Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  Bukowski got in early from the track and relaxed in the hot tub before receiving his guests, already having doubts about the project:

  My work was finally getting recognized. And I was still writing the way I wanted to and felt that I had to. I was still writing to keep from going crazy, I was still writing, trying to explain this god-damned life to myself. And here I was being talked into a tv series on commercial tv. All I had fought so hard for could be laughed right off the boards …

  (From: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship)

  When they met that evening, Harry Dean Stanton warned Bukowski that network sit-coms used canned laughter, which sounded bad, and the content was inevitably censored because of the sponsors. Maybe if they could take the project to Home Box Office, where they would have more freedom to portray Bukowski’s work honestly, it might work. The talking went on for several hours and finally the producer lost his temper, muttering it wasn’t fair the way movie actors had a downer on television. They made plenty of lousy films. ‘I remember saying that in that format, network television, there is no way you could do Hank’s work or do anything about Hank,’ says Harry Dean Stanton. ‘Actually the producer wasn’t all that happy about it. But I think I was dead right.’

  Another evening Bukowski, Linda Lee and Harry Dean Stanton went out on the town with Sean Penn. They had tickets for a concert by the rock band U2 and made the trip to the show by limousine.

  Dodger Stadium was pulsating with light and sound when they took their seats in the VIP section. The lead singer, Bono, was a fan of Bukowski’s work and the group had recorded a tribute song, ‘Dirty World’, using words from The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills.

  ‘This concert is dedicated to Linda and Charles Bukowski!’ Bono shouted, and the multitude roared their approval as if they knew who Bukowski was. It made him laugh.

  There was a vibrancy there but it was short-lived. It was fairly simplistic. I suppose the lyrics were all right if you could understand them. They were probably speaking of Causes, Decencies, Love found and lost, etc. People need that – anti-establishment, anti-parent, anti-something. But a successful millionaire group like that, no matter what they said, THEY WERE THE ESTABLISHMENT.

  (From: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship)

  They went to the bar afterwards and Bukowski got loaded on vodka-7s. He nodded hello to celebrities he had come to know since Barfly, although he worried about hanging out with film directors, pop singers and actors. He mostly disliked their work and, after years of being true to his art, he hoped he wasn’t being sucked into the show business maw. The only solution was to have another vodka-7. He ended up having so many he couldn’t remember a word Bono said to him, and Bukowski later collapsed drunk on the front steps of his house.

  He decided to cut back on schmoozing with celebrities, everyone except Sean Penn whom he felt close to. ‘Most of these people have pretense and Hank was not somebody who accepts pretense,’ says Linda Lee.

  If he had to, he was ready to give it all up and go back to the tar paper shack in Atlanta and live on candy bars, so long as he could write the way he wanted, without selling out. And he kept writing, turning out five hundred poems a year. He also began thinking about a new novel, something different. After all, he had exhausted the events of his life. It would be a detective story, of sorts, Pulp – a homage to bad writing.

  He was still not wholly well, complaining of occasional pains in his head, stiffness in his back and neck and, in the summer of 1992, he underwent an operation to remove cataracts which seriously impaired his vision.

  There were other irritants, too: readers he called ‘Chinaski freaks’. They turned up at his door demanding autographs, giggling on his porch while he explained he did not receive uninvited visitors. One group of fans parked a camper van in the street and had a party so they could say they had been drunk at Bukowski’s house. It drove him half-mad. ‘He hated people coming round and just sitting there wanting to have beers with Charles Bukowski,’ says Linda Lee. ‘It horrified him to think about doing something like that.’

  Although these people said they had read his work, they seemed to have no understanding of who he was. Several wrote to say they liked his books so much they stole them from public libraries, as if that was something he would approve of. Bukowski was disgusted. If it hadn’t been for the public library system, he might never have discovered Ask The Dust.

  Fans who approached him with consideration, and did not impose on his privacy, were often rewarded with letters, poems and sometimes drawings. He also continued to support small magazines by submitting work to editors across America and also in Britain, writing his return address on the front of the envelope in case they were rejected, which still happened on occasion.

  Book dealer Ed Smith wrote asking if he could publish a Bukowski news letter, which he wanted to call Sure, a word Bukowski often used when he signed off at the end of his letters. Bukowski agreed so long as he didn’t have to contribute anything. The news letter’s circulation grew until there were hundreds of subscribers around the world, a cross-section of society ranging from laborers to doctors, but with an emphasis on white collar workers, ‘people who were the exact opposite of him’, as Smith says.

  At times, Bukowski became irritated by Linda Lee’s sociability and the people she wanted them to entertain at the house. Linda’s mother visited several times and stayed for Christmas causing Bukowski to reflect upon the best Christmas he ever had. It was in Philadelphia. He saw no one, pulled the shades down and went to bed.

