Off topic, somewhat: Bukowski’s work - especially the late work - will always be bound, for me, to a boy I knew when I was 16/17 who I’ll call Martin.

Martin was very thin, short, with an already-receding hairline, flaking skin, and tiny, black, always-shifting eyes.

Martin was also very mean: a defense against the bullying I’m certain he endured most of his life. My best friend and I tried to hang out with him. We were weird kids too, and liked strange people, but Martin would never be pleasant or sincere with us. Sometimes he wouldn’t even tolerate our company.

I remember he loved horseracing, and gambling on it (underage).

One day, at a teenage house party - some parents out of town - Martin got far too drunk. He was lying on his side, vomiting onto a friend’s parents’ upholstery, sobbing. He was sobbing because he had been in love for years with a family friend - a pretty girl who was in one of my classes - but who would never, ever love him back, because he was so hideous, and because his personality, or the surface of it, was so abhorrent. That probably he should just kill himself, he thought, etc etc.

I’d just read a late Bukowski poetry collection and loved it the way you love Bukowski when you’re 16/17. I remember it was ‘The Last Night of the Earth’, so it would have contained the poems the article talks about Bukowski typing into his new computer.

I’d read that collection, and the yearning - from a place of perceived ugliness - and the beauty in that - I guess moved me, and made me think of Martin.

So I bought Martin a copy (it was expensive - £18, I think, which was a lot more back then, especially if you’re 17) and quietly gave it to him. I wanted him to see what I saw: that there was a nobility and dignity and a romance in his adoration of this girl, and in his ugliness.

Martin took the book, confused at the gift (kind of a gay thing to do), and then I didn’t see him for weeks. As if he was avoiding me.

When I finally did see Martin, he was so angry. So angry that it surprised me. He was a mean guy but I’d never seen him quite so angry.

He was angry that I’d seen him in the poems. He was angry at the poems themselves. He said he’d never been more insulted in his life.

I stopped trying to hang out with Martin so much after that. I felt bad that I’d hurt his feelings so much.

I check in every year or so using social media. Not to talk, just to look. The girl Martin was in love with is married now. Martin himself has grown into his age: he looked middle-aged then and it suits him better now that he’s approaching it. I think he does something in insurance.

I’ve always wondered: how many of the poems did Martin read? Was he so hurt because of Bukowski’s ugly author photo, and the content of the first few? And whether he read them or not, did he ever return to them, and find them beautiful? Or did Martin just throw the book away?

I hope he didn’t. Or, if he did, I hope he found another way than books of poetry to see himself better, now, compared to how he saw himself then.

Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer (2009)