The first time I read Bukowski’s poetry I was on my summer break from art school. At that time my family were living in a rented house in Slough. It was a respectable enough place, built around the fifties with a garden and even an outdoor shitter. I was the only person in the house that used it; a cold shock to the thighs from a freezing bog seat was still better than bursting something while waiting for your siblings to finish in the bathroom. There were three bedrooms in the house, and six of us. My sister had her own room, my mum and dad had theirs and I shared with my two brothers when I wasn’t away studying. I worked as a gardener in a theme park about six miles away in order to save some money for the next term. I wasn’t too good at the gardening, the saving or the studying for that matter.
I had already read some of Bukowski’s novels, but never the poetry. It was on a visit to Forbidden Planet in London where a title seemed to jump out at me from among the others in the “subversive literature” section. The book was called “The Last Night of the Earth Poems”. Wow, what a fucking title. At the time I was reading Keats and Henry Rollins, so in a way Buk was the happy medium between the two. Well, maybe not happy.
I couldn’t keep my eyes out of that book until I finished it a few days later. I ignored the girl I’d gone to London with on the train back, she got angry so I offered her a view of the page I was reading, but that was all she could get from me. When I was working I began the long tradition of sneaky reading while the foreman wasn’t looking. Poetry is perfect for clandestine reading at a job. What you wean from ten lines can contribute to a satisfying daydream session before the tea break.
Best of all, when I got home, I bought a few beers, climbed on top of that outdoor shit house and sat there with Buk in the sunshine. Reading those poems, stopping only to laugh, sigh or take another glug of the lousy American beer I was into at the time. My mother told me to get down from that thing before the neighbours thought I was a peeping tom and called the police. I told her I could always read the poems out loud to prove I wasn’t. She went back in, knowing the threat was serious.
About a month later I found out that my degree had been terminated. I had fallen behind with my work and had a few disciplinary skirmishes during the first term. Some lecturers stuck up for me, but it seemed the obscene note I had written to the head of faculty during a whiskey and amphetamine session had sealed my fate.
Even though I had brought upon my own ruin, I was devastated. I had fallen in love with the city of Bath where I studied and the prospect of pushing barrows for a living in a part of the country I had come to detest brought me down to the ground with a nasty bump. I had got into making short films and now I thought there was no way to express myself creatively. That’s why reading Bukowski was such a lucky thing for me. On reading the letter that said Thanks for studying with us Mr O’Sullivan, now kindly fuck off, I started writing about how I felt. That’s when I had my epiphany, even at college when I was meant to be a visual artist, when things got a little heavy, I always expressed it through words. Bad, slovenly adolescent angst ridden words, but words nonetheless. It made the next ten years of my life more bearable, the fact that when everything slipped beyond my grasp I could sit down at a keyboard or with a notepad and get to work. That was the one thing the fuckers could never take from me.
I know I’ve already mentioned this on the blog once, but please allow me to say it again. It’s been ten years since I was kicked out of that College (now a University) and they’re paying me to go back and read my stuff. Out of everything I’ve achieved and everything I pissed away in the past ten years, I can’t stop smiling about that. Here’s to you Charles, if it wasn’t for you I would never have cast aside my troubles, climbed on top of the shit house my life can sometimes be and smile with the poets in the sunshine.