чарльз буковски

true confession

now look Benny, he said
(blowing the cigar smoke into Benny’s
face),
we don’t want to circumvent the
truth, do we?
ah, no, said Benny
look, the only way I can defend you is
if you tell the truth.
sure…
then, tell me…
what?
you raped and killed this little girl,
right?
no, no, not me, it was somebody else…
you like little girls?
sure…
then you did it?
ah, no.
o.k., Benny, I did it. you defend
me.
I got no law training.
tell me, did you like it, Benny? what
did it feel like? he asked (blowing more
cigar smoke into Benny’s face).
it was like eating an ice-cream cone….
what flavor, Benny?
all the flavors….
I’m not going to let them put you in the
chair, Benny, I’m going to get you life…
thank you, Mr. Markovitch….
no thanks needed, Benny, I only do what I have to
do.
I guess we’re both lawyers then, Mr.
Markovitch….

******

fourteen dollars and thirty-two cents

hair in the soup
blinkers don’t work.
the usual insomnia.
pissed-off in traffic.
dead flowers.
dental appointment.
no auto insurance.
torn shorts.
roach in the radio.
sober neighbors.
lost space ship
boil on the neck.
dead cat on the boulevard.
de Sade grinning in the dark.
more trouble in the government.
supermarket line:
standing in torn shorts
with a boil on my neck.
getting an erection
looking at the girl cashier.
“how you doing?” she asks.
“I need my teeth drilled,” I tell
her.
she doesn’t answer.
she works the register
bags my groceries.
I pay her.
“have a nice day,” she tells
me.
I walk out.
my erection goes down.
there’s trouble in the government.
I didn’t run over the cat.
all those people in the market will eat
tonight.
I will too but I won’t sleep.
I go to my car.
the blinkers won’t work
but it’s only 2 p.m.
I’ll use hand
signals.
does that girl cashier ever think of
sex?
hair in the soup.
dead flowers.
roach in the radio.
lost space ship.
no auto insurance.
I drive off as
de Sade grins in the
dark.

******

the sniveler

you’re a sniveler, she said,
you snivel when she doesn’t call,
I phone you and you’re shit-faced on wine.
I’m a baby, I said, then too I can’t figure out
how anybody can live without me.
my god, she said, you really mean that?
yes, I said.
oh my god, you’re impossible, you big soft
baby’s ass!
suck me off and maybe I can forget, help me
forget.
you big soft baby’s ass!
I’m sensitive, yes. and how can anybody live
without me?
she hung up.
well, I thought, there’s two who can live without me.
there might be 2000, 2 million, 2 billion, 2 million
billion.
it was one of the most depressing thoughts I’d had
in years.
I went into my bedroom and stretched out and looked at
the ceiling.
I thought, well, I can masturbate, I can look at television,
and then there’s suicide.
having already masturbated twice that day
I had two choices left and
being a big soft baby’s ass I
switched on the tv.

******

just another bad affair

Paris
is the place you’ve heard about
it’s very large and the people seem rich but very
separated from each other
each person
a temple of indifference
but
when you search these structures more intently
you see that
fear
has become a habit with them
they are stuffed with
fear
and it’s the
fear
which makes them seem indifferent
to each other
and to you.
these grand Parisians,
the ladies and children
sit in the park like paper flowers
and the men roar about in their tiny cars
bravely pretending.
I’m sure the French
have done many things of import
but
it smells of the past.
to go to Paris to create art
now
would be much like sitting around
waiting for a butterfly to fart.
I like the waiters and the dogs
and the whores
and the way the people stay up
most of the night
any night
but there is a chill upon
the soul of Paris.
cities die
like people die
only more slowly
and people
who live in dying cities
become stuffed with indifference and
fear
and when their deaths
become actual
funerals seem superfluous.
Paris
you expected nothing of me
but I expected more
of you.
now that we know all this
let us quietly
say goodbye.

