"Okay." "You don't like nature." "Whores are natural." "The trees, the countryside..." "They bore me." "Carl Weisner took us through a trip through Germany, showing us all the hills and the hill with the greenness." "I started nodding off." "Shit, one time I was giving a poetry reading up in Oregon or Washington somewhere." "Some guy was driving us after the reading where I'm supposed to rape an English teacher, a female teacher by the time I got there I was so dulled I couldn't even get my dick up." "Trees, greeness..." "It's okay!" "It's okay, but I mean it can finally be deadening." "It's just like uh green trees... green trees, green trees, green trees." "Okay!" "All right." "What are you gonna do with it?" "Give me the cities, give me smog." "I like what the kid told me in Paris." "The king of the what?" "The king of the punks?" "He said:" ""People complain about smog" " I love it" and he zipped up and down" "And you know there is a way of loving smog it's not a non-truth, it feels good." "You walk out and you go" "You're part of it, shit!" "You're walking through smog, you live through smog you love the buildings, you love the inflation" "There are creatures who adjust to conditions." "There will be fo...smog people, inflation people." "The higher the price." "You're gonna go in their place someday you're gonna, the waitress'll say" ""Well, it's a dol..$365 for a a leg sandwich of mutton."" "and you'll say: "Is that all?" "I'm gonna pay you $565 and here's a $365 tip!"" "These are the people who are gonna survive, don't you see?" "They're ready for inflation." "They're ready for smog." "They love it!" "What's the difference?" "It's only mental." "Go with it!" "Here, have a $500 tip." "No, it's okay." "It doesn't mean anything unless you want to make it mean something." "Hell..." "So you keep changing governments, you keep changing women, what's the difference?" "Here we're back to women." "You said that starving doesn't create art, that it creates many things but mainly it creates time." "Oh yeah, well hey, that's very basic." "I'd hate to use up your film to say this" "But you know if you work an 8 hour job and you're gonna get 55 cents an hour you're gonna get it if you stay home you're not gonna get any money but you're gonna have time to write things down on paper." "I guess I was one of those rarities of, of our modern times who did starve for his art." "I really starved, (you know) to have... a 24 hour day, unintruded upon by other people." "I gave up food, I gave up everything just to..." "I was a nut." "I was dedicated." "But you see... the problem is you can be a dedicated nut and not be able to do it." "Dedication without talent is useless." "Understand what I mean?" "Yeah" "Dedication alone is not enough." "You can starve and want to do it" "Hey, you know?" "Just a waste." "I know." "And how many do that?" "They starve in the gutters and they don't make it" "But you knew you had talent." "They all think they have." "How do you know that you're the one?" "You don't know." "It's a shot in the dark, you take it or you become a normal civilized person from 8 to 5." "Get married, have children" "Christmas together, here comes Grandma." ""Hi Grandma, come on in" "Hi you"" "You know." "Shit, I couldn't take that." "I'd rather murder myself." "I guess just, in the blood of me couldn't stand the whole thing that's going on." "The ordinariness of life." "I couldn't stand family life." "I couldn't stand job life." "I couldn't stand anything I looked at." "I just decided I either had to starve, make it, go mad, come through or do something." "Even if I hadn't made it on writing" "I could not do the 8 to 5, I would've been a suicide, something." "I'm sorry." "I could not accept the snail's pace, 8 to 5." "Johnny Carson." "Happy Birthday." "Christmas." "New Year." "To me this is the sickest of all sick things." "So I just had to lock a helldown, somebody took a pile of my short stories somewhere." "Now I just sit around and drink wine, and I talk about myself because you guys ask the questions." "Not because" "I give the answers." "Okay?" "Okay." "So one time I'm working in this comic book house and these two clerks got in an argument about... comic books." "Somebody counted a rack of a a stack of comic books wrong." "The other one's arguing about, I said:" ""Jesus Christ." "This job isn't even, a comic book house." "It isn't even worth arguing about."" ""Well, that's the first time we heard you speak, in a couple of weeks."" ""We all know you always think you're a genius."" ""We know you think you're a genius!" "We know you think you're a genius!"" "I saw all these teeth come out." "All the faces" "I wasn't trying to be a genius, I just didn't want to be in a comic book house." "I want to be out in the park." "I want to be sailing down a river in a sailboat" "I want to- anything decent." "I could not resign myself to the 8 hour job of nothingness." "I could not understand it." "That's all." "So I bummed and I bummed and I bummed." "It was one job after another." "It was a park bench..." "It was a job in Dallas." "It was a job in Atlanta." "It was a job in Miami." "Name the city somewhere south, I been there." "And that's how one day you ended up in Philadelphia?" "Oh yeah, Philadelphia." "First I ended up in New York." "Then, New York was so bad I thought: "I want to go to a nice, shady, quiet city."" ""Everything is calm, the people are decent, there's no trouble."" ""Philadelphia, what do they call it?" "The City of Brotherly Love."" ""I'll just go there where people are dumb." "They don't fuck with anybody."" "I went there, it was tougher than New York." "They killed on the streets, they bribed the cops." "My first night in this bar I'm writing about, that's what appeased me, attracted me." "I walked in half dead, I just went in for a beer." "It wasn't even a night, it was about one in the afternoon." "I walked in and the place was packed, it was in a poor neighborhood." "I sat down, drank a beer, looked around." "It was packed!" "Everybody was crazy and drunk." "They were all drinking beer but all of a sudden here came a bottle flying through the air." "This guy next to me I find out his name's Danny Freely, turns and that, he says:" ""You ever do that again man, I'll kill you!"" "I said: "Boy, this is the place I want to be." "Something's finally happening."" "Another bottle flew by, through the air." "Crash!" "The bartender just poured another drink, he didn't say anything." "I said:" ""This my Nirvana, everything's happening." "Open...violence." "Decent open violence."" "And then, two guys got in a fight." "They start slamming it around and I went to take a piss- they're still fighting." "And I went right through them," "I said: "Okay pardon me, gentlemen." And they both stood aside and they start fighting again." "When I came back they, I said "Pardon me gentleman..."" "They start, I said: "This is my heaven."" "I'm gonna drink in this bar, I'm gonna fight like this and live like this." "This is the thing that I'm talking about:" "this bar, this place" "You know what happened?" "That night never repeated again." "It was like they had all planned it for me." "And the same people were there, and I waited and I waited." "I waited 2 1/2 years." "I went away a year and I came back" "I waited 2 1/2 years again, I sat in a stool." "There was never any night like that first afternoon." "I was trapped into a dream that I wanted." "That's all." "Bad shit." "Conversation on a telephone" "I could tell by the crouch of the cat the way it was flattened that it was insane with prey;" "and when my car came upon it it rose in the twilight and made off" "with bird in mouth a very large bird, gray" "the wings down like broken love the fangs in" "life still there but not much, not very much" "the broken love-bird the cat walks in my mind" "and I cannot make him out the phone rings, I answer a voice," "but I see him again and again, and the loose wings the loose gray wings," "and this thing held in a head that knows no mercy;" "I put the phone down and the cat-sides of the room come in upon me and I would scream, but they have places for people who scream;" "and the cat walks the cat walks forever in my brain." "That was a tough afternoon, saying that is that the one- that's the way it is, everybody says that's nature, you know." "Nature is not normal." "God is not normal." "Nature is not kind." "Nature...doesn't give a fuck, man." "And I give a fuck" "So when I see something happening, something getting, something else killing something else I don't like it." "But you know the real intelligent people say:" ""Well, that's the way it is, you see."" ""This is killing that and this is feeding that"" ""and here is the grasshopper, there's this- this feeds upon that." "It's all arranged."" "Except when something jumps upon them they scream, don't they?" "You see they don't get themselves in with the spider and the fly." "I got myself in" "I am the fly, that's the spider you see" "They don't get themselve into..." "they're indifferent to what's happening" "Oh, that's interesting." "Look" "But you see they too are involved" "But... the only is that there's a human going to kill now." "But they don't know it they're arranging it, but they don't know it." "They're dumb!" "They're dumb." "Almost all people are dumb." "Ever see people go into a restaurant to order food?" "They don't even want to eat food." "They come in because it's time to eat." "They're not even hungry." "The more I think of humanity, the less I want to think of them." "Is there anything else you ha..." "ask me something." "Jesus." "You lived in East Hollywood before moving here." "What are the places we could film there?" "Nowhere." "The bars are shut down" "The Big Twenty is covered with plywood like the, like the police have come and nailed plywood across the front of it with little tacks." "The Big Twenty is closed down like it was a malaria joint." "And that whole neighborhood is very, very dead." "I mean, umm..." "We used to walk around there and you'd see pimps and whores hanging around the corners, eating hotdogs, with mustards dripping down their chins." "There's nothing, there's nobody there anymore." "There's no place to film anything anymore." "I get the feeling the world is more and more drying up." "I don't where the whores are going, where the black pimps are going, where the music is going." "But my idea in life is where the black pimps are, where the whores are, where the music is playing where the bar, where the... jukeboxes are playing in the bars, where the lights are on," "that's where life is." "That may seem to be a terrible type of life to most people but you listen to that music and you walk into that bar sometime and you walk in try to find a barstool and you sit down and the bartender comes up and serves you a drink" "you're glad to get it." "Cause you're in a lively joint where something is happening." "I think degradation, black pimps, prostitution are the flowers of the earth." "I think those joints, where this is going on" "I think there's great happiness in terror and horror too but that all counts in adding up when you walk into a place to get a drink." "It's a liveliness." "When you clean up a city you kill it." "There's no place to film around Hollywood and Western, anymore." "It's dead...dead...dead." "It stinks of death." "The Puritans." "The Christians." "They've cleaned it up, they've dried it up like no rose will ever grow there again." "I've always been used because I'm a good guy." "And women when they meet me they say:" ""I can use this sonofabitch." "I can push him around, he's an easy going guy."" "So they do it." "But you know, finally I get to resent it a bit" "What do you resent?" "Just being pushed." "Pushed?" "Yeah." "Just being pushed." "Why do you let yourself to be pushed by this kinda shit?" "You idiot." "Why do you allow yourself to be pushed by this sort of thing?" "I've told you a thousand times to leave, you won't leave." "I've told" "Wait a minute" "No wait, that doesn't have anything to do with it" "Get an attorney to tell you to leave" "Why do you continually allow yourself to be pushed?" "Because I'm kind-hearted, I give the other person another chance." "You do?" " I've given you dozens of chances." "You keep pushing and pushing and you keep laughing at me." "That's why I'm gonna tell you" "I'm getting an attorney and I'm gonna get your ass moved out of here." "She thinks I don't have the guts." "She thinks I can't live without her." "I can move your ass out of here so bright and so fast with a Jewish attorney you're gonna feel like your ass is skinned, baby." "You think that you're the last woman on earth that I can get?" "Never had a thought about it." " Yeah, well... you better start thinking." "I'm turning you over to the next." "Next what?" "The next guy, he can have you." "I won't be the least bit jealous." "Your...bull shit, all your goddamn..." "stay out every night bull shit." "I don't need the kinda woman you are" "I don't need your shit, baby." "I don't need it" "What about the hostess?" "I don't need them either." "See what Linda doesn't realize, when I met Jan, she pushed the shit that Linda's putting on me now." "Out every night, showing up 5:30" "Not every night." "I don't want you to give these people that impression, because it's not true." "Okay, then you're not out every night." "Okay." "That's better." "All right." "Linda's not out every night" "Thank you." "Thank you very much." "You know what a fucking hunk of phony shit you are?" "I hate liars." "You lied right into their faces, you cunt." "Just then?" "Yeah..." "I did not." "You were out five nights in a row, last weekend." "You came in at 5:30 one night, 3:30 the other." "The night before last you came in at 2:01am" "There was a reason for every one of those nights" "Hey..." "And I told you about them and you simply wouldn't accept them." "Of course not, would you accept my nights out?" "Yes I would!" "I invited you along every time, I said come you can see, nothing is happening." "Come." "Don't enjoy." "Just come and understand that there is something that I am doing." "That I require." "I need to do in my life!" "And it's not bad, it's not against you it doesn't make me love you less." "It might even... permit me to love you more." "Listen" "You don't see that." "I don't want a woman out six nights a week after 2am in the morning." "I don't care what the excuse is." "It wasn't like that for six nights a week." "The month of May you were out fifteen nights past midnight." "It's true." "The calendar is marked." "So what?" "So what." "This is why, I'm gonna get an attorney" "What do you think?" "What?" "Wait a minute!" "to get you off of my ass." "Wait!" "Wait!" "Wait!" "Why are you so offended by..." "Why should I tolerate you?" "Why are you so offended by me doing something else?" "Because I live with a woman or she lives with me, she doesn't live with other people." "I do live with other people and I'm going to for the rest of my life." "I know, I'm gonna turn you over to them." "Don't you see?" "No, no no." "Like shit!" "You fucking cunt!" "You think you'll walk out on me every fucking night?" "You fuckin' whore." "You bitch!" "Who do you think I am?" "Just, I'm gonna do this, live with other people." "I didn't..." "You fucking shit!" "What's the address here, Hank?" "Ah, this is 2122 Longwood Avenue." "The house of horrors, the house of agony." "The house where I was almost done in, but not quite." "I'm still here you see." "This is the lawn that I manicured." "I had to mow it both ways." "This way first, then this way and I had to get all the hairs with the shears." "If I missed one hair, I got a beating." "One hair." "It's very hard not to miss one hair." "Try it some time." "So I always got a beating." "In here we have... a torture chamber." "So, we'll go and see that." "You'll go see a torture chamber, okay?" "Well... this... is a torture chamber." "This is where I learned, something." "The old man had a razor strap he used to hang here, and he'd just pick it off..." "Drop your pants and your shorts." "I would stand about here and he would begin." "And I wouldn't know how many lashes he would give me." "They'd be hard." "Eight, ten, twelve, fourteen." "And ah, of course you can't help screaming especially when you're six years old, seven years old." "As I got around to be about ten, or eleven, or twelve I screamed less, in fact" "the last beating I got I didn't scream at all." "I just... didn't make a sound and I guess that terrorized him because that was the last one, when I didn't make a sound." "So, uh... this place holds some memories all right." "I don't know it's just a terrible place to stand and talk about it." "Let's forget it, okay?" "You're a small creature and you have a large creature beating upon you and the mother... says okay." "Okay, this sounds very tearful and like uh..." "I'm weeping for mercy or something, but at that time it's very, very difficult because there's no place to go, there's nothing you can do." "But as we said earlier, and I've said other times" "I think