NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN
by Charles Bukowski
NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN
Copyright © 1969 by Charles Bukowski
All Rights Reserved
Cover design by Rex Ray
Cover photograph of Charles Bukowski by Brad Darby
Reproduced by courtesy of Brad Darby
Typography by Harvest Graphics
ISBN: 0-87286-074-4 / 978-0-87286-074-2
LC #73-84226
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FOREWORD
More than a year ago John Bryan began his underground paper OPEN CITY in the front room of a small two story house that he rented. Then the paper moved to an apartment in front, then to a place in the business district of Melrose Ave. Yet a shadow hangs. A helluva big gloomy one. The circulation rises but the advertising is not coming in like it should. Across in the better part of town stands the L.A. Free Press which has become established. And runs the ads. Bryan created his own enemy by first working for the L.A. Free Press and bringing their circulation from 16,000 to more than three times that. It’s like building up the National Army and then joining the Revolutionaries. Of course, the battle isn’t simply OPEN CITY vs. FREE PRESS. If you’ve read OPEN CITY, you know that the battle is larger than that. OPEN CITY takes on the big boys, the biggest boys, and there are some big ones coming down the center of the street, NOW, and real ugly big shits they are, too. It’s more fun and more dangerous working for OPEN CITY, perhaps the liveliest rag in the U.S. But fun and danger hardly put margarine on the toast or fed the cat. You give up toast and end up eating the cat.
Bryan is a type of crazy idealist and romantic. He quit, or was fired, he quit and was fired — there was a lot of shit flying — from his job at the Herald-Examiner because he objected to them airbrushing the cock and balls off of the Christ child. This on the cover of their magazine for the Christmas issue. “And it’s not even my God, it’s theirs,” he told me.
So this strange idealist and romantic created OPEN CITY. “How about doing us a weekly column?” he asked off-handedly, scratching his red beard. Well, you know, thinking of other columns and other columnists, it seemed to me to be a terribly drab thing to do. But I started out, not with a column but a review of Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner. Then one day after the races, I sat down and wrote the heading, NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN, opened a beer, and the writing got done by itself. There was not the tenseness or the careful carving with a bit of a dull blade, that was needed to write something for The Atlantic Monthly. Nor was there any need to simply tap out a flat and careless journalism (er, journalesé??). There seemed to be no pressures. Just sit by the window, lift the beer and let it come. Anything that wanted to arrive, arrived. And Bryan was never a problem. I’d hand him some copy — in the early days — and he’d flit through it and say, “OK, it’s in.” After a while I’d just hand him copy and he wouldn’t read it; he’d just jam it into a cubbyhole and say, “It’s in. What’s going on?” Now he doesn’t even say, “It’s in.” I just hand him the copy and that’s that. It has helped the writing. Think of it yourself: absolute freedom to write anything you please. I’ve had a good time with it, and a serious time too, sometimes; but I felt mainly, as the weeks went on, that the writing got better and better. These are selections from about fourteen months worth of columns.
For action, it has poetry beat all to hell. Get a poem accepted and chances are it will come out 2 to 5 years later, and a 50-50 shot it will never appear, or exact lines of it will later appear, word for word, in some famous poet’s work, and then you know the world ain’t much. Of course, this isn’t the fault of poetry; it is only that so many shits attempt to print and write it. But with NOTES, sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city. I get letters from people who have never read poetry, mine or anybody else’s. People come to my door — too many of them really — and knock to tell me that NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk, bullshit, drink half the night. A long distance telephone operator from Newburgh, N.Y., sends me money. She wants me to give up drinking beer and to eat well. I hear from a madman who calls himself “King Arthur” and lives on Vine Street in Hollywood and wants to help me write my column. A doctor comes to my door: “I read your column and I think that I can help you. I used to be a psychiatrist.” I send him away.
I hope that these selections help you. If you want to send me money, o.k. Or if you want to hate me, o.k. too. If I were the village blacksmith you wouldn’t fuck with me. But I am just an old guy with some dirty stories. Writing for a newspaper, which, like me, might die tomorrow morning.
It’s all very strange. Just think, if they hadn’t airbrushed the cock and balls off the Christ child, you wouldn’t be reading this. So, be happy.
Charles Bukowski
1969
NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN
some son of a bitch had held out on the money, everybody claiming they were broke, card game finished, I was sitting there with my buddy Elf, Elf was screwed-up as a kid, all shriveled, he used to lay in bed for years squeezing these rubber balls, doing crazy exercises, and when he got out of bed one day he was as wide as he was tall, a muscled laughing brute who wanted to be a writer but he wrote too much like Thomas Wolfe and, outside of Dreiser, T. Wolfe was the worst American writer ever born, and I hit Elf behind the ear and the bottle fell off the table (he’d said something that I disagreed with) and as the Elf came up I had the bottle, good scotch, and I got him half on the jaw and part of the neck under there and he went down again, and I felt on top of my game, I was a student of Dostoevski and listened to Mahler in the dark, and I had time to drink from the bottle, set it down, fake with a right and lend him the left just below the belt and he fell against the dresser, clumsily, the mirror broke, it made sounds like a movie, flashed and crinkled and then Elf landed one high on my forehead and I fell back across a chair and the thing flattened like straw, cheap furniture, and then I was in deep — I had small hands and no real taste for fighting and I hadn’t put him away — and he came on in like some zany two-bit vengeful individual, and I got in about one for three, not very good ones, but he wouldn’t quit and the furniture was breaking everywhere, very much noise and I kept hoping somebody would stop the damned thing — the landlady, the police, God, anybody, but it went on and on and on, and then I didn’t remember.
when I awakened the sun was up and I was under the bed. I got out from under and found that I could stand up. large cut under chin. scraped knuckles. I’d had worse hangovers. and there were worse places to awaken, like jail? maybe. I looked around. it had been real. everything broken and smeared and shattered, spilled — lamps, chairs, dresser, bed, ashtrays — gored beyond all measure, nothing sensible, everything ugly and finished. I drank some water and then walked to the closet. it was still there: tens, twenties, fives, the money I had thrown into the closet each time I had gone to piss during the card game, and I remembered starting the fight about the MONEY. I gathered up the green, placed it in my wallet, put my paper suitcase on the slanting bed and began to pack my few rags: laborer’s shirts, stiff shoes with holes in the bottom, hard and dirty stockings, lumpy pants with legs that wanted to laugh, a short story about catching crabs at the San Francisco Opera House, and a torn Thrifty Drugstore dictionary — “palingenesis — recapitulation of ancestral stages in life-history.”
the clock was working, the old alarm clock, god