On Drinking

by Charles Bukowski

people who fail at drinking

  tend to fail

  at many other things

  also

  and it’s not the drink that’s

  the curse

  it’s the person

  involved

  this is a fine

  second bottle

  we look at each other

  in the early

  morning

  and it is

  a fine love

  affair: direct

  honest and

  all-

  consuming

  and my fingers are still

  upon these keys

  as I think of Li Po

  so

  many centuries ago

  drinking his wine

  writing his poems

  then

  setting them

  on fire

  and sailing them

  down the

  river

  as the emperors

  wept.

  From

  “An Evening at Buk’s Place”

  Question: You used to do drinking contests, I think.

  Bukowski: Yeah, I remember that. The drinking contests? Yeah, I often won them.

  Question: Did you ever lose?

  Bukowski: Not that many. But at the time I was very good. I could drink a lot, and I could outdrink about everybody. I think I’ve always had a taste for it, you know. It’s pleasant. It feels good. And during these contests, all the drinks were free. It was very nice. And to get paid for drinking.

  Question: Alcohol, wine, are they a kind of veil of illusion you throw upon reality? Or is it a way to see things more clearly?

  Bukowski: Well, to me, it gets me out of the normal person that I am. Like I don’t have to face this person day after day, year after year . . . The guy that brushes his teeth, he goes to the bathroom, he drives on the freeway, he stays sober forever. He only has one life, you see. Drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now. But a man who drinks, he can become this other person. He has a whole new life. He is different when he is drinking. I’m not saying that he is better or worse. But he is different. And this gives a man two lives. And that’s usually in my other life, my drinking life, that I do my writing. So, since I’ve been lucky with the writing. I’ve decided drink is very good for me. Does that answer your question whatever?

  Question: So you drink to write?

  Bukowski: Yes, it helps my writing.

  Question: Preferably wine, as you said.

  Bukowski: Wine helps keep things normal. I used to drink beer and scotch together. And write. But you can only write for an hour, or maybe an hour and a half that way. Then, it’s too much. But with wine, as I said, you can write three or four hours.

  Question: And with beer?

  Bukowski: Beer, well . . . you have to go to the bathroom every ten minutes. It breaks your concentration. So the wine is the best for creation. The blood of the gods. [ . . . ]

  Question: In your young days, did you drink to prove your manhood?

  Bukowski: Yeah, in the worst sense, yeah. We used to think that a man drank, you know. That drinking made a man. Of course, that’s entirely untrue. And those ten years I spent just in the bars . . . An awful lot of people who drink aren’t men at all, they are hardly anything. And they get on my ear, and they talked the most terrible dribble into my head you’ve ever heard . . . so drinking doesn’t create anything. It’s destructive to most people. Not to me, you understand, but to most people.

  Question: To you it’s not?

  Bukowski: No, it’s anti-destructive. [ . . . ] I do all my writing when I’m drunk. All the time I type I’m drunk. How can I complain? Should I complain about the royalties? I’m paid for drinking. They’re paying me to drink. That’s lovely.

  immortal wino

  Li Po, I keep thinking of you as I

  empty these bottles of

  wine.

  you knew how to pass the days and

  nights.

  immortal wino,

  what would you do with an electric

  typewriter,

  coming in after driving the

  Hollywood Freeway?

  what would you think while watching

  cable tv?

  what would you say about the atomic

  stockpiles?

  the Women’s Liberation

  Movement?

  terrorists?

  would you watch Monday night

  football?

  Li Po, our madhouses and jails are

  overflowing

  and the skies are hardly ever

  blue

  and the earth and the rivers

  stink of our

  lives.

  and the latest:

  we’ve begun to detect where God

  hides and we’re going to

  flush Him out and

  ask:

  “WHY?”

  well, Li Po, the wine is still

  good, and in spite of it all, there is

  still some

  time

  to

  sit alone

  and

  think.

  wish you were

  here.

  say,

  my cat just walked in

  and here

  in this drunken room

  this drunken night

  are these

  great yellow eyes

  staring at

  me

  as I pour a

  full glass of

  this beautiful red wine

  to

  you.

  cleansing the ranks

  what I am talking about, he said, is the reformed alcoholic, they have

  come by here, I have seen their flesh turn yellow and

  their eyes drop out, their souls slack and

  dull, then they start talking about how they never felt

  better and that now life has true meaning, no more hangovers,

  no more women leaving them, no more shame, no more guilt, it’s

  really great, it’s really so great

  but I can’t wait for them to leave, they are horrible people,

  even when they walk across the rugs their shoes leave no

  marks, as if there is nobody there

  then they mention God, quietly, you know, they don’t want to

  push you but . . .

  I try not to drink in front of them, I don’t want to force

  them back into that evil

  place.

  finally, they leave . . .

  and I go to the kitchen, pour a tall one, drain off half,

  grin, go the other half.

  none of the reformed I have ever met were grade-A

  professional alcoholics, they just tinkered and

  chippied with it . . .

  I’ve been drunk for 5 decades, I’ve drunk more booze than

  they’ve drunk water; what gets them in a silly tizzy

  alcoholic shit-state is what I use to taper-off

  with.

  some people just fail at everything and what I am talking

  about here is the reformed alcoholic: you can’t be

  reformed if you were never really

  one.

  one thing that makes it all so dull and

  terrible: they all still claim to be alcoholics even after

  they’ve stopped.

  this is immensely resented by the true of the

  tribe: we have earned our place here, feel worthy and

  honored in our station, would prefer not to be

  represented by worthless fakers: one can’t give up

  what one

  never had.

  From

  “Gin-Soaked Boy”

  Question: What was the period you drew on for the screenplay [Barfly]?

 
; Bukowski: Actually, it was two periods and I melded them together. When I lived in Philadelphia, I was a barfly. I was about 25, 24, 26, it gets kinda mixed up.

  I liked to fight—thought I was a tough guy. I drank and I fought. My means of existence . . . I don’t know how I ever made it. The drinks were free, people bought me drinks. I was more or less the bar entertainer, the clown. It was just a place to go every day. I’d go in at five every day; it opened officially at seven, but the bartender let me in, and I’d have two hours free drinks. Whiskey. So I was ready when the door opened. Then he’d say, “Sorry, Hank. Seven o’clock. Can’t give you any more drinks.” I’d say that I’d do what I can. I was off to a good start, with two hours of whiskey. Then I’d get mostly beers. I’d run errands for sandwiches, get mostly beat up. I’d sit there till 2 A.M., go back to my room, then be back at 5 A.M. Two and a half hours of sleep. I guess when you’re drunk you’re kind of asleep anyway. You’re resting up.

  I’d go home and there’d be a bottle of wine there. I’d drink half of that and go to sleep. And I wasn’t eating.

  Question: You must have had a hell of a constitution.

  Bukowski: I did have, yeah. I finally ended up in a hospital ten years later.

  Question: Did you have a lot of energy?

  Bukowski: No. Just the energy to lift a glass. I was hiding out. I didn’t know what else to do. This bar back east was a lively bar. It wasn’t a common bar. There were characters in there. There was a feeling. There was ugliness, there was dullness and stupidity. But there was also a certain gleeful high hitch you could feel there. Else I wouldn’t have stayed.

  I did about three years there; left, came back, did another three years. Then I came back to L.A. and worked Alvarado Street, the bars up and down there. Met the ladies—if you want to call them that.

  This is kind of a mixture of two areas, L.A. and Philadelphia, melded together. Which may be cheating, but it’s supposed to be fictional anyway, right? Must have been around 1946.

  It seems that all the good old scum bars are disappearing. In those days, Alvarado Street was still white. And you could just duck inside and get 86’d in one bar and then move right down ten paces and there’s another bar to walk into.

  I’ve gone into bars with deadwood people and an absolute deadwood feeling. You have one drink and you want to get the hell out of there so fast. But this bar was a lively hole in the sky.

  The first day I walked in, I got hooked. I just got into town. I walked out of my room—it was about two in the afternoon. I walked in and said, “Give me a bottle of beer.” Picked it up and a bottle came flying through the air, right past my head. People just kept on talking! Guy next to me turned around and said, “Hey you sonofabitch, you do that again I’m gonna knock your goddamn head off.” Then came another bottle flew past. “I told you, you sonofabitch.” Then there’s a big fiiiiight. Everybody went out in the back.

  I said, “God, what a jolly, lovely place. I’m going to stay here.” So I kept waiting for a repeat of that first lovely afternoon. I waited three years and it didn’t happen. I had to make it happen. I took over.

  I finally left. I said, “That first afternoon is never going to recur.” I was sucked in. It was right after the war was over.

  240 pounds

  well, you get used to drinking, you have it

  around all the time, and then in between the

  hard drinking you rest up on beer and

  wine.

  then when you decide not to drink for a day

  or a night,

  here’s a knock on the door and 2 or 3

  people with something to

  drink.

  it’s fattening.

  I got up to 240 pounds and I’m only 5 feet

  eleven and three quarter inches

  but I blew out from under my neck,

  a curving bow of flesh, no, bowl is more

  like it, the too tight belt gripping,

  cutting off the air, the belly hanging down

  over the belt, the face overfull, the eyes

  reddened, the skin

  pitted and unhealthy.

  another drink made you

  forget.

  the buttons ripped off my shirt front,

  the sleeves were too short,

  t-shirts were best, and blue jeans,

  standing there bloated,

  immense, puffing on a cheap

  cigar, I didn’t know

  anything.

  but I always drank until sunup

  whether with somebody or

  alone.

  they no longer sold my pants

  size in the regular stores

  so I went to a big boy

  store and the guy stopped me

  at the door:

  “you’re not big enough!”

