[To Douglas Blazek]

[February 10, 1965]

[* * *] look, just went out to get mail and here’s two letters from Cuscaden, the last airmail and about an attack on me (review of Run with the Hunted by a. frederic franklyn (his lower case) and Cus quite upset about it, says freddy boy gets “almost hysterical; every low blow known to man (dig such lines as ‘the suspiciously effete contemporaries’!)” “This bastard’s harangue amounts to a disgusting, personal sort of thing…” says Cuscaden. I’ve got to write Cuss a letter and buck him up. He tells me that Freddy boy went on for 5 and ½ pages. As you know, Franklyn is with Trace and May’s right hand agent. I don’t go well in Los Angeles I guess (at least, that). Once I was over at May’s, brought my own liquor and got blasted. I get nasty sometimes this way and May later phoned me and said, “You couldn’t have meant those things you said about me; you must have been talking to a face on the couch, just somebody you saw sitting there. And nobody’s ever acted that way in my house!” Christ, maybe I smashed a few glasses against the wall, I don’t know. I know some weeks later when I was sitting in jail on a drunk rap and looking for somebody to bail me out (20$), the money was on my dresser but I had lost my wallet, and since I am a loner I was dialing long shot chances—May was one, and when I got him he told me: “I can’t help you. I am entertaining a man from India.” The shits have me wired for destruction. May knows the book reviewer of the Times (L.A. newspaper) and when the last issue of Coastlines came out the reviewer listed the names of all the writers appearing in there—except one. Sure, Bukowski. accident? maybe. accidents have been happening to me all my life. I never belonged and never will, and in a sense, I am proud of this. the only shit who can destroy me is myself, and that is when I start writing as bad as they think I am writing, or as bad as I think they are writing. I remember when I bought May the fifth he took it into the kitchen and every time I wanted a drink of my own whiskey I had to ask for it, and I was drunk or I wouldn’t have been there anyway, and I believe I remember starting on him then: “Why do you use all that fancy vocabulary?” and so forth. Sweetheart, they are always axing me because I don’t smile pretty or come to their tea parties. This poet Sherman came by the other week and he said, “I’ve got your archenemy out in the car.” I didn’t ask him who my archenemy was—it’s a kind of nebulous thing with yellow teeth and a swimming pool that I sometimes think of…. anyhow, what was I saying about Ole?