Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  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.

  When he got home, his pen friend Ann Menebroker called to say she was in San Bernadino at a poetry conference and suggested they meet. They had been corresponding for years in such an affectionate way that their letters constituted a platonic love affair. ‘I have grown to love that part of you that comes over the phone or through the mails,’ she wrote. Now Bukowski was intrigued to find out what she was like.

  When he arrived at Ann’s hotel, she introduced him to a group of poets who Bukowski roundly insulted, inviting one to go outside and have a fist fight with him. Then they drove back into Los Angeles, Bukowski rapping about the characters they passed on the sidewalk, making his world come alive for Ann.

  ‘He was exactly the way I pictured him,’ she says. ‘I thought he was very interesting. I fell in love with the man. I loved him for years.’ Even though she did not find him physically attractive, she decided his personality transcended his looks and they went to bed that night and the following night, although Ann didn’t let him have full intercourse because she was married.

  Bukowski found Ann very attractive and said he knew she was married with children, up in Sacramento, but he wanted her to come and live with him in LA. He needed her; she was the first woman for a long time he had felt comfortable with. But she turned him down.

  ‘There was a very strong pull, but I couldn’t do that,’ she says. ‘I had a normal sane life where I was.’

  With Ann gone, and hardly any money to play the horses, he found himself stuck at home all day with his poems, and his paper, and his crayons, like a child. He became increasingly frustrated and irritable. When new tenants began blocking his Plymouth with their cars, he convinced himself it would end in a fight and sent away for a $3 switchblade.

  He saw the knife advertised in the classified section of one of the pornographic magazines he was buying having decided he could make extra money writing ‘dirty stories’. The editor of Fling magazine, which specialized in photo-spreads of women with huge breasts, replied with an encouraging letter saying he would welcome submissions with a lot of kinky sex. Bukowski began churning out short stories that, while being set in his regular low-life milieu, contained scenes of bizarre and often violent sex including sado-masochism, rape, even bestiality.

  He put his problems aside in August for his fiftieth birthday, which he celebrated by getting drunk for a week. Then he sobered up to the bleak realization that he was fifty, unemployed and broke.

  When Carl Weissner finished translating Notes of a Dirty Old Man into German, he and Bukowski decided to invent a review quote by Henry Miller in a desperate attempt to boost sales. As Bukowski wrote to Weissner, rather guiltily, things were so bad they had little choice but to pull such a stunt:

  I’m not too happy with the fake H (enry) M (iller) quote, and I would not tell (John) Martin about it or he’d flip – maybe.

  But if you think it will make the difference in selling 2000 or 5000, go ahead. It’s best that we survive.

  Because the book was published in an expensive hard cover edition, it still sold only twelve hundred copies and earned Bukowski next to nothing. He grew ever gloomier about his freelance writing career. Post Office had not been published yet. He was having trouble collecting money from the sex magazines, which had printed some of his dirty stories. And he had been pinning his hopes on getting a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, working on the theory that most writers they gave money to didn’t deserve it. Then they sent a letter saying he’d been turned down. It was one disappointment after another and all the time his bank balance was diminishing. At his lowest point, which came in September 1970, he considered using the $3 switchblade to cut his throat.

  ‘I thought the life of a writer would really be the thing,’ he wrote in a letter to Neeli Cherkovski, ‘it’s simply hell. I’m just a cheap twittering slave.’

  8

  LOVE LOVE LOVE

  After Jane Cooney Baker, probably the greatest love of Bukowski’s life was the sculptress Linda King whom he met in 1970.

  Linda’s first impression of Bukowski was that he was too old, too fat and too drunk to be of interest to her. She didn’t even want to tell him her real name.

  ‘It’s Morona,’ she said, when Peter Edler introduced her to Bukowski at De Longpre Avenue.

  ‘OK, Morona, sit down,’ said Bukowski. ‘So you write poetry?’

  ‘Yes, I like to SCREAM mine.’

  She got up on the coffee table and declaimed a poem about a nervous breakdown she’d suffered. Yes, she was a looker, thought Bukowski, but wouldn’t you know she’d be crazy, too? He turned up the radio so he wouldn’t have to listen, and Peter Edler was so embarrassed he tried to put his hand over her mouth.

  When Edler said he had to go, Linda said she’d go with him.

  ‘Oh no, you’re staying here with Hank,’ he said, and left them together.

  There not being much else to do, they kissed, just lightly, almost without interest.

  ‘You’re a tease,’ said Bukowski.

  ‘Yes, I’m a tease.’

  He tried to kiss her again, but Linda got up to go, pausing in the doorway for one more touch before skipping out the door and along the avenue to her car. As she drove away, she told herself she was definitely not going to get involved with ‘that old troll’.

