Absence of the Hero Read online

  Bukowski would develop a hard, comic, lyric realism, a toughness, but underneath an abiding sensitivity and a photographic, documentary fidelity to everyday horrors. In his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columns, he records the humdrum facts of city life: drivers in Los Angeles, a confrontation between Nazis and Marxists, joyous nighttime sessions with his drunken landlady and landlord. He often writes the prose equivalent of William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say,” telling you precisely what is in front him without commentary. He addresses the reader directly, removing any barrier between writer and audience. And he strengthened his vulnerable, hurt self by muscling it with irony, by a subversive, mocking, irreverent sharpness of observation. Bukowski’s prose became more accomplished with time and his narratives more skillful: he would begin in medias res with an outrageous opening scene to hook readers and draw them into the story, as in “The Cat in the Closet.” This story is also a marvelous example of the ways he casts his alter ego as a comical, self-deprecating, helpless character lost in a universe where things just happen.

  The unexpected references to Stravinsky, Mahler, Hemingway, Camus’ The Stranger, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Berlioz against the backdrop of graphic sexuality and comic drunken self-abasement are typical examples of a literary device Bukowski frequently employs. These surprising, sudden allusions to cultural figures serve to “equalize” “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture to comic effect and are a kind of “winking” by the narrator to the reader, signaling that our hapless anti-hero may be a clown, but he is smarter than he lets on. So too Bukowski seeks to entertain us by playing the fool; he gives us our existential lesson, but with a knowing smile. His characters do not grow, achieve epiphanies, or reach enlightenment. Rather, as the Buddha said in the Diamond Sutra: “I obtained not the least thing from complete, unexcelled awakening, and it is for that very reason it is called complete, unexcelled awakening.”

  With increasing fame, Bukowski began to give poetry readings throughout the U.S.: in California (Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Francisco), New Mexico, Washington, Utah, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin as well as in Vancouver, Canada, and Hamburg, Germany. He also made a rambunctious appearance on the famous television talk show hosted by Bernard Pivot in Paris, Apostrophes. And as always, life fed his art as he began to chronicle his life on the road in his poems, stories, essays, and novels. He became a “literary hustler,” and he satirizes himself, and depoeticizes and deromanticizes poetry; he turns the lofty poetry reading into a ritual in honor of the god Dionysus, complete with rivers of wine and ecstatic maenads.19

  The sexual revolution of the Sixties coincided with Bukowski’s own raw and direct confrontation with his own sexuality. Due to his acne vulgaris and tortured childhood, Bukowski had never experienced a “normal” adolescence and he spent 1970–1977 playing catch-up for all the delights he had missed as a Southern Californian teenager. In “The Big Dope Reading,” for example, we see Bukowski at the height of his powers, engaging in multiple levels of irony and self-parody. The title itself may carry a double entendre: “dope” as in marijuana, but also the Big Dope equals the Poet as Clown. Bukowski gives his readers a hilarious moment of deadpan self-parody when Chinaski quotes two of the most famous Bukowski apothegms—“Genius . . . could mean the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way” and “Endurance is more important than truth”—which are in-jokes for devoted Bukowskians. Here too there are complex moments when he is at once parodying erotic writing, himself, and the convolutions of sexual/romantic “relationships” (he would have been allergic to such a psychobabble word). Bukowski often plays at the “meaning” of “relationships” in a teasing, Zen way which recalls Jacques Lacan’s gnomic apothegm: “There is no sexual relationship.” He stripped himself down to show his vulnerability, his wounds, trying to recover through love what was lost in his childhood yet, at the same time, poking fun at the effort to find salvation through love and sex.20 Yet Bukowski is also of course really a romantic who could write of falling in love in his June 24, 1974 “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column: “I walked about and it felt as if the sun were inside of me.” And as one of his favorite poets, e.e. cummings, wrote: “unlove is the heavenless hell and homeless home . . . lovers alone wear sunlight.”21

