Buk, Rhymes With Puke

If you go in a bookstore now, one of those chain bookstores in the mall, that reminds you of the Gap, plastic muzak and coffee aroma piped in, you're likely to see several of Charles Bukowski's books, on the shelf, along with books by people who knew him, books about him, books by people who didn't know him, hadn't met him. There may even be a couple of volumes of his letters.

You may see The Bukowski Tapes on the Independent Film Channel, or Sundance, the Buk himself, drinking wine and talking about the writing life. The racetrack life. The life of the demimonde of whores, losers, degenerate gamblers, winos, the hen-pecked, the pussy-whipped, the beat-down, the used-up. Postal workers. A defrocked postal worker, who, instead of going postal, wrote two-fisted books.

There's a coffee table book of a tour of Germany and France called Shakespeare Never Did This, and a movie with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, Barfly, a second movie with Ben Gazzara, Tales of Ordinary Madness. Both movies very funny.

If you look him up in a search engine there are several web sites devoted to his life and work. Little magazines issue Bukowski numbers, still. Many small press writers list him as a major influence on them.

People visit his grave, on the tombstone of which is written, "Don't try." Like a rock star. And Bukowski didn't like rock-and-roll. He liked wrack-and-ruin. Scriabin in a flophouse, a flower between cracks in the sidewalk, and a cat with a bird in its mouth. The militant Third-World lesbian feminists bowing up like Halloween cats and hissing him at his poetry readings, the academics growing faint, from outrage, the would-be writers, jealous of his fame, the media, until nearly the end, unaware of who he was.

No publicity, no national tour, no appearances on daytime television. His publisher, John Martin, Black Sparrow Press, just put high-quality editions of his books out there, and kept them out there, including putting them out there in translation, so he could come in through the back door, through Europe, where he was recognized as a major American writer when New York and Los Angeles, his home town, thought of him as a freak, if they knew about him at all.

The old reprobate. He's up there drinking a good Moselle and listening to Mahler and handicapping the day's races, which he will drive to in his BMW, from his house with the swimming pool in the quiet neighborhood, the clean young wife. Living well is the best revenge. Writing Pulp, where you laugh at impending death. Looking for the ghost of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a "great writer."

Made a spectacle of himself on French television before Bernard "Culture Soup" Pivot could ask him what his favorite cuss word was, and what God would say to him when he got to heaven.

There's been a mix-up, I'm afraid. You're not supposed to be here. Long-shots like you don't finish first, they finish fourth. Out of the money. Like writing.

They break a leg and have to be put down. No spavined steeds like you in the Winner's Circle.

One time he found a paycheck in a raincoat pocket he had forgotten to cash. Forgotten he had. It pissed his co-workers off. Big-time.

They lived from paycheck to paycheck, you see. They turned their paycheck over to the little woman.

Bukowski could get drunk and forget a paycheck. He could tell the bossman to go piss up a rope. Could say, "I was looking for a job when I found this one."

He could tell the writing program teachers, the grants administrators, the literary prize panelists, and the editors at the publishing houses, the book reviewers in the

newspapers, the critics, the publicists, the whole claptrap and machinery of the superstructure of a writing career to kiss his natural white ass, because he had a publisher, who published him, and readers, who bought, and read, his books.

Like Hemingway. He was a popular writer. And a literary writer, too. He combined the belletristic and the popular in a way all writers hope to and few writers do.

Bukowski wrote nonfiction pieces, and stories, in Open City and the L. A. Free Press, he wrote poems, he wrote a screenplay, he wrote novels, he wrote letters. The novels are about working for a living, the war between the sexes, growing up, and looking death square in the face.

Not bad. He didn't write any systematic criticism, outlining his aesthetic, except as asides, here and there, in his letters. But also in his poems, his prose vignettes, his screenplay.

People who discover him read everything by and about him they can lay their hands on. They get it where it is, tease it out of the oeuvre. A splendidly varied oeuvre it is.

Bukowski cries at Judy Garland movies. Bukowski laughs at Frank Sinatra singing "My Way."

Bukowski laughs at Gary Oldman singing "My Way" in Sid and Nancy, Bukowski is a student of popular culture, he wrote about it like George Orwell, he resuscitated the reputation of John Fante, and helped countless little magazine editors to keep their shoestring operations afloat, as an act of contribution to the

profession and service to the community. He put more back in than he took out.

Don't try indeed. He had a sentimental streak as wide as William Saroyan. Another dirty old man on the flying trapeze. Writing an "Application for Permission to Live."

Bukowski wadded the application up, went his own way, and lived the life he had imagined, not looking back. Not asking for permission or approval.

He walked down the center of the street smoking a Hav-a-Tampa cigar and whistling "Waltzing Matilda," like Lionel Jeffries in The Hellions.

Lickspittles ran for cover.

Rasputin was a hard man to take down. The czar of Russia wasn't up to the task. The czar's wife. All the king's horses and all the king's men. A bevy of wenches in a haystack, all the vodka he could lay his hands on. Opium, Rasputin smoked his share, it didn't faze him. When things got ragged he'd abscond and fast and spring back strong, swoop down over Moscow like an alien craft casting a great shadow, gather statesmen and beauties under his spell and do it all again.

Rasputin, a bad-boy mystic, arm wrestling with God. The thing the Organization skates around is he was one of God's favorite sons. Dullness is the one sin God will not forgive, and Rasputin was anything but dull. Eyes that drilled into the core of things, just beyond the edge of good and evil. When you're anchored in the core, anything goes, you can go anywhere, do what you damn well please. Rasputin's whim was more pleasing in the eyes of God than a pope's decree.

And who finally takes the big man out? Some aristocratic punks,

presagers of a new dawning. They were simply not impressed, and before they drugged, chained, poisoned, shot and drowned him, they killed Rasputin's magic. They did it out of boredom and disdain with a detachment far beyond a peasant's grasp. Rasputin was a peasant.

Rasputin's death marks the beginning of the death of magic. They laughed as he dragged himself along, conscious when he shouldn't be, draped in chains and focused. He went out that way, and that's the one thing that chinks their armor. He left them with a restless seed of doubt.

Magic is coded in that seed. Generals feel it like a kernel in their throats in quiet moments, corporate lawyers and execs, tin men selling siding to the poor. That seed will root and grow in concrete one fine day, and the magic will return, the full magnolia. Rasputin will walk the earth again, angels to his left and right, and capitulation to his roguish ways will be our only option.

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