Charles Bukowski (14 page)

In interviews he gave later in life, Bukowski denounced drugs in general, and marijuana in particular, but John Thomas and Steve Richmond remember Bukowski taking a variety of drugs in the late 1960s, including a lot of marijuana. John Thomas gave Bukowski handfuls of uppers and downers from the bowl of pills he kept on his coffee table, when Bukowski came over after work. He also gave Bukowski yage and his only LSD trip.

‘What is this stuff?’ asked Bukowski after taking the acid.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Thomas.

‘I’ve got a lump of ice in my stomach the size of a bowling ball, and it’s sort of jiggling around down there,’ Bukowski replied. ‘But the man who can rule his stomach can rule the world!’

John Bryan’s magazine,
Notes from Underground
, was short-lived and, after working for a while as managing editor of the
LA
Free Press
, he decided to launch a newspaper.
Open City
would feature radical writing and politics in the tradition of the little magazines, but by selling through vending machines and news stands he hoped to reach many more readers. He asked Bukowski to write a weekly column.

‘Let’s call it “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”,’ he said. ‘You are a dirty old man, aren’t you?’

Bukowski liked to ridicule Bryan and the other journalists who worked on the paper as a bunch of ‘scummy Commie hippy shits’, but the column ran for almost two years and made him more famous than anything he had done so far, even if many of his friends felt the moniker ‘dirty old man’ did him an injustice.
Open
City
contributor Jack Micheline wrote in his prose poem, ‘Long After Midnight’: ‘He is not a DIRTY OLD MAN; he has never been a DIRTY OLD MAN. He is an American postage stamp.’

The newspaper was a quintessential hippy production, actually sold by hippies on Sunset Strip, and featured articles about new music and psychedelic drugs. Bukowski attended staff meetings where the editorial content and agitprop were earnestly discussed, but he was unimpressed by what he heard. ‘The crew did not seem very fiery. Strangely calm and dead and well-fed for their ages. Sitting around making little flip anti-war jokes, or jokes about pot. Everybody understood the jokes but me. Run a pig for president. What the fuck was that? It excited them. It bored me.’ His world view was shaped by the problems of everyday life, as a postal clerk trying to make the rent; he was not at all interested in Vietnam, or pop music, or tie-dyed T-shirts, or the Civil Rights movement. If he said anything about politics, likely as not it was a provocative remark about what a fine fellow Adolf Hitler had been. ‘If he had any politics, he was a fucking fascist,’ says Bryan, who took the bait.

Bukowski wrote his column using slap-dash syntax and irregular spelling. He rarely bothered to capitalize letters or use conventional punctuation. But the apparent sloppiness was a stylistic experiment and, despite appearances, he was fairly serious about what he was doing. He wrote in the first person using his real name and, initially, he used his past life as subject matter: the death and funeral of his father, the Philadelphia barfly years, starving for his art in the shack in Atlanta, and marriage to ‘the Texan heiress’. By the summer of 1967, he’d exhausted his stock of anecdotes and
began inventing sex stories, which he delighted in reading to an elderly woman who lived next door before handing in his copy.

It was exciting seeing his stuff in print every week. ‘Think of it yourself: absolute freedom to write anything you please,’ he wrote of the experience, ‘sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city.’

There was a constant need for new story ideas, and Bukowski wasn’t choosy about where he got his material from, even when it meant upsetting friends. That summer he went to visit Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb at their new home in Tucson, Arizona, with a vague idea they would record some of his poems. The Webbs had arranged for Bukowski to stay rent-free in a cottage on the nearby university campus, but he was in a cantankerous mood and bitched about the searing desert heat, reluctant to leave the cottage at all during the day. The real reason for his bad humor was probably jealousy. The Webbs were engrossed in printing a Henry Miller book,
Order and Chaos Chez
Hans Reichel
, rather than another Bukowski project. When Jon Webb suggested Bukowski write a piece for the next issue of
The Outsider
, attacking the drug culture, he whimsically decided to defend the hippies and refused. The recording project came to nothing and, when he got back to LA, Bukowski wrote a spiteful column about his friends, referring to Jon Webb sarcastically as ‘the great editor’. Mischievously, he mailed a copy to a reporter at the
Tucson Daily Citizen
.

At one time or another, Bukowski managed to upset almost everybody who was close to him. Another victim was Douglas Blazek, whom he had been corresponding with since 1964. Blazek worshipped Bukowski and was not shy of expressing his devotion. ‘I looked up to Bukowski as something of a god,’ he says. Passing through LA in the fall of 1967, he telephoned asking if it would be convenient to visit, and Bukowski called in sick to the post office so they would have plenty of time together.

But when they met, it seemed to Blazek that the friendship built up over the years was being sloughed off by Bukowski. ‘He saw me as, I would think, an ordinary person, nothing special, nothing distinguished,’ says Blazek, ‘nobody who was going to do anything great in this world, or help make him great.’

Blazek formulated a theory about why Bukowski the correspondent was so different from Bukowski in the flesh. When he wrote his wonderful letters with the jokes, poems and funny drawings he often included, so intimate and revealing, he could allow himself to be vulnerable because he was at a safe distance. His antagonism and aggression came to the fore when he met people face to face. ‘As much as he wanted a camaraderie, he wanted to be friends, he wanted to be open, he wanted to share love, he couldn’t allow himself that luxury having been hurt so much in the past,’ says Blazek. ‘This made him rather mean-spirited as an individual.’

John Martin managed to stay friends with Bukowski, when so many failed, partly because he didn’t drink with him and therefore wasn’t around when Bukowski became boorish, but mostly because he was constantly thinking of new ways to earn money for Bukowski on what were essentially marginal publications.