my father taught me how to write." "Because, even now in times of difficult problems, I never weep, I never beg." "I go through the next situation quietly" "without asking mercy." "I just move on to the next situation." "I think it's good training." "I don't want that kind of training for anybody." "But for me, now that I've gotten it it makes me...you know, know things like other people have get a flat tire, something bad." "They go crazy." "I say well, that's just something bad that happens again." "It all, it should happen." "So, I take it better." "You know." "I lose a leg, somebody leaves, somebody robs the house." "Yes, well, that's it." "You see they made me ready." "And my father especially..." "Since my father's left me I've found others who have taken his place, you see." "Sometimes in female form." "So the father never leaves, even after he's dead." "Fathers always..." "No, I was against me." "Not in my heart, he might be under my toenail somewhere like dirty...grime." "Happy night, you know everybody, you know sometimes you have a good night, everybody's laughing you're feeling good." "So, while we're going to the store to get more beer, of course I'm buying" "I'm one of these type that always buys..." "I'm a sucker." "Anyhow so coming back I'm, they're carrying all these six-packs which, how everybody three or four people, we're all laughing" "and all of a sudden this guy comes up." "He says:" ""Gee, you guys seem to be having a good time" "You mind if I come along?"" "They all said: "Yes, yes, yes!" And I said: "Hey, wait..."" "He says: "Oh come on, let me come along." I said: "All right, come on."" "So we all in, and we start drinking and drinking." "So, uhh..." "There's a piano there." "I go to play the piano." "The night goes on." "I can't play it, but I play it." "And I'm sitting in a chair-I don't like this guy too much and I'm giving him um..." "Oh, what he's doing..." "He's talking about the war he's been in and how many people he killed." "And that didn't interest me too much, you know, because in a war... you can kill people and it doesn't mean anything." "It's legal." "It takes guts to kill somebody when it's not legal." "Got it?" "Okay" "So I told him this." "He kept talking, bragging." "About various things: what a good shot he was, how many people he killed." "I said: "Bull shit, Get out of here!" He said: "You don't like me?"" "I said: "Yeah, leave."" "So he left a while, we're all talking." "You know, you drink." "Is a lighter here?" "Yes." "I keep losing it..." "So, uh..." "All of a sudden he came back." "He had a gun." "Suddenly I had no friends around me." "You know, they kind of disappeared away... and then he came up behind me, and he said: "You don't like me, do you?"" "Well, you know... this is the point where people often make a mistake." "But I'm only gonna talk about myself." "I, I told him the truth." "I said:" ""No, I don't like you."" "So he came up behind me and he put the gun to my temple." "He says: "You still don't like me, do you?"" "I said: "No, I still don't like you."" "Let me tell you something, I really wasn't frightened at all." "It was almost like seeing a movie, somewhere..." "So he said: "Well, I'm going to kill you."" "And I said: "Okay."" "Let me tell you something" "I said: "If you kill me know..."" ""you're gonna do me a favor."" "It was true what I told him." "I said: "I'm a suicide case anyhow."" ""I've been wondering how to do this thing, now you've solved my problem."" "And also, I said:" ""P.S. By the way, If you kill me"" ""you've solved my problem"" ""and you've got a problem."" ""You do life in jail"" ""or the electric chair, whatever the hell's going ona round here."" "There was silence..." "I could feel it just pressing on me." "Just stayed there and I didn't say anymore, he didn't say anymore." "Then he put the gun down and he walked toward the door, and the screen door slammed, he walked out." "And, what I said was really true, you know, it ju..." "I had a suicidal, it didn't matter." "But he came up a wrong, along... a wrong, around, in between, on top of the wrong guy." "He came across the nut as bad as he was." "There was no solving but I think, if the person had, you know, had been me and said:" ""Oh no!" "Don't do it!" He might have done it." "You see..." "Even though I wanted him to do it." "So later, all my friends came around" ""Oh Hank you all ri-" I said: "Yeah, you guys are really great while I was in the"" ""You really helped me, didn't you?" "'" ""Just standing, watching." "You couldn't have grabbed him from behind or anything"" ""Well Hank-" I say: "Okay..."" "So later it was discovered he'd gone into some drugstore" "with a gun and did something smashed somebody with the gun butt, and tried to shoot and they put him in a madhouse, later." "So, he was really for true, you know but you know there's nothing like one nut talking to another, you know." "There's nobody well, there are many so crazy you can't get to them." "But, uh..." "I lucked it." "But I was really ready to go." "It wouldn't have been a big thing." "And he knew it." "If you don't feel the fear, you don't react." "Sometimes." "Some don't feel the fear and they still react." "So that's all." "No big story." "That's a lady fortune teller there." "I went in there one time." "She read my palm, she said:" ""You're an alcoholic."" "I said: "Really?" "Do I gamble too?" She says: "Yes, you gamble."" ""That'll be five dollars."" "Well, this is Hollywood and Western." "This is the place." "Look over there, man." "Great!" "There used to be...cement benches out front and all the insane people would sit there." "And all the people would sit there." "The street people, they'd talk to each other, all day long." "Here at this corner." "Yeah, it's still all right." "Got it?" "This is where the people are." "There's the old sex shop." "Keeps changing hands." "They used to call this..." "The Big, The Big Twenty, but they changed the name now to The Rail." "Used to have women across the street would sit in the windows." "You'd just say: "I want you."" "There's, there's a woman who's not a hooker." "There's a dope dealer." "That's a place I never got a loan, like I told you." "Oh, I been in this liquor store, many a time." "Many a time!" "Great place." "There's one of my men." "Bank of America." "All right!" "Shit!" "There's a back of, look at that hotel, man." "La Paula Apartment." "Beautiful." "That's all there is." "That's all." "Oh, here's a strange place." "You know, wanna get stuff about the devil?" "You go in there." "You can get all kinds of powder, if you know, you mail them to people and they die." "For 15 cents, you know, something like that, you can kill somebody." "It's nice." "Okay, this is the end of your territory?" "This is the end!" "They won't let me beyond." "They didn't let me beyond." "Where did I get all those stories out of those few blocks?" "Well, they came to see me." "The girls, you know." "The most vicious women in the world knocked on my door." "They knew how to find a softy, yeah." "Well... now I'm all straightened out." "Feel great." "Oh, I miss a little bit of that dirty action now and then." "I gotta admit it." "Teaches you where humanity is, you never want to forget that, you know." "You never quite want to forget who they are, where they come from and how they act." "You don't want to get too far away from that." "This bar used to be called The Playwright" "Yeah" "Did you go there?" "Not too often, just went there 4 or 5 times till they kicked me out." "Gave me the 86." "I just went in drunk, I said:" ""This place is called The Playwright?" "Where the hell are the playwrights?"" ""The bartender's not a playwright." "That guy's not a playwright."" "They took offence." "So this is the famous corner?" "Yeah, and there's The Pioneer." "It's open all night." "Lots of hookers go up there, you know, late at night." "Guys." "Thieves." "Murderers." "Get a late snack, get a... 3:30am, get a little bite of something." "After they've rolled somebody, you know." "It's quite chummy and warm there, there are good feelings there." "So, umm... there go a couple girls there." "Did you get 'em?" "Good." "Hey man, what's happenin'." "So, umm..." "We're gonna go down Western." "All right." "Oh yeah, there's a motel here" "I stayed in here after Linda King ran me out one night she came back, got me and I ended up living with her again." "Terrible mistake." "This motel, a great place, they have a swimming pool." "Used to have." "There it is." "Yes." "I had a terrible hangover and two big fat guys were jumping in it and they must've weighed 400lbs a piece." "I start laughing at 'em and they came up to get me." "I bolted the door and they're beating on the goddamn door" "There was another liquor store there" "Used to...and there's some of my friends." "That about covers it." "So you see, you don't have to come to Hollywood now" "I've told you all about Holywood and Western." "You got it, relax, forget it." "Go to sleep." "What do you think of then... the drugs (inadudible)?" "Ahh, my favorite subject." "I think a man can keep on drinking for centuries." "He'll never die." "Especially wine and beer." "But I've met too many... young people, especially when I was working for Open City" "just smoking marijuana within a two year period who were intelligent at first and after two years of marijuana they just came around like:" ""Hey!" "Hey!" "How you doing?"" "I'm gonna be one of the first to say... that marijuana is very, ultimately, destructive." "And then finally, there'll be government studies to prove that it's totally harmful." "Much more harmful that's ever been exposed to have been." "Cause I've seen it through people." "they just end up:" ""Hey...hey..."" "I don't like that." "I like drunkards, man, because drunkards they come out of it, they're sick and they spring back, they spring back and forth." "But even the light drug freaks, they're just..." ""Okay." "Okay." It's like... all mind circulation, all spirit has been cut off." "I've met good old alcoholics you know, this old guy Jim..." "I don't know if he's in..." "Yeah." "He's in port." "He's a great old guy, got drunk every night but his face was human, you know, he'd talk to you, he'd say:" ""Well, Hank..." He'd talk a definite language these other, you know these kids" "There's um... so...yeah." "I'm anti-drugs." "Put me down." "It's a very, very lousy way to go." "Just, out of what I've seen." "I can't call it." "Be an alcoholic." "If you gotta be anything, be an alcoholic." "What a...what can you dream?" "Alcoholism... well... or drunkness." "If I hadn't been a drunkard" "I probably would have commited suicide long ago." "You know, working the factories, the eight hour job." "The slums." "The streets." "Okay you work a god damn lousy job, you know." "You come home at night, you're tired." "What are you gonna do, go to a movie?" "Turn on your radio in a three dollar a week room?" "Or, are you gonna rest up and wait for the job the next day, for $1.75 an hour?" "Hell no!" "You're gonna get a bottle of whiskey and drink it." "And go down to a bar and maybe get in a fist fight." "And meet some bitch, something's going on." "Then you go to work the next day, and do your simple little things, right?" "But you're not, gonna just... do your 8 hour job and go back to your place in a bicycle factory." "This guy told me, I was working in a, he said:" ""You can have a job here all you like, if you want."" "Great!" "Wow!" "I mean alcohol... gives you the release of the dream without the deadness of ahh...drugs." "You know, you can come back down." "You have your hangover to face." "That's the tough part." "You get over it, you do your job." "You come back." "You drink again." "I'm all for alcohol, I'll tell ya." "It's the thing." "I loved murder." "I loved anybody who tried to murder me cause I had a suicide complex." "So they told me anybody who walked in there who wasn't known would be murdered." "So, of course, any suicide would walk in there." "So, I walked in and uhh... they didn't fulfill their promise." "Because you talked to the wife of a gangster, I think I remember." "Said: "You talk to here, you're dead, man" So, I went right up and talked to her." "She was a good looker." "And, you know, like any other woman she played right along with me." "Says: "Hi, how ya doing?" Shook her head." "I said:" ""I'm doin' all right, baby." Well, I wasn't, had about $13 in my wallet." "So, uh... some guy came up." "Well, there were two big, you know how these Italians look." "And they're both glaring at me, but you know, when death is there, death looks like anything..." "Death can look like a milk bottle or a milk carton or, or a... death can take any form." "Human, the human form doesn't even matter." "This guy came down..." "You know when a tough guy tries to be tough and you're ready for death it doesn't matter." "He came down." "He said: "Hey buddy"" "Oh, she went to take a leak, that's what happened." "You have to go down this long stairway down." "I found out later." ""I'll be back." "I have to go to the ladies room to powder my..."" "I don't know if she said that." "I said: "Okay, baby." "I'll be here."" "Meanwhile she said: "You know what my favorite song is?"" ""Her Tears Flowed Like Wine."" "So, I kept going to the jukebox and I went, must've been a nickel or a dime in those days." "I think it was a nickel." "I kept pumping nickels into the damn thing." "So all night long was "Her Tears Flowed Like Wine"." "And I love it, I like that song myself." "So it got me all hyped up." "So some-while she was down there this big moose came up." "He said:" ""Hey, man." I said: "Yeah..." He said:" ""You know..."" ""You know what you're doing?" "' I said:" ""Yeah, I don't know." "Yeah..." He said:" ""You're messin' with the boss' girlfriend."" "I said: "Yeeeaaahhhh?"" "He said: "You know what that means?"" "He said: "You know what that means, man." "Lay off and get your ass outta here now!"" ""Yeeeaaahhhh?" "I was a nut, you know." "So, he walked down, they both looked at each other and she came up." "And I said:" ""Put some more money in the juke, baby." "Her Tears Flowed Like Wine." We're thinking" "Got my arm around her, "Her Tears Flowed Like Wine", we're going like this." "These two guys are looking-the boss is out of town somewhere evidently." "And this is a tough, Philadelphia joint." "I'm still drinking." "So, finally I gotta take a piss." "So, I walked down...and I go down the stairway and I saw the..." "Finally I hear these two guys, each step I take, they're kinda in rhythm." "you know, I hear these two big guys, at the bar, they're behind me, like they're like two big shadows, each time I could take a step they come boom, boom" "But you know, I feel no fear." "No fear at all." "And I go down, and they're both standing behind me." "And they're waiting." "I unzip and I start pissing" "They're both standing and all of a sudden I feel this arm raising." "I don't even move" "I feel it coming down." "I stand there." "It goes...aaagh!" "I finish zipping, I piss up." "I finish pissing, I zip up." "I piss up and I finish zipping." "Okay, either way." "So, I turn around and they both look at me." "And one of 'em says to the other:" "That's us...oh no, wait, I say:" ""Pardon me gentlemen." "I want to get through here."" "And I start going up the stairway and the other guy says:" ""That sonofabitch is crazy!" "You can't kill him."" "So, I went upstairs again, I said: "Bartender..."" ""two more drinks."" "The jukebox has stopped playing" "I went up and put in some more coins and it was: "My tears flowed like wine"." "And the bartender didn't wanna come up." "I said:" ""Hey man I told you, I wanted some more to drink for me and my lady." "Now, come here!"" "And he very hesitantly came up, he finally poured me-looked at the other two guys." "I was sitting there all night." "And finally the night went on." "The bar closed and I noticed this bar was different from the other bars." "Because when the front door closed all the people stayed inside and they kept pouring drinks, except the lights went out." "And so, I don't, I'm talking but I really wasn't interested in her." "I was just trying to prove that I was not afraid." "And I guess that's a weakness, when you try to prove you're not afraid." "But I still had the weakness, but I didn't even want to fuck her." "She, I don't know, she looked like." "I wasn't even interested in her." "It was just the challenge that somebody else wanted." "I was supposed to pretend to want, that they were supposed to want." "And I think they finally knew that I kept dragging, drinking." "Then finally about...3:30am, the bar opened." "We all went outside, we're singing songs." "We got our arms around each other." "The bitch is gone somewhere, I don't even care." "And finally a guy says: "Hey,"" ""Hank." They learned my name." "He says:" "" Man, we really love you." "You got the guts."" ""You're a madman." "You're insane." "You got the courage."" ""You're beautiful." "You know what we want?" I said: "What?"" ""We want you to join our gang."" ""We're the toughest gang in Philadelphia." "We want you man, you've got what we need."" "I said: "Shit!" "I don't fuck with that kind of shit, you guys."" ""I gotta go away."" ""It was nice being with you."" ""Goodnight, babies." And I just walked off all by myself." "I had to... well, I shoulda gone this way, but see they were all standing here." "I had to circle the whole block, go back to my rooming house room." "Then I, no." "What I did, I was smarter than that." "While I was trying to circle this way a police car came by, and I said: "Hey!"" ""I been blackjacked." "Somebody tried to take my money."" "I was in need of medical attention." "I was bleeding like mad." "So they took me to a hospital" "The cops?" "Yeah, yeah." "So they said: "Who robbed you?" And I said:" ""Well, officers." "You're not gonna believe this."" ""But it was two sailors who jumped me from behind."" ""They tried to take my money and I fought 'em." "I fought 'em off."" ""You really?" And I said: "Yeah..."" "So, I was sitting there and they're, everybody's on my side." "They said:" ""Well, it could be two sailors." Everybody was very sympathetic toward me." "But the nurse who was playing with my head she had beautiful legs." "And she had them crossed." "All of a sudden drunkeness got across from me, I went:" ""Oh, you bitch!" And I started playing with her fucking knee." "And the cop said: "Oh oh!" "This guy's no fucking good."" "And they just stood up and they said: "Get him out of here!"" "And the doctor said: "Okay." "Okay, we'll let him go." "We'll get him out." So they pushed me out of there." "But I did get my stitches in my head which are still here." "Feel that bump?" "I know." "I know." "So that's, that's one of those bar stories, eh?" "Ahh, God..." "And that whole gang" "I was sitting in the other bar about, three days later and I said:" ""You hear what ha-what helped, what, what happened up at uh..." "We'll call it Murphy's." ""The cops came in." "I knocked over some tables."" ""Two guys shot some guns." "One guy got killed."" ""They all got locked up."" "So, thank God I didn't join that gang." "Just now, we're living here, we have our little garden." "Our three kitties, right?" "See?" "I do all the right things, don't I baby?" "Part of the time." "Huh?" "Shit." "Oh, I told you I'm not a guru." "I'm not a leader." "I drink my wine, I play the horses and I type poems." "That's all there is you see." "I have nothing to say about anything." "There's nothing to say." "The less I say the better I feel." "You ever tried keeping quiet all day long?" "The moment you awake till you go to sleep." "And better yet just sleep all day long and forget the day." "Get up the next day, you'll feel great." "People do too much, they say too much." "There, I'm giving directions but you know what I mean." "Yeah, I do." "Forget it." "That's my problem." "I'm usually living with a woman." "I try not to, but somehow I find myself with... one." "When I'm alone" "I'm handling my own propositions." "I always, or usually... when I'm alone." "I have periods where, you know, when I feel a little weak or depressed." "Fuck it!" "The Weaties aren't going down right." "I just go to bed for three days and four nights pull down all the shades and just go to bed." "Get up." "Shit." "Piss." "Drink a beer down and go back to bed." "I come out of that completely re-enlightened for 2 or 3 months." "I get power from that." "I think someday... they'll say this psychotic guy knew something that... you know in days ahead and medicine, and how they figure these things out." "Everybody should go to bed now and then, when they're down low and give it up for three or four days." "Then they'll come back good for a while." "But we're so obsessed with, we have to get up and do it and go back to sleep." "In fact there's a woman I'm living with now, get's around 12:30, 1pm, sh-I say:" ""I'm sleepy." "I want to go to sleep." She says:" ""What?" "You want to go to sleep, it's only 1pm!"" "We're not even drinking, you know." "Hell, there's nothing else to do but sleep." "People are nailed to the processes." "Up." "Down." "Do something." "Get up, do something, go to sleep." "Get up." "They can't get out of that circle." "You'll see, someday they'll say:" ""Bukowski knew."" "Lay down for 3 or 4 days till you get your juices back then get up, look around and do it." "But who the hell can do it cause you need a dollar." "That's all." "That's a long speech, isn't it?" "But it means something." "It's always trying to avoid being swallowed by machinery." "Yeah, basically all was, every inch of even when you walk in, you meet a waitress, you know, she walks up and says:" ""You wanna cup of coffee?"" "Right there it starts cause you don't even know if you want a cup of coffee cause she..." "Either she's up too fast or she's around too long." "It's always questions and answers and they have to fit." "We're never allowed to... you know?" "That's why... we all enjoy seeing madmen, in movies or something." "We admire them because they're doing exactly what they want to do." "It might be... cutting heads off of little girls and putting them all in the bathtub or something" "We admire that creature because it's aligned to do exactly what it wants to do." "And the closer you get to exactly what you want to do the better you are as a human creature." "Or as any kind of thing." "This wood, anything." "It's waiting to get burned." "Let's forget that." "But, you know my point" "So, if you get..." "People are pointless!" "Shit." "One more poem." "What is it?" "Oh...that's not any good." "The Tragedy of the Leaves." "I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead, the potted plants yellow as corn;" "my woman was gone and the empty bottles like bled corpses surrounded me with their uselessness;" "the sun was still good, though, and my landlady's note crackled in fine and undemanding yellowness;" "what was needed now was a good comedian, ancient style a jester with jokes upon absurd pain;" "pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more;" "I shaved carefully with an old razor the man who had once been young" "and said to have genius;" "but that's the tragedy of the leaves, the dead ferns, the dead plants;" "I walked into a dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to hell, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for the rent because the world has failed us both" "Good poem, even if it's an oldie." "But I write much better shit now." "What's the difference?" "The difference is, there is no differnce." "I write the same thing, over and over." "The difference is... area." "But, you know the terror is always there." "The ugliness is always there." "There's no way out." "You can get a beautiful woman living with you and she can be more ugly than putting your quarter into a newspaper stand and lifting it up." "Taking out the next days news." "There's never any escape from anything at all." "You're always going to be burnt." "There is never any pleasantness, easiness anywhere." "You'll be burnt down to the grave." "No matter how much you know, no matter how much you feel you're gonna be burnt, burnt...burnt...burnt." "Till the last minute you breathe." "Till you open a cap on a mustard jar, you're gonna be burnt." "If you open up a can of cat food, you're gonna be burnt." "Everything is burning." "All you're trying to do... is walk across a room and drink a glass of water and take it easy." "There's always things burning, ripping at you." "It's the whole universe." "It's everything." "Women." "Men." "Friends." "Everything." "Rips and tears..." "Rips and tears... all you wanna do..." "The best seems, a good eight hour sleep." "If you can get it." "If you can't, you might as well get drunk." "Hell." "What are we gonna do, you stupid fuck?" "Let's go to Paris and burn the town down." "Shit, man." "Oh!" "What, you don't hear anything?" "No, we have a..." "The mike disappeared again." "There should be a camera doing what we're trying to do." "Wait, I can't find it." "Linda." "Oh, I feel something." "What?" "Something's coming out, something's going down." "Wait, what is it?" "Is this all right?" "Can you hear?" "There's a little clip." "Well, Henry Miller's dead." "They gotta find somebody...dying." "Jesus!" "We had to done this with Henry in his last days." "Yeah." "He appeared on all the talk shows." "Baby, you're not gonna get, oh this is just as bad, isn't it?" "Next question." "Shit." "No..." "Why you don't want to go on a talk show?" "Going to a talk show..." "Okay." "A man begins typewriting with a typewriter, generally... he's got a tiny room somewhere, and he begins... telling something" "I won't say that it's bothering him, but it's something must come out." "And it just comes out naturally like a firecracker exploding." "You put a match to it, it blows up." "And this process goes on a while and it's a very good process." "And all of a sudden you get a letter in the mail, the royalties get a little better." "And somebody says:" ""I'll give $375 to appear on a talk show for 15 minutes."" "Uh, the other guests will be so-and-so and so-and-so." "And you know what, they bite on it." "How can they have the strength to begin with, to be original... and then have the very non-strength to appear on a talk show and sit in a chair" "and... say little, unreal things because they're not gonna say anything real, sitting with the other people." "Why do they do it?" "I don't know." "It's like swallowing your own vomit." "I was gonna say, if you ever catch me on a talk show..." "Okay!" "You can shoot me." "No." "The only talk show I'd go on would be Dick Cavett because that's the only guy I respect." "To go on Merv Griffin or, Johnny Carson, or any of those is swallowing your own vomit." "I know you would go." "Don't look at me." "I am me, you are you." "I'm speaking to my companion." "My female companion." "Of the moment." "No... it's really bad." "I don't see how an instinctive... person can have that non-instinct to finally bite the poison they've been trying to avoid." "I don't know what else to say." "It's just, it's just death." "This whole place is diseased with the presence of everybody but myself." "Now, Linda's gonna come back." "I'm not gonna be happy when she comes back." "Pretend, I say: "Hi..."" "I just don't like people." "I only like myself." "There's something wrong with me." "I don't know what it is but I'm not gonna try to cure it." "All I want is what I am." "I'm gonna keep pumping up what I love." "You smell a rose up your asshole your asshole is dead shit to begin with it doesn't matter if there are roses up it or a thorn's dick!" "God!" "You people don't understand any invented decency of any sort." "You're just so subliminal to, sublimal, subliminal... to whatever occurrence." "You just ride tendered little wave of nowhere." "You have no original courage of definition." "You're all flat-pancaked mamas with syrup spilled over your head." "You have nothing." "You have no direction." "You have no motive." "All you want is money." "You don't even would money is." "You want it but when you get it you wouldn't even know what to do with it." "Just smear it up your asshole and swallow it." "Out your nostrils of death." "And I know less than you, either." "Even though I talk about it at least I smooth it out and dance it around." "Which makes more sense than just letting it sit." "I'm pretty clever in spite of my dumbness." "Don't worry." "I handle my asshole." "Turd twirl." "Okay, next question, next poem." "Shit." "I'm sure you've all been at places like this." "The Man at the Piano." "The man at the piano plays a song he didn't write sings words that aren't his upon a piano he doesn't own" "While people at tables eat, drink and talk the man at the piano finishes to no applause," "then begins to play a new song he didn't write begins to sing words that aren't his upon a piano that isn't his" "and as the people at the tables continue to eat, drink and talk when he finishes to no applause he announces over the mike that he's going to take a ten minute break." "He goes back to the men's room, enters a toilet booth, bolts the door, sits down, pulls out a joint, lights up." "he's glad he's not at the piano and the people at the tables - eating, drinking and talking are glad he isn't there either." "This is the way it goes almost everywhere with everybody and everything as, fiercefully in the hinterlands, the black slum burns." "You know, sometimes I've walked down the streets, you know, and I've felt like you wanna reach out and grab this woman and do it, but you think just before you reach you think, why haven't other men" "reached and you think because there's a penalty for this." "We're all screened." "We're screened through the years." "It's very interesting." "Do you realize how well we're screened?" "But then, they think they've screened us, and all of a sudden we fool them finally." "On some bright day, in some special place." "And we cut of their legs, their arms, their heads." "Float them down the river laugh and drink our wine, and eat our chocolate cake." "Okay." "So..." "We;re all that way." "Not only me, but you and you and you." "We're all rapists." "We're all murderers." "It's just...while I'm not a murderer." "It's just, can we get away with it." "It's what holds us back." "I think." "Or maybe I'm wrong." "I hope I'm wrong." "I've admired all men, like Adolf Hitler." "All gross evil creatures have something" "because they don't believe in the rules." "I mean you're supposed to-this is not right" "These guys just come out and say:" ""I'll do..." Well, you know." "But they, they;re, they have escaped from all teachings." "And so..." "The rest of you men or...says:" ""They're insane." "They're insane."" "What happens when these evil men start attracting followers?" "Well, if enough evil men attract enough followers and the followers spread all over the earth then they become good men." "Then we need new evil men to overthrow" "Evil is what most people don't do well by people who do the other thing." "Celine was evil." "Well, all the good men are evil, that I can think of only using in the terms of human terms they say this man is evil." "To me the evil men are the good men." "You see, it's all reversed." "Anybody who can see the opposite of what's going on" "I think is exceptional." "Like, any place you go you see a long line of people standing" "You see another line, you see a line of fifty people standing in one line and four people standing in another" "You know which line you get into, don`t you baby?" "You always get in the line of ten people and you'll be better off." "No matter what?" "Politically..." "Right." "Automatically in any way?" "It's because the masses are always wrong." "You see a line of 1000, a line of 800, a line of 50, a line of 12, a line of 2..." "If you just see an open place waiting for nobody's gonna go there." "Go right there, and that's going to be it." "Wisdom... is doing everything the crowd does not do." "All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for." "It's true..." "Yeah." "That's how you win at the track." "Well, that's how I break even at the track and why they lose." "So, uh, yeah..." "It's a basic wisdom." "Wherever the crowd goes, run in the other direction." "They're always wrong." "Through centuries they're wrong and they will always be wrong." "Look." "There's a sense of human privacy" "I believe that everybody...should have." "And if they come in with three heads on, that's their business." "Now, if I come in with four heads on, that's my business." "You just take a glance and go back say, well..." "I'll have french fries and onions, you know." "That's it." "It's what I call style." "Style... is very important." "A sense of decency." "If we have nothing else left, amongst our carnivorous, glutinous," "anti-human, anti-life ways, we should have a minor sense of style left in all the rubbish." "We should realize, well, we're all dead, we're all fucked up but at least give us a glance and settle with our indifferences." "and order our meals, and leave each other alone." "That's a graceful sense of style, that's all." "Why stare?" "Why, if you stare you're trying to defeat and say I am better than you are." "Of course I am better." "I don't have to glance and stare." "Yes?" "The style is applies to everything." "Not to the writing but to well, the whole way of behaving." "Not only at staring, but..." "I think style is more important" "I always like to use that: more important than truth." "You know, like I say." "Endurance is more important than truth," "I think all things are more important than truth." "If we keep thinking of truth, we're not going to get there." "But we do, we do all things outside of truth and we may arrive there." "But we don't search for truth." "We do everything except the truth." "You understand?" "We just don't fuck with truth." "We don't go to temples." "We don't go to special occasions." "We sit in small rooms, pull down the shades and jack-off or read a magazine." "That's the truth." "Right then." "The further away I am from the human race the better I feel." "Even though I write about