Shadowboxing with Bukowski

1

The Big Shebang

Try as I may I can’t recall the first time I saw Hank Chinaski. His face appears out of nowhere, a loiterer who lurks on the edges of memory. He flits and stretches through a thousand different alleyways––­­­­a pervasive, irrepressible shadow: the very breath or spirit of Los Angeles.

Trying to remember the first time I saw Hank was like trying to remember the first time I had thought seriously about death, a subject I wasn’t keen to ponder, if I could avoid it. Death left me with a vague but no less disquieting sense of gloomy premonition that gnawed at my heels. A feeling I couldn’t easily shake. It was similar to the emanations of heat that rose like waves from the asphalt and concrete of Los Angeles, suspended in the hazy, particulate air: a dark prophecy that loomed and threatened to descend. It left me with suspicions that the whole sprawling mess that was L.A. was little more than an ornate mirage concocted by the desert sands, the lack of water, the scrub that grew––if that near cactus-like existence could be referred to as flora––like scabs on the soil, the accumulation of all the years of Hollywood scripts and film productions, the nameless actors and actresses who had disappeared in the cracks of its sidewalks, and to top it off those unholy Santa Ana winds. You could almost hear its choked whispers on the quietest nights suggesting, Nothing here is real.

I watched for Hank from my perch at The Little Big Bookstore on 6th Street, in Downtown San Pedro, a neglected half-forgotten little corner of Los Angeles. There, I studied the sea with alarming regularity, convinced it posed a fair amount of danger. I noted with some satisfaction, however, that San Pedro would be the first to go. The way I figured it, if you had to be annihilated there wasn’t much sense in waiting around until the bitter end watching friends, family and loved ones, to say nothing of the rest of humanity, swallowed up before your number was called. What was the advantage in being the last to go? Would the first to take the plunge have it any rougher than someone who saw everyone else go before him? Nah, best to beat the crowds, be the first to check out the lay of the land, so to speak, see what kind of refreshments are available in the nether world, grab a good seat, if at all possible, and hang on for the ride.

I suspected a far more pressing danger was the desert, those sands and heat that could snuff out any and all signs of life, so tenuously held. Hadn’t the Mojave and the Sahara once been garden paradises? Los Angeles itself was little more than a glorified desert, a painted wasteland, little different from the backdrop scenes I had often stumbled upon when my friends and I sneaked into the MGM lots in the backwoods of Culver City years before. All the swimming pools and steel and glass buildings couldn’t camouflage the fact that Los Angeles essentially had no water, was dry as a mummy’s corpse. The Los Angeles River was little more than a trickle one or two weeks a year and the only river I’d seen with a bed of concrete. Shut off the water that flowed down the California Aqueduct from the north, and the water piped in from the Colorado River to the east, and all of Los Angeles would blow away like a dead dandelion caught in a sandstorm.

Whether to die by drowning in a flood or to die suffocating on desert sands? Which was nobler in the mind to suffer? These were some of the burning questions that kept me awake at night, amid frets and worries over the bookstore. Los Angeles stood poised on the brink of imminent disaster, facing nature’s own supermarket of catastrophes: one good tidal wave would suffice, but then there were also potential floods and mudslides, earthquakes and fires, even volcanoes were possible. Hell, the whole thing could be sucked into the La Brea Tar Pits for all anyone knew. And there I was calling L.A. home, or rather San Pedro, for we tried to avoid acknowledging the ravenous monstrosity that was Los Angeles. I counted the minutes, the hours, the days until that final moment of reckoning, while waiting for when Bukowski or a customer would enter the store, whichever came first.

Chinaski had a face you couldn’t soon forget. At the same time it was a face that was naggingly familiar, a face mauled by the ravages of life. I’d seen him around Venice Beach, passed by him in Hollywood and Downtown L.A., around Santa Monica and Long Beach, Fairfax, Inglewood––especially in and around Hollywood Park––simply because Hank Chinaski wore the streets of Los Angeles upon his face. Peering at Hank’s mug was no different than crawling into the dingiest dive L.A. had to offer. I called him Hank like everyone else. Though he signed his books Charles Bukowski, Chinaski or Hank, his alter ego featured in his novels Ham on Rye and Women, was how most everyone referred to him. The only ones who ever approached him with, Hello, Mr. Bukowski, or called him Charles, were those who had never stepped through the suburbs, let alone the squalid, seedy downtown of Hank’s world; who hadn’t drunk from the same fetid trough as he, those who tiptoed through his poetry and stories now and then the way some people on occasion give themselves a thrill by driving––with windows rolled up and doors locked, of course––through some god-awful section of Downtown Baltimore or East L.A.

