Seriously though, what fucking use was it to be someone’s lookalike? Who wanted to be the flesh equivalent of a quotation mark? He really did like bearing a resemblance to his literary hero but that wasn’t all he wanted – he would have loved to channel the spirit of the man through his work. To be Bukowskiesque was his dream – not to come across like the copyists that modern literature seemed plagued with; that was the equivalent of being a literary karaoke singer. Unfortunately he seemed unable to bring the game he needed to make the leap beyond that definition – it plagued him.
Unfortunately the fact that he looked like CB was obvious to everyone; one of the first things that they noticed – one of the things that they always drew attention to in their reviews. The number of times he had been forced to read: ‘Well, he looks like the guy, but he can’t write for shit’. It tired him out, made him sick.
He’d be sitting in a bar drinking himself stupid because someone had yet again brought to his attention his resemblance and he would be struck by the irony that it had driven him to drink and he would have to stop – it would drain all the comfort out of the glass. What was he going to do? He couldn’t afford plastic surgery and if he looked different he wouldn’t have anything – half the reason he got any reviews was so the writer could say something disparaging and witty about him, their least favourite writer, and Charles B, their favourite.
He stood on the bridge looking down at the river and the intermittently visible reflection which swam up in its surface. Mirrors, fuck, he wished he were a fucking vampire and didn’t have to be bothered by the bloody things.
Filed under: 5th Floor, Part 1, fifth floor, room 53, tez, update | Tagged: 16 Flaws, 5th Floor, bukowksi, fiction, fifth floor, literature, look, part one, paul grimsley, prose, room 53, sixteen flaws, skull cull, story, tale, tez, update, writer, writing
