San Francisco 1992-ish
“I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to upset you,” I said, nervously talking to Neeli soon after we met.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t ask?” I asked back.
“Don’t try to meet him,” he said. “It won’t go well. He really just wants to be left alone.”
Neeli was speaking about Charles Bukowski, then still alive for another year and change. He just assumed, meeting a young, straight, male writer that eventually I would ask for the phone number, the address, or an introduction.
“No,” I said, “Not quite that. You’re really famous for your relationship with him, but a lot of people don’t know you write poetry, too.”
Which wasn’t a question. More of a statement. But it was the best I could do.
“Yes,” he said, and let out a sigh like a bouncy castle deflating.
Neeli’s Legacy
Neeli grew up in North Beach, down the street from City Lights and, as a teenager, hung out with all the famous Beats you can mention. He knew them. He went to the store to get cigarettes for them (back when you could send kids to the store to buy tobacco). He read them his poems outside of the Cafe Trieste. It’s a life so perfect for me, that if you put it in a film, I wouldn’t believe it happened to anyone.
Neeli Cherkovski told the best stories about all the subcultural writers you’d ever want to hear. Whitman’s Wild Children, his book of such stories was how I found out about him soon after it had come out in 1988. He ended up writing the first biography about Bukowski, Hank, some years later.
Neeli was one of the few writers that Bukowski liked as a person. There are two books dedicated to him. They edited a literary magazine together for three issues: Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. And the relationship started when Neeli was a teen living at home—Bukowski went to his house on the insistence of someone at City Lights, and when young Neeli tried to show him tribute poems, the old crank threw the poems in the fireplace and went in the kitchen and tried to “make love" to Neeli’s mom. God, there was something so hilarious about the way Neeli said “make love to my mom” with both admiration and disgust and also knowing it was the best punchline to any story about Bukowski.
Neeli’s stories about writers were both a social defense and a burden. Sometimes he knew he was asked to be interviewed under the guise of a new book of poems, and inevitably, the conversation turned to the enigmatic, reclusive Bukowski, and the question he hated most: “what’s he really like?”
“Just like he is in the poems,” he would say. “If you read his poems, that’s him.”
Other times, it was the way he fit into a social conversation and how he avoided talking about himself. Sometimes you could catch him in story mode, and it was everything you wanted it to be. It was hard for me not to treat him like a Story Jukebox about all my favorite writers.
But then sometimes, he would actually talk about the work. The poems. From the famous poets to Eastern European obscurities. And when he talked, he recited entire sections of poems, bringing to life some of the writers who had previously been flat on the page for me.
“You have some good lines in this,” he said to me once, while looking at a poem of mine.
I wanted him to say “you’re a genius! Get your other poems and get in the car! We have to drive down to San Pedro right now and wake up Hank!”
But it was helpful. I was 22 and, well, my poems needed work. But they showed real potential. A lot of them were bad, but had these nuggets. He tried to show me what I was doing right and then recited a poem written fifty years before about the same thing. It’s not cool to crush a young artist, but telling them they’re better than they are is also bad, and some would say worse than telling them they suck.
San Francisco, 2002-ish
I was walking down Valencia Street when I ran into Neeli outside New College. I was newly sober, trying to figure out how to get my shit together and I really wanted to go back to school. New College was one of those schools with no grades, just a lot of vibes. It eventually lost its accreditation and shut down in 2008—apparently, you have to keep student records and teach someone something.
“I’m teaching here!” he said. “You should sign up! I’ll be your department head. You can get your Masters in Creative Inquiry.”
“What is that?” I said.
“What indeed!” he replied. “You tell me, that’s your thesis statement.”
Such a San Francisco moment. And you know, had I done that, I would have been able to spend a lot of time with him inquiring and answering the grand questions of creativity and had an amazing time. I still think about this one as a “what if?”
SF State University 1992-ish
Around the time I met Neeli, I was also taking a class at SF State called “Whitman & Ginsberg.” I wish I still had a paper I wrote about Howl.
The professor left me a note, grading me down unless I referenced a quote I used from Neeli. The prof was generous enough to let me do a rewrite and fix such mistakes—a great technique that actually taught me a lot about writing term papers.
“You can’t just say ‘Neeli Cherkovski said that Ginsberg created what we know of the Beat mythos after the movement was over’ without saying where you saw the quote,” the professor explained politely after class.
“But I didn’t see the quote,” I replied. “I called him and I asked if he thought my theory was right and he said emphatically yes!”
“You called Neeli Cherkovski?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s a great guy. He lives in Bernal Heights.”
“You can’t quote personal conversations in a formal paper!” he said, frustrated with me.
“What if I publish our conversation in the school lit mag as an interview? Can I quote it then?”
“YOU CAN’T QUOTE YOURSELF IN A PAPER!” he insisted, losing his patience.
I still don’t agree with this sentiment today.
I don't agree with that sentiment, either. I thought that was a very clever loophole you found there.
This is a lovely collection of memories. I often wonder about the people who orbit celebrities, be they A-list or unlisted, like satellites. How the tension between being seen because and also in spite of their relationship with the star plays out in their daily interactions.
But I also am the type to make up background stories for complete strangers who share space at a stop light, so maybe it's not as complex as I think it is, ha.
Sorry to hear this, Bucky. Lots of moving tributes on Facebook.