people who fail at drinking
tend to fail
at many other things
also
and it’s not the drink that’s
the curse
it’s the person
involved
this is a fine
second bottle
we look at each other
in the early
morning
and it is
a fine love
affair: direct
honest and
all-
consuming
and my fingers are still
upon these keys
as I think of Li Po
so
many centuries ago
drinking his wine
writing his poems
then
setting them
on fire
and sailing them
down the
river
as the emperors
wept.
From
“An Evening at Buk’s Place”
Question: You used to do drinking contests, I think.
Bukowski: Yeah, I remember that. The drinking contests? Yeah, I often won them.
Question: Did you ever lose?
Bukowski: Not that many. But at the time I was very good. I could drink a lot, and I could outdrink about everybody. I think I’ve always had a taste for it, you know. It’s pleasant. It feels good. And during these contests, all the drinks were free. It was very nice. And to get paid for drinking.
Question: Alcohol, wine, are they a kind of veil of illusion you throw upon reality? Or is it a way to see things more clearly?
Bukowski: Well, to me, it gets me out of the normal person that I am. Like I don’t have to face this person day after day, year after year . . . The guy that brushes his teeth, he goes to the bathroom, he drives on the freeway, he stays sober forever. He only has one life, you see. Drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now. But a man who drinks, he can become this other person. He has a whole new life. He is different when he is drinking. I’m not saying that he is better or worse. But he is different. And this gives a man two lives. And that’s usually in my other life, my drinking life, that I do my writing. So, since I’ve been lucky with the writing. I’ve decided drink is very good for me. Does that answer your question whatever?
Question: So you drink to write?
Bukowski: Yes, it helps my writing.
Question: Preferably wine, as you said.
Bukowski: Wine helps keep things normal. I used to drink beer and scotch together. And write. But you can only write for an hour, or maybe an hour and a half that way. Then, it’s too much. But with wine, as I said, you can write three or four hours.
Question: And with beer?
Bukowski: Beer, well . . . you have to go to the bathroom every ten minutes. It breaks your concentration. So the wine is the best for creation. The blood of the gods. [ . . . ]
Question: In your young days, did you drink to prove your manhood?
Bukowski: Yeah, in the worst sense, yeah. We used to think that a man drank, you know. That drinking made a man. Of course, that’s entirely untrue. And those ten years I spent just in the bars . . . An awful lot of people who drink aren’t men at all, they are hardly anything. And they get on my ear, and they talked the most terrible dribble into my head you’ve ever heard . . . so drinking doesn’t create anything. It’s destructive to most people. Not to me, you understand, but to most people.
Question: To you it’s not?
Bukowski: No, it’s anti-destructive. [ . . . ] I do all my writing when I’m drunk. All the time I type I’m drunk. How can I complain? Should I complain about the royalties? I’m paid for drinking. They’re paying me to drink. That’s lovely.
immortal wino
Li Po, I keep thinking of you as I
empty these bottles of
wine.
you knew how to pass the days and
nights.
immortal wino,
what would you do with an electric
typewriter,
coming in after driving the
Hollywood Freeway?
what would you think while watching
cable tv?
what would you say about the atomic
stockpiles?
the Women’s Liberation
Movement?
terrorists?
football?
Li Po, our madhouses and jails are
overflowing
and the skies are hardly ever
blue
and the earth and the rivers
stink of our
lives.
and the latest:
we’ve begun to detect where God
hides and we’re going to
flush Him out and
ask:
“WHY?”
well, Li Po, the wine is still
good, and in spite of it all, there is
still some
time
to
sit alone
and
think.
wish you were
here.
say,
my cat just walked in
and here
in this drunken room
this drunken night
are these
great yellow eyes
staring at
me
as I pour a
full glass of
this beautiful red wine
to
you.
cleansing the ranks
what I am talking about, he said, is the reformed alcoholic, they have
come by here, I have seen their flesh turn yellow and
their eyes drop out, their souls slack and
dull, then they start talking about how they never felt
better and that now life has true meaning, no more hangovers,
no more women leaving them, no more shame, no more guilt, it’s
really great, it’s really so great
but I can’t wait for them to leave, they are horrible people,
even when they walk across the rugs their shoes leave no
marks, as if there is nobody there
then they mention God, quietly, you know, they don’t want to
push you but . . .
I try not to drink in front of them, I don’t want to force
them back into that evil
place.
finally, they leave . . .
and I go to the kitchen, pour a tall one, drain off half,
grin, go the other half.
none of the reformed I have ever met were grade-A
professional alcoholics, they just tinkered and
chippied with it . . .
