We kissed in the dark. I was a kiss freak anyway, and Sara was one of the best kissers I had ever met. I’d have to go all the way back to Lydia to find anyone comparable. Yet each woman was different, each kissed in her own way. Lydia was probably kissing some son of a bitch right now, or worse, kissing his parts.
(From: Women)
Reminded of Linda King, Bukowski flew to Phoenix to pay her a visit for old time’s sake and they spent a weekend together. He said she should come back to Los Angeles with him and battle it out with Cupcakes and his other girlfriends. Life was boring without her. ‘But I think we both knew it was over,’ says Linda. ‘He knew I wasn’t coming back.’
Their final farewell inspired the poem, ‘I am a reasonable man’. From reading it in isolation one would never know this was a woman Bukowski had been in love with:
we’d had the night together
and now it was breakfast
in this Arizona cafe,
nice quiet place
the sun coming in
on the red and white checkered
tablecloth.
she said,
‘I can’t eat …’
the tears were running down
her face
‘I’ll finish your breakfast,’
I told her,
‘no use wasting it …’
she straightened her back
inhaled and
screamed.
‘That was the kind of poem he wrote that I hated,’ she says. ‘The tone of the poem, like he was above and beyond any feelings, but he might stick around another night for a blow job, if I begged him. He could be quite cruel and spare himself beautifully.’ They never saw each other again.
Back in LA, the new Linda was waiting for him. ‘He was doing all this stuff with all these women and we became good friends,’ says Linda Lee. ‘We drank together and we would talk on the phone all the time.’ Intercourse was still out of the question, just kissing and some rubbing up against each other in bed, if he was lucky. But Linda Lee was becoming emotionally involved. She sent Bukowski sentimental poems decorated with pictures of hearts broken in two, and wrote letters about how everything she saw, everything she did in her daily life, reminded her of him. She was falling in love with him.
Cupcakes would have been a formidable rival for his affections, but she’d started dating a dental student and woke up in his bed one morning knowing she was finished with Bukowski. She didn’t even bother saying good-bye. He was inconsolable, of course, and the unhappiness was evident when the German film maker, Thomas Schmitt, asked him to read a poem for a documentary he was making. He read ‘the shower’, a poem he had written about Linda King, but it was applicable to all the lost loves, and he broke down when he came to the last stanza:
… you brought it to me,
when you take it away
do it slowly and easily
make it as if I were dying in my sleep …
‘This is Hank Bukowski,’ he said when Amber O’Neil answered the telephone. Amber was another of his fans. She had written from the San Francisco bay area saying how much she loved his stuff and would like to meet him. He told her he’d split with his girlfriend who, he added, had a perfect body. He wondered if Amber wanted to come to LA.
‘I’m not the type of woman you are used to down there,’ she replied, a little intimidated by the description of Cupcakes. ‘I’m very short and not all tits and ass.’
‘Well, that doesn’t matter,’ said Bukowski, who had noticed that she had a very high voice, like Betty Boop. ‘Maybe you could come down and we could just talk.’
‘Hey! I’m not that short.’
‘Well, whatever,’ he laughed.
‘Are you inviting me down?’
‘Yeah, sure, I do this all the time.’
It was a Friday evening at Los Angeles airport and Bukowski watched the women coming off the Oakland flight, haughty creatures looking like they had come to conquer LA. He looked slyly at their legs and breasts. Linda Lee said he never looked directly at women and it was true; beautiful women scared him. He wondered which one was Amber. Then he heard that squeaky voice.
‘Hello, Mr Bukowski.’
He looked down at what he took to be a young girl: five feet nothing, 94 lbs, wearing jeans, wedges and a red cotton blouse with a low neck and puffed sleeves. He wrote about the meeting in Women, calling her Tanya:
… I turned and behind me was this very small child. She looked about 18, thin long neck, a bit round-shouldered, long nose …
‘Come along, granddaughter,’ he said to Amber, who was actually in her thirties, and led her out to where his car was parked.
