Oneshots

Uncle Buk's Last Stand

When I was in high school, Charles Bukowski and I got ourselves into quite a bit of trouble.

Uncle Buk has always been a great friend of mine. I first stumbled across his earth-shattering work in late middle school, a battered copy of Slouching Towards Nirvana. A new student to the public school system, I found myself quickly bored and underchallenged by the work. Instead of the prescribed school-books, I read Plath, Whitman, Williams, and of course, Bukowski. Bukowski taught me about having fun in life, in the way school never could, and to never be afraid to make your art the way you want it to be.

But once I got to high school, the influence Bukowski had on me had started to darken. Living in a small town at the time, frequent boredom caused my potential first to stagnate, and then ferment. Instead of finding inspiration for self-expression through my own writing, I found in Bukowski's work a positive reinforcement for rebellious behaviour. His work inspired me to make a list of wrongs I wished to commit against the authority of my teachers, and he gave me the pointed courage to complete my task. Upon this list was this: present a wildly inappropriate piece of work to your class, doing your best to choose the most vulgar, slimy piece of literature, and then sit back and bask in the squirms of your peers.

Bukowski's inappropriately titled poem "Like A Flower in the Rain," has been, and always will be, in my eyes, a work of art. It is delving and dirty, but kind and intimate too, bouncing the reader between sexual-lewdness and a sense of compassion and community. In this particular poem, Bukowski vividly describes his progression into having sex with an unnamed woman, and then enjoying a large meal in her company. This was the only poem that could serve my purpose. I was sure of it.

The assignment that I so blatantly defaced with this selection was for my AP English Literature class. It was my senior year and I had recently adopted an attitude towards school that could only be described as a large middle finger raised at all times. Bukowski was not entirely to blame for this, but he was not exactly blameless, either. Propelled by his poetry, as well as the newly discovered works of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, I was as open as I could be about my discontent with authority, society, and the system in general. I left bottles of urine on the desks of those teachers that denied me the release of my own bladder. I turned in explicit love-scenes instead of papers in my most burdensome classes. I would take drugs before school, smoking marijuana and dropping LSD, letting their negative effects spill over the top of my persona as dissatisfaction with the system. Feeling stuck and frustrated, I completely cut loose from all standards of acceptable behaviour in society. Much of my rebellion was half-baked, but this particular selection from my list was not. In the words of Jonathan, the fictional character who introduced me to Uncle Buk, "When I commit, I bake it all the way, at four hundred twenty-five degrees." And with nothing else to do in my oppressive town, I committed.

The assignment itself was to choose a poem (or a song), that we would dissect through careful analysis, dragging out two or three common literary features to fry under a scrutinous eye, and then stitch it all back together to reveal its underlying meaning.. I found the assignment atrocious. The thought of squeezing meaning out of a poem was buying far too much into the system for my rebellious attitude. Many of my class picked catchy pop songs, figuring that the lack of substance in their lines would make the project easier. But oh how wrong they were. Choosing a poem with no substance and trying to pry meaning out with expensively-manicured claws ended only with unsatisfactory grades. But to pick a poem so chock full of Molotov Cocktails as Bukowski's "Like A Flower in the Rain" was the most bad-ass decision I made in my entire high school career.

I place so much importance in this act of rebellion only because of the sheer amount of work involved. Typically, my plans of anarchy were simple, one-step plots that had very little room to be stopped in their tracks. Leaving a bottle of urine only required the teacher to step away from her domain for a moment, perhaps en route to grant herself the privilege she so happily denied their subjects. I was in and out in ten seconds, no one to stand in my way. But to actually plan out a presentation which would force lewd vocabulary and vulgar subject matter into the faces of my peers, watch their disgust, and prove their initial responses as a socially-conditioned and incorrect attitude towards sex, was a much larger scheme than I had ever attempted to pull off in my adolescent criminal career.