the human race the further away I am from them, the better I feel." "Two inches is great, Two miles is great." "2000 miles is beautiful." "As long as I'm able to eat." "They feed me because I feed them." "But I don't like to be near them." "When somebody even brushes against me with an elbow, in a crowd, I react." "I do not like the human race." "I don't like their heads." "I don't like their faces." "I don't like their feet." "I don't like their convesations." "I don't like their hairdos." "I don't like their automobiles." "I don't like their dogs or their cats or their roses." "Earthquake." "Americans don't know what tragedy is." "A little 6.5 earthquake can send them to chattering like monkeys" "A piece of chinawear broken" "The Union Rescue Mission falls down." "6:00 am they sit in their cars, they're all driving around." "Where are they going?" "A little excitement has broken into their canned lives." "Stranger stands next to stranger." "Chattering gibberish fear anxious fear, anxious laughter" "My baby, my flowerpot my ceiling, my bank account," "This is just a tickler, a feather and they can't bear it." "Suppose they bombed the city as other cities have been bombed not with an A-bomb but with ordinary blockbusters, day after day." "Every day as has in other cities of the world" "If the rest of the world can only see you today" "Their laughter would bring the sun to its knees and even the flowers would leap from the ground like bulldogs and chase you away to where you belong." "Forever that is." "And who cares where it is as long as it's somewhere away from here." "I'm not interested in solving the ills of society." "I don't want to save the world." "I don't even want to save me." "I think...most talk is so boring." "I mean, save this, do that, do this" "I think...we're all so boring say everything we don't even want to save ourselves, we're so boring talking about it." "There's nothing left to say." "We;re so fucking boring." "Let it die, I say." "Let there be a new beginning." "It's awful." "Goodnight." "Fucking thing's been shut off for 20 minutes by now." "You guys don't fool me." "Shit!" "And you missed the best part." "No." "All right then." "Do you think there is there is absolutely no way the the human condition can be improved?" "Well, you know anybody asked that question would have to swallow a martini and an olive before answering it." "Would you ask me that again?" "I mean, do you think that there is no way that anything can be improved in the troublings of man and the problems of man?" "I would say..." "Like maybe the rent control or" "I would say, if you're really serious" "I would say we would need less" "God guru spiritual outlets" "which allow people to... escape their pains in another" "God form in other, in order to exist." "In other words, if you have an alter God up there that you can crawl to" "after you've been defeated all day long by a guy you're working a 14 hour day for" "$6 an hour or" "$3 an hour." "Well... then you're only helping that man." "In other words, I would say the only way humanity can escape what is bothering them a little bit is by removing" "the creatures in the sky and coming down and facing what's looking at them." "But you're not gonna get them to do that." "So they're going to keep on accepting their bad husbands, their bad wives, their bad jobs, their bad whores, their bad children, because they have gods up in the sky." "Later... who are gonna solve all these things for them when it's all unscrambled after they've died, you see." "But after you die is no time to unscramble things." "And they can't even be unscrambled now, but they can be a few kinks can be taken out of the air hoses." "So you can breathe a little better." "I'm not a guru." "I wish you wouldn't pose these things on me, man." "Ask me about women or something." "The only time I've been felt desperate for company is when I've been set up by a broad." "Like, you know, they make you used to them." "You know, some... long red-haired bitch, walking around with her hair." "Looking at herself in the mirror." "Putting on lipstick, talking." "They cause the vacancy when they're gone." "But it's not a true vacancy, you see." "What you're trying to do is find someone to substitute for what is gone when they are gone." "But this is not you." "This is what they have built in you." "The vision that they want." "But if they stay over six or seven days, two or three weeks it heals, you don't need anybody." "You don't need a replacement." "What it is, is just a mirage or somebody you think you need, you see." "I go with Ibsen's... the strongest men are without gods." "I think it was Ibsen." "If it wasn't, whoever said it was a fine gentleman." "So, when yout talk about the gods it's mostly about your luck." "And you talk very often about the luck." "The luck." "The luck." "And, uh..." "luck we can go into that for centuries, uh... it's talent mixed with circumstance mixed with" "being there at a certain spot when somebody is looking at you." "That's all." "I have no more to say." "Do you think there are many people that are..." "No." "There isn't any undiscovered talent laying around under the bushes." "It's just not there." "In fact, as time goes more and more on there seems to be an attrition of natural" "creative talent." "I guess it is the crush of the numbers upon the earth." "And also... the fact that we're all narrowed down through uh... shit like television, newspapers, communication." "Communication is the greatest destroyer of talent because it makes everybody like everybody else." "And the only way... a child who you must start as a child to become original is to be shut out from these forces of communication." "And, the only way you can do that is to have cruel parents to be burried under ground for six months or something terrible." "The brilliant child cannot be brilliant because he's taught to be brilliant." "You see, he must be the counterpart to all these forces that are telling him what to do." "It gets harder and harder for a child to become individual because they're more and more melded together into one piece." "So as time goes on and on it's gonna be more and more difficult." "We're gonna have to look in, uh... little places in Africa and then..." "Okay, this sounds very dismal but that's it." "The chance of genius becomes less and less." "The others say it becomes more and more." "But it's the same kind of genius that they agree with, you see..." "The true genius like Idi Amin," "Adolf Hitler, and Charles Bukowski will become less and less and less." "Further questions?" "There is something behind the light." "The devil's face." "Generally speaking, you're free till you're about four years old." "And then... five around, then you go to grammar school and you start becoming demented and solved in." "Orientated and shoved into areas." "You lose what individualism you have, if you have enough, of course... you retain some of it." "But most don't have enough so, you become watchers of game shows, you know, and things like that." "Then you work the eight hour job with almost... a feeling of goodness." "Like you're doing something." "And you get married like marriage is a victory, and you have children like children is a victory." "But most things most people do are a total grind." "Marriage." "Birth." "Children." "It's something they have to do because there's nothing else to do." "There's no glory in it, there's no steam, there's no fire." "It's very, very flat." "And the earth is full of them." "Sorry, but... that's the way I see it." "The Proud Thin Dying" "I see old people on pensions in the supermarkets and they are thin and they are proud and they are dying" "they are starving on their feet and saying nothing." "Long ago, among other lies, they were taught that silence was bravery." "Now, having worked a lifetime, inflation has trapped them." "They look around,steal a grape chew on it." "Finally thay make a tiny purchace, a day's worth" "Another lie they were taught:" "Thou shalt not steal." "They'd rather starve than steal" "(one grape won't save them) and in tiny rooms while reading the market ads they'll starve" "They'll die without a sound pulled out of roominghouses by young blond boys with long hair who'll slide them in and pull away from the curb these boys handsome of eye thinking of Vegas and pussy and victory." "It's the order of things:" "each one gets a taste of honey then the knife." "So... this is um... where I lived" "and drank and wrote some stories and some poems" "and had a hell of a lot of trouble." "I guess trouble make stories, you know." "That's about it." "This is the place, I got a lot of work done here." "Great." "This is where you wrote 'Woman' and where most of 'Woman' happens." "A lot of 'em were here, in fact..." "I think all of them came here, at one time or another." "There were a lot of them." "Good and bad, mostly bad." "But, I got a book out of it." "That's all it's" "Airplane." "Lots of airplanes." "The cops used to circle overhead with their helicopters, shine the light down..." "The helicopters used to circle our pad, you know, we'd go out and look at them nude and naked and leering." "It was great." "They'd say: "No!" "I'll kill you!" ":" "I'd listen there'd be glass breaking, you'd see shards of glass flying through the night." "You'd hear screaming but you know the cops never came." "It'd go on for two or three hours." "And finally there would be silence of one voice so you knew somebody would either be dead or reamed up the ass with a telephone pole or something, but you know but they got what they wanted." "So, San Pedro's all right but I kinda miss those nights too...kind of interesting." "I always liked the cops never came, in those cases." "The big hype now is to bring up there's a message goes through the underworld of all the grapevine, you know, all the bigwigs." "The big message now is to bring up Liz Taylor back to where she used to be." "Now, all the hype and the propaganda is to say" "Elizabeth Taylor is a great, beautiful woman." "She's the most wonderful creature of all-time." "Now, all the hype, all the media has been told to do this and they're doing it." "All of a sudden I read the papers and I think" "God!" "She must be some kind of super goddess." "All these films I saw her in were really crappy except the one, you know, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" "'" "Oh, I read on that." "Oh, I missed something." "Then, there's even a quote from J.D. Salinger." ""She's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen."" "And, you know when I was a kid, and I'm 61, when I saw her as a kid... now this, okay, I did." "I thought that woman is really ugly." "Her face is ugly." "Her eyes are ugly, her mouth is ugly." "And I always thought, Elizabeth Taylor is one of the most ugly women I've ever seen." "She had the most portentous, evil, grabbing, gross..." "She exemplifies the, the... female creature grabbing for everything because her lips are formed a little bit like that." "Her eyebrows are a little bit like that, her eyes are a little bit like that, and her hair is a little bit like that." "That has nothing to do with beauty." "That has things to do with the mada- mathematical equation of where the chin should be and the ears should be." "Beauty is nothing." "It's an idea of something." "The gods don't give beauty." "The gods don't give beauty." "There's no idea of physical beauty." "So she's a stupid woman." "Oh my god, it makes me sick." "I'm sorry." "And she can sue me for saying it." "I'll stand on it." "Get and put it right on in" "I said what I said." "I will Elizabeth Taylor you are an ugly woman." "And we will go into the courts to prove whether you are ugly or beautiful." "The judges will say you are beautiful." "But the gods of everywhere, beyond this place will know that you are not beautiful." "You just, ears were formed in certain way." "Your mouth was formed a certain way." "Your eyes were formed a certain way." "But you are not beautiful, Elizabeth Taylor." "You are hardly anything." "This is beautiful." "Millionaires you, no faces, no faces, nothing at all laughing at nothing—" "let me tell you" "I have drunk in skid row rooms with imbecile winos whose cause was better whose eyes still held some light whose voices retained some sensibility," "and when the morning came we were sick but not ill, poor but not deluded," "and we stretched in our beds and rose in the late afternoons like millionaires." "In those places people were closer to each other." "A knock on the door... someone has a bottle to share." "Yeah, very true." "There was almost..." "I'll say no night there because that's the way I used to talk." "No night there you went without a drink and if you didn't have one well, somebody would show up." "I guess... why they did it, I don't know." "But it just happened like" "Many a night I'd be laying there, I'd say:" ""Jesus, what am I-"" "I'd have, I'm all out of money... somebody would knock, a door would open, and here come a hand with a bottle." ""How ya doin', Hank?"" ""Hey!" "Come on in."" "Then you start drinking pretty soon someone else comes in, pretty soon you look up there are 3 or 4 people in the room." "A tiny room." "And all of a sudden people start getting out of money." "They run out of wine." "Somebody gets up a quarter, somebody gets up a dollar." "Somebody runs down the hall, comes back with a..." "Pretty soon, somebody goes down." "There's more wine bottles." "Pretty soon everybody's smoking, drinking, talking, the radio's on." "Everybody's drunk." "Can you imagine this happening in this neighborhood?" "Come on." "Quite interesting." "So the poor since they have" "What's the difference between having 75 cents or nothing?" "You know, you might as well give it to someone or share it, you know." "So... pretty good." "Style." "Style is the answer to everything." "A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing." "To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it." "Joan of Arc had style." "John the Baptist" "Christ." "Socrates." "Caesar." "Garcia Lorca." "Style is the difference." "A way of doing, a way of being done." "Six Herons standing quietly in a pool of water or you walking out of the bathroom naked without seeing me." "I'm not one of these self-centered, genius-driven characters, who wakes up and..." "I'm more like a slug." "I'm more like a... a very slow, easy creature." "I really don't want to do anything." "I wake up in the morning, I just wanna lay in bed three or four more hours." "There's nothing I wanna do... in fact," "even going to the typewriter, as I walk toward it I realize I must be a writer because, you know..." "I made money at it." "I don't even like the looks of a typewriter." "Sometimes I stay away from it for days because it seems like jobs I used to have." "The minute I sit down to the damn thing I have a few bottles of wine." "A few bottles..." "Well!" "A half a bottle of wine the thing starts humming and the words start popping out." "You know, like popcorn kernels." "So there's, there isn't" "For me there's no egocentric or..." "I'm not doing it." "Something's doing it to me." "See." "So, I walk into it and here's the gift." "Hi, baby." "And it happens." "That's not just false modesty, it just occurs." "I'm set off." "I'm tripped out." "I guess I'm just a good ole kid, from the stockyards or railroad yards and the post office." "I'm thinking at my 60th birthday," "Saturday..." "Do you realize ten years ago I was a postal clerk down at Alameda Street, sticking letters into slots like this." "Within ten years" "I'm published in Germany, Norway, France, Holland, Italy..." "England." "You know, more." "I can't name six or seven more." "What happened?" "I don't know, kid." "I guess..." "I just wrote down the words the way they were meant to be." "And it scares me alot because I wonder..." "No." "You get a little touch of luck, can you carry on with the same grace?" "It's a good bloody hard test." "I mean, okay, I'm 60... soon I'll be 61," "62, 67, 73." "Soon I'll be 83, 85, 89..." "Am I still gonna be typing at 92?" "I just heard from my uncle, he's 93." "He said:" ""I hope you're in good health, Henry."" ""Louisa and I are in good health, except our knees hurt."" "Maybe I'll be hurting-writing about hurting knees.... at the age of 93." "I hope not." "I hope I'm long dead and long gone." "Earthquake" "Americans don't know what tragedy is." "A little 6.5 earthquake can send them to chattering like monkeys." "A piece of chinaware broken" "The Union Rescue Mission falls down" "6am." "They sit in their cars, they are all driving around." "Where are they going?" "A little excitment has broken into their canned lives." "Stranger stands next to stranger chattering gibberish fear, anxious fear, anxious laughter" "My baby, my flowerpots." "My ceiling, my bank account." "This is just a tickler, a feather, and they can't bear it." "Suppose they bombed the city, as other cities have been bombed" "Not with an A-bomb but with ordinary blockbusters, day after day." "Everyday as has happened in other cities of the world." "If