I have wasted a lifetime at the racetrack
and to this moment, I still go every day.

I don’t know any other place to go.
the toteboard flashes and I move in.

–from “The Horse Players”

The writer Charles Bukowski is to horse racing as Ernest Hemingway is to bullfighting, which is to say forever intertwined in our collective consciousness, for better or for worse. The German-American poet and author wrote extensively and lovingly of the racetrack during his nearly fifty year career, which included over fifty books and thousands of poems. In many of his major works, his frequent main character (and thinly-veiled alter ego) Henry Chinaski, was a regular at the track and gambled heavily, almost exclusively on horses. Bukowski, too, frequented the racetrack, mainly Hollywood Park in his longtime home of Los Angeles.

Bukowski’s writing is not for the faint of heart. He was an alcoholic who started drinking as a teenager, and celebrated drunkeness and drinking in his writing even as it destroyed his relationships and kept him from being able to pursue traditional employment. That, too, was a common theme in Bukowski’s writing – he despised the monotony of work. He drifted in and out of a number of jobs throughout his life, from factory floors to a long stint at the United States Post Office (that provided him with the material for his first published novel, “Post Office.”). He wrote about being poor, lonely, adrift, and rejected by society. He chronciled and celebrated the world of the downtrodden, from the regulars in bars to streetwalking prostitutes to bookies and hopeless gamblers. Time magazine called Bukowski a “laureate of American lowlife.”

Portrait of Bukowski. (Graziano Origa/Wikimedia Commons)

Bukowski didn’t pursue writing full-time until he was 49 years old. Prior to that he primarily published in small independent presses for very little money, and penned a regular column in the Los Angeles Free Press called “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” He worked for more than a decade as a filing clerk, but he eventually quit that job to try his hand at making a living as a handicapper at the racetrack. Bukowski had developed several systems for betting on horses that he thought could keep him in the black. He spent some time traveling the country, playing the horses at tracks across America and blowing his money in bars getting drunk.

Throughout the 1960s, his profile grew among the counterculture as an underground poet, and in 1969, John Martin, the owner of Black Sparrow Press, a small publisher of strange and avant-garde writers, offered Bukowski a stipend of $100 a month to send him his poetry. Bukowski would mail Martin hundreds and hundreds of poems, and Martin would choose which ones to publish in collections. Those works flew off of bookshelves and brought Bukowski even larger fame. His stipend eventually grew to $7,000 a month. He bought himself a BMW, which he could later afford to valet park at the racetrack, and his standard win bet grew from $2 to $40, though never larger than that.

Along the way Bukowski wrote volumes, and in addition to writing dozens of poems about the race track, he also set many scenes in his novels there. In 1989 he wrote the novel “Hollywood” about his experiences selling and developing his novel “Factotum” into the motion picture “Barfly.” “Hollywood” detailed Bukowski’s life at its peak – no longer a down-and-out drunk cavorting with lushes in barrooms at closing time, but a sought-after scribe who palled around with Madonna and Sean Penn and whose work was earning millions of dollars. As Bukowski’s lifestyle and profile grew into that of a celebrity, he still never missed a day at the racetrack.

His writing about the track often focused on the characters he met there, his observations of the track as an intersection between the poorest and richest in society, a place that ran on teasing people’s basest dreams and desires. Bukowski was, at heart, a misanthrope. He held most of American society in contempt, and those feelings only subsided a little bit when he was at the track. In fact, his disdain for other people factored heavily into his handicapping. In his 1975 LA Free Press essay “Picking the Horses,” Bukowski wrote that “...simple reasoning against the prejudices and concepts of the crowd is your only chance. And luck, my friends.” He begins his essay with some do’s and don’ts, including his suggestion that you not talk to anyone at the track and you always go alone. “If you must be concerned with their welfare and with how their luck is going or whether they want a hot dog or a Coke or a whiskey sour, that is just going to add more weight against your chances of thinking easily and making the proper bets.”

His method for handicapping that he describes isn’t poetic, but fairly rote. He details a system of assigning points to the leading handicappers picks and weighing each horse’s score against their morning-line odds to come up with horses to toss, thereby increasing your edge by eliminating underpriced horses with no chance. It’s a rudimentary system that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s important to remember that Bukowski’s BMW was paid for by back-end points on a movie deal and not cashing win tickets.

Bukowski died in 1994 of leukemia at the age of 73. Despite the fact that his poetry and writing is often crude and borderline obscene, and his writing is sometimes considered unserious by critics and literary scholars, he is one of the highest-selling American poets even to this day. His books not only sell well, they are often among the most-stolen titles from bookstores. His dedicated fans collect his voluminous output of work with fervor – his 1982 collection of horse racing-themed poems and photographs titled “Horsemeat” often sells for over $2,000. And Black Sparrow Press eventually sold the rights to his work to Ecco/HarperCollins for over a million dollars.

In his essay “Goodbye Watson” in the collection “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” Bukowski mused about how the racetrack helped him as a writer:

with me, the racetrack tells me quickly where I am weak and where I am strong, and it tells me how I feel that day and it tells me how much we keep changing, changing ALL the time, and how little we know of this.

and the stripping of the mob is the horror movie of the century. ALL of them lose. look at them. if you are able. one day at a racetrack can teach you more than four years at any university. if I ever taught a class in creative writing, one of my prerequisites would be that each student must attend a racetrack once a week and place at least a 2 dollar win wager on each race. no show betting. people who bet to show REALLY want to stay home but don't know how.

my students would automatically become better writers, although most of them would begin to dress badly and might have to walk to school.

I can see myself teaching Creative Writing now.

“well, how did you do Miss Thompson?”

“Host $18.”

“who did you bet in the feature race?”

“One-Eyed Jack.”

“sucker bet. the horse was dropping 5 pounds which draws the crowd in but also means a step-up in class within allowance conditions. the only time a class-jump wins is when he looks bad on paper. One-Eyed Jack showed the highest speed-rating, another crowd draw, but the speed rating was for 6 furlongs and 6 furlong speed ratings are always higher, on a comparative basis, than speed ratings for route races. furthermore, the horse closed at 6 so the crowd figured he would be there at a mile and a sixteenth. One-Eyed Jack has now shown a race around in 2 curves in 2 years. this is no accident. the horse is a sprinter and only a sprinter. that he came in last at 3 to one should not have been a surprise.”>/em>

“how did you do?”

“I lost one hundred and forty dollars.”

“who did you bet in the feature race?”

“One-Eyed Jack. class dismissed.”