40 years ago in that hotel room
off of Union Avenue, 3 A.M., Jane and I had been
drinking cheap wine since noon and I walked barefoot
across the rugs, picking up shards of broken glass
(in the daylight you could see them under the skin,
blue lumps working toward the heart) and I walked in
my torn shorts, ugly balls hanging out, my twisted and
torn undershirt spotted with cigarette holes of various
sizes. I stopped before Jane who sat in her drunken
chair.
then I screamed at her:
“I’M A GENIUS AND NOBODY KNOWS IT BUT
ME!”
she shook her head, sneered and slurred through her
lips:
“shit! you’re a fucking
asshole!”
I stalked across the floor, this time picking up a
piece of glass much larger than usual, and I reached down
and plucked it out: a lovely large speared chunk dripping
with my blood, I flung it off into space, turned and glared
at Jane:
“you don’t know anything, you
whore!”
“FUCK YOU!” she
screamed.
then the phone rang and I picked it up and
yelled: “I’M A GENIUS AND NOBODY KNOWS IT BUT
ME!”
it was the desk clerk: “Mr. Chinaski, I’ve warned you
again and again, you are keeping all our
guests awake . . .”
“GUESTS?” I laughed, “YOU MEAN THOSE FUCKING
WINOS?”
then Jane was there and she grabbed the phone and
yelled: “I’M A FUCKING GENIUS TOO AND I’M THE
ONLY WHORE WHO KNOWS IT!”
and she hung up.
then I walked over and put the
chain on the door.
then Jane and I pushed the sofa in
front of the door
turned out the lights
and sat up in bed
waiting for them,
we were well aware of the
location of the drunk
tank: North Avenue
21—such
a fancy sounding
address.
we each had a chair at the
side of the bed,
and each chair held ashtray,
cigarettes and
wine.
they came with much
sound:
“is this the right
door?”
“yeah,” he said,
“413.”
one of them beat with
the end of his night
stick:
“L.A. POLICE DEPARTMENT!
OPEN UP IN THERE!”
we did not
open up in there.
then they both beat with
their night sticks:
“OPEN UP! OPEN UP IN
THERE!”
now all the guests were
awake for sure.
“come on, open up,” one of them
said more quietly, “we just want to
talk a bit, nothing more . . .”
“nothing more,” said the other
one, “we might even have a little drink
with you . . .”
30–40 years ago
North Avenue 21 was a terrible place,
40 or 50 men slept on the same floor
and there was one toilet which nobody dared
excrete upon.
“we know that you’re nice people,
we just
want to meet you . . .”
one of them said.
“yeah,” the other one said.
then we heard them
whispering.
we didn’t hear them walk
away.
we were not sure that they
were gone.
“holy shit,” Jane asked,
“do you think they’re
gone?”
“shhhh . . .”
I hissed.
we sat there in the dark
sipping at our
wine.
there was nothing to do
but watch two neon signs
through the window to the
east
one was near the library
and said
in red:
JESUS SAVES.
the other sign was more
interesting:
it was a large red bird
which flapped its wings
seven times
and then a sign lit up
below it
advertising
SIGNAL GASOLINE.
it was as good a life
as we could
afford.
my vanishing act
when I got sick of the bar
and I sometimes did
I had a place to go:
it was a tall field of grass
an abandoned
graveyard.
I didn’t consider this to be a
morbid pastime.
it just seemed to be the best
place to be.
it offered a generous cure to
the vicious hangover.
through the grass I could see
the stones,
many were tilted
at strange angles
against gravity
as though they must
fall
but I never saw one
fall
although there were many of those
in the yard.
it was cool and dark
with a breeze
and I often slept
there.
I was never
bothered.
after an absence
it was always the same with
them:
“where the hell you
been? we thought you
died!”
I was their bar freak, they needed me
to make themselves feel
better.
just like, at times, I needed that
graveyard.
the master plan
starving in a Philadelphia winter
trying to be a writer
I wrote and wrote and drank and drank and
drank
and then stopped writing and concentrated on
the drinking.
it was another
art-form.
if you can’t have any luck with one thing you
try another.
of course, I had been practicing on the
drinking-form
since the age of
15.
and there was much competition
in that field
also.
it was a world full of drunks and writers and
drunk writers.
and so
I became a starving drunk instead of a starving
writer.
the best thing was the instant
result.
and I soon became the biggest and
best drunk in the neighborhood and
maybe the whole
city.
it sure as hell beat sitting around waiting for
those rejection slips from The New Yorker and The
Atlantic Monthly.