Amber liked Bukowski’s ‘shit-brown’ apartment, a glorious dump of a place with old coffee cans full of grease in the kitchen, for frying steak and eggs, and a refrigerator loaded with white wine which he had started to drink because Linda Lee thought it better for him than beer and whiskey. Everything in the apartment appeared dark, because it was old and because there was only one forty watt bulb. But the bathroom had the unmistakable look that a woman had been in and cleaned and Bukowski confirmed that Linda Lee had scrubbed it. Amber also discovered Linda Lee had made the wooden bed frame upon which rested the Cupcakes Memorial Mattress, actually constructed the frame out of pieces of lumber. This was the same bed, presumably, they were going to sleep on. If that wasn’t weird enough, Linda Lee telephoned to check Bukowski was all right.
Not knowing quite how to proceed with her hero, Amber unzipped his pants, took off her jeans and mounted the penis she had read so much about, working out her nervousness in a sweaty fuck. Bukowski wrote in Women that it felt like being raped by a child:
She worked at it like a monkey on a string. Tanya was a faithful reader of my works. She bore down. That child knew something. She could sense my anguish. She worked away furiously, playing with her clit with one finger, her head thrown back. We were caught up together in the oldest and most exciting game of all. We came together and it lasted and lasted until I thought my heart would stop. She fell against me, tiny and frail. I touched her hair. She was sweating. Then she pulled herself off me and went into the bathroom.
‘Mr Bukowski,’ she said afterwards. ‘I can barely hold my head up. Do you mind if I go and lay down in that homemade bed made by your beautiful friend?’
The following evening he decided to splash out and take her to his favorite restaurant, The Musso & Frank Grill, a landmark on Hollywood Boulevard since before he was born. Amber wanted to look special for their big date and had with her what she describes as a ‘Chinese hooker’ dress, but it needed ironing and there was neither iron nor ironing board in the apartment. So she heated up the steak pan.
‘That’s certainly a first,’ said Bukowski as he watched her burn a hole.
An easy peace and quiet pervaded the dining rooms at Musso’s, air-conditioned cool like a cave after the heat and tourist bustle of Hollywood Boulevard. He told Amber he took so many women here that the barman probably thought he was a pimp. Ruben Rueda certainly knew Bukowski, and knew to watch out if he started drinking whiskey. ‘He was a little wild,’ he says. ‘I had to kick him out a couple of times. I could tell when he was drunk. The first thing I can see is the eyes. I talk and the eyes is gone some place.’
They sat at the bar and ordered drinks. It was a liquor night and Rueda watched Bukowski warily as he ordered whiskey and ordered the same again, but Bukowski was in a mellow mood. Looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, he said: ‘You know, I don’t look so bad.’ Amber realized how important his looks were to him. All his life he had thought of himself as ugly and now, in middle age, with his beard growing grey, he was starting to look good, like he ought to somehow.
‘You look very handsome,’ she said.
‘And you are one hell of a woman,’ he replied, tenderly. ‘And your eyes are beautiful, too.’
Back at the apartment, Amber fou
nd herself sitting in darkness on the couch with Bukowski opposite, the only light coming from the lamps outside in the court. He told her about Linda King teaching him to go down on her. He liked it and said he would like to do it with Amber, if she didn’t mind. She replied that she wouldn’t mind at all, thinking no man had ever asked so formally to have sex with her, and by the light of the moon, on Linda Lee’s homemade bed, he buried his old face between her legs.
Amber was not the only lover Bukowski took to the bed Linda Lee made. He also had an affair with Jane Manhattan, a well-spoken twenty-nine-year-old restaurant manager he met at a reading in Vancouver in November, 1976. They slept together then and later that month she flew to Los Angeles to spend a nine-day vacation at Carlton Way. ‘I think I was probably the most lady-like of all Bukowski’s friends,’ says Jane. ‘That was what was so funny. It was that contrast that made the relationship so hilarious.’
He took her to Musso & Frank and they went to watch the horses at Hollywood Park. Jane noticed the tellers and the barmen at the track all knew Bukowski, even if they didn’t know he was a writer. ‘He was one of the guys. That was the life that he loved. That was when he was happy.’
Shopping with Tina Darby in Hollywood, Jane bought a pair of black high heels. Bukowski was delighted when she showed him. He put his cock inside one shoe and began prancing round the bedroom, pretending to fuck it.
‘You don’t love me, bitch!’ he said and threw the shoe down, sending Jane into gales of laughter. ‘He was funny all day every day. A great love of life, and an enjoyment – always to be seeing the funny thing, and making a comment. He was a comedian.’
She saw a different side to him one afternoon when they passed a bar and she suggested a drink.
‘I can’t go in there,’ he said, starting to cry. ‘So many years were so terrible and all those hours and days and years that I spent in bars drunk out of my mind. I just feel sick to my stomach when I even look into a bar like that.’
Linda Lee began spending three days a week at the apartment, driving up from Redondo Beach on Saturday afternoon and staying until Tuesday, if Bukowski didn’t have any other women visiting. He realized she was falling in love with him. He liked her, too, although he sometimes felt she was becoming too possessive. She had begun to resent women telephoning, and he broke it off a couple of times because of this, but she reacted badly to being rejected. In a letter to Jo Jo Planteen in May, 1977, he wrote that Linda Lee went almost mad whenever they split. Still, he was skilled at deception. When he discovered that one of the leaders of the Meher Baba sect was coming to Redondo Beach in the first week in July, Bukowski suggested to Jo Jo that this would be an excellent opportunity for them to see each other. Linda Lee would be occupied playing host to her religious friend.
Despite his gripes about Linda Lee, they grew ever closer and Bukowski stopped trying to cheat on her. He liked the way Linda Lee looked after him, worrying about how much he drank and what cigarettes he smoked. After all, he was in his late fifties and starting to feel his age. She was attractive and bright and they had fun together, most of the time. Essentially they had become friends and he felt it was time he treated her better, as he wrote to Carl Weissner in August, 1977:
Went down to Del Mar with Linda Lee and we got stinko in our motel room and went swimming and diving in the rough surf at 1.30 a.m. A real gasser and not a bad way to die but I came on out and we got back to the motel, poured some more, and got along that night. She’s a good girl and has lived through many of my drunken, mad, unkind nights and has forgiven me … so far.
It was still not exactly torrid. Linda Lee likens that side of their relationship to the lifestyle of a monk. ‘There was indeed a great importance about celibacy,’ she says. ‘And that wasn’t because he was starving and not able to get sex – I think it was because he had had, off and on, amazing, obscene, absurd experiences with crazy women.’ The experiences had been distilled into Women, and the companion book of poems, Love Is a Dog from Hell. With the completion of these two works, he was satiated with his old ways and ready for a new life.
12
EUROPEAN SON
In May, 1978, Bukowski caught a Lufthansa flight to Germany to give a reading and visit the town of his birth. Linda Lee was travelling with him along with their photographer friend, Michael Montfort, who was hoping to put together a journal of the trip.
The complimentary drinks trolley came down the aisle and they started on the white wine and then they drank all the rosé before moving on to the red. ‘Michael, you have a deal,’ said Bukowski, when he was pleasantly drunk. ‘I’m going to write the book.’*
With business concluded, he set about drinking all the complimentary beer as they sped onward over the ocean he had last crossed as a child on the SS President Fillmore.
The first Bukowski book published in translation in Germany was Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in 1970, with the bogus Henry Miller quote on the cover. Undeterred by its poor sales, Carl Weissner and publisher Benno Käsmyr put together Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Storey Window, borrowing the title from one of Bukowski’s early chapbooks. It quickly sold fifty thousand copies by word of mouth. Three books of short stories followed, all taken from Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, the most outré work collected in The Fuck Machine. Each sold in the region of eighty thousand copies.
After this success, Weissner and a Frankfurt publisher collaborated on the book which really established Bukowski in Germany, a sampler of the novels Post Office and Factotum together with short stories. Published as Stories and Novels, it was better known as The Blue Book and sold almost a hundred thousand.
To Bukowski’s astonishment, he was soon more widely read in Germany than in America where his books were printed in small editions of only four thousand copies or so. Even though Black Sparrow Press reprinted most titles every year, sales did not approach his remarkable success in Europe.
John Martin believes Bukowski’s vulgarity appeals to German readers. ‘You see Stern magazine, they love nothing better than bathroom jokes and farting jokes. That’s their national humor, so he caught on right away,’ he says.
Carl Weissner sees his popularity in terms of a reaction to post-war German literature which was politically correct in an extremely self-conscious way. There was even a school of thought that, after the Holocaust, Germans couldn’t write poetry. ‘So everything was politicized on the left and all writers were interested in was interviewing workers and housewives. Since Bukowski didn’t have a political program, and didn’t bother with refined literary highfalutin language, that obviously was an attraction for a lot of people. It was his attitude: not wanting to belong, and largely writing about himself and things he had gone through. He was not considered, except by the right, as a porn writer or anything like that. In fact, a lot of people thought he was a proletarian writer.’
It was also Bukowski’s good fortune to have in Carl Weissner someone who took infinite care translating his unusual style of poetry and prose into readable and entertaining German. It was not always a straight-forward job. ‘He is easy to translate when he is colorful and uses a lot of adjectives,’ explains Weissner. ‘But he is difficult when his language becomes very bare, short sentences and stuff.’
Freelance photographer Michael Montfort, a German living in Hollywood, was hired to take the pictures for magazine articles about Bukowski, and made a good first impression by arriving at Carlton Way with a case of wine on his shoulder. ‘I felt that he was kind of awkward in posing for a camera,’ he says. ‘He was a pretty tough guy, but he didn’t like it from the beginning.’
Montfort became a fan of Bukowski’s work and began advising John Martin which German magazines it was worth giving interviews to. He also sat in on interviews, ending them when Bukowski got too drunk so he didn’t look like a complete idiot.
Bukowski had mixed feelings about dealing with journalists. ‘Basically I believe that h
e really rather wanted to be alone,’ says Montfort. ‘On the other hand, I’m sure that he loved the attention, although he never would have admitted it. It was also having something to do apart from the daily routine. At that time, if somebody paid for a case of wine, it made a difference in his life. If it was arranged and OK-ed, and was on his terms, his time, his date, he would more or less reluctantly play the wild man. He would try and live up to his image.’
One German interviewer was so overwhelmed by meeting Bukowski that he was unable to ask any questions. ‘It was like he was frozen, a frozen man!’ recalls Linda Lee. ‘He was catatonic.’ Bukowski was not at all pleased, having interrupted his day, and tried to get the interviewer to relax. ‘Hey man,’ he said. ‘Are you having a little problem? Are you OK?’
He offered him a drink, but still the interviewer couldn’t speak. ‘Hey, what’s your fucking problem?’ asked Bukowski, his patience running thin. ‘You stupid fucking son of a bitch, don’t you even know what the fuck to ask me?’
Apparently not.
‘Fuck it! I’ll ask you. I’ll interview you,’ he said. ‘So how’s it going, my man? What’s going on? So what’s your name?’
The German began crying, and held out his hand for mercy. Bukowski spat in it and pushed it back.
There had been a spate of terrorist bombings in Germany and the customs men at Frankfurt airport demanded to know what was in the parcels Bukowski had brought with him from Los Angeles. They were simply gifts for Carl Weissner and his son, Mikey, but Bukowski was not used to being questioned in this way and was still a little drunk from the flight. ‘It’s none of your fucking business,’ he snarled.
Charles Bukowski Page 20
