other female characters (who are sexual with Chinaski) are friends or co-workers of his other partners or friends, such as Valerie, the girlfriend of his musician friend Bobby, and Tessie, one of the subordinate clerks of Debra. Several of Chinaski's sex acts in this work, including anal sex with non-consenting partners who were drunk or unconscious, are vividly described in this book. Developing Guilt Complex At first, Chinaski slowly realizes that he is not beneficial to the women he is with when some of them ask him questions about this. This latent theme grows and grows, and it becomes the final plot, which revolves around a developing guilt complex as Chinaski is increasingly made aware of both how he has hurt these women and ultimately how he has pushed good women away from himself by his behavior. In excuse, he says he does this because he wasn't loved enough as a child and that he was insufficiently intimate with women in his 20's and 30's, having married a sexless woman who was 35 when he himself was only 25. This is in contrast to his other slowly-diminishing feeling, the shameless feeling that he was once a "lowly" postal worker, now was "famous writer", and needed to celebrate this every instant with alcohol and many sexual partners, making up for lost time in his 20's and 30's. He mentions his former, postal co-workers, and how they would think of him, during a threesome with two women whose summed ages was less than his age. Setting Los Angeles is the backdrop to the work for the majority, except when he travels to New York, Canada, or elsewhere to give readings of his material. He constantly derides his own poor, unsafe neighborhood, the large amount of prostitution available (even when he is a client of these services), and the fact that "all American women wear pants." Political commentary on these conditions, though powerful, would only amount to a few paragraphs or few pages of the work. Trivia In the book, Chinaski's nickname is Hank, which was one of Bukowski's nicknames. History Chinaski and Tanya had a weekend tryst. The real-life counterpart to this character wrote a self-published chapbook about the affair entitled "Blowing My Hero" under the pseudonym Amber O'Neil. The washed-up folksinger "Dinky Summers" is based on Bob Lind. Cover art Bukowski himself drew the picture of the woman on the cover