Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  ‘I don’t deserve this,’ he told Linda. ‘These are all my books. I wrote them. You need to give me back my books.’

  Linda got an armful from The Thing and started flinging books at the windows of his apartment. As the glass shattered, she shrieked at him:

  ‘THIS IS FOR THAT WOMAN! … AND THAT WOMAN! … AND THAT’S FOR THAT WOMAN!’

  I stood there as she screamed and broke glass.

  Where are the police? I thought. Where?

  Then Lydia ran down the court walk, took a quick left at the trash bin and ran down the driveway of the apartment house next door. Behind a small bush was my typewriter, my radio and my toaster.

  (From: Women)

  ‘She is screaming bloody murder and she’s got his typewriter,’ recalls Tina, who watched from her window. Linda swung it round her head and brought it down so it hit a parked car and bounced onto the road.

  … The platen and several other parts flew off. She picked the typer up again, raised it over her head and screamed, ‘DON’T TELL ME ABOUT YOUR WOMEN!’ and smashed it into the street again.

  ‘I actually did Bukowski a favor,’ says Linda. ‘John Martin had to buy him a new typewriter. He needed one.’

  She was so out of control that Bukowski felt he had no choice but to call the police, and Linda was dragged off to the station sobbing her heart out about how she’d lost their baby. Bukowski said he wouldn’t press charges, because she might lose custody of her children, but she had to realize she couldn’t behave like that any more. It was over, positively the end of their relationship and they both knew it. If things got any crazier, they would end up killing each other.

  Linda went home and made plans to move to Arizona, slightly regretful about what they had lost. ‘We really did have a love relationship which he diminished by adding other women with it, acting like it was nothing,’ she says. ‘We had a very great love, really, but when he got famous he had to have the fruits of his fame. That’s what men get famous for, right? All the women in the world. I didn’t want to be part of a hundred women.’

  * Ben Pleasants later abandoned the project.

  * Further background about this mysterious quotation can be found in the source notes to this chapter.

  * In fact, he was almost 24 before he lost his virginity – to a Philadelphia prostitute.

  11

  RED DEATH SUNSET BLOOD GLORY GALS

  Within weeks of meeting Cupcakes, Bukowski was besotted with her, hopelessly in love with a woman less than half his age who was quite indifferent to him. She laughed at his depressions, flirted with other men, vanished for days on end and then popped up again as though nothing had happened to find him in a funk of depression with a face like the Siege of Stalingrad.

  ‘Cups, I can’t do this any more,’ he would say, miserably. ‘It’s tearing me apart.’

  this time has finished me.

  I feel like the German troops

  whipped by snow and the communists

  walking bent

  with newspapers stuffed into

  worn boots.

  my plight is just as terrible.

  maybe more so.

  victory was so close

  victory was there.

  as she stood before my mirror

  younger and more beautiful than

  any woman I had ever known

  combing yards and yards of red hair

  (‘the retreat’)

  Cupcakes was unimpressed by his love poems. They were doggerel, in her opinion, and she enjoyed tormenting Bukowski by parodying his work in a bored, sing-song voice:

  So I woke up in the morning

  and I puked in the toilet

  and then I shaved …

  ‘You see,’ she said. ‘I can write what you write, but better.’

  ‘That’s funny, Cups,’ he said with a hollow laugh. ‘Very funny, yeah. But we really have to end this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s killing me.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked, speaking as if he were a stupid child. ‘You’ve watched too many soap operas.’ She grabbed his hand and pulled him up from the sofa. ‘Come on, let’s go. Let’s go to the track.’ She had a way of jerking him out of his depressions. Some redhead magic.

  They got in Bukowski’s Volkswagen – which now had a hole in the windscreen where Cupcakes had put her foot through it – and drove to Hollywood Park to catch the first race. Cupcakes said to keep an eye on her because she sometimes wandered off when she was on pills and, sure enough, when he came back from placing his bet she was gone. He went to the ladies toilet, the first aid station and finally found her with another man.

  The most any poet could do was write something about his beloved, and Bukowski wrote a whole book about Cupcakes, Scarlet, published in a limited edition by Black Sparrow Press. The four poems in the book show that lust was a large part of the attraction he felt for her:

  when she walked in I grabbed

  her and pulled her to my lap.

  I lifted my glass and told

  her, ‘drink this.’

  ‘oh,’ she said, ‘you’ve mixed

  wine with Jim Beam, you’re gonna

  get nasty.’

  ‘you henna your hair, don’t

  you?’

  ‘you don’t look,’ she said and

  stood up and pulled down her

  slacks and panties and

  the hair down there was the

  same as the hair

  up there.

  (‘red up and down’)

  In Cupcakes’ own copy he wrote: ‘For the girl who made me write these poems, for the girl who made me feel that feeling which comes so seldom in a lifetime.’ He presented it to her as a token of his adoration, a book all about her. She barely looked at it. ‘I didn’t have a tremendous amount of respect for his writing,’ she says. ‘His poetry was often negative and not complimentary. I thought I was just fodder.’ The book was tossed aside to get dusty and dog-eared, something she pulled out now and again to show friends.

