the other night some kid told me (he was sitting in the center of the rug looking very spiritual and beautiful):
“I’m going to shut off all the sewers. the whole city will be floating in turds!”
why, the kid had already told me enough shit to bury the whole city of L.A. and halfway up into Pasadena.
then he said, “got another beer, Bukowski?”
his whore crossed her legs high and showed me a flash of pink panty so I got up and got the kid a beer.
revolution sounds very romantic, you know. but it ain’t. it’s blood and guts and madness; it’s little kids killed who get in the way, it’s little kids who don’t understand what the fuck is going on. it’s your whore, your wife ripped in the belly with a bayonet and then raped in the ass while you watch. it’s men torturing men who used to laugh at Mickey Mouse cartoons. before you go into the thing, decide where the spirit is and where the spirit will be when it is over. I don’t go with Dos — CRIME AND PUNISHMENT — that no man has a right to take another man’s life. but it might take a bit of thinking first. of course, the gall is that they have been taking our lives without firing a bullet. I too have worked for dismal wages while some fat boy has raped fourteen-year-old virgins in Beverly Hills. I’ve seen men fired for taking five minutes too long in the crapper. I’ve seen things I don’t even want to talk about. but before you kill something make sure you have something better to replace it with; something better than political opportunist slamming hate horseshit in the public park. if you are going to pay through the nose get something better than a 36 month warranty. as yet, I have seen nothing but this emotional and romantic yen for Revolution; I’ve seen no solid leader or no realistic platform to insure AGAINST the betrayal that has always, so far, followed. if I am going to kill a man I don’t want to see him replaced by a carbon copy of the same man and the same way. we have wasted history like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men’s crapper of the local bar. I am ashamed to be a member of the human race but I don’t want to add any more to that shame, I want to scrape a little of it off.
it’s one thing to talk about Revolution while your belly is full of another man’s beer and you’re traveling with a sixteen-year-old runaway girl from Grand Rapids; it’s one thing to talk about Revolution while three jackass writers of international fame have you dancing to the OOOOOOOOOOMMM game; it’s another thing to bring it about, it’s another thing to have happen. Paris, 1870-71, 20,000 people murdered in the streets, the streets as red with blood as with rain, and the rats coming out and eating at the bodies, and the people hungered, ravaged, no longer knowing what it meant, coming out and yanking the rats off the corpses and eating the rats. and where is Paris tonight? and what is Paris tonight? and my buddy is going to add shit on top of this and he smiles. well, he’s twenty and mostly reads poetry. and poetry is just a wet rag in the dishpan.
and pot. they always equate pot with Revolution. pot just isn’t that good. for Christ’s sake, if they legalized pot half the people would stop smoking it. prohibition created more drunks than grandmother’s warts. it’s only what you can’t do that you want to do. who wants to fuck their own wife every night? or, for that matter, even once a week?
there are a lot of things I would like to do. first off, I would like to stop getting such very ugly looking people for presidential nominees. then, I’d change the museums. there is nothing as depressing or quite as stinky as a museum. why there hasn’t been a greater percentage of three-year-old girls molested on museum steps I’ll never know. first off, I’d install at least one bar on each floor; this alone would pay all the salaries and would allow for regeneration and salvation of some of the paintings and the dropping sabre-toothed tiger whose asshole is beginning to look more like the 8-ball sidepocket. then I’d install a rock-band, a swing-band and a symphony band for each floor, plus three or four good-looking women to walk around and look good. you don’t learn anything or see anything unless you vibrate. most people look at that sabre-tooth behind all that hot glass and just slink by, a little bit ashamed and a little bit bored.
but can’t you see a guy and his wife, each a beer in hand, looking at the sabre-tooth, and saying, “god damn, look at those tusks! a little bit like an elephant, huh?”
and she’d say, “honey, let’s go home and make love!”
and he’d say, “your ass! not until I go down to the basement and see that 1917 Spad. they say Eddie Rickenbacker flew it himself. got seventeen hun. besides, I hear they got the Pink Floyd down there.”
but the Revolutionaries are going to burn the museum. they figure burning answers everything. they’d burn their grandmother if she couldn’t run fast enough. and then they are going to look around for water or for somebody who can do an appendectomy or somebody who can keep the truly insane from cutting their throats as they sleep. and they are going to find out how many rats live in a city, not human rats but rat-rats. and they are going to find that the rats are the last things that drown, burn, starve; that they are the first things that can find food and water because they have been doing so for centuries without help. the rats are the true revolutionaries; the rats are the true underground, but they don’t want your ass except to nibble on and they are not interested in OOOOOOOOOMMM.
