Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  Linda King was not fooled by the prominent disclaimer:

  This novel is a work of

  fiction and no character

  is intended to portray

  any person or combination

  of persons living or dead.

  The fact that he had changed names – Linda to Lydia in her case, hardly an impenetrable disguise – and made this disingenuous claim that it was all fiction was a joke as far as she was concerned. ‘Everybody knew everything he wrote was a real thing,’ she says. At least Linda had been aware of what Bukowski was up to; he made no secret of it during their time together. But the book came as a rude shock to women like Amber O’Neil whom he had not bothered to warn.

  Since spending a weekend with him in February, 1977, Amber had continued to buy each new Bukowski book and was leafing through Women when she came across the character of Tanya, a comically diminutive girl Chinaski meets at Los Angeles airport and takes back to his apartment. She realized, to her acute embarrassment, that Tanya was meant to be her. ‘I didn’t like the way he said, “All these women got off the plane, and then this girl got off with a long nose and round shoulders,” and so on and so forth, ’cos actually I’m kinda cute! So I immediately took offence there, and then I didn’t like what he said about the blow job.’ Bukowski described two occasions when Tanya gave Chinaski oral sex, once so awkwardly Chinaski concludes: ‘… she knew nothing about how it should be done. It was straight and simple bob and suck.’

  ‘I thought, God, why did he write that? There were so many good things we had.’ She also thought the book denigrated women generally. ‘He said so many things about women in there that were painful, I just don’t understand that. Whereas in Post Office there was something about humanity. My frank feeling about it is this: most of his life he felt rejected by women and suddenly he was sought after by women and I don’t think he trusted that, and he was pretty cynical about it. He somehow got back all the anger he must have felt.’ This was unjust because, by and large, as Amber points outs, women had been good to him.

  Joanna Bull first read the novel when she ducked into Papa Bach Book Store in West Los Angeles to get out of the rain. She saw a shelf of Bukowski books and flipped through a couple to see if there was anything that reminded her of some of their experiences, and she found one. She had become the basis for the character of Mercedes. Once again, it was not the most flattering description:

  That evening the phone rang. It was Mercedes. I had met her after giving a poetry reading in Venice Beach. She was about 28, fair body, pretty good legs, a blonde about 5-feet-5, a blue-eyed blonde. Her hair was long and slightly wavy and she smoked continuously. Her conversation was dull, and her laugh was loud and false, most of the time.

  This was positively not how Joanna remembered their time together, or how she perceived herself. ‘We talked like mad and I had a beautiful body!’ she says, indignantly. But she forgave him, realizing he had to ginger things up to get a story. ‘What was he going to say, that we had a sane relationship, that we sat like two civilized people having refined conversation?’

  Ruth Wantling thought Bukowski’s portrayal of her as Cecelia, including the physical description of her as being ‘a cow of a woman, cow’s breasts, cow’s eyes’, was so wide of the mark it was risible. And although Bukowski had written about the evening in the motel at Laguna Beach, and her refusal to have sex with him, it was noticeable that he had left out the crucial details of the circumstances surrounding her husband’s death.

  The most critical portrait was of Cupcakes who Bukowski used as the basis of Tammie, a pill-popping single mother. ‘I come across as an air-headed, cock-sucking nothing, which I wasn’t at all,’ she says, ‘a woman without any substance who is just consumed with getting high. I was very disappointed.’ The Tammie of Women is promiscuous bordering on being a prostitute. When she first meets Chinaski, she offers to have sex with him for $100. In letters to friends, Bukowski wrote that he believed Cupcakes was dating a string of men and implied she did have sex for money. Cupcakes says this is absolutely untrue and that, apart from the dental student whom she was sleeping with towards the end of her relationship with Bukowski, the infidelities were all in his mind. ‘I remember reading Women and thinking what the hell is he talking about, why in the world is he portraying me in that way? He was so jealous, and so paranoid, and just thought the worst of me.’

