Notes of an Eager Young Man: A Candid Tribute to Charles Bukowski

Originally Published on my old blog, "The Angry Fix", March 30, 2013

“I like beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.”
-Tom Waits

When I’m in a real lazy leisurely mood I like to read Bukowski.

You get home from work on a Friday afternoon and there’s just enough space between you and the doom of the coming week to make it seem like it’s all over, so you can relax. And you take a nice afternoon shower so you feel clean and loose in the muscles, and with a small dose of caffeine in the veins you ease down on to your bed and prop your head up with a couple pillows.

And that’s when I make a selection from my Bukowski stack and start reading.
Buk writes with an intimacy and simplicity that relaxes me. The humor helps too. A saner man would read his stuff and get depressed, but not me. No matter how many tales of whiskey and whores and dead-end jobs and mean dogs and mangy cats and screaming girlfriends and horse races and listening to Wagner alone at 3:00 in the morning…no matter much of it all that dirty old man throws at me, it’s always a great tender leisure to read Post Office or Love is a Dog from Hell or Last Night of the Earth Poems on a tired afternoon in Happy Valley.

I think it’s because of the honesty of it all, of writing from where it is…“the pain and defeat of the world.” The merciful joy of the creative act from the bluebird soul of a gin-soaked German-born American pulp poet. “If you’re going to try, go all the way.” Buk once said of his craft. And he said it because he knew that writing was the only way to beat the grey fury of a relentless universe.

One day last summer I spent a glorious afternoon hour lying out under the hot sun on the lawn of Berlin’s museum quarter. Some folks from my study-abroad group were there, enjoying the lawn the same way I was, and a street violinist was playing Vivaldi and Mozart and the air smelled like bread and it all felt so good that it made perfect sense, as hardly anything ever does. I wished I had a cheap bottle of wine to take slow easy hits from, but I didn’t—and I don’t drink anyway—so I pulled my copy of Charles Bukowski’s Women out of my backpack and read for a while. A couple of girls from my group—young…flowers of chance…sweet and innocent in their own pure way…asked me what I was reading. I handed them the book and they looked at the back cover, reading the synopsis and gazing upon the picture of Buk grinning in the arms of his own cigarette smoke. They handed the book back to me and said something like “sounds interesting.” I could tell they meant it. I could also tell that though they meant it they knew as well as I did that they would never read a book like this. Just like they’d never fall in love with a sweaty bearded freak like me, though I imagined in my Berlin-fueled vanity that they wanted to.

With the book back in my hands I lay back down on the grass and read a few chapters of honest brutality—and the ink was wine at my leisure, just brutal and sweet enough to lubricate the soul and lull me to sleep on the warm lawn with the winos who had learned to love the bitterness of their own tragic lives.

And so, in America, or Europe, or wherever I happen to be betting on the muse, if it’s a lazy afternoon, or even a quiet night, and there’s enough inner madness to keep me grounded in the truth of all things, I might read Bukowski. And then I'll get feeling real honest and friendly, and in the tender leisure of it all I'll think, surely there must be a way. Surely there must be a divine chance that old Buk—in all his moments of ancient wisdom and laughter—was wrong when he said:

“All great poets die in steaming pots of shit.”