  “all right, I’ll see you in

  a month.”

  I was too big for regular clothing

  and too small for big boy

  clothing.

  also, the few women I knew said,

  “god, don’t get on top of

  me!”

  “o.k., baby, o.k., we’ll work

  something out . . .”

  all that beer, wine, vodka, scotch,

  whiskey, gin . . .

  those morning bowel movements were

  something . . .

  the toilet bowel looked like somebody

  had shoveled in 3 shovelfuls . . .

  and the mess not only smelled like

  excreta,

  you still got the smell of whatever

  was consumed the night

  before . . . the scotch, the gin . . .

  etc.

  the problem was that the stench

  lasted for 3 or 4 hours.

  if a visitor happened by

  they would say something like:

  “what the fuck is that?

  did somebody die in

  here?”

  I tried to solve that situation

  by getting a fan and blowing air

  about the bathroom

  but that only spread the problem

  all about the

  courtyard.

  I also puked a lot in the

  mornings and found the best way

  to settle the stomach was half a

  glass of ale mixed with a half a

  glass of tomato

  juice.

  one morning I was sitting at

  the window facing the street

  (I had the front yard) and

  these two delicate boys walked

  by.

  “hey,” I heard one of them say,

  “that old guy in there is really

  wild and weird, he’s like a

  Neanderthal man who has broken

  his chain.”

  I really appreciated that:

  recognized at

  last.

  From

  Hollywood

  [T]he screenplay began to move. I was writing about a young man who wanted to write and drink but most of his success was with the bottle. The young man had been me. While the time had not been an unhappy time, it had been mostly a time of void and waiting. As I typed along, the characters in a certain bar returned to me. I saw each face again, the bodies, heard the voices, the conversations. There was one particular bar that had a certain deathly charm. I focused on that, relived the barroom fights with the bartender. I had not been a good fighter. To begin with my hands were too small and I was underfed, grossly underfed. But I had a certain amount of guts and I took a punch very well. My main problem during a fight was that I couldn’t truly get angry, even when it seemed my life was at stake. It was all playacting with me. It mattered and it didn’t. Fighting the bartender was something to do and it pleased the patrons who were a clubby little group. I was the outsider. There is something to be said for drinking—all those fights would have killed me had I been sober but being drunk it was as if the body turned to
rubber and the head to cement. Sprained wrists, puffed lips and battered kneecaps were about all I came up with the next day. Also, knots on the head from falling. How all this could become a screenplay, I didn’t know. I only knew that it was the only part of my life I hadn’t written much about. I believe that I was sane at that time, as sane as anybody. And I knew that there was a whole civilization of lost souls that lived in and off bars, daily, nightly and forever, until they died. I had never read about this civilization so I decided to write about it, the way I remembered it. The good old typer clicked along.

  * * *

  Francine Bowers was back with her notebook.

  “How did Jane die?”

  “Well, I was with somebody else by that time. We had been split for 2 years and I came by to visit her just before Christmas. She was a maid at this hotel and very popular. Everybody in the hotel had given her a bottle of wine. And there in her room was this little wooden shelf that ran along the wall just below the ceiling and on this shelf there must have been 18 or 19 bottles.

  “‘If you drink all that liquor, and you will, it will kill you! Don’t these people understand that?’ I asked her.

  “Jane just looked at me.

  “‘I’m going to take all of these fucking bottles out of here. These people are trying to murder you!’

  “Again, she just looked at me. I stayed with her that night and drank 3 of the bottles myself, which brought it down to 15 or 16. In the morning when I left I told her, ‘Please, don’t drink all of them . . .’ I came back a week and a half later. Her door was open. There was a large blood stain in the bed. There were no bottles in the room. I located her at the L.A. County Hospital. She was in an alcoholic coma. I sat with her for a long time, just looking at her, wetting her lips with water, brushing the hair out of her eyes. The nurses left us alone. Then, all at once, she opened her eyes and said, ‘I knew it would be you.’ Three hours later she was dead.”

  “She never had a real chance,” said Francine Bowers.

  “She didn’t want one. She was the only person I’ve ever met who had the same contempt for the human race as I did.”

  Francine folded up her notebook.

  “I’m sure all this is going to help me . . .”

  Then she was gone.

  2 Henry Miller paintings and etc.

  drunkenness can have its advantages, like now, sitting alone in this

  room, one A.M. from the window I can see the lights of the city, well,