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| November 6, 2007 |
| This was sent quite some time ago by our friend Laura from KC. Isn't it odd how she thought of us? The summers are longer where the suicides hang and the flies eat mudpie. He's a famous street poet of the '50's and still alive. I throw my bottle into the canal, it's Venice, and Jack is holing up at the place for a week or so, giving a reading somewhere in a few days. The canal looks strange, very strange. "Hardly deep enough for self-destruction." "Yeah", he says in the Bronx movie voice, "you're right." He's gray at 37. Hook-nose. Slumped. Energetic. Pissed. Male. Very male. A little Jewish smile. Maybe he's not Jewish. I don't ask him. He's known them all. Pissed on Barney Rosset's shoe at a party because he didn't like something Barney said. Jack knows Ginsberg, Creeley, Lamantia, on and on, and now he knew Bukowski. "Yeah, Bukowski came to Venice to see me. Scars all over his face. Shoulders slumped. Very tired-looking man. Doesn't say much and when he does it's kind of dull, kind of commonplace. You'd never think he'd written all those books of poems. But he's been in the post office too long. He's slipped. They've eaten his spirit out. Damn shame, but you know how it works. But he's still boss, real boss, you know." Jack knows the inside, and it's funny but real to know that people aren't much, it's all a motherfucking jive, and you've known it but it's funny to hear it said while sitting by a Venice canal trying to cure an extra-size hangover. He goes through a book. Photographs of poets mostly. I am not in there. I began late and lived too long alone in small rooms drinking wine. They always figure that a hermit is insane, and they may be right. He goes through the book. Jesus Christ, it's a catsass sitting there with that hangover and the water down there, and here is Jack going through the book, I see spots of sunlight, noses, ears, the sheen of the photographic pages. I don't care, but I guess we need something to talk about and I don't talk well and he is doing the work, so here we go, Venice canal, the whole chicken-shit sadness of living it out -- "this guy went nuts about 2 years ago" "this guy wanted me to suck his dick in order to get my book published" "did you?" "did I? I belted him out! wit' dis!" He shows me the Bronx fist. I laugh. He's comfortable and he's human. Every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. Maybe we should all become queers and relax. Not belting Jack. He's good for a change. There are too many people afraid to speak against queers -- intellectually. Just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left wing -- intellectually. I don't care which way it goes -- I only know: there are too many people afraid. So Jack's good meat. I've seen too many intellectuals lately. I get very tired of the precious intellects who must speak diamonds every time they open their mouths. I get tired of battling for each space of air for the mind. That's why I stayed away from people for so long, and now that I am meeting people, I find that I must return to my cave. There are other things beside the mind: there are insects and palm trees and pepper shakers, and I'll have a pepper-shaker in my cave, so laugh. The people will always betray you. Never trust the people. "The whole poetry game is run by the fags and the left-wing," he tells me, staring into the canal. There is a kind of truth here that it is bitter and false to dispute and I don't know what to do with it. I am certainly aware that there is something wrong with the poetry game - the books of the famous are so very dull, including Shakespeare. Was it the same then? I decided to throw Jack some shit. "Remember the old poetry mag? I don't know if it was Monroe or Shapiro or what, now it's gotten so bad I don't read it anymore, but I remember a statement by Whitman: " 'to have great poets we need great audiences.' well, I always figure a Whitman a greater poet than I, if that matters, only this time I think he got the thing backwards. It should read: " 'to have great audiences we need great poets,' " "yeah, so, all right," Jack said, "I met Creeley at a party this time and I asked him if he ever read Bukowski and he got frozen real solid, wouldn't answer me, man, like you know what I mean." "let's get the fuck outa here," I say. We go out toward my car. I've got a car, somehow. A lemon, of course. Jack's got the book with him. He's still turning pages. "this guy sucks dick." "oh yeah?" "this guy married a schoolteacher who belts his ass with a whip. Horrible woman. He ain't writ a word since his marriage. She's got his soul in her cunt-strap." "you talking about Gregory or Kero?" "no, this is another one!" "holy Jesus!" We keep walking toward my car. I feel rather dull but I can FEEL this man's energy, ENERGY, and I