Into the Wild: Bukowski and Drinking

A few weeks back I wrote on my brother from another mother, that fella from the Midwest too, Monsieur Hemingway.  I particularly loved his letters back to his home and family from Paris, a love of mine that normally leads me to North Beach, of all places.  It ain't Paris.  Hell, it ain't even Italy (but don't tell the wait-staff that--I want them to keepa speakin'-a Italian, ifa you knowa what I mean).  But North Beach manifests in a great cafe culture.  You order a drink or two or cannoli or two and you sit with your book or your journal and you watch the world.  You hope other artists show up.  You hope to overhear a great debate about the writings of Sartre and Camus.  Or, barring all of that, Jo, you snob, you just listen and let the world wash over.

Probably the only disappointing aspect of Charles Bukowski's is something inconsistent with Hemingway--and that's a hatred of baseball.  Bukowski was not a baseball guy.  I can forgive him for it.  I have forgiven him for it about two hundred times since I moved here.  Not everyone likes baseball, after all.  The number one complaint that I've heard is that it's a slow sport.  (Usually the people who say this to me don't watch hockey either, which I would think would be the polar opposite of baseball, but watch football instead, a sport where much of each quarter is spent slamming into each other at the 45-yard-line just trying to get a down.)  Still, I'm trying to be open-minded.  So it's okay that Bukowski likes the ponies instead of sluggers or hurlers.  I'm fine with that.

I found Bukowski's "Sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way" about the same time that I found the Vesuvio Cafe.  But one at a time, gentle reader.

When I first moved to California in 2004 I was unemployed by my own hand as well, and living in Sunnyvale with my roommate, my brother.  My writing cafes were on Murphy Avenue in Sunnyvale and off of Dana in Mountain View.  I would park the car, unpack my HP laptop, and go sit with caffeine for two hours and write emails back to people I missed in Missouri.  On one of those sojourns in Mountain View I wandered around and found a two story bookstore in Mountain View one afternoon, a bookstore I found out was later a California chain called Books, Inc.  (It's still there, by the way.  Yes, I'm just as shocked as you are.)  I wandered around as I normally do with my book selection process, trying to find the best book to leave with, when I picked up the Bukowski volume, read the first page, and knew I was done shopping.  I took Bukowski back to the cafe with me and didn't bother with the laptop.  I just spent two hours reading his gruff, sympathetic voice.

Since buying that book in 2004, I've dabbled in it.  This year I sat down and read him every morning, after finishing my morning pages, one poem at a time, until I was done.  I knew I couldn't keep him, and I knew where I wanted to give him away.

The Vesuvio.

On another trip to Books, Inc (that was lethal stuff, finding that bookstore) in 2004 I came across a book chock full of San Francisco cafes, and I decided that while I didn't want to learn how to park in San Francisco, I did want to learn how to get around there.  North Beach, while a hike from the N-line (I didn't take buses until I moved to San Francisco in 2006), was a favorite.  I loved the beat culture--I had brought "On the Road" with me from Missouri as a part of a small, migrant collection.  Walking up Columbus, I found City Lights Books and one of the cafes in the cafe book that I could write on and cross off the list, Vesuvio.

I know that seasoned San Franciscans will probably disagree with me, but I don't think it would be much of a stretch to call Vesuvio a dive bar.  The space is dark despite a wall of windows, decoupaged from floor to ceiling with any manner and color of coasters, flyers, paraphernalia, and statements.  I walked in, and, miles from home had no desire to get drunk--the only thing I could get without alcohol was coffee or juice.  I went with coffee, a dollar a cup in 2004, and climbed up the narrow stairs to the second floor.  The Vesuvio, in all of it's funkiness, looks out over Jack Kerouac Alley to City Lights and to engraved sidewalk blocks with Ferlinghetti verses stamped in them.  Color, like a coat, is everywhere, and crammed.

I haven't been back since that writing in Vesuvio, until this past Saturday.

Once a year San Francisco has an event called Santa Con, a self-made, city-wide convention of men and women who want to dress up like Santa for a day and go revel in the streets.  There were groups of them at Vesuvio Saturday.  Across from me, completely unrelated to the revels, were two women with a pit bull in the booth with them, talking about the DVD boxed sets available of the Real Housewives and Jersey Shore.

Ah, but in front of me, dear reader, was another scholar, deep in a book, sipping his coffee, and doing his level best.  Level best at what, you ask?  Beats me.  Beat poetry.  Take a beat.  Prop Bukowski against the window.  Write with a vodka cranberry.  Pack up, leave Charles for a hope of a scholar, and walk out into the night.

Just the way Bukowski would have done.

Onward.

That Song by the Fray, Or, And You Discard

Keep In Touch...

I've been out for the last four days working on a project that I've gotten a grip around, which, I have to admit, was hard. When you work with others and are accountable to others, projects are visible all the frickin' time--you have to explain your progress. (I'm currently reading a memoir by Anthony Bourdain, and he said it best--"In the kitchen, you can't cover up.") But alone, and projects done alone, have no real accountability beyond yourself. You are accountable whether you show up, screw up, sleep in, get drunk, lose your keys, etc., but who's to know but you? In fact, are you truly accountable if no one else sees it? If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to--oh, you get the picture.

