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THE BARFLY YEARS
The Los Angeles Public Library, on West 5th Street, became a sanctuary for Bukowski when he was downtown looking for a job – a grand, richly ornamented building with all the books he might want to read. There were even girls to peek at. He went as often as possible, hoping to find something which expressed how he felt as an unhappy and restless young man. Then one day he discovered a book that became so significant in his life he likened finding it to discovering ‘gold in the city dump’.
John Fante’s novel, Ask the Dust, is written in a strikingly spare and lucid style with short paragraphs and short chapters, but it was the subject matter that was, at least initially, more interesting to Bukowski. The hero, Arturo Bandini, is a twenty-year-old would-be writer, the son of immigrant parents, who feels cut off from society. He wants to write about life and love, but has little experience of either so he goes to live in a flophouse at a place called Bunker Hill where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl.
Bukowski was enthralled by the story – seeing himself in Arturo Bandini – and incredibly excited by the fact that Bunker Hill was a real place, a shabby district of rooming houses directly across the street from the library where he sat with the book in his hands.
The specific place Fante romanticized in Ask the Dust was Bunker Hill, but more generally he wrote about downtown Los Angeles which was very different to the drowsy LA suburbs where Bukowski had grown up. Downtown bustled with garment makers, jewellers, street vendors, paper boys, cops, prostitutes, thieves and hawkers, all busy with some mysterious and important task. There were ethnic restaurants with crashing kitchens; back alleys where stock boys shared cigarettes; seedy bars; hotels both grand, like the Biltmore, and dives where the hookers worked. The funicular railway, Angel’s Flight, climbed Bunker Hill and then racketed down again, spilling him across the street into Grand Central Market.
When he had a few dollars, Bukowski drank in the local bars and imagined himself part of Fante’s world, inspired to try and become a writer himself. ‘Fante was my god,’ he later wrote, describing the intoxicating effect of Ask the Dust. ‘He was to be a lifelong influence on my writing.’
Bukowski made a perfunctory attempt to live the conventional life his parents expected, taking a job at Sears Roebuck, on Pico Boulevard. The department store was close to LA High and Bukowski was fired after he got into a fight with a student who came in and made fun of him. He’d hated the job, anyway, being contemptuous of the wage-slave mentality of the staff.
In September, 1939, he enrolled as a scholarship student at Los Angeles City College to study Journalism, English, Economics and Public Affairs with the vague idea he might become a newspaper journalist. LA City College had a more metropolitan feel than LA High, being in the heart of the city, on Vermont Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard, and the curriculum was designed especially for students like Bukowski who wanted vocational courses, but he got poor to average grades, being put on ‘scholarship warning’ in February, 1940, and on ‘scholarship probation’ in June.
There was much talk of the war in Europe and of joining the army, but Bukowski upset his fellow students by speaking up for Hitler and Nazism. He wrote to newspapers expressing his extreme views, making his parents fear for their safety because he was still living at home, and he attended meetings of a neo-Nazi group. He later excused his behaviour, saying he simply enjoyed being controversial.
In ‘what will the neighbors think?’ he wrote:
… I wasn’t aligned
with any group or
ideology.
actually the whole idea of
life and people
repulsed me
but it was easier to
scrounge drinks off the
right-wingers
than off old women
in the bars.
Bukowski was basically apolitical, throughout his life, but he also enjoyed doing and saying outrageous things to shock and draw attention to himself, and was attracted to extreme characters.
‘He saw that Hitler was like fire,’ says FrancEyE, a girlfriend of his adult life, who remembers Bukowski talking about Hitler as an adult. ‘It was that fire that attracted him.’
On another level, he had heard his mother saying what a great man Hitler was, and some of it sunk in; Kate Bukowski openly admired Hitler, calling him a champion of ‘all us working class’, a leader whom she believed had made life better for ordinary German people like her parents.
Having failed to hold a job, and now fast becoming a failed student, there was increasing tension at home. When his father discovered he had been writing stories on the typewriter they bought to help with his college work, Henry tossed the manuscripts, the typewriter and his son’s clothes out onto the lawn. Bukowski took $10 from his mother and caught a bus downtown where he rented a room on Temple Street before moving to a ‘plywood shack’ on Bunker Hill. He dropped out of college soon afterwards, in June, 1941, and, after working manual jobs for six months, in the Southern Pacific railroad yards and at the Borg-Warner factory on South Flower Street, he set out to explore America so he could write about ‘the real world’ of rooming houses, factory jobs and bars, like John Fante.
He caught a bus to New Orleans and worked in a warehouse there, saving his money until he had enough to quit the job and pay his rent in advance so he could stay in his room all day and write. When he ran short of money, he tried to live on candy bars to postpone getting another ‘eight-hour job of nothingness’. The only friend he made in New Orleans was a near-senile old man, and the only place he went was a depressing bar near Canal Street, ‘the saddest bar I was ever in’ as he wrote in his poem, ‘drink’.