realize that it might be possible that I am walking next to one of the few immortal and unschooled poets of our time. And then, that doesn't matter either, after I think about it a moment. I get on in. The lemon starts but the gearshift is fucked-up again. I've got to drive in low all the way and the bitch stalls at every signal, battery down, I pray, one more start, no cops, no more drunk-driving raps, no more christs of any kinds on anybody's kind of Cross, we can choose between Nixon and Humphrey and Christ and be fucked any way we turn, and I turn left, brake up at the address and we get out. Jack's still at the pages. "this guy's o.k., he killed himself, his father, his mother, wife, but didn't shoot his three children or the dog. One of the best poets since Baudelaire." "yeah?" "yeah, shit." We get out of the lemon as I make the sign of the Cross for one more start on the mother battery. We walk up and Jack bangs a door. "BIRD! BIRD! this is Jack!" The door opens and there is the Bird. I look twice. I can't see whether it is a woman or a man. The face is the distilled essence opium of untouched beauty. It's a man. The motions are man. I know it but I also know that he can catch hell and ultimate brutality every time he hits the streets. They will kill him because he has not died at all. I have died nine-tenths but keep the other one-tenth like a gun. I can walk down the street and they can't tell me from the news vendor, even tho the news vendors have more beautiful faces than any president of the united states, but then, that's no task either. "Bird, I need 20" says Jack. Bird peels off a g.d. twenty. His movement is smooth, without worry. "Thanks, baby." "sure, can you come on in?" "all right." We move in. Sit down. There's the bookcase. I lay my eyes across it. There doesn't seem to be a dull book in there. I catch all the books I've admired in there. What the hell? Is it a dream? The kid's face is so beautiful that everytime I look I feel good, like you know, chili and beans, hot, after coming off a bad one, the first food in weeks, well, fuck, I am always on guard. The Bird. And the ocean down there. and bad battery. a lemon. the cops patrolling their stupid dry streets. What a bad war it is. And what an idiot nightmare, only this momentary cool space between us, we are all going to be smashed, very quickly into broken children's toys, into those highheels that ran so gaily down the stairway to be fucked out of it forever, forever, dunces and fools, dunces and tools, god damn our weak bravery. We sit down. A quart of scotch appears. I pour a quarter of a pint down without pause, ah, I gag, blink, idiot, working toward 50, still trying to play Hero. Asshole hero in a fusillade of puke. The Bird's wife comes in. We are introduced. She is a liquid woman in a brown dress, she just flows flows her eyes laughing, she flows, I tell you, she flows, "WOW WOW WOW!" I say. She looks so good I've got to pick her up, hug her, I carry her on my left hip, spin her, laugh, nobody thinks that I am crazy. We all laugh. We all understand. I put her down. We sit down. Jack likes me coming on. He's been carrying my soul and he's tired. He grins the grin. He's o.k. Once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them? This was one of those magic times. I knew it. I glowed like a fucking hot tamale. It didn't matter. O.k. [LB: I liked that passage.] I smacked down another quarter pint out of embarrassment. I realized that I was the weaker of 4 people and I did not want to harm, I only wanted to realize their easy holiness. I loved like a crazy jackoff dog turned into a pen of heated female bitches, only they had miracles to show me beyond sperm. The Bird looked at me. "See my collage?" He held up a very shitty-looking thing with a woman's earring and some other dab of shit hanging upon it. (By the way....I realize I switch from present to past tense, and if you don't like it...ram a nipple up your scrotum. -- printer: leave this in.) I go into a long, boring, hartang, harrangue about how I don't like this or that, and about my sufferance in Art Classes... The Bird pulls the stop out of me. By yanking the thing apart it's only a popneedle and then he grins at me, but then I too know the inside: that perhaps, as I am told, from inside, the only junky who can make it is Wm. Burroughs, who owns the Burroughs Co., almost, and who can play it tough while all along being a sissy fat wart-sucking hog inside. This is what I hear, and it's kept very quiet. Is it true? For it all, true or not, Burroughs is a very dull writer and without the insistence of knowledgeable pop in his literary background, he would be almost nothing, as Faulkner is nothing except to very dry Southern extremists like Mr. Corrington and Mr. Nod, and Mr. Suck-Dry-Shit. "Baby" they start saying to me "you are drunk." And I am. And I am. And I am. There's nothing now but to be turned into the heat or sleep. They make a place for me. I drink too fast. They talk on. I hear them, gently. I sleep. I sleep in comradeship. The sea will not drown me and neither will they. They love my sleeping body. I am an asshole. They love my sleeping body. May all God's children come to this. Jesus Jesus Jesus Who cares about a dead battery? --- Charles Bukowski, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man "(1969) |