I’m not saying give up. I’m for the true human spirit wherever it is, wherever it has been hiding, whatever it is. but beware of the cowboys who make it sound so good and leave you out on a plateau with 4 hard-core cops and eight or nine national guard boys and only your bellybutton as a last prayer. the boys screaming for your sacrifice in the public parks are usually the furthest away when the shooting begins. they want to live to write their memoirs.
it used to be the religion con. not the big church con, that was a drag. everybody bored, including the preacher. but the little storefront places, painted white. Jesus, how they carried on. I used to go in drunk and sit there and watch. especially after I was 86’d at the bars. it beat going home and beating my meat. the best religious con places were L.A., followed by N.Y. and Philly. those preachers were artists, man. they almost had me rolling on the floor too. most of those preachers recovering from hangovers, bloodshot eyes, needing more $$$ for something to drink or maybe even a pop, hell, I don’t know.
they almost had me rolling on the floor and I was pretty cool and pretty tired. it was better than a piece of ass even if it only caught you halfway. I wish to thank these babies, most of them negroes, pardon me, blacks, for some entertaining nights; I think that if I have ever written any poetry that I might have stolen some of it from them.
but now that game is fading. God just didn’t pay the rent or come up with that bottle of wine no matter how much they hollered or got their last clean clothes dirty on that floor. God said WAIT and it’s hard to WAIT when your belly is empty and your soul don’t feel so good and maybe you can only live to be 55 and the last time God showed up was almost 2,000 years ago and then He just did a few cheap carnival tricks, let some Jew outfox him, then blew the scene. a man gets g.d. tired of suffering. the teeth in his mouth are enough to kill him or the same same woman in the same same small room.
the religious con boys are moving in with the revolutionary con boys and you can’t tell asshole from pussy, brothers. realize this, and you have a beginning. listen carefully, and you have a beginning. swallow it all, and you’re dead. God got out of the tree, took the snake and Eden’s tight pussy away and now you’ve got Karl Marx throwing golden apples down from the same tree, mostly in blackface.
if there is a battle, and I believe that there is, always has been, and that’s what has made Van Goghs and Mahlers as well as Dizzy Gillespies and Charley Parkers, then please be careful of your leaders, for there are many in your ranks who would rather be president of General Motors than burn down the Shell Oil station around the corner. but since they can’t have one, they take the other. these are the human rats of the centuries who have kept us where we are. this is Dubcek coming back from Russia a half-man, afra
id of psychic death. a man must finally learn that it is better to die with his balls slowly cut off than to live any other way. foolish? no more foolish than the greatest miracle. but if you are caught in the trap, always understand what it is that you are trading for, exactly, or the soul will give way. Casanova used to run his fingers, his hands up the ladies dresses as men were torn apart in the king’s courtyard; but Casanova died too, just an old guy with a big cock and a long tongue and no guts at all. to say that he lived well is true; to say that I could spit on his grave without feeling is also true. the ladies usually go for the biggest damn fool they can find; that is why the human race stands where it does today: we have bred the clever and lasting Casanovas, all hollow inside, like the chocolate Easter bunnies we foster upon our poor children.
the nest of the Arts like the nests of the Revolutionaries crawl with the most unimaginable licecovered freaks, seeking coca-cola solace because they can neither find jobs as dishwashers or paint like Cezanne. if the mold don’t doesn’t want you, the only thing to do is to pray or work for a new mold. and when you find that that mold doesn’t want you, then why not another? everybody pleased in his certain way.
yet, old as I am, I am particularly pleased to live in this certain age. THE LITTLE MAN HAS SIMPLY GOTTEN TIRED OF TAKING TOO MUCH SHIT. it’s happening everywhere. Prague. Watts. Hungary. Vietnam. it ain’t government. it’s Man against govt. it’s Man who can no longer quite be fooled by a white Christmas with a Bing Crosby voice and dyed Easter eggs that must be hidden from kids who must WORK TO FIND THEM. of future presidents of America whose faces on TV screens must make you run to the bathroom and puke.
I like this time. I like this feeling. the young have finally begun to think. and the young have become more and more. but everytime they get a spearhead for their feelings that spearhead is murdered. the old and the entrenched are frightened. they know that the revolution can come through the voting polls in the American manner. we can kill them without a bullet. we can kill them by simply becoming more real and more human and voting out the shits. but they are clever. what do they offer us? Humphrey or Nixon. like I said, cold shit, warm shit, it’s all shit.
the only thing that has kept me from being assassinated is that I am small shit, I have no politics, I observe. I have no sides except the side of the human spirit, which after all does sound rather shallow, like a pitchman, but which means mostly my spirit, which means yours too, for if I am not truly alive, how can I see you?
man, I’d like to see a good pair of shoes on every man walking the streets and see that he gets a good piece of ass and a bellyfull of food too. Christ, the last piece of ass I’ve had was in 1966 and I’ve been jacking off ever since. and there just ain’t no jackoff compared to that wonder-hole.
it’s tough times, brothers, and I don’t know quite what to tell you. I’m white but I’ve got to agree — don’t too much quite trust that paint job — it’s soft and I don’t too much like softshits either, but I’ve seen a lot of you black boys who can make me puke all the way from Venice West to Miami Beach. the Soul has no skin; the soul only has insides that want to SING, finally, can’t you hear it, brothers? softly, can’t you hear it, brothers? a hot piece of ass and a new Cadillac ain’t going to solve a god-damned thing. Popeye will have one eye and Nixon will be your next president. Christ slipped off the cross and we are now nailed to the motherfucker, black and white, white and black, completely.
