It is hard for me to find heroes anymore so I must create my own hero: myself. This makes for some hard nights. And days. One must remain pliable, open to changes, but one can’t simply change on a whim. The moves must be natural and come out of the living. I am sorry if this sounds holy but I think you know what I mean. I think much of the works of Knut Hamsun as a man who grew and widened, even though his first book Hunger was the most interesting, you mostly admired his later work because you could feel the growth, the white air, the valleys, the women, the pain and the humor and the lack of bullshit. I doubt that I will ever be another Knut Hamsun; I am too lazy a man; I like to lay around afternoons and stare at the ceiling or rub my scrubby beard; I lack ambition and perhaps I wait too long on the word, but for either my admirers or my detractors, I am not boxed into a certain area, so when you speak of Charles Bukowski, you can only speak of the Charles Bukowski of yesterday. I will throw one right past you tomorrow and you won’t know what it is for a while.
To the accusers I say, go ahead and accuse; to the praisers I say, go ahead and praise; to the woman who loves me, I say go ahead and love me; to Marina I say, go ahead and become a wonderful woman; to my car I say, go ahead and keep running so I won’t have to buy another one; and to my typewriter I say, go ahead and tell me more things, more and more things, different things; go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. . . .
Holy or unholy, this is about it, and about all I can tell you right now. Now I’m hungry and going to eat a sandwich. I like lots of hot mustard, don’t you?
Notes of A Dirty Old Man
L.A. FREE PRESS, JUNE 28, 1974
To find the proper place to write, that’s most important; the rent should be reasonable, the walls thick, the landlord indifferent, and the tenants depraved, penurious, alcoholic, and lower-middle-class. With the advent of the high-rise apartments, small courts, with their own private entranceways, have more and more vanished, and the wonderful characters that once infested these places have vanished along with them.
I lived for eight years on a front court on DeLongpre Avenue, and the poetry and the stories flourished. I’d sit at the front window typing, peering through excessive brush onto the street; I’d be surrounded by beer bottles and listening to classical music on the radio, sitting in my shorts, barefooted, my fat beer belly dangling. I was surrounded by rays and shadows and sounds, and I made sounds.
My landlord was a drunk, my landlady was a drunk, they’d come down and get me at night. . . . “Stop that silly typing, you son of a bitch, come on down and get drunk.” And I’d go. The beer was free, the cigarettes were free, they fed me; they liked me, we talked until 3 or 4 in the morning. The next day they’d knock on the door and leave a bag of something: tomatoes or pears or apples or oranges, mostly it was tomatoes. Or often she’d come with a warm meal—beef stew with biscuits and green onions; fried chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes and bean salad with cornbread. They’d knock, listen for my voice, then run off. He was 60, she was 58. I put out their garbage cans every Wednesday, eight or 10 cans gathered from the courts and the apartments in back. The alcoholic next to me fell out of bed at 4 each morning; there was an ATD case in one of the apartments in back; 14 Puerto Ricans lived in one of the center courts, men, women, and children; they never made a sound and slept on the rug next to each other.
Mad people came to visit me—Nazis, anarchists, painters, musicians, fools, geniuses, and bad writers. They all imparted their ideas to me thinking that I would understand. Some nights I would look around and there would be from eight to 14 people sitting about the rug, and I only knew two or three of them. Sometimes I would go into a rage and throw them all out; other times I just forgot it all. Nobody ever stole from me except one who professed to be my friend and was always fingering my bookcase, slipping first editions and rare items under his shirt. The police raided continually but only took me in once or twice, yes, it was twice. Once they came bearing a shotgun, but I told them I was a writer and they left. Yes, it was a good place to live and to write.
