Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  A correspondence developed that quickly became intimate. Barbara wrote that she was a single woman with a slight physical deformity, a problem with her neck which she feared might prevent her finding a husband. She repeated this sad story in a number of letters, becoming quite plaintive on the subject of being left on the shelf, and Bukowski couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, especially as she had been so kind about his work. One night he dashed off a letter to Texas telling Barbara to relax, for Christ’s sake, and stop worrying about not finding a husband. She sounded like a really nice girl and, in fact, come to that, he’d marry her himself! He forgot about it the next day, but Barbara replied that she accepted.

  She wrote to say she was quitting her job in Wheeler and catching a bus to Los Angeles, giving details of when Bukowski should meet her at the bus terminal. In the meantime, she sent photographs of herself, and when Bukowski saw the photographs he really started to worry.

  Barbara had two vertebrae missing from her neck which, together with a slight curvature of the spine, gave the impression she was permanently hunching her shoulders. It also meant she couldn’t turn her head. She looked very odd indeed, as her cousin Tom Frye explains: ‘Hers was an obvious deformity because you could tell it as far as you could see her. Her chin sat right on the ribs of her chest. She was a plain girl, short with no neck.’

  Bukowski prepared himself for the worst, but when Barbara stepped down from the bus he didn’t think she looked that bad, certainly attractive enough to go to bed with. So he took her back to his apartment on North Westmoreland and that evening they tried to make love.

  He worked away for what seemed hours, but no matter what he did, or what fantasy images he conjured up, he couldn’t come and it was a relief when Barbara climaxed and fell asleep. Bukowski lay awake afterwards, smoking cigarettes, wondering what the hell was wrong. Finally, he decided that Barbara had ‘a big pussy’. This was the real reason no man would marry the poor creature. It was nothing to do with her neck. Her pussy was so big a fellow couldn’t feel what he was doing.

  ‘Barbara, I understand,’ he said, when she woke the next morning. ‘But we’ll go through with it. I won’t back out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I mean, you’ve got this big pussy. You know, last night.’

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘You weren’t even in there.’

  ‘But what in the hell? You were moaning and groaning. I think you climaxed.’

  ‘I thought that was a new way of doing things … I didn’t know.’

  ‘You mean I wasn’t even inside of you?

  ‘No.’

  Bukowski later confessed he was so sexually naïve that, unless a woman placed his penis inside her, he was not at all sure what to do. They tried again, with Barbara guiding him in, and he was relieved to find the fit was snug and he was able to ejaculate. Satisfied everything was as it should be, they drove across the desert to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they married on 29 October, 1955.

  Like most of the women in Bukowski’s life, Barbara became the subject of many poems and works of prose – most notably she was Joyce in Post Office – but little he wrote about her matched up with reality.

  Barbara’s great-grandfather was a pioneer settler of the west who arrived in the Texas panhandle in 1877 to claim eight thousand acres as The Frye Ranch. The family ran cattle, bred horses and struck oil, although that was not the limit of their achievements. Barbara’s cousin Jack Frye invented an airplane called The Frye Interceptor, and co-founded TWA with Howard Hughes. Another cousin made a fortune training pilots. Barbara Nell Frye was born on 6 January, 1932, making her eleven years younger than Bukowski. Her parents divorced when she was two, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents, Lilly and Tobe Frye, whom she called Mummy and Daddy Tobe just as Joyce in Post Office calls her father ‘Daddy Wally’. (Bukowski writes: ‘Silly bitch … he wasn’t her daddy.’) She graduated high school, went to college and, through Daddy Tobe’s influence, was elected Wheeler court clerk.

  Barbara had never had a regular boyfriend and she told no one of her decision to marry Bukowski, just taking off for California with the little money she had in her savings account and, despite Bukowski persistently referring to her as ‘the millionairess’, this was the only money she had all the time they were together. Her father said she was crazy to marry a man she didn’t know, but other members of the family were more understanding. ‘It didn’t surprise me too much because I guess that was her only chance,’ says her cousin, Sunny Thomas.