He knew Bukowski liked to draw and was shrewd enough to realize original artwork could make their little books more valuable so he bought Bukowski art materials and got him to make simple abstract illustrations – he could do one every ten minutes – which were pasted into limited editions of the chapbooks, or sold separately. They proved popular with collectors and Martin kept Bukowski happy by paying a ten per cent royalty in advance for everything they did. Bukowski had nothing but praise for his new publisher. He even bragged that Martin let him pinch his beautiful wife, Barbara.

In fact, Barbara Martin remembers how reticent the dirty old man was when she met him. ‘When we would talk on the phone he would be flirtatious, in a very nice way, but when we first met he didn’t really talk to me much.’

The first Bukowski book published by Black Sparrow Press was
At Terror Street and Agony Way
. Although little more than a glorified chapbook, it included good new work like ‘traffic ticket’ which describes Bukowski’s hatred of his job. In this, and other work, he subverts the popular perception of Los Angeles as a place of endless sunshine, just as he subverted the image of Hollywood as being glamorous, choosing to describe wintry days when LA is dull and cold:

The little Black Sparrow books and the
Open City
column were turning him into a minor local celebrity and there were people at the post office who resented this. They misunderstood Bukowski’s cool as meaning he didn’t care about the job, because he was getting to be such a big shot. Even friends like Johnny Moore were confused. ‘I thought he had plenty of money,’ he says. ‘It was the way he used to carry himself, the way he used to talk.’

Bukowski was confronted on the steps of the building one day by a mail clerk who angrily exclaimed he was full of shit.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw that magazine.’

‘What magazine?’

‘I dunno the name of it, but I saw it, about you being a poet. What a bunch of bullshit! And your photo, with the little beard.’ Bukowski said he didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘You knows, you knows what I talking about. Don’t bullshit me.’

It turned out the clerk had been in a barber shop and picked up a copy of
Dare
, a magazine which had paid Bukowski $50 for one of his poems. He’d only agreed to have his picture published because he needed to pay the child support.

Somebody tipped off the post office that Bukowski was writing ‘dirty stories’ for a ‘hippy paper’, and that he was not married to the mother of his child. It was a situation management thought might bring the post office into disrepute and a spy was sent to De Longpre Avenue to snoop round for information about FrancEyE, and about Bukowski’s political interests. Francis Crotty told the spy to stop hassling ordinary people, and sent him away saying Bukowski ‘wasn’t no Commie’.

Bukowski was called in to see the assistant director of personnel and another manager. Spread in front of them were copies of
Open
City
, which was all the evidence they had against him. They were concerned about a story about sodomy
*
and a not altogether complimentary column about the post office.

‘Have you ever had any books published?’ he was asked.

‘Yes.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t know, four, five, six, seven… I don’t know.’

‘How much did you
pay
these people to publish your work?’ It was clear they thought he had got above himself. They said they were considering charging him with Conduct Unbecoming a Postal Employee. Bukowski reminded them of his constitutional rights and they commented, wearily, that they hadn’t had a case like this in years, asking if he was planning to write about the post office again. He said he didn’t think so and that brought them to stalemate.

When he emerged from the interrogation, Bukowski bumped into his union rep, David Berger, who had come down to see what the problem was.

‘Hey, Bukowski, what’s up?’ asked Berger.

‘Nothing. They wanted me to resign, but I’d be damned if I would.’

It was because of the
Open City
column that Bukowski got to meet Neal Cassady, one of the few beat figures he admired. Cassady was the former drifter and railroad worker who had been the lover of Allen Ginsberg and, more famously, the basis of the character Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s
On The Road
. In recent years he had served time in San Quentin for a drugs conviction and, upon his release, became a member of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, driving the Pranksters’ psychedelic bus. Bukowski admired Cassady because, apart from his ambivalent sexuality, he was a man after his own heart – someone who had worked factory jobs, been in jail and liked to drink beer and bet on the horses. So when Cassady passed through LA just after Christmas, 1967, Bukowski was pleased to meet him.

Cassady was on his way to Mexico to see friends when John Bryan offered to put him up at his house in Hollywood. As a joke, he appointed him circulation manager of
Open City
. Cassady was famous for his skill at the wheel of an automobile – it was one of the themes of
On The Road
– and he and Bryan spent two weeks dropping speed and smoking dope as they drove round LA in a black Plymouth sedan checking the vending machines were stocked with copies of the paper. One overcast winter’s day they spun round to De Longpre Avenue to see Bukowski.

Cassady was forty-one, several years younger than Bukowski himself, and yet he was clearly in a bad way; hollow-eyed, thin and jittery. Bukowski later wrote a column about the meeting – ‘a simpatico account of Neal’ as Ginsberg notes – describing him as ‘a little punchy with the action, the eternal light, but there wasn’t any hatred in him’. He offered him a beer and was impressed by the way he slugged it down as if it were water.

‘Have another,’ said Bukowski, deciding Cassady was even crazier than he was.

When they went out to the Plymouth, Bukowski was alarmed to discover that, despite the beer, pills and dope, Cassady was still going to drive.

It was raining and he started showing off what Ginsberg describes as his ‘driving genius … accuracy and boldness’. This consisted of driving as fast as possible on the wrong side of the road. They slid around the greasy East Hollywood streets as a storm broiled, skidding from vending machine to news stand, heading in a zig-zag across town to Bryan’s Carlton Way house where they were due to have dinner. In his column, Bukowski described how they almost had a fatal collision as they approached Carlton Way. He wrote that he would always remember the coupé that came towards them as Cassady swerved through traffic, imagining it hitting them ‘like a rolling steel brick thing’, but decided it didn’t matter as one had to die sometime.