  But although Bukowski dealt with his female characters in a critical, almost misogynistic way, at times, he did not spare his male characters either. The men in Women are almost all weak, dishonest and sexually insecure. None more so than Chinaski himself. As Gay Brewer points out in his critical study, Charles Bukowski, the Henry Chinaski of Women is far from being a virile he-man figure; he is frequently impotent with drink, made to look foolish, spurned and mocked and cuckolded by young women who are clearly his superiors. Indeed, the very first lines of the novel reveal Chinaski to be a pathetic, inadequate man:

  I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman – even on non-sexual terms – was beyond my imagination.

  There is great humor in this. Like Post Office, Women is a very funny book, containing some of Bukowski’s very best comic writing, and it was to prove popular with both male and female readers.

  Bukowski name-checked John Fante in Women as being Henry Chinaski’s favorite author, and indicated his enduring respect for Fante’s work by hailing Ask the Dust as a great book. John Martin had never heard of Fante, whose books were all long since out of print, and assumed the name of the writer and the novel were purely fictional, especially as Bandini (the name of Fante’s hero, whom Bukowski also name-checked) is a well-known supplier of garden fertilizer in California. ‘I thought this was just a metaphor for shit.’ But when they spoke about it, Bukowski assured him Fante’s novels existed, so Martin made a point of seeking them out and liked the work so much he set out to discover if Fante was still alive, thinking he might publish him.

  John Fante had turned to screen-writing after his early fiction was published in the late 1930s, and enjoyed a successful career in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s, including the filming of one of his own novels, Full of Life. But in later years he found it increasingly hard to make a living, partly because of his uncompromising attitude to his work, and, by the 1970s, he was unable to finalize any movie deal. He was forgotten as a writer and, to make matters worse, his health failed. Fante had suffered from diabetes for many years and became blind in 1978 when he was sixty-nine. When John Martin tracked him down to his home in Malibu, north of Los Angeles, he was at the lowest ebb, a sick and unhappy old man.

  They struck a deal to re-print Ask the Dust, and Bukowski wrote a new preface describing how he had discovered the book in the Los Angeles Public Library all those years ago, like finding gold in the city dump. He went on to praise Fante’s prose style warmly, writing: ‘Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me.’

  It was forty years since Bukowski first read Ask the Dust and now, thanks to that casual line in Women, he was finally about to meet his hero at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital where Fante was recovering after a double amputation of his legs. Bukowski was very nervous about seeing Fante, partly because he felt he had stolen from him the idea of dividing his novels into very short chapters, to give pace, but this hardly mattered as Fante had never read any of his work and, when Fante’s wife, Joyce, read to him from Women, he was unconcerned by Bukowski’s use of his ideas.


  Conversation was stilted when the two writers met, but some of Fante’s bulldog spirit came through to Bukowski.

  ‘The doctor came in today, told me, “Well, we’re going to have to lop off some more of you.” I like that, “lop”. That’s what he said, the bastard,’ Fante told him.

  ‘John, whatever happened to Carmen, the lady in your first novel?’ asked Bukowski.

  ‘That bitch. She turned out to be a lesbian,’ he replied. ‘Got a cigarette?’

  Fante was blind. His limbs cut from him. He was forgotten as a writer, but Bukowski was impressed to see that he was still undefeated by life. ‘The most horrible thing that happens to people is bitterness,’ Fante told him. ‘They all get so bitter.’

  Fante returned home to Malibu, his spirits lifted by the deal with Black Sparrow Press, and felt strong enough to dictate a final instalment of the saga of Arturo Bandini to Joyce. It was one of the happiest times in their marriage.

  One evening Bukowski and Linda Lee made the drive up from San Pedro for dinner and found Fante sitting up at the table, having made a special effort on their behalf.

  ‘I know that you’re a drinker, Hank, so I’m going to have a glass of wine with you,’ he said.

