“Great Art is Horseshit, Buy Tacos.”
-Charles Bukowski
When I was a kid, I spent most summers traveling the country with my father. One summer we were in the middle of nowhere West Texas. The next summer in old mobbed up Las Vegas. The next, the backwoods of Missouri. Then, when school came, I was shipped off to live with my grandparents back home in Boston. We had two television sets. One in the living room which my grandmother watched reruns of Lawrence Welk. The other, in the sunporch, which wasn’t a sunporch at all, but a front room with a couple of windows like any other room, that TV was commandeered by my grandfather. He watched Red Sox games or any old black and white movie with Bogart in it. I chose exile in the darkness of my silent bedroom. Shortly after, I discovered a love for reading.
We had one bookcase in our house. It had mostly old encyclopedias and do-it-yourself carpentry books, which didn’t make my life any easier. Then I discovered their collection of old detective magazines. I read them all in a short amount of time. I wish I knew as an adult after they died to have taken those, but I had no clue they’d be worth anything. Also, on the shelf was the book “Alive,” about the rugby team that resorted to cannibalism to survive a plane crash. I remember for a short spell being interested in the taboo subject. I asked questions about cannibalism. So much in fact, that a teacher called home and showed concern. My curiosity, called a “sin” by the church and school; thus, my grandmother begged me to stop asking questions about cannibalism.
I then found a book about The Elephant Man, and I became extremely interested in people with bizarre deformities. I felt oddly connected to Joseph Merrick. I wasn’t popular in school, maybe due to asking too many cannibalism questions, but I felt a strange connection to a man who was mocked, made fun of, put in carnival freak shows, then later even his friends at the hospital, and although treated him wonderfully, put him on a stage to study him. My heart burst for a man who died a hundred years before I was born. I loved Merrick even though I never met him. I begged my aunt to rent me The Elephant Man, directed by David Lynch. I watched Jon Hurt play the character with a wide-open heart. I wept when they chased him through the subway station and pointed at him and called him an animal. I cried for days after I watched the people corner him, and Hurt curled up in a ball and yelled out, “I’m not an animal, I’m a man.” I’m fifty-one years old now, and that line still runs through my head several times a week. The book, and the film, had an enormous impact on me.
Later, I’d start hearing the theme song to M*A*S*H, and I’d quickly run to my room, because once I heard that music, I knew boring times were coming to Wilson Avenue, but I was out of books to read from the shelf. The library was on the other side of town, and I certainly didn’t want my friends to know I liked reading, which was a serious offense in BMX bike gang land. “You like to read? Loser!” Our lives consisted of stealing Playboys, watching Mrs. Curves bend over in her garden, and talking about the hundred unusual ways Jason cut people up with one hundred different weapons. Reading an actual book, back in the early to mid-eighties, was for “fags.”
Around the time of the first Karate Kid film Franklin W. Dixon showed up in my life. My grandmother had recently discovered my grandfather had another affair, this time with a blind woman, and due to her strict love of Jesus and the Catholic Church divorce was out of the question, so she decided to spend all his money instead. She went on mega shopping sprees at Zayre and Bradlees. After one of those shopping sprees, she brought home three Hardy Boys books. I remember looking at the artwork on the books, Frank and Joe Hardy, and the blue spines, and thinking, “lame!” But you bet your ass when I heard the theme song to M*A*S*H, I opened the books and read the crap out of them. Eventually, I had all the books in the series because Grandma was still spending my grandfather’s money. I read all of them, and thanks to the one hundred different people who wrote under the name, Franklin W Dixon, I had become a true reading nut.
In my teens, I read what most other teens read like Stephen King, and it’s probably because of his name and the movie adaptations. Being young no one talked about books, so I snatched up what people told me to read. I didn’t do well in my high school literature class, I often skipped, and when I was there, the usual Shakespeare bored me, along with the Homer, Poe, stuff I was forced to read. My teacher knew I excelled at reading, and my written reports were among the highest grades in the class, but I didn’t care about class participation. I hated reading groups and reading communities. My teacher wrote down ten names on a list and told me to go check them out of the library. I remember the list like it was yesterday, it had Flannery O’Connor, Albert Camus, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, Raymond Chandler, and a host of others. The list changed my life. I read books by those authors like an endless basket of candy. I spent gym class on the bleachers reading. I read books in study hall, at home, on trips. Stephen King became instant horseshit, but I had yet to discover a voice I recognized as my own. A voice who represented people I know.
