When I was a kid, I wrote for fun. I didn’t worry about literariness; I simply wrote stories. But in college I suddenly – and wrongly – realized there were lots of us wannabes out there and to be King Wannabe meant sounding ‘like a writer’. And so for four (six) years, the work I brought to fiction workshops sounded like the last thing I’d read.
After A Farewell to Arms, I awoke in the morning when the light was not true yet. I dressed and made my way in the gray light to the outer room. It was cool there and the floor was solid. My table was in the corner. It was there and it was good. I poured a coffee. I sat. I warmed up as I worked. The man across the alley rose and emptied himself. I saw him in the light. The day was new. I wrote and it was good. I wore earthtones. I tried to grow a beard and I failed. I drank. It rained.
A note from a workshop classmate: Stop reading Hemingway. And please shave that ‘beard’
And on from Hem I swiftly moved. Right into Tolkien, and down a merry glen in the Land of Oak, named by the people who were there before the hotdog shop and the Mexican restaurant and the convenience store that had nothing because it was a front for the pixies who handed out bags of their magic dust until they got busted hard by Vice, on a lane called York, there existed a young man, a boy merely, who lived in a cheap hovel ($150/mo + electric), and who tried to put quill to paper, where before him a woman had done the same and before her a man had done the same, and before him another woman, but when she did it, the place was called At the Wood after the patch of forest that lay here since time immemorial and avoided by the city’s residents, then mostly faeries, because of ticks and nobody wanted to get the disease of Lyme.
One day I tried to read one of my Tolkien sentences in one breath and decided to move on after waking up several minutes later on the floor of my cheap hovel.
Sadly, I awoke into Raymond Carver. And I wrote. I made normal sentences. But I split them. Into about four more. By simply adding periods. And removing adverbs and adjectives and most conjunctions. I took pictures of a house. I made eggs. I drank screwdrivers. Also My wife sucks.
In my second-sophomore-year it was Donald Barthalme’s chance to inform my writing and, though I was too dumb to understand anything he wrote, on the bright side, three hundred pancakes and a FRIED GREEN TOMATO and a partially-shaved dwarf were riding the City Elephant out of Minola (TOOT TOOT) and saw the third face of the conductor after he dropped his Elvis album (LEAVing LAS veGAS). When he had stripped off his muumuu’s muumuu’s muumuu’s muumuu and made for the caboose carried by ants, we danced taps, a termite wearing a Leisure Suit came from under the seat and started a bonfire and beamed a hole in the roof with his New Age Indignation (GARP! GARP!).
Note from workshop classmate: You understand what words mean, right? Also, shave off that dumb fucking beard.
Then I found Charles Bukowski. I wish I’d found him in a manner old Buk would approve of, like on the back of a toilet in the bus station, exchanged for a squeezer in the bathroom in the bus station, or in the lost and found in the bathroom in the bus station. In reality, someone recommended him and I bought his book of stories South of No North.
Soon my writing was about drunks and narrated by other drunks and there was not a person in my stories who wasn’t drunk except for one person whose life was being ruined by drunks and who dealt with this by becoming a drunk. There were down-and-out people, down-and-out cats, and a variety of decisions whose only connecting tissue was the apocalyptic consequences they brought forth.
While my classmates workshopped my stories I’d sit there, not knowing enough to cringe out of embarrassment. Unfortunately, self-awareness is part of the free service granted by hindsight and so I have made up for this by cringing every forty seconds or so for the last 27 years. To this day, the only thing keeping me from writing personal apology letters to each of those workshoppers is that they were doing the exact same thing. And if I had to sit through faux Austens, faux Vonneguts, and faux Faulkners, then they could deal with my faux Bukowski.
When I get their letters, I’ll send mine.
The writer Charles Bukowski was born this day in 1920 and began a life spent almost entirely on the fringes of society. He was ugly and pockmarked. He had a head the size and shape of a rogue moon. He was abused by his father, outcast from other kids because of boils on his face. He expressed no interest in holding a job or living within what he saw as the confines of society’s expectations. Instead, he roamed America as a vagabond and a purposeful drunk. His work rails against the prison cell of the 9–5 job and against what is considered ‘normal’. Mortgages. Kids. Suburbs. Sobriety. The love of his life died from drinking in 1962 and he never got over it. He spent the rest of his life drinking, gambling, screwing, and screaming from the balcony.
