Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  You knock on my floor when I type within hours. Why in the hell don’t you keep your stupid t.v. set down at 10.30 tonight? I don’t complain to the managers, but it seems to me that your outlook is very one-sided.

  H Bukowski.

  Apt 303

  He wrote to Ann Menebroker: ‘Doesn’t she know I am the great Charles Bukowski? The bitch!’

  The old woman in 203 replied:

  Sir:

  It is not my TV set you hear, I don’t have it loud at any time.

  I was told you work from 5.30, but your machine is going day and night and Sunday. It is like living beneath an arsenal.

  This is an apartment house not a business establishment… It sounds as if you have all kinds of machinery up there.

  You would not be allowed all that noise and racket in any apt house where people live for peace and quiet.

  I have been in this house 26 years, and have inquired from many people, and you are out of line. Apt 203.

  He took a month’s unpaid leave from the post office to play the horses, but they were ‘running like salami’ and he lost his money. He became so low that suicide seemed the only logical solution to his problems. He began putting his affairs in order: mailing Jane’s bobby pin to Ann, boxing up the letters he had received from Corrington and mailing them back to Baton Rouge ‘before something happens’, as he explained.

  He had always hated Christmas, appalled by the behavior of what he called ‘amateur drunks’. Bukowski believed it was a time of year when professional drinkers like himself should stay indoors. ‘I hate to go out on the streets on Xmas day. The fuckers act like they are out of their minds,’ he wrote to the Webbs. But a few days before Christmas, 1962, when he was particularly low, he broke his rule and downed three fifths of Scotch in the local bars before passing out on a neighbor’s lawn. The police locked him up for the night in the drunk tank and, when he came to, Bukowski found himself frightened by his own excesses, as he wrote on 18 December to Ann:

  Have been laying here in horrible fit of depression. My drinking days are over. This is too much. Jail is a horrible place. I almost go mad there.

  I don’t know what is going to become of me. I have no trade, no future. Sick, depressed, blackly, heavily depressed.

  Write me something. Maybe a word from you will save me.

  Most evenings around 6 p.m. he had to stop work and drive along Sunset Boulevard to his post office job. The setting sun bled the sky in the rear view mirror as he rolled east out of Hollywood, past Echo Park, across Alvarado Street and into downtown, forking left on Alpine Street to the Terminal Annex – the ‘post office’ made famous in his novel of that name – a gigantic sorting office ornamented with carved eagles and US Postal Service decals.

  ‘How’re you doin’ tonight?’ called out assign clerk, Johnny Moore, when Bukowski punched on for the graveyard shift.

  ‘Alright, Big John,’ he shouted back.

  The work floor was the size of a football field, floodlit and busy with hundreds of clerks sticking mail, sorting parcels and lugging sacks while the supervisors yelled for them to keep moving. The noise was incredible. Cancelling machines clattered, huge conveyor belts moved an endless river of mail and there was muzak playing from speakers high up in the roof. It was hot, too, even when Bukowski arrived in the evening, a heat generated by the toil of human beings.

  Johnny Moore assigned Bukowski to one of the many booths that made up Sanford Station Letters* or to Parcels where two men together worked tossing boxes around like basketballs. Parcel work was rotated and, if Bukowski had a hangover when it was his turn, he would ask to work on letters because sorting letters was easier.

  ‘He used to come in loaded sometimes,’ says Johnny Moore. ‘That was dismissal right there, but we took care of it.’ He would assign Bukowski to a place where the supervisors were unlikely to find him, because the clerks thought of themselves like family, and Bukowski was one of them. ‘We knew the ropes, see, we was there a long time, and we don’t want no supervisor firing nobody when they’re a friend of ours.’

  There were ten black workers to every white worker on the night shift, which was the most unpopular shift of all at the Annex. ‘The whites saw it as beneath them,’ says former clerk Grace Washington. Bukowski could have moved to a day shift, if he wanted, but he stayed on nights for years, coming in around 6.30 p.m. and leaving around 2.30 a.m., because it gave him time during the day to write and go to the track and, perhaps surprisingly, his former co-workers say he was one of the least prejudiced whites in the whole building.