  Bukowski had to go away for a few days and tried to see Cupcakes to say goodbye, but she was nowhere to be found. He cruised Hollywood looking for her Camaro and, after he had been everywhere he could think of, he unhooked the Maltese military cross Grandfather Bukowski had given him – it hung from the rear view mirror of the Volkswagen – and draped it from the handle of her front door, as a sign that he had been trying to contact her.

  I keep searching the streets for that

  blood-wine battleship she drives

  with a weak battery, and the doors

  hanging from broken hinges.

  I drive around the streets

  an inch away from weeping,

  ashamed of my sentimentality and

  possible love.

  a confused old man driving in the rain

  wondering where the good luck

  went.

  (‘i made a mistake’)

  Each time he heard the clicking of heels on the concrete path of his court, he stopped typing, hoping the sound would bring Cupcakes to him, but the women always passed by. Whenever the telephone rang, it was like the excitement he felt when his horse was in among the leaders heading for the post, but he was not a winner. In the middle of the night he drove back to her bungalow and, seeing that the cross was still there, left a note:

  1.30 a.m. Sunday morning

  Red death sunset blood glory gal–

  Why is it that you are the one woman I have met who has not loved me entirely, madly and out of context? It confuses me. You must be my superior. Well, that’s all right. – I mean, if I can win 8 races out of 9 I can expect to be upset by a longshot.

  Blubberboy Charley.

  In the morning, when there was still no word, he went back and left a second note:

  Pam:

  I HATE YOU FOR NOT ADMITTING YOU LOVE ME.

  you are
acting like a stupid cunt.

  Hangover remorse followed:

  Pam–

  I didn’t mean it. I still love you. It’s just that you never show any feeling toward me, and Jesus Christ that sometimes cuts in pretty deep.

  I don’t mean to load myself on you. I’ll work it out. It’s just going to take me a bit of time to figure out what the hell’s happening. Hank

  And when she still didn’t call:

  Pam–

  Thanks a hell of a lot of shit for nothing.

  This behavior seemed excessive to Cupcakes, as it had to Linda King when Bukowski first fell for her. He was loving too passionately, considering the very short time they’d been together. However, Cupcakes would come to regret that she hadn’t appreciated the depth of his affection. ‘I didn’t take him seriously. I didn’t take myself seriously. I was just carefree and elusive and everything that drives a man crazy,’ she says. ‘I was just a silly kid.’ If Bukowski forced her to confront his feelings, if he tried to make her hear what she meant to him, she laughed it off. ‘I would make light of it, change the subject, because I wasn’t capable of loving anyone deeply, or getting attached to anyone then.’

  They went to New York for a reading, booking into the room at the Chelsea Hotel where Janis Joplin had liked to stay, high above cacophonous West 23rd Street. It was one of the hottest days of the year and Cupcakes sat on the balcony to try and keep cool. Bukowski watched her from the bed, her red hair glowing in the late afternoon sun. He was feeling particularly close to her because she had fallen asleep on the flight over from Los Angeles, resting her head on his shoulder. He thought it was one of the most tender moments they had shared, even though he knew she had passed out because she was stoned. He couldn’t even wake her up for landing.

  I looked at her enormous breasts. I watched for some sign of breathing. They didn’t move. I got up and found a steward ess.

  ‘Please take your seat, sir. We are preparing to land.’

  ‘Look, I’m worried. My girlfriend won’t wake up.’

  ‘Do you think she’s dead?’ she whispered.

  (From: Women)

  ‘You know, Cups, the nicest thing you have ever done, the moment I will always remember, is when you laid your head on my shoulder during our plane ride,’ he said.

  Cupcakes looked at him quizzically. ‘I remember thinking, “I can’t deal with this; what do I do with this?” I was too young.’ Instead of talking to him about his feelings, she decided to distract his attention. ‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘NO HANDS!’ She flung her arms out so she was balanced on the edge of the iron railing with nothing but the cheeks of her backside to stop herself falling. ‘Wheeeeeeee!’

  Bukowski saw that her eyes were glittery from pills and booze. ‘Come on, Cups, come back in,’ he coaxed her, like a dog. ‘Get down now.’

  ‘Wheeeeeeeee!’

  Then she fell, just catching herself before spinning down into the garbage cans.

  I’ve lost a lot of women

  in a lot of different ways

  but that would have been

  the first time

  that way.

  (‘liberty’)

  The reading was at St Mark’s Church, on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street, and it was a sell-out. Bukowski walked to the stage swinging a six-pack of beer with Cupcakes swinging her hips behind him. ‘He was just swamped by his fans,’ says Gerard Malanga, who was taking photographs. ‘These were guys you never see at a poetry reading.’ It was a significant improvement on the last time he had been in the city with a cardboard suitcase and $7 in his pocket only to find ‘Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip’ relegated to the end pages of Story magazine.

  He read five or six love poems to Cupcakes during the evening, but she was too stoned to know what was going on. Later that night, back at the hotel, she fell off the bed and didn’t even wake up.

