The high ground

The year Charles Bukowski died is coincidentally the same year I discovered him. 1994. It was also the same year my oldest son was born, I was 22. And he kept me company during that atrociously hot summer that swelled my feet so much while pregnant. So I put them up and read Hollywood, which I had found in the back of a thrift store. It was cheeky and real and one of the most down to earth things I had ever read. I didn’t know he died earlier that year, in fact, I wouldn’t read Bukowski again until I was in my very early 40’s. Something like life, happened; I was working, having an active social life, being a mom, doing the fulfilling yet mundane and typical kind of thing he abhorred. What can I say, I got busy and when I wasn’t, I was reading someone else. I had forgotten about him. I am ashamed in hindsight. 

I say this because I feel like I missed out all those years. Then, an ex boyfriend swore by a book he wrote, the author’s name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. He raved about Post Office, how funny it was, how much I would enjoy it. 

Then I found the book and dove right in, instantly falling. His ability to articulate his disdain, how deeply brutal his raw words left my soul pierced with the tragedy and comedy of the human condition. He didn’t write like anyone I had ever read. I had spent my youth stockpiling a collection of Dean Koontz, with horror, thrillers, like Rice and Barker, King and countless novels on serial killers; the macabre was my favorite. Sure I was an avid reader of Hemingway and the allure of Poe’s darkness was timeless. I still was heady over all the classics, but stumbling again upon this grotesque, magnificent and utterly compelling masterpiece that was Bukowski saved me.

I raped the internet for his poetry and quotes, I saved memes and poems, I read book after book. Stopping in between to switch things up, reread favorites, dabble in other authors, swoon over Fyodor and drown in Keats, and Yeats. I swim through the unknowns and the decadence written under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure. But I thirst for more of this lunatic man that put his finger on my pulse and spoke the truth of the downtrodden with such beautiful contempt and depravity.

He validated my off color opinions and perpetuated my emotions, such a dirty old man that was insanely lucid despite his constant drunken state, he spoke truth in ways most people are too chicken shit to draw from their own well and pen, and after seven books, it’s just not enough. 

I want more. So I shall continue my quest of reading anything he ever wrote. Honestly I would read his scribbled cocktail napkins if there were any, I would creep the decrepit walls of a dirty bathroom stall, if I thought he wrote on it. I’m chasing Bukowski. 

I have two loves; Bukowski and Hemingway. Their words burn me, they sear my heart and tickle my soul. I know it seems a bit unfair to any other man in my unwholesome opinion, but I have fallen in love with two men. They have a stronghold on my affections and the high ground of my thoughts. They’re both dead, but still so very much alive in my mind. Anyway, I’m rambling and gushing again.