******

the woman from Germany

every 3 or 4 nights the phone rings
and it’s this woman from Germany.
she keeps her calls short:
“hello,” she says, “it’s me.”
I never ask her name.
“what are you doing?” she asks.
“drinking white wine and typing,” I
say.
“you always say that.”
“that means that things are good.”
“I’ve had some red wine, how are things with
you?”
“more bad affairs,” I say, “they all end up
badly.”
“mine too,” she answers.
“it’s sad, isn’t it? I want to quit.”
“I can’t quit,” she answers.
“good. I don’t think I can either.”
“I’m going to sleep now. goodnight.”
“goodnight,” I say.
and I can see her in her bedroom. I can see her
put the phone down. now she puts out the light.
she pulls the covers up, inhales and exhales deeply.
she is sad. her walls cover her. she is alone.
I want to know her name.

******

parked

sitting in my car
on Catalina Avenue in Redondo Beach
I see a fellow of 19 or 20
riding his bicycle on the sidewalk.
he wears sandals and blue shorts,
slows down, stops, puts one foot down,
sits upon his bicycle seat.
it is 4:30 in the afternoon and
he is tanned a deep and even tan,
has yellow hair and mustache.
his face is smooth
unmarked by pain or experience.
then something animates him
and he pedals off.
another crosses the street,
he must be 21,
very large of chest, blond,
blue-eyed, very tanned, wearing
green shorts and sandals.
it is a Tuesday afternoon.
he stands a moment
looking down the street.
his face is the same as the
other face:
without expression or purpose.
a long cigarette is in his mouth.
he finally enters a liquor store,
comes out a moment later
holding a can of Bubble-Up.
these are the kind that my parents wanted
me to be
the kind my country wanted me to
be
the kind the girls wanted me to
be.
I start the engine and back out of
there
thinking about
Leo Durocher, Machine Gun Kelly,
Rocky Marciano, Two Ton Tony Galento
and Dutch Van Gogh.

******

let nothing ever happen

I drove in for gas and began filling my tank
and the attendant was a fat man dressed all in
orange.
he stood there watching and I had this feeling
that I should take the gas nozzle
jam it into his mouth
and fill him with about
five gallons of supreme.
I filled the tank instead
and hung up the hose.
I paid
got my change
and he watched me as I walked to the
front of my car
kicked the right front tire hard
circled the car
got in
and drove off.
I drove north down Pacific Coast Highway and it was all
right until I came to these orange
road-markers
which narrowed the three lanes down
to one.
traffic slowed
then stopped in a long line
for a red signal.
they had us all in the left
lane.
I looked out the right window
and saw this blond road-worker with a
beard.
he tossed a road-marker through the air
to another road-worker with a beard.
he caught it
laughed and tossed it back.
they were playing catch.
hell, I remember when only hermits wore
beards.
the lane to the left wasn’t moving and
I wanted to make a right turn
and there was nothing going on in the
other lanes
but this game of catch.
I cut into the right lane.
the blond boy saw me coming and
missed his catch.
as I drove past him he screamed,
“what the hell are you doing?”
I stopped my car and got out.
as I walked up to the blond the other
worker ran up.
he stopped in front of me.
“you can’t drive in this lane,”
he said.
“what the hell are you doing?” asked
the blond.
“if a cop was around he’d tag your
ass!” said the other boy.
“are you a cop?” I asked.
“no, you can see I’m not a cop.”
“this is what the hell I am doing: I’m going to get into
my car and make a right turn from this lane.”
“who the fuck do you think you are?” asked the
blond.
”I don’t know who I am, but I’m going to get into
my car now and make a right turn from this lane.”
“yeah,” said the other boy, “you can eat shit too!”
“there’s too much of it around here, I’m going to leave you
with it.”
I got into my car
started it and
made my right turn.
I shouldn’t have done that, I thought.
it’s when you do things like that too often that
they put you in the madhouse.
maybe it’s happening: this thing I’ve been
fighting against
so long.
I thought about driving back and
apologizing: “listen, fellows, I know I was wrong
and I’ve come back here to ask your forgiveness.”
or I could go back to the gas station man:
“listen, do you know that I was thinking of filling
you with five gallons of supreme and I’m here to
apologize for that.”
but I just kept driving along.
if I was careful I could hide among all of them
for years.
as I stopped for a signal there were cars all
around me.
I turned my radio on loud
to the worst music I could
find.

