish cry through neon memories,

  and I remember you drunk in bed

  in that cheap hotel room

  with nobody to live with but me,

  what a trundling hell that must have

  been, you with

  a young sot ten years your junior

  pacing the floor in his shorts while

  bragging to the deaf gods while

  smashing glasses against the walls.

  you were certainly caught out of place and

  time,

  your marriage broken on stained

  tiles

  and you

  being humped by a

  bewhiskered jerk who was terrorized by

  life, beaten by the odds, this

  thing

  pacing the floor, rolled wet cigarette

  in monkey mouth, then

  stopping to

  open another bottle of cheap

  wine.

  the dead rivers of our lives,

  hearts like rocks.

  pour the red blood of wine.

  curse, complain, wail, sing

  in that cheap hotel room.

  you, awakening . . . “Hank?”

  “yeh . . . here . . . what the fuck you

  want?”

  “hell, gimme a drink . . .”

  the waste

  yet the courage of the

  gamble.

  where’s the rent due coming from?

  I’ll get a job.

  you’ll get a job.

  yeah, fat chance. fat shit

  chance

  anyhow, enough wine gets you past

  thinking.

  I break a large drinking glass against the

  wall.

  the phone rings.

  it’s the desk clerk again:

  “Mr. Chinaski, I must warn you . . .”

  “AH, GO WARN YOUR MOTHER’S CUNT!”

  the slamming of the phone.

  power.

  I am a man.

  you like me, you like that.

  and, I’ve got brains too, I’ve always

  told you that.

  “Hank?”

  “yeh?”

  “how many bottles we got left?”

  “3.”

  “good.”

  pacing the floor, looking to fly, looking

  to live.

  neon memories cry the fish.

  4th floor of a 6th street hotel, windows

  open to the city of hell, the precious breathing

  of the lonely pigeons.

  you drunk in bed, me playing at miracle,

  wine-bottle corks and full ashtrays.

  it’s like everybody’s dead, everybody’s

  dead with their heads on,

  we’ve got to conquer the flailing of

  nowhere.

  look at me in undershirt and s
horts,

  bare feet bleeding shards of glass.

  there’s some way out that begins with

  3 bottles

  left.

  congrats, Chinaski

  as I near 70

  I get letters, cards, little gifts

  from strange people.

  congratulations, they tell

  me,

  congratulations.

  I know what they mean:

  the way I have lived

  I should have been dead in half

  that time.

  I have piled myself with a mass of

  grand abuse, been

  careless toward myself

  almost to the point of

  madness,

  I am still here

  leaning toward this machine

  in this smoke-filled room,

  this large blue trashcan to my

  left

  full of empty

  containers.

  the doctors have no answers

  and the gods are

  silent.

  congratulations, death,

  on your patience.

  I have helped you all that

  I can.

  now one more poem

  and a walk out on the balcony,

  such a fine night there.

  I am dressed in shorts and stockings,

  gently scratch my old

  belly,

  look out there

  look off there

  where dark meets dark

  it’s been one hell of a crazy

  ball game.

  he went for the windmills, yes

  something to keep you going is needed

  badly

  as the milkmaids now scream obscenities

  in sundry dialects,

  the mill is shut down,

  there are mass murders at hamburger

  joints,

  friar Tuck is screwed,

  the United States ranks 17th of the

  nations in longevity of the

  individual,

  and nobody wipes the windshield.

  the beast sleeps in Beverly Hills,

  Van Gogh is an absentee billionaire,

  the Man from Mars deals the ace of

  spades,

  Hollywood goes soap opera,

  the horse rides the jock,

  the whore blows congress,

  the cat is down to one life,

  the dead end street is a psychiatrist,

  the table is set with fish-head fantasies,

  the dream strikes like a blackjack in the men’s

  crapper,

  the homeless are rolled,

  the dice are fixed,

  the curtain is down,

  the seats are empty,

  the watchman has suicided,

  the lights are out,

  nobody waits for Godot

  something to keep you going is needed

  badly,

  madly,

  right now

  in the burning forest

  in the dying sea

  in the dull sonnets

  and the wasted

  sunrises,

  something is needed

  here

  besides this rotten

  music,

  these shorn decades,

  this place like this,

  this time,

  yours,

  mutilated, spit

  away,

  a mirror’s back, a

  hog’s teat;

  a seed upon a rock,

  cold,

  not even the death of

  a cockroach

  now.

  all my friends

  Van Gogh just walked in and complained to me

  that Theo had sent him the wrong

  paints.

  he was gone no longer than a moment

  when Dostoevsky knocked and asked for a

  loan to play the roulette wheel,

  claimed he was working on a masterpiece,

  something called Crime and Punishment

  then Chatterton knocked and asked if I might

  have some rat poison, said he had an idea of

  how to get away from the rats.

