Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 6

'I'm sitting here with Hal Norse,' he said, 'a d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d-d.a.m.n 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 h.o.m.ophobia irritated Norse and he believes it may have been a cover for Bukowski being bis.e.xual.

Norse claims that when Bukowski was drunk he sometimes got his c.o.c.k out and asked to see Norse's c.o.c.k. This did not appear to be meant as a joke. 'He was fascinated to see other men's c.o.c.ks. It's a s.e.xual 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 s.e.x with his friend. 'I was having s.e.x 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 s.e.xually.'

There is little doubt Bukowski would have been horrified to be considered anything other than entirely heteros.e.xual. '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 bis.e.xual, 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 bis.e.xual.

There was the incident at his apartment in the early 1950s when he had a.n.a.l s.e.x 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 h.o.m.os.e.xual. Further more, there is ample evidence Bukowski was enthusiastically heteros.e.xual 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 a.s.suming 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 done 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 f.u.c.king Guns, but co-editor Neeli Cherkovski persuaded him to change 'f.u.c.king' to 'humping'. The cover carried a manifesto written by Bukowski: 'In disgust with poetry Chicago, with the dull dumpling pattycake safe Creeleys, Olsons, d.i.c.keys, Merwins, Nemerovs and Merediths this is issue one volume one of Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.'

Bukowski was no better dealing with submissions than he had been back in the 1950s, when he co-edited Harlequin with Barbara Frye. Most of the stuff sent in was very bad and Bukowski began defacing ma.n.u.scripts, scrawling insults like 'These won't do, baby' or 'Shove it, man.' He poured beer over poems he didn't like, or dipped them in egg, before mailing the rejected work back to the authors.

The new book John Martin had been working on was The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. It was a retrospective of poems that had first appeared in chapbooks and little magazines, with an emphasis on the grief poems written after Jane died, and was one of the milestone books of Bukowski's career. It came out in a beautiful edition with a simple but striking jacket devised by Barbara Martin. There was no blurb on the back, no quotes from other writers saying what a brilliant fellow Bukowski was, just the ten words of the t.i.tle running down the cover, like a poem.

'Bukowski's t.i.tles are wonderful,' Barbara says. 'They make the cover. I always look at his t.i.tle and I don't have to do any more.'

Inside was a photograph of Bukowski as a grim-faced hobo, riding a box car. It looked authentic, but had been carefully posed because he wanted to appear as someone who had lived the hard times he wrote about. Sam Cherry, who really had been a hobo, took Bukowski down to the railroad yard behind Union Station and told him to climb up into a derelict wagon so he could get the shot. The ladder was several feet above the ground and Bukowski made a great performance of trying to get onto the car, even though he'd told Cherry he'd ridden box cars many times. Cherry noticed the awkward way Bukowski grasped the bars, and decided he had never ridden a boxcar in his life. 'It was not the professional way to get on a train,' he says. 'He didn't know what he was doing.' Bukowski finally managed to pull himself up, with Cherry and his son pus.h.i.+ng from below, and stayed there just long enough for the photograph.

'Hold me up, guys, for Christ's sake!' he cried. 'It's been a long time since I rode the freights.'

He had promised Harold Norse that he would dedicate the book to him, as thanks for getting him involved in the Penguin deal, but changed his mind at the last minute.

'It's dedicated to the woman that died that I loved,' he said when he gave Norse a first edition. Indeed Norse saw it was dedicated to Jane. 'I was going to dedicate it to you, as I promised ...' Bukowski went on, watching Norse's reaction.

'Oh, why didn't you?'

'Well, you know, my publisher John Martin, he looked at it and said, "What do you want to dedicate it to Harold Norse for? People might think you are friends."'

'Well aren't we?' he asked.

'Of course we are, Hal, you know that.' It was some time before the coin dropped and, when it did, Norse was furious. They continued to see each other occasionally, and talked on the telephone now and then, but he never really forgave the insult and Bukowski had managed to upset yet another friend who had been good to him, and who had helped his career in a significant way.

With so much going on, Bukowski desperately wanted to leave the post office so he could devote himself to his writing. He was forty-nine and the job was also grinding him down physically. Sticking mail for almost twelve years had given him chronic back and shoulder pains. But when he tried taking time off to attend to his literary work, the post office let him know he couldn't have any leeway. They warned him for absenteeism in the April and May of 1969. In June, Bukowski wrote to his friend, John Bennett, that the stress of trying to juggle his writing and his job was making him mentally and physically sick. In August he was suspended briefly without pay for absenteeism, and he was absent without leave on various dates through September, October and November.

