Not a Bukowski Statue

Introduction

The Little, Three Hearted Town/Cataloging the Unfinished

One partner in my beginnings without end is my best friend and hanai sister Angela “Romee” Romero, founder of the San Pedro Heritage Museum, who’d love my excitement and research ways to make it possible. She was there shortly after I started my bookstore and looked for spaces to rent when I wanted it to grow, she hosted my writing workshop and attended my poetry readings, she got me into Charles Bukowski’s house and introduced me to his wife, Linda, she dropped my poetry in her San Pedro Today column, and brought me whiskey. She knew the more improbable the beginning the more my mind would catch fire, like writing a city memoir of San Pedro that was both historic and reflective to match the complexity of a city that isn’t a city or like trying to build a statue in the face of a pandemic and multiple uprisings to a person we were “meh” about.

Romee and I were going to contextualize Bukowski’s version of San Pedro by highlighting references to this city in his poems, sharing snippets of the history of those places as he knew them, and reflect on how they have changed. That structure is still here, only where the history of Hank’s San Pedro would have been more robust, my response, as a person of color born the year Hank moved to Pedro, takes up more space.

This book is a map circumnavigating the boundaries of San Pedro defined by the three of us, Romee, Bukowski, and me. It starts with the freeway and the bridge where they spit Hank out from the race track and where my first Pedro home sits, along the waterfront and downtown where he ate and shopped, to Beacon Street where his P.O. Box was with its view of the port, up to Vista Del Oro and the hospital where I live, Romee stayed, and where he died, to his neighborhood, Holy Trinity, where he and Romee lived (my first house is there, too), and ending in Green Hills Cemetery.