It's mind-boggling to me, first of all, how one author can be so prolific. Bukowski wrote, I mean he must've done it all the time, a chronicler of all he saw, and a lot of what he saw was the gutter (from what I know). I put off "Hot Water Music" for a good while, but this reading was exactly what the doctor ordered in my current ordeal with my job status and the ugliness of this world. It is what it is, that's the way Bukowski seems to put it through this mass collection of short stories/vignettes.
One to the next, I would almost forget what I had read previously and need to refresh my memory. Ahh yes, Hot Lady, that's the one where the woman sets herself on fire to prove you could do it and not scream, Joan of Arc style. What's it mean? That people are crazy, it must mean that with the nonchalant, OH WELL ending (very common in these stories). And what else? Some Hangover, that's the one, yes, about a man getting extremely drunk then molesting two of the neighbors girls in his closet. ("She told you what?" "That you took her and Cathy into the closet and took their panties off and sniffed their peepees.") The man was a drunk, and somehow, someway, the neighbors decided to _help_ him, not call the cops. The moral? Hell, that one's tough...the terrible is terrible in isolation, but in totality it's the fucked crooked way of life. Terrible is subjective. And so on. These stories, especially exemplified by Some Hangover, could probably cause discomfort (as could lots of Bukowski from what I understand) if not taken at the bent he was trying to go for, exposure of a dirty world.
It's hard to isolate my favorites, so now I scroll through. Scrum Grief was a hilarious rub on modern poetry. Victor Valoff, the poet, was performing, and recurring Bukowski alter-ego Henry Chinaski, is sitting in with his girl and gets nauseous over the lines like, "East of the Suez of my heart / begins a buzzing buzzing buzzing / sombre still, still sombre", and so on repetitious, saying very little with a lot of words, the opposite of what poetry is supposed to be if you think about it. The Man Who Loved Elevators is a dark tale of a maybe or maybe not rapist (OK a probably rapist) who could only get excited about fucking women he didn't know on elevators. That one hit me because of the savagery of his final act, against an unwilling woman (the past one was all for it), and his inability to become intimate in bed, properly, the tale of a man too scared of the moment, his inhibitions only becoming, absurdly, sprung on elevators. It's sort of a crooked tale of sexual alienation. Beer at the Corner bar, shows a man being angrily brow-beaten by a corner bar crowd for his beliefs ("Hey, here's a guy who says he didn't feel a fucking thing when he read about those 50 little orphan girls burning to death in Boston!"). It's a staunchly Nihilistic bent, playing these sort of beliefs against a sentimental mainstream society. I liked Home Run, just for the bartender getting his skull cracked by the baseball bat, the bartender who is this sort of "in" world screwing over the bum drunk in the bar over, then getting his later on. I'd've had joy writing that one. Those might've been my favorite, who knows? There was only 30 some.
I guess I underplayed the comedy of these stories, too. The reactions to the absurd tales are hilarious. "So I've got this vase. It's a perfect fit for me. I put it into this vase and started thinking of Bernadette. I was going good when the damn thing broke. I had used it several times before but I suppose this time I was terribly excited. She's a sexy-looking woman..." Then the doctor, "Never never stick that thing into anything made of glass." That's just funny to me. Poor guy wanted to get his rocks off, but whoa, what a way to go about it. Had to get stitches. Anyhow, those are the types of situations Bukowski likes to write his characters into in "Hot Water Music". And what does the man do after he gets stitched up? Went grocery shopping. Another day.
So that's my first grand Bukowski experience. The guy is a master storyteller, especially with the brevity of these episodes (4-6 pages for most of 'em) he can really paint a situation, color it with dirty raw life and humor, and seemingly say fuck it, you do what you want with it.
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