Notes of a Dirty Old Man. Charles Bukowski
it.
I think I stayed long past my time, drinking and talking with Neal. the baby-sitter kept talking about Hemingway, somehow equating me with Hemingway until I told him to shove it and he went upstairs to check Jason. it was a few days later that Bryan phoned me:
“Neal’s dead, Neal died.”
“oh shit, no.”
then Bryan told me something about it. hung up.
that was it.
all those rides, all those pages of Kerouac, all that jail, to die alone under a frozen Mexican moon, alone, you understand? can’t you see the miserable puny cactii? Mexico is not a bad place because it is simply oppressed; Mexico is simply a bad place. can’t you see the desert animals watching? the frogs, horned and simple, the snakes like slits of men’s minds crawling, stopping, waiting, dumb under a dumb Mexican moon. reptiles, flicks of things, looking across this guy in the sand in a white t-shirt.
Neal, he’d found his movement, hurt nobody. the tough young jail kid laying it down alongside a Mexican railroad track.
the only night I met him I said, “Kerouac has written all your other chapters. I’ve already written your last one.”
“go ahead,” he said, “write it.”
end copy.
________
the summers are longer where the suicides hang and the flies eat mudpie. he’s a famous street poet of the ’50’s and still alive. I throw my bottle into the canal, it’s Venice, and Jack is holing up at the place for a week or so, giving a reading somewhere in a few days. the canal looks strange, very strange.
“hardly deep enough for self-destruction.”
“yeah,” he says in the Bronx movie voice, “you’re right.”
he’s gray at 37. hook-nose. slumped. energetic. pissed. male. very male. a little Jewish smile. maybe he’s not Jewish. I don’t ask him.
he’s known them all. pissed on Barney Rosset’s shoe at a party because he didn’t like something Barney said. Jack knows Ginsberg, Creeley, Lamantia, on and on, and now he knew Bukowski.
“yeah, Bukowski came to Venice to see me. scars all over his face. shoulders slumped. very tired-looking man. doesn’t say much and when he does it’s kind of dull, kind of commonplace. you’d never think he’d written all those books of poems. but he’s been in the post office too long. he’s slipped. they’ve eaten his spirit out. damn shame, but you know how it works. but he’s still boss, real boss, you know.”
Jack knows the inside, and it’s funny but real to know that people aren’t much, it’s all a motherfucking jive, and you’ve known it but it’s funny to hear it said while sitting by a Venice canal trying to cure an extra-size hangover.
he goes through a book. photographs of poets mostly. I am not in there. I began late and lived too long alone in small rooms drinking wine. they always figure that a hermit is insane, and they may be right.
he goes through the book. jesus christ, it’s a catsass sitting there with that hangover and the water down there, and here is Jack going through the book, I see spots of sunlight, noses, ears, the sheen of the photographic pages. I don’t care, but I guess we need something to talk about and I don’t talk well and he is doing the work, so here we go, Venice canal, the whole chickenshit sadness of living it out —
“this guy went nuts about 2 years ago.”
“this guy wanted me to suck his dick in order to get my book published.”
“did you?”
“did I? I belted him out! wit’ dis!”
he shows me the Bronx fist.
I laugh. he’s comfortable and he’s human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he’s good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers — intellectually. just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left wing — intellectually. I don’t care which way it goes — I only know: there are too many people afraid.
so Jack’s good meat. I’ve seen too many intellectuals lately. I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. I get tired of battling for each space of air for the mind. that’s why I stayed away from people for so long, and now that I am meeting people, I find that I must return to my cave. there are other things beside the mind: there are insects and palm trees and pepper shakers, and I’ll have a pepper-shaker in my cave, so laugh.
the people will always betray you.
never trust the people.
“the whole poetry game is run by the fags and the left-wing,” he tells me, staring into the canal.
there is a kind of truth here that it is bitter and false to dispute and I don’t know what to do with it. I am certainly aware that there is something wrong with the poetry game — the books of the famous are so very dull, including Shakespeare. was it the same then?
I decide to throw Jack some shit.
“remember the old poetry mag? I don’t know if it was Monroe or Shapiro or what, now it’s gotten so bad I don’t read it anymore, but I remember a statement by Whitman:
“ ‘to have great poets we need great audiences.’ well, I always figure a Whitman a greater poet than I, if that matters, only this time I think he got the thing backwards. it should read:
“ ‘to have great audiences we need great poets.’ ”
“yeah, so, all right,” Jack said, “I met Creeley at a party this time and I asked him if he ever read Bukowski and he got frozen real solid, wouldn’t answer me, man, like you know what I mean.”
“let’s get the fuck outa here,” I say.
we go out toward my car. I’ve got a car, somehow. a lemon, of course. Jack’s got the book with him. he’s still turning pages.
“this guy sucks dick.”
“oh yeah?”
“this guy married a schoolteacher who belts his ass with a whip. horrible woman. he ain’t writ a word since his marriage. she’s got his soul in her cunt-strap.”
“you talking about Gregory or Kero?”
“no, this is another one!”
“holy Jesus!”
we keep walking toward my car. I feel rather dull but I can FEEL this man’s energy, ENERGY, and I realize that it might be possible that I am walking next to one of the few immortal and unschooled poets of our time. and then, that doesn’t matter either, after I think about it a moment.
I get on in. the lemon starts but the gearshift is fucked-up again. I’ve got to drive in low all the way and the bitch stalls at every signal, battery down, I pray, one more start, no cops, no more drunk-driving raps, no more christs of any kinds on anybody’s kind of Cross, we can choose between Nixon and Humphrey and Christ and be fucked anyway we turn, and I turn left, brake up at the address and we get out.
Jack’s still at the pages.
“this guy’s o.k. he killed himself, his father, his mother, wife, but didn’t shoot his three children or the dog. one of the best poets since Baudelaire.”
“yeah?”
“yeah, shit.”
we get out of the lemon as I make the sign of the Cross for one more start on the mother battery.
we walk up and Jack bangs a door.
“BIRD! BIRD! this is Jack!”
the door opens and there is the Bird. I look twice. I can’t see whether it is a