Joan Jobe Smith, author of the upcoming Silver Birch Press title Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis: His Art & His Women (& me), twisted, frug-ed, and mashed her some potatoes as a go-go dancer for seven years during the swinging ’60s and ’70s. Joan often regaled her friend Charles Bukowski with her go-go girl tales, as memorialized in her poem, “Bukowski Chugs Cheap Beer @ the No-No a Go-Go.” An excerpt appears below.
Excerpt from Bukowski Chugs Cheap Beer @ the No-No a Go-Go
© Joan Jobe Smith
…Bukowski never drank
at any of those go-go bars I worked those 7 years. Too
expensive, too uppity and all that rock ‘n’ roll too noisy.
No, he preferred the bossa nova and cheap beer at the
No-No a Go-Go’s where barmaids wore overalls, not
fringed bikinis and could toss out any drunk, including
him, with one bare hand. Midnights Buk phoned me long
distance, drunk because his Woman had left him again,
he listened intently to my go-go girl tales about men like
him, broke, lonely who drank too much, said wild things,
talk of men not like him: astronauts, murderers, rich men
wearing diamond pinky rings while Bukowski chugged his
cheap beer in his cheap apartment in L.A., blew smoke
from cheap cigars into the telephone at me sipping cheap
white wine 40 miles away till one night Bukowski finally
said: You gotta write about all that madness, kid. So I did.
Photo: Courtesy of Joan Jobe Smith
Silver Birch Press 