Charles Bukowski (22 page)

Then she disappeared for days on end. She said she went to stay with her mother out in the San Fernando Valley, but Bukowski was convinced she was seeing other men (not that he’d slept with her yet). ‘I was a little flighty thing who would go away and come back,’ says Cupcakes. ‘That is enough to make any man nuts.’

In the poem, ‘huge ear rings’, Bukowski expressed his ambivalent feelings about her:

When Linda King became pregnant she didn’t know if the father was Bukowski, or whether it was one of two other men she had been dating to get her own back on Bukowski for cheating on her. Whoever the father was, she knew Bukowski would not support her or the baby. Fed up with the cycle of splitting and getting back together, Linda resolved to break from him once and for all. She quit her job, sold her house and decided to move to Arizona.

After a day shifting furniture and packing boxes, she went into premature labor and miscarried the baby, almost bleeding to death in the process.

Linda was at home recovering from the miscarriage when Bukowski called on the telephone. She told him what had happened, but he didn’t care. ‘He didn’t think it was his, so there was no reaction.’ He had news of his own. Cupcakes had been at his apartment earlier, he said. She’d finally agreed to sleep with him, but told him to get a new mattress first because the old one was so disgusting. A store had delivered a $35 mattress within a couple of hours and he’d given Cupcakes money to go and get champagne to celebrate. He wanted to know whether Linda thought Cupcakes would run off with the money? Linda hung up in disgust.

When Cupcakes returned with the champagne, Bukowski told her how upset Linda had been and they laughed themselves silly.

The following evening Linda King was drinking a bottle of rosé wine, which a boyfriend told her was good for replenishing blood, and the drunker she got the more she brooded on what Bukowski had said. ‘The idea of him celebrating with champagne while I was upset and suffering from my loss of everything so upset me.’ She decided to go over to his place and do some damage.

There was no answer when she knocked at his door on Carlton Way, so she wriggled in through the kitchen window, found his Royal typewriter, carried it out through the window and hid it behind a bush. She went back and stole his radio, his drawings,
paintings, old photographs and, most precious of all, the first editions of his books. It was everything she thought he loved.

Bukowski came home early from the track and found Linda crouching in the bushes. She was trembling with rage, like a lunatic, and the fight that ensued was extravagant even by their standards. Tina Darby, who came out to see what was going on, says Linda seemed to have gone out of her mind. Bukowski was worried for Tina’s safety, after the business with the Polaroids, and told her to go back in the house and close the door.

‘I don’t deserve this,’ he told Linda. ‘These are all my books. I wrote them. You need to give me back my books.’

Linda got an armful from The Thing and started flinging books at the windows of his apartment. As the glass shattered, she shrieked at him:

‘THIS IS FOR THAT WOMAN! … AND THAT WOMAN! … AND THAT’S FOR THAT WOMAN!’

‘I actually did Bukowski a favor,’ says Linda. ‘John Martin had to buy him a new typewriter. He needed one.’

She was so out of control that Bukowski felt he had no choice but to call the police, and Linda was dragged off to the station sobbing her heart out about how she’d lost their baby. Bukowski said he wouldn’t press charges, because she might lose custody of her children, but she had to realize she couldn’t behave like that any more. It was over, positively the end of their relationship and they both knew it. If things got any crazier, they would end up killing each other.

Linda went home and made plans to move to Arizona, slightly regretful about what they had lost. ‘We really did have a love relationship which he diminished by adding other women with it, acting like it was nothing,’ she says. ‘We had a very great love, really, but when he got famous he had to have the fruits of his fame. That’s what men get famous for, right? All the women in the world. I didn’t want to be part of a hundred women.’

W
ithin weeks of meeting Cupcakes, Bukowski was besotted with her, hopelessly in love with a woman less than half his age who was quite indifferent to him. She laughed at his depressions, flirted with other men, vanished for days on end and then popped up again as though nothing had happened to find him in a funk of depression with a face like the Siege of Stalingrad.

‘Cups, I can’t do this any more,’ he would say, miserably. ‘It’s tearing me apart.’

