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Authors: Charles Bukowski,Edited with an introduction by David Calonne

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“It's nothing. . . . Now, everybody, please step back. . . . You are frightening him. . . .”

The crowd was quite nice. Adults and children all, they stepped back. Not too far, but they did step back.

Harry looked up at the top of the truck.

“Bozo, it's me. . . . Remember me? Come on down . . . and bring that . . . thing . . . you have in your mouth with you. If you do, we'll be friends forever, I promise you! Bozo, are you listening?”

“What's that thing in his mouth, mister?” asked the same little girl.


GODDAMN IT, IT
'
S MY FINGER
!
NOW, DO YOU UNDERSTAND
?”

“What's he doing with your finger, mister?”

Harry looked at Bozo just sitting up there in the same dream-like trance.

Harry turned to the driver of the ice cream truck.

“Get me something, Something luscious! Something that . . . if you were a monkey . . . you'd come down and eat!”

“Huh?”

“All right, forget it . . . get me an ice cream bar!”

“What flavor?”

“Banana.”

The driver worked his way toward the back of the truck.

Harry looked back up at the monkey.


BOZO
!
YOU MUST BE HUNGRY
!
WE WANT YOU TO EAT
!
UNDERSTAND
?
WE
'
RE GOING TO GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO EAT, UNDERSTAND
?
EAT
!”

Bozo made a little sound.

Harry smiled.

Then Bozo took the finger out of his mouth, looked at it, put it back into his mouth, and started chewing.


OH SHIT
!
NOT THAT
!
STOP STOP STOP
!”

Bozo kept chewing. The driver came up to Harry and attempted to hand him the ice cream bar, saying, “We're outta banana. . . .”

Harry slapped the bar to the street. Harry tried to climb the side of the truck but the side was smooth, had no grips.

Harry stopped.

His bloody hand had left ugly and strange smears against the truck side.

Harry put his head there, rested.

“Oh shit . . . oh god. . . .”

Then he pulled his head from the truck side. He looked back to the top of the truck.

Bozo was giving it a last munch. . . .

Then he rounded his mouth and spit. . . .

A little bone flipped through the air and landed upon the asphalt. Harry looked at it, then turned away.

He began walking back down the street toward his house.

Then he heard a voice.


HEY, MISTER,
WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT YOUR MONKEY
?”

Henry turned.

It was the little boy who had the snot emanating from his left nostril.

“You can have him. . . .”


OH BOY
!
OH BOY, OH BOY, OH BOY
!”

Harry began to walk toward his house again.

He could see the ambulance in the driveway. There were two or three figures . . . maybe four . . . waiting there. . . . Maybe more. Things were beginning to blur. One of the figures that he could distinguish was his wife.


HARRY, THE AMBULANCE IS WAITING
!
SHOULD WE COME DOWN THERE
?”

He waved his arm over his head, the one with the bloody hand. . . .


NO, NO
!
I
'
LL BE THERE SOON
!”

Strangely, he felt as if not much had happened.

But he knew that
something
had happened.

As he walked along he held his hand down to his side,
that
hand, and he didn't look at it.

Mrs. Johnson was still watering the same spot on her lawn as he walked by.


MY HUSBAND
,” she screamed upon seeing him, “
IS GOING TO KICK YOUR FRIGGING ASS
!”

There was nothing else to do but walk toward the ambulance.

Playing and Being the Poet

4/12/92 11:42 P.M.

Where to begin? Well, it was Nietzsche who, when asked about the poets, responded, “The Poets? The Poets lie too much.”

As one reads the poetry of the past and of our time, this criticism seems damned apt. There seems much posturing, prancing . . . playing at being the poet, this select messenger from the gods. I believe that if the gods selected most of our poets, then they did, indeed, select badly. Of course, there is much con and chicanery in all the Arts, but I believe the poets are the best at besmirching their particular field.