the rest of the world could only see you today their laughter would bring the sun to its knees." "And even the flowers would leap from the ground like bulldogs and chase you away to where you belong wherever that is." "and who cares where it is as long as it's somewhere away from here." "When, uh..." "I started reading short stories in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's Bazaar" "By the way, I think the Atlantic just died recently, and they should..." "I'd read all these clean, tightly written stories of gentle agony and I'd say:" ""This isn't shit, they aren't writing about anything." "These are just..."" ""influential, tiny little people with tiny educations, writing about delicate things but they're not writing about anything." I knew it." "So..." "I kept trying to write." "I finally hit with" "Story Magazine." "Then I knew I still wasn't ready." "I knew I hadn't live enough then, even though I'd been fucked over, beat up." "So..." "I met this woman agent, she wrote me the letters, she said..." "I was living in Greenwich Village, at the time... not to live in Greenwich Village." "I'd just landed in New York, put my finger on a map and say..." "Unluckily it landed on New York City." "She sent me this kindly little note." "Kindly... snobbishly little note, from some agency." ""Dear Charles Bukowski, loved your story in Story Magazine"" ""I want to be your agent." "Won't you have a free dinner and drinks with me at so and so"" "Well Barbet, you've heard this all before, I've told you when I've been drinking but it's true, the same thing's true." "So I wrote her back:" ""Dear Madam, I'm not ready yet."" "So, that was it." "I knew... if she had been my agent, I'd met her to have drinks" "I could've pumped out some kind of shit, but she would have driven me into uh... some kind of dismal drivel, bullshit type of writing that I wasn't ready for." "So, I just left town, took off somewhere." "On the road." "I like Kerouac." "He went on the road as a fulfilling uh..." "I went on the road because there was no place else to go." "I just moved on because everything was ugly." "So it was, it was always for me no place to go, no place to land, no chance, ever." "I didn't expect a chance," "I didn't even want a chance." "All I wanted to do was find a small room somewhere, find a bottle of wine and start drinking." "Maybe find a job for a week, get enough to drink 3 or 4 days and nights to feel free, away from jobs and things." "then return and try to do what I had to do." "There wasn't much to do." "So I'd get a new job." "I'd be with all these people who were interested in their jobs, you know." ""Oh yes!" "Oh!" You know." "I never had that, you know." "I used to pick where I was going, I would open a map" "I would close my eyes and let the finger fall." "It would say:" "St. Louis, New Orleans, Savannah." "So, I'd get a bus ticket and go there and I'd always arrive in a town with very little in my pocket." "The first thing you do is find a boarding house or something that says: "Room For Rent"." "Then you get past the landlady, you have to act dignified." "And you come in, you kinda act like, you know" ""Yes I'm looking for a room..." You act like a jerk, you know, so" ""Oh, it'll be $4.50 a week."" ""What are you doing, ah..."" ""Well, uh..."" ""I'm a journalist and a freelance writer and uh..."" ""I have some checks coming in..."" ""I haven't quite caught up with the address and uh..."" ""Yes, I'm a writer." "Oh, you're writing, yeah." I say: "Yes."" "So, you go up the stairway, you follow her ass." "One had a beautiful ass, I followed her up and I said:" "If I could only make her fall in love with me." "Pretend to be a writer and just fuck her and have her cook for me." "I would never have to write, I'd just pretend." "Things like that." "Everything through the eye of Thurber looks good to me whether it's painting, I think Thurber is one of the least recognized geniuses of our time." "I hate the word that..." "One of the least recognized powers of, one of the least recognized..." "You know what?" "You always want to use that word but you are ashamed to use it." "James Thurber was so far ahead of his time, they've forgotten him and they're gonna recognize him in about...75 years again." "That guy really knew the man-woman situation." "He must've lived with a woman and just, got it down and still lived with her." "So excellent." ""When did you read Thurber?" "When you were in a Texas and that park bench?"" "No, no." "I was reading the Kenyon Review...and all that." "I read Thurber somewhere or other." "I don't know some cheap room, some cheap place some cheap town." "Are there such things as cheap towns?" "But, when you're starving you really like to read the snobs, you know." "Kenyon Review, Goss, and all that." "Those were the park bench boys." "I'd come off the park bench in El Paso and I would, you know, covered with dust" "I would rub it off my body, and the library, they'd kinda look at you." "It's a very tiny library." "It was then." "In El Paso." "It's very shady, you walk in about 10 in the morning, the li-you dust yourself off and the librarian kinda looks at you, but you sit at a table, you pick out a book so you're almost like she is, you know." "And that was the first place I wrote..." "I read" "Dosty...how do you pronounce that?" "Dostoevsky?" "Dostoevsky." "Dostoevsky, his 'Notes from the Underground'." "Which is a powerful god damn book." "When I read that I said:" ""If I can ever write close to that..."" ""If I can ever write close to that man, I would be near something." You know." "That's all" "So you were a writer from the beginning." "I mean you wanted to be." "Yeah, but... you know, I would open up the Atlantic Monthly, which has died, what a...about 2 or 3 months ago, they folded and I would open, I would read short stories" "they were just milk and honey." "They would show a sudden flash somewhere." "A decent line or two and that would be it." "It was a trick." "I said there's no chance for me, man." "I might as well get... a job here and there and just drink, and wait to die." "I'd say, I didn't't wanna live with a woman, have a family." "Said I'll just drift from town to town, get a job, drink and die." "But you were bringing the books to the..." "I would bring them to my rooms and..." "One room a landlady would say: "You know you're waking everybody up downstairs."" "I'd say: "How's that?"" "Because I was drinking, she'd say:" ""You must read a lot of books."" "So I say: "Why's that?" She says: "Because every night,"" ""you must go to sleep and all during your sleep we hear this..."" ""Pop!" "Pop!" "Pop!"" ""You're books keep falling to the floor, one by one, you're keeping everybody awake."" "I said: "Oh, I'm sorry."" "But I drank and I read books too at the same time." "And, you were writing short stories that were refused by magazines." "Hand printed." "Because I used to have a typewriter but I never had one very long because I'd hock to have enough to drink on mainly." "Not for the rent, you know, I want to go to the bar or get a bottle." "So, I hand printed all my short stories and I... wrote, you know, my jokes that I wrote" "5 or 6 letters a week, well in those days I'd write 5 or 6 short stories a week." "I would...they would be short, hand printed and I would find enough stamps put them in an envelope with return and they'd come back." "The Atlantic Monthly and all that." "So John Martin, I told him about this." "He said: "Whatever happened to those short stories?" I said: "I threw them away."" "He said: "Ach!"" "Why?" "Why did you throw them away?" "He probably thought that they were good" "I knew there was no chance..." "When you open a magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and the first line says:" ""It was a warm day in spring." "Mrs Gilli- McGillicuty's daughter was walking down..."" ""Central Avenue and the rain was beginning to..."" "...was trying to write my kind of stuff when they're printing that kind of stuff." "Right?" "So, I gave up and started drinking." "I thought it was because they were in a suitcase, too heavy to carry and" "Shit no." "I just, you know after you write something you lose interest in it anyhow." "Like, even Barfly, forgive me." "Anything you write you immediately lose interest in it a go on to the next thing." "If it isn't published, well you dump it that much easier." "You're always looking to the next, the next thing, the next thing." "Some of those stories you wrote on pieces of newspaper, or pieces of wax paper," "Something." "I just had newspaper, in a tin shack in Atlanta." "Well, that was just an automatic writers thing." "He didn't have anything else to do, so I found a pencil or a pen, I wrote on the edge of the newspapers." "Because, I'm like a spider that spins its web, doesn't know what else to do." "Pretty pitiful." "Was living in this tiny shack in Atlanta for what was it, a buck and a half a week." "I'm writing with a pencil on the edges of newspaper found on the floor." "Talk about a natural writer." "What the hell!" "I'm just there." "So, it's pretty pitiful but it's pretty automatic." "That's kinda nice too, you know." "It's the thing you got to do so you do it, anyhow." "Didn't happen too long." "And..." "I make it like it's six months or something." "Actually, it was..." "Probably two or three nights." "Uh, in fact it happened in sporatic moments." "We'd go out in the yacht you know, two or three nights then he'd come back." "Then a week later go out in the yacht again." "And... these were cheap whores." "The guy had a lot of money and had no way of evaluating a good woman." "He's picking up these cheap Alvarado Street whores and taking them out on his yacht." "And one of the cheap whores was my girlfriend who I was living with." "She was the least cheap." "She didn't get laid, or she claimed she didn't." "Just claimed she got laid to get drunk but I don't know." "I guess she did because she never had any fucking money." "But anyhow, I had a low class whore who didn't know how to hustle and he had the...now and then we'd wake up trying to go to Catalina and he had one arm" "I won't mention his name...but his boat was called The Wilcam." "It was nice out there." "There was plenty of booze and... there were three women, I fucked all three of his women including my own." "And, it was kind of strange for a poor guy to be on this nice yacht, you know..." "My kind of mind always accepts anything that happens, you know." "I accept, and so it wasn't strange to me it was just... something was supposed to occur." "Just like marrying a millionairess later on, which occurred." "I accept it." "So, it's just uh...nothing the yacht was there, you know." "It happened." "It was kinda nice, it just got cold out there at night." "He would drop anchor and get drunk." "He couldn't steer." "I'd have three women" "And...they'd say: "Oh, I'm cold, Hank."" "It's like one would come and huddle with me, and I'd fuck her." "The other would come up and huddle and I'd fuck her and the third would come up and huddle and I'd try to fuck her and I couldn't." "They all wanted to, you know, get in the bunk with me. "I'm cold."" "I guess lesbianism wasn't so rampant or open in those days or they would've gotten a bunk with each other and just left me alone." "You know..." "Which would've been just as welll, so..." "Yeah, that happened." "It was strange." "Anything to stay out of the factories helps, you know." "Yeah, you mention..." "Henry Miller every now and then." "How did you feel about him?" "Not too much, uh..." "Actually, i've been very unlucky in reading Henry Miller." "I guess I read the worst parts of him" "One time travelling across Texas..." "I jumped off somewhere and got one of his books." "I started reading and I fell asleep" "So many people have told me, you know:" ""You and Henry Miller, you must've engendered from him or liked him." But..." "To me... that sounds like a knock." "I just couldn't...injest him." "I guess he was, he went, too much now and then into the stars or into philosophy." "I liked his straight stuff, the little bit I read." "You know, when he said:" ""Well, Joe had a big dick." "Joe stuck his dick into Mary."" ""And they fucked." "Joe had a big dick." I liked that, see I could understand it." "When he went into Aries and Pisces and uh.." "all these ultra-mind trips." "I'm not, I don't have any mind." "So, I left him there." "Celine, Hemingway," "Dos Passos." "Good tough boys." "I stayed close to the earth." "The secret is in writing down one simple line after another." "Gertrude Stein found that out." "She said, you know: "A rose is a rose is a rose." We know that old cornball." "But Gerties problem was... she could only write down two or three lines." "Then Hemingway came along and he could only write down two or three thousand lines, or 230,000 lines." "Then he got boring." "But the secret is still in the line." "The secret is also... in the containment and the enjoyment and the energy in the line." "So, what I've tried to do is remain within the simple line and also bring in a sense of humor, like a... chorus girl dance, kicking up their legs and showing a bit of their cunts but not too much, you know." "Up and down, you know." "And... they jump off the stage and here comes a new crew." "What I'm trying to do is use a simple line and also inject" "a laughter through art." "Laughter through creation." "Creation is not all that serious." "Creation cannot be all that serious excpet, or we're going to fall asleep." "I'm falling asleep now talking about what it should be." "The only thing, the only thing about this film is that tragic, knowing, demented face." "If I saw that anywhere I'd say: "What's that guy got to say?" "I wanna hear him."" ""He must know something."" "Well, unfortunately it does." "No one's 18, 19..." "Everybody's gettin a job." "They're getting into the 8 hour a day...grind." "Everybody's doing it." "You know, you're either a chemist, you're a doctor." "You're a lawyer, you're a shipping clerk." "You're a filmmaker..." "You're a... cameraman." "You're doing some dumb thing, over and over and over again." "You get caught into the stricture of what you're supposed to be, and you have no other choice." "You're finally molded and melted into what you're supposed to be." "I didn't like this." "And I didn't like the 8 hour job." "I didn't even like the 4 hour job, even though I couldn't get one." "So, I decided..." "I'd rather starve and live on the edges of nowhere then do anything at all." "Then become anything labelled." "So, for fifty years I... was a scarecrow unlabelled, and now..." "I'm supposed to be a writer." "Cause in the last ten years what I wrote for a while has become translated into what... 12 languages?" "13, I don't know." "So the cancer's spreading all over Europe and now I'm supposed to be famous everywhere but here, in America." "Why is that?" "Because the gods... have decided to protect me from getting the ultra-fat head." "They have decided to keep me clean and good so I can keep on working in all of their areas." "That's all." "Besides that, Europe is always and will be, at least 100 years ahead of America in culture, feeling, and knowledge" "You know, they-they all sang that... fame is the greatest bitch of all, or something like that, you know." "But fame is a good test too because if you really have the power and the courage, and then they give you fame if you can ride past that baby, you've got the final touch." "And...it's a damn good test." "I'm not too famous...yet." "But I'm working on it and uh..." "I think I'll fail." "But, it's all right." "Mink!" "Minksy come here." "Aw....baby." "What is it?" "But your first story was published by Story Magazine." "It was something called 'A Story About a Story' or..." "It was called 'Lengthy Aftermath of a Rejection Slip'" "So I hit the big time." "That was a big magazine at the time." "Well, it was intellectually and spiritually and..." "Once you got printed in Story Magazine you were supposed to bea literary genius." "So, if you made those pages you were supposed to be there." "And they runed down the next story?" "No, I didn't send another." "I sent one more to Portfolio, that's Caresse Crosby at Portfolio." "She took it." "I was in there with Henry Miller and...all the boys." "So, you actually stopped the minute you were published?" "Yeah." "Twice, very 'in the big' things, I quit." "So what do you say to Barbet's question about choosing the life of the outsider?" "Well..." "In this case it seems like you just might have done that." "I hate to be guilty of that but I guess I was seeking more facts as dumb as that word may sound I just," "I didn't want to become a 'known' writer at that time." "Were you afraid it was too soon?" "I was just afraid." "So, I ducked and started drinking and doing whatever I did, which was nothing." "What happened when after that, after Portfolio was published and you bought a copy of it?" "What did you, what was your...where did you go with it?" "You know the story, Joe." "You've studied me, so..." "Well... one night in this bar, you know, where we