  Although he was infatuated with Cupcakes, Bukowski continued to see other women and corresponded with a number of female fans, young girls like Jo Jo Planteen, a twenty-two-year-old student from Sacramento who contacted him as a dare. Bukowski wrote that if Jo Jo ever came to Los Angeles she would find he was a champion at oral sex. He flew to Texas to see two women who had been writing to him, one of whom wanted to take him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. In September, he went to San Francisco for an assignation with a girlfriend of A.D. Winans. ‘That seemed to be a thing with Hank,’ says Winans. ‘When it came to friendships he would make it with your best girl, apparently, that was just one of his failings.’

  There was no answer one day when John Martin called Bukowski on the telephone, so he drove down to Hollywood to check he was alright. Sitting on the porch were two blonde girls from Holland, aged about eighteen, dressed in jeans and tank-tops. ‘They were like little drops of dew on the leaf,’ says Martin. ‘They looked like they had never used a bad word in their life.’

  ‘Is Hank in?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, he’s sleeping.’

  ‘What are you guys doing here?’

  ‘We came from Amsterdam to fuck him,’ they answered, like they were waiting to get into Disneyland.

  Another time the mail man came by and found three women waiting on Bukowski’s porch. ‘Hank, how do you do it, how do you get it?’ he asked. Bukowski replied that the problem was how to get rid of them.

  Then there were the groupies who came up to him at poetry readings, giving him their telephone number and saying how much they loved his work. Bukowski once said this was the worst way to meet women, yet it is how he met Linda Lee Beighle who became his second wife.

  Linda Lee was born in 1943 into a well-off Pennsylvania family. She ran away from home when she was a teenager and, in the 1960s, followed the hippy trail to India. Returning to the United States, she became a devotee of Meher Baba, the Indian guru who coined the phrase ‘don’t worry, be happy’, and worked for a television station in Miami, Florida, before moving to California where she opened a health food restaurant at Redondo Beach. When she discovered Bukowski was reading at The Troubadour in West LA, in the September of 1976, Linda Lee decided to try and meet him.

  Before the show, Bukowski and Cupcakes were drinking in the bar with Joan Smith and her boyfriend. Joan was a former go-go dancer turned poet, and her boyfriend, who was buying champagne, was a magazine publisher. He wanted to get Bukowski to write for him, but Bukowski was unimpressed. ‘He was rich and Bukowski didn’t like rich people,’ says Joan. ‘He didn’t like being patronized.’ Bukowski drained his glass, told Joan she was getting fat, picked up a six-pack of beer, which had become a stage prop for him, and went out to face the crowd.

  He read some of the new poems about Cupcakes, poems like ‘a stethoscope case’ which were later collected in the popular anthology, Love is a Dog from Hell.

  my doctor has just come into his office

  from the surgery.

  he meets me in the men’s john.

  ‘God damn,’ he says to me,

  ‘where did you find her? oh, I just like

  to look at girls like that!’

  I tell him: ‘it’s my specialty: cement

  hearts and beautiful bodies. If you can find

  a heart-beat, let me know.’

  ‘That’s me!’ yelled Cupcakes. She was stumbling around in the audience, banging into tables. People laughed. She was totally out of it. ‘Hey, that’s me!’

  ‘Yeah, baby, that was you,’ said Bukowski, reading another about how much he loved her. He didn’t notice that she had already left, wandering out onto Santa Monica Boulevard to cadge a lift home.

  When the crowd thinned out, Bukowski was left with Joan and her boyfriend, but he was no longer interested in drinking, upset that Cupcakes had left like that. He was making his way out of The Troubadour when Linda Lee Beighle introduced herself, saying she loved his work and had been reading it for years. He looked her over. She was younger than him, but not v
ery young. She was small and thin with a mop of blonde hair. Not bad looking. He wrote his telephone number on a scrap of paper, drawing a picture of a man with a bottle, and she wrote down hers. Then he went home.

  Things were still rough with Cupcakes so, a couple of days later, Bukowski drove over to Linda Lee’s restaurant, the Dew Drop Inn. She fixed him a health food sandwich and he sat down to eat and take in the ambience of the place. It was decorated with painted rainbows and posters of Linda Lee’s guru, a curious-looking fellow with a fixed grin.

  There was a bookcase. Three or four of my books were in it. I found some Lorca and sat down and pretended to read. That way I wouldn’t have to see the guys in their walking shorts. They looked as if nothing had ever touched them – all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheen of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or even gotten a traffic ticket. Skimmed-milk jollies, the whole bunch.

  (From: Women)

  Bukowski was in the middle of writing Women under the working title Love Tale of the Hyena. It was a thinly veiled account of his tangled love life since he quit the post office, inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Linda Lee, whom he began to date soon after visiting the Dew Drop Inn, became the basis of the character, Sara. ‘I was basically one of his guinea pigs,’ she says, ‘one of those he researched like a curiosity.’ But there was a fundamental difference between her and most of the other women Bukowski knew, and included in his book – Linda Lee wouldn’t let him have sex with her. At least not at first. Apparently one of Meher Baba’s teachings was that unmarried people should remain chaste, and she had been celibate for several years. Bukowski gently suggested Meher Baba might be mistaken, but all he could get from Linda Lee were kisses.