Charles Bukowski
Page 12
my mind was rather gone
and I stood in a patch of leaves
ankle deep
and kept my head turned
so they couldn’t smell the liquor
too much
and I took the ticket and went to my room
and got a good symphony on the radio,
one of the Russians or Germans,
one of the dark tough boys
but still I felt lonely and cold
and kept lighting cigarettes
and I turned on the heater
and then down on the floor
I saw a magazine with my photo
on the cover*
and I walked over and picked it up
but it wasn’t me
because yesterday is gone
and today is only catsup.
The little Black Sparrow books and the Open City column were turning him into a minor local celebrity and there were people at the post office who resented this. They misunderstood Bukowski’s cool as meaning he didn’t care about the job, because he was getting to be such a big shot. Even friends like Johnny Moore were confused. ‘I thought he had plenty of money,’ he says. ‘It was the way he used to carry himself, the way he used to talk.’
Bukowski was confronted on the steps of the building one day by a mail clerk who angrily exclaimed he was full of shit.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw that magazine.’
‘What magazine?’
‘I dunno the name of it, but I saw it, about you being a poet. What a bunch of bullshit! And your photo, with the little beard.’ Bukowski said he didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘You knows, you knows what I talking about. Don’t bullshit me.’
It turned out the clerk had been in a barber shop and picked up a copy of Dare, a magazine which had paid Bukowski $50 for one of his poems. He’d only agreed to have his picture published because he needed to pay the child support.
Somebody tipped off the post office that Bukowski was writing ‘dirty stories’ for a ‘hippy paper’, and that he was not married to the mother of his child. It was a situation management thought might bring the post office into disrepute and a spy was sent to De Longpre Avenue to snoop round for information about FrancEyE, and about Bukowski’s political interests. Francis Crotty told the spy to stop hassling ordinary people, and sent him away saying Bukowski ‘wasn’t no Commie’.
Bukowski was called in to see the assistant director of personnel and another manager. Spread in front of them were copies of Open City, which was all the evidence they had against him. They were concerned about a story about sodomy* and a not altogether complimentary column about the post office.
‘Have you ever had any books published?’ he was asked.
‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘I don’t know, four, five, six, seven… I don’t know.’
‘How much did you pay these people to publish your work?’ It was clear they thought he had got above himself. They said they were considering charging him with Conduct Unbecoming a Postal Employee. Bukowski reminded them of his constitutional rights and they commented, wearily, that they hadn’t had a case like this in years, asking if he was planning to write about the post office again. He said he didn’t think so and that brought them to stalemate.
When he emerged from the interrogation, Bukowski bumped into his union rep, David Berger, who had come down to see what the problem was.
‘Hey, Bukowski, what’s up?’ asked Berger.
‘Nothing. They wanted me to resign, but I’d be damned if I would.’
It was because of the Open City column that Bukowski got to meet Neal Cassady, one of the few beat figures he admired. Cassady was the former drifter and railroad worker who had been the lover of Allen Ginsberg and, more famously, the basis of the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. In recent years he had served time in San Quentin for a drugs conviction and, upon his release, became a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, driving the Pranksters’ psychedelic bus. Bukowski admired Cassady because, apart from his ambivalent sexuality, he was a man after his own heart – someone who had worked factory jobs, been in jail and liked to drink beer and bet on the horses. So when Cassady passed through LA just after Christmas, 1967, Bukowski was pleased to meet him.
Cassady was on his way to Mexico to see friends when John Bryan offered to put him up at his house in Hollywood. As a joke, he appointed him circulation manager of Open City. Cassady was famous for his skill at the wheel of an automobile – it was one of the themes of On The Road – and he and Bryan spent two weeks dropping speed and smoking dope as they drove round LA in a black Plymouth sedan checking the vending machines were stocked with copies of the paper. One overcast winter’s day they spun round to De Longpre Avenue to see Bukowski.