  The date he looked forward to each year was 2 January, the anniversary of his $100-a-month deal with John Martin. It was the luckiest break of his life. Twenty-three years later Martin gave Bukowski his latestraise, bringing the pay check to $7,000-a-month. Nineteen of his books were in print, each title selling at least ten thousand copies a year in America, and new markets were opening up around the world all the time with his books being translated into more than a dozen languages, including French, German, Spanish, even Japanese.

  Black Sparrow printed a Bukowski poem in a booklet each New Year, as a gift for friends. The 1993 poem was ‘those marvelous lunches’ and Bukowski sat down to sign the series of 226, making them worth several hundred dollars each. It was only a couple of years since he had staggered drunk into Book City on Hollywood Boulevard and offered to sign any of his books in exchange for the price of a beer.

  ‘Those marvelous lunches’ recalls school days during the depression when Bukowski’s parents gave him peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, because they were short of money. Bukowski had been so hungry he forced himself to make friends with Richardson, a fat ‘sissy’ whose parents sent him to school with a lunch pail stocked with ham sandwiches, beef sandwiches, fruit, and a thermos of chocolate milk. Richardson gave Bukowski potato chips and, in exchange, Bukowski kept him company on the way home.

  … I would

  carry the pail as

  I walked Richardson

  back to his

  house.

  we never spoke.

  as we got to his door

  I would hand him

  the lunch

  pail.

  then the door would

  close and he would

  be gone.

  I was the only friend

  he had.

  sissies live a hard

  life.

  It rained that afternoon as Bukowski autographed the books, adding a drawing of a man with a bottle of booze. When he was finished, he wrote a covering letter to John Martin sincerely thanking him for the raise to $7,000 a month which he considered an astonishing amount of money especially as they had not set out to become rich, but to publish books that they liked. He had lived through the Depression and now they had both made it through the recession and were still on top of their game. Maybe better than ever. He warned he was getting old and might slip in the future, but b
elieved that, even with slippage, they would continue to have luck so long as the gods remained kind.

  16

  END OF THE NIGHT

  Pulp was the first novel Bukowski had written which was not explicitly autobiographical, or even addressed his usual interests. Indeed, it broke all his rules, being conceived as a pastiche of a Mickey Spillane crime story. The plot, such as it is, concerns down-at-heel private eye Nicky Belane who is hired by two clients to investigate cases that are semi-surreal and also have metaphorical meaning. Lady Death asks him to find the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose melancholy novel Journey to the End of the Night was one of Bukowski’s favorite books. The second client, John Barton (a character based on John Martin) asks Belane to find The Red Sparrow.

  The Red Sparrow? What the hell is that?’

  ‘I’m sure it exists, I just want to find it, I want you to locate it for me.’

  ‘Any leads for me to go on?’

  ‘No, but I’m sure the Red Sparrow is out there some where.’

  ‘This Sparrow doesn’t have a name, does it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, a name. Like Henry. Or Abner. Or Céline?’

  ‘No, it’s just the Red Sparrow and I know that you can find it. I’ve got faith in you.’

  ‘This is going to cost you, Mr Barton.’

  ‘If you find the Red Sparrow I will give you one hundred dollars a month for life.’

  Belane starts his search for Céline at a Hollywood book store run by Red, a character based on Bukowski’s friend, Sholom ‘Red’ Stodolsky. When Belane walks into the store, Red tells him he has just missed ‘that drunk Chinaski’ and that Céline is in back. Belane goes over to talk to him and Red, a crusty old fellow in real life, also the proprietor of a Hollywood book store, gets upset and shouts at them:

  ‘HEY YOU!’ he yelled, ‘GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!’

  We were the only two in there.

  ‘Which one to get the hell out?’ I asked.

  ‘THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE CÉ LINE! GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!’

  ‘But why?’ I asked.

  ‘I CAN TELL WHEN THEY’RE NOT GOING TO BUY!’

  Even though he was apparently writing a crime story and had dispensed with the character of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski was still writing about his own life, and Pulp is full of in-jokes that only really make sense to those readers who are familiar with both his previous books, and something of his life story. He had been working sporadically at this peculiar project since 1991 and it was not going smoothly. A crime story, even one as unorthodox as Pulp, has to be plotted and Bukowski kept writing his hero into corners. When this happened, he abandoned the novel and wrote poems, which he said kept coming like ‘hot turds’. By the spring of 1993, two years after starting Pulp, he was still only three quarters of the way through, and then he fell ill again.

  He had myelogenous leukemia. A white blood cell had mutated and replicated itself, spreading the disease throughout his body. Cancer was another word for it. The doctor told him the bleak truth was that, without treatment, he might only live six months. Or they could try chemotherapy, which often had unpleasant side effects and still might not save him. Bukowski said he would do whatever they suggested and checked into the San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, a place he had driven by many times.

  … I sat there and watched the cars

  pass on the street and I thought,

  those lucky sons of bitches don’t

  know how lucky they

  are

  just to be dumb and driving through

  the air

  while I sit here on top of my

  years

  trapped,

  nothing but a face in the window

  that nobody ever

  saw.