did Barfly, what the book's all about well, they're asking me, they finally got to me. "What do you do?"" ""Well, I just sit at the bars." "No, I mean what..." "Well, I write."" ""You write?"" "I said: "Yeah." "You mean you got something in a magazine?" I said: "Yeah."" ""Hey, man!" "Can you show me the magazine you're in?"" ""I'll buy you a drink." "I'll buy you three drinks." I said: "Oh, good enough."" "So I was drunk." "I went down and got this big portfolio thing, you know, with all these" "It was a huge thing with drawings and..." "So, I came down...it was stupid, I shouldn't have done it." "Went over and I got my drinks and they said: "Jesus!"" "They uh...the waitress said:" ""Oh, listen to these words." "Oh..."" "And everybody said :"What?" And they all gathered around, so the drinks came." "Then it started raining outside." "I don't know, somehow we got outside" "Hell, I was leaving...something." "I was the hero then." "I was drunk so I dropped the thing and all the pages fell out." "And the wind was, you know Philadelphia, and it was raining." "I remember one guy, a big window washer." "He'd come along, he'd say:" ""Hey, I got this page!"" "And he had this big foot and it goes right in the center of this big thing right in the middle of the painting." "Finally, he gathered them all up, he said:" ""Here you go, Hank."" "So, I went back to my place and here was this final great you know, where it's supposed to be an immortal genius, open it up there were all these big footprints over my poems, over all the paintings." "So, I always get it up the ass, you know." "Somehow or the other." "The Shoelace a woman, a tire that's flat, a disease, a desire:" "fears in front of you, fears that hold so still you can study them like pieces on a chessboard... it's not the large things that send a man to the madhouse." "death he's ready for, or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood... no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse... not the death of his love" "but a shoelace that snaps with no time left..." "The dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which is always there - licence plates or taxes or expired driver's license, or hiring or firing, doing it or having it done to you," "or constipation, speeding ticket, rickets or crickets or mice or termites or roaches or flies or a broken hook on a screen, or out of gas or too much gas, the sink's stopped-up, the landlord's drunk," "the president doesn't care and the governor's crazy." "lightswitch" "speech broken, factor of mouth lightswitch broken, mattress like a porcupine;" "$305 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at sears roebuck;" "and the phone bill's up and the, market's down and the toilet chain is broken, and the light has burned out - the hall light, the front light, the back light, the inner light;" "it's darker than hell and twice as expensive." "then there's always crabs and ingrown toenails and people who insist they're your friends;" "there's always that and worse;" "leaky faucet, christ and christmas;" "blue salami, 9 day rains," "90 cent avocados and purple liverwurst." "or making it as a waitress at norm's on the split shift, or as an emptier of bedpans, or as a carwash or a busboy or a stealer of old lady's purses leaving them screaming on the sidewalks" "with broken arms at the age of 80." "suddenly 2 red lights in your rear view mirror and blood in your underwear;" "toothache, and $1979 for a bridge" "$900 for a gold tooth and china and russia and america, and long hair and short hair and no hair, and beards and no faces, and plenty of zigzag but no pot except maybe one to piss in" "and the other one around your gut." "with each broken shoelace out of one hundred broken shoelaces," "one man, one woman, one thing enters a madhouse." "so be careful when you bend over." "It's true." "Some psychiatrist or somebody like that wrote me." "Somebody who was in the great study said:" ""Your Shoelace poem, that's a very true thing."" "That people go to madhouses not out of great causes, you know you see your daughter murdered by a dragon who comes in at 6am in the morning and gobbles her up." "It's a , it's a ton of tiny little...nothingness." "Pardon me." "But that's it." "So, luckily I've had a bunch of...big tragedies instead of tiny ones." "So I've...almost kept out." "These are the bathroom windows." "I took all my beatings in the bathroom." "And as I took my beatings I used to look out...of these windows." "For mercy or light, until after a while you can't see anymore." "A very bad room for me there." "This was my bedroom." "Bed went this way, there was a dresser here." "When I got to be about 15 I started going out at night." "My parents would go to sleep at 8 o'clock at night." "And I let them sleep for about an hour and then I would get dressed and get out of bed." "And go out and drink, with older guys." "In fact, I kinda became the, the leader of these older guys." "I was very mean at the time." "I'm not, not like I am now, gentle and kind." "And uh..." "This is the window..." "I would sneak out of." "And this, I think is the same bush here but it was smaller at the time." "I'd go out the top of it and I wore by each night going out, I would wear the leaves off of the top part." "So the bush...always looked like somebody had been sliding out of that window." "But they never knew till uh...years later, that I was going out drinking with the boys." "One night, you know, going out during the nights" "I showed at the dorr, I couldn't get in, and they looked through the little thing and uh... they wouldn't let me in, you know my mother screamed: "You're not my son!"" "My father cursed me and I said:" ""I need someplace to sleep, I'm coming in."" "So, I lunged at the door two or three times, it broke open and I came in." "And uh..." "I don't know, I guess this exertion and being full of drink upset me." "So, right about here I...puked." "And my father was a great big guy, I guess" "I was around sixteen and a half." "And he came up behind me when I was puking and he says:" ""You know what we do with the dog, when it shits on the rug?" I said: "No."" "He said: "We put its nose in it."" "Well, I never struck back against my father until this moment and I said: "Don't do it"" ""Father." "Don't do it." So, he got me right down about here, of course," "I just spun around and I caught him with a beautiful uppercut." "The couch was somewhere around-he fell back on it, and he couldn't understand, you know." "It's okay to beat the kid but the kid must not...respond." "Of course my mother, she stood and just raked me." "She said:" ""You hit your father!" "You hit your father!" You know, a woman's nails." "My shirt was bloody, and I just stood there until she finished." "I said: "You satisfied?"" "And I started walking away and my father said:" ""I'll see you in the morning!" I said: "Why not right now?"" "He didn't bother me in the morning." "I guess that's called growing up, quickly." "That's about all of that." "Fireplace is still there." "You didn't go very much with people, but you went there a few times." "And I think you had some imagination about what it was and it wasn't what you expected." "Oh, yeah." "Well..." "I think what bothered me," "I think one time when I was a kid I saw this skid row film..." "I don't know if it was Gary Cooper or somebody but it was, it was some young bum on skid row and he was hopping off and on a freight, freight cars." "But he always looked very beautiful." "You know his hair was a little bit messed, but" "And I remember one time he got off the boxcar and all the little girls in the audience applauded." "They loved his look and I said:" ""Hey, this isn't right."" "But still I was a little bit on the romantic side of the the drifter who didn't want to fit into life." "And he was too strong to fit into life." "Well, I felt the same way too." "I didn't like what I saw, the streets, the drugstores." "The movie houses." "I thought: "Well, hell." "Maybe I'm too strong too, huh."" "But... the little shots I saw of skid row, usually I slept on park benches." "Even liked the flophouses." "But the guys I saw down there, and the guys I saw in the they have employment places, you know." "You sit on benches and you wait for a call, they need four guys to unload a boxcar or something." "Just sitting, and, well you sit in these places." "There are people there man, they don't even know where the hell they're at." "There's a guy going..." "There's another guy going:" ""Well, fuck!" "(mad gibberish)!"" "Another guy going" "You know they're all uh..." "These aren't the beautiful people down on skid row." "Like this film we saw, what the" "I won't name it." "But you know they're pushing in and they're all singing a little and they're playing with guitars." "And they're all...talking about their problems." "They have a little bonfire, there's none of that." "They're completely mad and they're they're almost like cockroach people." "They're ugly and you don't, you just want to get away from them." "It's terrible down there." "There's nothing like that movie we saw." "There's nothing even near that, I've never seen a skid row like that." "And you could go down there and search for years, you won't find it." "Those people down there..." "I went there because I wanted to escape." "They go down there because they were thrown down there." "See?" "And you want to escape and your down with people who were thrown down there that doesn't feel good either." "So then, where else do you go?" "Back to the bottle and a tiny room somewhere." "And wait." "And wait." "And wait." "That's all." "I'm loner, that's all." "Hell." "Unless you're a loner, I only met one guy like me." "But he couldn't have been much of a loner cause he kept knocking at my door, telling me how much he was a loner." "It was Red Strange, whatever." "But he was as close as I could find to a guy like me." "So he's telling me about himself, or else he'd read my stuff and he recognized it." "But he wasn't as much of a loner as I was." "So I said: "Hey, Red." "Go away."" "What was he doing in life?" "He just hung around." "He'd get little jobs in rooming houses and he was always ducking." "He never wanted to be seen, and..." "One time I was driving down the street and he was walking down and I think it was a...and I said:" ""Hey Red!" He was looking at a...walking down the street, he pretended to look at a theater marquee, you know, an advertisement for a theater." "He was trying to hide from the voice who said "Hey Red"." "So, I tested it." "I knew he was a real loner, he's trying to hide." "I said: "Hey Red."" ""It's Hank." He said: "Oh, Hank!" and he jumped in the car." "I said:" ""Okay, kid." "Tell me about it." So, he'd start talking you know about being a true loner." "But he talked too much." "Hours." "But I got a lot of short stories out of him." "He kept coming around." "He fed a lot of good stories and then he kept repeating his stories and I said:" ""Hey, Red."" ""Go out, get me some new stuff, and then come back." "You're boring me."" "So, I moved and meanwhile we didn't connect." "I could still use him, you know." "One of those erection stories." "The one uh..." "I don't know if you remeber." "There's a dog that keeps bothering people and they cut his throat." "That was a Red Strange story." "There are a couple others." "The guy fed me some stories you know, I used them" "He was the main character, the mean one, in that scene where it was just a story that he heard?" "Oh yeah, he was the guy that cut the dog's throat." "Ah, he was the mean one." "Oh yeah, he was mean." "We would walk down the street, you know, and he would say:" ""Hey, watch this guy." "He's got boots on, Hank."" "I'd say: "Yeah." He'd say:" ""Never wear boots, a guy could come up right behind you and cut your throat."" "This guy'd be walking about a block behind, he'd say: "Watch!"" "He'd go right up and start walking behind the guy and he'd go back to me like this:" ""See!" "See!" "See!" "See!" "See."" "I say: "Hey Red!" "Come on." "Come on."" "He was completely mad." "Of course I liked him very much." "So, he was very strange." "He was strange." "So, okay." "Good." "Goodnight." "To me, once a person enters the door the first thing I think of is getting rid of them." "The Vampires" "I am hungover and in bed and the doorbell rings" "It is 11 am" "What the shit?" "I ask" "She goes to the door and I hear her talking" "She enters the bedroom and tells me" ""It's a Mr. Sanderson" she says" ""He says you know him and he wants to talk to you"" ""Sanderson?" I ask" ""What's his first name?"" "She comes back with the answer" ""He says his first name is Frank."" ""Never heard of the son of a bitch." "Tell him to get out of here."" "I hear them talking back and forth and I consider all that very unnecessary." "I begin to get up and get dressed to run him off." "When I get there he is gone." ""What did he want?" I ask." ""He wanted to talk to you," she says." ""Well, now isn't that the cat's tit?"" ""He looked like a very nice boy." "He looked very sad when you sent him off."" ""I don't want to talk to any son of a bitch," I tell her." ""Well, I would of talked to him." She says." "I walk into the crapper, pull down my pants and my shorts and let it go." "That night I'm on my fourth or fifth beer when there is a brutal knocking upon the door." "I figure murder, emergency, anything." "Somebody needs help." "I open the door." "It is a fat son of a bitch and behind him there are five or six other people." "Male and female." ""Hey!" Screams the fat man." ""I am Bo Severus and we've come to say hello!"" "I swing the door shut but he sticks a big shoe in there holding it open." ""Hold it," he says, "we're a lot alike"." ""You'll really dig me." "Many people mistake me for you"" ""Get your god damn foot out of the jam," I say." ""I've read all your books," he says." "I take the heel of my shoe and crush it down along his toe." "The foot withdraws and I slam the door." "After a moment, empty beer cans and bottles hit against the door." "Then a rock or two." "I hear some curses and then I hear them walking off." "I sit down and open a new beer." ""Ever since I was about 16," I tell her." ""People have been after me and its never stopped."" ""44 years worth of that."" ""I don't know what they want with me be- cause you see I most certainly dislike them"" ""Maybe if you just give them a chance," she says." ""You'll find that everybody's an individual, if you just search them out"" "I drain my beer on that one then look at her." ""How the fuck did you get in here?"" "I walk into the kitchen and find the scotch." "Unpeal and pour a hit as the phones rings." "I hear her answer." "'Who?"" ""I'll ask him."" "I hear her walking toward me in the kitchen and I wonder why she doesn't already know the answer as I stand there holding the drink." "Watching the faucet leak." "The way they always do." "When you people leave tonight I'll feel much better." "No, I will." "Truly." "I mean I like you to an extent, but I mean, I like you better when you're not here." "Yes, I've been in jail..." "I don't know my record probably" "Thirteen common drunks." "Two drunk drivings." "One... attempted rape, which was dismissed." "This may not be in Los Angeles, it's all over the country, but most are in Los Angeles." "But...actually I'm an innocent man." "I get drunk and I pretend violence but I'm not violent." "It's just self-entertainment." "You know, you can't go to movies, those things." "I think most of the things I say when I'm drunk are very true even though, later in the morning people say:" ""Those things you said are very raw and untrue"." "I think" "I come, finally come out of my..." "What I'm hiding behind I really say, but I feel against things." "I might be wrong." "But I'm only wrong... against what's happening to me." "I'm dumb." "I'm impetuous and I'm dumb." "I'm silly and I'm unrehearsed and I don't have very much experience." "Or, I've picked it up lately you know, very much." "But I still react the same way." "I am a dumb person." "I react dumbly with violence." "I don't like to be wronged and I react directly toward that." "I have no excuses for my stupidity." "Nothing else?" "I will have to say one more thing." "A lot of reasons for my so-called stupidity with women later relate with what happened to me from the time I was born till I was" "17, 18, 19 years old." "In otherwords that area filled in-I'm not apologizing, I'm just saying" "I was brought up tough and hard by the toughest troops in the world." "So, I think they were wrong but they taught me to believe" "and not to forgive." "I never forgive." "I'm a dog." "You're either on time, you do it right, or you do it wrong." "And once you've made an error, forget it." "I don't make errors." "I just get drunk, slap people all to shit, drive my car over dead bodies, park in the garage and have another drink." "Okay?" "Leaning on Wood there are 4 or 5 guys at the racetrack bar." "there is a mirror behind the bar." "the reflections are not kind of the 4 or 5 guys at the racetrack bar." "there are many bottles at the racetrack bar." "we order different drinks." "there is a mirror behind the bar." "the reflections are not kind." ""it don't take brains to beat the horses, it just takes money and guts."" "our reflections are not kind." "the clouds are outside." "the sun is outside." "the horses are warming up outside." "we stand at the racetrack bar." ""I've been playing the races for 40 years and I still can't beat them."" ""you can play the races for another 40 years and you still won't beat them."" "the bartender doesn't like us." "the 5 minute warning buzzer sounds." "we finish our drinks and turn away to make our bets." "our reflections look better as we walk away:" "you can't see our faces." "4 or 5 guys from the racetrack bar." "what shit." "nobody wins." "ask Caesar." "You said that the racetracks were the universities of life" "What, what do you learn at the racetrack?" "Why do you go at the racetrack every day?" "Like Hemingway needed bullfights, you know, to see what was happening." "It taught him something." "Actually, he was studying death." "I'm more or less studying..." "life." "I think what it is it tells you something very quickly that you should know from the beginning." "But it doesn't quite give you the answer, it almost gives you the answer." "And that's important, to almost have the answer." "And that's all." "It teaches you something unnameable." "When I don't go to the track for two or three days I just wilt, like a... like a flower without water." "So, it's..." "I can't name it." "It's just..." "It's just there." "The thing is there, I have to go see it." "The monster, the god, the rat, the snail." "Whatever is out there I have to go see it, and look at it." "And endure it and...maybe not endure it." "But..." "It's needed." "That's all." "I really can't explain it." "If I could, I wouldn't go." "What is it...