The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Charles Bukowski
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why this spalpeen should set himself up as a special critic of literary know-how is more than I can dispense with a quodlibet.
Karl: Let me fill in the rest?
Henry: The stage is yours. I’ve quite hogged it with my sloughed-off loves.
Karl: The field boils with literary journals, a great slough and pot wash of them for those who wish to continue on the descensive, whether they be gnostics, pansies, or grandmothers who keep canaries and goldfish. Why these reactionaries cannot be content with their lot, why they must lacerate us with their yellow-knuckled souls, the looming kraken of their god-head, is beyond me. I certainly do not give a magniloquent damn what they print in their journals. I beg no alms for modern verse. Yet they come bickering to us. Why? Because they smell life and cannot stand it, they want to plunge us into the same spume and sputum that has held them daft with the deism of stale 1890 verse.
Henry: Amen.
Karl: But what I’m getting at, are you going to help me with this script?
Henry: Buy me another bottle of wine and I’ll think it over.
Karl: Your talent comes cheap.
Henry: What doesn’t nowadays? (Looking around) Ring down the curtain! Ring down the goddamned curtain! I want to get drunk! Audience, go home! YOU’VE HAD YOUR INTELLECTUAL CHIT-CHAT, now clear the hell out: I’ve still got, I still have, plans for the 20-year-old negress!
end . . .
Simbolica 21, 1961
Autographical Statement
. . . Born 8-16-20, Andernach, Germany. Brought to America at age of 2. And for amateur psychiatrists who wonder what makes me scream in my poems: when I was a kid the old man bought me an Indian suit and headfeathers when he noticed all the other kids in the neighborhood were playing cowboy. I owe the old boy a lot but since he’s dead I won’t bother to square accounts.
. . . Los Angeles City College, journalism and art, but the closest I ever got to being a reporter was as an errand boy in the composing room of the New Orleans Item. Used to have nickel beers in a place out back and the nights passed quickly.
. . . Started out writing short stories in such places as Atlanta over the bridge, paper shack, no light, no water, no heat, peanut butter sandwiches or candy bars . . . or New Orleans or the stale rotten Village, or Philly, Miami Beach, hell, North Carolina, Frisco, Houston, you name it . . .
. . . Air mailing short stories to the Atlantic Monthly and if they didn’t take them, tear them up. Finally heard of Story and Whit Burnett published my first. Appeared in international review, a ten buck rag, with Sartre, Lorca, everybody, then said to hell with it and got drunk for ten years.
. . . Ran errands for sandwiches and let the bartender beat me up—when I felt like it. I did work at times: dog biscuit factory, coconut man in a cake factory, shipping clerk, truck driver, stock boy for Sears-Roebuck, mailman, janitor, night watchman, dock hand, integral system player at your nearest track; hung posters in New York subways, god, I can’t remember them all; don’t want to. At the age of 35, sat down in front of a typewriter again and it all came out in poem form. To me, that is.
. . . But I found out that editors wanted everything in a cage. It was the same as punching the time clock or kidding the bartender out of a free drink. Boil it down, they said. You’re all over the placenta. But I found out that all they wanted was dullness and the poetic pose.
. . . I sat through a poetry class once that I’ll never forget, no matter how much dirt they throw on me. I mean burial, friend, not critical squirts across a verbal horizon.
. . . Well, I’ve just about said it, and there’s really nothing to say, either the poem says it or it doesn’t say it. I hold nothing against the boys who lucked it into the ivory and teach poetry classes. It’s a way of eating and a way of talking but I don’t think I could do it.
. . . If I have a god it is Robinson Jeffers, although I realize that I don’t write as he does.
. . . Married once to Barbara Fry, editor of Harlequin. She could not stand me. Divorce.
. . . What else do you want to know . . . ?
Long Shot Pomes for Broke Players, New York: 7 Poets Press, 1962
Bukowski Meets a Merry Drunk
“Getting drunk,” he told me, “is something like committing suicide, only here, most of the time the suicide lasts but one night and you have a chance to return to life.”
“How about grass?” I asked him.
“I’m not an expert on grass. I’d hate to get busted for grass; it seems so silly to get busted for so little. Grass is hardly that great. We all know that it is easier on the body and more often leads to a free and easy mellowness rather than violence. Drink tends to make asses of men more easily. Yet one’s lawful and easy to buy and use; the other is not. Of course, the oddity is that they arrest you for being drunk. In a sense it’s lawful to buy it but not to drink it. I’ve been in jail too much. And they make it rougher and rougher on the common drunk in Los Angeles. They used to just hold you overnight, then kick you out. Now there’s jail. You arrive in court a couple of days later, sweating, wondering. You’ve got to face a judge. Everybody gets fined, at least. Sometimes you can get over 30 days or 60 days. You never know. I try to stay off the streets. It seems like every time you go out on the streets nowadays either the police get you or the citizens do. I mean the citizens roll you or beat you up. I stay in now. Lock all the doors. The bars are the worst places. The bartenders shortchange you. The whores look to roll you. The muggers look to mug you. Being drunk is a state wherein inferior men have a chance at you that they’d seldom otherwise get.”
“Why do you continue to drink, then?”
“I don’t know. They say alcoholism is a disease. I often feel like telling the judge when he sentences me, ‘Your honor, medical authorities say that alcoholism is a disease. Would you fine or jail a man for having cancer?’ Of course, if I did ask him this he’d throw the book at me. You and I know that courts have very little to do with justice.”
“Are there any good sides at all to drinking?”
“Well, it breaks down the barriers to sexual intercourse on both sides. I’ve gotten a lot of sex through drinking that I would not have otherwise gotten. Of course, the price is pretty high: you usually get rolled, especially here in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles ladies are the hardest in the world, a real iron-hearted and dollar-mad bunch.”
“Anything else worthy in being an alcoholic?”
“Well, you usually don’t have to live so long. Almost all my drinking buddies and my ladies are dead. The stuff is fairly destructive to the body. I have been in and out of hospitals all my life. But drink has allowed me to survive under conditions that are almost intolerable: rat-infested rooms, months of no income, no jobs. The pressure becomes almost unbearable. One could go mad thinking about his state of affairs. Yet if you are able to get hold of a bottle of wine, your worries decrease for a couple of hours.”
“Was it because of drinking that you couldn’t hold jobs or did being unemployed lead to drinking?”
“It works both ways. Who wants to work anyway? It’s just a mutilation of your good hours.”
“This wine is very strong.”
“It’s better chilled or with ice. Sorry, I don’t have ice.”
“That’s all right.”
“I guess the hangovers are the worst. You can get in a very depressive state lying in some bedbug bed two days behind in the rent and listening to the landlord’s footsteps outside. There’s hardly a chance in this land unless you have a definite trade. Being over 45 and not having a trade, you might as well be dead. A dishwasher’s job is hardest to get. I used to show up at one of the big hotels downtown.