  Bukowski’s “defense mechanism” to ward off psychic anguish is of course laughter. Wit, an unerring sense of comic timing, and a driving inexorable energy power his writings; his beloved Renaissance brothers in manic extravagance were François Rabelais and Giovanni Boccaccio.22 He could also be sardonic, which was in perfect accord with the Zeitgeist: black humor would mark the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and Eraserhead (1978) were among his favorite films—humor and madness in close and delicate counterpoint.23 So too, Bukowski’s writing is poised between despair and lyricism, moving forward with a vigorous power that virtually always redeems his writings from nihilism. His admiration for the genius of Robert Crumb (who illustrated several Bukowski works) shows that for Bukowski there is a nexus between pain, laughter, and quasi-German-Expressionist extreme states of emotion.

  After he tendered his resignation at the post office at age 50, Bukowski demonstrated that he could be a practical working writer and he maximized his productivity by reassembling his plots in differing contexts. He not only recycled favorite narratives in stories and novels, but he even recast them in both story and poem: “Fooling Marie” exists in both forms. Furthermore, sections from Post Office, Factotum, and Women all appeared initially in his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in the LA Free Press as separate stories. Chapter 30 from Women appeared in two installments and in comparing the story and novel versions, one can see how much he altered and revised; in this case, many splendid passages were left on the cutting-room floor as he shaped his prose into novel form. This method of composition made perfect sense, since Bukowski’s fiction had always been episodic, constructed out of brief sections strung together. His novels are in a way a series of connected brief tales, which enabled him to detach sections for submission to magazines as separate short stories as he composed them. And there was yet another mode of literary proliferation: Bukowski’s work was circulated among many underground publications under an agreement with the United Press Syndicate (UPS) which allowed articles to be reprinted by all members of the organization.24

  As suggested above, perhaps due to both the loosening of censorship restrictions during the ’60s and ’70s as well as his own desire to explore more fully the darker reaches of his imagination, Bukowski would begin to experiment more dramatically with direct portrayals of violence.25 Films such as The Wild Bunch (1969), Easy Rider (1969), and A Clockwork Orange (1971) laid the groundwork for a story such as “Christ with Barbeque Sauce,” in which Bukowski used an actual newspaper account as the source for his narrative.26 In later stories such as “The Invader” (1986), Bukowski traces the sudden incursion of terror into the banalities of everyday life: tales of ordinary madness. This story also recalls his earlier apocalyptic portrayals of the human inability to fathom primal wildness in stories such as “Animal Crackers in My Soup.”

  Bukowski’s late, lovely cycle of poems about his cats reveals them to be creatures who preserve the style, poise, and lack of pretense that are so sorely lacking in human beings. And in one of his very last essays, Bukowski asserts that most people lose their magic at a very young age. In “Playing and Being the Poet,” he returns to his musings about the life of the poet: “Poetry comes from where you’ve lived and from what makes you create it. Most people have already entered the death process by the age of 5, and with each passing year there is less of them in the sense of being original beings with a chance to break through and out and away from the obvious and the mutilating.” For Bukowski, living life poetically is in fact the only way to really live.

  ABSENCE OF THE HERO

  The Reason Behind Reason

  CHELASKI, CF, .285 (AB-
246 H-70) felt a little . . . felt a little . . . different out there. There are days when you feel a little different. Things don’t set right. Like now, even the sun looked a little sick, the green of the fences too green, the sky much too high, and the leather of his glove too much like . . . leather.

  He took a few steps forward and beat his fist into his glove, trying to shake everything. Did he have a headache or what? He felt potential, as if he were about to scream or to leap up or to do something that shouldn’t be done.

  Chelaski was a bit frightened and looked over at Donovan, LF, .296 (AB-230 H-68) but Donovan looked very comfortable. He studied Donovan carefully, trying to draw strength from him. His face was very brown, and Chelaski had never noticed the pot belly before. Such an ugly bulge, so unselfconscious. Even Donovan’s legs seemed thick, tree-like, and Chelaski stared straight ahead again, feeling worse.