Though Bukowski is considered a lowlife, he’s not a far cry from one of his ancestral soulmates. Li Bai, one of China’s most beloved and revered poets from the 8th century, also chose a nomadic life and spent it wandering and writing poetry. Oh, and drinking. A lot. Some of his poetic hits include ‘Drinking Alone Under the Moon’ ‘Drinking Alone in the Mountains’ ‘Drinking with Someone in the Mountains’ and ‘Waking from Drunkenness on a Spring Day’ – no word if he’s alone or with someone. Put them next to Bukowski’s – ‘Are You Drinking?’ ‘Drunk Again’ ‘Beer’ ‘2 P.M. Beer’, ‘Drinking’ – and you have twins separated by a couple continents and a mere twelve centuries.
But Li Bia is considered one of the Chinese wonders. And his nomadic hedonistic lifestyle was not considered shameful at the time, and surely the same can’t be said of Bukowski. Bukowski lived not only on the fringe of society, but on the fringes of literature as well. Rejected by the mainstream literati, he eventually worked the dreaded 9–5 (at menial jobs and at the post office), he came home, listened to classical music, and wrote all night. He was a prolific writing machine fuelled by booze. Stories and poems written towards the end of the night almost audibly slur. His closets teemed with pages of typed poems and stories. He became an underground literary hero, publishing in little chapbooks in the LA area. He remained in this literary fringe until John Martin, owner of Black Sparrow Press, offered him $100 a month for life if he quit his job at the post office and wrote full time. Bukowski accepted the offer and would go on to influence two generations of writers, artists, musicians, and wannabe college writers who when told to write what they knew answered ‘I know being drunk.’ Ironically, his many imitators would break Bukowski’s heart, as one of his main themes is being forced to fit into a societal pigeonhole. Do you remember what you were before the world told you? Yeah, a writer of stories, not someone who wanted to sound like another writer of stories.
Oh, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Yawn,’ you say. ‘Another alcoholic writer,’ you say. ‘Why don’t you throw another tired motif our way, say a nerdy hot girl or a loner cop chomping on a toothpick?’ (then you go back to distractedly filing your nails)
And I get it. You could fill a 1000-page book with only the names of alcoholic writers in small print. Hemingway. Joyce. Highsmith. Faulkner. Hemingway again. But Bukowski is a different beast. He wasn’t a writer who was an alcoholic. Bukowski was an alcoholic who wrote while drunk about alcoholics who were drunk. His characters lived in LA’s demimonde like him. They were desperate people, losers, and drunks. And he was their laureate. Moreover, while other alcoholic writers warily acknowledged the toll of alcohol, Bukowski wrote about the joys of drinking. Even in his underbelly locations there existed a message of joy in the everyday mundane and the little miracles of life. Even if one of those miracles was a 2 PM beer.
One wonders in this era of obsessively measured, neutral, neutered words, this time when a misspoke sentiment or an accidentally-offered honest opinion can destroy a career or a life, what would become of Bukowski. There’s no doubt he would have (perhaps rightfully) incurred societal wrath. His writing is arguably (with lots of evidence) that of a sexist, machoistic, unapologetic advocate for the down and out and progenitor of physical and mental cruelty. His female characters have it hard in his stories and are often referred to without name: bitch, the blonde, the 24-year-old waitress. Surely swaths of modern society would spontaneously combust after reading a few lines from South of No North or Post Office. But would Bukowski check in, renounce booze, and repent his former ways? Would we hear his quiet lisp on Armchair Expert spouting to Dax Shephard the joys of newfound sobriety as Bukowski 2.0?
Nope.
First, as resident of the fringe and a permanent outcast, Buk could not be further cast out. He didn’t live in our world and he didn’t want in. Also, the world we inhabit with our Netflix and neighborhood barbecues and our Pinterest Halloween decorations was hell to Bukowski. He chose to live in the dive bars and the racetracks and with the people who inhabited them. For he is their drunken laureate.
So, what to drink to toast the Laureate of American Lowlife? Well, it’s got to be simple and it’s got to do the trick. No froufrou ingredients, no syrup, no spoons, no mixers, and no damned umbrella.
Today we drink the boilermaker.
Ingredients
- 1 oz. whiskey
- 8 oz. beer
- 1 shot glass
- 1 pint glass
- No car keys
- No phone
- A cat (extra points if you don’t own it)
Instructions
Though this is a glass-in-glass operation, the boilermaker couldn’t be simpler. The boilermaker was created to introduce as much alcohol to a system as quickly as possible. In other words – it gets the job done and fast. Fill the shot glass with whiskey. Fill the pint glass with 8 ounces of American lager. If you do this with an IPA or a beer with more than two syllables, I’ll personally disown you. Drop the shot into the beer and drink it down. Repeat until you are on the verge of making bad ideas come to fruition. Drink for Buk, for the lowlifes and the outcasts, drink for those brave enough to disregard society’s demands. Drink. And scream it from your balcony.
Great piece, I loved it. I bet you had a blast writing it!