Bukowski in Hollywood and the Collating Party at his Apartment

They called him Hank. We piled in a car and drove up from Irvine to his little bungalow apartment on DeLongpre near Hollywood Blvd. for a collating party for this Mag he started with Neely called “Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.” No shit, that was its title. So we're all getting drunk in his crowded little living room/dining/kitchen, it was really a tiny one bedroom place littered with beer cans, wine bottles, and stacks of poems and crap falling over in piles on every horizontal surface, when suddenly Neely Cherry wants to fist fight anyone who will take him on from our bunch of drunken college students, so Bukowski jumps up from his couch and drags him out to the front lawn and they start wailing on each other.

            Meanwhile, I spy this huge stack of Blue Chip stamps Bukowski's been saving up to get himself a brand new toaster or something, and while we're collating the pages of the magazine together (he published one of my earlier raunchy poems in this issue), well, we look at the stack of Blue Chip stamps and we're really getting sloshed on beer and wine, so naturally we started licking the backs of whole sheets of these stamps and pasting them into the damned magazine.

            So when Bukowski comes roaring back into the little apartment, I guess he sees his depleted pile of stamps, and he looks around at the sad little collection of wannabe poets up from Irvine and bellows, “Hey, what's happening to my Blue Chips stamps? I'm Bukowski, ain't I? That used to mean something around here?”