Cassady was forty-one, several years younger than Bukowski himself, and yet he was clearly in a bad way; hollow-eyed, thin and jittery. Bukowski later wrote a column about the meeting – ‘a simpatico account of Neal’ as Ginsberg notes – describing him as ‘a little punchy with the action, the eternal light, but there wasn’t any hatred in him’. He offered him a beer and was impressed by the way he slugged it down as if it were water.
‘Have another,’ said Bukowski, deciding Cassady was even crazier than he was.
When they went out to the Plymouth, Bukowski was alarmed to discover that, despite the beer, pills and dope, Cassady was still going to drive.
It was raining and he started showing off what Ginsberg describes as his ‘driving genius … accuracy and boldness’. This consisted of driving as fast as possible on the wrong side of the road. They slid around the greasy East Hollywood streets as a storm broiled, skidding from vending machine to news stand, heading in a zig-zag across town to Bryan’s Carlton Way house where they were due to have dinner. In his column, Bukowski described how they almost had a fatal collision as they approached Carlton Way. He wrote that he would always remember the coupé that came towards them as Cassady swerved through traffic, imagining it hitting them ‘like a rolling steel brick thing’, but decided it didn’t matter as one had to die sometime.
Bryan’s recollection is that Bukowski was not quite so calm. ‘Bukowski had a fit,’ he says. ‘He started screaming, “Stop the car! Let me out!”’
‘Fuck you!’ shouted the pranksters from the front and, when they finally pulled to a stop, Bryan claims Bukowski had shit his pants.
Before they parted company, Bukowski told Cassady that Kerouac has written the main chapters of his life, but that maybe he would write his last one. It was sadly prophetic. A couple of weeks later they heard Cassady had died in Mexico.
Bukowski had John Bryan to thank for the book of Notes of a Dirty Old Man. Bryan negotiated a $1,000 advance from Essex House, ‘the very finest in adult reading by the most provocative modern writers’, or ‘porny’ publishers as Bukowski called them, and he was grateful enough to promise Bryan ten per cent of the money. Despite the book deal, all was not well between Bukowski and ‘the beaded and the bearded’, as he called the staff of Open City, partly because there was such a cultural and generation gap between them.
‘It was a period of great agitation and experimentation and Bukowski didn’t really fit in very well, coming from an earlier period,’ says Bryan.
The association came unstuck after Bryan asked Bukowski to edit a literary supplement. Bukowski chose to use an explicit short story by Jack Micheline about the sexual antics of an underage girl. The story, Skinny Dynamite, appeared in the seventieth issue of Open City, in September, 1968, and because of it Bryan was arrested on obscenity charges. Micheline protested that his story was simply about a girl who likes to fuck and got letters of support from Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Hubert Selby Jnr and Norman Mailer. The case dragged on into 1969 and, although the charges were eventually dropped, it was the beginning of the end for Open City which folded shortly before its second anniversary.
‘Bukowski was very talented,’ says Bryan, ‘but he was really an asshole.’ He had a new nickname for his former friend: Bullshitski.
One of Bukowski’s main objections to the beat writers was that so many were homosexual. ‘He would say, you go from one coffee shop to another and there are poets hiding out in the bathroom sucking on each other’s ass,’ says Jack Micheline. ‘He didn’t like Ginsberg. He didn’t like fags.’ But he overcame his prejudice in the case of the poet Harold Norse, author of Beat Hotel and other books. Norse was introduced to Bukowski’s work while living in Paris. ‘I thought it was marvelous,’ he says. ‘I sent him something of mine and, from then on, it was a very close correspondence, very warm indeed. He called me Prince Hal, Prince of Poets.’
By 1967, Norse had moved to London where he knew Nikos Stangos, poetry editor with Penguin books. Stangos edited the Penguin Modern Poets series, which had already published poets as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Allen Ginsberg and Stevie Smith, and was on the look-out for new writers. ‘My editorial brief, which was my own decision, was that the series should be very
eclectic and should not ignore any strong, interesting, avant-garde or experimental work,’ he says. He decided Norse should be the central figure in the thirteenth book in the series, each of which featured three writers, and Norse suggested that the other poets should be American surrealist Philip Lamantia and his new pen friend Bukowski. Stangos wrote to Bukowski from London asking if he was interested, and Bukowski replied that it would be an honor to be included with Harold Norse whom he went so far as to describe as a ‘Godhead’.