******

smooth

slowly driving the back streets of the town, looking at
old houses, garbage cans, fences…in decay;
driving through the warehouse district,
then running the car down to the harbor, parking,
getting out, getting a coffee at a stand,
then sitting at a table watching ships as long as
a city block going out to sea, thinking of all the women
now gone and how important each one had seemed
of enormous importance
an importance bigger than any of the ships
and now they were elsewhere with other men
or alone.
getting up, back to the car, driving to the market
to get oranges and wine, radishes, green onions, toilet
paper,
looking at the people who had once seemed so dangerous,
now they were listless, pushing their carts,
no arguments, no trouble, no impatience.
even the racetracks were closed because of a special
holiday.
getting into the car with the goods
driving the back streets
there are children playing some game,
they step back to let the car through;
no curses, no rocks thrown, silence,
afternoon into evening, an effortless evolving;
no ambulances, not even a dead dog in the street.
it’s going to be a bad night,
I’m going to be mean to my woman and it’s not going to be
her fault.

******

message

I’ve been sitting in this
room for hours
typing, and drinking
red wine.
I thought I was
alone here.
the door is closed and
the window.
now a big fat fly
ugly and black
sits on the edge
of my wine glass.
where did it come
from?
so silent, motionless
like that.
that’s the way
it might be
with death.

******

they ruin your day

I parked the BMW and went in to get some papers
xeroxed.
I watched the white sheets of paper jump out of
the machine.
it was a warm and easy day.
I clipped the papers together
paid the clerk and walked out on the street again.
and here he came in seaman’s cap
blue work shirt and pants rolled too high.
there were others but he walked right up to me
grabbed my hand and began shaking it:
“hey, buddy, urgworg buddy lapu ssot udorob
I am your brother sag llah worg…”
“you’re breaking my hand,” I told
him.
I reached into my pocket and gave him a
quarter.
“wrogssarg buddy ssamniknat, you yremaerc…”
I walked on but he shouted after me: “ecin
wolley yemttrid ereth…”
I never liked such situations because I felt like
a fool if I gave up the money and I felt like a
bastard if I didn’t.
and no matter what I did or didn’t do
it just didn’t go away for a while.
I walked to my car
unlocked it
got in and sat there.
some girls were coming out of a cafe after lunch.
they were going back to work
a whole group of them chatting and walking along
and I stared hard at their breasts and their legs
and their behinds
but it didn’t help.
I started the car and drove down 6th to Pacific.
I crossed Pacific and went all the way to Gaffey
and it wasn’t until I turned off Gaffey and
on to 3rd and saw a boy on a lawn holding a dog
while another boy strangled the dog with a rubber
hose
that I forgot about that bum at all.

******

order

I’ve cleaned this room up
entirely
everything is up off the
floor
I even washed the top of this
desk
all is in order
now
paper clips
there
dictionary
here
stapler over to the
left
radio against the
wall
ashtray cleaned
out
stamps and international coupons in cigar
box
proper month showing on
calendar
unanswered letters in middle
drawer
3 corkscrews in a
dish
all is in order
now
the garbage in this room filled an
entire trash can
I look about
all this space
this cleanliness
it’s nice
here
but I can’t
write
I can’t
write
I CAN’T
WRITE
and I think of Lenny
Bruce’s immortal line:
I CAN’T
COME
now I sit in this
place
and
I can’t
write
and
I can’t
come
either.

******

my big fling

it was a bad night
one of those
where all the talk
only makes it worse,
uglier and uglier.
I was never one
who cared much for
“discussion”
anyhow
so I slammed the
door
got into my car
and then I was
on the freeway
radio on
driving north
into the big town.
I still knew a
few girls
from the past.
I got a motel room
on Sunset Boulevard
opened the bottle
had a drink
undressed
took a shower
came out
turned on the black
and white tv
laid on the bed
and had another drink.
then something came to
me,
I knew that any woman
an old girl friend
or a new one
only meant more of
what I had just gotten away
from.
I didn’t turn on the
lights, it felt good
in that dark room,
it was quiet, far away
from war
of any sort.
I stayed on the bed
and watched tv.
I had never cared much
for tv
but watching
all those people
with all their desires
and all their troubles
amused me.
I watched and I had
two bottles and I finished
one and I started the other
and I watched tv.
I felt like a boy who had
run away from home and
had found
his first room.
when the second bottle was
emptied
I slept.
when I got back
at noon
the next day
I didn’t expect her
to ask me if I had been
fucked
and she didn’t.
also, I didn’t ask
her and I didn’t care.
she was quiet.
the screaming was
over.
and two or three days
later
talking easily about
it
we found out
we had watched the same
tv programs,
the only thing was
she said she didn’t like
them
and I said
I did.
and we left it
like that.