In Atlanta, Georgia, he lived in a tar-paper shack lit by a single bulb. He was still trying to write, but the stories kept coming back from the New York magazines and he allowed himself to starve rather than get a regular job, believing that writing would save him, like the deluded hero of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, another favorite novel. Atlanta was the nadir of Bukowski’s time on the road, almost the end of him. Sick with hunger, he wrote to his father asking for money and, after getting a long letter of admonishment by reply, he considered committing suicide by touching a live electric wire. Then he noticed the blank margins on his newspaper and began writing in them. Looking at his life in retrospect, he said this was the moment that proved he was a writer. Although nobody would ever read what he had written, he felt compelled to scribble something.
He traveled west through Texas as part of a railroad gang. In the El Paso public library he read Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, one of the dozen or so novels which made a lasting impression. He empathized with the wretched narrator, who considers himself to be hideous, and yet yearns to be loved, and the descriptions of Czarist St Petersburg with its social e´lite reminded him of LA High.
By the spring of 1942 he was in San Francisco, driving a truck for the Red Cross. It was the most agreeable job he had yet had with good pay, easy duties and the company of young women. He had comfortable lodgings, too, in a boarding house overlooking Golden Gate bridge. The landlady gave him beer and allowed him to use her gramophone to play records he bought second-hand. Most people his age were interested in dance music or jazz, but Bukowski preferred symphony music.
He dutifully registered for the draft for World War Two and wrote to his father that he was willing to serve. He passed the physical examination, but after a routine psychiatric test he was excused military service for mental reasons and classified 4–F or, as he put it, ‘psycho’. Bukowski later recalled that the psychiatrist had written on his draft card that he was unsuitable for service partly because of his ‘extreme sensitivity’.
Fired from the Red Cross for arriving late at a blood donor center, he drifted on across the country, sometimes choosing his destination by randomly pointing at places on a map. In this haphazard way he found himself in St Louis, Missouri, where he packed boxes in the basement of
a ladies sportswear shop.
Bukowski resented it when his co-workers volunteered for overtime, so they had money to take their wives and girlfriends on dates. He did meet girls who were interested in him, but was too shy and awkward to form a relationship. He expressed his alienation in his autobiographical novel, Factotum, where a girl tries to strike up a conversation with the hero: ‘I simply couldn’t respond. There was a space between us. The distance was too great. I felt as if she was talking to a person who had vanished, a person who was no longer there, no longer alive.’
Instead of going out, he locked himself in his room and wrote stories which he mailed to prestigious magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, not knowing any other way of getting published. ‘… and when they came back I tore them up. I used to write eight or ten stories a week. All I’d do was write these stories and drink as much as possible.’
Whit Burnett was a magazine editor known as a patron of new talent. He had famously discovered William Saroyan, first publishing him in Story magazine. Bukowski was greatly impressed by Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, so he submitted one of his own pieces to the magazine. Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip was an autobiographical account of having a submission rejected by Burnett and, possibly by merit of his cheek, it was accepted with a payment of $25. The byline he chose for this, his début as a writer, was Charles Bukowski, dropping his first name because it reminded him of his father.
He went to New York in the spring of 1944 to see his name in print and excitedly bought the magazine for forty cents in a Greenwich Village drug store, but his story was not among the main body of the magazine. It appeared in the end pages as a novelty item and he was crushingly disappointed, feeling he had been made a fool of.
He took a job as a stock room boy in Manhattan so he could rent a room, but didn’t find the city to his liking. He was cold in his lightweight clothes. His landlord ripped him off. And he was alarmed by the el’ train that ran past his window. Intimidated by the city, and so angry with Whit Burnett that he never submitted to Story again, Bukowski left New York deciding he wanted to live in a ‘nice, shady, quiet city where everything is calm, where people are decent, where there’s no trouble’. He chose Philadelphia because it was known as The City of Brotherly Love.
It was lunch time when he walked into the bar on Fairmount Avenue, near downtown Philadelphia. A bottle whistled past his head.
‘Hey, you sonofabitch,’ said the man beside him, talking to another man down the bar. ‘You do that again, I’m gonna knock your goddamn head off.’
A second bottle spun towards them, and the men went out back to fight. Bukowski was thrilled by this action. He decided to stay in the neighborhood, and drink in this bar.
He rented a room at 603 North 17th Street in the Spring Garden district where there were many Irish and Polish families and a fellow named Bukowski could fit in, and he worked briefly as a shipping clerk at Fairmount Motor Products. When he wasn’t working, which was most of the time, he hung around the bar. He was the first customer in the morning, drinking the sops from the night before, and the last out the door at night. ‘I’d go home and there’d be a bottle of wine there. I’d drink half of that and go to sleep,’ he said.