  Villon sat around bitching half the night about

  how he had been barred from Paris—not for his

  writings but simply because of some petty

  thievery, really, he said, a chickenshit deal.

  then Ernie came in, he was drunk, and he started

  talking about the bullfights, that’s all he talks about:

  the bullfights and fishing, the BIG one that got away,

  and he’s always on the war, the war, the war.

  I was glad when he left.

  Picasso came in then and complained that his

  shack job, who was also a painter, was jealous of

  him, she thought she could paint but was being

  held back because she was a woman and that some

  day she would paint a book about him calling him a

  petty jerk-off monster and from this she would gain

  the only fame which she thirsted so badly for.

  then Knut Hamsun came in and claimed he was

  framed in the war crimes deal.

  followed by Ezra who spoke of the same thing.

  followed by the good doctor, Céline.

  then H.D. came in and said, “I only wish now that I

  had used my real name, Hilda Doolittle, to hell with

  the Imagist Manifesto, it ended up anyhow that when

  people saw ‘H.D.,’ all they did was reverse the initials

  and think of that fucker, D. H. Lawrence.”

  then Mozart, the x-child prodigy knocked and asked

  for a nickel, I gave it to him, what a fake pretending to be

  in trouble after writing more symphonies than any man

  I can ever remember.

  then there was Ernie again, asking to borrow a shot gun

  shell, claiming he had a special game in

  mind.

  I let him have it.

  then Borodin knocked, claiming his wife made him sleep on

  the stairway and always raised hell when he pressed his teabag

  with a spoon.

  after that I got tired of all the knocks and all the people—I kept

  screaming at Beethoven to go away but he kept knocking—

  so I cut the lights, stuck in my earplugs and went to sleep

  but it was no good because I had this nightmare and here was

  this Van Gogh fellow again, only he had not only cut off one ear

  but both ears, I mean, he really looked frigged-over, and he sent

  one ear to one prostitute and the other to another and the first

  prostitute gagged and tossed the ear over her left shoulder but

  the second prostitute just laughed, pulled down her panties and

  chugged the ear up her rectum saying, “now I can hear the pricks

  entering and the shit dropping.”

  then I awakened and Hemingway’s skull bones and blood dripped

  down on me from the

  ceiling.

  a reader writes

  “Dear Mr. Chinaski:

  I still like your writing but I liked it

  better back then, I mean when you were

  writing things like, ‘when she bent over I

  saw all that ass.’ Or

  you wrote about the drunk tanks and the rats

  and the roaches and the mice.

  I liked all your troubles with women, I have

  troubles with women too and I really dug what

  you were getting at.

  I liked all the craziness, the back alley

  fights, the police raids.

  Let’s have more of this, it keeps me going.

  I know it won’t mean shit to you but I’m

  going to tell you, anyhow.

  There’s a
group of us and we get oiled, we

  put on Frank Sinatra records and read your stuff

  out loud.

  Give us some more of the old

  stuff.

  yeah, yeah!”

  Dear Reader:

  About Mr. Sinatra, let’s forget that, but I

  must tell you that I am now 70 years old and it’s

  a surprise to me too but if I went on writing about

  peeking up women’s asses I wouldn’t have time to

  write about how my cat walks across the floor while

  carrying the secrets of Eternity to my brain, I mean,

  look, you can write something to death, most do when

  they find it sells books but I don’t write to sell

  books I write to keep my psyche’s guts from drowning

  in the dung-filled waters of this so-called Existence.

  Take Hemingway, he wrote himself into the same tight

  circle which eventually closed and squeezed him to

  death.

  Take J. D. Salinger, he wrote lively and compelling

  tales of ethyl youth but when he grew older there

  was no such thing left to write about.

  Specialization is death, bad rotten candy.

  Gamble is the only out, you have to keep throwing

  new dice.

  On women, they are over-rated because we over-rate

  them.

  You really can’t expect me to go on writing about the

  big asses of some women.

  But I did have some problems, a few doubts about

  leaving this vast and lucrative area—for I was getting

  more than the rent by doing so and so why take a chance

  about writing about, say, a one-winged bluebird struggling

  in a stack of mulch?

  I had to, that’s why, and take away the rent and more,

  and I’ll still have to.

  I make no excuses for my subject matter and it makes no

  excuses for me.

  Like, I once knew a popular song writer who had a

  problem—he had gotten famous by writing down and out

  songs about life in Hollywood motels and he lived in

  this one and got rich and famous and he still kept

  living there, afraid that if he left that place he’d

  lose his persona and his popularity.

  But actually, it makes no sense for a rich man to be

  living in a cheap Hollywood motel because it just

  isn’t the same as a poor man living there.

  Luckily for him they closed the place down and he

  didn’t have to pretend anymore.