Charles Bukowski (7 page)

‘Hank’s room was filthy,’ remembers Jory Sherman, a poet from St Paul, Minnesota, who became a close friend at this time. ‘He never cleaned up. Dishes in the sink and cigarette butts everywhere.’

Grim though the surroundings were, Bukowski was free from his failed marriage, and the expectations of his ambitious wife. He was doing what he wanted, and had his job at the post office to keep him from starving. ‘… at the best of times there was a small room and the machine and the bottle,’ he wrote. ‘The sound of the keys, on and on, and the shouts: “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE WE’RE WORKING PEOPLE
HERE AND WE’VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!” With broomsticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines …’

The landlord told him he would have to stop typing at 9.30 p.m. because the other tenants were complaining. That was precisely the time Bukowski was getting into the swing of it, with a few beers inside him, a cigar going and maybe some Mozart on the radio, if he lucked it. He put up with the noise of the other tenants: the canned laughter from their television sets, and ‘the lesbian down the hall’ who played jazz records all evening with her door open. Why couldn’t he be allowed to write? But the landlord had made his mind up. It was a new rule. So Bukowski developed a system. He typed until 9.30 p.m. and finished his work silently in hand-printed block capitals. He became so skilful he could hand-print almost as fast as he could type.

For several years, contact with his parents had been limited to asking for money when he was broke, and it got so that they barely saw each other. Kate and Henry moved out of LA to the suburb of Temple City, buying a new bungalow on Doreen Avenue and often complained to their neighbours, Francis and Irma Billie, about their wino son. By Francis Billie’s account, Henry was the same bullying braggart Bukowski had always despised, remembering that he tried to boss the neighbors around and exaggerated his importance at the LA County Museum, describing himself as Art Director although he had never risen higher than a preparator, and that by posing as the author, Charles Bukowski.

Kate started to drink heavily. She ordered deliveries of wine from the corner liquor store when Henry was at work and Irma Billie says that, when Henry came home, he often found Kate passed out drunk.

The last time Bukowski saw his mother she was in the Rosemead Rest Home, dying of cancer. Kate said he should have more respect for his parents, especially his father. ‘Your father is a great man,’ she told him.

Henry decided their son would make no further visits, and stopped giving him news of Kate’s condition. ‘Henry said it wouldn’t do any good anyway,’ says Irma Billie. ‘He would
just come down there drunk, so he didn’t bother to tell him.’ On Christmas Eve, 1956, Bukowski went out and bought a rosary as a gift for his mother and drove over to the home. He was trying to open the door to her room when a nurse told him she had died the day before. To what extent the bereavement caused him pain is impossible to say for certain because Bukowski never dwelt on his feelings for his mother, either in his writings or in private conversation, but it seems to have made little impression on him. ‘It’s a very veiled sort of thing, barely there,’ says his widow, Linda Lee Bukowski.

Henry lost no time looking for a new wife. First he tried to seduce Anna Bukowski, widow of his late brother, John, but she didn’t want to know, so he got engaged to one of the women who worked at the Billies’ dry-cleaning business. Late on the afternoon of 4 December, 1958 – nine months after Bukowski’s divorce – Henry’s fiancé came by the house and found him dead on the kitchen floor having apparently suffered a heart attack. If Bukowski failed to grieve for his mother, the death of the father was positively a cause for jubilation. ‘… he’s dead dead dead, thank God,’ he wrote.

The old man’s corpse lay in a Temple City funeral parlor where his girlfriend wept over the casket. ‘No, no, no,’ she wailed. ‘He can’t be dead!’ He had only been sixty-three, she said, a fit and strong man, with many years ahead of him. Bukowski, his Uncle Jake and Aunt Eleanor stood together looking at the corpse. Bukowski remembered his father beating him with the razor strop, telling him he would never amount to anything; trying to push his head down into the vomit on the rug; beating him while his mother stood by doing nothing; beating Kate until she screamed. He had a powerful compulsion to push the girlfriend aside and spit on his face.

A substantial block of granite marked the family plot at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena – BUKOWSKI etched in capital letters. The older ones were almost all dead: Henry and Kate; Henry’s brothers, John and Ben, both broken by the Depression; Grandfather Leonard, the drunken veteran of the Kaiser’s army; and Grandmother Emilie, the hard-shell Baptist who cackled she would outlive them all. But Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr was
left, whiskey on his breath and an uneasiness in his stomach as he listened to the prayers said for his namesake.

Back at Doreen Avenue, friends of his parents looked over bits of furniture and talked about lawn mowers and hedge clippers, and other oddments borrowed or promised over the years, things ‘Henry and Kate would have wanted us to have’. Bukowski told them to take whatever they wanted, giving away pictures from the walls, silverware, anything they asked for. Women were practically fighting over his mother’s home-made preserves in the kitchen, and so much stuff was taken that the contents of the house was valued at only $100 when it was sold.

There was a perverse pleasure lounging around in the empty bungalow while ‘the old man was down in the dirt’ and Henry’s attorney totted up what he would inherit. Bukowski remembered his father saying a family could get rich if the sons of each generation bought property and willed it to their heirs. It had seemed a stupid idea and he felt vindicated in his disdain for his father’s lifestyle when the attorney informed him that Henry had less than $300 in savings and still owed $6,613 to the Bank of America on his mortgage. Apart from the equity in the house, the only real assets were a pension fund, a painting by Erich Heckal and a four-year-old Plymouth. Still, when everything was settled, Bukowski received a little more than $15,000. After he became famous, he claimed to have drunk and gambled away the inheritance, but he never revealed he had inherited $15,000, a substantial amount in 1959, and it’s unlikely he frittered it all away. Friends remember him having thousands of dollars in savings within a few years of his father’s death, and the truth is that, from this point on, he became careful with money.

