Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 5

'No kidding?'

'Yeah.'

'How long it take you to write this?'

'Oh, I don't know, three or four months.'

'Oh, this is astonis.h.i.+ng. You mind if I read it?'

'Go ahead.'

Bukowski cracked open another beer while his visitor began wading through the ma.s.s of paper. There were countless poems and short stories, and most of it had never been published. It was such a treasure trove Martin could barely contain his excitement.

'Oh this is very good!' he exclaimed. 'This is great!' Another gem revealed itself. 'This is an immortal poem!'

'Oh yeah?' drawled Bukowski.

After what seemed a long time, Martin stopped reading and said he was thinking of starting a small press. He would like to take three or four of the poems with him, look them over at home, and maybe print them up as broadsides. 'There'll probably be some money in it for you. I don't know how much. We'll have to see,' he said. Bukowski shrugged and said he could go ahead. h.e.l.l, he'd put his hand in his own pocket to help editors publish his work. The Webbs had paid him in kind with copies of the books. To get paid money would be something new.

Apart from being a successful businessman, John Martin was a serious book collector who had an impressive library of first editions. It was his interest in D.H.Lawrence that led him to read about the career of B.W.Huebsch, founder of Viking and Lawrence's American publisher. He discovered Huebsch had started out by publis.h.i.+ng writers who were not yet established, and Viking grew as they became more successful. It dawned on Martin that many of his favorite writers, including Bukowski, had been ignored by the New York publishers. He also wanted to work with his wife, Barbara, in the way Harry and Caresse Crosby had worked together on the Black Sun Press. Inspired by the example of Huebsch, the Crosbys, and by a William Carlos Williams poem about a sparrow, he decided to launch Black Sparrow Press. 'I liked the combination of the e'lite black and very common sparrow,' he says, explaining the name.

He selected five of the poems from the bundle he had taken from Bukowski's closet and decided to print thirty copies of each, twenty-seven numbered and three lettered: A, B, and C, for author, publisher and the press operator at work who had agreed to print them up.

The first poem was 'True Story', which concerns a man who has castrated himself. Martin says he chose it because 'it's a pretty grim poem and it just struck me as being very existential.'

they found him walking along the freeway all red in front he had taken a rusty tin can and cut off his s.e.xual machinery as if to say see what you've done to me? you might as well have the rest.

In March, 1966, Bukowski went into hospital to have his haemorrhoids removed. He took time off work afterwards and wrote a hilarious account of the operation, All the a.s.sholes in the World and Mine, which was published by Douglas Blazek. He was still off work in April when John Martin brought the first Black Sparrow broadsides over to be signed. He also gave Bukowski a check for $25. It was money he badly needed because his post office sick pay had run out, his medical insurance didn't cover the hospital bills, and the child support was due.

Bukowski and Martin were very different personalities, but their differences worked to their advantage, forming the basis of a long and happy a.s.sociation. Once Bukowski came to terms with dealing with a teetotaller, although he never wholly understood it (what did Martin do if he didn't drink?) he trusted him more than a fellow drinker. 'He knew I'd never make a drunken stupid move, make a deal I shouldn't make,' says Martin. And although Martin is an astute businessman, Bukowski realized he was far from being conventional, and that he really did appreciate the work. Mutual friend and poet, Gerard Malanga, describes Martin as a paradox: 'He is kind of a straight guy in a funny way, but he is very hip. You can be straight and hip.'

Both men were pleased with the way the broadsides turned out and almost right away Martin decided to try and publish books. He sold his collection of first editions to the University of California at Santa Barbara and used the $50,000 he raised to build Black Sparrow into a company that could publish Bukowski and other new or neglected writers. He was soon bringing out broadsides and chapbooks as striking in the simplicity of their design as the Loujon books were ornate.

Barbara Martin was responsible for the distinctive Black Sparrow artwork. Her use of cla.s.sic typography, with plain rules, turned out to be the perfect complement to Bukowski's pared-down poems, work like 'a little atomic bomb' which they published in a chapbook called, simply, 2 Poems: o, just give me a little atomic bomb not too much just a little enough to kill a horse in the street but there aren't any horses in the street well, enough to knock the flowers from a bowl but I don't see any flowers in a bowl enough then to frighten my love but I don't have any love well give me an atomic bomb then to scrub in my bathtub like a dirty and lovable child (I've got a bathtub) just a little bomb, general, with pugnose pink ears smelling like underclothes in July The best of Bukowski's mature poetry was written in this minimalist style, although it is not to everyone's taste. 'Bukowski's poetry was essentially stories, just like his prose,' says Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 'It just happened some days that he didn't get the carriage of the typewriter to the end of the line. Depends how badly hungover he was when he started to type.' But Bukowski was achieving the trick he'd been trying to pull off since his twenties. Inspired by the direct prose style of John Fante and Ernest Hemingway, and more recently by the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Robinson Jeffers and others, he was 'writing down one simple line after another' and bringing humor in as well, because he believed 'creation cannot be all that serious, or you fall asleep.' John Martin loved the work and saw Bukowski as a totally original voice.

