Screams From the Balcony Read Free Page B

Ann Reynolds sounds like somebody to fill Duffy-gap. [* * *]
    Thanks for word on Outsider Finally got card from them through Coastlines . Asking me for contributions. Ah, well.
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    Bukowski’s birthday is August 16th .
     
     
    [To Jory Sherman]
    August 17, 1960
     
    it’s all over, I’m 40, over the hill, down the other side…made the rounds Sunday nite…alone…sat in strip joint, watched them shake and wiggle like something going on…bored…$1.25 for beer, but drank em like water. water hell. I don’t drink much water. Place after place…faces sitting there empty as jugs. shit. shit. oh, I got a lovely buncha coconuts! nothing. woke up with cracked toe, blood, couldn’t walk. oh I got a lovely buncha, a lovely buncha coconuts!
    old girlfriend sent over huge buncha flowers, all kinds, quite nicea her. like a funeral, like a beautiful funeral, buried at 40…
    sick today. [* * *]
    Do you mind if I sign myself Charles? it is old habit. when I write or when somebody writes me I am Charles. When they talk to me in a room I am Hank. This, my solidification. A chunk of 40 stone.
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    [To Jory Sherman]
    [August 22, 1960]
     
    black day, they have kicked my horse-ass good. 3 rejects, San Fran. Review, White Dove , and Oak Leaves . [* * *]
    Girlfriend said I was as drunk the other night as she’d ever seen me. I used vile lang. and yanked the mattress off her bed and then leaned back in chair and gave 2 hours lecture (while drinking) on the arts and what they meant or didn’t mean, and who was what and why.
    Kid, I am definitely cracking. These last 3 or 4 months have ended me. I think I’m written out. I’ve said it all. What the hell else? I don’t care. I’ve still got the horses and the whores and Schlitz. Let these 19 year old editors gobble the gugga of rooster.
    I’m going to try to buy a shack somewhere and give everything up. Just be dirty old man waiting to die. I’m sick of all the 8 hour faces and laughter and babble, Dodger talk and pussy-talk and zero-talk. A roof, no rent. That’s my aim. Pick up enough washing dishes 3 times a week or pimping. Lord, I’m sick of it all. And poetry too. No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing. I couldn’t die stretched in a blizzard because I’m already dead. So let Pound have it. And Keats. and Shelley. and belly. piss. the mailman with his smirking white rejectee envelopes, and all the grass growing and the cars going by as if it all doesn’t matter. Christ, I’m watching a guy water his lawn now. His mind is as empty as a department store flowerbowl. Water. water. water. make the grass grow green. GREAT. G R E A T.[* * *]
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    [To E. V. Griffith]
    [September 19, 1960]
     
    Got you plug in Quagga vol. I, no. 2, just off the press: “Charles Bukowski’s new book will be off the press early next month, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail . It is being published by Hearse Chapbooks in California.” So you see, I’m working at it. Pretty lively poem in Quagga about a riot that occurred while I was in Moyamensing Prison. Might instigate the sale of a couple of chapbooks. I feel that you have been somehow reluctant to put out the Wail, perhaps feeling it would not move, since I am an isolationist socially speaking and have only enemies, but life is sometimes odd Griff, and it might be that this thing will put some dough in your pockets. I feel I am a more lively writer than Crews, Creeley, Mason, etc., Eckman, but we’ll see.
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    [To E. V. Griffith]
    Mid September, [1960]
     
    Got your note on chapbook progress the other day. It appears to me that you are doing too much at once, getting out too many chapbooks at once, and although mine was started long ago others seem to be coming out ahead of me. I don’t know what the hell to make of it all and often wonder how another writer would have taken it.