Charles Bukowski (26 page)

It was wonderful to lay on the lawn under his fruit trees and
do nothing while his neighbors worked. Who would have thought he would be living like this after all those nights at the post office, all those years in cockroach-ridden court apartments? Who would have guessed he would be stretching out like a cat in his own garden under his own guava tree, sunlight through the leaves dappling his belly? He would never get tired of the free hours. It was glorious to have nowhere to go and nothing to do, but wait until dinner, wondering what type of wine he would drink.

He turned sixty in August, 1980, and signed a $10,000 contract with Barbet Schroeder to write a screenplay based on his life, with a promise of more money if the film went into production. The screenplay – which had the working title,
The Rats of Thirst
, later changed to
Barfly
– was an amalgam of the years Bukowski lived in Philadelphia, hanging out at the bar on Fairmount Avenue, and also when he lived with Jane in Los Angeles. He finished it in the spring of 1979 and Schroeder flew to Europe to try and raise the money.

Schroeder was not the only filmmaker interested in bringing Bukowski’s work to the screen. An Italian consortium, eager to cash in on Bukowski’s popularity in Europe, negotiated a $44,000 deal with Lawrence Ferlinghetti for rights to some of the City Lights stories, and yet another consortium was talking about an adaptation of
Factotum
. As the months passed, Bukowski found himself increasingly embroiled in the machinations of the movie business, for which he had intense distrust. Apart from anything else, he believed Hollywood had been the ruination of John Fante.

There were several long discussions about who would play Henry Chinaski in
Barfly
, the film which remained Bukowski’s
favorite project and the one he had most to do with. He met James Woods who had recently starred in
The Onion Field
. The singer Tom Waits came over to San Pedro for drinks. Kris Kristofferson was also suggested for the part, but Bukowski was horrified to learn he would sing and play his guitar in the movie. In the end none of them committed to the project and, without a definite star name, one film company and then another flirted with the idea of financing the movie before pulling out.

Months went by without anything being finalized, and Schroeder found himself spending many evenings drinking with Bukowski and Linda Lee at San Pedro, listening to Bukowski’s stories about when he was younger. He decided he should make a permanent record of these sessions and so began to film what became
The
Charles Bukowski Tapes
, a remarkable four-hour documentary of Bukowski talking about his life and work.

Most of the documentary was filmed with Bukowski speaking directly to the camera at his home in San Pedro, but they also revisited locations from his past life including the house at 2122 Longwood Avenue. Bukowski showed Schroeder the place in the living room where his father tried to force his face into the vomit on the carpet, and they went into the bathroom where his father had beaten him so many times with the razor strop.

‘Here we have the torture chamber,’ said Bukowski, looking round sadly. ‘This is a torture chamber where I learned … something … This place holds some memories all right. I don’t know, it’s just a terrible place to stand and talk about it … you don’t want to talk about it too much …’

Schroeder began to ask a question, but Bukowski turned away.

‘Let’s forget it,’ he said.

Linda Lee was a fan of the British rock group, The Who, and that summer she had been attending every one of their concerts in Los Angeles, partly because Pete Townshend was a fellow devotee of Meher Baba and an acquaintance of hers. Bukowski decided he hated The Who. He didn’t like their music, but mostly he hated them because he thought Pete Townshend and Linda Lee were having an affair, which was untrue. One evening when Barbet Schroeder was filming at the house in San Pedro, Bukowski
decided to confront Linda Lee about coming home late from the concerts.

‘I’ve always been used because I’m a good guy,’ he said. He and Schroeder had been drinking and filming all afternoon in the garden, getting through four bottles of wine, and Bukowski was in a volatile mood. ‘Women, when they meet me, they say, “I can use this son of a bitch, I can push him around, he’s an easy-going guy,” so they do it … But, you know, finally I get to resent it a bit.’

‘What do you resent?’ asked Linda Lee, who had also been drinking.

‘Just being pushed.’

‘Why do you let yourself be pushed by this kind of shit, you idiot?’