'When I started Black Sparrow, I was publis.h.i.+ng guys who thought they were French symbolists. I was publis.h.i.+ng guys who thought they were surrealists, and you had to sit and work with the poems to get the meaning,' he says. 'Then here comes this voice out of nowhere and you have no doubt what he means, and what he is trying to say.'

Bukowski liked to mock the counter-culture, having little time for drugs, pop, music or radical politics. But many of the young writers and publishers who liked his work were deeply involved in these things and Bukowski was inevitably drawn into what was happening in the late 1960s.

Another of his new admirers was a student called Steve Richmond whose wealthy family had set him up in a cottage by the ocean at Santa Monica. He studied law at the University of California, but spent most of his time getting laid, dropping LSD with his buddy Jim Morrison, and writing poetry about the amazing things going on in his head. What really freaked Richmond out was reading Bukowski's poems in Ole magazine. Like John Martin, but in a s.p.a.cier way, he decided Bukowski was 'a genius of the world' and made a pilgrimage to De Longpre Avenue to meet his hero. Bukowski made such an impression on him that he abandoned his plans to become a lawyer and opened a poetry book shop where he sold Bukowski chapbooks.

Flattered by the attention, Bukowski began hanging out at Earth Books, where he cut a very different figure from Richmond and his hippy friends. Bukowski's hair was very short and slicked back. His nose was red with broken veins. He wore short-sleeve b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rts, the neck open to reveal a triangle of white T-s.h.i.+rt. On his feet were brown or black lace-up shoes, 'post office shoes' as Richmond called them, and he wore a shapeless sports jacket if it were cold.

He was usually toting a brown paper bag containing two six-packs of beer. Everybody else was smoking dope and dropping acid, which didn't impress Bukowski at all. 'Bukowski thought it was so phony,' says Richmond. 'Timothy Leary and the hippies. He was right in a way.'

In a letter to Richmond, Bukowski wrote: 'LSD, yeah, the big parade everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.'

The hippies who drifted into the store, off Ocean Park Boulevard, generally liked Bukowski's work. But if they had read his latest chapbook, The Genius of The Crowd, they would have seen that, although he was against many of the conventions of society, he was not for the counter-culture either: ... The Best At Murder Are Those Who Preach Against It AND The Best At Hate Are Those Who Preach LOVE AND THE BEST AT WAR.

FINALLY ARE THOSE WHO PREACH.

PEACE.

Richmond was inspired to publish a selection of poems by Bukowski, and himself, in a radical new magazine which he called The Earth Rose. The page one headline read:

f.u.c.k.

HATE.

This was followed by a sub-heading: Whereby, on this day we able minded creators do hereby tell you, the Establishment: f.u.c.k YOU IN THE MOUTH. WE'VE HEARD ENOUGH OF YOUR BULLs.h.i.+T.

The cops arrested Richmond for obscenity, and seized his stock, including many of Bukowski's books.

After taking his first acid trip in 1962, John Bryan quit his job with the Hearst Corporation in San Francisco and moved to LA to spread the good news about LSD. 'We were into acid evangelism. We thought we could save the world by getting everybody high on psychedelics,' he says. 'For a while we almost did it.' He rented a house in Hollywood and started printing a magazine called Notes from Underground which provided formulas for making LSD.

Bukowski contributed poems to Bryan's magazine and, through this a.s.sociation, met other poets and publishers who were deeply into drugs, like the writer John Thomas.* Bukowski got into the habit of dropping by Thomas' house after finis.h.i.+ng his graveyard s.h.i.+ft and would sit up half the night talking about his problems at the post office, and his ha.s.sles with FrancEyE, while Thomas guzzled amphetamines which he was addicted to.

Bukowski said FrancEyE had become swept up in the idealism of the hippies and was dragging Marina along to peace marches and other protest events which he believed she was far too young for. He worried Marina might get hurt. He was also exasperated by FrancEyE's inability to manage her money, finding her so irritating he could no longer bring himself to use her name, referring to her laconically as 'the mother of my child'. He also complained at length about not getting laid.