As Bukowski produced and submitted a greater volume of work – never bothering to keep carbons so he had no copies unless the poems were published or returned – his poems appeared more frequently in the little magazines. This was partly because he was writing darker, more realistic poems reflecting his recent experiences of loss and death. In 1959, he had poems accepted by magazines including
Nomad, Coastlines, Quicksilver
and
Epos
. Success fired up his ambition, as Jory Sherman recalls: ‘He said, “I want to beat them all, beat every one of them.” He wanted fame, he really did.’

His first chapbook was published in October, 1960, two months after his fortieth birthday. E. V. Griffith, a small press editor from Eureka, California, who had already published broadsides of two Bukowski poems, spent two years sweating over
Flower
,
Fist and Bestial Wail
. ‘There were numerous delays in getting the book into print and the correspondence that ensued between poet and publisher was often testy,’ says Griffith. ‘But any ill-will dissipated quickly when copies were at last in Bukowski’s hands.’

Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail
is little more than a pamphlet, twenty-eight pages long and only two hundred copies printed, a good proportion of which went to friends of the publisher and author, yet it had a special significance for Bukowski being his first book.

Many of the poems, like ‘soire´e’, were dark and introspective:

Also in his fortieth year, Bukowski was show-cased in
Targets
, a New Mexico quarterly whose editors turned over an entire section of the magazine to ‘A Charles Bukowski Signature’. This included a number of his most accomplished early poems, like ‘The Tragedy of the Leaves’ which again is a gloomy, claustrophobic poem. It concludes with a confrontation between the poet and an angry landlady in a rooming house not unlike the place Bukowski was living:

A further step towards what Judson Crews calls the ‘Hank persona’ came with the chapbook,
Longshot Pomes
(sic)
for
Broke Players
, published in New York. There were poems about prostitutes, the race track and classical music, not the best work Bukowski ever wrote on these subjects, but getting closer to what he would become famous for. The change of direction was indicated by the cover art of a man playing cards at a table while a woman waits in bed. Inside was a brief biography giving the salient points of the emerging Bukowski mythology: his unhappy childhood; the years bumming around the country, living in rooming houses and working at menial jobs, crazy jobs like being the oven man in a dog biscuit factory and ‘coconut man’ in a cake factory. These jobs may have been invented to add colour, as they are not recorded on the very detailed work experience forms Bukowski later completed for the post office.

Of all the small press publishers Bukowski dealt with in these early years the most significant, by far, were Jon and Louise ‘Gypsy Lou’ Webb and their extraordinary Loujon Press.

As a young man, Jon Webb took part in the hold-up of a jewellery store in Cleveland, Ohio, and served three years in a reformatory. It was whilst he was inside that he developed a passion for literature, editing the reformatory weekly and writing crime stories. Upon being paroled, he returned to Cleveland where he met and married an Italian girl who came to be known as Gypsy Lou because of her colorful clothes and long dark hair. In 1954 they moved to the French quarter of New Orleans where Jon Webb decided to become a publisher of avant-garde writing. He contacted William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller and other leading underground figures urging them to submit work to
The Outsider
, a journal he and Gypsy Lou were setting up. Jory Sherman was appointed West Coast editor and suggested they
might also publish Bukowski. The Webbs loved his work. As Gypsy Lou says, they were greatly impressed with, ‘the realness, you know, not phony at all. He was just very honest and down to earth.’

The Webbs published eleven Bukowski poems in the first issue of
The Outsider
, some of the best he had written, alongside work by fashionable beat writers. The Bukowski selection was all the more impressive because Webb took a professional approach to being an editor, rejecting much of what Bukowski submitted as sub-standard. The best Bukowski poem in the issue was ‘old man, dead in a room’, which he meant as his own epitaph:

At times it seemed the poem might be prophetic. Bukowski was drinking hard, hitting the cocktail lounges night after night, getting into fights, and often waking up in city drunk tanks with the other ‘silverfish’, as he called his cell-mates. He retched so hard in the morning he saw blood in the toilet pan. Maybe he would die as the doctors had predicted, ripped apart by another hemorrhage. His drinking caused him to suffer small injuries and unpleasant ailments: he jammed a shard of glass in his foot when he was stumbling about drunk one night; and developed hemorrhoids to beat a world record. Thoughts of killing himself returned and he made an abortive attempt at gassing himself in his room one afternoon.

Once again, he started seeing something of Jane who was in an even more desperate state than when they were living together. She was working as a maid at The Phillips, a dive hotel in Hollywood, in exchange for a room rent-free and a few dollars drinking money.
Her legs had lost their shapeliness and her pot belly had grown to a grotesque size. Bukowski referred to her as ‘the old woman’ and they enjoyed the companionship of fellow alcoholics, as he wrote in ‘A Nice Place’:

Sometimes they had sex, but Jane was so far gone that intercourse repulsed him. He wrote to his pen friend, the Louisiana academic John William Corrington, that it made him think of a film he had once seen of a Cesarian operation.

There was a sense of impending tragedy about Jane, that nothing much could help her. In
Post Office
, Chinaski visits Betty at her hotel a few days after the Christmas holidays and the scene Bukowski describes is probably an accurate description of how low Jane had fallen by January, 1962: it is early in the morning when Chinaski calls at her room, but Betty is already drunk, surrounded by bottles of liquor given as Christmas gifts by the tenants, all cheap brands. Chinaski fears she will keep drinking until the bottles are empty, or until she is dead.