Yeah, those angels of mercy
used to sing and beg down in
Pershing
Square,
L .A.
Voices that haunted me and still do,
lost nightmare
Jesus sounds coming out of the coins
rattling in a cup from two blind ladies.
I was born in the city of angels
in the late 1940s, down on
Hope
Street, near
Pershing
Square and
Clifton's cafeteria in the pantry and all
them old strip joints on 5th and
Main.
You know, tonight,
White
Fury and her twin 44s,
Charles
Bukowski territory, beat outsider
America
and the music that's been lost from that time,
taken off the radios.
You had to have been there.
The backdrop is
MacArthur
Park and
Hollywood
Court
Apartments and racetracks.
The old
America when music still resonated through nightclubs,
people gambled and drank
and screwed and smoked.
People went down to the border and sipped highballs
and cocktails and went to the bullfights.
The old
America where the big guilt and political correctness
and the chain stores hadn't sunk
in so deep. I thought,
you know the best person to read these memories would have been
Little
Jack
Horton.
He was a circus midget who actually used
to drink with
Bukowski back in the 1950s.
Then I find out
Little
Jack
Horton's still alive and living in
Gidtown,
Florida with
all the old -time carnies and circus people.
So why the hell do we need any
fake
Hollywood tough guys here?
Here today, gone tomorrow,
boys in masks, flim
flamers, magazine faces.
We don't need them.
Little
Jack
Horton was the king of the carnival,
the voice of the great
American
Midway, a voice that sounds like ukulele icon laughing gas,
the real thing.
He's been shot out of cannons,
he did the pass of death on a
Shetland pony, he rode
the four walls of eternity on a motorcycle,
appeared in movies like
The
Terror of
Tiny
town at one -eyed
Jack's with
Marlon
Brando, and he wrote poetry.
This is a true
American voice from the sawdust
backlots of the old world.
I saw little
Jack a little while ago,
gave him some cassette tapes and a cheap cassette
recorder and asked him to read some
of these pages on
Charles
Bukowski memories.
Real low -fidelity
Americana the way it used to be.
Ladies and gentlemen, it's matinee time.
Here's little
Jack
Horton.
Thank