Jon’s hard at the book, I know. How about yours? I heard that your San Francisco Review has folded or will change hands. Weren’t they going to bring out a new collection of your poems? Check your tires for air.

Just off a four day drunk. Bloody ass. Glass on floor. Broke. Coffeepot now going in front of me: GLUGGLE, GLUGGLE, GLUKE GLUKE!! I think a new piece of ass would fix me fine. This old stuff gets so hard to handle. That their eyes spray me with love is not enough. It is the sagging of the tit, the worn-flesh? If I could only once have a drink of clear spring water. Everything has mud in it and sticks and discarded socks. Well, I am not so much myself. Crows don’t sleep with peacocks. I’ve got to realize this. [* * *]

Wormwood Review published the following letter as Bukowski’s response to the editor’s explanation that the payment for publication was four copies “which we will mail to anywhere, anybody or anything….” (M.S. is presumably a slightly disguised reference to Sheri Martinelli and C. W. to John William Corrington.)

[To Marvin Malone]

[August 1962]

well, ya better mail one to M.S. or she’ll prob. put her pisser in the oven, she thinks she is a goddess, and maybe she is, I sure as hell wd’t know

like some of the boys tell me,

then there is C. W. who does not answer his mail but is very busy teaching young boys how to write and I know he is going places, and since he is, ya better mail ’m one…

then there’s my old aunt in Palm Springs nothing but money and I have everything but money…talent, a good singing voice, a left hook deep to the gut…send her a copy, she hung up on me, last time I phoned her drunk, giving evidence of need, she hung up on me…

then there’s this girl in Sacramento who writes me these little letters…very depressed bitch, mixed like quite some waffle flower, making gentle intellectual overtures which I ignore, but send her a magazine

in lieu of a hot poker.

that makes 4?

I hope to send you some more poems anytime because I got to figure that people who run my poems are a little mad, but that’s all right. I am also that way. anyhow,—

I hope meanwhile you do not fold up before I do.

A note by the recipient identifies this as accompanied by the gift of a bobby pin. The “her” in question is presumably Jane Cooney Baker, who had died early in 1962. For Bukowski’s relationship with her, see Hank, chapters 4 and 5.

[To Ann Bauman]

[September 1962]

Death does not take everything, god damn it.