all right, I’m not much of a man. you’ve busted them out of their high caves with grenades, with air power, and they’ve come out ready to meet their slant-eyed God while screaming a banal language and you got to them, aimed, took them out, got some taken out. people like Mailer and Hem made money (and Hem so me Art, earlier) writing about it, but where does it leave us and what??? [* * *]

listen, Bill, listen to me, stay off the stuff. [* * *] only Ginsberg can smoke pot and advertise it and get away with it because his name has become BIG enough so that he’d love to get busted just to help push the circulation of his fading poetry, and also he’d be able to blow the screws after lights out. a man who WANTS to get busted can’t get busted because the orders are in. it’s like sometimes I’ve wanted to get fired but I couldn’t get fired yet some guy with 6 kids busting his ass and sweating his balls would get layed off. that’s the way it works. [* * *]

[To Jim Roman]

September 26, 1965

[* * *] A Charles Bukowski checklist/bibliography? why not? for all I’ve written I seem to remain like a monk fornicating a goose in a coal mine. of course, this is to my advantage too. it allows me to go on working, chipping at the block without interruption. of course, I die in my own vomit, but quietly, and that counts. the gods have been good to me, very very good. if you want to know anything, ask me—I have kept every mag that has published me except one—Portfolio II, which went for $10, a Caresse Crosby Black Sun Press thing, very akin to Webbwork, lavish with love and color, I had 2 copies, a short story of mine in there, around 1944, 45?—I remember Caresse writing me—“Who are you to write this story? I have never heard of you.” even a ten buck check, and there I was in with all the famous fucks—Sartre, Lorca, Miller and on and on…I was on the bum and needed the ten. I got drunk. came to the door of my parents weighing 135 pounds. my usual weight around 200. they hated my guts. charged me room and board, atrocious prices, while I got a job and paid it back in. or looked for a job. anyhow the old man stole Portfolio II, both copies, and got himself a better job at the L.A. County Museum by claiming that he was Charles Bukowski, and I often wonder, as the years went on [* * *] what the people thought of him. he was such a beastly stupid prick. “there goes Charles Bukowski,” I can hear them saying. well, that’s all over and he’s dead dead dead, thank god. the date of issues of Story that published my short story was March-April 1944, vol. XXIV, no. 106. I remember I was in New York at the time and walking down the street broke and I looked up and there was the god damned magazine in a rack at a corner drugstore. a hell of a feeling, believe me, when you’re 24 and half mad. a hell of a feeling anytime, I’d imagine. [* * *]