I’ve been drunk for 5 decades, I’ve drunk more booze than
they’ve drunk water; what gets them in a silly tizzy
alcoholic shit-state is what I use to taper-off
with.
some people just fail at everything and what I am talking
about here is the reformed alcoholic: you can’t be
reformed if you were never really
one.
one thing that makes it all so dull and
terrible: they all still claim to be alcoholics even after
they’ve stopped.
this is immensely resented by the true of the
tribe: we have earned our place here, feel worthy and
honored in our station, would prefer not to be
represented by worthless fakers: one can’t give up
what one
never had.
From
“Gin-Soaked Boy”
Question: What was the period you drew on for the screenplay [Barfly]?
; Bukowski: Actually, it was two periods and I melded them together. When I lived in Philadelphia, I was a barfly. I was about 25, 24, 26, it gets kinda mixed up.
I liked to fight—thought I was a tough guy. I drank and I fought. My means of existence . . . I don’t know how I ever made it. The drinks were free, people bought me drinks. I was more or less the bar entertainer, the clown. It was just a place to go every day. I’d go in at five every day; it opened officially at seven, but the bartender let me in, and I’d have two hours free drinks. Whiskey. So I was ready when the door opened. Then he’d say, “Sorry, Hank. Seven o’clock. Can’t give you any more drinks.” I’d say that I’d do what I can. I was off to a good start, with two hours of whiskey. Then I’d get mostly beers. I’d run errands for sandwiches, get mostly beat up. I’d sit there till 2 A.M., go back to my room, then be back at 5 A.M. Two and a half hours of sleep. I guess when you’re drunk you’re kind of asleep anyway. You’re resting up.
I’d go home and there’d be a bottle of wine there. I’d drink half of that and go to sleep. And I wasn’t eating.
Question: You must have had a hell of a constitution.
Bukowski: I did have, yeah. I finally ended up in a hospital ten years later.
Question: Did you have a lot of energy?
Bukowski: No. Just the energy to lift a glass. I was hiding out. I didn’t know what else to do. This bar back east was a lively bar. It wasn’t a common bar. There were characters in there. There was a feeling. There was ugliness, there was dullness and stupidity. But there was also a certain gleeful high hitch you could feel there. Else I wouldn’t have stayed.
I did about three years there; left, came back, did another three years. Then I came back to L.A. and worked Alvarado Street, the bars up and down there. Met the ladies—if you want to call them that.
This is kind of a mixture of two areas, L.A. and Philadelphia, melded together. Which may be cheating, but it’s supposed to be fictional anyway, right? Must have been around 1946.
It seems that all the good old scum bars are disappearing. In those days, Alvarado Street was still white. And you could just duck inside and get 86’d in one bar and then move right down ten paces and there’s another bar to walk into.
I’ve gone into bars with deadwood people and an absolute deadwood feeling. You have one drink and you want to get the hell out of there so fast. But this bar was a lively hole in the sky.
The first day I walked in, I got hooked. I just got into town. I walked out of my room—it was about two in the afternoon. I walked in and said, “Give me a bottle of beer.” Picked it up and a bottle came flying through the air, right past my head. People just kept on talking! Guy next to me turned around and said, “Hey you sonofabitch, you do that again I’m gonna knock your goddamn head off.” Then came another bottle flew past. “I told you, you sonofabitch.” Then there’s a big fiiiiight. Everybody went out in the back.
I said, “God, what a jolly, lovely place. I’m going to stay here.” So I kept waiting for a repeat of that first lovely afternoon. I waited three years and it didn’t happen. I had to make it happen. I took over.
I finally left. I said, “That first afternoon is never going to recur.” I was sucked in. It was right after the war was over.
240 pounds
well, you get used to drinking, you have it
around all the time, and then in between the
hard drinking you rest up on beer and
wine.
then when you decide not to drink for a day
or a night,
here’s a knock on the door and 2 or 3
people with something to
drink.
it’s fattening.
I got up to 240 pounds and I’m only 5 feet
eleven and three quarter inches
but I blew out from under my neck,
a curving bow of flesh, no, bowl is more
like it, the too tight belt gripping,
cutting off the air, the belly hanging down
over the belt, the face overfull, the eyes
reddened, the skin
pitted and unhealthy.
another drink made you
forget.
the buttons ripped off my shirt front,
the sleeves were too short,
t-shirts were best, and blue jeans,
standing there bloated,
immense, puffing on a cheap
cigar, I didn’t know
anything.
but I always drank until sunup
whether with somebody or
alone.
they no longer sold my pants
size in the regular stores
so I went to a big boy
store and the guy stopped me
at the door:
“you’re not big enough!”
“all right, I’ll see you in
a month.”
I was too big for regular clothing
and too small for big boy
clothing.
also, the few women I knew said,
“god, don’t get on top of
me!”
“o.k., baby, o.k., we’ll work
something out . . .”
all that beer, wine, vodka, scotch,
whiskey, gin . . .
those morning bowel movements were
something . . .
the toilet bowel looked like somebody
had shoveled in 3 shovelfuls . . .
and the mess not only smelled like
excreta,
you still got the smell of whatever
was consumed the night
before . . . the scotch, the gin . . .
etc.
the problem was that the stench
lasted for 3 or 4 hours.
if a visitor happened by
they would say something like:
“what the fuck is that?
did somebody die in
here?”
I tried to solve that situation
by getting a fan and blowing air
about the bathroom
but that only spread the problem
all about the
courtyard.
I also puked a lot in the
mornings and found the best way
to settle the stomach was half a
glass of ale mixed with a half a
glass of tomato
juice.
one morning I was sitting at
the window facing the street
(I had the front yard) and
these two delicate boys walked
by.
“hey,” I heard one of them say,
“that old guy in there is really
wild and weird, he’s like a
Neanderthal man who has broken
his chain.”
I really appreciated that:
recognized at
last.
From
Hollywood
[T]he screenplay began to move. I was writing about a young man who wanted to write and drink but most of his success was with the bottle. The young man had been me. While the time had not been an unhappy time, it had been mostly a time of void and waiting. As I typed along, the characters in a certain bar returned to me. I saw each face again, the bodies, heard the voices, the conversations. There was one particular bar that had a certain deathly charm. I focused on that, relived the barroom fights with the bartender. I had not been a good fighter. To begin with my hands were too small and I was underfed, grossly underfed. But I had a certain amount of guts and I took a punch very well. My main problem during a fight was that I couldn’t truly get angry, even when it seemed my life was at stake. It was all playacting with me. It mattered and it didn’t. Fighting the bartender was something to do and it pleased the patrons who were a clubby little group. I was the outsider. There is something to be said for drinking—all those fights would have killed me had I been sober but being drunk it was as if the body turned to
rubber and the head to cement. Sprained wrists, puffed lips and battered kneecaps were about all I came up with the next day. Also, knots on the head from falling. How all this could become a screenplay, I didn’t know. I only knew that it was the only part of my life I hadn’t written much about. I believe that I was sane at that time, as sane as anybody. And I knew that there was a whole civilization of lost souls that lived in and off bars, daily, nightly and forever, until they died. I had never read about this civilization so I decided to write about it, the way I remembered it. The good old typer clicked along.
* * *
Francine Bowers was back with her notebook.
“How did Jane die?”
“Well, I was with somebody else by that time. We had been split for 2 years and I came by to visit her just before Christmas. She was a maid at this hotel and very popular. Everybody in the hotel had given her a bottle of wine. And there in her room was this little wooden shelf that ran along the wall just below the ceiling and on this shelf there must have been 18 or 19 bottles.
“‘If you drink all that liquor, and you will, it will kill you! Don’t these people understand that?’ I asked her.
“Jane just looked at me.
“‘I’m going to take all of these fucking bottles out of here. These people are trying to murder you!’
“Again, she just looked at me. I stayed with her that night and drank 3 of the bottles myself, which brought it down to 15 or 16. In the morning when I left I told her, ‘Please, don’t drink all of them . . .’ I came back a week and a half later. Her door was open. There was a large blood stain in the bed. There were no bottles in the room. I located her at the L.A. County Hospital. She was in an alcoholic coma. I sat with her for a long time, just looking at her, wetting her lips with water, brushing the hair out of her eyes. The nurses left us alone. Then, all at once, she opened her eyes and said, ‘I knew it would be you.’ Three hours later she was dead.”
“She never had a real chance,” said Francine Bowers.
“She didn’t want one. She was the only person I’ve ever met who had the same contempt for the human race as I did.”
Francine folded up her notebook.
“I’m sure all this is going to help me . . .”
Then she was gone.
2 Henry Miller paintings and etc.
drunkenness can have its advantages, like now, sitting alone in this
room, one A.M. from the window I can see the lights of the city, well,