Charles Bukowski (9 page)

For the best part of twelve years Bukowski held this backbreaking job, working two weeks straight and then taking a four-day weekend and, as the years went by, he became convinced it would kill him.

It was a Friday night in the spring of 1963, the start of a long weekend after working ten days at the post office, and Bukowski was drinking in his room. Not having had any female company to speak of since Jane died over a year ago, and feeling lonely, he decided to call a woman who had written to him saying she loved his work. She was from somewhere back east but had recently come to stay with her mother in Garden Grove, a suburb of LA.

‘I have to see you right now,’ Bukowski insisted, when he got her on the line. ‘You have to come at once.’

She said she would love to, but had no transport because her mother was using the car.

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘No, come
now
.’

There was a Greyhound leaving Anaheim around midnight. If she walked to the station, she might catch it. But she wouldn’t be in LA until at least 2 a.m. Bukowski said he would be up.

His new friend was born Frances Elizabeth Dean in San Rafael, California, in 1922, but later changed her name to FrancEyE. Her father was an electrical engineer from a well-to-do family who made a fortune inventing a type of boiler. He died when FrancEyE was eight and she was brought up in Lexington, Massachusetts, home of her paternal grandparents. She went to Smith College where she joined the poetry club and started to write about what she describes as ‘my bitterness and despair’. She married a soldier and settled in Michigan, raising a family of four daughters, but continued to write poetry and to correspond with other poets.

One of her pen friends was Stanley Kurnik who ran a writers’ workshop in LA and knew Bukowski. He would go over to North Mariposa and look at his poems, the pile of old work he kept in the closet, and pick out some good ones to read to his workshop group. Sometimes Kurnik sent copies to FrancEyE and she was so thrilled by them that she wrote to Bukowski expressing her admiration. When her marriage ended, and she moved to Garden
Grove, FrancEyE wrote again, this time asking to meet him. It was this letter Bukowski was turning over when he called her on the telephone.

‘Of course he was drunk,’ she says. ‘He was drunk out of his mind. I didn’t realize this at the time. But I do remember thinking in the cab that brought me from the bus station, I hope he does follow through because I don’t have enough money to pay this cab driver.’

The next thing FrancEyE knew she was at North Mariposa in the still of the early morning with Bukowski, sobered up a little, coming down the steps with the money for the driver. ‘Bukowski seemed like this giant, this gorgeous giant,’ she says. ‘His hair was all slicked back … His gaze was very direct. He had a very symmetrical face. His nose was kind of smashed, but I just thought he was gorgeous.’

He was not supposed to have female visitors in his room out of hours, so they sneaked up to 303 and whispered together until dawn. ‘We would sit and not say anything and he would get nervous because he could never stand silence. He would always say something to start the conversation again.’ They discussed their mutual feelings of depression and isolation. ‘I was desperately lonely and grief-stricken and on the edge of suicide all the time because I didn’t have my kids,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have a life. And he was in much the same situation.’ Bukowski spoke about Jane’s death, and all the guilt and grief he felt, and how much he regretted being cruel to a dog they had, when he was drunk one time. When they had worn each other out with their misery, they climbed into the Murphy bed.

The following afternoon Bukowski took FrancEyE to Santa Anita to watch the horses. An incorrigible spendthrift herself, she noticed that, although he was clearly addicted to gambling, he was cautious with the amount of money he spent. ‘His rent was paid. His savings were in his savings account and he would gamble what he had left,’ she says.

They began to see each other regularly and she moved into Los Angeles to be near him, taking a cheap room on North Vermont Avenue, a couple of blocks up from the Phillips Hotel. The Hollywood Freeway ran under the apartment building and
when she opened her window in the morning she was engulfed in a cloud of exhaust.

FrancEyE was a moderate drinker, nothing like Jane had been, but this didn’t stop Bukowski from boozing. She remembers he kept his drinking more or less under control during the week, when he had to get to his job, but ‘drank non-stop’ at the weekends, benders which often ended with some accident, or with him spending the night in jail followed by a court appearance. He had a newspaper clipping about Alcoholics Anonymous stuck to the wall and would occasionally talk about whether he fitted the profile of an alcoholic. On balance he decided he didn’t because he could stop drinking if he wanted, if only for a day or so, and because he carried on writing however much he drank. This remained his opinion throughout his life.

