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Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne

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Also, the wife of the biggest producer backing this movie has fallen in love with Steve. She threatens to leave the producer for Steve, and since the producer doesn’t want to lose her, they all rather live together, eat together, all that. She is a beautiful and intelligent woman. They go to the gaming tables together and Steve is totally insane, grabbing chips, spilling drinks over himself, shouting passages from Schopenhauer, vomiting upon ladies’ dresses, exclaiming that Death is Everywhere, that it is crawling through his intestines like shit, that everything is shit. He is now the brilliant writer-actor. He has been interviewed for several journals but insists that they don’t take his photograph, says a camera would destroy his soul, most likely means his ass . . .
Will let you know as more unfolds.
Best,
Jean”
 
 
All right, skip two months. Like that. Did you do it? Fine.
There’s another letter from Sasoon. He’s in Paris.
“Dear Hank:
We finished the movie. Much trouble with shooting Steve. I’d tell him to talk there, say this, then he’d do something else. It kept on and on. It was terrible. But we finished. And since Barbette played the female lead we were all right there. Now editing the film. Steve stayed to be with the producer’s wife.
Good luck with your documentary. A major TV station bought it. They are going to show it on prime time. Every night. But they want it broken up into segments of six minutes or less. Much work to be done there but we have fourteen hours of you and ought to get some good segments out of it.
With Steve things are not going as well with the producer’s wife as before. She stays with the producer at night in the villa and meets Steve secretly during the day. Steve has borrowed too much money from her which he can’t repay. And he has been barred from the casino. I send him bits of money when I can.
He writes me, ‘Since I have become a writer and an actor I am more broke than I have ever been. I have holes in the bottoms of my shoes and I sleep with the bums at night on the park benches. I know each of them by name. When it rains we try to hang out in the train station but the police run us off. I am at the absolute bottom, completely dissolute and destitute, and as full of despair, I guess, as a man can get. I am too spiritually weak and inept to even kill myself. If I killed myself where would they put me? Just on another park bench in hell . . . There is no escape from anything. I don’t even have the ability to go mad.’”
 
Poor Steve. I had never gotten the story quite straight because I had heard it from both Steve and Jean, and both times during heavy drinking, but it translates something like this:
As a young man Steve Cosmos had entered a casino with a small sum of money and he had no idea how the game worked. He had walked up to the wheel and placed a wager. He won. He just left the money there. And won again and again. I mean, he left the chips there, you know. He still left them there when he went to the men’s room, and when he came back he had won an enormous sum: $19,000. Does this seem possible? Or maybe I don’t have it quite right. I remember the sum, though: $19,000. Cosmos went to the cage to collect and they asked him if he wanted a check or cash. He took the cash.
There was a very handsome woman about that night and Steve mentioned to somebody that he wanted that woman. That somebody told him that that was impossible, that that simply was not that kind of woman. He told this somebody that he would give this woman $2,000 for her favors. They went up to a room in the casino and that was that. Steve was hooked. He hung around casinos. He met some con artists. They went from casino to casino doing their tricks. Cosmos told me many of them which I don’t have the freedom to divulge here. Except one. They had an electronically controlled roulette ball which they could make drop into any number. The button was operated from a fake package of cigarettes. All they had to do was switch balls, which was easy enough to do with a screen of distraction and fast hands. The ball was very delicate, however, and one night during a good run it exploded. They left their winnings there for a quick exit.
The gang went from city to city around the world. They became known and had to wear disguises. At times they got enough money, wearied of it, split, only to meet and start up again.
In between times, my friend Steve learned other tricks. Besides passing bad checks with fake I.D.’s, he had a little camera, and with this little camera he walked up to expensive cars, put the little camera against the door lock and snapped the shutter. When the film was developed it showed the inside grooves of the lock. A key was made from this. Then Cosmos would go back to the car, open the door, jump-start the car and drive it off. He stole a great many cars this way. A steering-wheel lock meant nothing: he could break one down on an average of one minute and 15 seconds.
And he lived for free in the finest of hotels. He ran up huge sums and merely walked out, leaving an empty suitcase in the room with a note:
“Thank you so much for everything.”
A man like that could never consider an eight-hour job.
And there I had had him pulling weeds out of my garden . . .
And there was no way I could ever write about him because then the law would have me for harboring a criminal and the French Mafia would be after my ass, but I sat around thinking about the whole thing. I could present it as a work of fiction and then in the fiction I could say it was real. It was too long for a short story and not long enough for a novel. Well, shit.
 
