Free Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski Page A

swinging electric light and the other torn people walking up and down the halls, half out of their minds, miserable, waiting to die, wanting to get drunk. I let him talk on. I am not much of a talker. I think very slowly, very. I have some bad teeth and I lisp once in a while. But mainly, when you’re talking, you’re going OUT , burning away, and although I don’t mind much burning, I don’t care for haggle, argument, point and counter point. I am not a lawyer. I am not a movie star. I don’t know what I am. But as I go on, the feeling is toward a gentle center somewhere. Anyhow7, he went on and I listened, and he said, “I could have had my picture on the cover of The Outsider myself…. and then, there’s Corrington…you and Corrington. You dedicated a book to him and then he writes this stuff about you. Look at my face. Why don’t you look at my face? Are you afraid of me?”
    “That is not why I do not look at your face,” I told him.
    “I love you,” he said, “I guess I still do, but you are not the person you used to be. I mean, dedicating a book to an editoress . That’s cheap. And, in #3, The Editor’s Bit, it was too long and it cheapened everything.”
    “Don’t you think,” I asked, “that the way he tore up Creeley was a courageous thing?”
    “I threw Outsider 3) in the toilet,” he said, “I flushed it down the toilet.”
    (Cavelski [ Kabalevsky?—ed. ] on now. Something Brilliant Suite , so clean, so sharp. There have been men in the world, thank the gods, thank the tulips, thanks the dead horses, thank the Winters and the midgets and the grass growing.)
    “I told my wife I would only be gone 10 minutes,” he said. “I have wasted a half hour. Well, these people think you’re GREAT , there’s a lot of space separating you from them, they don’t know you like I know you, so they’ll keep thinking you are great. You are safe.”
    Then he got up and moved toward the door. “Just keep on living your small, little insignificant life the way you are doing.”
    “Slam the door when you leave,” I asked him.
    He got in the last punch. “I’ll leave it for you to close,” he said and walked out leaving the door open.
    He won. I had to get up and close the door.
    Now, I can’t pretend that all this did not bother me. I am very full of self-doubt, self-doubt twists me in the vise forever, and I know that I often do badly and write badly and I don’t live exactly like a saint, but it does appear to me that I ought to be allowed to think along my own lines and live in my own way. The trouble with this writer is that he has built an image of me, probably from my poems, that I do not seem to stand up to in the flesh. Well, maybe I lie in my poems. I try not to. But if I do not present a flaming torch while sitting in a chair drinking a beer, I can’t help it. I don’t believe much in extra talk. I can talk for hours on paper because there is only the click of the keys and this brown torn shade pulled down in front of my face. It is a clean white thunder. That is why I do not like opera. Somebody I know pretty good and who knows I like the classical symphonies [* * *] asked me, “How come you do not like opera?” and I answered, “Because it contains the human voice.” “What’s wrong with that?” she asked. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the human voice. I think it’s fake. Almost anything that comes out in voice is fake. I don’t care if it is singing or the Gettysburg Ad., I don’t like it. Here you have some bitch singing ultra-soprano who beats her kids and squats over a bowl and drops turds like the rest of us, and she is through the Art-form trying to become purified and trying to purify the rest of us. I just don’t like the human voice: it drags down, it wears, it will simply not let things alone.”
    But she was fairly sharp. “You like the violin, or some of the horns, don’t you?”
    “Yes, at times,” I said.
    “But don’t you realize that these