In 1969, John Martin, editor of Black sparrow did the following offer to Charles Bukowski by letter. The note said that he was offered $ 100 per month for the writer lifetime, so that he would leave the job he was doing at that time (he was a postman in the United States postal service and had been working there for about 15 years) to dedicate himself exclusively to writing. Bukowski, of course, accepted the offer and two years later delivered to the publisher Black sparrow his first novel "The postman".
The letter
The reply letter to John read something like this:
August 12st, 1986
Hi John:
Thanks for the letter. Sometimes it doesn't hurt so much to remember where we came from. And you know the places where I come from. Even people who try to write or make movies about it, they don't get it right. They call it "From 9 to 5". It's just never 9 to 5. In those places there is no meal time and, in fact, if you want to keep your job, you don't go out to eat. And there is the overtime, but the overtime is never properly recorded in the books, and if you complain about it there is another chump willing to take your place.
You know my old saying: "Slavery was never abolished, it was only expanded to include all colors."
What hurts is the constant loss of humanity in those who fight to keep jobs they don't want but fear a worse alternative. It simply happens that people empty themselves. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves your eyes. The voice is ugly. And the body. The hair. The ones. The shoes. Everything.
When I was young I couldn't believe that people gave their lives in exchange for those conditions. Now that I'm old I still don't believe it. Why do they do it? For sex? For a television? For a car at fixed payments? For the children? Children who will do just the same things?
Since always, when I was quite young and went from job to job, I was naive enough to sometimes say to my colleagues: “Hey! The boss could come at any moment and kick us out, just like that, don't you see?
The only thing they did was look at me. He was offering them something that they did not want to bring into their mind.
Now, in the industry, there are a lot of layoffs (dead steel mills, technical changes and other circumstances in the workplace). Layoffs are in the hundreds of thousands and their faces are shocking:
"I was here 35 years ...".
"That's not fair…".
"I do not know what to do…".
Slaves are never paid enough to break free, but just enough to survive and return to work. I could see it. Why can't they? I realized that the park bench was just as good, that being a bartender was just as good. Why not be here first before I put myself there? Why wait?
I wrote in disgust against it all. It was a relief to get all that shit out of my system. And now here I am: a "professional writer." After the first 50 years, I have discovered that there are other disgusts beyond the system.
I remember once, working as a packer in a lighting supply company, one of my colleagues suddenly said, "I will never be free!"
One of the bosses was walking around (his name was Morrie) and he gave a delicious laugh, enjoying the fact that this guy was trapped for life.
So the luck of finally getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of happiness, the joyous happiness of the miracle. I write now with an old mind and an old body, long after most would believe in continuing this, but since I started so late, I owe it to myself to be persistent, and when words start to fail and I have to get help climbing the stairs and can't tell a tile from a staple, I'll still feel like something inside me will remember (no matter how far I've gone) how I got in the middle of murder and confusion and grief towards at least , a generous death.
Not to have completely wasted life seems to be an achievement, at least for me.
Your boy
Hank