I wasn’t one of those who went up to pester him. I didn’t gawk after celebrities, follow limousines, or chase ambulances. If I saw Hank betting on the horses at Hollywood Park or Santa Anita, believe me I had sense enough to leave the man alone, even if it was only an acute sense of self-preservation that kept me at a distance. But it was more than that. I sure as hell wouldn’t want people coming up to me simply because they recognized me, liked a record I’d recorded, a book I’d written, or a movie I’d starred in. People didn’t see a building they admired and go off half-cocked and track down the architect, follow and hover round him or her, haunt their environment, phone them, ask for their autograph, try to find out where they lived, want to have their baby, did they?

Who knows? Perhaps there are anonymous groups out there that meet on a weekly basis to discuss their secret obsession with architects: gathered in a tight circle beneath a dim light in some borrowed attic or cellar, they sit, eager to share their problems of living in a society that is too quick to cast aspersions, and in which they are misunderstood: Hello, my name is Marcia, and I am a recovering obsessive/compulsive with a fixation on architects. A hum of acknowledgment, rich with empathy, emanates from the entire group, before they continue, going round and round each confessing their dirty little secret shame.

Besides, having had some experience of my own, I knew that people went to the racetrack to get away from it all, to dream big impossible dreams, and to feel some otherworldly affinity with those impressive thoroughbreds, those haughty fillies. Disturbing Hank at the racetrack would be like shouting out something obscene at someone on the other side of a cathedral: Hey, Louie, you get laid last night?

No, I’m telling you, it just wasn’t something you wanted to do.

Nevertheless, people approached him as if they were the very best of buddies, as if they’d both been weaned off the same bottle of muscatel or Ripple wine. Fans swarmed the man. They wanted to let him know they liked his stuff, that his was the only writing they read, that they had a thing or two in common. Hey, Bukowski, I love your poetry. Will you sign this racing program? Can I buy you a beer?

Was a writer different from any other schmuck? Was it something similar to the Native American who avoided having his image caught in a photograph; these people felt that in owning what the artist produced, they owned a piece of his soul as well?

Meanwhile, I beat a hasty and embarrassed retreat, perhaps due to my being a Kastinovich––anonymity being the preferred status of our family, for in that name lay a thousands insults and injuries, a thousand years of crimes and assaults, persecutions and depravities.

I cherished my inconspicuousness. I regularly practiced the art of being invisible, though, in reality, it was an innate ability I was born with. I didn’t have to try. I was regularly overlooked in stores and restaurants. If I spoke up in my pipsqueak voice, I’d get no response. I could be there for hours waiting for someone to assist me in my own bookstore. If there was anyone else around, the customers would walk right past me and up to them thinking they were the person who worked there. Even the baby in the window commanded more authority than yours truly.

While I waited for Hank to make an appearance, I gazed through the door of my bookshop, awaiting the eager throngs of book reading, book loving, more importantly, book buying customers––far too numerous to count––that San Pedro had to offer. The signs were favorable. Soon the Reagans would retire from office. New blood would turn things around. Young blood. People would wake up, wondering how it had happened, how the country had been allowed to slip into that deep dark sleep. Video games would become passé. America would regain its lost soul. The intelligentsia would rise again.

I merely waited for the trickle down theory to reach me. In the meantime, I patiently dismembered time, compared and contrasted reality with expectations. I surveyed the shop, found it overflowing with enough fiction, non‑fiction, art books, etc., to educate and enlighten a small country, books which all those potential I’ll-believe-‘em-when-I-see-‘em, customers could feed their much‑deprived heads. And I bit my fingernails down to the quick, hoping to make enough sales to pay the rent.

I planned the future as though it were a paint-by-numbers kit. I designed ornate connect-the-dot games in my search for an avenue toward achieving a modicum of success, a means of staying afloat. Never mind that one or another of my Jewish aunts or uncles constantly remarked: You want to make God laugh? Make a plan. Every other month had so far brought an imminent catastrophe of unpaid bills, surprise expenses, and forgotten or overlooked problems wreaking havoc in all corners of the store. Nevertheless, I dreamt glorious dreams of buying out the shop next door, perhaps upstairs as well; we’d expand, fill the entire building with books, used right now, sure, but how about a rare book room, and a new book section? How about shelves rising to the ceilings? A basement filled with subversive material? So what if there wasn’t a basement. Hell, I’d get down there with a shovel and dig one myself.

My dream was to have a literary Winchester Mystery House. I’d expand the bookstore downward and outward, room after room, filled to the brim with books.

