They Killed, Henry, John Berryman & Me

Fading away on tramadol and ganja takes my pain away; Lord, take me to the Upper Room  

John Berryman wrote Dream Songs— here's number 1,

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it that made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world, like a woollen lover, once did seem on Henry's side
Then came the departure.
Thereafter, nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, we survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be
once again a sycamore. I was

kicked off the stage by the MC.

In the face of every motha fuckin thing in the world They Killed, Henry, John Berryman & Me

John Berryman, high on something, scribbling a poem in the English Department,

remembering, 

a hot, mixed-up, cockeyed day in Chinatown at the opium den, dreaming of wooden ships, the god Neptune and flying fish.  

Catnapping in a rusty bed, he's pulverised by cockroaches, mosquitos, and lice magnifying 1000 times in the coterie of his dying brain,

he told the screws to mix his ashes with tobacco, and Bougainvillea pedals in a tin of Prince Albert Tobacco and to place it in the trunk of a Cadillac sedan because in his words,

there won't be a body this time.

The street people follow the cheerleader to Wicker Zoo where she hands the gorilla a hand-rolled Cuban cigar.

King Kong lights the blunt and blows a mighty ring of smoke around the moon.

All in all, it was a lovely remembrance just south of Elysian Field,

where all things meet. 

Jesse

During the summer of 78, it was so hot in Chicago, you could fry an egg on the sidewalk.

I was making 3.25 an hour working at the downtown Montgomery Wards as a stock boy. 

I worked with a Mexican guy, Jesse Valdez; he was 5ft 3 with a black pompadour, wearing pointy-toed shoes and tight pants. 

He was funny wise, saying shit like, 

if you're talkin to a chica and ur polla's hard, it means you can fuck her.

I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in the Loyola University neighbourhood near the el, riding it to Monkey Wards every morning.

After work one evening, I buy dinner and beer at El Pollo Loco for him. After we eat, he says, 

ah, Henry, let's go to my place, 

okay.

We walked six blocks to his three-story walk-up, then walking up three flights to his room 

His room was closet size, seven feet from the elevated train tracks. We squeeze in, him on the radiator and me on the tiny mattress; he has some pot, so we smoke. 

The sounds are deafening; train wheels give off a high-pitched squeaking sound; the air smells like burning rubber and rust.

Jessie had ripped off a Barbie Doll from Wards, he says, 

watch dis Henry.

He tosses the doll out the window, and it straddles 

the highly charged and lethal third rail, burning to a crisp in seconds.

After a few months at Wards, we were bored shitless; there was the time Jesse smashed an Easy Bake Oven to bits with a baseball bat or when he'd strip down a Ken and Barbey Doll and bend them into sexual positions like puppets.

One day we had lunch in the cafeteria; Jesse was in love with a server named Butterfly, he wanted to titty-fuck her, saying,

I'm gonna come down on that chica's titas, fat girls. Thank you to fuck 'em, Henry.

Butterfly lived in the Evergreen Trailer Camp, somewhere in Cicero. 

During the bus trip to her place, he says, 

dude we should bring Big Caesar with us to be sure we satisfy Butterfly, I tell him,

I see so you're planning a love-in.

At Butterfly's trailer, we knock on the door, and she opens it. 

She's working on a wade of bubble gum passionately saying, 

I hope you boys are up to the task.

Inside the three of us are talking at the kitchen table.

Jesse pulls out a pint of mescal, passing it around when Butterfly says, 

did you all boys bring the Spanish fly? 

Sure we did it's in your drink.

After a few drinks, Butterfly falls out of her chair onto the trailer floor, Jesse says, 

she's ready man, 

and we jump her, and Jesse says, 

back off Henry, 

I thought this was goin to be a love-in.

I need some downtime with Butterly, Do you get it, amigo?

That morning, we show up for work, we run into the store manager, John Blow, and he says, 

We gotta video of you boys bustin' up merchandise in the warehouse; security will escort you out of the store. 

Uma Kline Meets Henry Bukowski

I remember the summer of 78, bits and pieces of it anyway.

I lived in the basement of the Sparkling Angels Condominium. I was the janitor. 