(inaudible)" "Where women have failed with a lot of men" "I believe where this one thought that artistic men" "one who wrote of unusual things or unusual feelings had more" "than common men of the streets, business men... etc." "But you see that's not true." "Artists only heighten" "what is true." "But they themselves may not be as real as the guy next door." "They only realize a sense of reality and heighten it to a sharpened point." "And that's called art." "But they themselves may not be worthwhile creatures." "But with some women they think that men in the arts or" "great poets, great writers, or semi-great writers might have something extra." "But it's not true, they don't have anything extra." "They just do different things in a different way." "Perhaps in a more unkind way to... reach... what they're trying to explain of themselves." "It doesn't make a better man." "So, uh... she thought in me she could find something more gentle, more kind." "Actually, she found the reverse." "So, it doesn't matter." "But, they don't want to live with it." "All of them have come to see me and they try to change me." "They want to show me the happy life." "They want to..." "But you see, I didn't ask them to come by." "They're trying to save me." "They're interested in the evilness in my writing, if I can use that term, or the difference." "And that's what attracts them." "The minute, the moment they meet me they try to change me into them." "Which is not evil, interesting, or anything at all." "So, I resent that and I revolt to it and then we get an unhappiness." "But, I don't come to them, they come to me." "So then we have problems." "I used to hang around this park a little and... over there is the hotel." "Where the guy dropped out of the window while I was sitting, you know." "That's it." "We drank heavily and one morning I woke up with the worst hangover I ever had." "Like a steel band around my head." "I really felt terrible and she was in the bathroom puking." "We drank this very cheap wine, you know, the cheapest you could get." "Many bottles, so..." "I'm sitting there almost dying." "I'm sitting at the window trying to get some air." "Just sitting there and all of a sudden" "a body comes down." "A man fully dressed, he's got a necktie on neatly knotted, he seems to be going in slow motion." "You know, a body doesn't fall very fast." "Evidently he got up on the roof and just jumped off." "This building is not very tall." "I mean, he probably crippled himself for life." "I don't know." "So..." "I saw him go by and I said: "Well,"" ""I don't think I'm going crazy." "I think that was really a body that went by."" ""I know it was a body that went by."" "So, I hollered to the bathroom, I said: "Hey, Jane!" "Guess what?"" "She says: "Ya, what is it?"" "I said: "The strangest thing just happened."" ""Yeah?"" ""Yeah, a human body just dropped by my window."" ""His head was on top and his feet were, he was all lined up"" ""and he was dropping through the air." "He dropped right passed the window."" "She said: "Ah, bullshit." I said: "No, no, it really happened."" ""I'm not making it up."" "She said: "Ahhh come one, you're trying to be funny." "You're not funny." I said:" ""I know I'm not funny." I said: "Look, I'll tell ya what."" ""Just come on out here,"" ""come to the window and stick your head out the window and look down."" "She said: "All right, here I come." She came, she stuck her head out the window and all I heard was" ""Oh God Almighty!"" "She ran in the bathroom and puked and puked and puked." "And I laid there, I sat there and I said:" ""I told you so, baby."" ""I told you so."" "And I went to the refrigerator, got a beer." "I felt better, you know." "I don't know why I felt better." "Maybe cause I was right, you know." "So I opened my beer and I sat there and I drank it." "I still didn't look out the window, you know." "Because I was feeling bad." "This is where it happened, and that's all there is." "We were no longer living together, and uh..." "I came over to see her once and I knocked on the door." "There was nobody in the room and I opened the door and the bed covers had been pulled back, and there was a spot of blood... on the bed sheet about a little bit below the head." "And I sensed something very bad you know, just the feel of the bed and the shadows in the room and everything was there..." "So, I went downstairs to the... landlady and I said: "Where's Jane?"" "She said: "Well, the ambulance came and took her."" "So... then I went to see her." "She was in the County General where I'd spent a lot of my time." "And, so she was in a coma, and I kept sitting there," "and I wiped her face with a rag." "She came out of the coma, she recognized me." "She opened her eyes and she said:" ""I knew it would be you."" "Then she closed her eyes and she never came out of it again." "So yeah, that's how it happened." "She died maybe two days later." "For Jane" "225 days under grass and you know more than I." "they have long taken your blood, you are a dry stick in a basket." "is this how it works?" "in this room the hours of love still make shadows." "when you left you took almost everything." "I kneel in the nights before tigers" "that will not let me be." "what you were will not happen again." "the tigers have found me and I do not care." "She was a beautiful woman." "Okay, forget it." "Probably the second woman I went to be with." "The other was" "Just a... 250lb whore or the 300lb whore." "That was at 24, 25?" "I was... 24, 25." "She was around 35." "And she just accepted me." "Got me all this booze and..." "I don't understand it, but she was a real fine looking woman, with body and good sense." "A little bit mad." "To me it was like a miracle." "Of course I didn't act like it was very exciting because you just don't do that, you know." "So, I thought I really had something." "I did." "I had lots of trouble." "That's all." "She hgad beautiful legs, wore high heels." "Knew how to cross her legs with the skirt just so." "Kicking the heel like this and talking all kinds of shit, you know." "Nothing like beautiful legs." "Because with beautiful legs you always figure even though you've only been there once or twice there be something else there besides a cunt." "You know, there might be something really marvelous this time." "It could be a cunt, but it could be..." "There's something about looking at the legs that makes you dream." "I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the cunt." "But I'm saying you always imagine some extra magic when you're looking at the outside portion of the female." "But you really were in love with her?" "I mean, it lasted some time." "I was in love because it was the first person who paid any attention to me in my life." "So I was flattered." "You know, she used to say:" ""You have the most beautiful eyes of any man I've ever met." You know." "All this kind of bullshit, so..." "One is taken easily the first time." "And each time one is taken again, one is taken less easily." "Till finally you're taken again and again, then you're not quite taken." "You accept but you're not quite taken." "Anything else?" "Wanda was a good looker but men couldn't... stand her because she would attack them, physically." "With bottles or all of a sudden be sitting next to them in a bar, throw a glass in their face, or you know, act erratically." "But she never did that with me except one time, and then I cured that." "She did it twice, and I cured it twice and she never did it again." "I won't go into details." "Nothing torturous, just counterbalance of a... psychology." "She was a looker." "And, she had a strange mad kind of sensibilty that knew something which was this:" "That most human beings are just aren't worth a shit." "And I felt that, and she felt it." "So, we had a working ground to work upon." "That's all." "Anything else?" "How's it going?" "All right." "You said the feminists who attacked you, have not read Women." "What would they find if the read it well?" "They would find in a relationship between men and women that I cared more for the women than they cared for me." "They was more interesting and more alive and more humorous and... more joyful about our relationships." "The very fact that I'd written the book in such a manner is one of the proofs." "I was alive enough to write it and live through them." "And, I am not the hero in the book." "I am not the victor, you see." "What... the feminists, as you call them, are looking for is" ""he said this!" "He did that!"" "But they never see when she did this, she did that." "So I would say, basically they are sick and I am well." "Pardon me." "Okay." "Quiet Clean Girls in Gingham Dresses all I've ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes, madwomen." "I see men with quiet, gentle women" "I see them in..." "I see them in the supermarkets," "I see them walking down the streets together," "I see them in their apartments:" "people at peace, living together." "I know that their peace is only partial, but there is peace, often hours and days of peace." "all I've ever known are pill freaks, alcoholics, whores, ex-prostitutes, madwomen." "when one leaves another arrives worse than her predecessor." "I see so many men with quiet clean girls in gingham dresses girls with faces that are not wolverine or predatory." ""don't ever bring a whore around," I tell my friends," ""I'll fall in love with her."" ""you couldn't stand a good woman, Bukowski."" "I need a good woman." "I need a good woman more than I need this typewriter more than I need my automobile, more than I need Mozart;" "I need a good woman so badly that I can taste her in the air," "I can feel her at my fingertips," "I can see sidewalks built for her feet to walk upon," "I can see pillows for her head," "I can feel my waiting laughter," "I can see her petting a cat," "I can see her sleeping," "I can see her slippers on the floor." "I know that she exists but where is she upon this earth as the whores keep finding me?" "Yeah, where is she?" "Nowhere at all." "What are the places where you lived except apart the Carlton Way and the Longpre which were the 2 last ones before this one?" "They were pretty similar; the Longpre and Carlton Way?" "Yeah." "Well, I think of all the places Jane and I lived together, which were sometimes one week, sometimes two weeks, sometimes two nights cause we would fight." "We got a fancy, real place and we'd be all sober you know, and the landlord would come in and say:" ""We're gonna give you a nice, new, red rug here." "This rug is filthy."" "And we'd act like ladies and gentleman, oh yes, and Jane would say:" ""Oh, thank you." We'd act all dignified, you know." "This one place, they ripped up the green rug, all torn, they bought us a beautiful red rug." "And they just admired us." "They thought, they thought we had something, you know." "Then we had a fight one night, you know." "It goes on five or six hours." "Broken glass and screaming." "Oh shit." "So I woke up in the morning, I said to Jane:" ""You know, we're finished here, baby."" "All of a sudden the door popped open." "The guy had tears in his eyes." ""You're ruining my career!" "I thought you were decent people!"" ""You gotta leave!" "You gotta leave your room!"" "I said: "Okay buddy, we'll leave." "Just give us what you got us."" "So, we used to do that all the time." "We'd go from place to place." "We'd pay a weeks rent but we'd never last a week." "We'd get refunds." "There'd be broken mirrors." "And we'd go around and around." "It got so tiresome, you know." "We used to knock on doors and some of them they already knew us, they wouldn't rent to us." "So we'd just go around and around." "And, I don't know where the money came from." "I had part-time jobs." "And one morning it was about 3:30 in the-no..." "It was about 11 in the morning, it was Sunday morning." "I said: "Hey, Jane."" "She says: "What is it you son of a bitch?" "Give me a drink."" "I said: "Wait a minute." "Wait a minute."" ""There's something wrong."" ""I have parked my car in the middle of a street."" ""I'm blocking all traffic."" ""They've hauled my poor car away."" ""Oh bullshit, you son..." "No, I remember being drunk"" ""but couldn't find a parking space"" ""so I said I'll just park it in the middle of the street."" ""Oh bullshit!" "Bullshit!"" "Well you know, women will always think they don't know what you're thinking." "So, I put on my clothes and I looked up the first street and I couldn't find..." "Here I was up the third street, I blocked the whole street." "Here was the car parked there but luckily it was 11 o'clock in the morning and nobody on that street went to church." "They were all, you know." "So I got in, got in, turned the key and it started and I just drove right off." "Parksa (?" ") I blocked the whole avenue." "That was the Plymouth?" "Street." "I don't remember what car it was but you know it would barely start." "When I got in to start it I'd be..." "Those days were so wild, man." "We were always drunk, getting kicked out." "I had two cars." "One would break down, I have another..." "It was a continuous going into bars, getting into trouble, getting kicked out of rooms." "It was a tension that just" "But there was a liveliness there because we both didn't care for shit, you know." "Were you able to write during this time?" "What?" "Oh no, hell no." "There wasn't any time." "You were able to write while this was..." "And then she'd be in jail, I'd get her out." "I'd be in jail, she couldn't get me out." "So, it was awful." "But there was this constant-it was like being in a war, it never relented." "This speaks for itself." "I wouldn't go in there, you see." "Only a fool would walk-well, I might go in." "Yeah." "Time Motel, you can go in there, you pay 15 minutes to get a bed." "And here we have the broken down cars of everything." "This is Carlton Way?" "Yeah, watch the guy here." "This is where I used to live, but now..." "I somehow escaped." "Which I'm very pleased about." "Not that the poor aren't all right, there's just so god damn many of them." "Lots of action here." "This is an action place." "Was an action place." "Still seems to be." "So..." "Who were you neighbors?" "It was Sam the Whorehouse Man?" "Yeah, Sam the Whorehouse Man and... a couple of lesbians, a couple homosexuals upstairs." "a couple drug dealers..." "It's kind of become family now." "It's become much nicer, I guess." "But, I'm glad I'm not living here now." "It's not quite my... atmosphere." "So I really don't know..." "This is where I wrote 'Women', yes." "This is where I did my research." "And, one of them used to sit on the couch." "One morning I had three of them sitting on this couch." "The Mailman came by." "He asked me the next day: "Hank, how do you do it?" "How do you get 'em?"" "I said: "The problem is not how you get 'em, it's how you get rid of 'em."" "So ah..." "Sometimes people think you have a got thing, you got a bad thing you know." "So uh..." "It worked." "It turned into writing." "All these sounds you hear are sounds of my children." "No." "No." "But before that you were living in a similar place, a court." "I've always lived in courts." "I like courts." "You can come in drunk, leave drunk." "It's not like an apartment." "where everybody knows