I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead
I’m not sure what it was they were picking up on, but during my senior year of high school, adults in my life started giving me works by the beats—novels and poetry.
“Beatniks were members of a social movement in the mid-20th century, who subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle. They rejected the conformity and consumerism of mainstream American culture and expressed themselves through various forms of art, such as literature, poetry, music, and painting. They also experimented with spirituality, drugs, sexuality, and travel. The term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in 1958, as a derogatory label for the followers of the Beat Generation, a group of influential writers and artists who emerged during the era of the Silent Generation's maturing, from as early as 1946 to as late as 1963, but the subculture was at its most prevalent in the 1950s. The name was inspired by the Russian suffix "-nik", which was used to denote members of various political or social groups. The term "beat" originally was used by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to describe his social circle of friends and fellow writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Kerouac said that "beat" had multiple meanings, such as "beaten down", "beatific", "beat up", and "beat out". He also associated it with the musical term "beat", which referred to the rhythmic patterns of jazz, a genre that influenced many beatniks.” (Wikipedia)
Did I look like I’d had it? Like I was going to die of boredom? Like I was cut from the counter-revolutionary cloth of poets, musicians, vagrants, wanderers, seekers, and those perpetually discontented? Maybe they imagined there was something of themselves in me and they wanted to gift the younger version of them something they hadn’t received—the gift of being seen.
I just got off the phone with my longest-best girlfriend who I’ve known since I was 16 and she said, “Wait, who exactly was giving you these writings? I want to know the specific cases.”
“Well, 1 was that mutual friend of ours,” I told her, “Kevin S. He was a vagabond type from LA, a former junkie with a loud mouth and a sly smile but a heart of gold, who rented a big gorgeous house right on the cliff in Shell Beach and would throw the most outrageous dinner parties which ended up being a who’s who of our small town. I met the guy who would become my first boyfriend at one of those parties.
There was this little hole in the wall coffee shop called The Black Pearl—and this was before that term was popularized by the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. It was the coolest spot we had—well, that place and pool hall. That was kind of it if you were an alt kid not going to church. I mean, I tried the church youth groups too including the Christian punk rock shows but eventually, I couldn’t deal with all their anti-gay propaganda so it was the pool hall and The Black Pearl for me. So they had a bookshelf there at the Pearl and one day he handed me Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and said, ‘You should read this.’ I did.
2 was a teacher at the high school. He wasn’t even my teacher. But he ran the student newspaper so he probably should have been. I didn’t see myself as a writer back then. He had a classroom that was conjoined with the classroom of the teacher who taught Advanced Peer Communications where a bunch of us learned to be Peer Counselors. I used to mope around during breaks and lunches in there, utterly fed up with grade school. One day he handed me a stack of Bukowski poetry books like The Days Run Away Like Horses Over the Hills. I devoured them.
3 was an older man I was in a play with at the community theater—he had a wise stoicism about him. It was a version of Camelot in which the director wanted to make a statement about the war in Iraq. This was 2003 when all of that was starting up. Most of the people in the show were a little older than me and it felt like a good escape from high school. One day he handed me a boxed set of CDs (I think they were CDs and not cassette tapes) of Jack Kerouac reading his own poetry. I played them in my Honda Accord driving to and from rehearsals and I would feel a little more free. Given that I was not a 1950s dude in my 20s driving back and forth across the United States getting drunk at parties, I can’t imagine I saw much of myself in Dean Moriarity, but I must have liked the lawlessness of it—these characters didn’t conform to the straight and narrow. They did as they pleased—they did what felt good.
Then, of course, I get to college at Cal, with you there and it turns out we both love the Beats. We watched that documentary about them on my tiny crank dial TV from the 80s hooked up to a DVD player. Actually, how did we get that DVD? This was before Netflix. Blockbuster? Did we walk down to Blockbuster on Shattuck Avenue and search through the documentary section?
Then I met that guy—do you remember?—and there was a movie about Bukowski out and he drove me wildly around on the back of his motorcycle, terrifyingly up and down the steep, foggy hills of San Francisco at night. Then we went to a small independent theatre and took in Bukowski on the screen like crack cocaine. Still feeling a little hollow and lonely, though.”
It feels good to remember who I was at 18. My first blog, hosted on the Blogspot platform, that I started in college, was called Hustling Roses from the Bukowski poem Consummation of Grief.
Here are some of my favorite Bukowski quotes and poems.
The last one especially. So good.