In interviews he gave later in life, Bukowski denounced drugs in general, and marijuana in particular, but John Thomas and Steve Richmond remember Bukowski taking a variety of drugs in the late 1960s, including a lot of marijuana. John Thomas gave Bukowski handfuls of uppers and downers from the bowl of pills he kept on his coffee table, when Bukowski came over after work. He also gave Bukowski yage and his only LSD trip.

'What is this stuff?' asked Bukowski after taking the acid.

'What's the matter?' asked Thomas.

'I've got a lump of ice in my stomach the size of a bowling ball, and it's sort of jiggling around down there,' Bukowski replied. 'But the man who can rule his stomach can rule the world!'

John Bryan's magazine, Notes from Underground, was short-lived and, after working for a while as managing editor of the LA Free Press, he decided to launch a newspaper. Open City would feature radical writing and politics in the tradition of the little magazines, but by selling through vending machines and news stands he hoped to reach many more readers. He asked Bukowski to write a weekly column.

'Let's call it "Notes of a Dirty Old Man",' he said. 'You are a dirty old man, aren't you?'

Bukowski liked to ridicule Bryan and the other journalists who worked on the paper as a bunch of 'sc.u.mmy Commie hippy s.h.i.+ts', but the column ran for almost two years and made him more famous than anything he had done so far, even if many of his friends felt the moniker 'dirty old man' did him an injustice. Open City contributor Jack Micheline wrote in his prose poem, 'Long After Midnight': 'He is not a DIRTY OLD MAN; he has never been a DIRTY OLD MAN. He is an American postage stamp.'

The newspaper was a quintessential hippy production, actually sold by hippies on Sunset Strip, and featured articles about new music and psychedelic drugs. Bukowski attended staff meetings where the editorial content and agitprop were earnestly discussed, but he was unimpressed by what he heard. 'The crew did not seem very fiery. Strangely calm and dead and well-fed for their ages. Sitting around making little flip anti-war jokes, or jokes about pot. Everybody understood the jokes but me. Run a pig for president. What the f.u.c.k was that? It excited them. It bored me.' His world view was shaped by the problems of everyday life, as a postal clerk trying to make the rent; he was not at all interested in Vietnam, or pop music, or tie-dyed T-s.h.i.+rts, or the Civil Rights movement. If he said anything about politics, likely as not it was a provocative remark about what a fine fellow Adolf Hitler had been. 'If he had any politics, he was a f.u.c.king fascist,' says Bryan, who took the bait.

Bukowski wrote his column using slap-dash syntax and irregular spelling. He rarely bothered to capitalize letters or use conventional punctuation. But the apparent sloppiness was a stylistic experiment and, despite appearances, he was fairly serious about what he was doing. He wrote in the first person using his real name and, initially, he used his past life as subject matter: the death and funeral of his father, the Philadelphia barfly years, starving for his art in the shack in Atlanta, and marriage to 'the Texan heiress'. By the summer of 1967, he'd exhausted his stock of anecdotes and began inventing s.e.x stories, which he delighted in reading to an elderly woman who lived next door before handing in his copy.

It was exciting seeing his stuff in print every week. 'Think of it yourself: absolute freedom to write anything you please,' he wrote of the experience, 'sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Sat.u.r.day or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city.'

There was a constant need for new story ideas, and Bukowski wasn't choosy about where he got his material from, even when it meant upsetting friends. That summer he went to visit Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb at their new home in Tucson, Arizona, with a vague idea they would record some of his poems. The Webbs had arranged for Bukowski to stay rent-free in a cottage on the nearby university campus, but he was in a cantankerous mood and b.i.t.c.hed about the searing desert heat, reluctant to leave the cottage at all during the day. The real reason for his bad humor was probably jealousy. The Webbs were engrossed in printing a Henry Miller book, Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel, rather than another Bukowski project. When Jon Webb suggested Bukowski write a piece for the next issue of The Outsider, attacking the drug culture, he whimsically decided to defend the hippies and refused. The recording project came to nothing and, when he got back to LA, Bukowski wrote a spiteful column about his friends, referring to Jon Webb sarcastically as 'the great editor'. Mischievously, he mailed a copy to a reporter at the Tucson Daily Citizen.

