The two of us were introduced by my friend, Ryan LaRoux. It was a party on a hill overlooking the Winooski River. My friend Sean and I had this older dreadlocked dude, Island, living on our couch. Island was a wanna be reggae singer who played the melodica and he invited us to go to this bash which ended up being not so great but there was a keg of beer and plenty of weed. Anyway, our friend, Ryan lived in the house. I’m pretty sure it was a random reconnection. He hated Reggae. We were in his bedroom for some reason, probably to smoke weed, and there was a tattered copy of a novel on the floor, Women by Charles Bukowski.

I picked it up and asked Ryan, “Who is this guy?”

“He’s an old writer, a poet, a lush,” Ryan said. “One of his greatest lines is this: ‘Farmer John smokes his one bacon, now that’s one tough son of a bitch.’”

Hmm. I pawed through the novel. This was the first paragraph:

“I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without a sense of yearning and with a sense of futility.”

Interesting. It went on. the writing was straightforward, minimalist, and also felt brutally honest, almost too much so. I asked LaRoux if I could borrow the book and he told me no, he didn’t want to give it out. “Sorry, dude,” he said. “Whenever I let someone borrow a book I never get it back.”

I forgot about Bukowski for some time. Many years later I was browsing at a used bookstore, The Crow, in my hometown, Burlington, and there it was, another battered copy of Women. I picked it up and took it home. I lived in the attic of this flophouse on Green Street. I had the whole floor to myself and had a door I could lock but didn’t have my own entrance. I had to walk through the two floors to get up there. Usually my roommates, a collection of different people, were in the living room watching TV. My rent was $280 a month.

I took the book upstairs and finished it within a few hours. My first thought was how hilarious Bukowski’s antics were. It was touted as fiction but sounded autobiographical. Over the course of the next few weeks I found all of his novels, one by one–Factotum, Ham on Rye, Post Office, Hollywood–and bought and read them, then read them again, then his short story collections and a good amount of his poetry books. If I could point to a few reasons why I felt he spoke to me it was because I was just a blue class slob working in a kitchen, going out almost every night and getting drunk with my friends. I felt like I was living the Bukowski lifestyle and although he wrote mostly about living in Los Angeles in the 40s and 50s, he also lived that life of going from job to job and being unsatisfied and skeptical about the whole operation. Having shithead bosses, the whole process of being lower middle class and not having much money, and the interesting characters you meet in the wee hours of the night.

Despite all of Bukowski’s stories, he also took the time to write. He was incredibly prolific which said to me that although he wrote about all the debauchery going on, he still owned the immense discipline in order to sit down everyday and write. Instead of going back to school full time, I decided to take a writing class at the local community college. While the other students wrote about tamer subjects, I wrote about the kitchens I worked in and a lot of things like playing poker with my buddies and the outrageous types of things I would see drinking in bars late at night.

In downtown Burlington, there’s 20 or so bars within a three block radius. It was said, at the time, per capita, Burlington had the most bars than any other city. A lot of this was because of the large student population but also, in my mind, that it’s a very small, walkable city. There’s no need to drive at all. I would walk to work, finish up around 10 or 11 and then go out for a few beverages until 2.

I wrote these stories and they were well received in my classes. Each semester I took one writing class. When the teachers asked about my favorite writers, and I told them Bukowski, they would roll their eyes.

It’s been literal decades since I’ve read any of his stuff. I don’t even know where the books are anymore. They were a stepping stone to other, better writers however. Hemingway of course, Celine, Carver, other minimalist types who also wrote about the daily ins and outs of normal human, lower class existence. I started gobbling these novels up and realized how much better they were than Bukowski.

Once I moved out here, I had to go visit 5124 DeLongpre Ave. in Hollywood, a bungalow where Bukowski lived for a long time. There’s a sign over there in acknowledgment.

Bukowski retired in San Pedro. A weird place overlooking the ocean. A guy came in to the bar a few years back. We talked a bit, he lived there, and I brought up Bukowski.

“Huh,” he said. “You know of Bukowski?”

“Yeah.”

“He used to come into my restaurant, the San Pedro Cafe.”

This guy, John, looked the part. An older, larger gentleman with long, jet black hair and a big, black cowboy hat. I instantly liked him. He drank blended scotch on the rocks.

“Bukowski came in for lunch every single day,” he said. “Turkey club. We just started making it the instant we saw him. Nice guy.”

I ended up doing some work for John. Nothing crazy, but I helped him with starting up his cocktail program over there. My first ever consulting gig. Just being in the place gave me some connection, made me feel closer to Bukowski, who had died before I ever discovered him. Being in LA, in general, brought a large amount of those memories back, of those times. Of being young and stupid, of reading those old stories and living some of that life. Sometimes I regret it all and think I just wasted my early 20s but there’s another way to look at it too. I had a lot of fun. It wasn’t just the drinking but the characters I met along the way, the laughs, the introspective moments when hungover. I think less about regret than I do about pathways we all take. Without having taken those previous pathways, there’s no way I’d be where I am now. Yes, it sounds corny as hell, but would I have ever started writing again and returned to school if I hadn’t gone to that party? If I had never met Mr. LeRoux in the first place?