| October 12, 2006 |
L&N Hotel We left a few Hard Knoxville Reviews scattered in the L&N Hotel, something of a time capsule we imagined at the time of its closing. As usual, we had no idea what time had in mind, not to mention the wayward progressions of art and literature. Unfortunately, I had missed the last night the L&N was open. The woman with the multi-colored eyes who I was so fascinated with at the time later told me she stayed until the end of the evening waiting for me to arrive. I was somehow otherwise engaged and didn't make it. The L&N Hotel was closed the weekend before the 1982 World's Fair opened, that unprecedented spectacle in the villa of Knox sprawling some 70 acres through the middle of town. The L&N Hotel sat above it all on the north side of the bridge across from the station looking out over the length of the fair grounds down the 2nd Creek valley. For years the L&N Hotel had only been a bar and restaurant, the upstairs with its own back entrance a favorite gathering place for the late-night crowd. Our sincere wish being that it would reopen after the fair had come and gone. However, some time after the fair closed, on a freezing December night between Christmas and New Year's, the old vacant L&N Hotel was burned to the ground. They said it was the bums who started the fire to stay warm. I would at least suspect a few other better-heeled citizens in this crime. I witnessed the violent tragedy from a barely safe distance of six blocks away. Burning boards wafting in an icy night sky drifting over the ruins of the fair site as far as the Sublett Gallery where I stood on dense black smoke roiling its way toward me, eventually enveloping all of 11th street to Cumberland Avenue on to the river to begin the long dissipating trek to the sea. All those nights of a fine piano bar gone up in smoke. All evidence of Thomas Wolfe's letters regarding the exceptional slatterns of a railway boarding house lost for future research. All those kisses in the dark hallway upstairs near the bathrooms, the walks out to the parking lot near the old magnolia tree and the bridge that connected us to our beloved neighborhood. Gone. Now we're left with nothing. Nothing but this, you bums. --- R.B. Morris, "The Littoral Zone" |
| March 29, 2006 |
| I didn't write this, dammit - but someone else who has been there did. Good job, Noel... |
| August 8, 2005 |
| I
always walked to my room, it was six or seven blocks away. The trees
along the streets were all alike: small, twisted, half-frozen,
leafless. I liked them. I walked alone under the cold moon. That scene in the office stayed with me. Those cigars, the fine clothes. I thought of good steaks, long rides in winding driveways that led to beautiful women. Ease. Trips to Europe. Fine women. Were that much more clever than I? The only difference was money, and the desire to accumulate it. I'd to it too! I'd save my pennies. I'd get an idea, I'd spring a loan. I'd hire and fire. I'd keep whiskey in my desk drawer. I'd have a wife with size 40 breasts and an ass that would make the paperboy on the corner come in his pants when he saw it wobble. I'd cheat on her and she'd know it and keep silent in order to live in my house with my wealth. I'd fire men just to see the look of dismay on their faces. I'd fire women who didn't deserve to be fired. That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax. Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man. I'd build an empire upon the broken bodies and lives of helpless men, women, and children -- I'd shove it to them all the way, I'd show them! Factotum, Charles Bukowski (1975) (Thanks Michelle for turning me onto him...) |
| August 25, 2004 |
 Don't get jealous - you can't have it - it's a Jake and Elwood original by Michelle, but if you have some green lining your pocket, let us or her know, and maybe she can whip you up a damned fine Christmas gift. |
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A truly sad anniversary is upon us, as we are approaching the sixth year (April 29, 1997) of the closing of one of our favorite haunts. Here is the newspaper column announcing the death-knell, and a response sent in by Jake that Sam was dumb enough to publish. |
| Suttree
tapped at the
dosshouse door. The keeper shuffled along the hall and unlatched the
door
and peered out. He shut one eye, he shook his head. No ragman here.