‘I’ve told you a thousand times to leave. You won’t leave,’ said Bukowski. He said he was going to get a Jewish attorney to throw her out. It would happen so fast she would feel her ass was skinned. Linda Lee smirked at that. ‘She thinks I don’t have the guts,’ Bukowski told Schroeder, who was still filming. ‘She thinks I can’t live without her … You think you’re the last woman on Earth that I can get?’

‘I hadn’t thought about it.’

‘Yeah, well, you better start thinking.’ He was ready to turn her over to the next fellow and he wouldn’t be the least bit jealous, being sick and tired of her ‘Meher Baba bullshit’ and her staying out every night.

Linda Lee protested that she did not stay out every night. ‘I don’t want you to give these people that impression because it’s not true.’

‘What a fuckin’ hunk of phony shit you are,’ he said, menacingly. ‘I hate liars. You lied right into their faces, you cunt.’ She had been out past midnight, several nights running: 5.30 a.m. one night, 3.30 a.m. another. The night before last she came home at 2.01 in the morning.

‘Why are you so offended by me doing something else?’

‘I don’t want a woman out six nights a week after 2 a.m. I don’t care what the reasons … The month of May you were out fifteen nights past midnight.’ She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘That’s true; the calendar is marked,’ he said.

‘So what?’

‘So what? This is why I am going to get an attorney to get you off my ass.’

‘Why are you offended by me doing something else?’

‘I live with a woman, or she lives with me. She doesn’t live with other people.’

‘I
do
live with other people, and I’m going to for the rest of my life.’

Something snapped in Bukowski when she said that. Moving slowly, but with deliberate violence, he swung his legs onto the sofa and kicked her.

‘You fucking cunt,’ he snarled, his face pushed towards hers. ‘You think you can walk out on me every fucking night? You fucking whore! You bitch! Who do you think that I am?’ he asked. Then he swung at her. ‘You fucking shit …’

In the morning, Bukowski had no memory of what had happened, and Linda Lee says he was contrite when she told him. ‘I remember thinking afterwards, everybody is going to think this is the way we live our life: he beats me and this and that. I swear he never had before and he never did again.’ Linda Lee says she thinks Bukowski’s outburst was funny, and believes she was made powerful by it. ‘I mean, it’s humiliating but also, in a way, it’s so good, it’s so real.’

While Barbet Schroeder was making his documentary, and struggling to get the money together to make
Barfly
, the Italian director Marco Ferreri, best known for making
La Grand Bouffe
, secured the rights to several stories from
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions
and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
. He raised the money in Europe and the American actor Ben Gazzara signed on for the lead part as the Bukowski-like poet, Charles Serking.

The film,
Tales of Ordinary Madness
, would be based primarily on Bukowski’s
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
, a short story about a prostitute who mutilates herself and then commits suicide. Ferreri also wanted to use
Animal
Crackers in my Soup
which Bukowski had written for the soft porn magazine,
Adam
. The heroine of the story has sex with a tiger and Ferreri and Gazzara met with an actress to discuss the possibility of filming with a real
tiger. Ferreri said they could use glass to protect her. ‘It was the most amusing dinner I ever had,’ says Gazzara. ‘She was sitting there taking it very seriously, until Marco said it was too much trouble.’

Bukowski was unhappy that Ferreri began work before paying him his money – remarking in a letter to John Martin that even Hitler hadn’t trusted the Italians – but had mellowed by the time the crew came to Los Angeles, and met Ben Gazzara for a drink.

‘I’m really disappointed; you have gone up-scale, Buk,’ said Gazzara when he saw Bukowski and Linda Lee had brought bottles of good French wine with them to his hotel room.

‘Well, I made a little money, Ben,’ said Bukowski. ‘I thought I’d live well.’

‘I think he was proud that we were making a film about him, but low-key proud,’ says Gazzara. ‘He had this sardonic sense of humor that precluded his gushing about anything. But I think he was excited by it.’