Then love came and I moved out and into this house with this lady. She was good to me and it worked well, I liked her two children; there was space and shadow, a crazy dog, and a large backyard, a jungle of a backyard with bamboo and squirrels and walnut trees, wild rosebushes, fig trees, lush plants. I wrote well there—many love poems and love stories; I had not written too many of those. I walked about and it felt as if the sun were inside of me; I was finally warm, and things seemed humorous, gleeful, easy; I felt no guilt about my feelings. Yet, that finally went bad as those things do go bad. One or both begin to build resentments; things that once seemed so marvelous no longer seem that way. Each blames the other—it’s you . . . you did this, you said that, you shouldn’t have acted that way, you. . . .
I had to move quickly. I searched the streets for a plausible place, somewhere a man might possibly get off a short poem. The afternoons and mornings mingled: First and last month’s rent, $200 security, $75 cleaning, references. None of the places even seemed livable, and the landlords and managers gave off the worst of vibes: greedy, suspicious, dead-meat creatures. One of them wouldn’t even look at me; he just kept staring at his TV set and tolling off the charges. I began to feel dirtied, like an imbecile, a man without a right to hot and cold water and a toilet to rent as his own. There was actually no place to be found. In weariness I simply paid somebody and began moving in.
It was a modern apartment, a place in the back, up one flight, apartment 24. There was a garden in the center and two managers, man and wife, who lived downstairs and they never left the premises; one of them was always there, especially the lady, who dressed in white and walked around with a little brown bag and often caught the leaves as they fell from the bushes; she got them before they hit the ground. She was immaculate, face heavy with white powder; she wore much lipstick and had a rasping voice, a voice that always gave the sound of somebody lying. Her husband had the booming voice, and he boomed about the Dodgers and about God and about the prices in the supermarket. My first night there the phone rang and he told me that my radio was on too loud; they could hear me all over the court. “We can hear you all over the court, Hank,” he said. He insisted that we call each other by our first names. My radio had not been on loud. I turned it off. Then somebody started playing an accordion. “Oh, that’s beautiful!” I heard a voice. The guy ran through all the Lawrence Welk tunes.
She was always there, ubiquitous, most ubiquitous, and I’d have a hangover, be coming down the stairs, listening, thinking, she’s not around, I’ve gotten by her this time. And I’d have my bag of empties full of ashes and crap, the bottom wet and wanting to rip open, myself feeling like vomiting, I’d get down on the ground and then go through an opening in the back garage in between the cars, trying to get to the trash container, and out she’d pop with her broom: “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?” “Oh yes,” I’d say, “it’s a nice day.”
And she was always at the mailboxes when the mail came, she was out there with her broom; you couldn’t get your mail. Or if somebody unknown came to the court she’d ask: “What do you want?” On warm days she placed herself in one of the deck chairs and reclined, and it seemed as if all the days I lived there were warm. And others came out and joined her and one was allowed to listen to their voices and their ideas.
The modern apartment-dwellers are all the same; they spend much time scrubbing and waxing and dusting and vacuuming; everything glistens—stoves, refrigerators, tables; the dishes are washed immediately after eating; the water in the toilet is blue; towels are used only once; doors are left open, blinds parted, and under the lamps you can see them sitting quietly reading a safe paperback or watching a laugh-track family-affair comedy on a huge TV screen. They buy knickknacks and ferns, things to hang about, fill the spaces; a Sunday afternoon at Akron is their Nirvana. They have no children, no pets, and they get intoxicated twice a year, at Christmas and at New Year’s.
There were two small couches in
my place about a foot and a half wide. Upon one of these I was supposed to sleep. It was impossible to make love to a woman on either one of them. I discovered 18 roaches behind the refrigerator, and whenever I typed the woman below me beat up on her ceiling with a broom handle. And there was always somebody knocking on my door saying that I was disturbing them. Then one day all the tenants were given forms saying that there would be an automatic $5-a-month boost for each apartment. The roach spray I used almost cost me that. The writing had dwindled, almost stopped. My editor phoned me and assured me that every writer had his slumps. He said that I had five years left; that I needn’t write anything for five years and that I still could make it. I thanked him. . . .
