BUKOWSKI EFFECT

When I first came to Hollywood, the writer I most read was Charles Bukowski. At that time, no one back in the East Coast ivy-league enclave I hung out with even knew who he was. If they had, it would have both shocked and disgusted them. Not only was he "a guy"; he was "an old guy". He was less than working class; looked like a leper; dressed like somebody out of a 1940s poorhouse; was an alcoholic who celebrated his black- outs, sexist behavior, life with cockroaches and crabs, and was most at ease in the company of insane prostitutes far past their prime.

However, he was a poet. A real poet. And while not as "pretty in his prose" as Steinbeck or Joyce, maybe, there was that same observational/participatory truth. He was not only watching the world around him (in all its misery and glory), he was living it. Minus pretention. Minus cool-handed irony. Minus anything, it seemed, including a conscience or a mirror.

As much as I despised a lot of his activities, there was a lifeblood in his writing that I couldn't ignore. It spoke to me. Gave me something to ...well...not exactly model my life upon (brrrr...) but something that gave me hope. That told me: this man, at his worst, still writes. In paper-thin wooden shacks without floor nor electricity nor anything to write upon except grocery bags,with broken pencil stubs, he writes. And though there is a valid point that many of the scenarios he wrote about are repetitive (we know the punchline before we even crack open the cover of the book), so are most American lives. (I'm willing to bet: so are most EARTHLY lives...)

The fact that Bukowski was from California, but didn't turn out as we are taught Californians turn out, i.e. successful; tanned; beautiful; charmingly casual; fitness freak, spoke to me. The fact that he was forced to take jobs he was vastly underqualified for, often, and was often fired, gave me hope the few times I was desperately looking for jwork--even with a sterling four year college degree-- gave me hope when I found work that I had to accept (because the rent was coming due or there were no groceries in the house)but hated doing. The fact that he got up and began his mornings with a stiff drink; then went on to end his evenings in the same way; helped me get clean and sober, (but more, to understand my drinking Irish family in a way that had puzzled and shamed me in the past). The fact that he was so butt-ugly, yet, women followed him home and considered him a genius, gave me unrelenting hope that maybe, out there, I, too, would one day find Redemption.

More than anything, the image Bukowski always included in his work: of the lone writer, tapping out his life, on a typewriter, while listening to classical music in a city of razzledazzle and Rap, late at night, in a cheap apartment, sitting in his underwear in the cooling dark, wrestling demons (and angels) onto a page...for me, this was The Holy Grail. He wasn't young anymore. He was often alone. But he kept at it. None of the prize-winning poets nor the Harvard-educated novelists I was taught by could offer such sage advice. Nor serve as such living role models. He didn't give a rat's ass about impressing anybody. All he desired to do was: to write.

Yeah, after years of fighting to survive, he did find an editor who took pity; offered him barely enough to cover his rent, every month, for life. (A miracle!) In return, that editor got sole rights to all Buk's work: prose, poetry, essays. Later, the investment paid off like a gold mine--and is still paying off, though Bukowski, himself, is long enough dead. But that blessing was years in the coming.

Yeah, he got to quit the USPS and focus, finally, on the telling and re-telling of the tales which nourish me--still. Yeah, they even made a couple movies and some documentaries out of those tales and that life. Big stars , like Sean Penn and Bono, marvel at Bukowski's wordsmithing. And yeah, he finally ended up marrying a beautiful, independent woman, who stayed with him till the end, when cancer he thought he had beaten, as a younger man, roared up, again, and took him down.But when he went, he was working on a lap-top; he was wearing clean clothes and good shoes; he had a house not far from the beach and a great car; he was off the hard liquor and his sound system was state of the art. He was still ugly. He was old. A helluva lot of American critics despised him and continue to argue about his place in the lexicon of American Literature.

I think he won the brass ring, after all.

For a feminist (still), a working writer who doesn't have a patron (or even an agent), a woman trying to make it alone while no longer young nor pretty, Bukowski is a weird addiction to admit to --but, if he can get under my skin and give me the chops I need to sustain the flow, it's an addiction I'm going to keep.