The neighborhood liquor store was my destination on a cloudy afternoon. Approaching on foot, I saw something I thought had gone defunct—the Old Crow Book Club! The crew was in session on its usual stretch of sidewalk and my heart rocked with joy. They saw me coming and threw up waves and a rowdy hello.
Mark introduced me the club's newest member, Jamie. She was a younger woman with big eyes and a big smile and sat on the sidewalk alternating between drinking a Smirnoff Ice Smash, eating stir fry, and rolling a cigarette.
I held out two tins of luxury pipe tobacco to Mark and asked if he wanted them. Did he ever! He was beyond giddy at the prospect and I handed over two English blends. Mark said he had loved the Balkan leaf I'd previously given him. He'd just run out! I told him he'd be smoking fine pipe tobacco for the next decade considering the supply I had stashed in the garage.
Another member of the club, Sean, said he'd taken a bit of the Balkan, doused it with Old Crow, and then massaged it into a chaw. A damn chaw! And the combination was delicious! It was certainly the only Old Crow-flavored chaw made from fine pipe tobacco in the the history of tobacco chewing and I burst into laughter at the thought.
Did Sean have any Old Crow at the moment to build another chaw? He did not. He informed me that the liquor store was plumb out of the affordable half pints.
Then I noticed a book on the sidewalk and could not believe it: Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski!
Right then and there I knew Bukowski's inebriated ghost had materialized on this very sidewalk. These were his people, they were reading him, reading about themselves, they were drunk, misfits to varying degrees, and homeless. It occurred to me that I didn't know if Bukowski ever was actually homeless in the way it's defined today. He always seemed to hole up in cheap motels or flop houses and had a factotum job to keep him (barely) in bread, wine and tobacco. It also occurred to me that most of the characters Bukowski wrote about in his fiction, including himself, would probably be homeless in Los Angeles today.
The presence of Hot Water Music had astonished me and I said as much. Sean said he and Jamie took turns reading one page aloud to each other on the sidewalk and in the evenings wherever they ended up, most likely in a tent. I gathered she was his girlfriend. How romantic! How perfectly Bukowski!
I quoted Bukowski to the members: “I can get more knowledge of life by talking to a garbage man than I could talking to T.S. Eliot.”
They laughed and agreed, although Mark lightly countered T.S. Eliot was a very smart guy because Mark had undoubtedly read and grasped his poetry while I had tried and failed with “The Waste Land” a half dozen times.
It dawned on me that I was learning more about the current American human condition from the Old Crow Book Club than I was learning from anything I'd read.
The crew thanked me for the tobacco and went to work rolling cigarettes. Once they had them ready, they'd light up and start reading where they'd left off.
But the Old Crow Book Club was obviously and unacceptably missing something while reading Charles Bukowski and that loss demanded immediate rectification.
I walked to the liquor store and made my purchase and an extra purchase. I dropped a fifth of Old Crow into the hands of the club and they went nuts. I said it probably wasn't the right thing to do to people living on the streets, but Jamie said, “It fucking A is the right thing to do!” and broke out in the happiest face I have ever seen on a homeless person.
Sean gave me a fist bump for the booze, but it was more than that, and I knew that was the truth.
As I walked away, Mark yelled to me: “I'm going to start calling you Matt Bukowski.”
Excellent
Good to hear that the Old Crow Book Club is thriving.