And I will grant you here that it's much easier to criticize poetry than to write it. When I was a very young man, I enjoyed reading the critical articles in the
Sewanee
and
Kenyon Reviews
, in regard to poetics. Those critics were such darlings, such snobs, so protected, so inbred, and they were amusingly vicious—at times—toward other critics. They neatly sliced each other to pieces in the finest of language, and I admired that, for my own language was rather coarse and direct, which I preferred, yet their way held much wonderment for me. Ah, such a gentlemanly way of calling each other assholes and idiots. Yet, beyond this, they had some insights on what was wrong with poetry and what could possibly be done about that. But, look here, when I turned to the actual poetry within the pages of those magazines, it was very bad poetry—pretentious, pale, inconclusive, muddied, boring. . . . It was an insult to the pages. The fight was gone, the gamble was gone. It was stale milk. It was the wretchedness of being all too careful. And when the critics themselves tried the poem, it had none of the bombast and fireworks of their critical pieces. It was as if moving to the poem form, they left what there was of their souls someplace else. Poetry is the final testing ground and very few practitioners in our time or in centuries past have passed the test.

Poetry comes from where you've lived and how you've lived and from what makes you create it. Most people have already entered the death process by the age of 5, and with each passing year there is less of them in the sense of being original beings with a chance to break through and out and away from the obvious and the
mutilating
. Generally, those who do have had life experiences and continue to have life experiences that set them aside, isolate them in such a manner that they become beautiful freaks, visionaries with their own visions. Perhaps there is some luck involved here but not exactly, for daily we are given choices, and if you choose wrong too often, anti-life, then you will soon be dead long before burial.

Those who are best at poetry are those who have to write it and will continue to write it no matter the result. For, if they don't, something else will happen: murder, suicide, madness, god knows what. The act of writing the Word down is the act of miracle, the saving grace, the luck, the music, the going-on. It clears the space, it defines the crap, it saves your ass and some other people's asses along with it. If fame somehow comes through all this, you must ignore it, you must continue to write as if the next line were your first line.

Also, there
are
other writers, though very few of them. But for
me, there were maybe 6 or 7 who kept me going when all else said stop.

And although we must ignore praise, there are times when we might allow ourselves to feel good for just a bit. I received a letter from a prisoner in a jail in Australia who wrote me, “Your books are the only books that pass from cell to cell.”

But, I've talked enough about writing poetry here; there is still time tonight to write some. A few beers, a cigar, classical music on the radio. See you later.