Cupcakes was unimpressed by his love poems. They were doggerel, in her opinion, and she enjoyed tormenting Bukowski by parodying his work in a bored, sing-song voice:

‘You see,’ she said. ‘I can write what you write, but better.’

‘That’s funny, Cups,’ he said with a hollow laugh. ‘Very funny, yeah. But we really have to end this.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s killing me.’

‘What are you
talking
about?’ she asked, speaking as if he were a stupid child. ‘You’ve watched too many soap operas.’ She grabbed his hand and pulled him up from the sofa. ‘Come on, let’s go. Let’s go to the track.’ She had a way of jerking him out of his depressions. Some redhead magic.

They got in Bukowski’s Volkswagen – which now had a hole in the windscreen where Cupcakes had put her foot through it – and drove to Hollywood Park to catch the first race. Cupcakes said to keep an eye on her because she sometimes wandered off when she was on pills and, sure enough, when he came back from placing his bet she was gone. He went to the ladies toilet, the first aid station and finally found her with another man.

The most any poet could do was write something about his beloved, and Bukowski wrote a whole book about Cupcakes,
Scarlet
, published in a limited edition by Black Sparrow Press. The four poems in the book show that lust was a large part of the attraction he felt for her:

In Cupcakes’ own copy he wrote: ‘For the girl who made me write these poems, for the girl who made me feel that feeling which comes so seldom in a lifetime.’ He presented it to her as a token of his adoration, a book all about her. She barely looked at it. ‘I didn’t have a tremendous amount of respect for his writing,’ she says. ‘His poetry was often negative and not complimentary. I thought I was just fodder.’ The book was tossed aside to get dusty and dog-eared, something she pulled out now and again to show friends.

Bukowski had to go away for a few days and tried to see Cupcakes to say goodbye, but she was nowhere to be found. He cruised Hollywood looking for her Camaro and, after he had been everywhere he could think of, he unhooked the Maltese military cross Grandfather Bukowski had given him – it hung from the rear view mirror of the Volkswagen – and draped it from the handle of her front door, as a sign that he had been trying to contact her.

Each time he heard the clicking of heels on the concrete path of his court, he stopped typing, hoping the sound would bring Cupcakes to him, but the women always passed by. Whenever the telephone rang, it was like the excitement he felt when his horse was in among the leaders heading for the post, but he was not a winner. In the middle of the night he drove back to her bungalow and, seeing that the cross was still there, left a note:

In the morning, when there was still no word, he went back and left a second note:

Hangover remorse followed:

And when she still didn’t call:

This behavior seemed excessive to Cupcakes, as it had to Linda King when Bukowski first fell for her. He was loving too passionately, considering the very short time they’d been together. However, Cupcakes would come to regret that she hadn’t appreciated the depth of his affection. ‘I didn’t take him seriously. I didn’t take myself seriously. I was just carefree and elusive and everything that drives a man crazy,’ she says. ‘I was just a silly kid.’ If Bukowski forced her to confront his feelings, if he tried to make her hear what she meant to him, she laughed it off. ‘I would make light of it, change the subject, because I wasn’t capable of loving anyone deeply, or getting attached to anyone then.’

They went to New York for a reading, booking into the room at the Chelsea Hotel where Janis Joplin had liked to stay, high above cacophonous West 23rd Street. It was one of the hottest days of the year and Cupcakes sat on the balcony to try and keep cool. Bukowski watched her from the bed, her red hair glowing in the late afternoon sun. He was feeling particularly close to her because she had fallen asleep on the flight over from Los Angeles, resting her head on his shoulder. He thought it was one of the most tender moments they had shared, even though he knew she had passed out because she was stoned. He couldn’t even wake her up for landing.

‘You know, Cups, the nicest thing you have ever done, the moment I will always remember, is when you laid your head on my shoulder during our plane ride,’ he said.