In my mid-twenties I was living with my then-girlfriend Ginny, and her brother Bob in Malden. I was in and out of college. I partied and dropped acid like it was part of a work week. My weekends were spent drunk and stoned on a stoop or at a concert with fifty of my friends. During that time, I worked in Faneuil Hall, the lamest tourist attraction in Massachusetts, even more boring than Plymouth Rock. I sold Swatch watches, literally no one bought them. I was hired to stand there and do nothing but read. Ginny was into an author I’d never heard of before, as were her older sister and all her cool friends that lived in a Brownstone in Boston. I remember asking Ginny, “What are you reading?” She said, “This book Ham on Rye.” I looked at an interesting cover of a kid in a boxing pose, and the author’s name, Charles Bukowski. I didn’t know he also wrote poems, short stories, and a column. She also had a copy of his novel Factotum.
The next day, I borrowed the copy of Factotum and sat at the Swatch Watch counter and started to the book. My boss, a recovering heroin addict named Harry, noticed me reading the book. “You like Buk?” he asked. I told him it was the first book of his I ever read. He waved at me to follow him into the basement of Faneuil Hall where they kept inventory, backup registers, and money. A room I wasn’t allowed in, and Harry lifted a little tarp, and underneath it was his personal stash of Bukowski books. I remember seeing, Post Office, Love is A Dog from Hell, Hot Water Music, Women, War All the Time, and a dozen other books. It was a Bukowski safe house. It felt like discovering something I shouldn’t be reading. Like we were these underground rebels reading the voice of a generation. I picked up Post Office, and took it upstairs to finish my shift.
“It began as a mistake.” As a person in the trades, I’d say it is without a doubt the greatest opening line about working class life I’d ever read, not only then, but even today. The novel is not only hilarious, but honest. It’s brutally honest. I remember thinking to myself, now here’s a voice I understand. The humor, the hatred of day jobs, the drinking, the gambling on life, the madness of the grind, giving away your soul for pennies on the dollar, I knew that world. I lived in that world. I watched the joy in the eyes of all my family members slowly drift away because they wasted their lives on meaningless work. I was hooked on Bukowski’s work like a drug.
Growing up in New England the only poet you study in school is Robert Frost. I spent countless days, weeks, years, tortured by him. When I was a child, I thought he was the only poet who ever existed because I heard his name so much. When grandma set the table I wondered where Frost was going to sit. If I took a shit, I wondered if Robert Frost shit in there earlier in the day. That was until in my mid-twenties when I tried giving poetry another chance. I read Love is a Dog from Hell, which to this day remains my favorite collection of poetry ever written. What I love about Buk’s poetry is that they read like stories. He didn’t have time for metaphor. He went straight for the meat and bones. He wrote poems about classical music; making art out of a mundane life; humanity; drinking; sex; being annoyed about other writers and their circle jerks; gambling on horses; women; working-class life; madness; suicide; grief; loss, and God damn, he was funny. The great poet Jack Micheline said of Bukowski, “Back then he was known as the king of the little magazines, but once he connected to the working man, the everyday man, he was well on his way to becoming a legend.”
I read everything the man has written and let me tell you there’s a lot. He couldn’t go long without writing or he’d suffer from rage and depression. I’m not a huge fan of the stuff they put out after his death, even Ol’ Hank had stuff he hid from the world that he didn’t want published. If you are going to read him for the first time, don’t read any book put out after 1994, the year he died from Leukemia. Anything before then, please do check him out.
Today, a lot of people dislike him for stupid reasons. One famous and massively dull poet and now dull author who works for The Paris Review, said “no thanks,” to Bukowski. Another guy I know from the Twitter days, said, “I have studied him relentlessly (really you devoted countless years of study to his work?) and he sucks… Also buy my midwestern noir book titled Midwestern Noir. What it really boils down to is jealousy. Why is he in over one hundred different languages? Why is he one of the most quoted writers in history? Because what he wrote about, he wrote with power, dignity, and character. He was honest, and people don’t like to deal with reality. Buk’s reality wasn’t sitting around playing videogames, then posing as a writer at night. He didn’t sit around the poetry nook in Yale, he wrote from his apartment, in hotels, and the streets. He wrote about what he saw, experienced, the everyday person. Now, if you don’t like him because the language is simple, lacks metaphor, or because he wrote about sex in the way he did, then fine, you are entitled to your opinion, but more times than not, those people find, ‘Infinite Jest,’ to be a highly entertaining book. And for me, that book is still the only book I have destroyed. Fun fact, as much as I loathe David Foster Wallace’s pretentious work, did you know he was a Bukowski fan? Stick it up your ass Yale poetry nook!
There are some things I don’t like about Bukowski, although they have nothing to do with the man. The Cult of Bukowski is annoying, young people sticking up for his corpse and thinking they know what he would’ve done in every situation, which is drink. And yes, his drinking is legendary. More than likely he was an alcoholic, but he was born in 1920, around the time my grandparents were born. And in those days, you didn’t seek out therapy. You didn’t take medications for depression, you drank. Alcohol was the medication to beat out the blues. I’m not telling you to run out and buy a bottle of whiskey to cover up your depression in the year 2025, but I know that’s what I did when I was down or anxious. It didn’t influence my psyche like people think, in fact, it helped me out when I needed to blow off some steam. Yes, the cult of Buk is annoying. Much like the Cult of Stephen King in the horror world, or the Cult of Chandler in the noir world, or the Cult of Frank Herbert in the Sci Fi world. It does get annoying. I understand but keep following me.
