Factotum

By Bill Pearse on March 6, 2026 • ( 0 )

After a couple weeks our dog finally got tired of eating the landscape mulch. In the past she’d throw it up on the carpet, the grossest thing you could imagine. This time it just came out the other end in the yard, back into the same beds I’d first applied it to, the same color and texture. A closed-loop system. ➰

The frogs were back, just like the pets at feeding time they appeared on schedules only they seemed aware of. The frogs sang together in the early morning hours in the storm drains beneath the metal grate in the dark of the parking lot, a kind of Beowulf vibe both beautiful and creepy.

I thought better of giving the Bukowski book to our daughter. Parts were likely triggering and it just wasn’t as good as I remembered it. Arguably bad. At best the vignettes evoked the voyeur in me drawn to roadside catastrophe.

Born in 1920, Bukowski would have been the age I am now when this story was published in 1975. One of the first things you notice is his self-effacing self-portrayal. The emphasis on physical grotesqueries in himself and others. Or the comic book quality to how he portrays women, R. Crumb-style with big boobs, painted-on makeup, tight skirts. Reading this in my 20s was like a step above Mad magazine, a quasi-literary version. But with the writing so simple and unpretentious I thought heck, I could do that. And I tried, but then I couldn’t. I’d worked a lot of the same entry-level jobs as he, drunk and drugged a bit, but my stories didn’t compare. They lacked the bite, the voice.

It didn’t take long to read Factotum but it grew sad and tiresome toward the end. Maybe that’s the point, the repetition of all the dead-end jobs and the lying about drinking, wiping himself off with newspaper. I think I’ve now outgrown it.

Last night I attended my first men’s group recovery meeting, definitely a different vibe. Put thirty guys in a room and no matter what, it’ll feel different. Toward the end of the meeting they started passing something around and taking turns writing on it, then one of the guys discreetly folded and handed it to me. It was a list of everyone’s phone numbers with my name written at the top. I was really touched. One guy said, just text a few people on that list every day for the next week and then they’ll have your number too. I did it like he said and they all wrote back with personal notes. I feel like I took a good step in doing that. Life has a weird sparkle to it like it did when I was young and it felt like anything was possible.