  The mail clerks worked in booths leaning on a rest bar made of wood. ‘What you did, you rested your butt on this thing,’ says David Berger, Bukowski’s union rep. ‘That would keep you in a permanent position so you weren’t actually standing on your feet, you were at an angle. It kind of took the weight off your feet and made it easier to work.’ The mail arrived in long trays which had to be sorted within a time limit or else the clerks were ‘written up’ by the supervisors. There were other rules: clerks were only allowed to use their right hand to throw mail, and the mail had to go into the relevant cubby holes so the stamps were ‘up’ and the return addresses ‘in’. Bukowski was not exaggerating when he described in Post Office how this system ground the clerks down over the years. It was a brutal régime and many, including Bukowski, suffered chronic back and shoulder pains.

  ‘KEEP MOVING!’ called the supervisors as they marched along beside the rows of clerks. ‘PICK IT UP NOW!’ they yelled, as new mail came down the conveyor belts. Up above in what the clerks called ‘the spy gallery’ other supervisors watched for pilfering. Bukowski knew that if he took one stamp home he would be fired.

  The clerks chattered incessantly to pass the time, about sport mostly, football games and baseball scores. They also bet to see who could clear their trays fastest, each throwing a dollar in a pot and then sticking mail as fast as possible until one clerk finished. But there was no way of beating the clock, as David Berger says: ‘Just about the time you figure you had cleaned up what was in front of you, here came somebody with another tray, so it never ended.’

  Bukowski was unusual because he didn’t talk while he was working. He didn’t joke or race the other clerks or try and get the trays that seemed to have less mail. He worked steadily, without joy or complaint, with the stoicism he had learned as a boy. ‘He wasn’t grumpy, he just never started any conversation,’ says Berger. ‘If you talked to him, he would probably answer you, but he would never really carry a conversation.’ Grace Washington actually wondered if he was retarded.

  In his break, Bukowski either went downstairs to the cafeteria or across the street into Chinatown where the clerks could get a late night beer at Mama’s Bar. Sometimes when he was in Mama’s, he would tell the clerks he was a writer, but this only confirmed their opinion that he was a way-out fellow and Johnny Moore says they never believed him anyway. Then it was back to the Annex until 2 a.m., or later in the run-up to Christmas.

  For the best part of twelve years Bukowski held this backbreaking job, working two weeks straight and then taking a four-day weekend and, as the years went by, he became convinced it would kill him.

  It was a Friday night in the spring of 1963, the start of a long weekend after working ten days at the post office, and Bukowski was drinking in his room. Not having had any female company to speak of since Jane died over a year ago, and feeling lonely, he decided to call a woman who had written to him saying she loved his work. She was from somewhere back east but had recently come to stay with her mother in Garden Grove, a suburb of LA.

  ‘I have to see you right now,’ Bukowski insisted, when he got her on the line. ‘You have to come at once.’

  She said she would love to, but had no transport because her mother was using the car.

  ‘How about tomorrow?’

  ‘No, come now.’

  There was a Greyhound leaving Anaheim around midnight. If sh
e walked to the station, she might catch it. But she wouldn’t be in LA until at least 2 a.m. Bukowski said he would be up.

  His new friend was born Frances Elizabeth Dean in San Rafael, California, in 1922, but later changed her name to FrancEyE. Her father was an electrical engineer from a well-to-do family who made a fortune inventing a type of boiler. He died when FrancEyE was eight and she was brought up in Lexington, Massachusetts, home of her paternal grandparents. She went to Smith College where she joined the poetry club and started to write about what she describes as ‘my bitterness and despair’. She married a soldier and settled in Michigan, raising a family of four daughters, but continued to write poetry and to correspond with other poets.

  One of her pen friends was Stanley Kurnik who ran a writers’ workshop in LA and knew Bukowski. He would go over to North Mariposa and look at his poems, the pile of old work he kept in the closet, and pick out some good ones to read to his workshop group. Sometimes Kurnik sent copies to FrancEyE and she was so thrilled by them that she wrote to Bukowski expressing her admiration. When her marriage ended, and she moved to Garden Grove, FrancEyE wrote again, this time asking to meet him. It was this letter Bukowski was turning over when he called her on the telephone.

  ‘Of course he was drunk,’ she says. ‘He was drunk out of his mind. I didn’t realize this at the time. But I do remember thinking in the cab that brought me from the bus station, I hope he does follow through because I don’t have enough money to pay this cab driver.’

  The next thing FrancEyE knew she was at North Mariposa in the still of the early morning with Bukowski, sobered up a little, coming down the steps with the money for the driver. ‘Bukowski seemed like this giant, this gorgeous giant,’ she says. ‘His hair was all slicked back … His gaze was very direct. He had a very symmetrical face. His nose was kind of smashed, but I just thought he was gorgeous.’

  He was not supposed to have female visitors in his room out of hours, so they sneaked up to 303 and whispered together until dawn. ‘We would sit and not say anything and he would get nervous because he could never stand silence. He would always say something to start the conversation again.’ They discussed their mutual feelings of depression and isolation. ‘I was desperately lonely and grief-stricken and on the edge of suicide all the time because I didn’t have my kids,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have a life. And he was in much the same situation.’ Bukowski spoke about Jane’s death, and all the guilt and grief he felt, and how much he regretted being cruel to a dog they had, when he was drunk one time. When they had worn each other out with their misery, they climbed into the Murphy bed.

  The following afternoon Bukowski took FrancEyE to Santa Anita to watch the horses. An incorrigible spendthrift herself, she noticed that, although he was clearly addicted to gambling, he was cautious with the amount of money he spent. ‘His rent was paid. His savings were in his savings account and he would gamble what he had left,’ she says.

  They began to see each other regularly and she moved into Los Angeles to be near him, taking a cheap room on North Vermont Avenue, a couple of blocks up from the Phillips Hotel. The Hollywood Freeway ran under the apartment building and when she opened her window in the morning she was engulfed in a cloud of exhaust.

  FrancEyE was a moderate drinker, nothing like Jane had been, but this didn’t stop Bukowski from boozing. She remembers he kept his drinking more or less under control during the week, when he had to get to his job, but ‘drank non-stop’ at the weekends, benders which often ended with some accident, or with him spending the night in jail followed by a court appearance. He had a newspaper clipping about Alcoholics Anonymous stuck to the wall and would occasionally talk about whether he fitted the profile of an alcoholic. On balance he decided he didn’t because he could stop drinking if he wanted, if only for a day or so, and because he carried on writing however much he drank. This remained his opinion throughout his life.

  Despite the indifference he later showed FrancEyE, she says the relationship began as a love affair. ‘We both had such a need for love and we both received love from each other,’ she says. Bukowski did not write very much about FrancEyE, and there are no love poems comparable to those he wrote about Jane. Indeed, the closest he ever came to admitting love was in the poem, ‘one for old snaggle-tooth’, written years after they’d split, in which he acknowledges they ‘were once great lovers’. However, in a letter to Corrington, he described FrancEyE as a grey-haired old woman (she was forty-one when they met) who loved him, but whom he did not love.

  FrancEyE explains this by saying Bukowski had difficulty expressing love. ‘He wrote about the negative emotions more,’ she says. ‘He used to be really embarrassed by positive feeling.’ This was not limited to feelings for her, but extended to all human relationships. As an example, she recalls Bukowski confessing he admired some people who had recently been to visit him. He thought they were wonderful, but he said these feelings of admiration for other human beings made him feel sick.

  The visitors were probably photographer Sam Cherry and his teenage son, Neeli. Bukowski was becoming close to the family, whom he had met through Jory Sherman, admiring Sam Cherry for the hard life he’d led during the depression: riding the box cars as a hobo, working as a longshoreman and living on San Francisco’s Skid Row.

