LEFT ON 4TH, LEFT ON SPRING, RIGHT ON 2ND. IT'S ON YOUR LEFT, BABY.

For "Hank" Henry Charles Bukowski

-and for the old, gray courthouse security guard who,

not too long ago, recommended his legend to me

Every library holds its secrets, and like some misunderstood people, some unfortunate libraries take theirs to the grave.

A sunny day it was, the day a security guard at the local courthouse recommended a book to me, or should I say, it was recommended to me by said security guard that I go find and read the works of certain notorious author, for the better edification of my young and wayward life’s foundational capacities. Little, soft clouds and yellow light casted a branchwork of community-shaken streets and butterfly-glossaries that day, painting the sun-garnered streets of East Los Angeles orange and black with shadows and morning sicknesses. The courthouse in East Los Angeles is located just across the 60 freeway from East L.A. College. There is a simple bridge spanning the freeway on which one always notes the local graffiti artists. New ones with each passing season. East Los Angeles College’s library is just now being rebuilt, along with the entire campus for that matter. The contractors are attacking the thing piece by piece, section by section, so as not to disturb the entirety of the campus during its total makeover. They plan to complete the entire project by 2005. Lo dudo.

To ultimately prepare for the building of the library, which is to be an extensive, glass-paned behemoth, the college’s book collections were moved into the gym, complete with the shelving and all proper library-related accoutrements. The bleachers and courts and everything were left open for the athletic department. This was the janitor’s idea. How it got from him to the chancellor bespeaks a general and quasi-inverted kind of bureaucratic nepotism I’d rather not go into right now. I began attending the college back in the fall term of 1998, and have been attending classes on and off until now, the spring term 2001. I'm now dropping out before I am given the unfortunate chance to graduate in nothing in particular, really. Life seems to have steered me in this direction, though, I must say. And it did just this by way of a simple book recommendation, or, as I’ve already clarified priorly, an author recommendation, something much more powerful comparatively. I sit here in King Eddy’s, right off First Street in Downtown L.A. I’m sipping a beer and reading poetry by Charles Bukowski. I have been freed, gloriously. Please, sit down and enjoy one with me, and allow me to continue. Dios mío, where was I?

I got my second unofficial DUI by the time I was 16. Luckily, the L.A. Central Juvenile Hall chose to give me a break, and they dismissed me seventy days early after I was thrown in there for a while succeeding the accident. Yellow lights. Lovin' it.

The third and fourth stunts, which would have been considered felonies in the state of California had I been old enough to've testified as an adult for the first two, have landed me again in an uncomfortable but not terminal series of conditions. As it stood, the third landed me a hungover overnighter in L.A. County Prison. Sweet blocks of fancy. This discrepancy was due to the small East Los Angeles precinct’s cage vacancy holding a steady flood by way of the gang interactions. The central prison would have to hold the drunks, too. Let them juicebox. And the fourth DUI simply has me scratching myself here in limbo, filing for another public lawyer, knowing I stand somewhere between life in prison if I’m unlucky and a few years of community service if I am lucky. The court date is set for a Tuesday morning, bright and early, September 11, 2001. Luke and the judiciary bunch. I’ve got to wait around until then to know my fate. For now, I'll keep writing autobiographical fiction on the backs of receipts and other such paper-fodder, and we'll call it fate.

Following my acquirement of my fourth charge some months ago I took the subway metro to the East L.A. Courthouse over on First Street by the park, where it sits adjacent to the 60 freeway in its mustard-hued paint job.

The security guard who was on duty that day changed my life for good. The guard, somehow, perhaps it was due to his dexterous handling of the security metal detector machine, though I don’t see how that could’ve dispatched this particular bit of information to him, realized that I had a copy of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in my shoe bag, where I also had my wrinkled court files and some spare change and my hat and sunglasses and a few joints in a small plastic bag. He smiled at me, a rough, beautiful, Santa Clausey smile I’ll never forget, and shared with me the author recommendation.

He handed my shoe bag back to me after it passed the detector’s test and asked, “So, Kerouac, you like that stuff, huh?”

“Y-yeah,” I responded meekly. Should I not like Kerouac for some reason? I thought.

“Well, hmmm,” he scratched at his chin. He smiled again, the same smile.

“You should look up Bukowski. You’ll like his stuff.”

“Bukowski?”

“Yeah, just check him out, you’ll like him. Charles Bukowski. He’s a real artist. A real one.”

“Ok, sure,” I said as I threw my shoe bag around my shoulder and onto my back, in that awkward, weak way shoe bags always get thrown on the backs of the people who are clueless and impractical enough to be wearing them. This jab is intended only at myself, for others may have their own reasons and philosophies about shoe bags and their utility. I walked away from the stout, gray-mustached guard, never really comfortable around such people in such circumstances, and I could hear his keyrings jingling lugubriously, I could hear him sighing and laughing to himself as he scrounged his belt around with his two hands as if his pants were full of ants. I remember the sound of his keyrings jingling, ringing along the stale courthouse hallway as I departed into the elevator which would supposedly lead me to my purgatorial and ever-postponed officiary doom.

After my educational little stop by the courthouse I spanned the bridge of graffiti. I entered the college campus and stormed the locker room's precincts where I thought the bastards deferred the fiction section. Nope. I checked the bathroom stalls. Nope. Only theology and physics and some statistics there. I checked the benches, the exit hallways, to no avail. Then I found the fiction collection. In the showers. I found no Bukowski, so I sat down and read from one of their copies of The Dharma Bums. I'm like that, I like a change. They have a few Kerouacs. The light was dim and forgiving and intimate. It reminded me of my childhood years, the seasons of the rubber ducky and the tepid bathwater. The languid lamplight in the old shower stalls: soft memorial splashes. Yellow light. An unofficial official library's tree of life. When you read him in a peaceful setting Jack Kerouac stirs the budding mind with vines of tepid, alcoholic, Nirvana-coated memorabilia and one becomes one with the immortal drunken monkey of life. Kerouac and Bukowski walk into a bar.

Later that night I thought more about what the security guard had said, and I decided that I would make my way downtown to the Los Angeles Central Library sometime in the next week. It’s acted as the beautiful, well-perched crown of the city ever since it was rebuilt in the modern-neo-classical style, after the damage incurred by the 1986 fire.

I eventually did make my way to the L.A. Central Library a few weeks later, on a Monday morning. This morning.

Today. This cloudy, warm Monday’s morning.

I found Charles Bukowski in the central library today. I spent all day curled up in a small window-nook in the northeast corner of the library’s fiction section and, while I finished off a bottle of port, I read and finished his first novel, Post Office.

After that, I stumbled down to The Last Bookstore on Fourth Street. It's right across the street from the Thrifty's on the corner. I asked the man behind the register if they had any Charles Bukowski. He smiled, a smile similar to the security guard’s smile, but this time nicer and yes maybe because it was in a nicer environment, a nicer situation, per say. He led me to a section of the bookstore's giant first-floor room where there waited for me a whole Bukowski section. Shelves and shelves full of slightly overpriced books by a certain Charles Bukowski. Black Sparrow press singing in the dead of night. Apparently, I had found some kind of local prophet, one who, more importantly, had lived only just a little while ago. One who once prowled the very streets I now prowl. And in the night. Tonight. Yesterday, tomorrow’s blues. A splash of yellow light.

I purchased three collections of his poetry in The Last Bookstore, dabbled book-talk with the man behind the register, and walked out the double doors, walking east down Fourth then swinging a left up Spring and then a right on Second Street, straight to King Eddy’s.

I am now sitting in King Eddy’s drinking a nice, cold beer. The man behind the register back in the bookstore, after seeing the books I had purchased and still having it in mind probably that I was young and eager and responsive to experiencing real poetry, eager and responsive enough to run after the trail of refuse which was triumphantly left behind by the late and local prophet, probably seeing in my eyes the showing signs of another very potential convert, left succinct directions on the back of my receipt to the un-famous dive bar here in Downtown L.A. which Charles Bukowski, supposedly, once frequented, and oh, not too long ago either. King Eddy’s.