our choice is almost no choice. if we move too quickly, we are dead. if we do not move fast enough, we are dead. it isn’t our deck of cards. how you gonna shit with a 2,000-foot Christian cork jammed up your ass?
to learn, do not read Karl Marx. very dry shit. please learn the spirit. Marx is only tanks moving through Prague. don’t get caught this way please. first of all, read Celine. the greatest writer of 2,000 years. of course, THE STRANGER by Camus must fit in. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE BROTHERS. all of Kafka. all the works of the unknown writer John Fante. the short stories of Turgenev. avoid Faulkner, Shakespeare, and especially George Bernard Shaw, the most overblown fantasy of the Ages, a real true-blown shit with political and literary connections beyond belief. the only younger guy I can think of with the road paved ahead for him and kissing ass whenever necessary was Hemingway, but the difference between Hemingway and Shaw was that Hem wrote some good early work and Shaw wrote completely flip and dull crap all the way through.
so, here we are mixing Revolution with Literature and they both fit. somehow everything fits, but I grow tired and wait for tomorrow.
will the Man be at my door?
who gives a damn?
I hope this made you spill your tea.
________
is this the way it ends? Death through the nose of Everywhere? how inexpensive. how plagiaristic. how brutal. — raw hamburger forgotten and stinking on the stove.
he vomited across his chest, too sick to move his body.
never mix pills with whiskey. man, they weren’t kidding.
he could feel his soul floating out from under his body. he could feel it hang upside down there like a cat, its feet gripping the springs.
motherfucker, come back! he said to his soul.
his soul laughed, you’ve treated me too bad too long, baby. you’re gettin’ what you need.
it was about three a.m. in the morning.
with him it wasn’t dying that mattered. with him it was the unsolved and loose parts left behind — a four-year-old daughter in some hippy camp in Arizona; stockings and shorts on the floor, dishes in the sink; an unpaid for car, gas bills, light bills, phone bills; and parts of him left in almost every state in the Union, parts of him left in the unwashed pussies of half a hundred whores; parts of him left on flagpoles and firescapes, empty lots, Catholic Church Communion classes, jail cells, boats; parts of him left in band-aids and down in sewers; parts of him left in thrown-away alarm clocks, thrown away shoes, thrown-away women, thrown-away friends …
it was so sad, so very sad. who could blow the blues the way they really were? nobody could. that’s it. nobody could or ever did. they could only try and get bluer than blue because there was no way home.
he heaved again, then lay still. he could hear the crickets. crickets in Hollywood crickets along Sunset Blvd. healthy crickets: that’s all he had.
I blew it, Jesus, I blew it, he thought.
yeah, brother, you blew it, said his soul.
but I want to see my little girl again, he said to his soul.
your little girl again? you’re no artist! you’re no man! you’re soft!
I’m soft, he answered his soul, you’re right, I’m soft.
he’d reached the end of cures. beer wouldn’t go down. not even water. no pills, no pop, no hash, no grass, no love, no breeze, no sound — just crickets — no hope — just crickets — not even a match to burn the fucking place down.
then it got worse.
the same tune started playing over and over again in his head:
“you’d better tend to business Mr. Business man,
while you can …”
and that was it. the same melody over and over again:
“you’d better tend to business Mr. Business man,
while you can …”
“you’d better tend to …”
“you’d better …”
“you’d …”
with an effort borrowed only from the madness of space (who can blow the blues? nobody can.) he reached up and turned on the little overhead lamp, which was then just an exposed electric bulb, the shade long ago smashed off (who can blow the blues?) and he picked up a postcard found in the mailbox a few days back and the postcard said:
“dear — : we slap greetings at you while drenched in German beer and Schnapps,
in stained-glass waiting …”
the lines fell off into that sloppy and impolite scrawl of fat boys who live luckily upon the land without the need of excessive wit or courage.
something about leaving
for England tomorrow. poems slowly coming. too much grease and few visitations. too much the world hanging by the tip of its cock.
“we consider you the greatest poet since Eliot.”
then the professor’s signature and his pet student’s signature.
only since Eliot? what a short inch that was. he’d taught these bastards how to write a living poetry of clarity and now they were joyriding and finger-fucking Europe while he died alone in a skid-row room in Hollywood.
“you’d better tend to business Mr. Business man,
while you can …”
he threw the postcard down on the floor. it didn’t matter. if he could only feel some real good ace-high self-pity or some two-bit anger or some chickenshit vengeance, it could save him. but it was all dry inside of him, dry and silly and the way it had been for a long time.
the professors had begun knocking at the door about two years ago, trying to find out where it came from. and there was nothing to tell them. the professors were all the same — a bit pretty and rather rested in a female sort of way, gangling long legs, large picture window eyes, and finally rather stupid, and so their visits didn’t please him at all. they were, in reality, only the fat-head nobles of a changing structure, which like an idiot in a candy store, refused to see the walls burning down. their candy was the mind.
— the clinging to the intellect, the clinging to the intellect, the clinging …