Factotum

by Charles Bukowski

As I relaxed in bed I had this strange feeling in my head. It was as if my skull was made of cotton, or was a small balloon filled with air. I could feel space in my skull. I couldn’t comprehend it. Soon I stopped wondering about it. I was comfortable, it wasn’t agonizing. I listened to symphony music, smoking my father’s cigarettes.

was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me. I took a drink of wine.

I felt as if she was talking to a person who had vanished, a person who was no longer there, no longer alive.

Her eyes seemed to look right through me. I couldn’t make a connection with her. I didn’t feel shame for that, only rather embarrassed, and helpless.

That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write.

A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The

myth of the starving artist was a hoax. Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man. I’d build an empire upon the broken bodies and lives of helpless men, women, and children—I’d shove it to them all the way. I’d show them!

My Beerdrunk Soul is Sadder Than All The Dead Christmas Trees Of The World. We

Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank.

When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat. I

As usual Carmen was wearing a very tight knitted dress that fit her like a balloon fits the trapped air, maybe tighter.

“People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.”

How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so? My

Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer.

But most men, fortunately, aren’t writers, or even cab drivers, and some men—many men—unfortunately aren’t anything.

the lives that people lead are driving them crazy and their insanity comes out in the way they drive.