Post Office by Charles Bukowski

In early March of this year, Titus Andronicus came to the A.V. Club office to record their (controversial) version of They Might Be Giants’ “Birdhouse In Your Soul.” My favorite part of their performance was the prologue, where the band used an audio recording of Harry Dean Stanton reading Charles Bukowski’s poem “Bluebird.”
I knew Bukowski’s name and his reputation, but had never read any of his stuff. In my mind, I lumped him in with Raymond Carver (justifiably, given the existence of a book called The Dirty Realism Duo: Charles Bukowski & Raymond Carver) and Jack Kerouac, writers who, in my experience, tended to appeal to males who are very into the idea of being writers—and the binge drinking they apparently consider a prerequisite for the lifestyle. These are guys who’d scoff at the “tortured artist” archetype for being pretentious and overly intellectual, only to embody it on more ostensibly blue-collar terms. They’d wear hangovers like badges of honor and mistake misogyny for musedom.
That’s not to say I disliked Carver or Kerouac; I enjoyed the former, though I was a little let down by the latter’s On The Road. I read it at 19 after hearing people go on about it, thinking I’d find some kind of non-conformist tome and instead discovered a dude getting loaded around the country. (That was the review I wrote in my zine, at least. I’ve been meaning to re-read it as a real adult.)
Back to Bukowski. I asked Twitter where to start with him, and was surprised by the number of “don’t bother” responses. This being Twitter, the writers didn't have much space actually critiquing Bukowski—they just reassured me about my blind spot by saying I wasn't missing anything. Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office, seemed as good a place as any. Supposedly written in three weeks, the book is highly personal; like his fictional surrogate Henry Chinaski, Bukowski worked in the post office as a carrier and sorter for years, and also supported himself for a while making money betting on horses. He based two of the female characters on women in his life. And, like Chinaski, Bukowski was an inveterate boozer. As Chinaski reminisces in Ham On Rye (another semi-autobiographical book about Bukowski’s childhood) about his first time getting loaded: “I thought, ‘Well, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long long time to come.’”
Of course, no one reading Bukowski’s Post Office would think alcohol did anything but keep Chinaski in a life of squalor, barely able to hold down a (shitty) job and living hand to mouth. Rare is it—or maybe unheard of—that Chinaski starts his day at the post office without a raging hangover. At one point, he’s so out of it that he walks into the wrong apartment in his building, thinking nothing of the different interior or the woman on sofa. (“She looked all right. Young. Good legs. Blonde.”) In Bukowski’s world, Chinaski is practically irresistible to women, despite his alcoholism, misogyny, and general crankiness, so the blonde flirts with him instead of freaking out.
“Yes,” I said, “I really like the way this place looks. It’s really going to lift my spirits.”
“That’s nice. My husband likes it too.”
“Now why would your husband…What? Your husband? Look, what’s this apartment number?”