I am wearing my alone beard. By which I mean that, to crueller, less wine-tired eyes than mine, it may well look as though a dried-out husk of roadkill has been pasted to my chin. As though my face has been the subject of some cosmic practical joke to which I have not yet wised-up.
I have, however, wised-up. It’s just that this morning I didn’t care enough to shave.
Hence, perhaps, my aloneness.
But Henry Chinaski! I mean, that Henry Chinaski…geez, what a guy! He has a likeshaped beard – at times scruffier, at times neater than mine – and yet he winds up with Laura! And Laura, well, let me tell you about Laura…
No, perhaps I should come back to her later – if I start off on that topic now, I’m liable to get distracted and not make the point I’m trying to make. Best to stick with Henry for the time being. He’s sometimes called Hank – one of those not-certain-how-it-came-about name-shortenings – but I think I’ll stick to Henry Chinaski here.
Anyway, the first time I met him, probably, he was drinking rotgut wine, or talking about drinking rotgut wine. Or thinking about it. Or on the verge of a fight out the back of a bar, smelling of it, breathing its flavour back up.
Yeah, that was it. I think.
Well, a bar was involved, somewhere, somehow. You see, bars are integral to Henry. He’s practically been built of them, by them. In return - the decent thing to do - he props up any he can find. He’s not picky, this Henry, not in the usual way. At least not when it comes to a drink. Or a fight.
But he is picky, very picky, when it comes to words. Oh, he can fool you into thinking that he isn’t, of course, because he really doesn’t seem to be. And it’s not as if he goes around all the time worshipping those words just for the sake of them being words either. No, what Henry does is respect what words can mean – he’s really very particular about meanings, very understanding of them and their importance to the human world. This is why he’s always eager and proud to announce to people that he’s a writer, that his greatest aspiration is to be one professionally. Words, he tells me, are ‘necessary things’ and he simply wants to make the most of their being necessary. He wants to ‘work’ them because they are there and they have to be worked and he is good at that. Oh, he might be able to fool some people into thinking that he isn’t, but he is. They have, out of their necessity, become natural to him. He was, as a documentary (which I still haven’t seen) suggested in it’s title, born into them.
Yeah, they made a documentary about Henry! Of course, there they call him something else. They call him Charles Bukowski. But Henry’s what he’s called in other films, and in books – yeah, in books too! – so let’s stick with Henry for now.
Having said all that, though, I may as well carry on and tell you that one of the times I met Henry, earlier tonight, it was in a film based on one of those books, Factotum. As always with Henry, it was a great way to pass through midnight into that part of morning just before that other part of morning when I’m getting ready to go to sleep. That latter time, naturally, being now.
Now, on this meeting, this specific but slightly booze-haze vague meeting, I sat by (yet was always included) as he drank rotgut (yes, that was this time not the first!), as he talked about how a poem is a city, as he won at the races, as he punched out a man at those selfsame races. As he met Jan – oh, yeah, I forgot to mention Jan. I went slightly less green over her, but each to their own – and went to bars with her, moved in and brought rotgut home to her. And I was sitting by too when he met Laura…
But wait – I should probably tell you about the first time I met Henry before getting into all that. Tell you about it properly.
You see, I met him semi-accidentally one night, one morning, in a film called Barfly (now, don’t get me wrong, I’d known Charles for some time – not long enough, but certainly enough to know I’d be better off if I knew him for longer. But that night was the first time I met Henry). He looked different then, younger and older at the same time, or in different light – in daylight and nightlight and twilight and barlight – but he sounded and acted pretty much the same as he did this evening. He gave off the same scent in my mind. Tripped the selfsame wires. But he didn’t quite look angry when he was swinging for the barman, and he didn’t quite look peaceful when the barman laid him flat out cold.
He just looked thirsty. Permanently thirsty, permanently getting thirstier, like a man stranded out at sea and disobeying all the rules about the water, water everywhere. Only not quite like that at all. More just thirsty for more experience about which it will be necessary to write, for more life that he can try to understand or just make more beautiful when he lays it out cold on the page. It doesn’t look peaceful, of course, but it does look beautiful.
So does he, in his way, despite the trimmed-roadkill mess of his beard, despite the way he’s half-blurred-out by alcohol most of the time. Despite the way he walks, arms wide away from his torso as though they’re always on standby to heft his bags and belongings for place to place, from old room to new old room, back slightly hunched from working on his writing over desks and over bottles. Flat-footed – never been much of an athlete, Henry – pounding the pavement and tiles of the barroom bathroom floors like his fingers pound typewriter keys, like they always mean to be going somewhere, even if they’ve got no fixed place in mind. Mainly, though, the first time I met him he just looked like he knew himself. He sounded that way too.
It was the same tonight. His look, his sound. As near as dammit, anyway. I could understand why he had women fighting over him, bareknuckle, in Barfly, and I could see how he wound up with Laura, for a time, in Factotum. And Laura…
Well, Laura’s one of a kind, one in a million… but the thing is, well, sometimes you get the feeling that it’s the millions that truly concern Henry Chinaski. That he can’t help thinking of them in all their multitudes and pondering their daily grinds, even as he goes about and talks about and writes about his own. What he had with Laura, well, even she had to know it wouldn’t hang about too long, because how you keep someone like Henry from looking out the window of tall office blocks that he’s cleaning and seeing the city and thinking about how that city is a poem and vice versa, how ‘a poem is a city asking a clock why,
its barbershops filled with cynical drunks,
a poem is a city where God rides naked
through the streets like Lady Godiva,
where dogs bark at night, and chase away
the flag; a poem is a city of poets,
a poem is this city now, 50 miles from nowhere,
the taste of liquor and cigarettes,
no police, no lovers, walking the streets’ and perhaps it sounds mean, but perhaps it isn’t, to say that Laura might not have been the point here, that maybe it’s really more about the things she made him write.
Because Henry, Henry knows very much that you have to live, that you have to go out and be there and live, but that you have to react to your life as well, that you only really know yourself when you do that, when you say what you most want to say and let out the thoughts that you most want to think. And, also, that if you somehow do what you most want to do, and live how you most want to live, then perhaps you should write about it sometimes, just so you remember than you have and that you can.
And Henry, or Hank, or Charles, whatever you want to call him, he does something to me, he makes me want to look at things more, and look for things, and find the rhythm in the way the world goes by, in the sound of the hooves of the days as they run away like wild horses over the hills. He makes me want to look at myself sometimes and not hide from what I see, and not lie about it either, and instead, if I'm dissatisfied, ask myself what I can find that will change that, that will make the satisfaction come.
He makes me think that maybe I’ll shave in the morning. Makes me think that maybe I’ll find me a poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment