Charles Bukowski

“Don’t try”.

So reads the epitaph on the headstone of one of the iconic forefathers of the Transgressive Fiction/ Dirty Realism movement in American Literature. Born in Germany around the same time Mickey Mouse was introduced to the world under the guise of Steamboat Willie, his life was a million miles from a Disney fairy tale. Abusive parents, dyslexia, social banishment and alcoholism were the nuances of his “normal”, the accoutrements to his life’s wardrobe. It was this DNA that filtered throughout his body of work and made his name royalty amongst the communities of poets, short story writers, novelists and screenwriters of the modern era.

Charles Bukowski.

Royalty, even if only amongst the working class. He was the scribe behind hundreds of short stories, the creative force that inked thousands of poems. His novels and smaller works produced over sixty books; in film, he has been immortalized many times over. His narratives were universal, largely penned with such themes as alcoholism, poverty, illicit debauchery with women and the drudgery of the workplace. It was these everyman vantages that made him the voice of the real and a curiosity to the fantasy peddlers in literature, the elitists with noses forever planted in the spine of the happy-go-lucky classics. TIME magazine dubbed him “A laureate of American lowlife”. A nation of these theoretically labeled lowlifes named him King.

Bukowski approached the trials and tribulations in his life with a jubilant acceptance that poured into his creations. His alter ego, the irrepressible Hank Chinaski, was Bukowski in high def- an unapologetic drunk who welcomed his demons and shunned a culture that judged him for his vices. Essentially, Charles Bukowski simply shrugged his shoulders at things that caused the more tightly wound citizens of his time to shriek in horror. Bukowski, who in earlier years halted writing altogether after unsuccessfully breaking into the publishing realm (opting instead for a ten year drinking binge-the “lost years”), simply wrote what he knew. His research came from staring at a reflection in a glossy bottle of Pabst.

Ham on Rye, Factotum, Notes From a Dirty Old Man, Horses Don’t Bet On People & Neither Do I…a small scattering of genius that he left behind that stands as important a reference tool to an aspiring writer as an English Degree. Charles Bukowski may have very well been a poor man’s Hemingway, but in a world increasingly set upon a 99% versus 1% demographic, perhaps it was Hemingway who was the rich man’s Bukowski. Either way, both men had a masterful way of imbibing just a touch too much and creating the definitive reflection of the life they knew-themselves, in a visceral form.

Creating.

It brings us full circle to the headstone that marks Bukowski’s final drying out spot. And it is the perfect summary to his imperfect life, stolen from a letter the author wrote to a colleague in 1963, an absolutely brilliant piece of craftsmanship from a wordsmith that could only be Charles Bukowski:

On the set of Barfly with Faye Dunaway & Mickey Rourke  

"Somebody at one of these places asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillac’s, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”

The Absurdity of Normal

 

Normal.

If you are a word junkie, then the dictionary is your bible, the gospel. And according to the Good Book, “normal” is an adjective. It’s definition:

“Conforming to the standard or the common type; usual; not abnormal; regular; natural.”

Depending on the user, this adjective can be thrown as an insult, a jab, a barb towards one’s existence. Additionally, it can be a reflection upon the shortcomings of the orator himself.

Case in point; the inherently evil Jim Crow era, which lasted from 1876 until 1965, only twelve years before my own birth-and I am still a relatively young man. Whether it was de facto in the North or de jure in the South, blatant and institutionalized racism and segregation was considered “normal” in this country. Man was on the verge of stepping foot on the moon, baby boomers were revolutionizing music and schools of thought, the seeds that would create the internet were a few years away, and in major cities across the United States, diners, drinking fountains and public restrooms were separated with two sobering words: Whites or Coloreds.

This was how the world spun for millions. This was a long gaze without a blink. This was, in some twisted dose of dysfunction, normal.

Conversely, looking at the citizens of the Earth today, for all of our shortcomings and insufficiencies, America often serves as a standard. Not an hour goes by without some grave injustice in places such as North Korea, Darfur and Tibet. The impoverished, tortured people of these lands have lost the cosmic coin toss; they had no choice in where they would be born. They have little hope and even less opportunity. In our country, even the most barbaric ghetto or backwoods Appalachian child has a shot. We hear the stories everyday. “Rags to riches” is almost an exclusively American term. To us, the lands that are run by war lords and pirates and religious zealots and dictators are a blemish to the world, an archaic curiosity, a bizarre and cruel entity.

How easy things could be if they just followed our path, we say, and we are partially correct. Why can’t they just be normal-like us?

Not even forty years in between, we have had our bad “normal” and our good “normal”. We have shown the universe our best and our worst. Of course, we are still lodged between the two, and forever will be. There are unending nuances, trends, lifestyles and cultural shifts, and the normalcy of these will change with the seasons. Normal is like beauty. It is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no right or wrong, no true or false answer key; it is an essay, open for interpretation.

All we are left with is a grey area.

This is what inspired me to write Throwaway Kids. Wesley Gamble is fairly normal in our current times, certainly within his demographic. Duffy Saxson certainly is not. Who is the more extreme between the two at the end of the day? 

And there is the rub.

So much can be said for the right/wrong paradigm of both. The topics at play are quite polarizing. Hopefully, it plays tug-of-war with the reader’s mind. I do not have a dog in the fight myself; my goal is to simply spark a conversation.

Just keep the debates flowing with “normal” decorum.