Suttree
thanked him and descended into the street again.
It was still
raining a
cold gray rain when he eased himself down the narrow path at the south
end of the bridge and made his way over the rocks to the ragman's home.
As he came about the abutment and entered the gloom beneath the bridge
three boys darted out the far side and clambered over the rocks and
disappeared
in the woods by the river. Suttree entered the dim vault beneath the
arches.
Water ran from a clay drain tile and went down a stone gully. Water
gushed
from a broken pipe down the near wall and water dripped and spattered
Hello, called Suttree. An echo echoed in the emptiness. He shaded his eyes to see. Hey, he called. He could make out the shape of the old man's bed dimly in the cool dank. He stood at the foot of the ragpicker's mattress and looked down at him. The old man lay with his eyes shut and his mouth set and his hands lay clenched at either side. He looked as if he had forced himself to death. Suttree looked about at the mounds of moldy rags and the stacked kindling and the racks of bottles and jars and the troves of nameless litter, broken kitchen implements or lamps, a thousand houses divided, the ragged chattel of lives abandoned like his own. He moved along
the side
of the bed. The old man had his shoes on, he saw their shape beneath
the
covers. Suttree pulled a chair up and sat and watched him. He passed
his
hand across his face and sat forward holding his knuckles. Well, he
said.
What do you think now? Suttree looked around. These boys have been at your things. You forgot about the gasoline I guess. Never got around to it. Did you really remember me? I couldnt remember my bear's name. He had corduroy feet. My mother used to sew him up. She gave you sandwiches and apples. Gypsies used to come to the door. We were afraid of them. My sisters' bears were Mischa and Bruin. I cant remember mine. I tried but I cant. The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world. Did you ask? About the crapgame? What are you doing in bed with your shoes on? He passed his hand through his hair and leaned forward and looked at the old man. You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your retchedness. He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. There's no one to ask is there? There's no... He was looking down at the ragman and he raised his hand and let it fall again and he rose and went out past the old man's painted rock into the rain. Suttree, Cormac McCarthy (1979) |
| Ahhh, the
sixties. It
has been said that if you remember them, you weren't really there.
Jake
was going to write a memoir about his part , but he found the paper
curiously
blank.
However, while
stumbling
across that free-hog-farm called the Internet, we found an excellent
site
devoted to the Summer
of Love, and if you dig deep enough (or if you knew already), there
are some pretty interesting photos of a young Peter Coyote as one of
the
original Diggers. |
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| I know, but Elwood thinks it's art... |
| PROEM
You
see, I have always had this love... So
life goes on... So what? The
timekeeper suddenly appears to show us we are not invincible.
But... The
tears of grief can also nourish the flower of hope.
When
forces we can't control get together to make decisions for us,
When
emotions we've never felt suddenly consume us,
When
memories become love,
We
think, because we are taught to think. I
should think it's wrong, but I know it is right.
I have always had this love... ---
Anon |
Jake knew she would help him out, be he had no idea that her response would be so hilarious. Well, come to think of it - he should have known. Read about the Dynamic Duo's trip to the Emerald Isle (printed without her permission, of course!).
So here is the continuing soap opera which is
Elwood's Jailhouse Journal.(And you people didn't even think he could write...)
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