In exchange for free beer or a shot of whiskey, he ran errands for the other customers, laying bets and fetching sandwiches. Sometimes he and the bar man, burly part-time laborer Frank McGilligan, ‘a big ox with a cruel streak’, went out back to see who was toughest. Mostly Bukowski got thrashed, but that always earned him a couple of drinks. ‘I was hiding out,’ he said of the two and half years he spent in the bar. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. This bar back east was a lively bar. It wasn’t a common bar. There were characters there. There was a feeling. There was ugliness. There was dullness and stupidity. But there was also a certain gleeful high pitch you could feel.’
One Saturday evening in July, 1944, he was resting up in his room, drinking port wine, with Brahms’ 2nd Symphony on the radio, when two FBI agents barged in wanting to know why he hadn’t reported for the draft. He told them he was 4–F. But why hadn’t he kept in touch with the draft board? They suspected he was a draft-dodger and took him to jail.
Although it looked impressive with its castellations and granite walls, Moyamensing was a low-security prison holding men awaiting trial, and men serving short sentences for non-payments of fines. But it was the first prison Bukowski had been in and he wrote about the experience many times afterwards, giving the impression of having been in a veritable Alcatraz.
The guards took him to a whitewashed nine-by-thirteen-foot cell, with a single barred window, occupied by a chubby fellow who looked like an accountant and introduced himself to Bukowski as Courtney Taylor, ‘public enemy number one’. Bukowski introduced himself, saying he had been accused of draft dodging and Taylor tried to menace the new boy saying draft dodgers were the one type of criminal cons didn’t like. Bukowski presumed this is what was meant by honor among thieves.
‘What d’you mean?’ Taylor asked.
‘Just leave me alone.’
Taylor was thirty-six, a fraudster who had operated under more than fifty aliases and spent literally half his life in jail. From 1941 to 1943, he was incarcerated in Wisconsin. When he was released, he moved to a basement off Fairmount Avenue where he was arrested in June, 1944, for manufacturing and passing bad checks and, ironically, considering what a hard time he gave Bukowski, for forging draft cards. As for being public enemy number one, he did feature on the FBI’s ‘ten most wanted’ list but not until years later.
It seems they were put in the same cell because the authorities wanted to keep the mental cases together. Bukowski was 4–F, which put a question mark against his sanity, and Taylor was an oddball who demanded to be seen by a psychiatrist and, when he was sentenced, asked the judge for an extra eight years.
Taylor cheerfully explained to Bukowski that if he wanted to kill himself – as many try to do on their first night inside – he could stand in the slopping out bucket and jam his hand in the light socket. That would do it. Bukowski thanked him, because he had been thinking about it, but perhaps not right now. Instead, they spent a convivial evening betting dimes on who could capture the most bed bugs. Taylor, the veteran swindler, won by breaking his bugs in half and stretching the pieces to double his score.
Bukowski was released from prison as soon as he failed a second psychiatric test, and went back to the ‘good old scum bar’ on Fairmount Avenue. McGilligan welcomed him home by asking him outside for a fight.
‘The schtick, of course, was to let him beat me up for the entertainment of the customers,’ said Bukowski. ‘I got tired of that game and decked the bastard and they promptly 86’d me. There I was, on the streets, and out of a job just like that.’
He claimed that for the next ten years of his life he abandoned writing to become a drunk, a barfly, but the truth is he continued to work on short stories and submitted successfully to magazines.
His most notable success came in the spring of 1946 when he received a letter from the socialite, and patron of the arts, Caresse Crosby, who together with her husband had founded the Black Sun Press, publishing many of the greatest names in modern literature including James Joyce and Henry Miller. Bukowski had submitted a short story, 20 Tanks from Kasseldown, to Crosby’s Portfolio magazine. It was about a man in prison awaiting execution and Crosby was sufficiently intrigued to write asking who Bukowski was. He claimed to have replied, enigmatically:
Dear Mrs Crosby,
I don’t know who I am.
Yours sincerely, Charles Bukowski
The story was accepted for publication in the third issue of Portfolio which appeared in the spring of 1946. The contributors, who included Jean Genet, Garcia Lorca, Henry Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre, were given space for a biographical note and Bukowski emphasized his blue collar credentials by writing: ‘I am employed sandpapering, puttying and packing picture frames in a warehouse. Th
is is not as bizarre as it sounds, but it almost is.’
Influenced by reading the work of poets including Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, he decided that ‘poetry is the shortest, sweetest, bangingest way’ to express what he wanted to say. Two of his earliest efforts were accepted by Matrix, a Philadelphia mimeographed magazine, and published in the summer of 1946 along with a short story. The poems are interesting in that they deal with the subject matter which became his stock-in-trade: rooming house life, bar life and unfaithful women. They also have the distinction of being his first published poetry, appearing a full nine years before he generally said he started writing poems.
Rex was a two-fisted man
Who drank like a fish
And looked like a purple gargoyle.
He married three
Before he found one.
And they hollered over cheap gin,
Were friendless
And satisfied.
and frightened the landlord.
She hollered plenty
And he would listen dully,
Then leap up red with choice words.
And then she began again.
It was a good life.
Soft and fat like summer roses.
(‘Soft and Fat Like Summer Roses’)
Charles Bukowski Page 4