Charles Bukowski famously stated, "The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you."
I think that's where I part company with him, as I have never had a nine-to-five job even if I had a nine-to-five job, if you know what I mean. I always had a job that interested me and always thought I worked for myself and my own betterment and benefit. And the 'five' in 'nine-to-five' never stopped me from working longer, not for the paid overtime which I never claimed but for what it gave me in extra satisfaction.
I think I really hit my stride when I began contract work when it was not the hours I worked but the results I achieved, finally culminating in becoming self-employed and running my own business where I was free to work as long and as often as I wanted, usually well into the night and over weekends. "All work and no play ..." was never dull for me.
Reading the letter to his publisher John Martin in which he expressed his relief at having escaped full-time employment, I saw something that reminded me of a time-and-motion study I once did in a metal factory. There the operators stood like robots by their machines, performing the same routine movements many hundreds of times a day, day in, day out, year in, year out, with one operator telling me almost proudly he had been doing the very same job at the very same metal press for twenty years. I had to look into his eyes to see if there was any life left inside.
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8-12-86 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors." And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?" They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: "I put in 35 years..." "It ain't right..." "I don't know what to do..." They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!" One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. yr boy, Hank |
The movie "Factotum" is based on the author's highly autobiographical novel by the same name and a handful of stories about the poetically debauched author’s primary subjects: drinking, writing, women and gambling. But mostly drinking. That's where I also part company with him, as I haven't touched the stuff in years - except for an occasional glass of retsina because old Greek habits die hard. "Yamas!"