Cupcakes looked at him quizzically. ‘I remember thinking, “I can’t deal with this; what do I do with this?” I was too young.’ Instead of talking to him about his feelings, she decided to distract his attention. ‘Look!’ she shouted. ‘NO HANDS!’ She flung her arms out so she was balanced on the edge of the iron railing with nothing but the cheeks of her backside to stop herself falling. ‘Wheeeeeeee!’

Bukowski saw that her eyes were glittery from pills and booze. ‘Come on, Cups, come back in,’ he coaxed her, like a dog. ‘Get down now.’

‘Wheeeeeeeee!’

Then she fell, just catching herself before spinning down into the garbage cans.

The reading was at St Mark’s Church, on the corner of 2nd Avenue and 10th Street, and it was a sell-out. Bukowski walked to the stage swinging a six-pack of beer with Cupcakes swinging her hips behind him. ‘He was just swamped by his fans,’ says Gerard Malanga, who was taking photographs. ‘These were guys you never see at a poetry reading.’ It was a significant improvement on the last time he had been in the city with a cardboard suitcase and $7 in his pocket only to find ‘Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip’ relegated to the end pages of
Story
magazine.

He read five or six love poems to Cupcakes during the evening, but she was too stoned to know what was going on. Later that night, back at the hotel, she fell off the bed and didn’t even wake up.

Although he was infatuated with Cupcakes, Bukowski continued to see other women and corresponded with a number of female fans, young girls like Jo Jo Planteen, a twenty-two-year-old student from Sacramento who contacted him as a dare. Bukowski wrote that if Jo Jo ever came to Los Angeles she would find he was a champion at oral sex. He flew to Texas to see two women who had been writing to him, one of whom wanted to take him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. In September, he went to San Francisco for an assignation with a girlfriend of A.D. Winans. ‘That seemed to be a thing with Hank,’ says Winans. ‘When it came to friendships he would make it with your best girl, apparently, that was just one of his failings.’

There was no answer one day when John Martin called Bukowski on the telephone, so he drove down to Hollywood to check he was alright. Sitting on the porch were two blonde girls from Holland, aged about eighteen, dressed in jeans and tank-tops. ‘They were like little drops of dew on the leaf,’ says Martin. ‘They looked like they had never used a bad word in their life.’

‘Is Hank in?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, he’s sleeping.’

‘What are you guys doing here?’

‘We came from Amsterdam to fuck him,’ they answered, like they were waiting to get into Disneyland.

Another time the mail man came by and found three women waiting on Bukowski’s porch. ‘Hank, how do you do it, how do you get it?’ he asked. Bukowski replied that the problem was how to get rid of them.

Then there were the groupies who came up to him at poetry readings, giving him their telephone number and saying how much they loved his work. Bukowski once said this was the worst way to meet women, yet it is how he met Linda Lee Beighle who became his second wife.

Linda Lee was born in 1943 into a well-off Pennsylvania family. She ran away from home when she was a teenager and, in the
1960s, followed the hippy trail to India. Returning to the United States, she became a devotee of Meher Baba, the Indian guru who coined the phrase ‘don’t worry, be happy’, and worked for a television station in Miami, Florida, before moving to California where she opened a health food restaurant at Redondo Beach. When she discovered Bukowski was reading at The Troubadour in West LA, in the September of 1976, Linda Lee decided to try and meet him.

Before the show, Bukowski and Cupcakes were drinking in the bar with Joan Smith and her boyfriend. Joan was a former go-go dancer turned poet, and her boyfriend, who was buying champagne, was a magazine publisher. He wanted to get Bukowski to write for him, but Bukowski was unimpressed. ‘He was rich and Bukowski didn’t like rich people,’ says Joan. ‘He didn’t like being patronized.’ Bukowski drained his glass, told Joan she was getting fat, picked up a six-pack of beer, which had become a stage prop for him, and went out to face the crowd.

He read some of the new poems about Cupcakes, poems like ‘a stethoscope case’ which were later collected in the popular anthology,
Love is a Dog from Hell
.

‘That’s me!’ yelled Cupcakes. She was stumbling around in the audience, banging into tables. People laughed. She was totally out of it. ‘Hey, that’s me!’