Ken Hada is a fourth generation Oklahoman, descendant of Danish and Hungarian immigrants:
Gypsy poets, barn dance aficionados, art lovers, amateur philosophers, wheat farmers,
preachers, teachers and common-
“These poems, acting as spare parts themselves, go into the making of one smooth-
-
Author of Pushing the Bear
‘Cause I Skinned it, Bent it and Been in it
Charles Bukowski, Unknown Location, HA
Sent: 01/30/2010
Yes Polyphony. I’ve heard of the pe. Mostly frightened sons & daughters set up for the sucker punch by Kerouac. I’ve already written somewhere a kind of or kind eulogy for Kerouac’s boy Neal C., who went and died by the Mexican railway, under a moonless sky, so I’m not gonna write anything like it here. What Neal had was guts. These suckers, jesus mother, they had some of the Hank in them, they were good duckers. In the old days a good ducker knew how to duck a punch.
During my last years, when everyone asked around how could it be that old Hank was still breathing the filth of this dear world and still shitting with his own anus, I got a visit from Sallie. As I always did with the women visitors who crowded my front yard to fondle the old cock, screaming from his cage, I let Sallie in and said, “Take your pants off. Keep your shirt. The bed is over there. Give me two minutes until the V takes effect.”
“Hank, I’m your granddaughter.”
Ah, the vultures have come for the rotten, I thought. “You are… Is that so? Well, if you’re not here to make me wet than that’s the door, cupcake.”
“You may regret that Hank. I know you like to act tough, but I’ve seen you on TV. I’ve seen you cry like a motherless teenager panting after Linda, when she left you and wouldn’t come back.”
I took another look at her, there had been too many Lindas and the only kid I had wasn’t with a Linda and had no kid of her own as far as I knew, but this one in front of me, feisty and bitchy, could be of Bukowski stock, of German refuse. Well, shit, I don’t know, I went soft but told myself, don’t worry I’m making a study of her.
“What do you want?” I asked her, when the better question, if I wasn’t obsessed with
the shitty-
“Don’t you want to know who my grandmother is?”
“Fuck no. Even if you told me, how should I remember or know what you’re saying isn’t a lot of crap and probably it is.”
She laughed. She laughed easy for a kid meeting her grandpa for the first time. Ah, what the fuck am I saying, I’ve had a lot of trouble with women and I wouldn’t know how they laugh. “So, what do you want?”
“Just to chat, old man, you don’t have to be an ass just because I came to you.”
“As hell you know I wouldn’t have come to you.”
“Well, in a way, you have,” she said and tilted her stupid head.
“And how is that?”
“I’ve read your poems, all your novels – I’m not sure they should be called novels though, they’re more like lesbian letters, shallow and sad – but your poems are something else, one can live by them.”
“Fuck me if you’re not the prim, tender frog from the lily pond. Well cupcake, I never cared to write any novels, but poetry doesn’t sell.”
“Since when did the drunkards care about selling?”
“Haven’t you heard, booze ain’t free?”
“No Hank, it’s not, but I have a remedy.”
“You do?! What might that be, hitting up old men?”
We were shooting the breeze like a well oiled German machine-
“He drinks too much…”
“He beats his women…”
“He’s sold out…”
“He died, just the other day…”
She measured me up, those eyes of hers squinting and intense.
“I have a group of writers. We share a new vision, a vision of writing without the bullshit of selling. We take from the rich.”
“That you do. And how do you do that?” She explained to me the plan that was all
but normal, legal and if I don’t call it criminal it is because Sallie’s accomplices,
the pe, had the so-
“I’ve come here to ask for your blessings.”
Ah, Saint Hank Bukowski was called to duty, away from Hades and further down with the polyphonous ennui.