Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski Read Free Book Online Page B

viewpoint of others that he is guilty of something but he does not know what. He is shuffled from room to room, endlessly, to the rattle of papers and bureaucracy, a silent simmering horrible living dream of ordinary mad and pressing, senseless everyday life. Most of his books are on this order: the shadow, the dream, the stupidity. Then there are other things—where a man turns into a bridge and lets people walk across him. Then there is another where a man gradually turns into a giant cockroach (“The Metamorphosis”) and his sister feeds him as he hides under the bed. Others, others. Kafka is everything.
    Forget Henry James. James is a light mist of silk. Kafka is what we all know. [* * *]
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    [To Jon and Louise Webb]
    November 30, 1962
     
    [* * *] Yes, disgusting the rent they charge of a dive in the business districts of anywhere, and the landlord doesn’t have to do anything but sit back and take it in while you hope to make it—somehow. Hang on, you’re getting an award too, somewhere, somehow; this is lit. history like Poetry when Ez was European editor and full of beans, or even like Mencken’s Mercury ; or Dial ; but you are essentially the new center and the part of this age, only people never realize the blood sweat weariness disgust breakdown & trial of soul that goes into it; and the puking little criticisms of milk-white jackasses. [* * *]
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    Federman was coeditor of Mica, the last issue of which appeared in November 1962. Bukowski’s story, “Murder,” was published not in Mica but in Notes from Underground, no. 1 (1964). Dorbin records no earlier story in Mica, although one was published in Canto (Los Angeles), winter 1961 .
     
     
    [To Raymond Federman]
    December 6, 1962
     
    Rec. your O.K. on “The Murder.” I write very few short stories—you’ve taken the only 2 I have written in years. Both of them were very close to a type of personal experience and feeling that just did not seem to fit into the shorter poem-form.
    You might call “The Murder” a prose-poem as I have worked with the poem so long that when I do try the story-form I still feel as if I were laying down the poem-line.
    It might interest you to know that over drinks and in conversational lulls with the few odd people that get in here I have told the story of “The Murder,” first telling them what made me write it, what was happening to me at the time, and how I took this and made it into a story—or whatever it is.
    Their comment at the finish was usually, “Jesus Christ!,” which I took more as a criticism than a vindication.
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    [To Ann Bauman]
    [Tuesday] December 18, 1962
     
    Terrible happenings. Got drunk Sunday night and thrown in jail. Must see judge on Wednesday. Fell and twisted ankle—swollen now, might be broken. Missed 2 days work. Judge might give me 120 days. This is not first offense. Will mean loss of job, of course.
    Have been laying here in horrible fit of depression. My drinking days are over. This is too much. Jail is a horrible place. I almost go mad there.
    I don’t know what is going to become of me. I have no trade, no future. Sick, depressed, blackly, heavily depressed.
    Write me something. Maybe a word from you will save me.
     
    [To Jon Webb]
    [December 19, 1962]
     
    I lucked it. Easy judge. Nobody got a day all the time I was in court, but all fined. A good 40 or 50 appeared ahead of me. Jail might be full. Christmas. Whatever. [* * *]
    Don’t be angry, Jon, but there are very few editors holding my recent stuff, so I can’t write them. And the other stuff, the older stuff has disappeared and I don’t keep records and/or carbons so it’s pretty much lost. I’ve dropped 200-to-300 poems this way since 1955, and I used to try to get some of these poems back, the larger batches of 20 or 40 that I remembered anyhow, but I have found that the elongated keepers of poems or destroyers of poems WITHOUT EXCEPTION do not respond to polite and reasonable inquiry with proper