  What was wrong?

  The batter connected and it was an outfield fly . . . to Donovan. Donovan moved forward a few steps, moved his arms leisurely, and caught the ball. Chelaski had watched the ball in its long, slow arc through sun and sky. It had seemed pleasant enough, but somehow unrelated, unattached to anything. The next man hit an infield single that he didn’t have to handle. One out. One on. What was the inning? He turned to look at the scoreboard and saw the crowd. His eyes didn’t focus on them. They were just bits of movement, cloth, and sound.

  What did they want done?

  It ran through his mind again: what did they want done?

  Suddenly he was terrified and didn’t know the reason. His breath came hard and the saliva ran in his mouth; he felt dizzy, airy.

  There was Donovan . . . standing. He looked again at the crowd and saw everyone, everything, all together and separately. Glasses, neckties; women wearing skirts, men wearing pants; there was lipstick . . . and fire on things sticking in mouths . . . cigarettes. And they all hung together in a strange understanding.

  And then it came . . . an outfield fly . . . to him. An easy one. He was worried. He studied the ball fiercely and it almost seemed to stop its movement in air. It just hung there and the crowd shouted and the sun shone and the sky was blue. And Donovan’s eyes were watching him, and Donovan’s eyes were watching. Was Donovan against him? What did Donovan really want?

  The ball came into his glove. It entered his glove and he felt the strong pressure and pleasant push of the catch. He threw the ball to second, holding the runner on first. It was a good throw and Chelaski was amazed; it had seemed is if the ball had gone there because it was supposed to. His terror left a little; he was getting away with it.

  The next man was out, short to first, and Chelaski began the long trot to the dugout. It was good to be running. He passed several opposing players but they didn’t look at him. It bothered him a little, and the bother hung there in a little knob as he followed Donovan’s set neck into the dugout. When Chelaski got down there, he felt somehow naked, or spotted, or something, and in an effort to act as if he were all right, he walked up to Hull and grinned down on him.

  “Do you want me to kiss you? I could make you forget,” he said to Hull.

  Hull was hitting .189 and had been benched for Jamison, the college kid. Hull looked up at Chelaski. It was a look of absolute unrecognition. Hull didn’t even answer; he got up and walked to the water cooler. Chelaski quickly moved up to the railing, with his back to the bench.

  Corpenson singled. Donovan hit into a double play and trotted back down the first base line, lifting his legs high, his stockings showing, somehow all full of color.

  Chelaski walked to the plate. There was the umpire, the catcher, the pitcher, the fielders, the audience. Everything waiting, everything waiting. Outside, perhaps, a man was holding up a bank; or, a streetcar full of people sitting, was turning a corner; but here it was different: it was settled, expected . . . not like that, outside: the streetcar, the holdup. Here it was . . . different, caught up, demanded.

  He swung and missed the first pitch and people shouted. The catcher yelled something and tossed the ball back. A bird skipped through the air, up and down, going somewhere, very fast. Chelaski spit and stared at the birthmark on the ground. The ground was very dry. Ball one.

  The next one came on the outside, where he liked them. He swung the bat swiftly, automatically, and the crowed screamed. It was a long drive, deep over the centerfielder’s head. Chelaski watched it bounce against the wall by the flagpole. The crowd screamed louder than ever; it screamed louder than Chelaski had heard it all season. Then Jamison, who was on deck, began yelling at him.

  “Run! Run! Run!” he shouted.

  Chelaski turned and looked at Jamison. His eyes were extremely wide and burned like two flashes, cups of hot, driven things. His face was contorted, the lips turned out, and Chelaski noticed especially the thick veins in the red neck.

  “Run! Run! Run!” Jamison shouted.

