Essay

Here's a sample Essay from Last Call

HUSTLING FOR DRINKS, PRAYING FOR LINES by Todd Moore ©2004 Todd Moore

 

Charles Bukowski was a great dark force, a black mountain of fire in the world of writing. And, when he died he left a huge, gaping hole in that world. I never had the pleasure of meeting the man though there are a few stories around to the contrary. He worked the L.A. scene pretty much the way Raymond Chandler did. He made Los Angeles his stomping grounds. And, I worked the midwest. Rockford, Chicago, the alleys, the diners, the creeks, the flea bags, the bars, the ditches.

 

During his life time, and even more so, during the ten years since his death, Bukowski has become an American legend. He has passed into the mythology of American writers the same say that Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, and Faulkner have. Somehow in America, we have a way of loving our legends more than we love our writers while they are still among us. I’ve never been able to quite figure out why. I think it has something to do with that fact that they are no longer around to be threatening some how makes them so much easier to worship, a joy to enshrine.

 

I suppose the one question that haunts most writers of Bukowski’s generation is, was he the greatest American writer of the second half of the twentieth century? I know there are some people who would automatically hand him the mantle. Personally, I think he was right up there, but he did have some formidable competition. First, there was Hemingway. And, as damaged as Hemingway was after FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, he still was very dangerous for any writer to go up against. Hemingway was a monster and was incredibly famous while he was still alive. And, you know, un less you want to be broken, too, you don’t try to fuck with the man.

 

Then, there was Faulkner He wasn’t nearly as famous but he was enormously talented. Nobody I know of can even now come close to AS I LAY DYING or THE SOUND AND THE FURY. I take that back. Maybe one guy can - Cormac McCarthy. Both Faulkner and Hemingway were still alive and writing while Bukowski was just getting started in 1955. And, if anyone thinks that this is an unfair comparison, just remember, we don’t compete against the poet or novelist across town or in what passes for a region. We compete against everyone writing during our life times and in a broader sense every one writing for all time.

 

For all time. That’s the catch. If you write and say you are not writing for all time then you are just kidding yourself because everybody I know writes for all time even if it’s murder mysteries, even if it’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME, even if it’s THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY. Nobody with half a brain writes for fun. You jack off for fun. You get laid for fun. You get wasted for fun. When you write, it’s always for the blood or nothing at all. And, if you end up with nothing, at least you played for what was on the table, you played for the blood.

 

Scott Fitzgerald knew that with Gatsby. Without Gatsby, Fitzgerald would be in the abyss with the rest of the wreckage out of the twenties. He’s probably in the abyss anyway, but he’s well remembered in that wreckage for creating somebody like Jay Gatsby.  And, the point is you can make it with style, like Bukowski, or you can make it with a big book like WAR AND PEACE or THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, or you can make it with a character like Ahab, Judge Holden, Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby. Make it meaning, nailing it down, getting it right. Along with style, Bukowski created Henry Chinaski. Only time will tell whether HC holds up against Gatsby and the crew. But it’s a crap shoot. Even claiming your own style and puffing your own special imprint on it is one hell of an achievement. It’s like batting 400 in baseball.

 

Which makes the whole idea of writing some kind of game all tied up with love and hate and skin and pride and hope and despair and energy and anger and envy and howling and blood. Mostly blood. Because that is the fuel we all use to get the poem, the novel, even the bare electric line, down on the page. Blood is the fuel and the dream and the hope for every single thing that we write. And, I’m absolutely dead certain it was no different for Charles Bukowski. He may have resembled a huge damaged flesh rug unrolled for the party, but when he wrote, he wrote with all of his blood and all of his bones, full out.

 

Charles Bukowski wasn’t a handsome man. You couldn’t even call him ruggedly good looking, though I think in his moments of high fantasy he might have seen himself as a poetic version of Humphrey Bogart. Maybe if you looked into his eyes you might see some Bogart, but Bogart even in his most broken moments was never as broken in both body and soul as Bukowski looked, swilling booze in his shorts on the couch, or standing next to a fridge in a black t shirt holding a bottle of beer.

 

Bukowski, like Lorca, had a head that was slightly too big for his body. But Lorca was a kind of pretty boy. And, he especially had a boyish look. Bukowski never looked like a boy even when he was younger. Bukowski always had a tinge of the old man about him. Maybe it was that bout of acne he had in his teens. Or, maybe it was the result of the war he had with his father. But, it seems to me, he never looked young.