It was the end of the line, and he knew it, as he told Harold Norse. 'He was moaning and whining most of the time in a very sad and lugubrious way, not for sympathy, just feeling, "This is the end, what can I do?"' says Norse. 'The post office would have killed him if he hadn't taken the plunge.'

* A good friend of Bukowski, Thomas died in bizarre circ.u.mstances in 2002: suffering heart failure while serving a jail sentence for molesting one of his daughters.

* The third issue of The Outsider magazine, published in the spring of 1963, had Bukowski's face in the cover.

* The incident in the 1950s when Bukowski had a.n.a.l s.e.x with a male friend by mistake.

* Due to the subsequent break-up of the Beatles, and the folding of Zapple, the recording was not released until 1997 when it appeared on CD.

7.

POST OFFICE.

One of the most famous stories about Bukowski's career is that he became a successful writer after bravely quitting the post office, at the age of forty-nine, with only the promise of a small monthly pay check from John Martin to keep him from Skid Row.

The truth, as revealed in his post office file, was rather different. Bukowski did not leave the post office voluntarily; he was forced into quitting after they wrote to him, in the late fall of 1969, saying he was about to be dismissed for absenteeism. He could try and appeal, but the result was a foregone conclusion. He had taken too much time off work to do his writing, and they were sick of him. Bukowski did not tell John Martin about this letter, however, when he went to him with a proposition.

'If you get me out of the post office, I'll write more books than you can publish,' he said.

John Martin began to consider whether he could afford to pay Bukowski a small salary, against royalties, to cover his living expenses so he could write. They worked out that he needed $35 for his rent, $20 for groceries, $5 for gas, $15 for beer and cigarettes, $10 to pay the telephone bill and $15 for Marina's child support. It came to exactly $100 a month. That was a quarter of John Martin's monthly income, and he had a wife and child to support, so it was a serious undertaking. Bukowski might simply have got drunk with the money, and not produced anything worthwhile. But he had faith in him.

'OK, I'll take a chance I'll give you $100 a month, for life, guaranteed no matter what happens,' he said, 'if you quit the post office to write full time.'

There was no written contract, just a gentleman's agreement. It was enough for Bukowski to go to the post office and resign his job before they fired him.

The deal with Martin was not the only money Bukowski had to cus.h.i.+on his freelance writing career. A thrifty man, he had built up a savings account of several thousand dollars, the basis of which was money left by his father. He had more money coming to him from the sale of his papers to the University of California at Santa Barbara, a deal set up by John Martin. He also had $3000 in his pension fund, which he could draw out if he was in trouble. He had no outstanding debts, and spent very little on himself. In fact, Bukowski had a reputation among his friends as being tight with a buck. 'He was like a f.u.c.king conservative German, like a conservative banker,' says Steve Richmond. 'He paid every bill on time and dreaded debt. It scared the s.h.i.+t out of him.'

He had always refused requests to give public readings in the past, simply because the idea terrified him, but now every dollar counted. When his friend Peter Edler invited him to read at The Bridge, a book store off Hollywood Boulevard, Bukowski said yes. The date was set as Friday 19 December, 1969, and in the hours before his appearance, Bukowski worked himself into in a terrible state of nerves.

'What am I going to do? I just don't know how to do this,' he told friends.

Far from the handful of people they expected, a couple of hundred fans showed up on the night. The place was packed. Bukowski was lit by a spotlight, sitting in an easy chair on stage with the galley proofs of The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. 'He is sitting there like a grandfather,' remembers Steve Richmond, one of many friends who came to watch. 'Nice scene everybody so close to him. It was a magic thing.'

Although extremely nervous, he read fluently, choosing his best work, and the audience stayed with him. As his confidence grew he smiled, drank beer from a bottle and even extemporized a poem, 'Carter to resign?', from an article in a daily newspaper. Richmond notes how different the evening was compared with the rambunctious readings Bukowski gave later in his career, when poet and audience traded insults. 'It was so perfect, so right, everybody believed in him and was feeling for him, not in a pitying way, and feeling his pain when there was pain.'