what the hell you're doing." "In a Neighborhood of Murder" "the roaches spit out paperclips and the helicopter circles and circles smelling for blood" "searchlights leering down into our bedroom" "5 guys in this court have pistols another a machete" "we are all murderers and alcoholics but there are worse in the hotel across the street" "they sit in the green and white doorway banal and depraved waiting to be institutionalized" "here we each have a small green plant in the window and when we fight with our women at 3 a.m." "we speak softly and on each porch is a small dish of food" "always eaten by morning we presume by the cats." "...zoot suits..." "Oh...zoot suit." "Well..." "That was World War II." "And uh... of course" "I was one of the few guys who was not interested in World War II." "It was a very patriotic time." "You know now, you know the... the Jane Fonda, anti-war things didn't take much courage you know, cause everybody was against them." "She's up there screaming." "Wiggling her ass against the war." "That doesn't take any courage, you know." "But during World War II, if you were against the war man, you were a cockroach you know." "But like I always said there aren't any good wars or any bad wars." "Guys get killed or get their balls blown off." "And somebody wins and somebody loses." "And when it's all over and the smoke clears just re-corruption, re-corrupt." "But, getting back to the zoot suiters." "They were about my only allies because I wasn't interested in the war and..." "The Mexicans weren't either because they were starving on the east side of L.A." "So they were quite neat, these Mexicans." "They wore these things called zoot suits and they ca...they carried little knives, razors." "They'd go around attacking the U.S. troops." "Cutting sailors throats." "Murdering them, beating the shit out of them in gangs." "And..." "You know, that was quite beautiful because it was so much against the tide of American feelings and patriotism." "I thought... shit!" "These guys are just like I am." "They're not interested in the war, in fact they even don't like it." "Well, I didn't dislike it." "It didn't matter." "It didn't matter to me, you know." "I didn't want to cut a sailor's throat." "He wants to go to the war, let him go." ""Hey baby." "Save the world."" "But these guys were actually a... quite magic and..." "I felt a great affinity towards them but I didn't want to join their gangs because what's a whitey gonna come in:" ""Hey, man."" ""I'll help you cut a sailor up." You know." "Hey!" "Here's this...white face guy." "But anyhow anything against the normal tide, when the tide is going all this way and any group stands up and goes a little bit that way they interest me very much." "It's so easy just to go, you know." "The zoot suiters were very interesting." "And now, I guess in our times they've become kind of magic heroes." "They make little plays about them and..." "But at that time it was very difficult for them." "Finally, the Navy got very angry against the Mexicans and they would just..." "Sailors would go into East L.A. and just grab a Mexican and just beat the shit of him." "You know, they'd run through the whole town." "They'd just start beating up Mexicans you know, because all Mexicans were zoot suiters." "So, you know that's how that went." "That ended up badly." "Because there are more guys in the Navy than there are zoot suiters." "So, there you go." "It was a very glamorous gang." "I liked the minor swelling against authority at that time." "That's all." "When I start drinking now I drink, you know, two or three bottles of wine a night but I type." "I always do my work while I'm drinking so it's okay." "Before you do a reading though, you do an incredible amount of drinking." "More than you usually do." "Fear." "Go ahead." "Yet, when you get on the stage you don't look the least bit afraid." "Is that an act?" "Or...is that becasue you're" "Joe..." "I'm lucky." "Once I get out" "I look at them" "You know what I do?" "I take one tiny sweep of the second or third row and I see these faces." "All of a sudden I feel completely superior." "I don't know what happens but..." "Because the addition of the faces: men and women, there's no challenge." "So, once I get there I smooth out..." "I think it's before I see them while I'm waiting" "I imagine I'm gonna see an audience of a strange type of group, you know." "But once I take the glance, it's all over." "So it's great." "So, I read it on through." "There's no fear, I'm on my game." "Technically." "Beautifully." "Of course then I drink to much and I'm..." "I'm just gone." "But there's no fear, finally when I hit the boards." "There can't be fear, because I look at them." "What am I looking at?" "That." "What's there to fear?" "So I read, get my money, and go." "So, do you think you're...what you do on the stage is a little bit affected by their expectation?" "I believe you're right." "I believe, in a sense, before I begin reading" "I know they expect the drunken... idiot clown thype of creature." "So, I give them that." "You don't think that's any danger to your integrity as a..." "Of course there's a danger to my integrity." "But, if I have enough integrity left over, I'll be all right." "Right?" "Depends upon how much you're loaded." "That's why I don't read that much and if I were doing or giving away my integrity once a week" "I would be in danger." "But once every two years, it's like a mosquito bite." "I don't like it, Joe." "But I love the money." "I have nothing against money." "Give me all the money you want." "I will not refuse it." "Because I've been dead broke so many times." "I've been so dead broke." "Starved so long." "I realize the value of money." "It's tremendous." "Money is magic!" "I'll take all I can get." "I hope I never miss a meal again." "But won't you have too much at a certain point?" "Not yet." "Give me some more and test me." "Try me." "But there's nothing that you that you want that you don't have right now, is there, really?" "I mean, you don't think about things like that, do you?" "You don't want a sailboat?" "The only thing I'm missing now... is more privacy than I'd like." "I would like to be alone more than I am." "Like the phone rings too often." "There's too many cameras and all that and I kind of accept it, but it's not me." "When these things are gone I go back to the room and I become myself again." "Often times, I'll pull down all the shades like I used to and just lay down in the room for five or six hours, just alone." "Just lay in that bed, and get something back." "Some kind of juice." "Just being away from people is one of the most marvelous fulfillments a man like me can have." "Just the absence of humanity is a fulfillment so graceful that even God would understand if he invented them." "Nobody..." "Which he probably didn't." "Can do." "Say when." "Whenever you like." "Okay..." "Jesus." "Where are all the pretty little girls in the audience?" "Where are all the little groupies?" "They aren't..." "They don't want to come see me after the reading." "They don't wanna... suck my middle finger." ""Hey kid!" "Yeah, you can have my autograph baby."" "That's what destroys..." "I'll tell you." "Okay." "The Crunch" "too much too little" "too fat too thin or nobody." "laughter or tears haters lovers" "strangers with faces like the backs of thumb tacks" "armies running through streets of blood waving winebottles" "bayoneting and fucking virgins." "an old guy in a cheap room with a photograph of M. Monroe." "there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock" "people so tired mutilated either by love or no love." "people just are not good to each other one on one." "the rich are not good to the rich the poor are not good to the poor." "we are afraid." "our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners" "it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides." "or the terror of one person aching in one place alone" "untouched unspoken to watering a plant." "people are not good to each other." "people are not good to each other." "people are not good to each other." "I suppose they never will be." "I don't ask them to be." "but sometimes I think about it." "the beads will swing the clouds will cloud and the killer will behead the child like taking a bite out of an ice cream cone." "too much too little too fat too thin or nobody" "more haters than lovers." "people are not good to each other." "perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad." "meanwhile I look at young girls stems flowers of chance." "there must be a way." "surely there must be a way that we have not yet though of." "who put this brain inside of me?" "it cries it demands it says there is a chance." "it will not say" ""no."" "Yeah, I walked in the employment office and the guy looked at me, says:" ""Well, what do you want?"" "I said:" ""I need a job." "Hell, I need a job." "That's all."" "He says: "You're hired." He laughed." ""Have you ever lifted any heavy weights?" I said:" ""I used to fight in the ring."" "He said: "What?" I said: "Yeah,"" ""I fought a couple, you know six round or three rounders down in Arizona."" ""What's your name?" I said:" ""I fought under the name I don't know,"" ""my promoter called me Kid-something."" "Said..." "He said: "How'd you do?" I said: "I lost all the fights." But I said: "I'm strong."" "I was starving to death." "Hadn't had a meal in about..." "You know, I was trying to be a writer or something." "I was all fucked up." "So, he hired me." "He says: "I like your spirit."" ""I'm gonna put you in with a bunch of Canadian ex-fliers from World War 2."" "I said: "Great."" ""They just work with little tuna tin cans." "They're high class boys."" ""I can tell you're high class." I said: "Okay, thank you."" "So, finally I showed up with my little card." "I punched in." "There weren't any Canadian ex-force fliers." "Put me with a big bunch of 8 foot blacks with 3 foot shoulders and full of white hatred." "Guy said: "You Bukowski?" "' I said: "Yeah." He said:" ""Hey, where are you're boots?" I said: "I don't have anything."" ""Put these on!" "Them your boots." I put them on, they were three sizes too small." ""This is your hat."" "This tin hat on my head rang of death." "I was starving." "And then, he said:" ""This is what you do, man."" "And these big hunks of beef, slaughtered things were running on hooks." "They keep running." "They come one after another." "And he says: "Watch that man what he do."" "And shit." "You know I've been starving for three weeks." "I had to pick up this big thing on my shoulder." ""When that hook drops, you catch it."" "So I caught it." "This is what I got for trying to be a writer." "Starving when I got this hunk of dead steer on my shoulder." "And the bones cut into my shoulder like knives." "And I caught and I'm weak, but all the blacks are watching and they're thinking" ""Whitey can't do it." "Whitey..."" ""is a pansy ass because he's white."" "I knew what they were thinking so I had to take it..." "But, I wasn't only white, I was starving to death but they didn't understand that part." "Had to take it and you take it in a truck then you gotta lift it off your shoulder like this and there's a hook on a truck that carries these things." "Only instead of the hook being very sharp, so you can hook this thing on it, you know like a, like a tiny razor blade." "It's like the end of your thumb." "So you're very tired and you reach this thing up and you try to go like that." "It won't poke through cause all your strength is for lifting this off your shoulder, trying to poke it through and you can see it's just trying to work through the skin." "There's big, black guy behind you." "Well fed, strong and young." "He ain't worried about writing poems." "He's had a T-bone steak." "He's fucked his woman." "He's full of eggs and beer." "He syas: "Come on, man!" "What the fuck you doin' there?"" "So you go..." "And you never beg for mercy." "That's the worst thing you could ever do." "Finally, you poke it through." "And you go again, and the circle goes again." "Here comes another one." "It hits you, cuts again." "You say: "Aw...shit."" "I can't fail because I'm white." "They think it's only white and black." "They don't realize I'm starving." "I want to write a poem." "I want to write a short story." "I want to write a novel." "I don't want to carry this dead hunk of meat on my shoulder." "But they think it's just: black-white, black-white, white's weak." "I was weak because I was starving." "But still, I had some kind of guts." "I went on for four hours." "Hooking and working." "And...finally." "Guys...no, two hours." "I only went two hours." "I'm sorry." "And finally, somebody said:" ""Coffee break."" "And then the little coffee truck came up." "You know I just-I could see the lights, I could see...donuts." "Little sugary pastries." "Hot steam rising up." "It looked like God himself had arrived on wheels." "With the juice of goodness and glory." "I said: "If I can get a cup of coffee I could beat this night."" ""Oh shit." "I'll beat these guys, even if they think it's only white against black."" ""Even though I'm starving to death I'll beat their asses in out of my guts."" "I started moving toward the coffee thing." "You know, all the blacks are..." "I'm sorry this is a black and white story, but it is." "All the black workers are going toward the thing." "And there might have been one white in there." "I didn't see him." "Now here comes this big hand on my shoulder." "He said:" ""Bukowski."" ""Yeah, what is it?"" "He said:" ""before you take your coffee break, man..."" ""I want you to move..."" ""That truck from stall C-6 to stall C-9."" "I go what the fuck is this?" "I'm no truck driver." "I've never driven a truck the size of three houses." "I said: "This guy, once again, is testing my guts."" "I said: "What am I gonna do now?"" "If I had any sense you know, you're so dizzy from starving." "I would've said:" ""I demand my coffee break." "I'm getting my coffee."" ""Then I'll move your truck."" "But you know, you're so weakened and so terrified and so fucked up..." "I said: "All right."" "So, I went toward this big huge truck." "I was starving, i'm weak." "Everything..." "I clamber up into the-I've never driven-I can't even drive a fucking car, this thing is huge!" "So, I clamber up into the god damn and I got my tin hat on." "I'm sweating, sick." "I look for the ignition key." "I start it." "I kind...find neutral." "Then I look down." "You know what's in those big trucks?" "There's not only one set...of things, you know, like a...reverse." "You have about six sets of pedals sitting there." "It's amazing." "It's like a piano." "I said: "Well, now what the fuck am I gonna do?" "Which one of these do I hit?"" "So I just got pissed off and I hit one." "I put it in a seeming reverse." "And I let it out and the whole big-this huge thing started backing up." "I said: "Fuck, well I'm doing it." "That's what I was supposed to do."" "So I'm...drove this huge, big truck." "I circled it around." "Here was stall six." "I circled it all around, further back, like a real trucker." "Then..." "I pulled it up." "I circle it back." "Then I back the whole fucking thing back, perfectly into stall 6-C." "Then..." "I was complete-I lost the last of my energy." "And I said: "Well, I gotta get out and get that cup of coffee."" "So, I open the door..." "You know, there's a little step you're supposed to take on the way down?" "I saw it but you know, you're body gets so tired, your eyes sees the step, your foot sees it, but somehow you miss." "There's kind of a haze." "So I dropped all the way from the cab to the ground and I landed flat on my back." "It took all the wind out of me." "I got up, I said: "Shit!"" "So I stood up and I walked around the back of the truck." "And, just as I was leaving..." "You know, just as I was walking around the back of the truck." "Here came the little coffee truck, just drocking-dropping away." "Driving off to go to the next plant." "So, I walked out." "I walked toward where I was working." "Guy says: "Okay Bukowski." "Ready to go back to work?"" "I didn't say anything." "I just walked away." "I walked up." "There's a little place you go where you enter to get in." "And I had my hat, my tin hat on." "And the guy at the, at the guard's place." "I put my tin hat down." "He says: "What are you doing?"" "I said: "I quit."" "He said:" ""Where are we gonna send your pay?" I said: "Forget it."" ""Keep it."" "That was it, I walked out." "I did all that fucking work." "I parked..." "I didn't get any, I didn't..." "I'm an asshole." "What they were doing, they were testing my courage." "But what they were didn't realize, my body was so weak." "I could've... met all his challenges." "Since I was starving to death it pissed me off that they challenged me only to be white." "Not undertsanding that even whites starve to death or go crazy." "So, this is an anti-black statement." "They didn't treat me very well." "Though, later on in factories, I met some good fellas." "That was a bad experience." "That's all." "Now I gotta piss."