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Jon took us up to see the hotel. It looked authentic. The barflies lived there. The bar was downstairs. We stood and looked at it…It was painted grey as so many of those places were. The torn shades. The table and the chair. The refrigerator thick with coats of dirt. And the poor sagging bed…I was a little sad that I wasn’t young and doing it all over again, drinking and fighting and playing with words. When you’re young you can really take a battering. Food didn’t matter. What mattered was drinking and sitting at the machine. I must have been crazy but there are many kinds of crazy and some are quite delightful. I starved so that I could have time to write. That just isn’t done much anymore. Looking at that table I saw myself sitting there again. I’d been crazy and I knew it and I didn’t care.

From Chapter 28 of Hollywood by CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Photo: “City street scene with neon signs of bars, hotels and theatres along skid row in Los Angeles, California, 1965.” Los Angeles Timesphotographic archive, UCLA Library. Copyright Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library. More information here.