Despite the indifference he later showed FrancEyE, she says the relationship began as a love affair. ‘We both had such a need for love and we both received love from each other,’ she says. Bukowski did not write very much about FrancEyE, and there are no love poems comparable to those he wrote about Jane. Indeed, the closest he ever came to admitting love was in the poem, ‘one for old snaggle-tooth’, written years after they’d split, in which he acknowledges they ‘were once great lovers’. However, in a letter to Corrington, he described FrancEyE as a grey-haired old woman (she was forty-one when they met) who loved him, but whom he did not love.

FrancEyE explains this by saying Bukowski had difficulty expressing love. ‘He wrote about the negative emotions more,’ she says. ‘He used to be really embarrassed by positive feeling.’ This was not limited to feelings for her, but extended to all human relationships. As an example, she recalls Bukowski confessing he admired some people who had recently been to visit him. He thought they were wonderful, but he said these feelings of admiration for other human beings made him feel sick.

The visitors were probably photographer Sam Cherry and his teenage son, Neeli. Bukowski was becoming close to the family, whom he had met through Jory Sherman, admiring Sam Cherry for the hard life he’d led during the depression: riding the box cars as
a hobo, working as a longshoreman and living on San Francisco’s Skid Row.

When Sam Cherry visited North Mariposa, Bukowski tried to establish his own tough guy credentials, by boasting that he’d killed five men.

‘Come on, don’t give me that shit, Bukowski,’ Cherry replied. ‘How many men did you really kill?’

Bukowski took a drink, looked at the crack in the wall, and said he had killed four men. Cherry guffawed and there was another pause before Bukowski revised this to three men.

‘After about twenty or thirty minutes it got down to zero,’ says Cherry. ‘He was full of bullshit.’

Apart from the love and support of FrancEyE, and the friendship of people like Sam Cherry, it was Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb who lifted Bukowski out of his long period of depression by writing to him that they liked his work so much they had decided to make him their first Outsider of the Year. He would get an inscribed plaque to hang on his wall and, more importantly, they would publish an anthology of his best poems. Bukowski was overwhelmed by the Webbs’ generosity of spirit, people he still had not met. He knew it would be a crippling task for them financially, with no money other than what they could raise through friends like book dealer, Ed Blair, and sympathetic writers like Henry Miller, as well as being a massive time commitment.

The proposed book was to be an infinitely more substantial publication than the chapbooks previously brought out. It would be a beautifully produced hard-cover volume, properly bound, and sold commercially through stores. The Webbs selected Bukowski’s best work since 1955 – poems like ‘the tragedy of the leaves’, ‘conversation in a cheap room’ and ‘old man, dead in a room’ – and then set about making the design so remarkable that anyone walking into a store would feel compelled to pick the book up, even if they’d never heard of Bukowski. The poems were printed on expensive deckle-edged paper in a range of colours and bound in an elaborate cork cover. Jon Webb wanted to sell autographed copies so he mailed unbound pages to Bukowski to sign with a silver deco-write pen, giving precise instructions on
how hard he must press, how long the ink took to dry, which side of the paper to work on and how many inches in from the margin he should write. A bemused Bukowski reflected it was a wonder the book didn’t walk and talk the amount of trouble they were taking with it.

In the colophon, Webb described the arcane conditions in which the book was produced, writing that he and Gypsy Lou hand-fed the pages into an ancient Chandler & Price letterpress, working through the humid summer of 1963 in a workshop behind a sagging mansion in the French Quarter of New Orleans. ‘The workshop’s windows gaping out into a delightful walled-in courtyard dense to its broken-bottled brims with rotting banana trees, stinkweed and vine.’ Rats ran about in the roof sending showers of plaster over completed pages and they had to share the workshop with ‘cockroaches big as mice’. There were myriad hitches to contend with, including bugs in the ink, blown fuses and wiring that twice caught fire. The press broke down three times, and the Louisiana humidity burst the composition rollers, but finally the job was done.

