Gabbing with a ghostly Boooookowski
By Daniel Perez
Alone, I sit in a San Pedro graveyard waiting for Henry Charles Bukowski Jr. The headstone reads “Don’t Try,” but, Mr. Bukowski, I will try. It was always a dream of mine to interview my favorite deceased writer, resurrect him from the dead and make him give one final interview. I don’t know how the nice people at the Union pulled it off, maybe they know God herself, but I will interview Bukowski tonight.
There is no smoke and mirrors with Bukowski; everything he says is straightforward. It doesn’t surprise me that he comes crawling out of his grave with a bottle of vodka and a cigarette.
“Are you going to help me out, or are you just going to fucking stare at me?” he says.
I set up two beach chairs next to his tombstone. Our interview begins.
Daniel Perez: I guess I should start with a generic question, just to get the ball rolling—
Charles Bukowski: My balls are so old that the only way I can get around is by having them roll on the floor with me… How’s that for getting the ball rolling?
DP: Hm… yeah, that works. Okay, my first question is: do you have any advice for writers, like myself, who are at the starting line of this path of no return?
CB: Do you know that feeling you get when the hemorrhoids of your ass touch the cold, white porcelain of your toilet?
DP: No, I’m sorry I’m not familiar—
CB: How about pissing in the wind?
DP: I’m familiar with that term.
CB: Not the term… have you ever actually pissed in the wind?
DP: No, I haven’t.
CB: Then I have no advice for young writers like yourself. Actually, my advice is to kill yourself. It is only when you’re dead that your writing becomes recognized.
DP: Is that so?
CB: Yeah, “most writers I know now / only praise safely / dead writers.”
DP: I guess you could say that was particularly the case with you and your work.
CB: For the most part, yes, “and to those who are quick to praise me / then, I say it now: fuck / you.”
DP: I know you died because of health issues that might have been avoidable—
CB: I know what you’re getting at.
DP:…
CB: You want to know when I knew my time was up—when I just gave up?
DP: Yeah, I mean, no. I wasn’t going to put it that way.
CB: Listen, kid, you can’t offend the dead. I think that’s why it would be a great thing if everyone were dead, because then no one would become offended.
DP: Interesting observation—
CB: Okay, I’ll tell you when I decided to give up. It was on a day that “I got up and walked out of / the bedroom and out of the / house and I began walking / down the street and I / turned the corner at twenty- / first street and I walked / down twenty-first street / and I kept walking and / walking past / hedges and driveways and / houses and there / were men mowing and watering / their lawns, and there were / dogs barking, and there was / nothing else to do, there was / absolutely nothing else for me to / do.”
DP: It sounds like it was a peaceful ending.
CB: It was. What, do you think a demise has to be full of bitter regret and shit like that?
DP: No, I just—
CB: Don’t believe what others have to say. Even the afterlife is not that bad. Hell has been given a bad reputation.
DP: Hell?
CB: Yeah. C’mon, you don’t think the guy with the big pants would let me in to heaven…”
DP: Yeah, I guess not.
CB: But it’s not that bad. Hemingway and I go on blind dates all the time. We try to bring Carver along but he’s too busy trying to nail some bitch, I tend to forget her name. Wait… Wait. It’ll come to me… Oh yeah, her name is Emily Dickinson.
DP: Ah-ha. I wouldn’t blame him. I mean, have you read her poem “Because I Could Not Stop For Death?”
CB: She fucking writes poetry?
DP: She’s a writer, well… was. Hm, moving on… So what else do you and Hemingway do down there in hell?
CB: Hemingway and I usually end up at the bars where we drink “the devils drink from the breast / of stunned maids.”
As he says this last comment he drinks the rest of the bottle of vodka (without offering me any). His cigarette is long gone, and then with a blink of an eye our interview is over.
