by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com
Perhaps no writer has told of the average joe’s plight in the nine-to-five drudge.
Than the great Bukowski.
Yes he was a sleaze – he admitted this himself.
This is why he agreed to write the newspaper column ‘Notes of a dirty old man’.
But let’s be honest at least half of urban-nine-to-five slave-women like sleazes – at least sometimes.
You see it’s about utilitarianism – They can use the sleaze & then throw them away.
They are conveinient, disposable.
They are fun during bar-night-ovulations or during rolling personal crises that is ‘modern city life’.
So while half of urban western women say they hate Buk – They are are at least intrigued by a wild animal type like Bukowski.
Because Buk was more a phenomenon of our dystopian reality just as much as he was a ‘dirty old man’.
I mean the cliché is that all women like a ‘bad boy’.
Clichés have to at least be half true – don’t they?
Of course they are.
And that’s why at least as many Western dystopian city livin’ women love Bukowski as hated him, & probably more.
Although he did say himself that he ‘let women push him around’, & that’s why they liked him so much.
But that was a schoolboy analysis, even he would know that – after all, he had a big brain.
But I think – on top of the ‘Western city dystopia effect’ – he was at least a hybrid of both a ‘pushover & a bad boy’.
Perhaps it was the hybrid nature that intrigued his many boozy women that he talked of in his novel ‘Women’.
But then again most of Buk’s women were fellow ‘bottom of the barrel types’.
They were alcoholics, party animals, literal prostitues etc.
Though later in life Buk said he ‘couldn’t be bothered with bars no more’ –
He ‘just wanted to sit in a quiet room with a beer and his thoughts’.
You see even an dive-bar-livin’-alco like Buk can’t party much past fifty.
There’s the famous video where he gets pissed at Linda (his wife) because she keeps partying big.
In the infamous video she is unrepentant & says “I’ll keep going out at night & I’ll see whoever I want”.
This makes Buk ‘see red’ – he threatens to ‘Get his Jewish lawyers to kick her out’.
She is again unrepentant to his discomfort & his view of ‘how it should be’.
He loses it, his anger boils over & as the are both at opposite ends of the couch,
He starts kicking her like a child would – it looks bad on camera but there’s no force behind the kicks.
He ruined his poise & argument there.
It was a good argument to not be an alcoholic if you can help it at all.
Because if you’re deeply damaged – and most of us are – alcohol takes all your problems and makes a stage show of them.
But if you are (an alco) and you can’t (stop), it also helps (like Buk was) to be an entertainer, artist or writer – and living in America
They kinda issue you a ‘free pass to misbehave’ over there.
This is why America has both the best art and literature and the worst behavour.
So Rest In Peace Buk – may you be soaking in a giant vat of Budweiser in the clouds.
You behaved bad AND made great art.
The embodiment of the USA.
For the record I was a binge drinker for fifteen years, but not an alcoholic.
These days I just sit in a quiet room, drink two beers a night & write.
Like Bukowski my wild party days are long gone.
All I have left are a few wild memories.
And sometimes I really miss my (watered down) version of the various Bukowski Boozy Babes.
As Bukowski’s life was a testament to:
Time really does turn deadly sharp edges into fuzzy warm curves.
The truth is they were both good and bad and you could not have one without the other.
This is why you should never ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’.
Perhaps both the best saying and civic instruction to have ever lived.
So let us never throw Bukowski’s out of the pages of our literature.
Anton Martin Smith Writer 