******

the secret of my endurance

I still get letters in the mail, mostly from cracked-up
men in tiny rooms with factory jobs or no jobs who are
living with whores or no woman at all, no hope, just
booze and madness.
Most of their letters are on lined paper
written with an unsharpened pencil
or in ink
in tiny handwriting that slants to the
left
and the paper is often torn
usually halfway up the middle
and they say they like my stuff,
I’ve written from where it’s at, and
they recognize that. truly, I’ve given them a second
chance, some recognition of where they’re at.
it’s true, I was there, worse off than most
of them.
but I wonder if they realize where their letters
arrive?
well, they are dropped into a box
behind a six-foot hedge with a long driveway leading
to a two car garage, rose garden, fruit trees,
animals, a beautiful woman, mortgage about half
paid after a year, a new car,
fireplace and a green rug two-inches thick
with a young boy to write my stuff now,
I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a
typewriter, feed him whiskey and raw whores,
belt him pretty good three or four times
a week.
I’m 59 years old now and the critics say
my stuff is getting better than ever.

******

we evolve

at first it seems like fucking is the big thing,
then after that—social consciousness,
then intellectual accomplishment,
and then after that
some fall into religion
others into the arts.
after that begins the gathering of money
and after the gathering of money
the stage where we pretend that
money doesn’t matter.
then it’s health and hobbies,
travel, and finally just sitting around
thinking vaguely of vague things,
rooting in gardens
hating flies, noise, bad weather, snails,
rudeness, the unexpected, new neighbors,
old friends, drunks, smoking, fucking,
singing, dancing, upstarts,
the postman and weeds.
it gives one the fidgets: waiting on
death.

******

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
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 is
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 fiercely
in the highlands
the
black swan burns.

******

beasts bounding through time—

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward
us
impossibly.

******

ANYHOW

the nights you light best
are
when all the guns are pointed
at you,
when all the voices are
dark,
when the dream is being
strangled.
the nights you fight best
are
when reasonability gets
kicked in the
ass,
when the chariots of
gloom
circle
you.
the nights you fight best
are
when the laughter of tools
conquers the
air,
when the kiss of death is
celebrated as
love;
the nights you light best
are
when the judges are
fixed,
when the crowd screams
for you blood.
the nights you light best
are
on a night like
this
as you shake a thousand
dank rats from
your brain,
as you rise up against
impossibility
as you become brother
with the tender miracle
of joy
moving on through
anyhow.

******

trashcan lives

the wind blows hard tonight
and it’s a cold wind
and I think about
the boys on the row.
I hope some of them have a bottle
of red.
it’s when you’re on the row
that you notice that
everything
is owned
and that there are locks on
everything
this is the way a democracy
works:
you get what you can,
try to keep that
and add to it
if possible.
this is the way a dictatorship
works too
only they either enslave or
destroy their
derelicts.
we just forget
ours.
in either case
it’s a hard
cold
wind.

******

the lost generation

have been reading a book about a rich literary lady
of the twenties and her husband who
drank, ate and partied their way through
Europe
meeting Pound, Picasso, A. Huxley, Lawrence, Joyce,
F. Scott, Hemingway, many
others;
the famous were like precious toys to
them,
and the way it reads
the famous allowed themselves to become
precious toys.
all through the book
I waited for just one of the famous
to tell this rich literary lady and her
rich literary husband to
get off and out
but, apparently, none of them ever
did.
Instead they were photographed with the lady
and her husband
at various seasides
looking intelligent
as if all this was part of the act
of Art.
perhaps because the wife and husband
fronted a lush press that
had something to do
with it.
and they were all photographed together
at parties
or outside of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop.
it’s true that many of them were
great and/or original artists,
but it all seems such a snobby precious
affair,
and the husband finally committed his
threatened suicide
and the lady published one of my first
short stories in the
40’s and is now
dead, yet
I can’t forgive either of them
for their rich dumb lives
and I can’t forgive their precious toys
either
for being
that.