  In Post Office, Bukowski writes about Chinaski visiting Joyce’s home town and the impression given is that they settled in Texas for a while. Although Bukowski and his bride did visit after getting married, it was only for a couple of weeks when her grandparents, who didn’t approve of the marriage, were on vacation. Bukowski arrived in his regular city clothes and had to be fitted out in a set of Daddy Tobe’s cowboy duds, which made him look ridiculous. His next shock was discovering that Wheeler was in a dry county.

  When they got back to LA Barbara published a special issue of Harlequin featuring eight of Bukowski’s poems, including the accomplished ‘Death Wants More Death’, and they co-edited issues of Harlequin with Bukowski dealing out rough treatment to contributors he didn’t like, which was most of them, and getting his own back on poet-editors who had rejected his work. One of his first victims was Judson Crews whose poems he rejected as pay-back for the snub he’d received. Another victim was Leslie Woolf Hedley, a poet who had responded to Barbara’s advertisement. Bukowski thought Woolf Hedley’s poems awful and told Barbara they couldn’t publish them, even though they were already accepted. ‘She wrote me a letter that she wasn’t going to use the poems because Bukowski refused to do so. He was against it,’ says Woolf Hedley, who considered taking legal action against them. ‘Mine were not quite as avant-garde as he would like. He was a professional alien, a person who liked to be alienated, and I think he played that to the hilt.’

  Barbara was not content to live in a downtown apartment building, so they moved to a little house in the LA suburb of Echo Park. She also made it clear they wouldn’t be living on her family’s money, telling Bukowski she intended to prove to the folks back home they could make it on their own. Bukowski, who had been forced to resign from the post office after his hemorrhage, would have to start thinking about a career. He was working at a typical ‘shit job’ at the time, shipping clerk at the Graphic Arts Center on West 7th Street. He despatched consignments of ink, paper and pens from the warehouse to trucks that pulled up in the alley and spent a good part of each shift swigging beer in the Seven-G’s (sic) bar round the back. It was the same old routine and he liked the people at Graphic Arts, but Barbara said it wouldn’t do at all and got it into her head he might become a commercial artist. He had a modest talent for drawing and, with some schooling, maybe he could get himself a job in an advertising agency, or with a newspaper. She persuaded him to enroll in classes at Los Angeles City College, and started taking him out to galleries.

  The college work involved designing Christmas advertisements for Texaco gas stations and Bukowski’s idea, which he thought a good one, was to have a Christmas tree with the Texaco star at the top. The teacher told him he didn’t want designs featuring Christmas trees because Christmas trees were passé. Although he had been doing reasonably well until then, scoring a B average, he lost interest after this and eventually dropped out of the course. But when Christmas rolled around, he was amused to see Texaco stations had posters with a star on a tree.

  ‘Look, baby, my drawing,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you proud of me?’

  ‘You’re always laughing at yourself,’ Barbara replied, exasperated with his lack of ambition.

  She was unable to understand how a man who had been published in a magazine with Jean-Paul Sartre could laze round the house drinking beer and reading the racing form, and was less than impressed when Bukowski went back to work for the post office as a trainee distribution clerk fo
r $1.82 an hour.

  ‘You didn’t turn out the way I thought you would,’ she told him when they were several months into the marriage. ‘I expected you to be more fiery, more explosive.’

  For his part, Bukowski was becoming irritated by what he perceived as Barbara’s phoniness. He noticed she affected a fake English accent to answer the telephone. She never knew when he was being funny. Conversely, she thought he was joking when he was serious. In fact, the more he thought about her personality, the less he liked it. She was a ‘cold, vindictive, unkind, snob bitch’.

  ‘He was a screwball,’ says Barbara’s aunt, Leah Belle Wilson, who received a visit from the couple in San Bernardino. Bukowski was surly and uncommunicative and, when she tried to engage him in conversation about his work, just chit chat – did he like his job? – he grunted that he didn’t want to talk about it and began reading a comic book instead. Barbara attempted to excuse her husband saying he was a writer, a dreamer, ‘a child who has never grown up’. But Aunt Leah Belle thought him plain rude. It certainly wasn’t the way folks carried on back in Texas. ‘He wasn’t very friendly,’ she says. ‘He was like an outsider.’

