Charles Bukowski (16 page)

‘Hold me up, guys, for Christ’s sake!’ he cried. ‘It’s been a long time since I rode the freights.’

He had promised Harold Norse that he would dedicate the book to him, as thanks for getting him involved in the Penguin deal, but changed his mind at the last minute.

‘It’s dedicated to the woman that died that I loved,’ he said when he gave Norse a first edition. Indeed Norse saw it was dedicated to Jane. ‘I was going to dedicate it to you, as I promised …’ Bukowski went on, watching Norse’s reaction.

‘Oh, why didn’t you?’

‘Well, you know, my publisher John Martin, he looked at it and said, “What do you want to dedicate it to Harold Norse for? People might think you are
friends
.”’

‘Well aren’t we?’ he asked.

‘Of course we are, Hal, you know that.’ It was some time before the coin dropped and, when it did, Norse was furious. They continued to see each other occasionally, and talked on the telephone now and then, but he never really forgave the insult and Bukowski had managed to upset yet another friend who had been good to him, and who had helped his career in a significant way.

With so much going on, Bukowski desperately wanted to leave the post office so he could devote himself to his writing. He was forty-nine and the job was also grinding him down physically. Sticking mail for almost twelve years had given him chronic back and shoulder pains. But when he tried taking time off to attend to his literary work, the post office let him know he couldn’t have any leeway. They warned him for absenteeism in the April and May of 1969. In June, Bukowski wrote to his friend, John Bennett, that the stress of trying to juggle his writing and his job was making him mentally and physically sick. In August he was suspended briefly without pay for absenteeism, and he was absent without leave on various dates through September, October and November.

It was the end of the line, and he knew it, as he told Harold
Norse. ‘He was moaning and whining most of the time in a very sad and lugubrious way, not for sympathy, just feeling, “This is the end, what can I do?”’ says Norse. ‘The post office would have killed him if he hadn’t taken the plunge.’

O
ne of the most famous stories about Bukowski’s career is that he became a successful writer after bravely quitting the post office, at the age of forty-nine, with only the promise of a small monthly pay check from John Martin to keep him from Skid Row.

The truth, as revealed in his post office file, was rather different. Bukowski did not leave the post office voluntarily; he was forced into quitting after they wrote to him, in the late fall of 1969, saying he was about to be dismissed for absenteeism. He could try and appeal, but the result was a foregone conclusion. He had taken too much time off work to do his writing, and they were sick of him. Bukowski did not tell John Martin about this letter, however, when he went to him with a proposition.

‘If you get me out of the post office, I’ll write more books than you can publish,’ he said.

John Martin began to consider whether he could afford to pay Bukowski a small salary, against royalties, to cover his living expenses so he could write. They worked out that he needed $35 for his rent, $20 for groceries, $5 for gas, $15 for beer and cigarettes, $10 to pay the telephone bill and $15 for Marina’s child support. It came to exactly $100 a month. That was a quarter of John Martin’s monthly income, and he had a wife and child to support, so it was a serious undertaking. Bukowski might simply have got drunk with the money, and not produced anything worthwhile. But he had faith in him.

‘OK, I’ll take a chance – I’ll give you $100 a month, for life, guaranteed no matter what happens,’ he said, ‘if you quit the post office to write full time.’

There was no written contract, just a gentleman’s agreement. It was enough for Bukowski to go to the post office and resign his job before they fired him.

The deal with Martin was not the only money Bukowski had to cushion his freelance writing career. A thrifty man, he had built up a savings account of several thousand dollars, the basis of which was money left by his father. He had more money coming to him from the sale of his papers to the University of California at Santa Barbara, a deal set up by John Martin. He also had $3000 in his pension fund, which he could draw out if he was in trouble. He had no outstanding debts, and spent very little on himself. In fact, Bukowski had a reputation among his friends as being tight with a buck. ‘He was like a fucking conservative German, like a conservative banker,’ says Steve Richmond. ‘He paid every bill on time and dreaded debt. It scared the shit out of him.’

