On Reading Bukowski

ON READING BUKOWSKI

by Kelp

I don’t have much patience for self-destructive people who try to make an art form out of their self-destructiveness.

True, life is hard and people get tough breaks and have traumatic experiences that can scar them for life.

True, some people can’t live with who they are.  Maybe most people.

Too pretty or too ugly, too thin or too fat, too smart or not smart enough.

All these things are true and form the basis for suffering in our world. 

We are all disabled to some degree.

We are all on the continuum of ability and disability.

But the familiar storyline of the artist that succumbs to drugs or alcohol or some other self-destructive addiction doesn’t move me to sympathy and certainly not to empathy.  It doesn’t speak to me in any way.   It bothers me, it makes me angry.

Maybe it’s because of the people I knew growing up in the Bronx.

I knew a fair number of drug addicts and alcoholics. 

Potheads. Junkies. Barflies.  Compulsive gamblers.  Sex fiends. Those were not terms of endearment; often they were the labels they gave themselves.

I knew their stories, but they didn’t move me. 

What a waste, I said, and I tried to stay clear of these people who were always wasted.  When someone said I’m wasted, I didn’t think he was cool; I thought what a waste.

My father, for example. 

I knew his story better than anyone.

I knew he’d had a tough life, growing up on the ghetto streets on the lower east side during the depression.  Learns the printing trade as an apprentice when he is 17. 

Off to war at age 19.  Dodging bullets on the beach at Normandy.   Falling off a halftrack on his way to the Battle of the Bulge, breaking his back, literally, with the fall. Lying in a military hospital in traction for weeks while the rest of his platoon is completely wiped out in the battle.  Lucky, in a way.  But survivors don’t always feel lucky; most of the time they feel guilty.

Comes back home with a couple of purple hearts.  Falls in love.  Gets married. But could never escape his demons.

Finds his mother dead in her apartment when he goes to visit her one Sunday.  This kind of shit he could never get over.

So, he drank. 

Works as a proof-reader for nearly every newspaper in New York:  three years at The Herald Tribune before it went under, one year at The Journal American before it went under, four years at The Daily Mirror before it went under.   Plus, a lot of time in between when he wasn’t working at all.  

Finally winds up at The Daily News where he works for nearly twenty years.  Struggles with every boss he ever has.  Always on the verge of being fired.  Often accused of drinking on the job.

There was a bar he liked; it was called The Blarney Stone.   He was a regular there most days after five, and then come home drunk.  My mother couldn’t stand it.   She’d smell his breath when he came in the door, push him back outside, and close the door on him, screaming at him at the top of her lungs: I can’t stand it.  How can I live like this?  It wasn’t easy for her being married to an alcoholic.

One time – it was the worst time that I remember -- he didn’t come home from work.  He was expected home at 6:30 for dinner, but he didn’t show.   I remember watching my mother sitting on the couch leaning forward with her elbow on her knee, massaging her forehead with one hand, a lit cigarette in her other hand.  It was 7:30, 8:30 … 9:30 … and still he didn’t show.   She’s going out of her mind.  Crying.  Hysterical.  Expecting the worst.   I am trying to comfort her.  I bring her a glass of water, which she doesn’t touch.  I tell her, finally, that I am going to call the police.  I call, but they don’t want to talk to me.   They want to talk to my mother.   She can hardly talk.  She can hardly catch her breath.   But she manages to answer all their questions.  

Sometime after 11 PM we get a call from the police.   We go downstairs to meet them.   My mother doesn’t want them coming up to the apartment.  Downstairs, on the sidewalk, there’s my father, with a policeman on either side of him, kind of holding him up.  Where were you? shouts my mother. Do you know how worried I was?  My father is smiling sheepishly.  I’m sorry, he says.  I’m really sorry.   He had had a few too many drinks at The Blarney Stone.  He had fallen asleep on the subway car.  Back and forth from the first station to the last station on the D train.  Sound asleep for hours lying sideways on the subway seat.  The police picked him up at around 10:30 and brought him to the police station.  The police officer was kind enough and smart enough to call my mother just after 11:00, or maybe it was just procedure.   But they couldn’t have known just how hysterical she was.

My father eventually gave up the bottle when he was much older.   He was on too many anti-depressives; he wasn’t allowed to drink.

And now I’ve got this fucking Charles Bukowski in front of me.   The great barfly.   Liquor’s like a symphony, he said one time in an interview.  I’m so tired of people who are sober every day, he said. They never get drunk.  They never get sick.  They never get a hangover.   They never get high.   They never go crazy.   He’s flipped it all around is what he’s done.  Like you’re not alive unless you’re a drunkard.  All the sober people are just boring.   It’s only the drunks that are interesting.  Oh yeah.   Oh yeah. 

But here’s the thing about Bukowski.   Like a lot of drunkards, he’s charming as hell.  And, you know, you can’t help liking the guy.   His poems are true.  And when he’s bullshitting, he tells you he’s bullshitting, and he’s a very charming bullshitter.  Self-effacing.  Funny.   And pretty much every poem ends with a kind of a punch line, a surprise ending that takes you off guard.   Usually funny.   And true.  And wise.  He’s a wise guy in every sense of the word. 

Like in his poem called the shoelace where he lists all the stuff that can go wrong, a litany of crap, the phone bill’s up and the market’s down and the toilet chain is broken, and the light has burned out – the hall light, the front light, the back light, the inner light; it’s darker than hell and twice as expensive, but in the end it’s a broken shoelace that’s kind of the last straw.  You can live with all kinds of pain, but sometimes it’s the smallest thing, like a broken shoelace, that makes everything snap.   And then he ends with a kind of punchline, he says so be careful when you bend over.

Reading poem after poem, I’m expecting to get disgusted at some point, but it never happens.  The more I read him, the more I like him.   I guess that could be the meaning and the purpose of the whole poetic experience:  when a guy like him can get through to a guy like me.  So much so that I am tempted to imitate his style.  To write the kind of poems that he writes.  Go all the way. 

Well, not all the way.