John William Corrington wrote the introduction identifying one of Bukowski’s main achievements as his use of ‘a language devoid of the affections, devices and mannerisms that have taken over academic verse’. This style, he wrote, was ‘the spoken voice nailed to paper’.

The title of the book,
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
, was taken from a line in a poem by Robinson Jeffers, Bukowski’s favorite poet at the time. ‘Jeffers, I suppose, is my God,’ he wrote to Jory Sherman, ‘the only man since Shakey to write the long narrative poem that does not put one to sleep.’ He also liked Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound, ‘but Jeffers is stronger, darker, more exploratatively [
sic
] modern and mad.’

The finished book, which was published in October, 1963, was a work of art and, although only 777 copies were made, the extraordinary craftsmanship could not fail to draw attention to Bukowski and his poetry. The arrival of the first copy at North Mariposa was THE DAY. ‘My God, you’ve done it, you’ve done it!’ Bukowski wrote to the Webbs in high excitement. ‘Never such a book!’ The years of misery, the depression, the
feelings of loss had been worth enduring to see something so wonderful.

‘That made him,’ says Gypsy Lou. ‘Of course he made a lot of money later in life, but we helped him get going.’

W
hen FrancEyE became pregnant she didn’t tell Bukowski straight away, but considered having a termination because her circumstances were not ideal for having a child. She had little money. She was living in a rooming house, and Bukowski had made it very clear he didn’t want a family. The only reason they hadn’t used contraception was that he hated condoms and, at forty-one, FrancEyE believed she was too old to get pregnant. Yet despite all the problems, she decided to have the baby. ‘I thought, well, I’ll go to Bukowski and, if he doesn’t want to help, I’ll go to my mother. Somewhere I’ll get help.’

When she did tell him, Bukowski unexpectedly asked FrancEyE to marry him, not because he particularly wanted to repeat an experience that had ended so unhappily with Barbara Frye, but because he wanted to do the right thing. FrancEyE thanked him, but said she never wanted to marry anyone again and they compromised by agreeing to live together as a family with Bukowski paying the bills. They found a suitable home on De Longpre Avenue, where Bukowski would stay for the next nine years and where he wrote some of his best work.

The 5000 block of De Longpre Avenue runs parallel with Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood, still within walking distance of Ned’s liquor store. There is a Ukrainian church, a scattering of modest family homes and a few low-rent apartment courts,
one of which was owned by a middle-aged couple named Crotty who worked as extras at the nearby film studios. Theirs was not exactly ‘the last Skid Row court in Hollywood’ as Bukowski was fond of describing it, but it had seen better days. It consisted of four bungalows built on one side of a driveway that led from the sidewalk to a five-room boarding house. FrancEyE remembers it was ‘half a court’ because there was no facing row of bungalows, just a vacant lot, as if the builders had run out of money.

Francis Crotty was a short, pugnacious mid-Westerner with sparkling eyes, slightly bulbous nose and a moustache, a busy and resourceful landlord who was adept at fixing things. His wife, Grace, was a thick-set woman with red hair. Because they owned the court outright, and didn’t have to worry about every cent, the Crottys charged reasonable rents and made sure their tenants got enough to eat by going on ‘dent runs’ to stores which sold damaged cans of food and day-old bread at a discount. ‘They would buy a whole bunch of it and give it to people who were poorer than they were,’ remembers former neighbor, Sina Taylor. There were also communal dinners at Thanksgiving and the Crottys would host ‘drinking days’ when they handed around whiskey and Eastside beer until everybody in the court was pleasantly smashed. The Crottys were tolerant of eccentricity in others and didn’t care that Bukowski and FrancEyE weren’t married, even though many landlords wouldn’t have rented to them. Bukowski decided they were the best landlords he’d ever had.