I kept one uncertain finger on the pulse of the leading economic indicators, monitored the unemployment rate, business failures and inflation. During the Great Depression people had flocked to the movies. But how had book sales fared? People had sought escape, diversion, and, after all, used books were an inexpensive commodity. On top of that, the best of them were works of art; they enriched the soul, were objects of beauty.

I wasn’t sure, however, whether it was best for the economic situation to improve so that people would have more money to spend, or for things to worsen so they would rush to buy books in order to alleviate their problems. It was yet another quandary in which I found myself befuddled, a Gordian Knot I couldn’t unravel.

Hank regularly sat and chatted with the old Romanian at the Ka‑bob place directly across the street, two relics in a modern world, the Sphinx and the Cyclops, a lovely sight to behold. Most of the time the Sphinx sat with a newspaper, while the Cyclops stood guard, or wiped the counter with a soiled rag. I watched, noting that for the most part they conversed in silence.

Hank smoked his slender, brown, foreign cigarettes, the Romanian his hand-rolled smokes. There they chewed the fat, snarled at passers‑by, shared a laugh or two. The two of them older and meaner than sin itself.

I watched them with an undying fascination, a sense of awe. I had a strong affinity for anything and anyone old. I relished decrepit buildings, ruins, shards of ancient pottery, and relics of any kind.

I brought out my binoculars, to have a better look. Hank sipped a cup of something. Probably the thick, bitter, European coffee the Romanian brewed up for himself. It was a dark gooey brew I couldn’t even get down. He smoked. There was a paper on the table in front of him. A racing form, perhaps. I strained to see what horse he might be betting on, but, due to the angle of the paper and the distance, couldn’t make out anything. The thought of walking up with Hank to cash our winning daily double helped buoy my spirits.

The combined viciousness on their side of the street was, of course, in marked contrast to the sheer youth, inexperience, and innocence on our side. I watched the Cyclops and the Sphinx spit, smoke and swear, communicating mostly with grunts and snarls, a few monosyllables thrown in now and then. I listened, and must admit I did attempt to mimic, to join in on the exclusive language they shared. I even practiced it when alone in the shop: how to sit like Bukowski, the gestures, the look, the voice. But I failed miserably, except to entertain my one-year-old daughter, who occupied the crib in the bookstore window. The kid was my cohort, my partner, and sometimes bouncer. My wife’s presence was sporadic, as she often had to find a job so we’d have money to pay the rent, put food on the table, and of course buy books with which to stock our shelves.

I struggled with how to overcome my purity, my innocence. I didn’t smoke, drink or do drugs. I didn’t cavort with prostitutes, or even gamble with any enthusiasm. I’d never even seen the inside of a jail cell. God, I was green.

Hank’s voice went with his face. It was the voice of a mountain, if a mountain could or would talk. I, on the other hand, had the voice of a sparrow. And aside from maybe sticking a lit cigar down my throat I had no idea how to attain the ability to speak like a mountain. Besides, it was tricky to escape the banal, the pleasantries, hello, how are you, what’s new? I could handle the monosyllables okay. But I couldn’t get around the problem that one word led to another, a question begged a response, which led invariably to another question.

Unbearable long stretches of time passed wherein the Sphinx and the Cyclops didn’t utter a single word.

Whenever I saw Hank on the street, or in my bookstore, or across at the Kabob stand, I’d wave. He’d wave back.

Just got back from the track, Hank would say, flashing a grin that led me to believe he’d had a good day. Then I faced the obvious, glaring question of what, if anything, to say next? Gee, how’d you do? What horses did you bet on? You going back tomorrow? Or just nod and grin? Silent pauses made me squirm. It was a vicious cycle. The grunts and other noises also gave me trouble. I could neither decipher nor utilize them correctly––that specialty of saying so much by not saying anything. Perhaps I could convince the Cyclops to write a dictionary of grunts and other sounds for me on the three-and-a half by five-inch notepad on which he jotted down his daily totals.

The Romanian’s saving grace was that he never ever asked Hank about his writing, never once mentioned books; words were intended to adorn a menu or a sign, nothing more. Books were the equivalent of someone who not only talked too much, but who couldn’t stop; who could possibly have that much to say? About anything? He would no more read a book than he would listen to someone spill their guts about their lifetime of sorrows. He looked at books the way I looked at Pet Rocks, or Cabbage-Patch dolls, or I Found It! bumper stickers; they were ludicrous, utterly without merit, useless.

Anything I need to say, he informed me, I can say in one or two sentences. Who needs a whole book? He was among the many who were eager to inform me, a bookseller, why they didn’t buy or read books.

