Charles Bukowski Stamps

Somewhere in storage, I've still got an armload of Charles Bukowski books, most of them autographed. Over the years, I've given some away as gifts. Others just languish in the dark. I thought at one time that if I ever had trouble paying rent, I could pawn them off on Hank Chinaski enthusiasts for some extra scratch. Held onto some very old Lovecraft books and autographed Burroughs, too, for the same reason.

There was a time when I was enamored of his writing. Jaw-dropping amounts of booze, gambling, and desperation. Loose women and soul-draining work. During long, snowbound Midwestern winters, the Southern California he described, even with its bums, drunks, adulterers, addicts, and assorted losers, held an almost aching grip on my imagination.

Here's the deal about Bukowski, though: once you've read ten of his stories (any ten: pick 'em), you've pretty much read his entire oeuvre. Despite his sometimes mesmerizing use of English, there's only so much I can read about an alcoholic's inside take on bleeding ulcers, distended livers, and drunk-tank vomit before I wonder...what else have you got?

So I stopped buying Bukowski books. Stopped reading the ones I own. I still got a smile today, though, when I was digging through old papers and found my long-lost Bukowski stamps.

These aren't supposed to exist.

Bukowski spent nearly 15 years working for the US Postal Service. His novel Post Office is an autobiographical take on those awful years and remains perhaps his best-known work. Although one hears occasional rumblings about the possibility of an official USPS Bukowski stamp, that hasn't happened. These stamps are a bit of subversive art I picked up in New York back in the 1990's and made to look like actual postage stamps, complete with a little Glassine sleeve. They are an homage to America's most famous real-life postal worker, if not our most celebrated alcoholic.

Maybe I'll trade them for a bottle of Thomas H. Handy rye. I'm pretty sure he'd approve...

Goes well with:

• I've always enjoyed pseudobiblia, the books and ephemera from our literary past said to exist, but sprung entirely from an author's imagination. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, for instance, falls into this category, as does The Courier's Tragedy, a fictional Jacobean revenge play written by the equally fictional Richard Wharfinger in Thomas Pynchon's very real The Crying of Lot 49. In the novel, ancient secret rival postal services operate under the very noses of us hoi poloi. Had anyone actually affixed Bukowski stamps to envelopes back when postage was only 29 cents and mailed them, they would've fit right in the paranoid world of Miss Oepida Maas. 
• What Do You Want from the Liquor Store?, a bit I wrote about Ted Hawkins' fantastic song Sorry You're Sick after hearing it on This American Life. Hawkins' performance and links included. 

Potted, Plotzed, and Corned: An Overdrinker's Thesaurus

This weekend we say goodbye not just to summer (a largely meaningless gesture in San Diego), but also to our good friends Dr. Fidel, Mama Charlie, Awesome Rob, and Mrs. Awesome. They’d been renting a nice little house for the last week in Pacific Beach, an oceanside community where the surfers, college kids, and stoners get along (mostly) while sun-bleached baby Lebowksis are just as likely to call you bra as bro, or—increasingly and annoyingly at my age—sir.

Last night we showed up with beers to feed the cooler just before the sun went down while preparations for a seafood feast got underway. I popped open a can, applied a Texas Dent, and strolled out to the patio.

And that’s when I saw him. The neighbor. Spread eagle on the ground, face up, and flat as a slab of turf, keys in one hand, cash and ID in the other. A quick check proved he was breathing and there was no blood—our friends confirmed he had been swerving drunk as he wound his way up the footpath. There was talk of rolling him over to avoid his aspirating dinner if he hurled, but, since he continued to breathe, we just kept a wary eye on him from our side of the footpath.

In the end, his roommate emerged, took a swig from his beer can, poured a long stream of beer on his prone buddy’s face from about six feet up, and went back inside. Sleeping Beauty spazzed, sputtered, arose, and started throwing down rhymes to anyone who would listen. Us? Our arms-length supervision was over. We turned to Dungeness crab, shellfish, and corn on the cob.

In the course of writing Moonshine, I chronicled so many terms for being drunk that I compiled them into what I like to call the Overdrinker’s Thesaurus, an ever-growing list, part of which made it in the book. From the merely tipsy to the flat-out annihilated, I offer the following alternatives for describing what condition your condition is in.

Please do drop a comment if your favorites are not here….

An Overdrinker's Thesaurus

Annihilated
Befuddled
Bent
Besotted
Blind drunk
Blitzed
Blitzkrieged
Blotto
Bombed
Booze-blind
Borracho
Bottle fever, to have or be afflicted with
Brined
Cocked and loaded
Cockeyed
Corned
Crippled
Demolished
Dizzy
Drenched
Drunk
Drunked up
Faced
Faded
Flat-faced
Floored or floor-hammered
FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition)
Fucked
Fucked up
Gathered a talking load
Getting your drink on
Getting your swerve on
Glazed
Greased
Guttered
Hammered
In your cups
Inebriated
Intoxicated
Jiggered
Jimjams
Jugged, in the jug
Knee-walking drunk
Leathered
Liquored up
Lit
Lit up
Loaded
Loopy or looped
Loose
Mangled
Mashed
Maudlin
Mellow
Numb
Obliterated
On a bender
On autopilot
Ossified
Pickled
Pie-eyed
Piqued
Pissed
Plastered
Plotzed
Plowed
Potted
Pottzed
Pot-valiant
Pounded
Put a load on
Rat-assed
Reeling
Relaxed
Retarded
Riotous
Sauced
Senseless
Shattered
Shellacked
Shitbombed
Shit-faced
Skewered
Skunked
Slagged
Slammed
Slaughtered
Slopped
Sloshed
Smashed
Soaked
Soused
Spins, to have the
Staggers, to have the
Staying afloat
Stewed
Stinking drunk
Stupid
Tangle-footed
Tanked
Tanked up
Tied one on
Tight
Tipsy
Torn up
Tossed
Trashed
Trousered
Trucked
Tub-thumped
Twatted
Tweaked
Under the influence
Wasted
Well-oiled
Wheelchaired
Whacked
Wiggity whacked
Wiggity wiggity whacked [NB the progression]
Zoned