  When Sam Cherry visited North Mariposa, Bukowski tried to establish his own tough guy credentials, by boasting that he’d killed five men.

  ‘Come on, don’t give me that shit, Bukowski,’ Cherry replied. ‘How many men did you really kill?’

  Bukowski took a drink, looked at the crack in the wall, and said he had killed four men. Cherry guffawed and there was another pause before Bukowski revised this to three men.

  ‘After about twenty or thirty minutes it got down to zero,’ says Cherry. ‘He was full of bullshit.’

  Apart from the love and support of FrancEyE, and the friendship of people like Sam Cherry, it was Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb who lifted Bukowski out of his long period of depression by writing to him that they liked his work so much they had decided to make him their first Outsider of the Year. He would get an inscribed plaque to hang on his wall and, more importantly, they would publish an anthology of his best poems. Bukowski was overwhelmed by the Webbs’ generosity of spirit, people he still had not met. He knew it would be a crippling task for them financially, with no money other than what they could raise through friends like book dealer, Ed Blair, and sympathetic writers like Henry Miller, as well as being a massive time commitment.

  The proposed book was to be an infinitely more substantial publication than the chapbooks previously brought out. It would be a beautifully produced hard-cover volume, properly bound, and sold commercially through stores. The Webbs selected Bukowski’s best work since 1955 – poems like ‘the tragedy of the leaves’, ‘conversation in a cheap room’ and ‘old man, dead in a room’ – and then set about making the design so remarkable that anyone walking into a store would feel compelled to pick the book up, even if they’d never heard of Bukowski. The poems were printed on expensive deckle-edged paper in a range of colours and bound in an elaborate cork cover. Jon Webb wanted to sell autographed copies so he mailed unbound pages to Bukowski to sign with a silver deco-write pen, giving precise instructions on how hard he must press, how long the ink took to dry, which side of the paper to work on and how many inches in from the margin he should write. A bemused Bukowski reflected it was a wonder the book didn’t walk and talk the amount of trouble they were taking with it.

  In the colophon, Webb described the arcane conditions in which the book was produced, writing that he and Gypsy Lou hand-fed the pages into an ancient Chandler & Price letterpress, working through the humid summer of 1963 in a workshop behind a sagging mansion in the French Quarter of New Orleans. ‘The workshop’s windows gaping out into a delightful walled-in courtyard dense to its broken-bottled brims with rotting banana trees, stinkweed and vine.’ Rats ran about in the roof sending showers of plaster over completed pag
es and they had to share the workshop with ‘cockroaches big as mice’. There were myriad hitches to contend with, including bugs in the ink, blown fuses and wiring that twice caught fire. The press broke down three times, and the Louisiana humidity burst the composition rollers, but finally the job was done.

  John William Corrington wrote the introduction identifying one of Bukowski’s main achievements as his use of ‘a language devoid of the affections, devices and mannerisms that have taken over academic verse’. This style, he wrote, was ‘the spoken voice nailed to paper’.

  The title of the book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, was taken from a line in a poem by Robinson Jeffers, Bukowski’s favorite poet at the time. ‘Jeffers, I suppose, is my God,’ he wrote to Jory Sherman, ‘the only man since Shakey to write the long narrative poem that does not put one to sleep.’ He also liked Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound, ‘but Jeffers is stronger, darker, more exploratatively [sic] modern and mad.’

  The finished book, which was published in October, 1963, was a work of art and, although only 777 copies were made, the extraordinary craftsmanship could not fail to draw attention to Bukowski and his poetry. The arrival of the first copy at North Mariposa was THE DAY. ‘My God, you’ve done it, you’ve done it!’ Bukowski wrote to the Webbs in high excitement. ‘Never such a book!’ The years of misery, the depression, the feelings of loss had been worth enduring to see something so wonderful.

  ‘That made him,’ says Gypsy Lou. ‘Of course he made a lot of money later in life, but we helped him get going.’