by Martin Anton Smith
I like to think of myself as a modern day “Chinaski” but less hard drinking & my floozies do not flooze so much. When I was younger, perhaps I was more like him – with a better class of floozie & slightly less wild nights out.
Of course the fictional ‘Chinaski’ was in fact the more than semi-autobiographical ‘alter ego’ of himself – Charles Bukowski. Bukowski the 20th Century San Padro ‘Poet Laurette’ of the “American Gutters”.
It took a while but eventually the writing snobs mostly agreed he was at least somewhat a literary genius; or at absolute worst a semi-historic, partially worthwhile truly original writer. Of course his stuff is amazing, gritty, real, unpolished. He paints with words the underbelly of twentieth century urban America – namely Los Angeles.
I’d like to think I’m like the Chinaski that finally belted out a bachelors degree & the had a crack at being upper middle class, then ditched it out of disgust, picking up a hammer & a rake, & at night – a pen.
This about face with garden tools & pens & blogs serves as my requiem of that fake-ass zombified corporate office scene I was engaged in for a decade and a half. Bukowski is right their are way too many terrible work environments that kill a man’s soul. I’ve seen it & if you’re reading this – you probably have too.
But I’m probably just romanticising Bukowskis mostly horrible life. The guy was clearly deeply depressed. But he said he had never given up for a better life. He had Hope for his writing. Writing was thing that staved away the kinds of suicides that plagued his drinking buddies The drug overdoses & liver failures.
I agree with Buk – ‘Hope’ is so important in a tough life. You can’t live without it, if you try to live without Hope, you can only be actually dead or if you somehow stay alive – you will become the pinhole eyed, shuffling, pale, flabby skinned, disheveled, walking dead. It’s one or the other if you are in the gutters or almost-gutters & you don’t have At least a glimmer of Hope.
I’m like the Chinaski that realised he could easily be an independent contractor instead of a salary slave. I don’t know why Chinaski didn’t realise this.
After all Chinaski could have been an independant cleaner or odd jobs man with ease. But perhaps he would have been too ‘lazy’ to be his own boss.
But Chinaski wasn’t lazy – he had that peculiar form of lazyness – sticking to terrible jobs. But then again he was also harvesting material.
Chinaski’s 11 years in the Post office paid off – he wrote his first published Novel about the misery of it all. I can’t forget his line about one of his colleagues – about how the muscled fit young new guy that slowly lost his self respect & turned to a depressed blob – like every other ‘lifer’ at the Post office. I know what it’s like – I worked for three months at an Australian Post Office – it was basically the same as Buk had described in Post Office.
Without Chinaski type literature, many middle class snobs would never see the reality of urban underclass life: The rooming houses with couples screaming at each other, punching each other. The dive bars & their casual but brutal fights in their back alleyways. Jobs that kill the soul mind & body for slave wages. The evictions the downtrodden faced every other month (yes usually for good reason) .
Through through his personified character ‘ Chinaski’ Buk told of the life of downtrodden drunkard, but he also added the spice of hope – his nightly typewriter & those hours that turned out all those unique gems we get to read or listen too.
His stubbornness eventually paid off when he was 50 – he was offered a stipend by Black sorrow press & he decided to quit the Post office or as he put it to “starve & be happy” Vs stay & be “ dead but full” (something like that anyway).
But Buck’s faith in Hope did pay off. Blow me down if in the last few years of his life in the late 80’s if Hollywood didn’t knock on his door & make a film about it all – ‘Barfly’ was pretty good & was made on a shoestring. Bukowski write the screenplay. Mickey Rourke play him.
Anyway I just thought I’d write a few words about the troubled but great man. I know Not enough Kiwis or Australians know his work. He should probably n fact be loved in both countries – given our tough life heritage on both sides of the Tasman sea.
Sure he was probably an asshole, a sleaze bag, a bad drunk….but he had his good points – he wrote each sentence with real punch & he made things happen through grit & artistic discipline – he was a champion of the liberal arts. If you realise you don’t need to be his best friend to read his stuff – you’ll get the fruits of his labour.
He’s definitely worth a read. I’d start with Post office or maybe Ham on Rye or Factotum.
But beware! Don’t be like me. Don’t glamourised his day to day drunken life too much – least your subconscious mind begin to go to “the track” way too much & you start to kill your liver at a time where you should be doing more gardening.
I wonder what Chinaski’s doing right now? And I wonder if those two places actually exist – did he go to heaven or hell? It’s a fine question, there’s arguments for both sides.
Give him a read or at least watch the movie called ‘barfly’ – last I saw it was till on YouTube.
And for us ‘would be writers’ we should take inspiration that he didn’t make any real headway until he was 50 – but to get that chance he had done the leg work for three decades before. So at the least we ‘would be’s’ need to keep writing regularly. Our time could still in theory ‘happen’. We’re putting ourselves ‘in the game’. Let’s keep writing @ take Bukowski’s advice: write each sentence with punch.
Anton Martin Smith Writer 