Charles Bukowski (2 page)

It was the afternoon of 4 January, 1997, about 2.00 p.m. local time, and I was driving east across Arizona to Phoenix to meet Bukowski’s former girlfriend, Linda King (a wonderful person who you will meet in the following pages). The previous day had been my thirty-second birthday, and I had celebrated with a Bukowskian meal of a steak dinner, washed down with many drinks, in a ratty joint on the California border (curiously, I had started to copy Bukowski’s personal habits). The next day was cold, but bright and clear, and as I drove across the desert to see Linda I realised with great relief that I was finally out of range of the
Daily Mirror
, with its constant, impertinent phone calls, and rather than chasing stories for the paper I was engaged in a project I considered worthwhile; I was pursuing it in the way
I
thought best (as opposed to the life of a hack journalist who is forever being told what to write and how to write it); and I was being paid for it. This, I decided, was the life for me.

My career as a newspaper reporter was over then, essentially, though I endured another eight months, during which time I completed most of my research and started to write the manuscript. Writing demands even more concentration than researching a book: months sitting quietly at a desk working without interruption. This proved extremely difficult with a demanding full-time job. At home in London in August 1997 I was looking forward to the bank holiday weekend, because I needed three clear days to get on with the manuscript, which I had to deliver to the publishers fairly soon. As I dressed for work on the Friday morning before the long weekend, my mind on the book rather than the job, or
the other job
as it were, the
Daily Mirror
news desk rang to tell me to drive immediately to the Lake District to cover a murder. If I set out on this trip, I knew I would not be back in London before the end of the weekend and would therefore be unable to do any writing. So I refused to go. As I did so I knew I was being entirely unreasonable, and that I had to either apologise and do what I was told or quit the
Mirror
. The book had come to mean so much to me that this was a simple decision. Automatically, I sat down and typed my resignation letter which I faxed to the office that morning, thereby leaving the world of normal employment and casting myself into the life of a full-time author. As Bukowski himself noted, this change comes as something of a shock to the system (see Chapter 7).

As touched upon, I believe that good books are written by authors who, for some reason, feel compelled to tell a story, whatever it may be. The fact that I quit my job (well-paid as it was, with a car, a pension and all the other perks that go with being a company man) in order to finish this biography proves how a story can take over an author’s life, and make one behave in ways that, perhaps, are not entirely rational.

Fortunately, I had one successful book under my belt, some money in the bank and good publishers who shared my enthusiasm for Bukowski. Although the principal deal was with Grove Press in New York, the British edition of this book came out first,
published by Canongate of Edinburgh, with whom I worked closely. We went out of our way to create a book that was more than a run-of-the-mill biography, rather a book in the spirit of Bukowski. The title, for instance, is not exactly snappy, not obviously commercial. But
Locked in the Arms of a Crazy
Life
is an apt quote from a Bukowski poem, as Bukowski himself used long poetic titles for his own books (
The Days Run Away
Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
for example). So the title was in his style. For the same reason we reproduced his line drawings as chapter headings, and because yellow was Bukowski’s favourite colour we made the jacket of the first UK edition yellow.

It is also worth adding a few words on the way the book was written. Like Bukowski, I used short, simple sentences and brief chapters. Like his novels, the biography is a slim volume. Furthermore, I adopted an American voice, using US spellings and the terms and phrases Bukowski himself employed. I am English, moreover a Londoner, and do not normally speak or write as I do in the body of this book, but I didn’t want my Englishness to jar against Bukowski’s idiomatic American style of speaking and writing, which I quote from liberally. I also refrained from discussing my sources in the text, because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the story. (There are fulsome source notes at the end.) In short, I did everything I could to write a book in Bukowski’s style, or at least one in which his own voice wouldn’t seem out of place. The result is a biography that, while being very revealing about the life, reads at times like fiction. In fact, one of the most pleasing reviews came when a critic in the magazine
Deluxe
wrote that
Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
‘reads like a great lost Bukowski novel’.

Because the book reads like fiction please do not assume, however, that it cannot be relied upon for accuracy. Despite my background as a tabloid journalist, I was scrupulous not to sensationalise Bukowski’s life, though I didn’t shy away from stories that reflected badly on him either. In writing the biography I was leaving behind the hyperbole and other vices of tabloid journalism and seeking to tell a story completely straight. I do not pass judgement on Bukowski’s behaviour in the book, as newspapers are so fond of doing. Rather I saw my job as presenting
you, the reader, with the facts of Bukowski’s life in an entertaining but always reliable way. The research is as good as it could be. It’s up to you, having read the story, to decide what sort of man you think Bukowski was, though of course we both start off from the point of admiring the books, and thereby the author. I wouldn’t have written the biography if I didn’t feel warmly towards him, and you would be unlikely to be reading it unless you shared my enthusiasm.

