Thirst Trap

Stepping into Cole’s, one of the oldest restaurant-bars in Los Angeles, and the self-professed inventor of the French Dip sandwich, feels like stepping back in time to 1908, when the saloon first opened. It’s dimly lit inside, there are old wood-paneled walls, and a long bar greets you upon entry. On a quiet afternoon, you eat your sandwich, maybe have a drink or two, and then chances are you’ll eventually hit the restroom. If you’re in the men’s room, you might notice a bronze plaque bolted to the wall near the stalls: “CHARLES BUKOWSKI PISSED HERE.” People love to take pictures of it. On Instagram, it’s nearly as popular as shots of the sandwich that made Cole’s famous. In 2019, Bukowski’s dissolute work and lifestyle—not to mention his well-documented womanizing and racism—would create firestorms were he alive today. Why does he still appeal to so many people?

One reason might be found in the poem “tonight,” included in On Drinking (2019), a recent compendium of Bukowski’s writing on alcohol edited by Abel Debritto:

I drink alone now.
I drink with myself and to myself.
I drink to my life and to my death.
my thirst is still not satisfied.

As is typical with Bukowski, it’s all a tad melodramatic and pseudo-romantic—a mood that appeals to those who fancy Bukowski the legend rather than Bukowski the writer. Literature is filled with such pickled wordsmiths. William Faulkner had his whiskey. Carson McCullers started the day with a beer. Dorothy Parker was so synonymous with drinking that the New York Distilling Company named a gin after her. Yet the persistent mythology around Bukowski is inseparable from his work: he’s the hard-living, hard-drinking rebel who lived by his own rules and whose fiction and poetry trawl the sordid underbelly of America, especially his hometown of L.A. Again and again, he returned to the poisonous allure of alcohol. As he writes in his novel Women (1978): “That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” 

Many of Bukowski’s readers, almost exclusively male, still try to emulate him. Consider his more famous disciples: so-called Hollywood bad boys such as Johnny Depp, who was supposed to lend his voice to a cartoon adaptation of Bukowski’s stories (it’s apparently stuck in development hell), and Sean Penn, who has called the writer “the sweetest, most vulnerable pussycat.” Penn was up to play Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s fictional alter ego, in the semi-autobiographical film Barfly (1987), but the part went to Mickey Rourke instead.

Rock stars love Bukowski, too: The Red Hot Chili Peppers name-check him; so do the thrash metal band Anthrax. The Florida punk quartet Hot Water Music is named after a Bukowski story collection. On YouTube, you can find a video of Tom Waits reading Bukowski poems in his unmistakable growl. Even Jon Bon Jovi sings about “those Bukowski poems we couldn’t live without” on his solo album Destination Anywhere (1997).

Bukowski looms large in pop culture, but it’s a complicated legacy. Some consider him a relic of passé transgressiveness while for others he’s a source of cult-like hagiography. I wonder: What’s the point of a book of his poems, letters, fiction, and interviews devoted to drinking? Debritto, a Bukowski scholar who has edited four previous collections of the writer’s work, doesn’t offer much by way of explanation. The anthology just starts right off with the poem “ants crawl my drunken arms.” It’s a declaration of sorts for Bukowski, in which he hopes that booze will serve as his muse the way it did for his poetic forebears:

ants crawl my drunken arms
and they sent Rimbaud
to running guns and looking under rocks […]
they put Pound in a nuthouse
and made Crane jump into the sea
in his pajamas

It’s a clever, self-aware bit. But for all his carousing, Bukowski lived to be 73 before succumbing to leukemia in 1994; not quite the end he probably envisioned for himself. In a 1990 interview he says: “Still, my own death, I am ready for. It’s only the other deaths that bother me.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bukowski’s veneration of alcohol and alcoholic writers is almost entirely male-centric. For him, the intersection of machismo and liquor is where worthy, complex art happens. From “the replacements”:

Jack London drinking his life away while
Writing of strange and heroic men.
Eugene O’Neill drinking himself oblivious
While writing his dark and poetic
works.

From there, he goes on to lambaste “moderns”—that is, people (men) who sit in “tie and suit” in colleges and lecture

the little boys soberly studious
the little girls with glazed eyes […]
the lawns so green, the books so dull,
the life so dying of
thirst.

Bukowski imagines himself among the Rimbauds and Pounds, and that grandiosity is one reason he continues to attract fans—not necessarily readers—drawn to the image of the writer as the dirty-talking poet laureate of skid row. Drinking With Bukowski (2001), an anthology of personal recollections featuring Raymond Carver, Wanda Coleman, Harold Norse, and others foregrounds this idea of Bukowski the heroic drinker, literature’s debauched savant. His words are splashed across everything from T-shirts to Tinder profiles, and he’s perhaps second only to Ernest Hemingway in terms of being quoted most often on bars’ sidewalk chalkboards.

Speaking of Hemingway, Papa makes a few cameos in the collection. A poem named after him features a woman recounting the time she met the Nobel Prize winner:

she said, it was in Havana in 1953
and I was visiting him
and one day I saw him
and it was in the afternoon
and he was drunk

Elsewhere in the book, Bukowski’s Chinaski alter ego gets drunk and instead of reading his poems tells a crowd: “I am Hemingway. I am hot shit.”

No other 20th century writer is as famed for his larger-than-life exploits and macho persona than Hemingway, and like many other poets and novelists who appear in On Drinking, Hemingway’s life came to an abrupt, tragic end when he shot himself in 1961. By then, at age 61, both his body and his talent had given out, partly eroded by years of committed drinking. Yet to this day, Hemingway is celebrated in some quarters for his bravado and adventurism. Bukowski, too, is still lauded as a modern American libertine, the last of the romantics. What the two writers share most, however, is their alcoholism. “Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship and it’s a substitute for suicide,” Bukowski said in an interview in 1971.

