HOW I GOT TO BE WHO I AM

All my life, in that neighborhood, I had been walking into spider webs, I had been attacked by blackbirds, I had lived with my father. Everything was eternally dreary, dismal, damned. Even the weather was insolent and bitchy. It was either unbearably hot for weeks on end, or it rained, and when it rained it rained for six days. 
And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. 

The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun.
I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children.
Hell, I couldn`t even get a job as a dish-washer.    

There are the seeds and the roots of everything. 

There is a what behind every why. 

A drunkard, a self proclaimed misanthrope and a genial observer of the ugliness of the real world- that is Charles Bukowski. 

How it all began, where and why?

The answers are hidden in this painful, disturbing, yet honest and moving book.

Ham on Rye is by far Invitation To Inspiration`s favorite Bukowski`s book.