When Norse returned to the United States in 1968, Bukowski called him regularly on the telephone to ask when the book was coming out and to talk about how unhappy he was at work.
‘It’s super triple hell, baby,’ he’d say. ‘The post office is nailing me to the cross.’
Norse suggested they meet for a drink at his place in Venice Beach and, one night during a rain storm, Bukowski drove over.
Norse’s first impression was of, ‘a big hunchback with ravaged, pockmarked face, decayed nicotine-stained teeth, and pain-filled green eyes,’ as he wrote in Memoirs of a Bastard Angel. ‘Flat brown hair seemed pasted to an oversized skull – hips broader than shoulders, hands grotesquely small and soft. A beer gut sagged over his belt. He wore a white shirt, baggy pants, an ill-fitting suit, the kind convicts receive when released from prison. He looked like one, down and out.’
Bukowski was charming, at first, calling his friend ‘Prince Hal’ and extravagantly praised his poetry until Norse told him to knock it off. After a few drinks they decided to record their conversation on Norse’s reel-to-reel, thinking maybe they could sell the tape to a book dealer. Bukowski spoke first.
‘I’m sitting here with Hal Norse,’ he said, ‘a damn good writer … But I’m Charles Bukowski! … Number one!’
‘What are you doing?’ asked Norse, switching off the machine.
‘I’m only having a bit of fun, Hal,’ Bukowski laughed. ‘You know I think you’re the best. Turn it on.’
They tried again.
‘This is Charles Bukowski. I’m at Hal Norse’s pad. He thinks he’s a writer, but don’t they all? I’m the king!’
That was the end of the tape-recording idea.
They drank until 3.00 a.m. when Norse went to bed leaving Bukowski on the sofa. A couple of hours later, when Norse went to the toilet, he saw Bukowski sitting up, flashes of lightning illuminating his face as the rain lashed the windows. He was talking and chuckling to himself, and yelled out, as if demented: ‘Who are you anyway, you blond kid, you?’
It was companionable having someone of his own age to talk to, when most of his friends were so much younger, and Bukowski began to spend a lot of time hanging out with Norse. After one day together, he wrote: ‘You know, as you walked along the beach with me back to my car, well, I don’t wanna sound like a god-damn romantic, but I got a real feeling of human warmth for a change.’
There was another side to Bukowski’s character, as Norse was to discover. The good Bukowski was ‘sort of sad and not very aggressive or arrogant’, quick to praise the work of others and polite and courteous to strangers. But when he was drinking, a more troublesome Bukowski emerged: an egocentric braggart who picked fights and was not above antagonizing Norse with talk of ‘faaaaags’, a word he’d drag out in a sneering way, saying at least Norse was not one of those ‘swishy faaaaags’. Why, he was almost manly, like Bukowski himself. The homophobia irritated Norse and he believes it may have been a cover for Bukowski being bisexual.
Norse claims that when Bukowski was drunk he sometimes got his cock out and asked to see Norse’s cock. This did not appear to be meant as a joke. ‘He was fascinated to see other men’s cocks. It’s a sexual thing,’ says Norse. ‘You can’t get away from that.’ There was no physical contact, no move by Bukowski to have contact, or sign from Norse he would welcome it. In fact, Norse says he was revolted by the notion of sex with his friend. ‘I was having sex with the most beautiful youths in California and here’s this horrible-looking man with a purple pitted face, like the Phantom of the Opera, and his belly falling like blubber over his belt. If he sat down, his paunch went halfway down to his knees,’ he says. ‘I would blow my brains out if I ever had to touch Bukowski sexually.’