  A cushion came out of the stands. Then another one. The crowd was so loud he could no longer hear Jamison. What was probably the same bird came flying back, hopping up and down, only a little faster. The centerfielder had fielded the ball. The noise was almost unbearable. Chelaski was hit by a cushion and he turned to look at the crowd. When he did, many of them leaped up and down, waving their arms. Cushions, hats, bottles, everything came down. For a moment Chelaski’s eye caught sight of a girl in a green skirt. He couldn’t make out her face, or her blouse or her coat. He saw a green skirt, and a pleat in a green skirt, shadow-like and leaping. Then he was hit by another cushion. It stung, cut, felt warm. For a moment he was angry.

  The throw came into the second baseman, who relayed it to first for the out. The noise was volcanic, stifling, maddening. Jamison had Chelaski by the arm, pulling him from the batter’s box. He noticed Jamison’s face, streaked with shots of red and white, looking thick, as if several layers of skin had been added.

  Chelaski walked to the dugout as the noise continued. The team was taking to the field, Hull replacing him in the outfield.

  It was cold in the dugout, dark in the dugout. He saw the water bucket with the towel over its side. He walked down in there, saw somebody’s hands slide nervously on the bench, somebody’s legs cross.

  Then Chelaski was standing in front of the manager, Hastings. He didn’t look at Hastings; just looked at his shirt below the V of the neck.

  Then he looked up. He saw that Hastings was trying to speak but couldn’t get it out.

  Chelaski turned quickly and ran down the runway that led to the locker room. When he got there, he stood a moment looking at all the green lockers.

  Outside, the crowd was still shouting and some of the reporters were making their way down to Chelaski to ask him what was wrong.

  Love, Love, Love

  I can hear my father bathing. He splashes tremendously, spews water, knocks his elbows against the sides of the tub.

  “Have you noticed that I’ve had my teeth in all day, Mama?”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “They feel like my own teeth, all my life.”

  “Pretty soon you’ll be able to eat nuts and things.”

  “Nuts. Ha!”

  My father walks down his driveway, stops, stoops, talks to my mother, who is still in the house:

  “This carrot is still alive.”

  “I know. Say, what’s that . . . your sleeve. . . .”

  “What?”

  “Look, your sleeve is torn. Under the arm. Look under the arm. . . .”

  I find a note on my bed. It’s written on the back of an envelope, inked in my father’s fat scrawl:

  ½ bottle whiskey

  2.00

  1 full whiskey

  3.65

  ½ bottle gin

  1.90

  2 ginger ale

  .30

  Laundry & Cleaning

  3.25

  Underwear

  8.25

  1 dress shirt

  4.00

  Room and Board

  10.
00

  33.35

  My father walks down the hall. He wears leather slippers that knock on the floor. He walks into the bathroom. “Gosh, what’s all this water on the floor? Did you spill all this water on the floor?” he asks my mother.

  “What water?”

  He opens the door and walks into my room. “Did you spill all that water on the floor?”

  “Yes,” I say, “I cupped my hands and tossed it around.”

  He begins to shout. . . .

  My brother George tells his war experiences: “They blew the paratroop alarm and I thought, my God, the Japs are coming. Well, I thought, I’ve got my C-rations, I’ve got my .45, my dum-dums; I’ve got a bottle of Stateside, and I thought, well, I’m all set. I’ll go down to the field and take a C-47 the hell out of here. . . .”

  My brother George is missing all night and phones me in the morning: “Chuck. Chuck. I’m all cut up. I have a big scar over my eye. I’ve got a black eye. Blood all over me. My coat is ruined. Got drunk with a man who had scars all over the inside of his mouth from sticking pins in it. Said pain was merely a matter of control. Blacked out, don’t remember what happened. I’m in Hollywood. What day is this?”

  We are at the dinner table, except for George. My mother sits in her big house gown and puts a potato in her mouth.

  “Chucky, your cheeks are so thin. I will make your cheeks so big they will hang over your jaws. It’s a shame, the way you are. You have such a lovely profile.”

  “That’s true,” says my father.

  “Already you’ve gained,” says my mother. “If only you’d stop drinking. . . . Why do you keep your eyes on your plate? Why don’t you look at people? Look at me. . . . Do you want some more potatoes?”

  “No.”