  (‘the observer’)

  He must have dropped off to sleep because, when he opened his eyes, he saw yellow flowers. Bukowski once wrote he liked yellow so much he could eat it.

  ‘Frances?’ he asked, focusing on the mother of his child. He had never got used to her new name, FrancEyE. ‘Frances, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I just thought you should have some flowers,’ she said. Marina had told her he was sick and she caught the bus from Santa Monica, wanting to see him before the chemotherapy started.

  ‘Well, you know, I don’t want visitors.’

  ‘I know. I just thought you should have some flowers … and I love you,’ she said. She patted his hands, the hands which had held their daughter, and said good-bye to him.

  A catheter was inserted into a main vein and the chemotherapy started. Bukowski lost his strength and his hair fell out in long silvery strands on the pillows. Linda Lee brought food from home each day and hugged and kissed him. She often stayed through the night watching the IV lines to make sure there were no air bubbles, calling the nurses when he wanted help. Bukowski was bleeding from different parts of the body, the strangest parts, including his forehead. He spent sixty-four days in hospital over the following months, going home between treatments. Then the doctors said the cancer was in remission.

  Taylor Hackford was in New York producing a movie when he called home to Los Angeles to get his messages. ‘Hello, Taylor Hackford, you don’t know me,’ said a man’s voice on his answer machine, ‘but I’m a friend of Hank’s and I just thought you should know Hank died tonight at 8.05.’ The caller hung up without leaving his name.

  Not sure quite what to do, Hackford called Bukowski’s number and, when the answer machine clicked on, he left a cautious message.

  ‘Linda, this is Taylor. I’m in New York. I just got a really horrible message about Hank. I’m not going to say what it is, but I would appreciate you calling me back …’

  ‘Taylor, baby, what’s happening?’

  ‘Shit! Hank?’ asked Hackford.

  ‘Yeah, baby.’

  ‘You won’t believe this, but some guy called my house and left a message on the machine you died tonight.’

  ‘What an aaaasss-hole,’ said Bukowski.

  ‘I sat on the bed and I just wept.’

  ‘I’m touched, baby. I’m touched.’

  Rumors of Bukowski’s death had gone round on four occasions in recent months. Nobody knew for certain how it was happening, but Bukowski believed it to be malicious and wrote a poem about the jealous, failed writers he presumed were responsible for upsetting his family and friends.

  your cowardice will

  not be

  missed

  and you were

  dead

  long

  before

  me.

  (‘an answer’)

  It was a long time since Hackford had seen Bukowski, and the sorrow he felt when he heard he might be dead reminded him how much he cared, so they arranged to meet at San Pedro. ‘He had cancer. He talked about that,’ says Hackford. ‘He had been in the hospital once. He said, “It’s slow-moving and I’m writing every day.”’ Hackford brought champagne and two bottles of red wine over to the house and introduced Bukowski and Linda Lee to his girlfriend, the actress Helen Mirren, whom Bukowski had watched in Peter Greenaway’s sexually explicit movie, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

  ‘Yeah, I saw you taking it all …’ he said mischievously as he greeted her, ‘lying there in that freezer …’

  She laughed and they were soon emptying bottles like old times. They went out for Thai food, drinking beer at the restaurant, and came back to the house for more wine. ‘I stumbled out of there at a quarter to six in the morning,’ says Hackford. ‘Helen and I and Hank had drunk seven bottles of wine – Linda had stayed on rum and coke – seven bottles of regular wine and a bottle of champagne.’

  After the initial euphoria of being in remission, Bukowski gave up alcohol altogether and drank only herbal tea and mineral water. He had been cutting back ever since his bout of TB and found that he didn’t miss the booze at all. He quit smoking, too.
<
br />   An emaciated old man, invalided out of the struggle of life, he spent the days quietly in the garden sitting under the walnut tree. He took up transcendental meditation, at Linda Lee’s suggestion, and agreed to try the alternative healing treatments of the self-help guru, Deepak Chopra: mind over matter and rubbing oil into the body to remove impurities. He had always scoffed at New Age ideas in the past, but with ‘the dark angel’ of death hovering, he was willing to try anything, as he wrote in ‘decline’:

  sitting naked behind the house,

  8 a.m., spreading sesame seed oil

  over my body, jesus, have I come

  to this?

  I once battled in dark alleys for a

  laugh,

  now I’m not laughing.

  He decided to complete Pulp while he could, knowing in his heart it would probably be his last book, and killed off Nicky Belane with four gun shots to the gut. Bukowski then wrote an ending which was partly a contemplation of his own death. As the detective lies dying, the Red Sparrow appears before him like a vision of God, metaphorically recalling the Black Sparrow which had transformed his own life.

  Then, as I watched, the Sparrow slowly opened its beak. A huge void appeared. And within the beak was a vast yellow vortex, more dynamic than the sun, unbelievable.

  This isn’t the way it happens, I thought again.

  The beak opened wide, the Sparrow’s head moved closer and the blaze and the blare of yellow swept over and enveloped me.