Kipowski said in the last letters,
You know, Russell, good writing seemed to stop dead
when World War II began.
Since then, we've had a half-century of dead writing.
Everybody's too practiced, too precise,
too lacking in the gamble.
There's no fire or excitement in it.
Jeffers laid blood on the paper.
As I said before, Hemingway was better when I was young.
I lacked experience, and Hemingway seemed packed with it.
But after I got to be 40 or 50,
I had my own little knapsack filled with my own *,
and his stuff didn't read so tough then.
Also, he was a crank. He had no humor at all.
Hell is really a laugh sometimes.
You know.
And I drank on.
This is Little Jack again.
That was me doing the funhouse laugh there.
They would record me, or sometimes I'd do it live.
And they'd lower it, slow it down, or...
I'd...
You know, and the women would go in,
and the...
The air whistle would blow up their skirts,
and you'd see their cotton panties.
Man.
Well, one day, I got lushed up, and I was shooting crank,
and Chuck Bukowski had given me a poetry book of American poets.
And I came out of that funhouse.
Now, I used to say, you know, on the midwife,
say, hey, Freddy, bring out the armless boy.
Or, hey, Freddy, bring out the tattooed man.
Or B.J. Reid, the geek who eats chickens, you know.
Well, this time when I was lushed up,
and I'd been reading that poetry and trying to make sense of it,
I'd say,
as a joke, I said,
hey, Freddy, bring out Charles Bukowski.
Here's Charles Bukowski himself, in the flesh.
If you've noticed, everything is calculated.
When I finish the last poem,
the last drink will arrive at the same time.
Let's work out.
On the hustle.
I suppose one of the worst times was when,
after a drunken reading and an all-night party,
I'd promised to appear at an 11 o'clock English class.
And there they sat,
nicely dressed, terribly young, awfully comfortable.
I only wanted to sleep,
and I kept the wastebasket close in case I puked.
I think I was in the state of nefariousness,
in Nebraska, or Illinois, or Ohio.
No more of this, I thought.
I'll go back to the factories, if they'll have me.