Koma-Saufen: Coma Drinking

Saufen, grölen, pöbeln – wer das Pech hat, in einer britischen Urlaubshochburg zu landen, wähnt sich schnell in der Hölle. Kein Wunder, dass das Wort Koma-Saufen vom englischen „Binge-Drinking“ kommt. Das Saufen bis zum Umfallen ist eindeutig eine britische „Erfindung“.

~ Das Bild
2 June 2008

[My somewhat free translation since my German is only so-so: Drinking, bellowing, swearing—whoever has the misfortune to land in a British tourist stronghold quickly presumes himself in hell. No wonder that the word “coma-drinking” comes from the English "binge drinking." Drinking until you fall down is clearly a British "invention."]

British and German tabloids are having at each other over how unpleasant each others’ tourists are, spurred on when Briton David Barnish was granted an award against a travel agency that booked a trip for his family in a Greek hotel packed to the rafters with Germans. The Sun tabloid lays out the dirt here while Das Bild lashes back here with unflattering images of nekkid sunburned English women and insults to British national pride. For a splurge in sophomoric nationalism, it’s worth a peek.

Now, our family is largely Irish, so perhaps this is a bit of a pot/kettle discussion, but what gets me is the misguided notion that binge drinking is a British invention. Germans, noted as much for their sobriety as their vegetarianism, seem to be no strangers to consuming prodigious amounts of ethanol (Oktoberfest, anyone?).

In fact, one of my favorite anecdotes of American distillers is from the revolutionary war and involves Germans (notes? Of course I can’t find notes: it’s hours past my bedtime). As I recall, a band of Hessian mercenaries descended on a New Jersey farmstead en route to attacking American forces. The family, rebels that they were, proved their guile by inviting the soldiers to camp in their field and even provided them with a drop of applejack (that is, a local apple brandy) to warm themselves against the cold.

Well, more than a drop. The Hessians drank so much and got so hammered that they passed out and were summarily dealt with. Nein, Das Bild, es tut mir leid: Koma-Saufen seems not to be a British invention. Maybe American…

Does anyone know this story? Is it documented or just a bit of folklore? And, lest anyone think I'm slamming Germans, it's just a little familial ribbing: my great-grandmother, apparently, was named von Hassenberg.

[10 June 2008 edit: Will Elsbury, Pre-Twenieth Century Military History Specialist at the Library of Congress, takes up the gauntlet and digs up a source of the tale here]

Goes well with:

• Starving Themselves, Cocktail in Hand, a New York Times piece on "drunkorexia... shorthand for a disturbing blend of behaviors: self-imposed starvation or bingeing and purging, combined with alcohol abuse." "Drunkorexia," it claims, "is not an official medical term." Yeah, I pretty much figured. Disturbing nonetheless.
  

.

Modern Drunk History

You know that vodka is tasteless going down,
but memorable coming up.

~ Modern Drunkard

I like me some Modern Drunkard Magazine. It is at turns sophomoric, insightful, sad, and wickedly funny. I like it better online because remembering to take a copy home at the end of the night…ah, sometimes just getting in the cab is task enough. Yet, oddly, I do have a fair number of back issues at home. They’re coming from somewhere. Maybe just breeding in my vertical files.

The vodka quote above is from their column “You Know You’re a Drunkard When…” —little more than a list of signs that, well, you’re a drunk. Now, some of my very best buddies are drunks and readily admit it. When we get together, we play beer pong, guzzle beer on the stoop, and Edward Fortyhands somehow doesn’t seem like a bad idea. There's even been backyard oil wrestling after someone's wife forbade it ("I'm telling you, Mommy says no!"), then went to the kitchen for that bottle of Wesson. Some warning signs got me smiling:

• Future generations will call you an urban legend [I’m thinking of our dear friend Gabriel who lives in Philadelphia, but about whom even a California bartender exclaimed “You mean Doctor Gabriel?”]
• M.A.D.D. has a budget line with your name on it.
• You measure time by drinks, as in: "Hold on a shot, the movie doesn't start for another four bourbons."
• You wonder why they call it Southern Comfort when they know damn well there is nothing comfortable about being handcuffed in the back of a squad car.
• Think box wine is great; eagerly awaiting box whiskey.
• The bartender is in the weeds and you’re the only person in the bar.

Now, that last one I can identify with, but mostly because I’ve been known to bring my own bitters to bars and instruct tyro barkeeps how to make old fashioned cocktails and sidecars.

But that first quote up top immediately reminded me of Derek Waters’ drunken takes on historic American events. In particular, of volume two that features Eric Falconer after downing eight Cape Codders, reciting the tale of Benjamin Franklin (Jack Black) discovering electricity, and then, um, undrinking them.


Drunk History Vol 2


Goes well with

• Drunk History Vol 1. On August 6th 2007, Mark Gagliardi drank a bottle of Scotch...And then discussed a famous historical event.
• Goody’s Headache Powders

.