 

Bukowski had some kind of influence on almost every one of his contemporaries. And, I use the word influence in its broadest application. The poets who were most easily influenced were the young, kids who had never lived on skid row or worked shit jobs a thy in their lives were suddenly trying to drink and write like Charles Bukowski. I’m sure Bukowski regretted seeing so many lost young poets trying to be, drink, and write just like him. It’s like getting back bad echoes of your own voice.

 

Then, there were his contemporaries. Poets who were either his age or slightly younger who saw in him something to be admired and almost worshipped. Some time around the seventies, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not far off, Bukowski became the poet to get drunk with. All you have to do is thumb through Howard Sounes’ BUKOWSKI IN PICTURES to get the idea. Hemingway was no longer around so Bukowski was the next best bet. I’m just guessing, but it seems as though Bukowski put these guys under the table and out wrote them to boot. But, they were his disciples, make no bones about that. They loved him and maybe hated him a little but had to be close to get a little piece of him because if you don’t have it and can get a little piece of it from somebody you know it’s almost like having it. In the realm of wannabe poetry it’s like getting laid.

 

The last group Bukowski influenced, this one is tough to pin down, is his contemporaries who already had developed styles and voices of their own. I’ll start the show by admitting I’m probably one of these people. I knew about Bukowski when I started writing poetry in the late sixties early seventies but it wasn’t until I had created my own individual style of writing poetry that I finally took a good look at what Bukowski was doing. I couldn’t help but get a good look because his work was appearing along with mine in many of the eighties mags. By this time, I knew where I had come from, I pretty much knew what I sounded like, and I had a kind of half assed idea of where I thought I was going. Maybe more than a half-assed idea. I had my own style and if you don’t have your own style you haven’t got shit, Dashiell Hammett notwithstanding.

 

And, I had Dillinger. Finding Dillinger was like lucking into the big one, hitting the gusher, finding the main vein, locating the huge treasure way back in the psyche. And, it’s kind of funny but it was only after I was well into the poem that I found a poem Bukowski had written about Dillinger but this was only after I’d written “The Name Is Dillinger” and by that time I'd gone so far back into Johnny’s darkness I found his guns. I found his guns and I found his fire and I found his breath and I found his blood.

 

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to the way Buk was putting poems together. Forget about the novels. Let somebody else worry about them. I’m not a novelist. As far as I’m concerned or have ever been concerned it’s been the poetry. It’s like I’m standing at a roulette wheel and the poetry numbers are all out there red and black and I’m betting the ones that I think will work best. I can feel the play in my finger tips and it shoots energy all through me. As it had to for Charles Bukowski.

 

Bukowski was a gambler only instead of betting roulette, he bet the ponies. Same thing different setting. The poems became the horses and he bet them heavily. What Bukowski lacked in range he more than made up for with style. It didn’t mailer whether or not he signed his poems. I could always tell if it was a Bukowski poem, the same way I can spot a Mark Weber poem, or a KeIl Robertson poem, or a Tony Moffeit poem, or for that matter a Gerald Locklin poem. Style is where it all begins and style is where it all ends and if you can’t ante up style you ain’t even going to get into the game.

 

And me? It wasn’t so much Bukowski’s gab or brag or risk in a poem as it was just simply the way he put the line down and the voice he packed into each and every poem. The page was his painting and I studied his brush strokes. And, it doesn’t mean that I tried to write like him. I never had to do that. All I had to do was look at what he was doing and look at what I was doing and then look what somebody else was doing and from that I always knew that only I was doing what I was doing. That’s the way you work the poem and that’s the way the poem works you. That’s the way you stay focused and pay attention to the work.

 

And, who was influenced by Charles Bukowski? I’d say practically everyone in L.A at the time and very likely everyone else writing in the small press, too. And, if anyone from the period of 1970 through the early 90’s offers a strong disclaimer, then you know that guy is lying through his teeth.

 

Charles Bukowski wasn’t the only small press poet who will ultimately leave a powerful legacy. There are a few others but maybe only one or two who have written as authentically or as much as Bukowski did. Bukowski was one of those natural forces that come along maybe once in a generation. I can’t think of any other contemporary writer who was quite like him. If you compare him to Hemingway, he was to Papa what the Tasmanian devil is to Clark Gable. He had a speaking voice that was something of a cross between W.C. Fields and William S. Burroughs. He was the least likely candidate of his generation to become an important American writer and yet he did just that. In spite of the snobs who despised him.

 

Fifty years ago I used to know lots of guys like Bukowski, just as damaged and wrecked as he was but without the genius to get it all down on the page. There was this one guy in particular who used to sit in the Clifton Café writing down notes for novels he never got around to writing. He always had the burger and fries. The fries were brown and glistened with grease and he was always wiping his fingers on his pants.

