March 24-30, 2005

cityspace

Bar None

HORN OF PLENTY: These days it's called Jay's 17th Spot. In Barfly it was The Golden Horn. Bukowski knew the place by a name lost to time. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

This Fairmount watering hole served poet Charles Bukowski equal parts inspiration and desperation.

by Mike Newall

Charles Bukowski was a stumblebum.

He worked odd jobs, roomed in roach-infested flats and drank oceans of cheap beer in cheap bars with cheap women. He had an enormous simian head and a face pitted with scars from childhood acne. He was a violent drunk. And probably the most influential American poet of the 20th century.

His was the poetry of the crestfallen, the woebegone. "I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways," he once wrote. "I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces."

His style was lean and honest and spawned tons of imitators. By the time of his death in 1994 at the age of 73, he was a folk hero in the literary underground. Last month, his ninth posthumous poetry volume, Slouching Toward Nirvana, was released. It contains poems depicting Bukowski's three-year stay in Philadelphia. It was in Philly that Bukowski would gather much of the material he used to write Barfly, his 1987 autobiographical film starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

Bukowski spent much of his life in the Skid Rows of Los Angeles. But sometime around 1944, the young author arrived in Philly during a vagabond period he described as his "ten year drunk." He found a rooming house at 603 N. 17th St. and, by most accounts, a corner bar at 17th and Fairmount whose name then has been lost to time.

"The nearest bar was 50 years old," he would later write. "You could smell the odor of urine, shit and vomit of a half century as it came up through the floor into the bar from the restrooms below. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Two men were fighting in the center of the bar."

The place had a "liveliness" Bukowski admired and became the inspiration for The Golden Horn in Barfly. "It wasn't a common bar," he would later say of the Philly haunt. "There were characters there."

There was Marie the Whore, Lily the Dopester, Frogman, Tommy the Albino, Helen the Prostitute and Frank McGillian, the stocky, square-jawed bartender who would take Bukowski into the back alley and beat him for the enjoyment of the other customers. McGillan was the model for Frank Stallone's "Eddie" in Barfly.

Bukowski had a job at Fairmount Motor Works on 16th Street. He earned 65 cents an hour delivering packages to the post office. He was fired after being spotted at the bar on a sick day.

One night, a "300-pound whore" walked into the bar. The two broke the legs off Bukowski's rooming house bed. It was his first sexual experience.

Sometimes, before heading to the bar, Bukowski would lie down in the tall grass of a graveyard off Fairmount Avenue and go to sleep.

"And always before sleeping, I'd look around the graveyard at the tilting headstones, their inscriptions obscured," he writes in Slouching Toward Nirvana "And I wondered about their bones buried there, bones having long ago escaped from the rotting coffins. It was all so curious, so strange, those long dead and forgotten bones, those lives gone, totally erased, their history never to be rediscovered."

The rooming house where Bukowski lived is now shuttered and abandoned. The windows are broken. The paint is peeling. (Last year, local Bukowski devotee Kerry Gibbs unsuccessfully lobbied City Council to place a historical marker in front of the residence.)

Fairmount Motor Works is gone. Condos and townhouses priced as high as $500,000 now line 17th street. A shiny blue sports car is parked in the "slop pitted alley" where Bukowski took his beatings. And the graveyard has been built over.

But the bar remains.

It is now called Jay's 17th Spot. The proprietors are Jay and Gloria Guzman, an affable neighborhood couple who purchased the bar in 2000. It was a sinkhole then, dark and dank, rotting from within.

The Guzmans gave the place a complete facelift. Sunlight now pours through the new windows and upon the shiny bar. The beers are cheap, and there is camaraderie among the regulars, none of whom are familiar with Bukowski's work.

But "the Buk" probably would dig the place. There is a liveliness to it. The current cast of characters includes old-head Eddie "Papa," Young Rob the bartender, Carlos the pool player, Eddie the Vietnam Vet, "Scandal" the graffiti artist, and Fernando the unofficial bouncer.

On a recent afternoon, a discussion about whether nonpaying customers should be allowed to use the pool table dovetailed into a heated debate about the merits of the Vietnam War and the current conflict in Iraq.

"There is no right or wrong in life," theorized one regular in Bukowski-like fashion. "Just circumstance."

The argument dissipated, and Young Rob nodded his approval, put a round of Buds on the bar and turned up the salsa music.

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