The US première of
Tales of Ordinary Madness
was held at the Encore Theater in Hollywood on a wet evening in 1981. Bukowski sat at the back drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag as he watched the Gazzara character giving a poetry reading whilst wearing dark glasses – a bad beginning, in Bukowski’s opinion – and drinking out of a bottle in a brown paper bag. Serking molests a twelve-year-old girl before having sex with a blonde played by actress Susan Tyrell. (Gazzara says that as he was carrying Tyrell to the bed to be whipped and raped, she whispered in his ear: ‘My father’s a minister, wait until he sees this picture!’) Bizarre scenes follow with the masochistic character of the prostitute harming herself in various ways, including putting a safety pin through her vagina. At one stage, she lies across Gazzara’s bed, enticing him to join her, but he carries on writing.

‘If that were me, I would have stopped typing long ago,’ Bukowski heckled from the back of the theater, adding that he had never seen a rooming house so clean (the interiors were far from authentic having been filmed in a studio outside Rome, Italy).

‘Shhh,’ hissed a member of the audience.

‘Hey, I’m the guy they made the movie about. I can say anything I want!’

‘Shut up!’

‘You shut up!’

Bukowski thought Ben Gazzara totally wrong for the part, referring to him mockingly as ‘Ben Garabaldi’ (sic) and later writing that he had ‘appealing eyes like a constipated man sitting on the pot straining to crap.’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had sold the film rights to Ferreri, agreed. ‘The trouble was [Gazzara] was too good-looking. They should have had a really ugly hero and then the film would have really made it. But the producers didn’t have the nerve to do that. They had to go for the Hollywood approach. It could have been a great film if they had a real Quasimodo-type playing Bukowski.’ Gazzara defends himself by saying he was not trying to play Bukowski, ‘not having lived with him to study his mannerisms. I had to invent my own. I didn’t go for putting the pock-marks in the skin and doing the make-up to uglify. I thought the important thing was the artist, the interior man.’

The stories used as the basis for
Tales of Ordinary Madness
are not among Bukowski’s best work, being the sensationalist stuff he wrote for the underground press and pornographic magazines when he was short of money, and the Italian director also had difficulty with American material. The press unanimously agreed the film was a non-starter. ‘By turns repellent, naïve and risible,’ reported
Sight and Sound
. ‘They just dismissed the picture out of hand,’ says Gazzara. ‘Nobody came, reviews were bad, and that was it.’ The movie did reasonably well in Europe, however, particularly in Paris where it opened in six theaters with queues around the block.

After the première, Bukowski and a small entourage trailed along Melrose Avenue. Drunk and tired of being followed around, he walked out into traffic and shouted: ‘Hey, I thought you guys would follow me
wherever
I go!’

They went into a bar where he baited a group of men: ‘Look at the faaaags,’ drawing the word out to be as insulting as possible. Later, at Dan Tana’s restaurant, he told the mâitre d’ he had an ‘empty face’.

Driving back to San Pedro that night, Bukowski was stopped by the police, ordered to get out of the BMW and lay face-down on the road while they put handcuffs on him. It was raining. His
clothes were getting soaked and, when he looked up at the cops, rain splashed into his eyes.

The arrest didn’t bother him unduly. In Los Angeles, drunk drivers were sent to ‘alcohol studies’ class and given a diploma if they completed the course. Bukowski already had one diploma, framed and hanging on the wall as a joke.

His behavior after the première, and when he kicked Linda Lee off the sofa, appears to be that of an out-of-control alcoholic, a man in need of help, but Linda Lee completely rejects this perception of Bukowski’s drinking. She says he was a ‘smart drunk’ and adds that he did not think of himself as an alcoholic because, however much he drank, and whatever he did when he was drunk, he always got up the next day and worked, even if he didn’t get up until noon. ‘I know a lot of alcoholics, but Hank remained prolific. I don’t call that alcoholism. I think alcoholism is when you drink and you can’t do anything anymore.’