The thing is, I'm a workaholic by nature. I will make up crap to do JUST TO BE BUSY. And I realized that this past weekend when I finished two books in two days from just a few pages into the front cover--I was making up crap to stay busy when I could be making my dreams come true. The Healer and the Airman have told me, as have others, that I am my own worst enemy. I set an impossibly high standard and then immediately proceed to wreck the car as a 15-year-old might, with a strong sense of flailing stubbornness. I realized when I finished those two books over the weekend that I was in a race with competitors who WEREN'T RACING. They were just living. I was trying to keep up with trends, like people who were working conventional jobs, had husbands, wives, and kids, and who had their own passions.

Their own passions.

That last one was the true hang-up.

This last Monday I went to a Giants game, for a very cheap price for a very good seat. (I'll skip to the end of the night and share this: the seat was great but ended up sucking because I was next to five Washington Nationals fans who didn't know how to behave as guests. So the cheap seat ended up being worth its price, after all.) I love to get to games early and watch my boys warm up--you can see their humanity come out. I also love to go alone to games--I know that it's anti-social of me, but when I take other people to games they get up and down through the whole damn thing, I end up eating too much for my impaired stomach, and, even though I LOVE AT&T Park, I don't want to walk around it. I have walked it. Once a month for at least six months a year since 2004. In 2004 I would have walked it with you, but I don't do that now. Going with two other people works because they can walk off together and I can get away with eating like a bird, but one other person I have to entertain, and I go to the ballpark to be entertained.

I deeply love baseball, though, and wanna share it, so I took pictures of batting practice and sent them to a couple of people, with no response. My phone is dead quiet these days, so I was instantly discouraged. This is BASEBALL, PEOPLE. I HAVE A PASSION AND I'M OUT ENJOYING IT! CONGRATULATE ME.

I pocketed the phone and went to my seat, which happened to be behind a happy Latino group of about seven people (two kids, five adults, and THEY are Giants fans). The group brought a soft-side cooler, blankets, mitts--the regular family campout. Contrary to most single baseball fans I LOVE groups like this--they want a fun night too and kids are fun until they become teenagers, in my humble opinion. All of them disappeared save one woman who I presumed was the ticket-buyer's sister, she sat down in a seat about two seats down from me and proceeded to text on her phone.

Ten minutes later, no joke, batting practice brings a ball in our midst and slams it into the seat in front of her. A guy from the other side of me starts to get up to get it, but she's quick--she's got it and is back in her seat before he gets past me. She has a baseball! Her family missed it, but I was there, and I congratulate her. "I can't believe it," she laughs, all happiness. It's a damn round of leather and both of us are giggling and sharing the story over and over as though someone just swung by from Tiffany's and gave us each a pendant. As we are still laughing about it the rest of the crew comes back, flush with nachos, hot dogs, sodas, the works. She holds up the ball to her brother and he goes bananas--"You caught that?" And she tells the story again while I laugh behind them. He turns to me and laughs with me, "She caught that!" We're all incredulous at her good fortune. He turns to me again and asks, "Are you a season ticket holder?" "Nope," I say. "I got this ticket for 16 bucks on Facebook." "Me too!" he laughs. "And she caught a ball! And we're on ground level! And we're under the awning, no rain! Don't these seats rock?" I clinked my soda to his beer bottle and we were freshly stunned all over again at our good fortune. They had the best seats ever. And I had found someone to watch the game with who didn't need to be entertained and didn't need to respond on their cell phone.

That night was transition time for me...if I never heard from anyone I knew ever again, I would survive. Living in the Bay Area, I am surrounded by a party. Tuesday, Wednesday, and, once a month Thursday nights I join people with the same passions as me for an hour (hell, for the Tuesday night portion we are so comfortable with each other there are no longer introductions and we all KNOW what everyone else is working on, and we all get there an hour early to talk). Sometimes on Saturdays I get to spend the whole day with writers. Once a month I get to spend four hours in a ballpark with people who not only know who "Stamos" is but say that name when Brandon Crawford steps to the plate. All 42,000 of us have "Like a G-Man" memorized, and we bop around like bobbleheads when it comes on the big screen. I have a sneaky suspicion that when I go to the "Night at Treme" event at the Davies Symphony Hall tomorrow night there'll be more than one person around me thrilled to see Kermit and Wendell walk on stage.

My social circle has moved from the people that I was in proximity with at work to the strangers I will never meet again, or to the people who sprout names once a week and care about me as a WRITER or FELLOW PERSON OF PASSION, and not as a former fellow prisoner somewhere.

Will I discard past friends? Hell, no. The Healer once told me this discard might happen--my life will grow rich and full somewhere else and no one from my past will survive. But every week someone from my past finds me on Facebook, and some of those friends from the past prisons happen to share a passion of mine somewhere (independent film, Giants baseball, baseball in general, Vincente Fernandez concerts, 60% cocoa chocolate, literature, Philz Coffee, the Travel channel...it doesn't matter WHAT it is), and we might see it simultaneously somewhere. But to pine for someone to see my passion, and someone who wasn't there as a product of that passion--that's a waste and a closed door on the possibility of new friends, even if they end up just being a friend for the length of a caught pop fly into section 133, row 36, seat 3, of AT&T Park. I have discovered that I need to put the possibility first, and not keep waiting to go home again. Passion will be reborn in those that share passions, not pasts, with me.

For Auld Lang Syne, my dear. Keep in touch.

Onward, dear reader.

P.S.--This is where the title of today's post of Life For Rent comes from. I also have a writer's blog with a title from one of the lines from this song, here. You could say that "we agree and then never change." :)