My Favourite Books

No 67 - Factotum by Charles Bukowski

Charlie becomes the first on the block with three entries in this series.

If you’ve been paying attention to previous postings about Bukowski, or you’re familiar with any of his work, then you won’t need to ask what this ‘novel’ is about.

It’s Henry Chinaski, drinking to excess, gambling at race-courses, failing to hold down a series of menial jobs, drinking to excess, screwing a series of alcoholic whores and quasi-whores, drinking to excess but somehow amidst it managing to write the odd biographical piece about gambling, drinking and screwing, getting sacked and drinking to excess.

Bukowski is called the ‘poet laureate of skid row’ and much of this book, like all his others, may churn a certain type of delicate stomach. This, like ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is most definitely a book that you would not let your servants read.

It’s strong stuff, no doubt, and I won’t try and dress this up as some sort of earthy, authentic, working-class, literature-verite. It is a drunken scum-ball writing about the life of a drunken scum-ball, and I simply love it, because it is hilariously funny, while simultaneously cloaked in deep pathos. There is simply no getting away from the fact that this is life in the cess-pit, and is only recommended for those with iron constitutions, who have an inexplicable affinity with the gutter.

In my recent posting about Orwell’s essay on Donald McGill’s art, I quoted Orwell’s assertion that in the world of seaside postcards ‘drunkenness is ipso facto funny’. And so it is in Charles Bukowski’s work. There’s no point in approaching any of Charlie’s stories on the po-faced basis of alcoholism being an illness, and alcoholics needing treatment. That may well be the case, but if that was at the forefront of your mind then this stuff would merely depress you. No, you simply have to go with the flow - or stagger with the flow, more accurately - and treat this as one long slapstick odyssey undertaken by a man whose state of sobriety never gets above ‘tipsy’, but very often plunges below ‘miraculously and violently and dangerously drunk’.

Over the course of the 200 pages of the book, Henry is variously employed as a packer in a magazine distributors (quit after 4 days after asking for, and being refused, a raise); as an advertisement copier on a newspaper (sacked for spending all his time drinking beer in a nearby pub); as a packer in an auto parts warehouse (quit in order to move somewhere else away from his parents); as a person who replaces the advertising posters on subway cars overnight (didn’t fancy it and left the first shift to head to the nearest bar); as a dog biscuit maker in a dog biscuit factory (permanently drunk, snapped, assaulted the foreman, left without being asked); as a cleaner in a bar (drank his wages); as a shipping clerk in a ladies dresswear shop (actually sold one of his stories to a magazine, decided to head to Los Angeles in search of fame and fortune); as an unlikely librettist to an eccentric alcoholic millionaire who was writing an opera (the millionaire quickly drank himself to death); as a warehouseman in a bicycle warehouse (start time was 8am - sacked for turning up 6 days in a row at 10.30am); as an auto parts warehouseman (again) (doesn’t do any work, leaves early every day to get to the racetrack, fired for not pulling his weight); as an odd-job man (‘extra ball-bearing’) in a clothing store (sacked for stealing some of the clothing); as a shipping clerk in a fluorescent light fixture company (went on a bender for 3 days, didn’t bother going back to be fired); as a janitor in a newspaper building (sacked for being fast asleep in the ladies toilets); as a partsman in an automobile brake shop (smoking in the no-smoking area); as a driver for the Red Cross (drove to the wrong town, lost the blood donors); as a driver for the Yellow Cab company in Los Angeles (sacked for failing to disclose multifarious previous convictions for drunkeness and drunk driving - “I thought if I put it down I wouldn’t get hired“); as a shipping clerk in an art supply store (sacked for having sexual intercourse in the stock room with a part Japanese part Native American girl - who had a limp, - “I ended up getting fired for trying to fuck a slant-eyed squaw with a gimp in her left leg on top of 40 gallons of auto paint“); as a truck-loader for a Christmas decorations company (one liquid lunch break too many - didn’t return to work at all in the afternoon); as a warehouseman in another fluorescent light company (made redundant at new Year); as a Coconut Man in a bakery (made redundant); and as a weekend manager in a hotel employment office (drank a pint of whisky on the Sunday, had a blackout, held the hotel manager hostage, suggested that they employ prostitutes on the first floor, tore his coat and relented only when the police were on their way).

Just your sort of regular c.v. (if you happen to be a drunken bum).

Henry Chinaski’s philosophy (and the philosophy of his creator) is neatly summarised in the following sentence from the book -

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30am by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

The sort of life that Henry/Charlie envies is that of the LA bums who

“lived down there (the dry bed of the LA River) by the hundreds in little cement alcoves under the bridges and overpasses. Some of them even had potted plants in front of their places. All they needed to live like kings was canned heat (Sterno) and what they picked out of the nearby garbage dump. They were tanned and relaxed and most of them looked a hell of a lot healthier than the average Los Angeles businessman. Those guys down there had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed.”

(NOTE: ‘Sterno’ is a fuel for stoves and outdoor burners made from ethanol, methanol, water and an amphoteric oxide gelling agent, plus a dye that gives it a characteristic pink color. Designed to be odorless, a 7 oz (198 g) can will burn for up to two hours. The methanol is added to denature the product, which essentially is intended to make it too toxic to be drinkable. In other words, it is a very alcoholic drink, but it cannot be drunk because it has been rendered poisonously undrinkable.

Well, rendered poisonously undrinkable to most of us, but not, unfortunately to those who will drink anything containing alcohol**. And here is the real beauty of it - because it’s ‘undrinkable’ it is not taxed as a beverage. Exactly like methylated spirits it therefore combines the 2 most desirable aspects of a liquid - it is both highly alcoholic and very very cheap.

Sterno has long been mixed with water and other liquids to produce a drink called “canned heat”, “squeeze” or “pink lady”. The product is squeezed through a rag (or in other traditions, a loaf of French bread with ends removed) to extract the alcohol. These alcoholic beverages, primarily used in poorer communities, have been linked to numerous deaths from methanol poisoning, including 31 people in Philadelphia in 1963.)

(Note - for those of you of a legal bent, see the case of Pennsylvania v Max Feinberg, Supreme Court of Pennsylvania 433 Pa. 558, 253 A.2d 636 (1969)

which was the principal case arising out of the Sterno deaths in Philadelphia - Feinberg being the shop-keeper who sold the lethal industrial strength Sterno to his thirsty skid-row cutomers - Feinberg was charged with and convicted of 31 charges of involuntary manslaughter - the case, and the court’s decision has some interesting similarities to the much later Scottish ‘glue-sniffing kits’ case of Khaliq and others -v- H.M.A. 1984 S.L.T. 137.)

** Old Campbeltown joke - at one time the driver and crew of the local refuse collecting vehicle (bin lorry) were notorious drinkers. One day the bin lorry arrived at the gates of a farm outside the town, where they were met by the farmer and the following exchange took place -

“I’m sorry boys, ye cannae come in here. We’ve got a case o’ anthrax”

“That’s OK, we’ll drink anything”

I’ve moved a long way from discussing Chuck’s book. It’s one of my favourites. Buy it, read it , love it.