And I lucked it. I found this court just off of Hollywood and Western; I found it by getting the inside that somebody was moving out before that somebody moved out. It is my kind of neighborhood—massage parlors and love parlors are everywhere; taco stands, pizza parlors, sandwich shops; cut-rate drugstores full of wigs and old combs, rotting soap, hairpins, and lotions; whores night and day; black pimps in broad hats with their razor-sharp noses; plainclothes cops shaking down people at high noon, checking their arms for needle marks; dirty bookstores, murder, shakedowns, dope. I walk up Western Avenue toward Hollywood Boulevard and the sun shines inside of me again. I almost feel in love again. My people, my time, the taste of it. . . .
I’ve only been here a week and just last night I looked around, beer bottles were everywhere, the radio was on, and in my place there were some people who live in this court: a guy who runs one of the love parlors, two guys who work in a dirty bookstore, and a dancer from one of the bars. We talked about dildoes, shakedowns, some of the ladies of the boulevard and the avenue; we talked about the freaks and the good people and the hard-hearted; we talked all through the night, the smoke curling, the laughter O.K. We ran out of beer and the delivery boy came in high and screwed-up and stayed an hour. We sent out for chicken and potatoes and coleslaw and buns. The night rolled easy. Finally I called an end: I’d been drinking beer since 11 A.M. They left in good form. I went to the bathroom, pissed, and then went to bed. Hemingway couldn’t ask for better. The light was coming through; I was in love with the world again. Ah.
Notes of A Dirty Old Man
L.A. FREE PRESS, AUGUST 22, 1975
Down around Sunset, about Sunset and Wilton, near the freeway exit and by the gas station, you’ll see them sometimes in their uniforms with swastika. They wear pleasant looks on very white faces and hand out literature. They also wear helmets and some of the boys are big enough to play for the L.A. Rams. They are ready: members of the American Nazi Party. Well, it’s Hollywood and one thinks of it more like part of a grade B movie, but then there are those who will tell you that it began that way over there, too—just a few guys standing around who should have been fingering girls in the back seat of the movie house. Next thing you knew they were sitting at the sidewalk cafés of Paris, getting it off. But then if you’re going to allow the Communist Party and the Socialist Party and the Gay Party and the Demos and Repubs, you can’t very well say, well, the Nazi Party has no right to exist. So there they are but they intend to get the average person more wrought up—memories of ovens and Pathé Newsreels of Hitler screaming, and then they are wearing uniforms that don’t exactly remind some of Jack Oakie in bell-bottoms.
Sometimes the police arrive in three or four squad cars. I was gassing up at the station one day when it got very goosey around there. There were seven or eight cops looking very nervous, unsure, grim. The Nazis were gathered in squad formation, standing at attention except for the leader who was speaking to one of the cops. Then back toward Wilton was gathered a group of New York Marxist intellectual types, thin, some Jewish, black-bearded; most were around 5′6″, wore old black coats—even in the heat of day—with white wrinkled shirts open at the collar, and they were screaming: “Hey, go back to Glendale, you bastards! Go back to Munich!”
One could sense conflagration, moil, and murder just a tick away. One curious wrong word and they would all be together, upon each other: cops, Marxists, and Nazis.
Sitting there in my car the old thought came back to me: How was it possible for people to believe in such opposite things with such rigor, such energy, such righteousness? How could some people be so sure there was a God and others so sure there was not? How were people unlucky enough to believe in anything? And then if you didn’t believe in anything wasn’t that a belief? Tra lala.
I got out of my car and walked toward the Nazi leader and the cop he was talking to. The cop saw me approaching first and stopped talking to the Nazi. He watched me. He had red eyebrows and looked as if he were wearing suntan lotion. I stopped three feet away.
“What do you want, buddy?” the cop asked me.
“I want a pamphlet. I want to know what this man’s ideology is.”