  ‘There was a close bond of friendship,’ says Joyce Fante. ‘It would have been stronger had the circumstances been different. It was very difficult for John not being able to see and feeling ill, as he did all the time. I think they would have been close friends if they had met in earlier years.’

  Because of the interest and patronage of Bukowski and John Martin, several volumes of Fante’s work were re-published and, at his readings, Bukowski urged his fans to buy Fante’s books, calling him ‘my buddy out of nowhere’. The books sold well, particularly in Europe, and left Joyce well-provided for in her old age.*

  The Internal Revenue Service presented Bukowski with substantial tax demands now he was making big money from his writing. He hired an accountant who urged him to spend, spend, spend before Uncle Sam took it in taxes. He should buy a new typewriter, a car, office supplies. He even tried to make a case for deducting Bukowski’s liquor as a work expense. The accountant also advised him to invest in land deals and other speculative schemes. But Bukowski was essentially conservative when it came to money, other than gambling on the horses, and preferred to use what he had to minimize debt, so he made additional repayments on his mortgage instead. However, when his ’67 Volkswagen finally broke down he saw the sense in buying a new car. It would be a fifty-two per cent tax write-off and, as he wrote in the poem, ‘notes on a hot streak’, he’d been driving ‘the worst junk cars/imaginable’ for thirty years. He deserved something good.

  The salesman at the BMW dealership eyed Bukowski suspiciously, noting his cheap clothes and the pens in his top pocket. He didn’t look like the sort who could afford a new BMW. He looked more like a working guy who would buy a second-hand Chevrolet, with a trade-in. The salesman was so reluctant to stir himself to talk to the loser in his show room, that Bukowski had to call him over.

  ‘I think I like this car,’ he said, pointing at a black BMW 320i.

  ‘With sun roof, radio and air-conditioning, this automobile costs $16,000,’ the salesman told him, stiffly.

  ‘OK, I’ll take it.’

  The salesman asked, rather superciliously, what kind of arrangements sir would be making.

  ‘I’ll write a check,’ said Bukowski, casually.

  It was the punch-line to a routine he had been working on for weeks because, far from being a casual buyer, he had actually read up on BMWs in advance and knew exactly what model and extras he wanted, and how much he was prepared to spend. He was just enjoying the fun of confounding the salesman’s preconceptions, and derived huge pleasure from watching his expression change to one of respect after he telephoned the bank and discovered there was enough cash in Bukowski’s checking account to more than cover the price of the car.

  Bukowski did not attempt to disguise the fact that he had bought a house and a BMW, removing himself from the low-life world he had always written about, but used these symbols of his newfound wealth to comic effect. In the poem, ‘the secret of my endurance’, he wrote that he still received mail from men with terrible jobs and women trouble, men like he had been. The letters were often written in blunt pencil on lined paper ‘in tiny handwriting that slants to the/ left’. He wondered if they knew their letters were delivered to a mail box behind a six-foot hedge at a two-storey house with a long driveway …

  … a two car garage, rose garden, fruit trees,

  animals, a beautiful woman, mortgage about half

  paid after a year, a new car,

  fireplace and a green rug two-inches thick

  with a young boy to write my stuff now,

  I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a

  typewriter, feed him whiskey and raw whores,

  belt him pretty good three or four times

  a week.

  I’m 59 years old now and the critics say

  my stuff is getting better than ever.

  It was wonderful to lay on the lawn under his fruit trees and do nothing while his neighbors worked. Who would have thought he would be living like this after all those nights at the post office, all those years in cockroach-ridden court apartments? Who would have guessed he would be stretching out like a cat in his own garden under his own guava tree, sunlight through the leaves dappling his belly? He would never get tired of the free hours. It was glorious to have nowhere to go and nothing to do, but wait until dinner, wondering what type of wine he would drink.