Perhaps without meaning to be, this collection is a record of just how often American culture has historically venerated, and even rewarded, sickness in artists. Bukowski plays that up. When asked about the corrosive effect booze had on writers such as John Berryman, Norman Mailer, and, yes, Hemingway, Bukowski answers that society inculcates drinking with a deep sense of guilt. “I don’t share that guilt,” he says. “If I wish to destroy my brain cells and my liver and various other parts, that’s my business.” In another interview, he talks about how he gave up writing for a decade: “Drinking and shacking with women became my art form.”

Look past the braggadocio, however, and you’ll see the cracks in Bukowski’s chronic self-mythologizing. He tells another interviewer he drinks so much because he’s bashful: “Something about alcohol erases the self-doubt and allows the ego to come out.” In “the master plan,” he writes about how he “became a starving drunk instead of a starving writer.” He gave up chasing his big dream and hit the bottle hard, something he claims he started when he was still a teenager.

the best thing was the instant
result.
and I soon became the biggest and
best drunk in the neighborhood and
maybe the whole
city.
 
it sure as hell beat sitting around waiting for
those rejection slips from The New Yorker and The
Atlantic Monthly.

I came away from On Drinking with a new, albeit small, degree of sympathy for Bukowski, although I doubt that’s the book’s aim. He was an addict, partly spurred by fans who cheered on his messy antics. Maybe they believed it was all an act or a persona, but as On Drinking makes clear, that wasn’t the case. Bukowski was sick, he suffered, and audiences exploited that. That doesn’t excuse the ugly comments he made throughout his life about women or people of color, but it points to a systemic problem in American pop culture.

Drunks are often portrayed as lovable buffoons or bumbling sidekicks. Think of Animal House or Bad Santa or Leaving Las Vegas or virtually any recent Hollywood comedy. T-shirt slogans read “Save water, drink tequila,” or “AA is for quitters.” Similarly, society roots for the tortured artist or the addicted creator, and Bukowski was both. He says so himself several times in On Drinking, often while tendering excuses for his behavior. Alcohol helps his creative process, he explains, adding: “Drinking is a chemistry which also rearranges our horizons for us. It gives us two ways to live instead of one.” When not making excuses, Bukowski boasts about the various women he “shacked” up with, or waxes philosophical about his constant boozing. In one interview he says, “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.”

On Drinking also throws into stark relief Bukowski’s casual misogyny and racism. In one interview, he describes himself as “antiblack, also antiyellow,” and admits he doesn’t like Black people because “they drive four in a car. And they hit my bumper.” Discussing a fight he almost got into with “four black guys” when he was “drunker than shit” after coming home from the racetrack, he says: “Drinking leads you into avenues where courage can’t take you.”

The book highlights the many dark places that drink took Bukowski. He was never shy about how much he imbibed, and he gave audiences what they apparently wanted when he talked or wrote about the prodigious quantity of wine or whiskey he put away. But read closer and you’ll see traces of struggle. “I keep drinking beer and scotch, pouring it down, like into a great emptiness … I admit that there is some rock stupidity in me that cannot be reached,” he writes in a letter to the poet William Wantling in 1965.

There are moments of sudden clarity, too. One interviewer asks Bukowski if he drank to prove his manhood when he was younger. “Yeah, in the worst sense, yeah,” he answers. “We used to think that a man drank, you know. That drinking made a man. Of course, that’s entirely untrue.” Still, if you read this chronological collection as a de facto biography, it seems Bukowski remained content with playing that part even toward the end of his life—at least publicly. In “11/6/92 12:08 AM,” an essay from 1992 about being invited to a concert at Dodger Stadium “courtesy of the rock musician who reads my books,” Bukowski comes across as older and a bit sadder. All signs point to this being a U2 concert, though Bukowski never says so directly. (The band played Dodger Stadium just a week before the date indicated in the essay’s title, and their song “Dirty Day” ends with “these days... run away like wild horses over the hills,” an homage to Bukowski’s 1969 poetry collection by a similar name.) “Rock music does not do it for me,” Bukowski writes, and he wasn’t impressed by the singer (Bono) dedicating the set to Bukowski and his wife. But he does appreciate the bartender in the VIP lounge who says he used to read Bukowski back when he had a column in an alternative newspaper. That loosens him up. “I kept going back to the bar again and again for my vodka 7’s. The bartender poured me tall ones.” Bukowski eventually blacks out, stumbles, and cracks his head on the bricks. “I looked like the old days after the barroom fights,” he writes, with mingled nostalgia and regret.

Would readers still care about Bukowski had he not been a notorious drunk? A more provocative question: Would he have been a different writer had he never poured himself a glass of whiskey or downed a beer before sitting to type? In an interview from 1989, Bukowski admits that drinking didn’t help him as much as some readers imagine. “I have had an illness that has limited my drinking,” he says. “So I sat down and wrote without the bottle, and it all came out just the same. So it doesn’t matter.” In a 1989 letter to the German writer Carl Weissner, Bukowski writes about falling off the wagon at his daughter’s wedding, and describes himself as “weak, coughing for 12 hours straight, no sleep, no appetite, almost too weak to walk to bathroom.” Hard living usually catches up in the end—a truism the Bukowski myth largely overlooks.

One of the last entries in the book is a 1992 letter to John Martin, Bukowski’s publisher at Black Sparrow Press: “Sober tonight. I think I write as well sober as drunk. Took me a long time to find that out.” If only Bukowski and all those rooting for him to chug one more beer or throw back another shot had realized earlier what he concluded two years before he died.