  Linda was a thirty-year-old brunette, raised as a Mormon on a ranch near Bryce Canyon, Utah. Shortly after getting married, she had a severe mental breakdown, receiving electro-convulsive therapy, and afterwards came to Los Angeles to try and become an actress. After her marriage ended, she settled with her two children in the suburb of Burbank, renting a place on Riverside Drive, and, when her acting ambitions came to nothing, she began concentrating on her sculpting and poetry, both of which she was good at. Hanging out at The Bridge, she met Peter Edler and got to hear about Bukowski. He sounded like an interesting man whom she’d like to meet.

  After that first visit to De Longpre, Linda read more of Bukowski’s work and was surprised to discover he rarely wrote about women, and what he did write betrayed some ignorance. So she sent him a poem of her own:

  come out of that hole, you old Troll

  come and frolic

  with the liberated Billies

  we’ll put some flowers in your hair

  Also enclosed was a letter asking if he would sit for a sculpture of his head. He replied that he would, and she was welcome to come over when she liked.

  It was around 11 a.m. when Linda came back to De Longpre. She found Bukowski coughing up blood.

  ‘You want me to come back late
r?’ she asked.

  Bukowski said it was alright, he went through this every morning.

  ‘When I first met him he really was pretty ugly,’ says Linda. ‘He was 240 lbs and his hair was really short, like an old Will Rogers haircut.’ But the more she saw of him, as she worked at modelling the head, the more attractive he seemed. ‘He was very funny. He had a way of living, making each moment real. Sometimes he would be real stubborn and not talk at all, but for the most part, if you were around him, you felt this aliveness.’ Their conversation and body language became increasingly flirtatious as the weeks went by, and Bukowski wrote her romantic letters. Linda’s friends warned her not to get involved with a man so much older, a drunk with no money who didn’t even have a proper job, but she found herself casting coquettish looks at him as they worked on the head, which began to mimic his slightly suggestive smile. ‘I fell in love with him,’ she says. ‘We kind of fell in love over the clay.’

  ‘Bukowski, you’re a good writer,’ she said one day, when she was working. ‘But you don’t know anything about women.’ He admitted he hadn’t had much experience. The last time he had had sex was after the reading in New Mexico and, other than a couple of one night stands, he had basically only had three lovers in his whole life: Jane Cooney Baker, Barbara Frye and FrancEyE. Linda said she thought as much.

  She was in the kitchen when he came and pressed himself against her. He got a quick kiss. Then Linda pushed him away, saying if they ever became lovers, which he should know was highly unlikely, he would have to go down on her.

  ‘I’ll never get mixed up with a man again who doesn’t like to eat pussy,’ she said. Bukowski was forced to admit he had never done such a thing. ‘Oh well, you know, ha ha, too bad for you,’ said Linda, who often spoke with a peculiar chuckling laugh. ‘Forget it.’

  Bukowski couldn’t stand the teasing any longer. He scooped her up in his arms, carried her to the bed and proceeded to ‘eat her cunt like a peach’, as he wrote in an unpublished love poem.

  After a difficult first year as a freelance writer, 1971 started well for him. Post Office was published in February, in a beautiful edition designed by Barbara Martin, the cover made to look like a letter. Bukowski’s friend Gerald Locklin gave it a rave review in the Long Beach Press Telegram, saying he doubted a better novel would be published in America that year. February was also the month Bukowski started sleeping with Linda.

  They got off to a shaky start. He was using the tranquilizer drug Valium, to help him sleep at nights, and the cocktail of booze and pills rendered him impotent. Linda gathered it had happened before, because he didn’t seem at all surprised or worried. Instead he had a good time letting her squeeze the blackheads that covered his back and chest. He said it felt almost as good as sex, but she wanted more than that out of a relationship.

  She made him cut back on his drinking, told him to stop taking Valium and put him on a diet and exercise régime. He slimmed down to 160 lbs, losing so much weight cheekbones appeared on his face for the first time in thirty years. Linda found she had to scrape some clay from the head. He grew his hair and beard long, in keeping with the fashion, and she encouraged him to buy bell-bottom trousers and floral-print shirts. When the make-over was complete, she said they could try again.

  Bukowski assured her there was no need to use a rubber because, even if he got an erection, and held it, he would withdraw in time.

  ‘You came inside!’ she yelled in a rage, jumping up and down on the bed. ‘Jesus Christ, man!’

  ‘I was too hot. It just happened. What do I do?’

  ‘Do? You’re fifty years old. You’re supposed to know things.’

  They were soon having sex every day, like young lovers, and Bukowski became infatuated with her. He told Linda he loved everything about her, even the way she walked. She made him feel so strong he believed he could knock down walls with his hands. One morning, when he was cooking eggs for breakfast, he was so befuddled by love he put the pan of water in the refrigerator, rather than on the stove. Linda was taken aback by the intensity of his feelings. ‘I didn’t want a man loving me that hard; it was like it was obsessive instead of natural.’

  With obsessive love came jealousy. Bukowski invited Linda to parties at his place, but couldn’t cope with the way she danced and flirted with his friends. There was a New Year’s party and a party for the third and final issue of his magazine, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.

  ‘It’s a collating party,’ he said, when he asked if she would come.

  ‘A copulating party? No, really, what did you say?’

  ‘Putting the magazine together, that’s collating.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Who’s going to be there?’

  ‘A bunch of half-assed poets, myself.’

  ‘Now if it was a copulating party …’

  ‘It will be. You and me after.’

  She danced like she was having sex. Her favorite step was the White Dog Hunch, named after a dog in her home town of Boulder, Utah, that tried to mount every human being it met. Bukowski was driven half-mad with jealousy as he watched her gyrating and rubbing up against his guests, a jealousy fueled by alcohol. He wanted to kill the sons of bitches she was dancing with. He wanted to kill Linda, too.

  When everybody had gone home, he told her she was a slut, one of the whores of the centuries, just like Jane. And being a fiery young woman, a feminist who believed she was within her rights to dance with whoever she liked, however she wanted, Linda told him to fuck off. They were finished. To hell with Bukowski!

  Linda would leave Bukowski and come back to him countless times during their relationship and when they were apart, they continued their battles by mail. After this first break-up, she wrote that her name was not spelt J – A – N – E, but L – I – N – D – A, and that he should get her out of his ‘smelly Jane bag’ because she couldn’t ‘live with dead bones and dead memories’.

  She wrote that he was denying the genuine love she had to offer, ‘to protect yourself from pain … or maybe you’re just glommed [sic] onto the word pain to excuse your self-indulgence of drinking. The pain is false. It’s a drama. It’s the show … You sometimes talk like you’re the only man with feeling in the whole world. It probably comes from only caring how Charles Bukowski feels. You have intense interest in the pain of yourself. I don’t think that you can care that much for anyone else including me …’

  Referring to the way he wrote about women, she added: ‘your women are all weak and floppy and untrue. My heart is a wild sensuous white bird and it’s always wanting to fly. Fly Bukowski. you’re afraid to fly.’

  They soon got back together and went to another party where Linda flirted and Bukowski became jealous again. He drove her home in a fury afterwards, accusing her of having affairs behind his back. A day or so later she received a bizarre letter from Bukowski, saying he wanted to have fun as well so he’d picked up a man on the way home. At the time, Linda thought he was trying to rile her, but she later wondered whether he meant he’d had sex with a man.

  ‘I think that if he [did] it was like this drunken thing. When he got real drunk he would do anything.’

  She typed out her reply on a length of Lady Scott toilet paper, writing that she hoped he’d had a good time, whoever he was with. She wanted him to know she had not been unfaithful, and that whichever woman Bukowski ended up with – she listed women she was jealous of, including Ann Menebroker – she hoped they had a good screw. They could thank Linda for teaching him how. She ended the toilet paper letter by telling him to blow his nose with it.

  Although enraged by Linda’s flirtatious behaviour, Bukowski had no compunction about trying to screw any woman who looked at him twice and, now he was getting better known as a writer, more women were interested in him. ‘He had double standards, typical of the chauvinist world. He pissed me off regularly,’ says Linda. ‘He needed to be fought!’

  She accused him of stirring up trouble to get material for his writing, which tur
ned out to be true, and in a letter, in May, 1971, described a cruel streak in her lover: ‘It runs down the middle of you and pretty wide, too … even if you had an easy woman with twelve soft pillows to sleep on you’d still find some reason it wasn’t enough … I hope you can write your novel now with one more shitass woman for material.’

  But she forgave him in the end. In a note addressed to her ‘darling insane lover’, a few days later, she said she simply had to write and tell him how much she loved his ‘crazy ass’.

  Each summer Linda went home to Utah for 4 July. After doing the White Dog Hunch in town, with the local cowboys, she and her sisters went camping on land the family owned. Before she left for her holiday, Bukowski gave her a novelty ring with a horse’s head on it, as a token of his love. A couple of hours later he found himself staring at the remains of their last breakfast. Her egg shells seemed special somehow. He tried to work at his typing table, but every woman that passed by reminded him of Linda, so he stopped work and got drunk for six days.

  When he sobered up, he began to bombard Linda with love letters and long-distance telephone calls. If she was out when he called, he wouldn’t leave the bungalow until she phoned back. Then he stopped going out at all in case he missed her. Having better things to do with her time than make endless long-distance calls, days went by without any word from Linda and Bukowski imagined the worst. Even Marina, a devoted six-year-old with braces on her teeth, could not cheer him up. He apologized for his depression, saying he loved Marina more than the ‘hair in his ears’ but Linda would be away for two weeks!

  One morning he woke from a nightmare that Linda was with another man. He got up and wrote an anxious letter, asking what she was doing. A couple of hours later he wrote a second letter, assuring her that all the women in his life had been like grains of sand compared with her, even Jane. He went out to post the letters and then started drinking. When he was good and drunk, he telephoned Boulder, but Linda’s sister said she was out. When he finally reached her, Linda assured him patiently that she loved him. There was nothing to worry about. She would be back soon. He put the phone down and wrote his third love letter of the day, just to let her know he felt better.