Bukowski

I first heard about Charles Bukowski in '82. The movie Tales Of Ordinary Madness had come out. People were talking in awe about how the hero tried to head butt his way into a woman's vagina in the film. That and the scene where the girl puts the pin through her face. Those were the sort of things we used to get excited about in movies back then.

I knew this guy called Bob who was already reading Buk when the movie appeared. He was a year older than me. He didn't attend classes at the college, but he hung around with the students. He was thin, a smack head. He used Bukowski as a rationalisation of his self-destructive instincts. One day he got beaten up in a Kettering pub by a couple of guys he didn't know, and when he came out wiping blood from his face, he was laughing. Buk would have loved that, he said.