More Notes of a Dirty Old Man

by Bukowski, Charles

  The gang went from city to city around the world. They became known and had to wear disguises. At times they got enough money, wearied of it, split, only to meet and start up again.

  In between times, my friend Steve learned other tricks. Besides passing bad checks with fake I.D.’s, he had a little camera, and with this little camera he walked up to expensive cars, put the little camera against the door lock and snapped the shutter. When the film was developed it showed the inside grooves of the lock. A key was made from this. Then Cosmos would go back to the car, open the door, jump-start the car and drive it off. He stole a great many cars this way. A steering-wheel lock meant nothing: he could break one down on an average of one minute and 15 seconds.

  And he lived for free in the finest of hotels. He ran up huge sums and merely walked out, leaving an empty suitcase in the room with a note:

  “Thank you so much for everything.”

  A man like that could never consider an eight-hour job.

  And there I had had him pulling weeds out of my garden . . .

  And there was no way I could ever write about him because then the law would have me for harboring a criminal and the French Mafia would be after my ass, but I sat around thinking about the whole thing. I could present it as a work of fiction and then in the fiction I could say it was real. It was too long for a short story and not long enough for a novel. Well, shit.

  I had just finished my fourth novel and my favorite cat had died, a real tough son of a bitch, and Cristina and I were having our problems, but the racetrack was still there. I really loved that place, all those places, Anita, Hollywood Park, Los Alamitos. Del Mar and Pomona you could have. But the track was the best shrink I could ever have. It taught me about myself, the others, everything. It was the open lesson of balance and chance, it was a flash of lighting and it was the durability of the gods. It was the place for me.

  I drove into valet and the guy who handed me the yellow stub said, “You been sick, champ?”

  And I said, “No, what makes you ask?”

  “Didn’t see you yesterday,” he said.

  “How’s your wife and family?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  I walked on in and checked the program. Lots of maiden races. Good. My favorite play. Very little public information. But I had a method of detecting where my solid money was going.

  By the fourth race I was $225 ahead, sitting there, checking my program against the racing form and the board action when I sensed somebody sitting behind me. I could feel him there, looking over my shoulder. I didn’t like anybody near me. I moved on down. I felt this same figure following me, sitting down behind me again. I am one who is not too fond of humanity, even those who we are told are great, even those sicken me, so, you see, I didn’t like anybody around, so I turned and I said, “Hey, look, you son of a bitch—”

  And, you guessed it, it was Steve Cosmos.

  “Ank—” he said.

  “Well, baby,” I said, “all I can let you have is a twenty—”

  “Don’t worry, my friend,” he said. He pulled out a huge roll of money, very green, very fat, very legal.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I could ask you the same. How about a drink?”

  “Fine.”

  We walked up to the bar. Steve had a double whiskey and water. I ordered a vodka tonic.

  “Who do you like in this race?” he asked.

  “Well, if the board doesn’t change too much I like Blue Fire.”

  “Far Dream will win,” he said.

  “You ought to lay off those big closers,” I said. “I keep telling you that over and over but you won’t listen.”

  “Far Dream will win. There will be a fast pace.”

  “The old textbook approach. The game is different now. Nowadays the speed of the speed usually wins.”

  “Winner buys dinner?” Cosmos asked.

  “Winner buys dinner,” I said.

  We raised our drinks, clicked them, drained them off.