He had always refused requests to give public readings in the past, simply because the idea terrified him, but now every dollar counted. When his friend Peter Edler invited him to read at The Bridge, a book store off Hollywood Boulevard, Bukowski said yes. The date was set as Friday 19 December, 1969, and in the hours before his appearance, Bukowski worked himself into in a terrible state of nerves.

‘What am I going to do? I just don’t know how to do this,’ he told friends.

Far from the handful of people they expected, a couple of hundred fans showed up on the night. The place was packed. Bukowski was lit by a spotlight, sitting in an easy chair on stage with the galley proofs of
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses
Over the Hills
. ‘He is sitting there like a grandfather,’ remembers Steve Richmond, one of many friends who came to watch. ‘Nice scene – everybody so close to him. It was a magic thing.’

Although extremely nervous, he read fluently, choosing his best work, and the audience stayed with him. As his confidence grew he smiled, drank beer from a bottle and even extemporized a poem, ‘Carter to resign?’, from an article in a daily newspaper.
Richmond notes how different the evening was compared with the rambunctious readings Bukowski gave later in his career, when poet and audience traded insults. ‘It was so perfect, so right, everybody believed in him and was feeling for him, not in a pitying way, and feeling his pain when there was pain.’

The evening was such a success, Peter Edler invited Bukowski back the next night to do it all over again.

At the end of his final graveyard shift, a few days later, Bukowski wished everyone at the post office such a casual goodbye the clerks thought he was just going for the night. That was fine by Bukowski, who didn’t want a fuss. He drove home via Ned’s, where he bought beer, and got royally drunk. He stayed that way for several days, completely disorientated by the sudden rush of freedom. ‘After living in the cage I had taken the opening and flown out – like a shot into the heavens,’ he wrote.

Now, as he rolled free of his terrible job, there was nothing to do at 6.30 p.m. each day but call up friends to come and get drunk with him, and he had a party at the bungalow through the end of December, 1969, until New Year’s Eve when he finally threw his guests out, locked the door, and pulled down the shades so he could sleep.

Two days later, on the afternoon of 2 January, 1970, Bukowski sat down at his Royal typewriter and started his first novel: ‘It all began as a mistake.’

That was 1950, when he was shacked with Jane and working downtown as a temporary mail carrier. He remembered the lonely women he delivered to, the ones whose husbands were at work, others whose husbands had not come back from the war. Crazy bitches some of them, but what bodies they had. He would put
some sex in this book, for laughs. Writing
Notes of a Dirty Old
Man
had taught him sex sold.

He worked at the novel day and night over the next three weeks, hardly leaving the bungalow as he reviewed his past life through the character of Henry Chinaski: the death of Jane, changing her name to Betty; his marriage to Barbara Frye and their trip to Texas; buying the ’57 Plymouth new, the same ’57 Plymouth that sat outside now, rust spots around the door sills, dead leaves on the windscreen. He described the tyrannical supervisor when he was a substitute carrier; the day he tried to deliver mail during a deluge; the endless scheme tests he had to take to keep his job; and the events of the past few months, culminating in his quitting to write a novel.

When it was finished, he went back with a biro crossing out repetitions and tightening sentences. Then he took a fresh sheet of paper and worked on a title. His first thought was to call it
Six
Pack No Scheme
. He wrote out more than twenty other names, ticking those he liked best:
12 Years Gone, Death of Betty
and
Postal News
were favorites, but still none was exactly right. Finally he had it, and he dialed John Martin’s number in West LA.

Before he left the post office, Martin had told him that he should try and write a novel, if he thought he had one in him, because it was their best hope of making money. Bukowski hadn’t said he would be starting right away.

‘Come and get it,’ he said when Martin answered.

‘What?’

‘The novel.’

‘You wrote a novel?’ he asked, astonished.

‘Yep, all done.’

‘What’s the name of it?’

‘
Post Office
.’

Post Office
is the seminal prose work of Bukowski’s career
just as
The
Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
is his seminal poetry book. It is the first, and arguably the best, of a series of five novels charting the life and times of Henry Chinaski in an innovative but accessible prose style that, in its simplicity, is remarkably similar to the poetry. The novels have proved popular with readers all around the world and, in the years following its publication,
Post Office
has been translated into fifteen languages.