 

He had one of those death mask faces. Broken on the outside and broken all the way in.

He almost looked like a third rate version of Jack Palance but without the toughness.

He just had that fragile haunted look like he was hustling for a drink and praying for a

line.

 

So, once I went up to him and said, “Are you a writer?” and he shot me one of those killer looks and said, “Don’t fuck with me, kid.” He drifted on like a lot of the other guys who stayed at the Clifton. I never saw him again, but sometimes I like to think that maybe this was Bukowski before he became Charles Bukowski and I was a skinny assed little wise guy fuckup before I grew up and realized I could take a shot at being Todd Moore.

 

 


Further thoughts by the author inspired after reading LAST CALL:

 

You don’t even have to say that this is a book about Charles Bukowski.  You can just say Bukowski and nearly anyone who claims to be well read will recognize the name.  This is the hallowed place in pop culture where all you have to say is the last name, like Hemingway, Faulkner, Chandler, and Steinbeck.  Just say the name and you are there.  You have entered that man’s territory.  And, each one of these writers has created an unmistakable plot of ground.  For Hemingway, it was Paris, Key West, Havana, and Upper Michigan. For Faulkner, it was Yoknapatawpha.  For Chandler it was forties L.A. and for Steinbeck, it will always be the thirties with the Joads on the road.  Last name recognition simply means that along with Hitchcock and Kafka and Celine and Thompson, you have finally become an icon.

Last Call: The Legacy of Charles Bukowski, if it had been published in say Berlin, would have been called a festschrift, which is a collection of poems, stories, short memoirs, and essays honoring a well known literary figure.  Instead, Last Call was published in San Pedro, ironically a place that Bukowski called home the last decade or so of his life. And, instead of a festschrift, which implies high culture and everything that goes with it, this book is more like one of those rowdy parties Bukowski used to throw when he was in his prime.

Several of Bukowski’s contemporaries are here.  Ann Menebroker, Alan Catlin, Gerald Locklin, Edward Field, Gerald Nicosia among others.  And, the feel for the memory of Bukowski is here, but as Raindog, assures us in his introduction, Last Call really isn’t meant to be a “lovefest” of Bukowski, the man or the myth.  However, the spirit of Bukowski resonates throughout Last Call.  One thing I’ve noticed over time is that, like Hemingway, the images of Bukowski have become almost as important as his books. And, we are a people who are hungry for images.  The famous shot of Bukowski’s typer on the front cover, Bukowski rolling a sheet of paper into it, the sketches of the long haired and bearded Bukowski throughout all capture the essence of the look of the man. And, somehow that look has become part of Bukowski’s style.  And, has even added something to the legacy of that persona.

One point that Raindog makes is that for him as well as for many others in this collection, Last Call is a way of coming to terms with Bukowski’s legacy and of attempting to create a singularly distinct voice in writing.  And, what exactly was Bukowski’s legacy?  The question is almost too simple and yet too complex to answer with an essay, a book, or several books over the course of the last decade or even for that matter, decades to come. In fact, this simple question, I predict, will keep a cottage industry of professors and pop culture pundits busy for at least a generation to come.  However, I can attempt to lay out a simple roadmap for anyone interested.

There is a scene in the movie Rio Bravo where Sheriff John Wayne tells his drunken deputy, Dean Martin to enter the front door of a saloon in pursuit of a killer and Martin balks at the idea.  Wayne’s reply is, they wouldn’t expect to see you come through the front door.  It’ll be a complete surprise, and it was.  The same holds true for Bukowski.

Nobody expected Bukowski, the small press borracho, to enter the front door of American Literature.  The MFA professors are still trying to swallow large chunks of that crow.  Nobody expected Bukowski to be the next huge American Icon.  Certainly, Robert Lowell, James Dickey, or James Wright would’ve qualified, but NOT Charles Bukowski.  Hide the china and send your daughters on a very long cruise or at least get them the hell out of town before Bukowski arrives for the ritual vomiting and then the reading.

What Bukowski did was defy the rules.  First, he wasn’t the product of any writing program.  Second, he wasn’t a writing teacher for any college or university.  Third, he wrote authentically out of his own blood and bones and self.  Fourth, he didn’t give a rat’s red ass what anyone thought.  I can almost hear some of my contemporaries yelling in the background, but I did that, too.  Probably true, but Bukowski did it with such marvelous style that he kicked almost everyone else’s ass through the bar’s front door.