—Charles Bukowski

Sources

“The Reason Behind Reason,”
Matrix
, vol. 9, no. 2, Summer 1946.
“Love, Love, Love,”
Matrix
, vol. 9, nos. 3–4, Winter 1946–47.
“Cacoethes Scribendi,”
Matrix
, vol. 10, nos. 3–4, Fall-Winter 1947.
“The Rapist's Story,”
Harlequin
, vol. 2, no. 1, 1957. “80
Airplanes Don't Put You in the Clear,”
Harlequin
, vol.
2, no. 1, 1957. “Manifesto: A Call for Our Own
Critics,”
Nomad
, no. 5/6, 1960. “Peace, Baby, Is Hard Sell,”
Renaissance
4, 1962. “Examining My Peers,”
Literary Times (Chicago)
, vol. 3, no. 4, May, 1964. “If I Could
Only Be Asleep,”
Open City Press
, vol. 1, no. 6,
January 6–13, 1965. “The Old Pro,”
Ole
, no. 5, 1966. “Allen Ginsberg/Louis Zukofsky,”
Ole
, no. 7, May 1967.
“Notes of a Dirty Old Man,”
Open City
, no. 32,
December 8–14, 1967. “Bukowski on Bukowski,”
Open City
, no.
92, February 23–March 1, 1969. “The Absence of the Hero,”
Klacto 23/International
, Frankfurt, 1969. “Christ With Barbecue Sauce,”
Candid Press
, December 27, 1970. “The Cat in the Closet,”
Nola
Express
no. 51, March 20–April 2, 1970. “More Notes of
a Dirty Old Man,” December 6, 1970,
Candid Press.
“Ah,
Liberation, Liberty, Lilies on the Moon!” unpublished ms, UCSB, 1971. “Sound and Passion,”
Adam
, vol. 15, no. 3, March 1971. “I Just Write
Poetry So I Can Go to Bed With Girls,”
Rogue
,
No. 29, April 1971. “The House of Horrors,” unpublished ms,
1971, University of Arizona Library. “Untitled essay on d.a. levy,”
The Serif
, Vol. VIII, no. 4, December 1971. “Henry
Miller Lives in Pacific Palisades and I Live on Skid
Row, Still Writing About Sex,”
Knight
, vol. 9, no. 7, 1972.
“A Foreword to These Poems,”
Anthology of L.A. Poets
, eds.
Charles Bukowski, Neeli Cherry & Paul Vangelisti, Laugh Literary/Red Hill
Press, 1972. “
The Outsider
: Tribute to Jon Edgar Webb,”
Wormwood Review
, vol. 12, no. 1, issue 45, 1972.
“Vern's Wife,”
Fling
, vol. 15, no. 2, May 1972. “Notes
of A Dirty Old Man,”
Nola
, No. 104, April
14–27, 1972. “He Beats His Women,”
Second Coming: Special Charles
Bukowski Issue
, vol. 2, no. 3, 1973. “Notes of A
Dirty Old Man,”
L.A. Free Press
, June 1, 1973.
“Notes of A Dirty Old Man,”
L.A. Free Press
, June
28, 1974. “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,”
L.A. Free
Press
, August 22, 1975. “Notes of a Dirty Old
Man: Notes of a dirty old driver of a light
blue 1967 Volkswagen TRV 491,”
L.A. Free Press
, Nov. 7, 1975.
“The Big Dope Reading,”
Hustler
, March 1977. “East Hollywood: The
New Paris,”
Second Coming
, Vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1981.
“The Gambler,”
High Times
, November 1983. “The Ladies Man of
East Hollywood,”
Oui
, February/March 1985. “The Bully,” unpublished in
English, 1985. “The Invader,” unpublished in English, 1986. “Playing and Being the Poet,”
Explorations '92
, 1992.

About the Authors

Charles Bukowski
was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 and brought to California at age three. Although Bukowski spent two years at Los Angeles City College, he was largely self-educated as a writer. He spent much time in his youth in the Los Angeles Public Library, where he encountered some of the writers whose work would influence his own: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Nietzsche, D.
H.
Lawrence,
Céline,
e.
e.
cummings,
Pound,
Fante,
and
Saroyan. He was a prolific poet and prose writer, publishing more than fifty volumes. City Lights has published several Bukowski titles including
Tales of Ordinary Madness, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,
and
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990.
Charles Bukowski died in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994.

David Stephen Calonne
is the author of
William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being, The colossus of Armenia: G.I. Gurdjieff and Henry Miller
,
and
Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am/Interviews & Encounters 1963–1993.
For City Lights, he has previously edited the Bukowski anthology
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990.
He has lectured in Paris and at many universities including UCLA, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of London, Harvard, and Oxford. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. During Spring Term 2009, he taught a seminar on William Saroyan at the University of Chicago. Presently he teaches at Eastern Michigan University.

1
. “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,” “Twenty Tanks from Kasseldown,” and “Hard Without Music” may be found in Charles Bukowski,
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944
–
1990,
ed. and with an introduction by David Stephen Calonne, San Francisco: City Lights, 2008. The early stories are remarkable not only for their style and approach, but also because they encapsulate virtually all of the major themes that would preoccupy Bukowski throughout his career: his romantic and erotic quest, sense of alienation, troubled family history, discovery of alcohol, struggles to be a writer, and love of classical music.

2
See “Carson McCullers” in
The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps
, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001, p. 35.