He and FrancEyE moved into the one-bedroom end bungalow, next to the sidewalk. The lounge had an old couch, a rickety coffee table and book shelves constructed from building blocks. At the back of the room was a desk and over the desk Bukowski kept what he called his ‘cheeseboard’, a set of post office pigeon holes which he used for scheme test practice because, although he was a regular mail clerk, he still had to pass tests to hold his post office job. The rest of the time he used it to file papers. The typewriter and typing table his parents had given him were by the window so he could watch people while he wrote, as he described in ‘the new place’:

Although Bukowski and FrancEyE liked the new place, they were not suited to living together. She involved herself in causes and with groups which Bukowski, the outsider, considered a waste of time. He wrote to the Webbs that FrancEyE was fighting ‘to save and understand all mankind’ and it was not a battle he thought she had much chance of winning. He was also contemptuous of her poetry workshop friends, people like Stanley Kurnik who sometimes came over to talk about literature. ‘Hank did not like my workshop friends,’ she says. ‘My workshop friends were cardboard. They were an intrusion on him. They were Hollywood People. They were phonies. But they were my only friends!’

The fact he was about to become a father didn’t make him at all happy and, when Jory Sherman visited, Bukowski suggested the baby might not even be his. ‘I was furious,’ says FrancEyE. ‘But at the same time I knew he was drunk, so I didn’t make a thing out of it. He was doing that as part of his posturing in front of Jory.’
Bukowski moaned about FrancEyE in letters to friends, making fun of the books she read, even complaining that she was getting fat. His dissatisfaction also came out in poems, like ‘the new place’, where the poet is interrupted in his work by ‘the woman’ calling him to dinner:

‘The new place’ was published later that year in
The Wormwood
Review
, a small literary magazine edited in Connecticut by Marvin Malone, who became a great supporter of Bukowski. Another poem in the issue, ‘poetess’, which Bukowski dedicated to FrancEyE, showed a more affectionate side to their relationship. Bukowski describes how she looks after him when he has been drinking, and praises her own poetry by saying ‘she wrote like a man’. FrancEyE was not entirely comfortable with the idea that writing like a man should be a compliment, but she knew he meant well.

Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb arrived in LA in August, 1964, to talk to Bukowski about a second book, because the first had been such a success. Bukowski met them at the Crown Hill Hotel, introducing FrancEyE, pompously, as ‘my woman’. Jon Webb told him that no man owned a woman, he just borrowed her. After a few drinks they went back to the bungalow on De Longpre where Gypsy Lou noticed the Outsider of the Year plaque they had sent from New Orleans was hanging prominently on the wall, next to a pyramid of empty beer cans. Bukowski sat staring at the plaque when he was drinking. ‘He would look at it and almost cry and say he didn’t understand how anybody could ever have done anything so beautiful for him,’ says FrancEyE. ‘He didn’t think he would live to have such a wonderful thing happen.’

Jon Webb made Bukowski promise he would write new material for their next book, because they’d already used the best of his old stuff, and they spent four days working out the details. When Bukowski took the Webbs to Union Station to catch
their train back to New Orleans, the bond of friendship had been forged strongly. From the Webbs’ point of view, Bukowski had shown himself to be worthy of their hard work, a man who ‘said it like it was’, also some one rather different from the image he presented in his writing. He was not tough at all, decided Gypsy Lou. ‘He was a gentle giant, really a sweetheart.’

Bukowski had grown so fond of the couple he told Gypsy Lou they would name their baby after her, if it was a girl, and when they had gone he wrote them a letter saying they were the sort of people he always hoped to meet but rarely had and, if they could work the miracle of
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
again, his life would be complete.

As the expected date of the birth approached, Bukowski remembered Barbara’s miscarriage and became anxious that his years of drinking might cause the baby to be born damaged. He also worried the pregnancy might be rough on FrancEyE, who was now forty-two, becoming quite angry that she had allowed herself to get into this condition, as if it were nothing to do with him. But on 7 September, 1964, she gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby girl. She chose Marina as the first name, after a courtesan she had been reading about, and Bukowski chose Louise as the middle name in honor of Gypsy Lou.

Marina would be Bukowski’s only child and he was a devoted father from the beginning. ‘He would change her, take care of her. He loved to watch her when she was finding her toes and fingers,’ says FrancEyE. ‘I was so grateful for having her when I saw what a wonderful father he was.’