“You can’t have one.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have given an order to disperse and anybody within this area in five minutes will be under arrest.”
“But I’m getting gas.”
“That your car at the pump?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Fill up and get out.”
Cops can kill you and I’ve been jailed often enough but I can’t help getting a sense of the comical out of them. I do suppose that the very fact of their ultimate and unmolested power is what makes them ludicrous. One realizes that power when given even to one man is a very dangerous thing and that man must be of very good soul and mind not to misuse it, and to use it judiciously. Yet in a city like Los Angeles thousands of men are given this power and sent among us with guns, clubs, handcuffs, two-way radios, and high-powered cars; and helicopters, disguises, green-beret training, plus gas, dogs, and even more dangerous: women.
Yet the sense of the comic remains. Once I gave a party at my place and drank too much. I passed out on the rug and the party went on. Then somebody pulled at me and I regained consciousness. “Bukowski, somebody’s at the door and wants to talk to you.” Still stretched on the rug I looked up. It was a policeman with cap tilted rakishly and smoking a cigar. “You own this place, pal?”
“No, officer, but I pay the rent.”
“Well, look, pal, I know this place. I’ve been here before.” He inhaled on his cigar and took it out of his mouth and looked at the red and glowing end of it. Then he put it back in his mouth. “I’ve been here before, pal, and I’ve got to tell you this: one more call and I’m throwing you in the slammer!”
“All right, officer, I understand. . . .”
Back to the Nazis. I sat in my car and got gassed-up. As I did I saw the leader of the Nazis leave the cop and then stand in front of his troops. Then he gave some commands and they marched off down the street. The New York Marxists followed somewhat behind, still cursing but feeling some minor victory. The whole moil of them turned north up Wilton and I paid for my gas and followed slowly in my car. I couldn’t understand what attracted me. I suppose it was only the action, like horses breaking out of the starting gate.
One block up Wilton the troops crossed the street and marched toward a large van. The doors opened in back and the Nazis entered in orderly fashion, sitting down and facing each other, very straight, on long ledges on each side of the van. The doors closed and the leader and one other Nazi got into the front seat. One of the Marxists threw a rock which hit against the rear of the van and fell into the street.
The van full of Nazis moved off. I followed them and behind me were two carloads of Marxists and a police car. I looked back and one of the Marxists hollered at me: “Let’s get those sons of bitches!” I nodded and looked forward again. When we reached Franklin I made a sudden right. The disparate fellows continued north. Like fights with women, history never ended. The history of politics, that is. Maybe the balance of everything was the secret: all lawn and no weeds or all weeds and no lawn, and we’re really doomed: all spiders, no flies; all lambs, no lions; all me an
d no you and we were doomed.
I turned south down Western and drove into the liquor store. Two six-packs. All you and no me.
Notes of A Dirty Old Man
Notes of a dirty old driver of a light blue 1967 Volkswagen TRV 491
L.A. FREE PRESS, NOVEMBER 11, 1975
Many of the irritable things about life and in people come about when I am driving the boulevards and streets of Los Angeles. Allow me to begin right away: one of the most obnoxious things that many drivers do is to turn out part of their left front wheel (and often a portion of their car) just a shade into your lane as you approach them. They are getting ready to make a left turn and they block part of your lane either out of greed or stupidity or anxiety or bluster. I do suppose they want you to stop so they can make their left turn in front of you. I’ve never seen it done. All drivers take a quick scan of their rearview and side mirrors and float out into the lane to their right, just a bit.
Another obnoxious type is the one who has such a great difficulty in simply making a right turn. They slow and grip the wheel; they slow to 5 mph and then drift way out left in order to make the right turn, twisting the wheel as if they were steering a great ship through a storm. And you make your right turn, following them, and you have too much time to study their ears and their necks and their bumper stickers which usually say something like: “Christians aren’t perfect. They are only forgiven.”
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