There is little doubt Bukowski would have been horrified to be considered anything other than entirely heterosexual. ‘He would have punched you about that,’ says Norse, ‘which proves he was trying to keep something down.’ Friends like Jack Micheline are outraged by the suggestion Bukowski might have been bisexual, saying Norse’s recollections are tinged by jealousy and bitterness. It is true Norse later fell out with Bukowski, and was already slightly cross he had plagiarized one of his letters for use in Notes of a Dirty Old Man, but his is not the only evidence Bukowski might have been bisexual.
There was the incident at his apartment in the early 1950s when he had anal sex with a male friend, apparently by some extraordinary mistake. And Sam Cherry’s son, Neeli Cherkovski, recalls an occasion when Bukowski was drunk and asked if he wanted to get into bed with him. Nothing happened and in the morning Bukowski made a joke of it.
‘Remember I came up to you and I asked, “You wanna go to bed with me?”’
‘Yeah,’ said Cherkovski.
‘I thought you were some woman I knew whose name was Nelly,’ said Bukowski, laughing.
‘Did Nelly have a moustache?’
It is also true that Bukowski enjoyed saying and doing outrageous things to shock and it is entirely possible he was teasing Cherkovski and Norse, both of whom are homosexual. Further more, there is ample evidence Bukowski was enthusiastically heterosexual when he had the opportunity, and was sober enough to perform.
As the ’60s came to an end, even the Beatles picked up on Bukowski. Paul McCartney had become interested in new writing and asked his friend Barry Miles to suggest poets whom The Beatles could record. Miles came up with a list that included Bukowski and, although McCartney had never read his work, he approved the suggestion. ‘He was just very interested in the avant-garde, very open-minded about these things and prepared to take my word for it if I said this guy was OK,’ says Miles who was appointed manager of Zapple, the spoken word section of Apple Corporation, and flew out to LA to make the recordings.
The Zapple deal was set up via John Martin, who was assuming the additional responsibilities of being Bukowski’s agent, but when it came to cutting the record Bukowski was too shy to go into the studio at Capitol Records in Hollywood. ‘He didn’t want anybody to watch him because he hadn’t don
e any reading,’ says Miles. So he took a reel-to-reel tape machine over to De Longpre where he found Bukowski with what looked like an old-time hooker, slowly putting her stockings back on.
He gave Bukowski the tape machine and a box of twelve blank tapes, and a couple of days later Bukowski settled down on his sofa, opened a beer and started recording. He read more than fifty poems, pausing to give a commentary on the state of his life, and to gripe about Francis Crotty who was working noisily on a car outside the window. All the tapes were full by the time Miles returned a week later. In fact, Bukowski had enjoyed himself so much he had tried to record on both sides, not realizing professional tape only goes one way, and had erased half his work. The highlight was an eight-minute rendition of ‘fire station’ which, in Miles’ opinion, showed a natural talent for dramatic reading. ‘He builds it and reads it just brilliantly.’
At the end of the decade, Bukowski had the Zapple record to look forward to*, the Penguin Modern Poets book coming out in Britain and Notes of a Dirty Old Man out in paperback in the United States. A visitor from Germany, Carl Weissner, was even talking about translating his stories for publication in Europe. A small press in Berkeley had brought out a new chapbook, Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Storey Window, and John Martin was compiling another poetry anthology. Bukowski still found time to launch his own little magazine, an alternative to what he saw as the self-conscious cleverness of the Black Mountain School. He loathed the Black Mountain poets, even though John Martin was an admirer and published some of their work.
‘He would get a little jealous of somebody like Robert Creeley, who he didn’t understand, and he had some sharp things to say [about him],’ says Martin. ‘He was threatened by them. He didn’t understand what they were doing and maybe what they were doing was the right way and what he was doing was silly. Bukowski didn’t realize that there were different types of poetry.’
He wanted to call his magazine Laugh Literary and Man the Fucking Guns, but co-editor Neeli Cherkovski persuaded him to change ‘fucking’ to ‘humping’. The cover carried a manifesto written by Bukowski: ‘In disgust with poetry Chicago, with the dull dumpling pattycake safe Creeleys, Olsons, Dickeys, Merwins, Nemerovs and Merediths – this is issue one volume one of Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.’