I loved the basement place; friends called it the bunker.

I had an electric plate and oven; I could cook anything. 

In the morning, I'd make Swedish pancakes with Loganberry sauce and wash them down with hot green tea. 

By 11 am, I'm lying in bed smoking devil weed, fiendishly reading Alan Ginsburg's poem Howl.  

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz

At midnight, I go to  The Skank Bar. Sitting at the bar, I order a Bud Light and a bowl of clam chowder. 

A Germanic woman sitting alone in a booth walks to the bar asking, 

are you Henry Lucowski the writer? I've read your work in The Village Voice and The Bronx News, 

thanks, I don't get many positive reviews, tell me about yourself.

Okay, I’m Uma Kline; I’m an actress currently performing in the off-off-Broadway play Velvet Kinks at The Steppenwolf Theater.

Henry, let's go to my place and have a drink. It's not far, we can walk there, 

great, The Skank Bar bores the hell outta me.

As we walk, Uma grabs my hand; her hand is warm, her warmth is appealing. 

Reaching The Chelsea Hotel, home to an A-list of literati who've lived there over the years: Mark Twain, Herbert Huncke, Quentin Christ, Leonard Cohen, and so on. 

We ride a cage elevator to the 11th floor and walk to Uma's room; it's a rectangular room with a painted concrete floor, purple wallpaper, red velvet curtains, a black leather sofa and an antique bed.

Uma's on the bed, and I'm on the sofa; after a few drinks, she lies back on the bed  

She lies on her back and opens her legs, takes off her panties, stroking her large blue clitoris. 

In a New York minute, I jump on the bed, landing with my head in her muff.

She knows every position in the book, after balling we fall asleep in each other's arms

I wake the next morning, noticing a note written in lipstick on the mirror reading,

See you tonight at The Steppenwolf Theater; the tickets are  under your pillow; love you, Ulma.

That night, I was paralytically drunk in The Skank Bar, falling off the bar stool and landing on the floor. I never saw Umla again.

Fancy Dancer

Sherman Alexie is a lionized Indian writer and filmmaker; I doubt you've heard of him. 

And, for sure, nobody on X has heard of him.

Family, friends, and publishers convinced him to open an X account, and he only got 4o followers, because Tweeps are into horror, romance, and spy novels 

Sherman is a lionized writer worldwide. He's a card-carrying member of the Academy and Institute of Letters whose pin is in the desk drawer under a pile of papers.

In his book Superman and Me, he talks about learning to read when he was 3, reading a comic book, and associating the panels with the written narrative.  

One day, he picks up a book and looks closely at the words. It's hard, but he sees the words on the pages as though they were cattle corralled into paragraphs. Sherman says it like this,

I didn't have the vocabulary to say, paragraph, but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence.  

At the age of 3, the prodigy sees the world in paragraphs. In his own words saying, 

This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and adopted little brother. 

By the age of 5, Sherman’s in kindergarten reading The Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck, laughingly, as his neighbors are reading Dick, Spot, and Jane.

Sherman, the wunderkind, was seen as an oddball on the reservation; Indian kids weren't supposed to be geniuses. 

In 1985 Alexie applied and was accepted to Jesuit Gonzaga University in Spokane, receiving an academic scholarship, the only Indian kid to make it to college from his reservation.   

His work focused on the troubles of Indians, life on the reservation, alcoholism, poverty, and despair, but he didn't cry about it, he wrote comically.

Sherman played guard on the Jesuit school's basketball team till his Senior year. 

One day, he calls the reservation to talk to his mom, who's in the bathroom, asking her,

is papa there? 

Henry, you know your father died 7 years ago. 

Alexie says, 

My mother laughs at the angels who wait for us to pause during the most ordinary of days and sing our praise to forgetfulness before they slap our souls with their cold wings; the angels burden and unbalance us, and da ride us piggyback. 

Alexie is also a filmmaker. He's produced and written screenplays for several low-budget films, including Fancy Dancing, Winter in the Blood, and Smoke Signals. 

All in all Sherman Alexie is 1 of my favorite writers.