"Notes of an Old Goat" by Charles Bukowski, summary

The publication was based on material from a weekly column for the Los Angeles newspaper Open City. Publisher John Bryan gave the creator complete freedom to explore topics without the censorship of the official press. The notes were typed out over a beer, in perfect order. This collection of essays and satirical stories was published as a book in 1969.

The book opens a series of short prose collections. The publication has not received any official literary awards.

Road wanderings and first incidents

A drunken card game with a muscular friend nicknamed Elf ends in a brawl in a cheap hotel room. A scotch bottle smashes the closet mirror. In the morning, the hero takes his hidden winnings, grabs a cardboard suitcase containing a typewriter, and escapes from the annoying landlady. On the stairs, a worker nailing a carpet blocks his way. The typewriter lands right on the insolent man’s head. The escape continues through the bus station to Fort Worth and New Orleans.

In a baseball story, a hopeless Blues team suddenly finds salvation. A young man named Irus Chrispin, wearing paper wings strapped to him, soars above the field, darting between the bases. Manager Tim Bailey bets a thousand dollars on a win with bookmaker Bugsy Malone at odds of 250 to 1. Before the decisive game, a woman is planted on the winged player, who is then drugged, and the bookmaker’s henchmen saw off his wings with a hacksaw. Bailey pulls a Luger pistol from his desk and murders Malone in cold blood in the stadium’s guest box.

The New York period brings hard work and poverty. The room across from the elevated tracks is illuminated by the headlights of passing trains, adorned with the faces of criminals and vagrants. Night work on the subway requires posting advertising posters on the tracks. Walking on rotten ties thirty meters above the street in the dark threatens death from the live golden contact rails. The worker throws down his tool and leaves the city forever.

Californian Meetings and Street Life

A bohemian party in Pasadena brings together drunken drifters, drug addicts, and art lovers. Literary debates alternate with brawls in darkened rooms.

A meeting with Neal Cassady on the eve of his departure for Mexico turns into a frantic car chase in the rain down Sunset Boulevard. He makes risky turns at intersections and narrowly avoids oncoming cars. A few days later, news arrives of Cassady’s death on a railroad embankment in the desert.

In Venice, California, poet Jack Micheline leafs through poetry collections and berates the literary elite for their falsehoods. A ride in a rickety car leads the friends to Ptakha, who creates collages from earrings and clip-on earrings.

Boxing matches at the Olympic Arena draw raucous crowds. The defeat of the black favorite, Watson Jones, to the edgy young Enrique Bolaños leaves a deep mark of disappointment.

A mass riot erupts at Santa Anita Racetrack on March 22, 1968. The board of stewards arbitrarily reduces the payout on a winning horse, Quadrant. Enraged bettors run onto the track, blocking the horses’ passage. Police disperse the protesters with batons.

A visit to the renowned writer L. turns into an embarrassing incident. Pupu, a German shepherd, attacks the guests outside the three-story mansion. Marlow’s Japanese servant twists the guest’s arm and forces both visitors to throw away their wallets in honor of the host.

Social unrest and violence

The assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968 unleashed a wave of demagoguery. The hypocritical speeches of politicians and reactionary journalists sought to curtail civil liberties. Bukowski criticized salon rebels who incited crowds to violence for the sake of beautiful slogans. The Parisians of 1871, besieged in the city, starved and ate rats. The creative path requires work at a typewriter, not street rallies.

What follows is a Saturday drinking bout between Moss and Anderson, the workers. The friends reminisce about their school days, prison morals, and the king of liars, Jimmy Davenport. A call to his girlfriends arranges a meeting under the guise of a Harvard philosophy professor.

Fred McCullers sits on the floor, building a toy city with his three-year-old daughter. The sudden appearance of his ex-wife and her aggressive partner, Marty, ignites tension. McCullers grabs a kitchen knife and fatally stabs Marty in the throat. The killer calmly returns to his childish game as police sirens approach.

Tailor Jack quietly sews on a typewriter in an apartment with three corpses. The smell of decay fills the kitchen, closet, and bathroom. His friend Harry arrives and pulls the microphone out of the phone receiver to masturbate. Jack calls the duty officer and asks for a van to pick up the bodies.

Insurance agent Henry Beckett discovers his body one morning, golden with green polka dots. Doctors are helpless. Beckett takes his rifle, climbs a hill by the highway, and opens fire on passing cars. In the midst of a night of gunfire, the spots suddenly disappear. The shooter emerges with his hands raised and is killed by a Thompson patrolman’s bullets.

Women, marriages and separations

A suicide attempt in 1954 is interrupted by a headache from the smell of gas. Ex-con Lou, in a nearby motel, also attempts to gas himself after being fired from his job cleaning candy machines, but is saved by opening the windows just in time.

Early one morning, a fifty-five-year-old woman with the face of an old woman and the figure of a young girl in pink panties appears on a Hollywood street. The overnight visitor spends the morning in the hero’s bed and quietly leaves wearing his old work pants.

A Philadelphia innkeeper closes his establishment at two in the morning. The publication of his story in the elite magazine "Portfolio" is celebrated by scattering colorful pages on the wet pavement. In a nearby gangster bar, a trip to the basement toilet results in a blow to the back of the head with a club.

The father’s death leaves his son with a house, a car, and neighborly feuds. Harry, the laundry manager, keeps a five-thousand-dollar menagerie of birds in his yard. His drunken wife releases the birds into the wild. In the chaos, his father’s mistress, Shirley, ends up in the heir’s bedroom, and the police arrest all those involved in the brawl.

An overnight stay in frozen Atlanta lands the wanderer in a cardboard shack without kerosene in the yard of an old woman with a face made of chicken skin. His father’s reply rejects his requests for money, demanding he write moralizing stories in the spirit of Mark Twain.

His marriage to a wealthy Texas heiress, Barbara, begins after a correspondence about poetry. A trip to a remote town introduces the newlywed to local relatives. A move to Los Angeles leads the couple to an evening art studio. The professor admires Bukowski’s rough brushstrokes, infuriating his ambitious wife. A dish of fried Asian snails with visible anuses seals the deal. Barbara leaves for Alaska to join a fisherman.

Loneliness and family dramas

A false bravery conceals childhood trauma. His cruel father beat his son weekly with a leather razor strop for every blade of grass he missed on the lawn. The teenager stubbornly suppressed tears during the ordeal. At seventeen, the drunken youth knocked his father out with a crushing uppercut.

School years are marked by severe boils all over the body. A protective army uniform leads the student to the military training ground. Mechanically following commands brings victory in a weapons drill competition. Envious teachers fete the losing favorite, and the winner throws his medal into a roadside ditch.

A chance affair with stripper Renee and the wife of a neighboring auto mechanic destroys his relationship with typist Miriam.

Marriage to Yvonne plunges his life into a mystical delirium. His wife, in a dirty robe, raves about demons with eagle claws and magical mirrors. Felitsa, the housemaid, shares these superstitions. An attempt to have his wife declared insane in court fails. The family moves to a farm in Glendale, where a huge, bearded tenant named the Last Benson forcibly takes Yvonne as his mistress. The main character runs away with Felitsa to a motel, but abandons her at the first sign of madness and heads off to Hollywood to be with a new, random woman.