I’ve now spent the last three hours reading every poem in the three poetry books I bought, and I feel, certainly, as if they are the very pork in my beans, the bread under my garlic butter, the expressive gutters of my Taj Mahal’s baths. Lord!

Lord, I’ve read every poem in these books and I here resolve to be the next great poet of my generation. The Muse of the new millennium.

But! But not only a poet of Los Angeles, no! I want to be a poet of the world. I will write. I will move mountains. I will write a short piece and dedicate it to the late great poet who inspired me. I will forever wrestle with the syntax of Joyce and the dialogue of ol' Buk. I will prosper with the prosperous poetic Prosperos of our time and of all times. I will build something that will outlast my generation.

I sit on my barstool and I continue to mutter alliterative self-accusations and worldly affirmations, and a particular word I once came across in James Joyce's Ulysses, panamahelmeted, comes to mind. I say the simple, silly word over and over again, simply out of a pure, aesthetic enjoyment. Literature's yellow, shining, starlike mysteries. Panamahelmeted. Panamahelmeted.

I will throw a Shakespearean tempest in the room where a blind, careful elephant once made itself indiscreetly, ironically, and innocently destructive. I will sweep up the broken China Plates and make a blue and white mosaic representing the everlasting purity and wonder of all creation.

Read Bukowski, the security guard said to me. Ironically, yes, I have been freed by the very hand that yet seeks to imprison me and drain me of my very soul. Some visions of Stockholm. I once was a boy who read Poe. Certainly, literature will always remain a mystery. E. A. Poe and Jack Kerouac and James Joyce and Charles Bukowski walk into a bar, and through the elegantly swinging saloon doors behind them in walks me, the nameless poet. The everydrunk.

And so it goes.

I take the cheese and leave the trap behind. A moon without a sun.

I write, sitting on a swivel stool here behind my fourth beer in King Eddy’s. I wonder about how long those old-bound books will go untouched in the college lockers, in the bathrooms, in the showers, and in the hallways of the old gym. The city lights outside flicker in my ears. I watch the fizz depart soulward from my beer's limit and I listen quietly to the easy SoCal drizzle out on the streets as it begins to lick the pavement purple, beginning its classical pat-pat-pat dance. The sounds grow in my belly. I feel a flickering fame emulating from all those weary, lost, worn stars above, and from below I sense the meteor shower of scant raindrops, careful reminiscences, and I hear poetry beating in the eyeless, pupil-dilating walls of my old, young, old heart.

I snap back into reality from my sentimental reverie and remind myself that once the library is finished, the gym’s the next building to go. Down and up. Up and down. Reborn like the poets. Where will they put all the towels? I now sit here and wonder.

I have a feeling all the books might keep about their spines an aroma of something odd and chaffy. Locker-room antics. Anyway, the librarian of the law wasn’t so bad after all. But alas, this receipt has come to its end, and alas, empty of any barflower's influence.

Signed,

A nameless poet

Los Angeles

2001

The above piece was transcribed off the backside of a dismal, trash-bound receipt, a true work of Avant-Garde Art almost lost to nothingness and the cruel grip of fate. It was found on Los Angeles's Skid Row the night of August 27th, 2001, a Monday. The receipt's face shows the purchased contents of three books of poetry from a local Los Angeles bookstore, priced at $24.72. The writer remains to this very day an unknown poet who happened to write in very small print on the backsides of forgotten slips and other perishables. We here stop to share a spirited moment of silence for our dear and anonymous subject, the nameless poet of the Twentieth Century and his Art and his memory, in the form of the calming breach between a new paragraph and its not-likely-to-be-forgotten predecessor.

Thank you. The ambiguous content of the receipt has been transcribed exactly as it appears, that is, word for word, for the celebratory benefit of the gentle audience's professional enjoyment. Indeed, the script had been written in a very, very fine handwritten print. There is nothing particular about the receipt. Just another day at the bookstore. As for the story, and as for time and the river, they never end: only the years wane.