  He turned sixty in August, 1980, and signed a $10,000 contract with Barbet Schroeder to write a screenplay based on his life, with a promise of more money if the film went into production. The screenplay – which had the working title, The Rats of Thirst, later changed to Barfly – was an amalgam of the years Bukowski lived in Philadelphia, hanging out at the bar on Fairmount Avenue, and also when he lived with Jane in Los Angeles. He finished it in the spring of 1979 and Schroeder flew to Europe to try and raise the money.

  Schroeder was not the only filmmaker interested in bringing Bukowski’s work to the screen. An Italian consortium, eager to cash in on Bukowski’s popularity in Europe, negotiated a $44,000 deal with Lawrence Ferlinghetti for rights to some of the City Lights stories, and yet another consortium was talking about an adaptation of Factotum. As the months passed, Bukowski found himself increasingly embroiled in the machinations of the movie business, for which he had intense distrust. Apart from anything else, he believed Hollywood had been the ruination of John Fante.

  people who hang around

  celluloid

  usually

  are.

  (‘the film makers’)

  There were several long discussions about who would play Henry Chinaski in Barfly, the film which remained Bukowski’s favorite project and the one he had most to do with. He met James Woods who had recently starred in The Onion Field. The singer Tom Waits came over to San Pedro for drinks. Kris Kristofferson was also suggested for the part, but Bukowski was horrified to learn he would sing and play his guitar in the movie. In the end none of them committed to the project and, without a definite star name, one film company and then another flirted with the idea of financing the movie before pulling out.

  Months went by without anything being finalized, and Schroeder found himself spending many evenings drinking with Bukowski and Linda Lee at San Pedro, listening to Bukowski’s stories about when he was younger. He decided he should make a permanent record of these sessions and so began to film what became The Charles Bukowski Tapes, a remarkable four-hour documentary of Bukowski talking about his life and work.

  Most of the documentary was filmed with Bukowski speaking directly to the camera at his home in San Pedro, but they also revisited locations from his past life including the house at 2122 Longwood Avenue. Bukowski showed Schroeder the place in the living room where his father tried to force his
face into the vomit on the carpet, and they went into the bathroom where his father had beaten him so many times with the razor strop.

  ‘Here we have the torture chamber,’ said Bukowski, looking round sadly. ‘This is a torture chamber where I learned … something … This place holds some memories all right. I don’t know, it’s just a terrible place to stand and talk about it … you don’t want to talk about it too much …’

  Schroeder began to ask a question, but Bukowski turned away.

  ‘Let’s forget it,’ he said.

  Linda Lee was a fan of the British rock group, The Who, and that summer she had been attending every one of their concerts in Los Angeles, partly because Pete Townshend was a fellow devotee of Meher Baba and an acquaintance of hers. Bukowski decided he hated The Who. He didn’t like their music, but mostly he hated them because he thought Pete Townshend and Linda Lee were having an affair, which was untrue. One evening when Barbet Schroeder was filming at the house in San Pedro, Bukowski decided to confront Linda Lee about coming home late from the concerts.

  ‘I’ve always been used because I’m a good guy,’ he said. He and Schroeder had been drinking and filming all afternoon in the garden, getting through four bottles of wine, and Bukowski was in a volatile mood. ‘Women, when they meet me, they say, “I can use this son of a bitch, I can push him around, he’s an easy-going guy,” so they do it … But, you know, finally I get to resent it a bit.’

  ‘What do you resent?’ asked Linda Lee, who had also been drinking.

  ‘Just being pushed.’

  ‘Why do you let yourself be pushed by this kind of shit, you idiot?’

  ‘I’ve told you a thousand times to leave. You won’t leave,’ said Bukowski. He said he was going to get a Jewish attorney to throw her out. It would happen so fast she would feel her ass was skinned. Linda Lee smirked at that. ‘She thinks I don’t have the guts,’ Bukowski told Schroeder, who was still filming. ‘She thinks I can’t live without her … You think you’re the last woman on Earth that I can get?’