of course, I never really considered quitting the
writing game, I just wanted to give it a
ten year rest
figuring if I got famous too early
I wouldn’t have anything left for the stretch run
like I have now, thank
you,
with the drinking still thrown
in.
this
being drunk at the typer beats being with any woman
I’ve ever seen or known or heard about
like
Joan of Arc, Cleopatra, Garbo, Harlow, M.M. or
any of the thousands that come and go on that
celluloid screen
or the temporary girls I’ve seen so lovely
on park benches, on buses, at dances and parties, at
beauty contests, cafes, circuses, parades, department
stores, skeet shoots, balloon flies, auto races, rodeos,
bull fights, mud wrestling, roller derbies, pie bakes,
churches, volleyball games, boat races, county fairs,
rock concerts, jails, laundromats or wherever
being drunk at this typer beats being with any woman
I’ve ever seen or
known.
From
The Bukowski Tapes
I’m one of these types that always buys, I’m a sucker. Anyhow, so coming back, I’m carrying all these six-packs with three or four people, we’re all laughing and all of a sudden this guy comes up.
He said, “Gee, you guys seem to be having a good time. You mind if I come along?”
They all said, “Yes, yes, yes!”
And I said, “Hey, wait . . .”
He said, “Oh, come on, let me come along.”
So we are all in, and we start drinking and drinking. There’s a piano there. I go to play the piano. The night goes on. I can’t play it, but I play it. And I’m sitting in a chair—I don’t like this guy too much . . . He’s talking about the war he’s been in and how many people he killed. And that didn’t interest me too much, you know, because in a war you can kill people and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s legal. It takes guts to kill somebody when it’s not legal. Got it? So I told him this. He kept talking, bragging about various things: what a good shot he was, how many people he killed.
I said, “Bullshit, get out of here!”
He said, “You don’t like me?”
I said, “Yeah, leave.”
So he left a while, we’re all talking and drinking. All of a sudden he came back. He had a gun. Suddenly I had no friends around me. They kind of disappeared away . . . and then he came up behind me, and he said: “You don’t like me, do you?” This is the point where people often make a mistake. But I’m only going to talk about myself. I told him the truth.
I said, “No, I don’t like you.”
So he came up behind me and he put the gun to my temple.
He said, “You still don’t like me, do you?”
I said, “No, I still don’t like you.”
Let me tell you something, I really wasn’t frightened at all. It was almost like seeing a movie somewhere . . .
So he said, “Well, I’m going to kill you.”
And I said, “Okay. Let me tell you something, if you kill me know you’re gonna do me a favor.”
It was true what I told him.
I said, “I’m a suicide case anyhow. I’ve been wondering how to do this thing, now you’ve solved my problem. If you kill me you’ve solved my problem and you’ve got a problem. You do life in jail or the electric chair, whatever the hell’s going on around here.”
There was silence. I could feel the gun just pressing on me. Just stayed there and I didn’t say anymore, he didn’t say anymore. Then he put the gun down and he walked toward the door, and the screen door slammed, he walked out . . .
So later, all my friends came around, “Oh, Hank, you all right?”
I said, “Yeah, you guys really helped me, didn’t you? Just standing, watching. You couldn’t have grabbed him from behind or anything.”
“Well, Hank . . .”
I said, “Okay . . .”
So later it was discovered he’d gone into some drugstore with a gun and did something, smashed somebody with the gun butt, and tried to shoot and they put him in a madhouse, later. So, he was really for true, but you know there’s nothing like one nut talking to another. I lucked it. But I was really ready to go. It wouldn’t have been a big thing. And he knew it. If you don’t feel the fear, you don’t react.
* * *
I think a man can keep on drinking for centuries, he’ll never die; especially wine and beer . . . I like drunkards, because drunkards, they come out of it, and they’re sick and they spring back, they spring back and forth . . . If you gotta be anything, be an alcoholic. If I hadn’t been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago. You know, working the factories, the eight hour job. The slums. The streets. You work a god damn lousy job. You come home at night, you’re tired. What are you gonna do, go to a movie? Turn on your radio in a three dollar a week room? Or are you gonna rest up and wait for the job the next day, for $1.75 an hour? Hell, no! You’re gonna get a bottle of whiskey and drink it. And go down to a bar and maybe get in a fist fight. And meet some bitch, something’s going on. Then you go to work the next day, and do your simple little things, right? . . . Alcohol gives you the release of the dream without the deadness of drugs. You can come back down. You have your hangover to face. That’s the tough part. You get over it, you do your job. You come back. You drink again. I’m all for alcohol. It’s the thing.