3
Juvenal,
Satires
VII, ll. 50–52: “Nam si discedas, laqueo tenet ambitiosi/consuetudo mali, tenet insanabile multos/scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde sensecit.” “You can't escape [you're caught up in the noose of bad ambitious habit]; there are so many possessed by an incurable endemic writer's itch that becomes a sick obsession.” Juvenal,
The Sixteen Satires
, trans. Peter Green, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 56. On literary creativity and hypergraphia, see Alice W. Flaherty,
The
Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and the Creative Brain
. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

4
For Bukowski and the little magazines see Abel Debritto,
Who's Big in the “Littles”: A Critical Study of the Impact of the Little Magazines and Small Press Publications on the Career of Charles Bukowski from 1940 to 1969.
Ph.D. thesis, Universitat Aut
ò
noma de Barcelona, 2009.

5
Charles Bukowski,
Ham on Rye
. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982, Chap. 34, p. 146.

6
Debritto,
Who's Big in the Littles
, p. 118. Debritto also reveals that Bukowski corresponded with Burnett from 1945 to 1955, again dispelling the myth of his dropping out of the literary world during his “ten-year drunk.”

7
Friedrich Nietzsche,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. p. 40.

8
Carl Weissner's translations led directly to Bukowski's success in Germany and Europe. For Bukowski's connection to Germany and Carl Weissner, see Jay Dougherty's interview with Bukowski, “Charles Bukowski and the Outlaw Spirit” in Charles Bukowski,
Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews & Encounters 1963–1993
, ed. and with an Introduction by David Stephen Calonne. Northville: Sundog Press, 2003, pp. 231–235. On Bukowski's German reception, see Horst Schmidt,
The Germans Love Me For Some Reason: Charles Bukowski und Deutschland
. Augsburg: MaroVerlag, 2006.

9
Maurice Berger, “Libraries Full of Tears: The Beats and the Law,” in Lisa Phillips,
Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965
. Paris/New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Flammarion, 1995, pp. 122–137.

10
See Barry Miles,
Charles Bukowski
. London: Virgin, 2005, pp. 152–153 and Howard Sounes,
Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
, New York: Grove Press, 1998, pp. 83–84.

11
Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips, and Jerome Rothenberg,
A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1969–1980.
New York: Granary Books, 1998, p. 48. On d.a. levy, see
d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution
, eds. Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg, Huron, Ohio, Bottom Dog Press, 2007. For Bukowski's essay in support of Lowell, see
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook
, pp. 61–62. On the underground, see Jean-Francois Bizot,
20 Trips from the Counter-culture: Graphics and Stories from the Underground Press Syndicate.
London: Thames and Hudson, 2006;
Diane Kruchkow and Curt Johnson, eds.,
Green Isle in the Sea: An Informal History of the Alternative Press, 1960–85
. Highland Park: December Press, 1986; Roger Lewis,
Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and its Context: Notes on a Cultural Revolution.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

12
Jack Micheline,
Sixty Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints
. San Francisco: FMSBW, 1999. See Miles, p. 160; Sounes, p. 93. Micheline on Bukowski,
San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets
, ed. David Meltzer, pp. 226–227. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001.

13
Kenneth Rexroth, “There's Poetry in a Ragged Hitch-hiker,”
The New York Times
, July 5, 1964. Bukowski on Rexroth,
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970
,
ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993, p. 165, p. 330. On Bukowski and the Beats, see Jean-Fran
ç
ois Duval,
Buk et Les Beats: Essai Sur La Beat Generation
. Paris: Editions Michalon, 1998. English edition, trans. Alison Ardron,
Bukowski and the Beats
. Northville: Sun Dog Press, 2002.

14
Harold Norse on Bukowski, see
Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey.
New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989, pp. 420–422; 424–426; and “Laughter in Hell,” in
Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row
, ed. Daniel Weizman, New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000, pp. 91–96.