He began to include news of the baby’s progress in letters to friends, praising her beauty, good nature and intelligence. In a letter to Corrington, he wrote: ‘The girl-child is Marina Louise Bukowski and I am a sucker for it. Very large mouth and eyes and when that mouth opens and spreads into the big grin laugh, all sunflowers and sun, and I break in half, she has me.’ Now, when the suicide complex came upon him, there was one good reason to resist.

The arrival of the baby did not make his relationship with FrancEyE any happier, however. Bukowski’s night work made it almost impossible to organize a domestic routine that gave them
all enough sleep. FrancEyE mostly stayed up until Bukowski came home from the post office, in the early hours, before going to bed. Then they were woken by Marina at dawn, and again at 8 a.m. by construction work on the vacant lot next door. Bukowski liked to sleep until noon, so FrancEyE tried to take Marina out in the mornings, but when she came back he wanted to write. He wouldn’t say she had to be quiet because he was working, but if something bothered him he would come and yell, so she crept around with Marina, frightened even to turn the radio on.

Jon Webb was concerned Bukowski was not writing the poems they needed for the completion of the new book, the early pages of which he and Gypsy Lou were already in the process of printing, so in March, 1965, he invited Bukowski to New Orleans for a break.

The Webbs were renting a bug-infested room on the ground floor of a building on Royal Street, in the French Quarter. It was more workshop than home with a printing press taking up most of the floor space, art materials on the shelves, and reams of paper everywhere, paper the manufacturers guaranteed would last eight hundred years. Webb had built the bed on stilts so they could store paper underneath, and Bukowski was amazed to see pages of his book stacked on wooden slats over the bath tub. ‘It was a terrible place,’ says Gypsy Lou, who was becoming increasingly irked with the conditions. ‘There wasn’t room for anything.’ Bukowski drew a cartoon in which she tosses the pages in the air, yelling: ‘Bukowski! Bukowski! I can’t stand it anymore!’

The Webbs were utterly dedicated to the book and regularly worked twelve-hour days, leaving Bukowski to his own devices. He drank with the artist, Noel Rockmore, whose etchings would be used on the cover, and spent evenings flirting with Minnie Segate, a friend of the Webbs who was putting him up during his two-week stay. He was having such a high old time that Jon Webb told him sharply to stop larking about and get down to writing the poems they needed.

‘Got any poems, Bukowski?’ he would ask, when he saw the poet at his door. If he had none, Webb told him to go away and write.

Bukowski feared working under pressure would turn his writing ‘into journalism’. He was also uneasy about the book’s proposed title,
Crucifix in a Deathhand
, which Webb chose from a line in one of the new poems, even though Bukowski thought there were many better titles. He had begun to outlive his welcome at Minnie’s, coming home drunk at all hours and generally making a fool of himself, and wrote to his friend, Al Purdy, that he felt he was just getting in the way.

Towards the end of the vacation, John William Corrington drove over from Baton Rouge to meet Bukowski. Corrington was flushed with success having recently returned from England where he had taken a doctorate at the University of Sussex. He had also recently had his first novel published. Neither achievement impressed Bukowski who made his feelings clear in letters. When they began corresponding, in 1961, Bukowski addressed him with the utmost courtesy as ‘Mr Corrington’, impressed that an academic was interested in his work, but the relationship had degenerated to the extent that he had started a recent letter, ‘fucker’. Despite this, Corrington was excited about meeting Bukowski. ‘He believed they would immediately become fast friends,’ says the poet Miller Williams, who came along for the ride.

Bukowski was sitting on the loft bed drinking beer when they came in the room. Also present were Jon Webb and two of his young friends, Ed Blair and Ben C. Toledano. There was an uneasy atmosphere from the start. According to Blair, Corrington was very gregarious, very confident in himself, and thought everybody loved him, ‘the kind of person Bukowski wasn’t going to go for’. Corrington and Williams talked about literature and university life, and Toledano chipped in about being a lawyer. Bukowski felt at a disadvantage in such company and said nothing.