At one time or another, Bukowski managed to upset almost everybody who was close to him. Another victim was Douglas Blazek, whom he had been corresponding with since 1964. Blazek wors.h.i.+pped Bukowski and was not shy of expressing his devotion. 'I looked up to Bukowski as something of a G.o.d,' he says. Pa.s.sing through LA in the fall of 1967, he telephoned asking if it would be convenient to visit, and Bukowski called in sick to the post office so they would have plenty of time together.

But when they met, it seemed to Blazek that the friends.h.i.+p built up over the years was being sloughed off by Bukowski. 'He saw me as, I would think, an ordinary person, nothing special, nothing distinguished,' says Blazek, 'n.o.body who was going to do anything great in this world, or help make him great.'

Blazek formulated a theory about why Bukowski the correspondent was so different from Bukowski in the flesh. When he wrote his wonderful letters with the jokes, poems and funny drawings he often included, so intimate and revealing, he could allow himself to be vulnerable because he was at a safe distance. His antagonism and aggression came to the fore when he met people face to face. 'As much as he wanted a camaraderie, he wanted to be friends, he wanted to be open, he wanted to share love, he couldn't allow himself that luxury having been hurt so much in the past,' says Blazek. 'This made him rather mean-spirited as an individual.'

John Martin managed to stay friends with Bukowski, when so many failed, partly because he didn't drink with him and therefore wasn't around when Bukowski became boorish, but mostly because he was constantly thinking of new ways to earn money for Bukowski on what were essentially marginal publications.

He knew Bukowski liked to draw and was shrewd enough to realize original artwork could make their little books more valuable so he bought Bukowski art materials and got him to make simple abstract ill.u.s.trations he could do one every ten minutes which were pasted into limited editions of the chapbooks, or sold separately. They proved popular with collectors and Martin kept Bukowski happy by paying a ten per cent royalty in advance for everything they did. Bukowski had nothing but praise for his new publisher. He even bragged that Martin let him pinch his beautiful wife, Barbara.

In fact, Barbara Martin remembers how reticent the dirty old man was when she met him. 'When we would talk on the phone he would be flirtatious, in a very nice way, but when we first met he didn't really talk to me much.'

The first Bukowski book published by Black Sparrow Press was At Terror Street and Agony Way. Although little more than a glorified chapbook, it included good new work like 'traffic ticket' which describes Bukowski's hatred of his job. In this, and other work, he subverts the popular perception of Los Angeles as a place of endless suns.h.i.+ne, just as he subverted the image of Hollywood as being glamorous, choosing to describe wintry days when LA is dull and cold: I walked off the job again and the police stopped me for running a red light at Serrano Ave.

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 s.h.i.+t.

'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 bulls.h.i.+t! 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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 ha.s.sling ordinary people, and sent him away saying Bukowski 'wasn't no Commie'.

Bukowski was called in to see the a.s.sistant 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 const.i.tutional 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 b.u.mped 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 d.a.m.ned if I would.'

It was because of the Open City column that Bukowski got to meet Neal Ca.s.sady, one of the few beat figures he admired. Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady because, apart from his ambivalent s.e.xuality, 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 Ca.s.sady pa.s.sed through LA just after Christmas, 1967, Bukowski was pleased to meet him.

Ca.s.sady 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. Ca.s.sady 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.

Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady 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, Ca.s.sady 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 coupe that came towards them as Ca.s.sady 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!"'

'f.u.c.k you!' shouted the pranksters from the front and, when they finally pulled to a stop, Bryan claims Bukowski had s.h.i.+t his pants.

Before they parted company, Bukowski told Ca.s.sady 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 Ca.s.sady 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 Ess.e.x House, 'the very finest in adult reading by the most provocative modern writers', or 'p.o.r.ny' 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 a.s.sociation came unstuck after Bryan asked Bukowski to edit a literary supplement. Bukowski chose to use an explicit short story by Jack Micheline about the s.e.xual 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 f.u.c.k 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.

To add insult to injury, Bukowski wrote a satirical short story, The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper, about a paper he called Open p.u.s.s.y, and the pretensions of its editor. There were particularly crude comments about the editors's wife. The story had obvious parallels with Open City and, when it was published in Evergreen magazine, it helped trash another friends.h.i.+p.

'Bukowski was very talented,' says Bryan, 'but he was really an a.s.shole.' He had a new nickname for his former friend: Bulls.h.i.+tski.

One of Bukowski's main objections to the beat writers was that so many were h.o.m.os.e.xual. '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 a.s.s,' says Jack Micheline. 'He didn't like Ginsberg. He didn't like f.a.gs.' 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 'G.o.dhead'.

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 h.e.l.l, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 s.h.i.+rt, 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.