Free Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski

maybe even myself and go out and ask people to buy the g.d. book. If you think this is slick sales talk, it is not. I have thrown money into the fire. I have thrown my guts into the fire. I know more than this. But these people are the oddest set of living gods ya ever saw. She sells picture postcards on the sidewalks for meek coin and he stands 14 years hours a day poking paper into a cheap press he has hustled somewhere. I can’t tell you more than this, only that these people are giants in a world of ants. If you can get hold of The Outsider #3 (same address) (as book) perhaps you will understand more of what I mean.
    Meanwhile, glad your car running good. Mine lets up this cul de sac cloud of gaseous nauseous burning oil continually, until people stare as I go by…like a forest fire.
    I lost your photo. How could I do this? Ya don’t have another around, do you? Perhaps some day we will meet over a beer. It’s a long way to Sacramento, but perhaps a good horse…a little luck? And then we’d only be bored and disgusted with each other. Keep working with the poem; if you treat it right, it is the most faithful and truest of all.
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    [To Jon and Louise Webb]
    March 26, 1963
     
    [* * *] If you think the interview with Kaye ( Lit. Times ) was rough for me in the sense of the poppyseed question, you should have heard afterwards…when we’d both had a bit more to drink:
    K: “Look, if the world were going to end in 15 minutes what would you do, what would you the tell the people?”
    B: “I wouldn’t tell ’em anything.”
    K: “Now LOOK , man, you’re not cooperating! If the world were going to end in 15 minutes, I wanna know what you would do!”
    B: “I’d lay down and rest, just like I’m doing now.”
    K: “But what would you tell the people, man, the PEOPLE !”
    B: “Don’t forget your streetcar transfer.”
    And the odd thing is, you tell these people the truth and they think you are not cooperating. [* * *]
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    [To Jon and Louise Webb]
    March 28, 1963
     
    [* * *] I have already caught hell, in person, for #3, and I was going to spare you some of this, but it may prepare you for what’s to come. I bought him a bottle of wine and he arrived an hour later than he said he would—which is bad form; when I tell someone I will be there at a certain minute, I arrive on the minute . However, it gave his wine a chance to chill, and he fingered his drink and began, mostly telling me that there was another type of poverty that nobody knew about and he was going to write about it. What he means is that he has a $200 a week job and he somehow can’t MAKE IT ! I told him that I had little sympathy with this type of poverty, that one hundred and sixty million out of 180,000,000 in this country lived that way. I think it an entirely different thing to want something to eat and not being able to eat, and a place to sleep and rest the tired body, and only having the benches, the streets, the ice, the rain. Because a man needs 2 cars, a tv set, 12 pairs of shoes for his wife, this signifies to me only an unhandsome sort of greed that is needed to fill a hole where something else should be. I did not tell him all this but let him talk. Then he got on his job, writing blurbs for the pictures in nudie magazines, and then he said, “Oh, I know you were offered the job first and you turned it down, X. told me about it and I am tired of hearing about it, and you were offered the job again, there was another opening and you turned it down again…but you could not have gone up the ladder the way I have!” What he means is that he has been promoted from writing the nudie blurbs for the magazines that lay around in barbershops chairs and that he has been elevated to writing books about legitimate nudism…nudist camps, etc. He is right: I would not have gone up the ladder. I wouldn’t have lasted one day writing blurbs. I would rather wash dishes and go at night to the glory of a small box-like room with