Nobody wrote like Buk. Nobody had the stones like he did, to live life to the fullest. to celebrate the grit and existence of the loser. The rooming house boarder, the Barfly. Bukowski was the bard of the bum, the miserable minstrel, walking lonely streets of LA. People would look at him and see him as a dirty old man and pass "notes" to one another like giggly school girls. But they would never get the soul of such a great writer, such a great, but ragged prince.
I knew Buk. Drank with him when he was just a brash thirty-five year old with a head full of stories but not the voice to convey those yarns. I gave him his voice.
We were out bar hopping one night, and I lent him a copy of my latest opus called The Mailman, about a man who one day wakes up after a surreal vision and decides he needs to deliver letters to the good citizens of the City Of Angels. So, he goes to work for the Post Office. This is a story that holds a mirror up to America in the middle sixties and shows what an ugly beast it had become.
Well Charlie took it and staggered out of the bar. He read it that night cover to cover. Needless to say he loved it-- in fact, he was in love with it! So inspired by it, he trashed his little room in search of his typewriter-- he had to write... had to put ink to paper because what he read in my book touched him in ways that he did not understand. My words reached those dark places in his dark soul. They soothed him the way David's harp soothed King Saul.
So, when he found his typewriter, he began pounding away at what would be his iconic novel Post Office.
This work would not only go on to be his best seller, it would be talked about in the halls of Academia. It would be loved, caressed by generations of dough-eyed collegiates.
I like to think I had an invisible hand in steering such greatness.
No comments:
Post a Comment