  SOURCES

  Open City, June 23–29, 1967

  Open City, July 7–13, 1967

  Open City, December 29, 1967–January 4, 1968

  Open City, October 25–31, 1968

  Open City, January 24–30, 1969

  NOLA Express, December 31, 1971–January 13, 1972

  NOLA Express, February 25, 1972

  Los Angeles Free Press, July 7, 1972

  Los Angeles Free Press, February 9, 1973

  Los Angeles Free Press, February 23, 1973

  Los Angeles Free Press, June 15, 1973

  “Bukowski Takes a Trip: No Nudie Bars,” Los Angeles Free

  Press, August 3 and August 10, 1973

  Los Angeles Free Press, September 28, 1973

  NOLA Express, November 2–15, 1973

  Open City, June 16–22, 1967

  Los Angeles Free Press, January 18, 1974

  Los Angeles Free Press, August 2, 1974

  Los Angeles Free Press, September 6, 1974

  Los Angeles Free Press, October 4, 1974

  Los Angeles Free Press, December 13, 1974

  Los Angeles Free Press, March 7, 1975

  Los Angeles Free Press, April 4, 1975

  Los Angeles Free Press, May 16 and May 23, 1975

  Los Angeles Free Press, July 11, 1975

  Los Angeles Free Press, July 18, 1975

  Smoke Signals, Vol 2. No. 4, 1982

  “Ecce Hetero: Bukowski’s Thoughts to Live By,” High Times,

  February 1983

  “Night on the Town,” High Times, December 1983

  “My Friend, The Gambler,” High Times, October 1984

  AFTERWORD

  by David Stephen Calonne

  Nineteen sixty-nine was Charles Bukowski’s annus mirabilis: Penguin Modern Poets 13 (Bukowski, Lamantia, Norse), a volume in the distinguished British series devoted to contemporary poets edited by Nikos Stangos in London, A Bukowski Sampler, and The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills were published. And, perhaps most significantly for his transformation from a largely unknown “underground” writer to a literary figure with an international reputation, Notes of a Dirty Old Man appeared on January 24, 1969, from Essex House, a small North Hollywood publisher specializing in erotica, in an edition of approximately 28,000 copies.1 The genesis of the book was aided by the efforts of an indefatigable editor named John Bryan. Bukowski had appeared previously in several Bryan publications: as early as July 1961 in Renaissance, with his poem “The Way to Review a Play”; in 1962, again in Renaissance, with his essay “Peace, Baby, Is Hard Sell”; and in 1964, in the magazine Notes from Underground, with his story “A Murder.” In San Francisco in November 1964, Bryan started Open City, then known as San Francisco Open City Press, which continued for fifteen issues. Bukowski’s brief story “If I Could Only Be Asleep” appeared in the January 1966 issue.2 Bryan had been in San Francisco when the owner of the Los Angeles Free Press asked him to move to Los Angeles to help with the newly inaugurated newspaper: he became managing editor and was responsible for significantly increasing its circulation.

  Then in 1967, Bryan decided to start his own newspaper in Los Angeles—Open City—and asked Bukowski to contribute, agreeing to pay him $10 a week. Bukowski claims in his autobiographical essay “Dirty Old Man Confesses” that it was he who invented the title (echoing one of his favorite books, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground): “one day John Bryan decided to start an Underground newspaper called Open City. I was asked to contribute a column a week. I called the column ‘Notes of A Dirty Old Man.’”3 The debut installment appeared in the May 12–18, 1967, issue.4 Bryan would publish 93 issues, ending in March 1969, with Bukowski appearing in 89 of them.5 In his Foreword to Notes of A Dirty Old Man, Bukowski described the ease and pleasure of his new assignment:Then one day after the races, I sat down and wrote the heading, NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN, opened a beer, and the writ
ing got done by itself. There was not the tenseness or the careful carving with a bit of a dull blade, that was needed to write something for the Atlantic Monthly.... There seemed to be no pressures. Just sit by the window, lift the beer and let it come. Anything that wanted to arrive, arrived.6

  Bukowski went on to describe the Sturm und Drang involved with writing and publishing poetry—sometimes he would wait two to five years to see a poem in print after it was accepted—but “with NOTES, sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city.”7

  Bukowski was thrilled by the birth of his first volume of prose and dashed off a happy self-review for Open City: How many times can a man go through the thresher and still keep his blood, the Summer sun inside his head? How many bad jails, how many bad women, how many sundry cancers, how many flat tires, how many this or that or what or what or what? . . .

  Frankly I read my own stories in easy wonderment, forgetting who I was, almost almost, and I thought: Ummm, ummm, this son of a bitch can really write.8

  The offer from Bryan actually came just at the right time, because Bukowski had already been composing prose for the past few years. In 1965, Douglas Blazek published Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts—a story in nine sections dealing with Bukowski’s life from childhood through his marriage to and divorce from Barbara Frye—and in the following year All the Assholes in the World and Mine, a hilarious account of his hemorrhoid operation. Now he had contracted to produce a weekly column: the discipline of the deadline opened the creative floodgates. Open City, and subsequently NOLA Express and the Los Angeles Free Press, gave Bukowski the opportunity to mine his past experiences and to try out various treatments of material which he would later transform in his novels Post Office, Factotum, Women, and Ham on Rye.

  Notes of A Dirty Old Man was reprinted in 1973 by City Lights and since then has been continuously in print. The series became a forum where Bukowski presented stories, essays, poems, interviews, even several cartoons (now more elegantly christened “graphic fiction”). However, the original book contained only forty of the hundreds of works he submitted under the “Dirty Old Man” rubric: other columns would later be collected in Erections, Ejaculations and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), South of No North (1974), and Hot Water Music (1983), as well as in the posthumous volumes Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook (2008) and Absence of the Hero (2010). Notes of a Dirty Old Man met with international success: Bukowski had broken through into new territory in American literature. He was a strange, compelling creature: a “drop out” from the mainstream, a “working-class” artist in love with “high culture”—Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Catullus, Li Po, Céline, and Dostoyevsky—and composing a hip, direct, swiftly moving prose, a new American argot: “vulgarity” punctuated by sudden, exquisite flights of lyrical sensitivity.9

  Bukowski first read Dostoyevsky in the early forties in the El Paso Public Library.10 And on the opening page of Notes of a Dirty Old Man, the narrator tells us that he was “a student of Dostoevski and listened to Mahler in the dark.”11 Like Dostoyevsky’s character in Notes from Underground, many of Bukowski’s Dionysian poets, dreamers, and misfits are half-mad, angry, impetuous, inspired, ecstatic. The title precisely describes Bukowski’s aim: he combines Dostoyevskian “notes” with the American slang expression “dirty old man,” thus mixing the Eastern European tradition of dark psyches at war with themselves and others with a cool, subversive American style informed by all the counter-cultural themes and obsessions of the sixties and seventies.

  For example, in the story depicting his trip to New Orleans, his wit and verve can be seen in the abrupt, telegraphic opening: “Going east. In the barcar. They had sent me money for the barcar. Of course, I had a pint getting on and had stopped for a pint at El Paso. I was the world’s greatest poet and he was the world’s greatest editor and bookmaker (and I’m not talking about horses).” The repetition of the primarily mono- and disyllabic words—“barcar,” “pint,” “greatest poet,” “greatest editor”—and stop-and-go syntax mirror the sound of the chugging and clattering train as it sets out on its journey. The narrative then grows organically, one element of plot added to another in a natural, effortless way. This skill was the product of years of labor, although what was new in Bukowski’s style of the sixties was this rapid movement of a shrewd, tough intelligence under the influence of the new, heady, casual openness of the Age of Aquarius.

  The compulsive eroticism of the series was at once a clever way to attract attention to his writing (as well as to sell newspapers) and an exploration of sex and love as the ultimate arena in which the frequently comic struggle for selfhood takes place. Bukowski often sees the sexual drama as an insane farce:So, to some writers, including the gloriously impertinent Bukowski, sex is obviously the tragicomedy. I don’t write about it as an instrument of obsession. I write about it as a stage play laugh where you have to cry about it, a bit, between acts. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote it much better. He had the distance and the style. I am still too near the target to effect total grace. People simply think I’m dirty. If you haven’t read Boccaccio, do. You might begin with The Decameron.12

  Interestingly, Pasolini’s film version of The Decameron (1970) appeared the year following the publication of Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Boccaccio (1313–1375) served as Bukowski’s thematic and structural model for his novel Women: The Decameron has 101 chapters, Women, 104. The other great Italian (Roman) writer to whom Bukowski was most devoted was Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84–54 B.C.), to whom he wrote several homages, including the humorous poem “what have I seen” in which he imagines seeing Catullus at the race track bar in the company of a lady of questionable virtue: “I like your way, Catullus, talking plainly about the / whore who claims you owe her money, or about / that guy who smiled too much—who cleaned / his teeth with horse piss, / or about how the young poets / come with their blameless tame verse, or about / how this or that guy married a slut.”13 Although he played brilliantly the role of an anti-intellectual primitive, Bukowski would bring his considerable knowledge of world literature to bear in his portrayal of the human sexual comedy.

  Bukowski explores a good deal of taboo territory, every form of sexual expression, “perversion,” or “deviancy.” We are introduced to a gallery of characters worthy of Wilhelm Stekel, or Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Although he surely did not intend in a conscious way to present such an encyclopedic summary of paraphiliae, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” over the course of the column’s lengthy run, would provide portrayals of child rape, castration, anal intercourse, three females picking up and ravishing a man, intercourse with a high-heeled shoe, voyeurism, bestiality, sexual role playing (in which a man is treated as a child by a middle-aged woman), fetishism, onanism, necrophilia, and violent sadism. Surely part of the success of the series was due to the fact that Bukowski said things that many people would have liked to say but lacked the courage to express. He took the lid off the id; he is “unrepressed” in his insistent uncovering of the submerged activity of the libido in the unconscious.

  As Michel Foucault asserts in The History of Sexuality: The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, of great transports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it was through a reflux movement, originating in these peripheral sexualities.14

  Bukowski provides an often humorous opportunity—as if to lessen the pain of the revelation—for these variou
s characters to make a “confession of what they were.” And even “the legitimate couple”—in, for example, the story of the couple in bed in which the wife is dreaming of intercourse with another man and the husband confesses to incestuous longings—is exposed in Bukowski as harboring dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of conscious awareness.

  Yet Bukowski, like D.H. Lawrence, sought a more natural expression of sexuality which was constantly frustrated by our alienating, cold, technocratic society. He writes in his NOLA essay of December 31, 1971–January 13, 1972 aboutall these people, the love-lost, the sex-lost, the suicide-driven . . . somewhere in the structure of our society it is impossible for these people to contact each other. Churches, dances, parties only seem to push them further apart, and the dating clubs, the Computer Love Machines only destroy more and more a naturalness that should have been: a naturalness that has somehow been crushed and seems to remain crushed forever in our present method of living (dying). See them put on their bright clothes and get into their new cars and roar off to NOWHERE. It’s all an outside maneuver and the contact is missed.

  It is possible to read Bukowski’s elaboration of all the varieties of sexual behavior as a kind of diagnosis of the ills of our culture, of the ways this “naturalness” has been subverted. The inhibition of this need to make “contact” with one another is precisely what has led to the frequently frenetic efforts of the caged human animal to break out of its traps in whatever ways it can devise—even if this means amputating parts of itself as it attempts to break free from the manacles.