  When they had first got married, sex was so good Bukowski decided Barbara was a nymphomaniac. Then she frightened him by saying they should be thinking about having children. He was set against the idea and began to withdraw before ejaculation, the only form of contraception he was willing to try. It wasn’t easy to get the timing right and he worried Barbara would trick him into coming inside her. When she did become pregnant, she miscarried their baby. Bukowski blamed himself, believing the amount of alcohol he had drunk over the years had damaged his sperm in some way. Barbara blamed him, too. She took a lover and began divorce proceedings, accusing Bukowski of subjecting her to mental cruelty, a charge which upset him because, whatever his shortcomings, he didn’t feel he’d mistreated her.

  The divorce was finalized on 18 March, 1958, two years and four months after their wedding. It seemed he wouldn’t be getting his hands on those Texas millions after all, as he wrote in one of his most sardonic poems, ‘The Day I Kicked Away a Bankroll’:

  … you can take your rich aunts and uncles

  and grandfathers and fathers

  and all their lousy oil

  and their seven lakes

  and their wild turkey

  and buffalo

  and the whole state of Texas,

  meaning, your crow-blasts

  and your Saturday night boardwalks,

  and your 2-bit library

  and your crooked councilmen

  and your pansy artists –

  you can take all these

  and your weekly newspaper

  and your tornadoes,

  and your filthy floods

  and all your yowling cats

  and your subscription to Time,

  and shove them, baby,

  shove them.

  Triple X cinemas. Cocktail lounges. Apartment courts with cracked swimming pools. Boulevards lined with diseased palm trees sagging in the smog. This was the other Hollywood, what Bukowski called East Hollywood, the area he moved to after leaving Barbara. It was only a couple of miles from the mansion homes of the movie stars in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, but had more in common with the seedy end of downtown where he had lived with Jane, and which it was also near to.

  The 1600 block of North Mariposa Avenue cut north–south from Hollywood Boulevard to the broken down, busted-out east end of Sunset Boulevard in the rotten core of the district he adopted as his new home. He parked his ’57 Plymouth and went into the Spanish-style rooming house at number 1623: two dozen cold water apartments arranged like prison cells along three landings. There was no elevator and no air conditioning. He took room 303 on the second floor. There were a couple of old chairs, a lamp with dented shade, chipped dining table, cockroaches in the kitchenette, a Murphy bed that folded out of the wall and a shared bathroom down the hall.

  Ned’s Liquor Store, at the corner of Hollywood and Normandie, was a short walk away. Bukowski stocked up on Miller High Life beer, boxes of White Owl cigars and cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes, went back to his room, turned his transistor radio to a classical station, pulled the shade, flipped the top from a beer and sat at the typewriter, thinking of the other losers who had lived there before him. Then he began to type whatever came to mind, experimenting with putting down what Black Sparrow Press publisher, John Martin, calls a ‘series of images’, as opposed to his mature work which mostly consisted of stories.

  ‘Hank’s room was filthy,’ remembers Jory Sherman, a poet from St Paul, Minnesota, who became a close friend at this time. ‘He never cleaned up. Dishes in the sink and cigarette butts everywhere.’

  Grim though the surroundings were, Bukowski was free from his failed marriage, and the expectations of his ambitious wife. He was doing what he wanted, and had his job at the post office to keep him from starving. ‘… at the best of times there was a small room and the machine and the bottle,’ he wrote. ‘The sound of the keys, on and on, and the shouts: “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE WE’RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE’VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!” With broomsticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines …’

  The landlord told him he would have to stop typing at 9.30 p.m. because the other tenants were complaining. That was precisely the time Bukowski was getting into the swing of it, with a few beers inside him, a cigar going and maybe some Mozart on the radio, if he lucked it. He put up with the noise of the other tenants: the canned laughter from their television sets, and ‘the lesbian down the hall’ who played jazz records all evening with her door open. Why couldn’t he be allowed to write? But the landlord had made his mind up. It was a new rule. So Bukowski developed a system. He typed until 9.30 p.m. and finished his work silently in hand-printed block capitals. He became so skilful he could hand-print almost as fast as he could type.