* * *
We drank heavily and one morning I woke up with the worst hangover I ever had, like a steel band around my head. I really felt terrible and she was in the bathroom puking. We drank this very cheap wine, the cheapest you could get.
I’m sitting there almost dying. I’m sitting at the window trying to get some air. Just sitting there and, all of a sudden, a body comes down. A man fully dressed, he’s got a necktie on, neatly knotted, he seems to be going in slow motion. You know, a body doesn’t fall very fast. Evidently, he got up on the roof and just jumped off. This building is not very tall. I mean, he probably crippled himself for life. I don’t know.
I saw him go by and I said, “Well, I don’t think I’m going crazy. I think that was really a body that went by.”
So, I hollered to the bathroom, I said, “Hey, Jane! Guess what?”
She said, “Ya, what is it?”
I said, “The strangest thing just happened.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, a human body just dropped by my window. His head was on top and he was all lined up, and he was dropping through the air. He dropped right past the window.”
She said, “Ah, bullshit.”
I said, “No, no, it really happened. I’m not making it up.”
She said, “Ahhh, come on, you’re trying to be funny. You’re not funny.”
I said, “I know I’m not funny. Look, I’ll tell ya what. Just come on out here, come to the window and stick your head out the window and look down.”
She said, “All right, here I come.”
She came, she stuck her head out the window and all I heard was, “Oh, God Almighty!”
She ran in the bathroom and puked and puked and puked. And I laid there, I sat there and I said, “I told you so, baby, I told you so.”
And I went to the refrigerator, got a beer. I felt better. I don’t know why I felt better. Maybe because I was right. So I opened my beer and I sat there and I drank it. I still didn’t look out the window because I was feeling bad, and that’s all there is.
[To A. D. Winans]
February 22, 1985
[ . . . ] On quitting your job at 50, I don’t know what to say. I had to quit mine. My whole body was in pain, could no longer lift my arms. If somebody touched me, just that touch would send reams and shots of agony through me. I was finished. They had beat on my body and mind for decades. And I didn’t have a dime. I had to drink it away to free my mind from what was occurring. I decided that I would be better off on skid row. I mean that. It had come to a faltering end. My last day on the job, some guy let a remark fall as I walked by: “That old guy has a lot of guts to quit a job at his age.” I didn’t feel I had an age. The years had just added up and shitted away.
Yeah, I had fear. I had fear I could never m
ake it as a writer, moneywise. Rent, child support. Food didn’t matter. I just drank and sat at the machine. Wrote my first novel (Post Office) in 19 nights. I drank beer and scotch and sat around in my shorts. I smoked cheap cigars and listened to the radio. I wrote dirty stories for the sex mags. It got the rent and also got the soft ones and the safe ones to say: He hates women. My income tax returns for those first years show ridiculously little money earned but somehow I was existing. The poetry readings came and I hated them but it was more $$$. It was a drunken wild fog of a time and I had some luck. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, I loved the banging of the typer. I was fighting for each day. And I lucked it with a good landlord and landlady. They thought I was crazy. I went down and drank with them every other night. They had a refrig. stacked with nothing but quart bottles of Eastside Beer. We drank out of the quarts, one after the other until 4 A.M., singing songs of the 20’s and 30’s. “You’re crazy,” my landlady kept saying, “you quit that good job in the post office.” “And now you’re going with that crazy woman. You know she’s crazy, don’t you?” the landlord would say.
Also, I got ten bucks a week for writing that column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” And I mean, that ten bucks looked big sometimes.
I don’t know, A. D., I don’t quite know how I made it. The drinking always helped. It still does. And, frankly, I loved to write! THE SOUND OF THE TYPER. Sometimes I think it was only the sound of the typer that I wanted. And the drink there, beer with scotch, by the side of the machine. And finding cigar stubs, old ones, lighting them while drunk and burning my nose. It wasn’t so much that I was TRYING to be a writer, it was more like doing something that felt good to do.
dark night poems
the faster you pour it down
the more immortal you
feel.
not immortal in the sense of
living forever
but immortal in the sense of
feeling you’ve almost lived
forever
and you’re still here
in spite of
all
and
almost
in spite of
yourself.
* * *
why people want to get cured from
drinking is
beyond
me
although I realize there’s a price
on the liver
the heart
and
everything
else
I am willing to pay that
price