No AA for Buk
I'm about 100% positive he never went or even ever entertained the notion of AA. His attitude I think to drinking was that it was a choice. I even doubt he considered himself an "alcoholic" in the "disease" model of that word.
He says in the Taylor Hackford film, in the scene with Linda King, that it got him up, it got him out. How most people just stay with the daily, never get high, never get ecstatic. I wonder too when he says "some people never go crazy..what horrible lives they must lead" whether both madness and alcohol were for him means of transcendence, of ecstasy, as sexual love can be. Bukowski is about trying to find the sacred in life.
Now I think it is possible to find these ecstatic states without recourse to "mind expanding" substances. [For example, Buk got high on great music--for example Stravinsky, Sibelius, Mahler, Bach..].
I love a writer as much as I love Bukowski who is his COMPLETE OPPOSITE in every way--Vladimir Nabokov. And Nabokov I think got high by studying butterflies, by writing very weird and complex and lovely books, by hiking in the Swiss mountains. The guy never got drunk in his life and he was just high on being a genius. But Buk had a bit of a more difficult childhood...:eek: