Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  Bukowski and Linda were reunited in San Francisco when he read at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poets’ Theater and, although they had a terrible fight at the party afterwards,* Bukowski decided he couldn’t live without her and told Liza it was over. They were in bed at De Longpre Avenue and she reacted by becoming almost hysterical, weeping, beating on his chest and demanding to know why. He said Linda had a special hold over him and he guessed he was a louse.

  ‘I loved him with great enthusiasm and then I was heartbroken with great enthusiasm,’ says Liza. ‘I could never understand why he was going back to Linda. I always thought of her as being rather trashy. I thought she was some kind of shrew with a magic vagina.’ Liza got so upset she threw up in the bed, and out came her false teeth. She knew he would write about it in his column, no matter how much she begged him not to. ‘He was so happy,’ she says, ‘it was my full set.’

  Linda took out a mortgage on a detached house in the LA suburb of Silver Lake, and she and Bukowski set up home together as a surprisingly domesticated couple. She forbade him from drinking in the house and he managed to stay sober for weeks at a time. He did his share of the household chores and they started having Marina over to stay at weekends.

  Marina and her mother had settled in Santa Monica and Bukowski made a point of attending open days at her school, just like a regular dad. Marina was particularly pleased to look out from the stage at her first school pageant to see him in the audience. ‘I remembered at the time that he gave poetry readings and he had to get up on the stage and do that sort of thing,’ she says. ‘It was nice to have him there.’

  When she came over to Silver Lake, Marina played with Linda’s two children, Gaetano and Clarissa, baking cookies, playing in the large back yard and painting pictures with Bukowski who kept them amused with stories. ‘He did make me laugh a lot,’ says Marina. ‘But it was more of a feeling of being able to play with him and laugh and also being able to tell him anything, that he really knew who I was. I just always felt happy and safe.’

  Marina knew Bukowski was different from most fathers, partly because all the adults treated him as if he was special, and partly because he was so different from the traditional fathers she saw on television and in story books. ‘I remember reading some story with a very traditional father in it that wore slippers and a robe and smoked a pipe and behaved in a very clichéd kind of way, a very appealing story to a child and thinking: that’s sort of your regular kind of father. If you could choose your father, would I trade my father for a regular father?’ She decided there was no question. ‘I thought, no, I’m really lucky to have the father I have because he may have been really unusual, but he always talked to me just as another person. He didn’t talk down the way a lot of adults do to their children and, as a result, I felt much closer to him.’

  Linda’s daughter, Clarissa, was not such a big Bukowski fan, and often told him off. ‘I hate you!’ she would say, emphatically. ‘You are ugly! You’ve got a big red nose!’

  ‘I love that kid,’ Bukowski told Linda. ‘She’s the only honest person around.’

  Bukowski took Linda to the races, driving across the city using the boulevards never the freeways, and usually sitting in the less popular sections of the grandstand, arriving early and leaving before the last race – everything calculated to avoid the crowds which he couldn’t stand. He said he didn’t even like it when people brushed up against him. ‘If we won, we would go out and have a great dinner afterwards. If we lost, we would say, what the hell, let’s have a good dinner anyway,’ says Linda. He liked chain restaurants which weren’t too expensive, particularly The Sizzler on Hollywood Boulevard where he ordered medium rare T-bone steak with baked potato and side salad. When he craved a drink, Linda took him to Baskin-Robbins’ ice cream parlor, hoping he’d be content with a sticky dessert. It worked for a while, as he wrote in ‘the icecream people’:

  the lady has me temporarily off the bottle

  and now the pecker stands up

  better, and there is much use for the

  pecker …

  however, it changes the nights –

  instead of listening to Shostakovitch and

  Mozart through the smeared haze of smoke and

  scotch and beer,

  these nights change

  complexities:

  we drive down to Baskin-Robbins,

  31 flavors

  Rocky Road, Bubble Gum, Apricot Ice, Strawberry

  Cheesecake, Chocolate Mint …

  …

  and later that night

  there is use for the pecker, use for

  love, and it is a glorious

  fuck, long and true,

  and afterwards we speak of easy things

  our heads by the open window with the moonlight

  looking through, we sleep in each other’s

  arms.

  the icecream people make me feel good,

  inside and out.

  give me 2 quick shots of

  vanilla.

  ‘He was nice when he was sober,’ says Linda. ‘I think his true self was when he was sober. But when he was drunk it was like a demon took him over – Bukowski the Bad.’

  One weekend they had a big party at the house and, when Bukowski was drunk, he accused Linda of being a lesbian, which infuriated her so much she pulled him out of his chair and threw him in the fireplace. He landed on his backside with his beer in his hand, not having spilt a drop.

  ‘She gets so … angry,’ he said, refusing to lose his cool. ‘It fascinates me how … angry she gets.’

  Linda hurled herself at him and they brawled on the floor until dragged apart by their guests.

  ‘Get out!’ she screamed. ‘All of you are getting out.’

  Bukowski slowly got himself ready to leave, making remarks about Linda as he put his jacket on and did his shoes up. He said she had thick ankles, something she was very sensitive about. While he was bent over tying his laces, she picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels and held it over his head. She was shaking.

  ‘You better kill me when you hit me,’ he said. ‘Because if you don’t, I’m going to kill you.’ Then he straightened up and faced her. ‘You ain’t shit,’ he said.

  Another night a man came over to the house to talk to Linda about her poetry. She was so flattered to be the center of attention, for a change, she relaxed the no-drinking rule and they had ‘boiler makers’ (whiskey washed down with beer). As the evening wore on, it became apparent the visitor was really only interested in talking to Bukowski and Linda pushed them both out of the house.

  ‘OK, you guys, if you want to see each other, leave together,’ she said.

  The front door was made up of little panes of glass and, when Linda refused to let them back in, Bukowski took off his shoe and began knocking out the glass piece by piece. The visitor joined in, too, thinking it great fun. Linda flung the door open and they fell into the hall, breaking one of her sculptures. ‘That’s what infuriated me,’ she says. ‘I came out like a tiger, and drove them back out the door and they fell down the steps.’ There was such a racket the neighbors called the police who arrived to find Bukowski back inside the house holding Linda’s couch over his head, saying he was going to toss it through the window.

  ‘Don’t throw the couch!’ said the cops, pulling their guns.

  ‘He’s wrecking my place! He’s wrecking it!’ screamed Linda.

  ‘Put the couch down.’

  On the way to the station, Bukowski began to charm the officers, telling them he was a famous writer. He wanted to call his publisher to bail him out. His publisher was an important man, they’d see.

  The last thing John Martin wanted was to drive across town at 2 a.m. He told Bukowski he would call Linda, smooth things over between them, and get her to bail him out.

  ‘There’s no way I’m going to go and get that son of a bitch,’ she said, when he called. ‘He was wrecking the place!’

  ‘You know h
e loves you, Linda. He really loves you. If you go down and get him, you will have his eternal gratitude. He will never do this again.’ Martin knew it wasn’t true. Their relationship was like the Hundred Years War – an end to hostilities was not in sight. ‘And I’ll pay for the glass,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Linda wanted Martin to come over and talk about the horrendous things she was going through with Bukowski. ‘I thought Martin took this attitude, you are the low-life people. I don’t want to get my hands dirty. I publish it, but I don’t want to get involved.’ But, reluctantly, she agreed to collect Bukowski from the station.

  Martin called the police back to let Bukowski know Linda was on her way.

  ‘Oh yes, Mr Martin, just a moment please,’ said the desk sergeant, unctuously. ‘Charles!’ he called. ‘Oh Charles, it’s for you.’

  Martin heard somebody asking Bukowski if he cared for a cup of coffee, and Bukowski replying: ‘Yeah, put it down there, thank you.’ It seemed to be a very civil evening in the drunk tank. When he came on the line, Bukowski thanked Martin for fixing things and said the superintendent wanted a word.

  ‘Mr Martin,’ said the superintendent. ‘We are taking good care of your friend here. We are all big admirers of his work.’

  It turned out the cops were all avid readers of Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man column, which had a much wider readership now it was appearing in the LA Free Press. They hadn’t even bothered to lock him up.

  Bukowski was starting to get quite a lot of fan mail, some of it from women who were attracted to the honest way he wrote about sex and relationships, now Linda King had taught him a thing or two. ‘He had the capacity to love and love deeply and a lot of men don’t even have that capacity,’ she says. ‘He wasn’t afraid of that. He let his emotions loose. Bukowski let himself feel all kinds of things.’

  One of these women was Joanna Bull, a voluptuous blonde former girlfriend of rock star drummer Levon Helm. She sent samples of her poetry and began visiting Bukowski at the bungalow on De Longpre Avenue, which he had kept as a bolt-hole for when he wanted to get away from Linda.

  Joanna was more interested in Bukowski’s mind than his body, but she knew he wanted to sleep with her and one night, when she had stayed later than normal, and smoked a lot of dope, she resigned herself to it. But her subconscious was apparently set against the idea. ‘When we got to the moment of truth, and we were all wrestling around and doing stuff and preparing ourselves, he realized I hadn’t taken off my panties! He was absolutely disgusted.’ Afterwards she went into the toilet and threw up. ‘It was unbearable to me,’ she says.

  In July, 1973, Bukowski accompanied Linda on her annual trip to Utah. He was looking ahead to writing his novel, Women, and needed to collect material, as he explained in a letter to John Martin: ‘I’m making a study on [Linda]. If I ever get it down right some day you’ll see the female exposed as she has never been exposed.’

  On their first night in Boulder, the King sisters threw an uproarious party. ‘Every wild character we knew we had there, and I think he was a little taken aback,’ says Gerry King. ‘He was used to being the wildest person at a party and he had competition at that one.’ A couple of days later, Bukowski, Linda and Gerry, together with their children, drove to where the family had a trailer on the side of Boulder Mountain.

  Bukowski and Linda slept in a tent the first night, but it rained so hard they had to squeeze into the trailer with Gerry’s family. By the third day the cramped conditions were getting on everybody’s nerves. What was worse, the beer Bukowski had brought up the mountain was gone. He wanted to go into town for more and, when Linda said he couldn’t, he grumpily stomped off into the pines as if he were back in Hollywood, taking a walk along Sunset.

  When he had been gone a couple of hours, the King sisters began to wonder what had happened. As Gerry says: ‘At first we were annoyed and didn’t believe it. Surely he didn’t get lost.’ Of course he had and it made for one of the funniest passages in Women, and one of the most comical accounts in modern fiction of a city dweller being lost in the countryside: falling into lakes, being attacked by giant flies, sinking into a bog and all the while hollering for Lydia (as he called Linda in the novel) to rescue him. Finally she did:

  … ‘I tracked you. I found your red notebook. You got lost deliberately because you were pissed.’

  ‘No, I got lost out of ignorance and fear. I am not a complete person – I’m a stunted city person. I am more or less a failed drizzling shit with absolutely nothing to offer.’

  ‘Christ,’ she said, ‘don’t you think I know that?’

  When they got back to LA, Linda began to suspect he was seeing other women, partly because he kept disappearing for hours on end, ‘to go to the supermarket’, he claimed. It seemed a most unlikely excuse.

  One afternoon in September, he took her to the Olympic Auditorium to watch the boxing and then rushed her home before going off to do more shopping. Feeling extremely insulted, like she had been party to a double-booking, Linda drove over to a house on Santa Monica Boulevard where she thought one of Bukowski’s girlfriends lived and, sure enough, she saw him. He was walking back from the liquor store with a brown paper bag full of bottles, whistling a happy tune.

  He heard a familiar sound, like the engine of Linda’s car. Bukowski stopped whistling and turned to see that it was Linda’s car, the Volkswagen which was so ugly they called it The Thing. She had The Thing up on the sidewalk and was driving at him. The VW was just narrow enough to get between the lamp posts and the buildings. It was on a collision course. ‘I backed him up against the wall,’ says Linda. ‘I wasn’t going to kill him. I was mad though.’ Bukowski was so frightened he dropped his bag and the bottles smashed on the concrete.