The times I sat down to eat in his establishment, instead of taking the food to go to enjoy in the refuge of my bookstore, the Cyclops joined me more or less by sitting down at one of the other tables, or at least rested one foot on a nearby chair as he leaned on his knee and smoked a cigarette. He sighed such weary, heavy sighs. While I ate he gazed up at the ceiling, blew smoke rings and watched them dissipate, picked up a newspaper, looked at his hands, his fingernails, stared at the door. He sighed again, then spat a shred of tobacco onto the tiled floor. He closed his eyes. If I was thoughtless enough to ask a question or make a remark like, Seen Hank lately? he snarled at the intrusion, the disturbance to his train of thought. And for all I knew he was thinking about grand unforgettable events: recalling his youth, past joys, the name of the gorgeous girl he had kissed one night at her window––what had ever happened to her?––the friends he had grown up with, those rare moments in his life when contentedness and happiness had paid him a short visit; moments far too fleeting, too remote, and too few.

The Romanian greeted his customers with a shout, Vhat do you vant? in a thick, unruly accent. He’d tell them what they could or couldn’t have with their sandwiches, what was acceptable to put between two slices of bread and what was not, and ran people out of the place if and when they annoyed him, which wasn’t infrequently. Other than that he was quite lovable.

I liked the old man. Every day I waved, Hey, Svevo, how’s it going? He’d wave back and snarl. A gesture indicating things were rotten as usual.

Vhy you always call me that? he sometimes asked.

Call you what?

Svevo?

Isn’t that your name?

No, he said, looking at me as though he was considering the removal of my head. I never told you my name.

I didn’t bother to ask what his name was either, and he never did tell me. I liked the one I had picked out for him just fine. He seemed like a Svevo, acted like a Svevo, and so for me he would always be Svevo. There were plenty of other things I didn’t ask him about, though I was definitely interested in knowing: what the faded tattoos that adorned his arms were; what he had seen and done during his long life; what was the secret of his friendship with Bukowski? But all that would have entailed conversation.

I stepped outside the bookstore and watched for potential customers, some unwary strays I might lure into the shop. A sporty couple in their early thirties, very trim and squeaky clean, looking every bit as though they’d just stepped off their catamaran, entered the ka-bob shop, looked over the menu and ordered something. Perhaps they would stroll over to my shop after they enjoyed their meal.

Say, how about putting some of that sauce on the sandwich? this foolish tourist fresh off the boat asked.

No! the Romanian answered.

Look, I’ll gladly pay extra, I don’t mind, I just want some of that sauce.

You know vhat? the Romanian said. I no put that sauce on that sandwich. That sauce don’t go on the sandwich. The sauce is for salad. You vant sauce, you order salad.

Get the man riled up and he says more in one minute than he has said in a whole month. There was no arguing with him. There was no shaking him from his convictions. These people simply did not know how to eat. He’d send them off in search of another establishment, or they’d become so indignant with his behavior, his mannerisms, his smoking as he cooked their food, that they would leave.

Come on, dear, let’s go somewhere else!

Fine, you go. He dismissed them with a wave of his hand.

I watched them jump back into their sports car and drive off without so much as a glance toward the bookstore. I called out to my friend, who stood in his doorway glaring after his errant customers. You sure got rid of them, all right.

Idiots. They vant to tell me how to make my food.

My daughter spied him from her crib in the window. Look, daddy, it’s the funny old man, she said. He scowled and waved his fat fist at her, but she laughed and pointed at him. Funny old man.

She wasn’t the least bit afraid of this man who made a regular habit of yelling at potential customers, leaving them cowering with a sudden loss of appetite, eager to flee from his shop, about to soil their pants. I, too, always prepared to defend myself, ready to duck or run, whenever I asked for one of his Greek salads or one of his beloved gyros sandwiches, never knowing if he was going to chew me out, slap me upside the head, or throw the food at me.

My daughter, on the other hand, thought he was amusing.

He came over still shaking his fist at her. Who’s a funny old man?

You are, she said, standing her ground, her tiny hands grasping the wooden rails of her crib.

I’m not a funny old man. Your father, he’s a funny old man.

No, she said with a giggle. You’re the funny old man.

He held up a packet of crackers, dangled it like a carrot in front of her face.

You vant crackers, huh? he said, gruffly. She nodded her head, yes, yes. I punch your face! He touched her face with his clenched fist and handed her the crackers. Vhat you say?

Thank you, funny old man, she said, laughing, as she watched him cross back to his side of the street.

I’m telling you, the girl never once laughed at Hank