  For several years, contact with his parents had been limited to asking for money when he was broke, and it got so that they barely saw each other. Kate and Henry moved out of LA to the suburb of Temple City, buying a new bungalow on Doreen Avenue and often complained to their neighbours, Francis and Irma Billie, about their wino son. By Francis Billie’s account, Henry was the same bullying braggart Bukowski had always despised, remembering that he tried to boss the neighbors around and exaggerated his importance at the LA County Museum, describing himself as Art Director although he had never risen higher than a preparator, and that by posing as the author, Charles Bukowski.

  Kate started to drink heavily. She ordered deliveries of wine from the corner liquor store when Henry was at work and Irma Billie says that, when Henry came home, he often found Kate passed out drunk.

  The last time Bukowski saw his mother she was in the Rosemead Rest Home, dying of cancer. Kate said he should have more respect for his parents, especially his father. ‘Your father is a great man,’ she told him.

  Henry decided their son would make no further visits, and stopped giving him news of Kate’s condition. ‘Henry said it wouldn’t do any good anyway,’ says Irma Billie. ‘He would just come down there drunk, so he didn’t bother to tell him.’ On Christmas Eve, 1956, Bukowski went out and bought a rosary as a gift for his mother and drove over to the home. He was trying to open the door to her room when a nurse told him she had died the day before. To what extent the bereavement caused him pain is impossible to say for certain because Bukowski never dwelt on his feelings for his mother, either in his writings or in private conversation, but it seems to have made little impression on him. ‘It’s a very veiled sort of thing, barely there,’ says his widow, Linda Lee Bukowski.

  Henry lost no time looking for a new wife. First he tried to seduce Anna Bukowski, widow of his late brother, John, but she didn’t want to know, so he got engaged to one of the women who worked at the Billies’ dry-cleaning business. Late on the afternoon of 4 December, 1958 –
nine months after Bukowski’s divorce – Henry’s fiancé came by the house and found him dead on the kitchen floor having apparently suffered a heart attack. If Bukowski failed to grieve for his mother, the death of the father was positively a cause for jubilation. ‘… he’s dead dead dead, thank God,’ he wrote.

  The old man’s corpse lay in a Temple City funeral parlor where his girlfriend wept over the casket. ‘No, no, no,’ she wailed. ‘He can’t be dead!’ He had only been sixty-three, she said, a fit and strong man, with many years ahead of him. Bukowski, his Uncle Jake and Aunt Eleanor stood together looking at the corpse. Bukowski remembered his father beating him with the razor strop, telling him he would never amount to anything; trying to push his head down into the vomit on the rug; beating him while his mother stood by doing nothing; beating Kate until she screamed. He had a powerful compulsion to push the girlfriend aside and spit on his face.

  A substantial block of granite marked the family plot at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena – BUKOWSKI etched in capital letters. The older ones were almost all dead: Henry and Kate; Henry’s brothers, John and Ben, both broken by the Depression; Grandfather Leonard, the drunken veteran of the Kaiser’s army; and Grandmother Emilie, the hard-shell Baptist who cackled she would outlive them all. But Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr was left, whiskey on his breath and an uneasiness in his stomach as he listened to the prayers said for his namesake.

  Back at Doreen Avenue, friends of his parents looked over bits of furniture and talked about lawn mowers and hedge clippers, and other oddments borrowed or promised over the years, things ‘Henry and Kate would have wanted us to have’. Bukowski told them to take whatever they wanted, giving away pictures from the walls, silverware, anything they asked for. Women were practically fighting over his mother’s home-made preserves in the kitchen, and so much stuff was taken that the contents of the house was valued at only $100 when it was sold.