It is not a perfect novel. Bukowski included material relevant to his life as autobiography, but which does not make for a cohesive work of fiction; the section about his marriage to Barbara seems out of place; and the last quarter of the book is weak. But
Post
Office
is highly original and accomplished for several reasons.

It is the spare style of the prose that is most striking. From reading Fante and Hemingway, he had learned to write in a straight-forward way with lots of dialogue. From Fante, in particular, he took the idea of dividing the novel into very short chapters, or numbered sub-sections of chapters, some only half a page long. ‘I was concerned with “pace”,’ Bukowski explained, ‘a briskness of style which would not lie and which would still keep the reader awake while I was getting at what I wanted to say.’

An even greater achievement is the totally convincing way in which he writes about work. He succeeds in making the drudgery of carrying and sorting mail real and relevant to every reader who has had a job they disliked. Sorting letters is not a sexy subject for fiction, but he makes it interesting and that is a significant accomplishment because repetitive work is the stuff of so many lives. In his critical study of Bukowski,
Against the
American Dream
, Russell Harrison writes: ‘No contemporary American novelist has treated work as extensively or intensively as Bukowski … Indeed Bukowski’s outstanding achievement is his depiction of work, most notably in
Post Office
.’

Finally,
Post Office
is very funny, a humor which leavens all the other ingredients. As Bukowski was fond of saying, Hemingway was a great writer but his books aren’t a barrel of laughs. He made sure that Henry Chinaski’s misadventures, as lover and postal worker, were recounted with a sardonic humor that saves the novel from becoming pretentious. This would be true of the
best of his subsequent novels, and is undoubtedly one the main reasons for their enduring popularity.

Although he finished
Post Office
remarkably quickly, Bukowski did not reward himself with a break. Quite the contrary, he felt compelled to write almost constantly now that he was free of his job, partly because he was terrified of not earning enough to support himself. He wrote masses of poetry in the first few months, so many poems that he ran out of small magazines to send them to. And within weeks of finishing his first novel, he began planning a second which at this early stage he called
The
Horseplayer
.

John Martin came by now and then to check on Bukowski and talk about their books, and sometimes they went out to eat at a local restaurant, but they spent relatively little time together and this distance helped preserve their friendship. The fact that Martin was now his primary source of income was also a strong reason for Bukowski to stay on good terms with him.

In April, a collection of Bukowski first editions came up for sale at a literary auction in New York, alongside collections of Faulkner and Hemingway. Although the Bukowski books raised only a fraction of the prices commanded by the more famous writers, they sold easily and it became apparent there was a lucrative market in collecting his books, magazine appearances, letters and manuscripts, even his child-like paintings. But Bukowski had only a limited understanding of the value of his artwork, as Martin discovered when he telephoned to arrange the collection of forty new paintings he had buyers for. When he asked what would be a good time to pick them up, Bukowski said he didn’t have the paintings anymore. He didn’t think they were very good so he’d put them in the bath and pissed all over them. He wasn’t quite sure why, perhaps he was crazy. And he couldn’t get them back, because he’d dumped the whole mess in the garbage. Martin was aghast at this, and asked if he had any idea how much money they could have made.

The success of The Bridge reading encouraged Bukowski to accept other offers to read in public, although he never overcame his nerves or his inherent distaste at clowning for an audience. Neither would he read for free, like some of his acquaintances
whom he felt liked to hear the sound of their own voices. This was work and his minimum fee was $25, plus expenses.

In May, he caught a train to New Mexico for a university reading, and afterwards went to bed with a woman who had been in the audience, managing only a ‘drunken half-fuck’. The next morning he flew up to Seattle, Washington, for an engagement at Bellevue Community College. It was the first plane ride of his life and he celebrated by getting wrecked.

He was woken with a hangover at 8.30 the following morning at the home of one of the academics who had invited him, and whom he had insulted the previous evening. He was so sick with nerves he threw up in the parking lot before going into the college.

They showed him into a small room where a handful of fashionably dressed students had gathered to hear him read. He noticed the girls in front crossed their legs so he couldn’t see up their skirts.