It’s Charles Bukowski’s Birthday. Born in 1920, Buk has long been called the great poet and prose master of the wino set, but in truth, he was the great champion of working-class drunks. He didn’t live in an alley, he tried very hard to stay out of them, even if it meant doing the most menial job imaginable. I’ve always thought of him as a more direct and obscene Hemingway, with a bit of Nietzsche and Fante thrown in. He didn’t bother with that “Tip of the Iceberg” style of writing Hemingway mastered, he just crashed that iceberg right into the harbor, inviting everyone to have a good long look. He was one of the few popular writers who was right upfront about how much he drank, on and off the page. He reveled in revealing how much he laid back. So, how much and what did Bukowski drink? He was a true omnivore. He drank beer, wine, whiskey, vodka, ale, whatever you were willing to bring over to his hovel, he would drink it. In the dives he leaned to cheap drafts and well liquor, noting, “Liquor is like a symphony . . . you don’t use it as a downer, you use it to leap up into the sky when you have pain.” True story: Whenever Buk managed to claw a paycheck from the Man, he’d stock up, laying in jugs of cheap wine which he positioned in a semi-circle around his bed as totems against the cruel world lurking outside. “So I stayed in bed and drank,” he wrote. “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” Damn straight.