The evening was such a success, Peter Edler invited Bukowski back the next night to do it all over again.

At the end of his final graveyard s.h.i.+ft, a few days later, Bukowski wished everyone at the post office such a casual goodbye the clerks thought he was just going for the night. That was fine by Bukowski, who didn't want a fuss. He drove home via Ned's, where he bought beer, and got royally drunk. He stayed that way for several days, completely disorientated by the sudden rush of freedom. 'After living in the cage I had taken the opening and flown out like a shot into the heavens,' he wrote.

Now, as he rolled free of his terrible job, there was nothing to do at 6.30 p.m. each day but call up friends to come and get drunk with him, and he had a party at the bungalow through the end of December, 1969, until New Year's Eve when he finally threw his guests out, locked the door, and pulled down the shades so he could sleep.

Two days later, on the afternoon of 2 January, 1970, Bukowski sat down at his Royal typewriter and started his first novel: 'It all began as a mistake.'

He stopped, struck out the word 'all' and returned the carriage.

It began as a mistake.

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire d.a.m.ned near anybody, and so there I went and the next thing you knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft!

That was 1950, when he was shacked with Jane and working downtown as a temporary mail carrier. He remembered the lonely women he delivered to, the ones whose husbands were at work, others whose husbands had not come back from the war. Crazy b.i.t.c.hes some of them, but what bodies they had. He would put some s.e.x in this book, for laughs. Writing Notes of a Dirty Old Man had taught him s.e.x sold.

I think it was my second day as a Christmas temp that this big woman came out and walked around with me as I delivered letters. What I mean by big was that her a.s.s was big and her t.i.ts were big and that she was big in all the right places.

He worked at the novel day and night over the next three weeks, hardly leaving the bungalow as he reviewed his past life through the character of Henry Chinaski: the death of Jane, changing her name to Betty; his marriage to Barbara Frye and their trip to Texas; buying the '57 Plymouth new, the same '57 Plymouth that sat outside now, rust spots around the door sills, dead leaves on the windscreen. He described the tyrannical supervisor when he was a subst.i.tute carrier; the day he tried to deliver mail during a deluge; the endless scheme tests he had to take to keep his job; and the events of the past few months, culminating in his quitting to write a novel.

When it was finished, he went back with a biro crossing out repet.i.tions and tightening sentences. Then he took a fresh sheet of paper and worked on a t.i.tle. His first thought was to call it Six Pack No Scheme. He wrote out more than twenty other names, ticking those he liked best: 12 Years Gone, Death of Betty and Postal News were favorites, but still none was exactly right. Finally he had it, and he dialed John Martin's number in West LA.

Before he left the post office, Martin had told him that he should try and write a novel, if he thought he had one in him, because it was their best hope of making money. Bukowski hadn't said he would be starting right away.

'Come and get it,' he said when Martin answered.

'What?'

'The novel.'

'You wrote a novel?' he asked, astonished.

'Yep, all done.'

'What's the name of it?'

'Post Office.'

Post Office is the seminal prose work of Bukowski's career just as The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills is his seminal poetry book. It is the first, and arguably the best, of a series of five novels charting the life and times of Henry Chinaski in an innovative but accessible prose style that, in its simplicity, is remarkably similar to the poetry. The novels have proved popular with readers all around the world and, in the years following its publication, Post Office has been translated into fifteen languages.

It is not a perfect novel. Bukowski included material relevant to his life as autobiography, but which does not make for a cohesive work of fiction; the section about his marriage to Barbara seems out of place; and the last quarter of the book is weak. But Post Office is highly original and accomplished for several reasons.

It is the spare style of the prose that is most striking. From reading Fante and Hemingway, he had learned to write in a straight-forward way with lots of dialogue. From Fante, in particular, he took the idea of dividing the novel into very short chapters, or numbered sub-sections of chapters, some only half a page long. 'I was concerned with "pace",' Bukowski explained, 'a briskness of style which would not lie and which would still keep the reader awake while I was getting at what I wanted to say.'

An even greater achievement is the totally convincing way in which he writes about work. He succeeds in making the drudgery of carrying and sorting mail real and relevant to every reader who has had a job they disliked. Sorting letters is not a s.e.xy subject for fiction, but he makes it interesting and that is a significant accomplishment because repet.i.tive work is the stuff of so many lives. In his critical study of Bukowski, Against the American Dream, Russell Harrison writes: 'No contemporary American novelist has treated work as extensively or intensively as Bukowski ... Indeed Bukowski's outstanding achievement is his depiction of work, most notably in Post Office.'