15
Bukowski's fine memoir in
Open City
of his meeting with Neal Cassady and Cassady's death in
Mexico is anthologized in Ann Charters,
The Portable Beat Reader
.
New York: Penguin 1992, pp. 438–444; David Kherdian,
Beat Voices:
An Anthology of Beat Poetry
. New York: Henry Holt,
1995, pp. 120–123; and in Jeffrey H. Weinberg, ed.
Writers
Outside the Margin
. Sudbury: Water Row Press, 1986, pp. 94–96.
Charters also included another of Bukowski's “Notes” columns in
The
Portable Sixties Reader
, New York: Penguin, 2003, pp. 436–439.

16
On Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, see Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters,
Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day
. San Francisco: City Lights Books and Harper and Row, 1980, p. 210, p. 221; also see Barry Silesky,
Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time
. New York: Warner Books, 1990, pp. 177–178; Bukowski's poem “The Bard of San Francisco” is an homage to Ferlinghetti; see
onthebus
Issue 14, Vol. VI, No. 2, 1997, pp. 30–32, collected in
Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories.
Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, pp. 233–235.

17
See Sounes, pp. 140–141.

18
See Debritto, p. 214, 330.

19
Bukowski remarked, “I give poetry readings—for money. Strictly survival. I don't like to do it but I quit my job last January 9 and now I've become what you'd call a literary hustler. I do things now that I wouldn't have done before. I don't like to do it at all.” See
Sunlight Here I Am
, p. 47.

20
Bukowski's obsessive returning to the site of his traumatic wounds also recalls Lacan's conception of the unconscious. Slavoj Zizek declares that “the unconscious is not the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks out. Therein lies Lacan's version of Freud's motto
Wo es war, soll ich werden
(Where it was, I am to become): not ‘The ego should conquer the id,' the site of the unconscious drives, but ‘I should dare to approach the site of my truth.' What awaits me ‘there' is not a deep Truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with.” Slavoj Zizek,
How to Read Lacan
. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007, p. 3. Bukowski often uses humor to live with that unbearable truth.

21
e.e. cummings,
A Selection of Poems
. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965, p. 155.

22
On Rabelais see Bukowski's “he died April 9, 1553” in
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems.
Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001, pp. 218-19. And in an interview from 1981 he explained: “. . . the
Decameron
, Boccaccio. That is what influenced
Women
a great deal. I loved his idea that sex was so ridiculous, nobody could handle it. It was not so much love with him; it was sex. Love is funnier, more ridiculous. That guy! He could really laugh at it. He must have really gotten burnt about five thousand times to write that stuff. Or maybe he was just a fag; I don't know. So, love is ridiculous because it can't last, and sex is ridiculous because it doesn't last long enough.”
Sunlight Here I Am
, p. 179.

23
For Bukowski's favorite films, see
Sunlight
, p. 230. On black humor, see Morris Dickstein,
Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
, New York: Basic Books, 1977, “Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties.”

24
On the UPS, see Bizot, pp. 6, 226–227.

25
For a superb study of Bukowski and violence, see Alexandre Thiltges,
Bukowski
ou Les Contes de la Violence Ordinaire
. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006. Thiltges' monograph, unfortunately not yet translated into English, is the best single work of Bukowski scholarship to have appeared to date.

26
Bukowski had submitted the story to Curt Johnson, publisher of
Candid Press
, to whom he wrote a letter dated December 3, 1970: “Just glad I could curve one by you guys. That $45 check didn't bounce anyhow and allowed me to get some repairs on my old '62 Comet to get it running again so I could get around to my chickenshit poetry readings where I read half-drunk and hustle up a few more bucks. Now listening to Haydn. I gotta be crazy. Enjoyed writing the story, though. Read in the paper where they had caught some cannibals somewhere—Texas I think—and when they pulled them over this gal was just cleaning the meat off the fingers of a hand, nibbling. . . . I took it from there.” Uncollected letter, Brown University Library.

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