******

my non-ambitious ambition

my father had little sayings which he mostly shared
during dinner sessions; food made him think of
survival:
“succeed or suck eggs…”
“the early bird gets the worm…”
“early to bed and early to rise makes a man (etc.)…”
“anybody who wants to can make it in America…”
“God takes care of those who (etc.)…”
I had no particular idea who he was talking
to, and personally I thought him a
crazed and stupid brute
but my mother always interspersed these
sessions with: “Henry, listen to your
father.”
at that age I didn’t have any other
choice
but as the food went down with the
sayings
the appetite and the digestion went
along with them.
it seemed to me that I had never met
another person on earth
as discouraging to my happiness
as my father.
and it appeared that I had
the same effect upon
him.
“You are a bum,” he told me, “and you’ll
always be a bum”
and I thought, if being a bum is to be the
opposite of what this son-of-a-bitch
is, then that’s what I’m going to
be.
and it’s too bad he’s been dead
so long
for now he can’t see
how beautifully I’ve succeeded
at
that.

******

education

at that small inkwell desk
I had trouble with the words
“sing” and “sign.”
I don’t know why
but
“sing” and “sign”:
it bothered
me.
the others went on and learned
new things
but I just sat there
thinking about
“sing” and “sign.”
there was something there
I couldn’t
overcome.
what it gave me was a
bellyache as
I looked at the backs of all those
heads.
the lady teacher had a
very fierce face
it ran sharply to a
point
and was heavy with white
powder.
one afternoon
she asked my mother to come
see her
and I sat with them
in the classroom
as they
talked.
“he’s not learning
anything,” the teacher
told my
mother.
“please give him a
chance, Mrs. Sims!”
“he’s not trying, Mrs.
Chinaski!”
my mother began to
cry.
Mrs. Sims sat there
and watched
her.
it went on for some
minutes.
then Mrs. Sims said,
“well, we’ll see what we
can do…”
then I was walking with
my mother
we were walking in
front of the school,
there was much green grass
and then the
sidewalk.
“oh, Henry,” my mother said,
“your father is so disappointed in
you, I don’t know what we are
going to do!”
father, my mind said,
father and father and
father.
words like that.
I decided not to learn anything
in that
school.
my mother walked along
beside me.
she wasn’t anything at
all.
and I had a bellyache
and even the trees we walked
under
seemed less than
trees
and more like everything
else.

******

sunny side down

NOTHING. sitting in a cafe having breakfast. NOTHING. the waitress,
and the people eating. the traffic runs by. doesn’t matter what
Napoleon did, what Plato said. Turgenev could have been a fly. we are worn-
down, hope stamped out. we reach for coffee cups like the robots about
to replace us. courage at Salerno, bloodbaths on the Eastern front didn’t
matter. we know that we are beaten. NOTHING. now it’s just a matter of
continuing
anyhow—
chew the food and read the paper. we
read about ourselves. the news is
bad. something about
NOTHING.
Joe Louis long dead as the medfly invades Beverly Hills.
well, at least we can sit and
eat. it’s been some rough
trip. it could be
worse. it could be worse than
NOTHING.
let’s get more coffee from the
waitress.
that bitch she knows we are trying to get her
attention.
she just stands there doing
NOTHING.
it doesn’t matter if Prince Charles falls off his horse
or that the hummingbird is so seldom
seen
or that we are too senseless to go
insane.
coffee. give us more of that NOTHING
coffee.

******

the finest of the breed
there’s nothing to
discuss
there’s nothing to
remember
there’s nothing to
forget
it’s sad
and
it’s not
sad
seems the
most sensible
thing
a person can
do
is
sit
with drink in
hand
as the walls
wave
their goodbye
smiles
one comes through
it
all
with a certain
amount of
efficiency and
bravery
then
leaves
some accept
the possibility of
God
to help them
get
through
others
take it
straight on
and to these
I drink
tonight.

******

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