Finally, Post Office is very funny, a humor which leavens all the other ingredients. As Bukowski was fond of saying, Hemingway was a great writer but his books aren't a barrel of laughs. He made sure that Henry Chinaski's misadventures, as lover and postal worker, were recounted with a sardonic humor that saves the novel from becoming pretentious. This would be true of the best of his subsequent novels, and is undoubtedly one the main reasons for their enduring popularity.

Although he finished Post Office remarkably quickly, Bukowski did not reward himself with a break. Quite the contrary, he felt compelled to write almost constantly now that he was free of his job, partly because he was terrified of not earning enough to support himself. He wrote ma.s.ses of poetry in the first few months, so many poems that he ran out of small magazines to send them to. And within weeks of finis.h.i.+ng his first novel, he began planning a second which at this early stage he called The Horseplayer.

John Martin came by now and then to check on Bukowski and talk about their books, and sometimes they went out to eat at a local restaurant, but they spent relatively little time together and this distance helped preserve their friends.h.i.+p. The fact that Martin was now his primary source of income was also a strong reason for Bukowski to stay on good terms with him.

In April, a collection of Bukowski first editions came up for sale at a literary auction in New York, alongside collections of Faulkner and Hemingway. Although the Bukowski books raised only a fraction of the prices commanded by the more famous writers, they sold easily and it became apparent there was a lucrative market in collecting his books, magazine appearances, letters and ma.n.u.scripts, even his child-like paintings. But Bukowski had only a limited understanding of the value of his artwork, as Martin discovered when he telephoned to arrange the collection of forty new paintings he had buyers for. When he asked what would be a good time to pick them up, Bukowski said he didn't have the paintings anymore. He didn't think they were very good so he'd put them in the bath and p.i.s.sed all over them. He wasn't quite sure why, perhaps he was crazy. And he couldn't get them back, because he'd dumped the whole mess in the garbage. Martin was aghast at this, and asked if he had any idea how much money they could have made.

The success of The Bridge reading encouraged Bukowski to accept other offers to read in public, although he never overcame his nerves or his inherent distaste at clowning for an audience. Neither would he read for free, like some of his acquaintances whom he felt liked to hear the sound of their own voices. This was work and his minimum fee was $25, plus expenses.

In May, he caught a train to New Mexico for a university reading, and afterwards went to bed with a woman who had been in the audience, managing only a 'drunken half-f.u.c.k'. The next morning he flew up to Seattle, Was.h.i.+ngton, for an engagement at Bellevue Community College. It was the first plane ride of his life and he celebrated by getting wrecked.

He was woken with a hangover at 8.30 the following morning at the home of one of the academics who had invited him, and whom he had insulted the previous evening. He was so sick with nerves he threw up in the parking lot before going into the college.

They showed him into a small room where a handful of fas.h.i.+onably dressed students had gathered to hear him read. He noticed the girls in front crossed their legs so he couldn't see up their skirts.

'This is my fourth reading,' he told them bashfully. 'I'm pretty raw.'

He read with little expression, stumbling over his words. The funnier poems, like 'Soup', Cosmos and Tears', barely raised a chuckle and there was no applause when he concluded a poem. He tried 'Another Academy', a poem about being down and out, not an experience these kids seemed in danger of having, but something he feared he might be again: how can they go on, you see them sitting in old doorways with dirty stained caps and thick clothes and no place to go; heads bent down, arms on knees they wait.

or they stand in front of the Mission 700 of them quiet as oxen waiting to be let into the chapel where they will sleep upright on hard benches leaning against each other snoring and dreaming; men without.

... I heard one guy say to another: 'John Wayne won it.'

'Won what?' said the other guy tossing the last of his rolled cigarette into the street.

I thought that was rather good.

Pouring a drink of vodka and orange from his Thermos flask, he gave the students a little half-time speech that played up to his image.

'I have a friend who keeps taking me down to Skid Row,' he said. 'Since I spent the early part of my life there, I don't learn too much by going back.'

He drank himself stupid at the airport as he waited for his flight home to LA. The whole experience had been a nightmare, but with the bank account sagging he had no choice.