motherfucker, come back, he said to his soul

Somewhere in L.A., there’s a typewriter that, after years of merciless beating by the stiff, dry fingers of a reluctant legend, is rusting away in peace and obscurity. Job done, give this old machine a swift kick and pitch it in the landfill where it belongs. Today I crack a beer, scratch my ass, sit down for a good think. I haven’t washed. I’m thinking how stupid it is, and how unavoidable, that this moment should come. I’m following advice that’s not advice, from a man I never knew, so I can get it off my chest, how I feel remembering him now that he’s gone, and that’s one thing he never would have wanted from me. If he could look down on me right now, it’d be with a contempt that none of you could match if you had a million bucks to spend and a thousand years to live. He’d tell me I’m wasting my time. I guess he’d be right.

A year ago March 9, Charles Bukowski finally disembarked from Planet Earth, off to wherever dirty old men go when their number finally comes up. The dry facts: not quite 74 years old, of pneumonia during treatment for leukemia. We were surprised—we never thought he’d die, for christsake, and certainly not as a frail old man in a hospital gown, plugged into a machine. But what stands out a year later, thinking about Bukowski, is the growing realization of what a black hole remains where he used to be. Nobody did what Bukowski did. Yeah, he was a literary disgrace in nasty shorts; sure, he had the unsettling knack for telling you why and how to fuck off when you least wanted to hear it. But who else gave enough of a shit to do this for us? To look us in the eye and say, hey friend, I’d just as soon jack off in the shower and call it a day? Nobody, that’s who. We owe him for that.

revolution sounds very romantic, you know. but it ain’t. it’s blood and guts and madness; its little kids killed who get in the way, it’s little kids who don’t understand what the fuck is going on. it’s your whore, your wife ripped in the belly with a bayonet and then raped in the ass while you watch. it’s men torturing men who used to laugh at Mickey Mouse cartoons. before you go into the thing, decide where the spirit is and where the spirit will be when it is over.

About twelve years ago, it seemed like everybody was turning on to Buk’s poems and stories—his stuff– and man, did we have a lot to learn. We were at that age just getting the hang of challenging the preconceptions that weighted us down, the fixed stares with which we greeted the world everyday, how we never attempted a new take on life, never changed channels. What Buk helped us learn, what his death would demonstrate, was that writing was more than just a miserable way to spend a life. The act of writing carried with it responsibilities, and the first of these was to tell the truth, naked and unvarnished. The words you write will outlast you, friend, on your short trip from birth to eternity. The short of it: tell it like it is, or don’t bother.

The other thing was Bukowski’s durability. Before he died, it seemed like he was immortal, this writer whose poems smelled like hangovers of the soul, who chronicled the bleak and nameless life of drunks without a decent haircut, the humanity of whores along the strips of L.A., whiskey-shot eyes catching a long shot come into the home stretch, maybe paying 6-1, another week’s rent, a bottle of wine. Bukowski’s life, as recounted in his art, was tough and gruesome, and more than a few have mistaken his drinking, puking, fighting, shit-stained world for the stories, columns, and poems which it engendered. We respected him when he wrote, “Endurance is more important than truth,” because he had the authority to make it stick and maybe because we came to realize that they were ultimately the same thing.

I fought a guy who later ended up very high in the United States Navy. I fought him one day from 8:30 in the morning until after sundown. Nobody stopped us although we were in plain sight of his front lawn, under two huge pepper trees with the sparrows shitting on us all day. It was a grim fight, it was to the finish. He was bigger, a little older and heavier, but I was crazier. We quit by common consent. I don’t know how this works, you have to experience it to understand it, but after two people beat on each other eight or nine hours, a strange kind of brotherhood emerges.

What about Bukowski as rendered by Bukowski? An ugly, drunken, ill-tempered, arrogant son-of-a-bitch who’d drink your whiskey dry and then fuck your wife behind your back. How can you give a shit about a man like that? The answer is simple. Not a word he wrote was ever a lie. Bukowski’s world, bars and whores and losing days at the track, cheap whiskey and third-rate blowjobs, fighting and drinking and fucking to block out the empty night, the day after day, and coming back for more—that’s our world, too, folks, yours and mine, and Buk wasn’t about to let us forget it. You don’t have to like it, motherfuckers, but you can’t deny it. It ain’t gonna go away. We’re all whores, so many sheep getting led by the nose daily to the ongoing slaughter of America. It might not all be great poetry—you have to find that where you can—but it’s truth. His writing never was intended to pander to the stale illusions of the masses. He was, as my friend Wayne put it, the consummate iconoclast, busting down the illusions of whitebread America, scraping reality off the wheel and pouring it straight, beer back.

So now we embark on the post-Bukowski years, or something like that. Buk brought it home time after time, like it or not. He blended his life and work into an almost seamless whole for thirty-odd years, often publishing his work in nameless, faceless rags like the one you’re reading now. He did the work, walked the walk. For all its rawness, Bukowski’s writing was never lowbrow or simplistic. He was at home with Celine and Dostoevski, Beethoven and Mahler, Whitman and Miller. He showed us that knowledge need not be barren, that refinement wasn’t confined to the drawing room. He loathed in print the effete intellectualism of the coffee house elite, the academics with their grants and in-house vehicles, and the wannabes who came to his door, seeking counsel. How in hell, you can hear him asking them, can you want to be a writer? There’s no wanting about it. Either you write or you do not. That’s something we should remember, not because we owe him, but because we owe ourselves.

to learn, do not read Karl Marx. very dry shit. please learn the spirit. Marx is only tanks moving through Prague. don’t get caught this way, please. first of all, read Celine. the greatest writer of 2,000 years. of course, the Stranger by Camus must fit in. Crime and Punishment. The Brothers. all of Kafka. all the works of the unknown writer John Fante. the short stories of Turgenev. avoid Faulkner, Shakespeare, and especially George Bernard Shaw, the most overblown fantasy of the Ages, a real true-blown shit with political and literary connections beyond belief. the only younger guy I can think of with the road paved ahead for him and kissing ass whenever necessary was Hemingway, but the difference between Hemingway and Shaw was that Hem wrote some good early work and Shaw wrote completely flip and dull crap all the way through.

so, here we are mixing Revolution with Literature and they both fit. somehow everything fits, but I grow tired and wait for tomorrow.

will the Man be at my door?

who gives a damn?

i hope this made you spill your tea.