As I say, I never met Bukowski and as a result I am asked occasionally: ‘How can you write a biography of somebody you never knew?’ In reply I point out that many eminent biographers and historians would be made redundant by this logic. Evidently Vincent Cronin didn’t interview Napoleon for his 1971 biography of the emperor; Peter Ackroyd wasn’t able to sit down with William Blake. Yet both got to know their subjects by a process of deep research and as a result they wrote compelling lives of these men. In fact, there are at least two significant advantages for the biographer not to have his or her subject around. Firstly, and very importantly, they can’t influence you to write about them in the way they would prefer to be portrayed. (Many biographies written with the co-operation of the subject are bad because the author is hamstrung in this way, the result being hagiography.) Secondly, without direct contact with the subject, one is obliged to dig deep for material, and interview widely, which is healthy and helps one get at ‘the truth’ (though lives always remain slightly mysterious, which is as it should be). I travelled extensively to meet and interview virtually everybody of significance in Bukowski’s life, much more so than anybody else who has written about Bukowski, and this book is the concatenation of many memories. I also turned up a small mountain of documentary evidence, including hundreds of letters and previously unpublished photographs, many of which appear in this book, others in my companion book
Bukowski in
Pictures
. So I didn’t meet the man, but like Cronin and Ackroyd I got to feel I knew my subject, and I hope you get that feeling too, reading the book.

My interest in Bukowski faded after the biography was published in 1998, as happens when you finish a book that has been a central part of your life and other subjects and concerns take its
place. Rereading the biography recently was like looking at the work of a stranger. I was amazed by it. Part of the magic of books is that, if they are any good, they have a life of their own beyond that of their author, and that has been the case with
Charles Bukowski
:
Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
. It was well-received when first published and has made its own way in the world successfully ever since, selling steadily in the UK, the USA and in translation in more than a dozen languages, the translations ranging from Japanese to Hebrew. My best hope is that it will come to be seen as the classic biography of this remarkable American author, entertaining and informing readers while also returning them to Bukowski’s own marvellous stories and poems.

Howard Sounes
London, 2006

C
harles Bukowski raised himself up from his chair and got a beer from the refrigerator behind him on stage. The audience applauded as he drank, tipping the bottle until it was upside down and he had drained the last golden drop.

‘This is not a prop,’ he said, speaking slowly with a lilt to his voice, like W.C. Fields. ‘It’s a necesssssitty.’

The crowd laughed and clapped. A young girl in front exclaimed that he was a ‘funky old guy’. Indeed, at fifty-two, Bukowski was old enough to be the father of most of the kids who had come to hear him read, and his behavior was all the more amusing because of it.

Bukowski looked odd, as well as speaking in a peculiar way. He was a tall man, a quarter-inch under six feet, heavyset with a beer belly, but his head seemed too big for his body and his face was alarming, like a Frankenstein mask: a long jaw, thin lips, sad slitty eyes sunk into hollows; a large boozer’s nose, red and purple with broken veins; and a scraggly grey beard over greasy skin mottled with acne scars, skin so bad he looked like he’d been in a fire.

He had been flown up to San Francisco, in September, 1972, by his publishers, City Lights Books, because of the success of a collection of his short stories,
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions
and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
. The book was dedicated to his young girlfriend, Linda King:

who brought it to me
and who will take it
away

Eight hundred people paid to get into a gymnasium on Telegraph Hill, eager to see the author of
Life in a Texas Whorehouse
and the other outrageous, apparently autobiographical stories. The idea of appearing before them terrified Bukowski. Although he looked intimidating, he was chronically shy and hated himself for hustling his ass in the home town of the beat writers, a group he neither liked nor considered himself part of.

He’d been drinking all day to get his courage up, on the morning flight from Los Angeles, in the Italian restaurant where he and Linda King had lunch, and behind the curtain while waiting for his cue to go on. His face was grey with fear, and he vomited twice.

‘You know it’s easier working in a factory,’ he told his friend, Taylor Hackford, who was filming a documentary. ‘There’s no pressure.’

The crowd knew him for his short stories, but Bukowski read poetry. Poems about drinking, gambling and sex, even going to the crapper – he knew that the title alone, ‘piss and shit’, would make them laugh.

‘Listen, some of these poems are serious and I have to apologize because I know some crowds don’t like serious poems, but I’ve gotta give you some now and again to show I’m not a beer-drinking machine,’ he said. He chose a poem about his father, whom he had hated with a passion. It was called ‘the rat’: 

It seemed he might cry as he finished the last sad lines. But he snapped out of it and began playing the wild man again.

‘Do I know you?’ he asked a fan who called out a request. ‘Don’t push me around, baby …’ he threatened, breaking into a grin. ‘One more beer, I’ll take you all.’ He threw his head back, showing ruined teeth, and cackled. ‘Ha Ha Ha. Watch out!’

Another fan tried to get up on the stage.

‘What the hell you want, man? Get away from me,’ said Bukowski, as if talking to a dog. ‘What are you, some kinda creep?’ The crowd whooped with laughter.