What Bukowski did for me no other author has done since, not in such a grand scope, which was create an opening to find literature that I love today. He was, in fact, a great gateway drug to some of my other favorite authors. It’s no different than building a record collection. Say you love The Beatles. After you play their records to death you look for other bands who influenced them. Boom! You are into Roy Orbison. Then you look for bands who the Beatles influenced, Boom! You are into Black Sabbath. It goes on and on, the gift that keeps on giving. Bukowski did the same for me. Because of him I discovered John Fante, and after John I discovered writers who were fans of Bukowski: Raymond Carver, Thom Jones, Lucia Berlin, Sam Shepard, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, Dan Fante, Brad Watson, Denis Johnson, Dorothy Allison, Carson McCullers. I could keep going here, but you get the point. All those writers and more like them hold holy places on my bookshelves because of Bukowski.
When I discovered them, I bailed on certain writers I tried out and kept trying but just hated, back then I called them ‘books with raised letters” because they were always the hot release with silver glowing covers with a crime or action writer wearing a bomber jacket or trench coat leaning against a brick wall with folded arms. The books had big and stupid raised letters. Shitty best sellers by Vince Flynn, James Patterson, Clive Cussler, Nora Roberts, Lee Child, Robert Parker. I’m not saying those people couldn’t write a story, but they didn’t do anything for me. I don’t particularly like series, aside from anything Joe Lansdale, Charles Willeford, Richard Stark, Chris Offutt, and James Lee Burke put out. I do like a lot of noir, but often, and maybe due to my Buk love, prefer it in a bit of reality. I love Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, James Crumley, Dorothy Hughes, Elmore Leonard, Megan Abbott, William Boyle, Dennis Lehane, and I also adore a slew of Hard Case Crime, and Starlite Pulp books, but yes, Vince Flynn and many others like him can go shit in a hat. Or as Buk put it:
…don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that…
I remember when I read Ginny’s copy of Ham on Rye, and to this day it’s the most honest, heartbreaking of all of Bukowski’s novels. A book about growing up with an abusive father, being treated poorly by classmates because of his terrible case of acne vulgaris. He writes about being a child and going to the doctor’s and they had to stick needles in his face to dry out the acne, and how painful it was for him, and he had to do it for years and six or seven times a year. His fellow students mocked him, made fun of him. When he got home his father beat him with a belt every day. He didn’t have anyone, so he took an early interest in books, and writing. His father found his writing and threw it away, called him insane. He was considered ugly by all the girls, and on prom night he went and watched the prom through a window with his head wrapped like a mummy in toilet paper. Spots of blood leaked out onto the tissue because earlier in the day the doctors went at his acne with countless needles, and he sat there wishing to be a part of the dance, the young love, the friendship, much like The Elephant Man, much like me, he was a freak.
I had no girlfriends in high school. I tried everything to be a part of the crowd, and when I look back now at high school, I call it the terror dome. A place of demonic-like horror where I was treated as the outcast, the hated, the despised simply because of how I looked, or that I was shy, or that my family couldn’t afford the right clothes. I tried playing sports to be a part of the cool clicks, but I wasn’t a great athlete. I was mocked for dropping a fly ball or fumbling a football. I was made fun of because I was shy and didn’t talk. By my senior year I quit caring, and I read countless books, rented movies, fished in the ragged creek, smoked weed, and simply hung out with myself, and waited on the day I graduated. I didn’t even go to graduation. When all my fellow classmates stood in line wearing their green caps and gowns, ready to head into the world and become a banker or lawyer, I was off somewhere at a concert giving zero shits about a place I loathed. I didn’t even tell my family the date of graduation.
Reading Ham On Rye, connected me to another human being who wasn’t loved. Who later turned those horrors into a style that became his own. So, if you ask me who my early life influences: living summers on the road with my father. The life of The Elephant Man, and Charles Bukowski. They helped shape my sensitivity, my outlook on the world, the way my mind works, my sense of humor, defying the odds, and taking risks. They helped guide me until I could find my own voice. And I cannot thank them enough. The next time you decide to mention the bravado, the macho style (FYI macho is a stupid disco word), the drinking, the tough guy attitude, go look in a mirror and really stare at it. Stare deeply into your eyes, pores, ears, and say, “go fuck yourself.” Or skip that and go join a happy little poetry nook and discuss the happy little poems written by the award winning poet who will be more than likely forgotten because they wrote about the hot button social topics of the day, rather than the only universal truths that touch us all: we are born, we die, and if you are a lucky enough you fall in love.