The other thing that he did, or that happened to him, because these things that occur in writers, these subtle changes morph or take place in the cells and dreams of a poet so subversively that not even the poet realizes it until that change has happened.  Somewhere between 1950 and 1960 Bukowski started to write like Bukowski.  Before this change took place, Bukowski’s work lacked life and flare and style and hustle.  Nothing popped, none of the words had his authority.  But, after 1960 something happened to his poetry.  Something so subtle and mysterious and commanding that I don’t think even he could account for it.  And, it doesn’t matter if you see Bukowski’s early publishable work as surrealist and his later work as minimal.  Even in that early surreal period Bukowski acquired a sound that became his sound.  Most of his imitators have never really looked that far into his work.  They see the wise guy with the beer bottle up to his face wandering down some city street and they write from that, the stance, the image.  I would be willing to bet that most of his imitators were sucked into writing like Bukowski not so much from the way he wrote, but from the way he looked.  It’s a carryover from going to a really great movie and coming out wanting to look like Humphrey Bogart or James Dean or Marlon Brando or, well, you fill in the blank.  Some people give us back our magic faces by sacrificing their own and Bukowski was someone like that.

Which, I guess, is part of legacy but then what the hell is legacy anyhow except a game that the critics and professors play.  What was this guy’s impact on blah blah.  What was that guy’s influence on the generation of blah blah.  The fact is you don’t really recognize legacy until you feel it as a writer.  You can read a stack of  books on French poetry, the Beat Generation, The Angry Young Men, or Outlaw Poetry, but until you’ve actually been up close and personal with say just one poem by Gulling, Weber,  Moffeit, Locklin, Micheline, or Robertson and that poem has somehow entered your blood and your soul you’ll only have a vague idea what’s going on.  Some poems have the power to rip out your guts, kick your ass, tear your eyelids off.  This is where legacy enters the domain of the real.  And, this is the effect that the best of Bukowski’s poetry has had and will continue to have in the future.

I’ve noticed that some critics are saying that part of Bukowski’s legacy or importance is that he wrote about the ordinary.  My only reply is just what the hell is the ordinary.  Is it ordinary for a man to live in bare bones apartments and flophouse hotels.  How many people that you know have lived that way?  I know a few.  Micheline was one.  Kell Robertson was another.  And, I would make a third.  I’m pretty sure Ginsberg didn’t live that way.  I’m pretty sure Kerouac didn’t live that way.  As for the critics who claim that this is the life of the ordinary, I’ll bet the farm they never lived that way.

If anything, what Bukowski did was give us a birds eye view of what it felt like to be down and out.  Really down and out.  Not fashionably down and out.  Down the way Tom Kromer was down and out the way Jack London was out.  And this is not the life of the ordinary but the life of the sub ordinary.  Life under the floorboards.  A life where the notes come from underground.  Shades of Dostoevsky or Gorky with a dash of Henry Miller thrown in for good measure.

On another level, legacy might as well be a stack of chips a writer gets when he buys into the high stakes game of poetry and make no doubt about it, poetry is a high stakes game even though it pays you nothing and claims your time, your blood, your work and your soul.

And, the game?   Lets call it blackjack because somehow you get blackjacked into it, you get blackjacked during the game, and when death claims you, you are blackjacked out of it.  And, no matter how much money Bukowski made off the game, he still took a pretty good blackjacking while he played.  Legacy might just as well be the way in which a writer plays the game, even against the odds.  Style figures in here just like style figures in the way a writer whips that line onto the page.  Style, in spite of the game, in spite of the winnings and the losses.  Style right down the line until there isn’t any more breath to put the words in.  Which translates into a kind of heroism.  Because, maybe like Bukowski, you made the money, or you made the rep, or you found that sound in your voice the same way that Bukowski found that sound in his.  That’s where the legacy begins and ends.  When you have found the sound and the sound has found you.  And, that’s where you beat death.  The way Hemingway did, the way Faulkner did, the way Bukowski did.

One important thing about Last Call is that the cumulative effect of this collection gives us all a better look at Charles Bukowski.  Here, in some rare moments we can see that Bukowski the Icon really was a human being instead of some bloodless legend.  And, because we see him as a human being, we are somehow given permission to be human beings as well.

Last Call is not just about Bukowski’s legacy which seems like that has always been obvious.  A book like this is never completely about the man it is about.  Instead, this book is about a whole generation of writers who are or have been attempting to come to grips with not just Bukowski’s legacy but their own separate legacies as well.  For that reason, Last Call: The Legacy of Charles Bukowski is important in the same way that the memoirs of A. D. Winans and John Thomas are important.  Books like Last Call help us understand Charles Bukowski.  And, they also help us understand ourselves maybe just a little bit more.

-- Todd Moore

 

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