Somebody asked how many beers he could drink. Others were less impressed, demanding that Bukowski stop wasting time; they had paid to hear poetry, not to watch a drunk.

‘You want poems?’ he teased the college kids, disliking their expensive clothes and untroubled faces. ‘Beg me.’

‘Fuck you, man!’

‘Any other comments?’

The more drunk he became, the more hostile he was towards the audience and the more hostile the audience got. ‘It ended up with them throwing bottles,’ recalls beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, who had Bukowski hustled out back for his own safety.

There was a party afterwards at Ferlinghetti’s apartment in North Beach. The place was packed with poets, musicians, actors, members of the audience, and almost everybody was drunk or stoned. Bukowski had little time for drugs, but he was roaring drunk. He asked every woman he met whether they wanted to
have sex with him, and snarled at Taylor Hackford when Hackford tried to film a close-up:

‘What do you want, mother-fuck?’

Bukowski was talking to his friend John Bennett when a fan came over to compliment him on a great show. They told him to get lost.

‘Fuck you, and your mother!’ said the fan.

Bukowski didn’t mind people insulting his mother – he had disliked her himself – but Bennett took offence at the remark and threw the man down the stairs.

‘Oh God, here we go!’ exclaimed Linda King as she watched a chair smash through a window in the fight that ensued. Bennett put his fist through another window, gashing his hand, and soon half the men in the room were throwing punches at each other.

Bukowski grabbed Linda’s hand and pulled her after him into the kitchen. She assumed he wanted to protect her, or maybe give her a kiss, but he accused her of flirting with John Bennett, saying she was no better than a whore, and tried to hit her over the head with a frying pan.

‘I looked in his eyes and it was like a creature who was not Bukowski at all,’ says Linda, who had been the victim of his jealousy many times in the year and a half they’d been together. ‘I always claimed he got possessed when he was drunk. I could see he was really going to get me.’

He blocked her in a corner with his left arm, and was brandishing the frying pan in his right hand, ready to bang her on the head. She bit him hard on the hand, ducked and made a run for it. He lunged after her with the pan, but tripped and cut his face on the stove as he fell.

‘To hell with you, bitch, you’re out of my life,’ he screamed.

Linda heard the familiar sound of police sirens wailing towards them through the city. This often happened when they went to a party, even though Bukowski promised to behave. In her frustration, she kicked a panel out of the door and clattered down the stairs into the street where a crowd was gathering. The police soon showed up, but Linda stayed back, knowing it was better not to get involved.

Marty Balin, leader of the rock group Jefferson Airplane,
wanted to make a movie out of Bukowski’s short stories and came to the party to meet him. ‘The windows were broken and glass was all over the floor,’ says Balin who arrived just after the fight. ‘Bukowski was on a mattress on the floor with no other furniture in the place, broken glass all over, bottles. His face was all cut up.’

When he saw Marty Balin’s girlfriend, Bukowski scrambled to his feet and squared up to the couple.

‘You know, I could take that woman away from you like that!’ he said, snapping his fingers in Marty Balin’s face.

The poet Harold Norse turned up to find Ferlinghetti outside on Upper Grant Avenue, apparently appalled at the goings on. Norse asked what had happened and the mild-mannered Ferlinghetti replied that Bukowski and Linda King were wrecking his place.

‘Didn’t I warn you?’ asked Norse. He knew Bukowski of old and that, when he was sober, Bukowski was quiet and polite, even deferential. But when he got drunk – especially in sophisticated company, which made him uneasy – he became Bukowski the Bad: mischievous, argumentative, even violent. They could hear him up there now being Bukowski the Bad. He was howling like a lunatic.

‘FUCK ALL THIS!’ he bellowed.

Morning broke with beautiful warm autumn sunshine, a fresh breeze blowing in from the bay, and the sound of broken glass being swept up. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harold Norse came back to the apartment and picked their way upstairs, through the shards of glass and splintered wood, until they found Bukowski. He was sitting on the floor, still dressed in the clothes he had on the day before, his face smeared with dried blood, drinking a beer for breakfast. He had been in residence for only one night, but, as Ferlinghetti says, the place ‘looked like a nest of junkies had been living there a month.’

Ferlinghetti greeted Bukowski remarkably affably, considering the state his home was in, and told him he had brought his money for the reading. His share was $400.

‘And to think I used to work for 35 cents an hour,’ said Bukowski in genuine wonder. He was talking about the factory
jobs he had worked at nearly all his adult life, most recently as mail clerk in Los Angeles, sorting letters while the supervisor yelled at him to hurry up. He held that terrible job almost twelve years before leaving, when he was forty-nine, to become a writer. Everybody said he was mad – what about his pension? – but this proved he had been right. He held the money to his face.

‘Poetry, I love poetry,’ he said, kissing the bank notes. He meant it seriously, but couldn’t help making a joke that lived up to his image. ‘It’s better than pussy,’ he added, ‘almost.’