Friday, January 13

I sketched out an outline of what I want to say at my reading. I called it The Making of Bukowski Never Did This.

Joe Smith, Red Roach Press, emailed me 10 questions for an interview for The Die.

I answered them, and sent it back. He may have follow-up questions.

I am getting excited about my trip.

I have reservations at the Key West Inn. I'm going to drive Brenda's rental car. I may eat at Lambert's Throwed-Roll Cafe, in Foley.

I'm going to take US 98 instead of I-10.

I hold up the book. Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family.

I recite the title. "Bukowski Never Did This: A Year in the Life of an Underground Writer and His Family."

I begin to speak.

Most people know-the readers I am trying to reach know-who Charles Bukowski is. The ones who don't, and are curious, will learn from my book.

Charles Bukowski--hereinafter Bukowki, or the Buk, like Madonna, or Cher--was an underground writer who made good.

After toiling in the little magazines and alternative newspaper scene, where he wrote a column called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," for the L. A. Free Press, learning his chops, a small press publisher, John Martin, Black Sparrow Press, gave him a monthly allowance to quit his job and write a book about working at the post office. He wrote the book in a matter of weeks. The rest is history.

Post Office was followed by Women, Factotum, and Ham On Rye, then the posthumous Pulp, a meditation on aging, and death.

He was dying when he wrote it.

He had t.b. The drugs they gave him cured it, but gave him leukemia.

The years from 50 to 60 were good years for Bukowski. The years from 60 to 70 were very good years. He had a clean young wife in a gingham dress, a BMW, a house in San Pedro with a swimming pool. Several cats.

Actually, Bukowski had the ideal career for a writer. His publisher published everything he wrote, and kept it in print, he translated his books, and sold them overseas, and three movies were made of his books. And a couple of documentaries.

At the height of his fame--he was famous overseas before he was famous in America--he toured Europe, took a paparazzo with him, and wrote Shakespeare Never Did This.

I wrote Bukowski Never Did This while working at the post office, so to speak. With no publishing contract. Indeed, with no hope of it ever being published. I had written 250 books without selling a word to New York, Hollywood, or a major regional or fine arts press. And with a wife and two kids.

Writers are competitive about things like that. I had it harder. You had it easier.

Hemingway said he went ten rounds with Mr. Tolstoy. Bukowski said he went ten rounds with Mr. Hemingway. I went ten rounds with Mr. Bukowski.

Without a paparazzo. But I wrote about what it was like in my book.

Several years ago I was employed as a senior information development specialist for a manufacturer of fiber-optic cable in Atlanta. Lucent Technologies.

I had a defined-benefit pension, paid for by the company.

I planned to retire in five years.

Remember Enron?

Many, if not most corporations were doing as Enron did. They cooked the books to show double-digit growth each quarter. They bought other companies. They sold divisions that were making money to raise cash. To buy other companies.

It was all a shell game. It was voodoo economics. It collapsed like a house of cards, leaving investors, employees, and customers holding the bag. Upper management floated down on their golden parachutes with a suitcase full of money, like Evel Knievel pulling the old ripcord at Snake Canyon.

I got out with what I had in my pension account. I was out of a job, but I did have that. There were no more high-paying, high-tech jobs. Those all went offshore.

I hadn't been busted, I had been reverted to my permanent rank. Yardbird.

That's buck private. The lowest enlisted rank. Bucking for private.

Charlie Parker's nickname was Yardbird. Not because he liked fried chicken, which he did, but because he was a yardbird in the service, picking up cigarette butts on the drillfield like a chicken pecking shit in a barnyard.

I had ten weeks separation pay, 26 weeks of unemployment, and one 13-week extension, or 49 weeks of paid idleness.

I could draw early, reduced benefit social security, at 62. I was 62.

I had rolled my pension distribution over into an annuity. I cashed in my 401k and paid off my credit card debt. I was debt-free, except for the mortgage on our house in Atlanta.

My wife's mother had just died, and her brothers and sister urged her to move into the old home place, keep it up, and buy it from them after her brother Wayne's estate was settled, a matter of some two years. So we had a free place to stay for two years and then a house to buy for $35,000--I had it appraised--at our own pace. Like Liv Ullman in Saraband.

We put our house in Atlanta up for sale, I moved to Panama City, Florida, and started fixing the house up, Brenda stayed in Atlanta to sell the house, and work until she got laid off, so she could draw 39 weeks of unemployment, and I went on sabbatical. We made enough profit on the house to pay a mover to move us.

In a year I wrote 24 books. And posted them on the web. It was my most productive year to that time. Probably ever, because I can't do that again.

Anyhow, when my unemployment ran out I found a job as a technical writer and started paying off the note on the house.

I got fired for blogging. After six months.

I got another job, as a grant writer, out of town. A long commute, but I could work from home several days a week.

So we had survived the layoff, the downsizing, the contraction of the business cycle, our cost of living was way down, but our standard of living had improved. Our quality of life had improved. We had simplified our lives, and liked them better.

We could eat fresh mullet, vegetables Brenda grew in her garden, and go hear Dread Clampitt play live acoustic string band music once a week, at The Red Bar, in Grayton Beach.

I called myself a hospitality industry report writer and folk art critic, the ecotourism czar of South Walton County, the sex tourism czar of Panama City Beach, an adventure travel correspondent for outdoor magazines, and a senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing think-tank the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI), in Point and Shoot, Florida. A wine tour of Point and Shoot. Let me show you my Point and Shoot. Point and Shoot is for lovers.

I said I wrote for the L. A. (Lower Alabama) Free Press. The Redneck Riviera.