  He was bending down to pick up the broken glass when she came round again, stopped the car, got out and marched up to Bukowski. He was holding one solitary bottle of beer he had saved. Linda snatched it and hurled it at the house where Bukowski’s lover was peering out at them. It went through her window like a bullet.

  Lydia ran off and I walked up the stairway. Nicole was still standing there. ‘For God’s sake, Chinaski, leave her before she kills everybody!’

  I turned and walked back down the stairway. Lydia was sitting in her car at the curbing with the engine running. I opened the door and got in. She drove off. Neither of us spoke a word.

  Taylor Hackford’s documentary about Bukowski was given a preview screening at the Municipal Art Gallery Theater, in Hollywood, on 19 October. Bukowski arrived with Linda and Jory Sherman and his wife, taking seats in the front of the auditorium. He had been nervous about the evening and was astounded by how large his face appeared on screen. There were his fights with Linda, the love triangle with Liza Williams, the drunken reading in San Francisco and, finally, Bukowski mulling over his experiences and philosophizing laconically that he ‘wouldn’t advise women to anybody’. It was a well-made and entertaining film and the reviews were good when it was shown on KCET, a local public television station.

  Most of Bukowski’s old friends gathered for the party afterwards, but some felt success was beginning to change him. Steve Richmond had been deeply hurt by Bukowski’s poem, ‘300 Poems’, published in a new Black Sparrow Press collection, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. Bukowski had insinuated that Richmond’s ‘gagaku poems’, written to the rhythm of Japanese folk music, were lousy and Richmond was so upset by it he almost took an overdose.

  Neeli Cherkovski, also at the party, had been taken aback when Bukowski told him, apparently seriously: ‘I am getting more well-known with these Hollywood people. I don’t know how much time to spend with you guys.’ So when Cherkovski met John Martin that evening there was already a degree of estrangement. As Cherkovski recalls the conversation, he suggested Black Sparrow Press might consider publishing other poets like Harold Norse, John Thomas, Jack Micheline, Jack Hirschman and some day maybe himself. The way Bukowski heard it, Cherkovski sa
id: ‘You ought to print me and Norse and Micheline and Richmond. Why do you print Bukowski? He’s like a worn-out tape machine saying the same things over and over.’ The next time he saw Cherkovski, Bukowski cut him dead, saying he wasn’t talking to the asshole.

  William Wantling was one of several long-standing friends Bukowski had corresponded with for years, but never met. He was a former Marine who had served in Korea, done time in San Quentin for fraud, and had developed a fearsome drink and drug problem – all of which gave him material for writing the sort of gritty poetry Bukowski admired. So when Wantling invited him to read at the Illinois college where he taught English, in the spring of 1974, Bukowski was happy to accept and arranged to meet Wantling and his wife, Ruth, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

  Despite arriving at O’Hare wearing his dead father’s overcoat, which made him look like a bum, Bukowski was beginning to enjoy considerable success. Another volume of short stories, South of No North, had recently been published by Black Sparrow Press while the earlier books were being reprinted regularly. City Lights was paying a $10,000 advance for a new edition of Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Bukowski was corresponding with Doubleday about a possible collection of poems. He’d given sold-out readings across the United States and been awarded a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, after years of trying.

  Wantling’s career, in comparison, had fizzled out. To Bukowski’s disappointment, he’d taken a teaching job and stopped writing the type of primal poetry Bukowski so admired. ‘He thought it was terrible that Bill was in the university. He thought it was ruining his writing,’ says Ruth.

  Bukowski gave a bad reading, while members of the audience whispered to each other that the poet was obviously drunk, and afterwards endured a reception in his honor, saying little to Wantling and his wife and being downright rude to every one else. From Bukowski’s point of view, he considered he’d done enough for his $500 fee ($300 of which went on the air fare) and didn’t want to answer questions as well.