I had just finished my fourth novel and my favorite cat had died, a real tough son of a bitch, and Cristina and I were having our problems, but the racetrack was still there. I really loved that place, all those places, Anita, Hollywood Park, Los Alamitos. Del Mar and Pomona you could have. But the track was the best shrink I could ever have. It taught me about myself, the others, everything. It was the open lesson of balance and chance, it was a flash of lighting and it was the durability of the gods. It was the place for me.
I drove into valet and the guy who handed me the yellow stub said, “You been sick, champ?”
And I said, “No, what makes you ask?”
“Didn’t see you yesterday,” he said.
“How’s your wife and family?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said.
“That’s great,” I said.
I walked on in and checked the program. Lots of maiden races. Good. My favorite play. Very little public information. But I had a method of detecting where my solid money was going.
By the fourth race I was $225 ahead, sitting there, checking my program against the racing form and the board action when I sensed somebody sitting behind me. I could feel him there, looking over my shoulder. I didn’t like anybody near me. I moved on down. I felt this same figure following me, sitting down behind me again. I am one who is not too fond of humanity, even those who we are told are great, even those sicken me, so, you see, I didn’t like anybody around, so I turned and I said, “Hey, look, you son of a bitch—”
And, you guessed it, it was Steve Cosmos.
“Ank—” he said.
“Well, baby,” I said, “all I can let you have is a twenty—”
“Don’t worry, my friend,” he said. He pulled out a huge roll of money, very green, very fat, very legal.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I could ask you the same. How about a drink?”
“Fine.”
We walked up to the bar. Steve had a double whiskey and water. I ordered a vodka tonic.
“Who do you like in this race?” he asked.
“Well, if the board doesn’t change too much I like Blue Fire.”
“Far Dream will win,” he said.
“You ought to lay off those big closers,” I said. “I keep telling you that over and over but you won’t listen.”
“Far Dream will win. There will be a fast pace.”
“The old textbook approach. The game is different now. Nowadays the speed of the speed usually wins.”
“Winner buys dinner?” Cosmos asked.
“Winner buys dinner,” I said.
We raised our drinks, clicked them, drained them off.
SOURCES
 
Open City
, June 23–29, 1967
Open City
, July 7–13, 1967
Open City
, December 29, 1967–January 4, 1968
Open City
, October 25–31, 1968
Open City
, January 24–30, 1969
NOLA Express
, December 31, 1971–January 13, 1972
NOLA Express
, February 25, 1972
Los Angeles Free Press
, July 7, 1972
Los Angeles Free Press
, February 9, 1973
Los Angeles Free Press
, February 23, 1973
Los Angeles Free Press
, June 15, 1973
“Bukowski Takes a Trip: No Nudie Bars,”
Los Angeles Free
Press
, August 3 and August 10, 1973
Los Angeles Free Press
, September 28, 1973
NOLA Express
, November 2–15, 1973
Open City
, June 16–22, 1967
Los Angeles Free Press
, January 18, 1974
Los Angeles Free Press
, August 2, 1974
Los Angeles Free Press
, September 6, 1974
Los Angeles Free Press
, October 4, 1974
Los Angeles Free Press
, December 13, 1974
Los Angeles Free Press
, March 7, 1975
Los Angeles Free Press
, April 4, 1975
Los Angeles Free Press
, May 16 and May 23, 1975
Los Angeles Free Press
, July 11, 1975
Los Angeles Free Press
, July 18, 1975
Smoke Signals
, Vol 2. No. 4, 1982
“Ecce Hetero: Bukowski’s Thoughts to Live By,”
High Times
,
February 1983
“Night on the Town,”
High Times
, December 1983
“My Friend, The Gambler,”
High Times
, October 1984
AFTERWORD
 
by David Stephen Calonne
 
 
 
 
Nineteen sixty-nine was Charles Bukowski’s
annus mirabilis
:
Penguin Modern Poets 13
(Bukowski, Lamantia, Norse), a volume in the distinguished British series devoted to contemporary poets edited by Nikos Stangos in London,
A Bukowski Sampler
, and
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
were published. And, perhaps most significantly for his transformation from a largely unknown “underground” writer to a literary figure with an international reputation,
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
appeared on January 24, 1969, from Essex House, a small North Hollywood publisher specializing in erotica, in an edition of approximately 28,000 copies.
1
The genesis of the book was aided by the efforts of an indefatigable editor named John Bryan. Bukowski had appeared previously in several Bryan publications: as early as July 1961 in
Renaissance
, with his poem “The Way to Review a Play”; in 1962, again in
Renaissance
, with his essay “Peace, Baby, Is Hard Sell”; and in 1964, in the magazine
Notes from Underground
, with his story “A Murder.” In San Francisco in November 1964, Bryan started
Open City
, then known as
San Francisco Open City Press
, which continued for fifteen issues. Bukowski’s brief story “If I Could Only Be Asleep” appeared in the January 1966 issue.
2
Bryan had been in San Francisco when the owner of the
Los Angeles Free Press
asked him to move to Los Angeles to help with the newly inaugurated newspaper: he became managing editor and was responsible for significantly increasing its circulation.
Then in 1967, Bryan decided to start his own newspaper in Los Angeles—
Open City
—and asked Bukowski to contribute, agreeing to pay him $10 a week. Bukowski claims in his autobiographical essay “Dirty Old Man Confesses” that it was he who invented the title (echoing one of his favorite books, Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from Underground
): “one day John Bryan decided to start an Underground newspaper called
Open City
. I was asked to contribute a column a week. I called the column ‘Notes of A Dirty Old Man.’”
3
The debut installment appeared in the May 12–18, 1967, issue.
4
Bryan would publish 93 issues, ending in March 1969, with Bukowski appearing in 89 of them.
5
In his Foreword to
Notes of A Dirty Old Man
, Bukowski described the ease and pleasure of his new assignment:
Then one day after the races, I sat down and wrote the heading, NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN, opened a beer, and the writing got done by itself. There was not the tenseness or the careful carving with a bit of a dull blade, that was needed to write something for the
Atlantic Monthly
.... There seemed to be no pressures. Just sit by the window, lift the beer and let it come. Anything that wanted to arrive, arrived.
6
 

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