Charles Bukowski (25 page)

There was a group of travelling salesmen singing traditional German folk songs and, although Bukowski did not understand the words, he sensed their pomposity and started dancing and singing in mockery, prancing on the tables and clapping his hands.

They went up to Bukowski’s room where Degen pretended to interview him using a shower head as a microphone. Bukowski played along with the game for a while and then hurled the shower head into the street, bringing the hotelier pounding up
the stairs to see what was going on. Degen was thrown out and Thomas Schmitt was escorted from the building. Bukowski went out on the balcony and bellowed across the frigid Rhine to them. ‘Thomas, you marvellous motherfucker, a long life to you!’ he yelled. ‘A LONG LIFE TO GERMANY!’

It was book sales in Europe rather than success in the United States that earned Bukowski his first substantial royalties, so much money that his accountant advised him to get a mortgage to reduce his tax liability. This led Bukowski to take a closer look at his general finances and, for the first time, he began to question his business arrangement with John Martin.

At the time, Bukowski was being paid around $6,500 a year by Black Sparrow Press, advance royalties for the novels and books of poems and short stories published in America, apart from those published by City Lights Books which brought in extra income. It was not very much to live on. After paying child support and rent, Bukowski complained he was probably eligible for food stamps. He had also begun to resent producing original artwork for special editions of each new book, the habit he and Martin had established years before. He informed Martin in one angry letter that he felt like wet back labor and reminded him there were New York publishers interested in his work. Several friends had advised him to leave Black Sparrow and Linda Lee, in particular, felt he had been loyal enough. In a June, 1978, letter to Weissner, Bukowski wrote that Martin also took twenty per cent of foreign sales:

His concerns came to a head late on the evening of 11 June, 1978, when he telephoned Martin at home. He said he was no longer happy with being sent a monthly check, currently $500. In future he wanted specific information about sales and a reckoning-up twice a year. If it meant he was paid less some months, that
was fine. There was another complaint: he was frustrated with the delay in publishing
Women
, which he considered the best work he had done. The manuscript had been with Martin almost a year and still the book was not out.

‘It was the only rancorous call, and he didn’t even remember it the next day,’ says Martin, but although he assured him they had never been more than a few hundred dollars apart, if that, he agreed to send a regular royalty statement twice a year in future. The monthly payments continued as before. ‘In the thirty years I published him we had remarkably few tense moments and I always understood that he was basically in charge.’

Reassured his affairs were in order, and encouraged by a check for $9,000 from his publishers in France, Bukowski and Linda Lee began looking at property to buy. They went all over the Los Angeles area, going as far as Santa Monica and up into Topanga Canyon, before finding an old two-storey detached house in San Pedro, the port town at the southern edge of the Los Angeles sprawl.

The house, which had an asking price of a little over $80,000, had been built on the crest of a small hill overlooking the harbor. There was a hedge in front which Bukowski liked (privacy was becoming increasingly important now he was famous). The living room was large, with an open fire, and sliding glass doors led into a garden planted with roses and fruit trees. Upstairs – he had never lived in a house with stairs before – was a master bedroom and a box room with a balcony overlooking the harbor, a perfect place for writing.

It was strange to be buying property after a lifetime of renting. Frightening, too. What if he couldn’t make the payments? But he decided to take the risk and was soon pottering happily in his garden with Butch, the stray cat he brought with him from Carlton Way, a suburban home owner at last.

One night the telephone rang and a foreign-sounding fellow introduced himself as Barbet Schroeder, a film director. He wanted to meet to discuss a movie project. Bukowski’s number was unlisted, now he had got laid as much as the average man, and he did not take kindly to the intrusion. ‘Fuck off, you French frog,’ he said.

Schroeder was thirty-seven, born in Iran and raised in France. He had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before becoming a promoter of jazz concerts, then a journalist, an actor and finally a director of underground movies. He was a charming man, both in person and on the telephone, and managed to persuade Bukowski to meet him, telling him he had read all his books and wanted to make a ninety-minute film from one of his stories, not to exploit the work but to pay homage to it. Bukowski was not sure, wondering whether any of his stories could stretch to such a long adaptation. Schroeder seemed sincere, however, and Bukowski liked him. He said he would think it over but first he had to go to Paris to appear on a TV show.

Apostrophes
was a discussion program broadcast on national French television. It was hosted by Bernard Pivot, a well-known personality in France, and had an audience of several millions. The TV company were so eager to have Bukowski on the show that they paid for flights from Los Angeles, for him and Linda Lee, and put them up in a hotel in Paris. Bukowski figured the show would help his European sales, and he and Linda Lee planned a holiday around it, hoping to visit Carl Weissner and Linda Lee’s mother who was staying in the South of France.

Bukowski arrived at the Channel 2 building forty-five minutes early. He had stipulated he wanted two bottles of good white wine delivered to him before he went on the show and the first arrived while he was in make-up. He was soon drinking wine from the bottle, and was very drunk indeed when he was led through to meet his fellow guests. These included a distinguished psychiatrist, who had treated Antonin Artaud, and an attractive female author, of what exactly Bukowski was never sure. They were seated round a coffee table on which were arranged several of Bukowski’s books.

Bukowski was the star guest, so Pivot began by asking him how it felt to be fêted in Europe, to be on French television.

‘I know a great many American writers who would like to be on this program now,’ replied Bukowski, speaking even more ponderously than usual. He was puffing on a
sher
bidi
, a type of Indian cigarette Linda Lee had introduced him to. It looked like a joint and smelt awful. He was also obviously drunk, slurring his
words and nodding his head. ‘It doesn’t mean so much to me …’ he said.

Pivot tried to develop a discussion from this unpromising start, but Bukowski seemed to have trouble following the translation so Pivot turned to the lady writer. After a few minutes Bukowski broke into the conversation, saying he would like to see more of the woman’s legs. More specifically, he wanted to examine her ankles. That way he felt he might know how good a writer she was.

Pivot gave him a withering look and Bukowski told him he was a ‘fucking son of a fucking bitch asshole’ which set the translators an interesting problem as the show was going out live. Pivot fully understood what Bukowski had said. He put his hand over the American’s foul mouth and told him to shut up.

‘Don’t you ever say that to me,’ Bukowski growled.

He pulled the translation device from his ear, rose unsteadily to his feet and turned to leave. Pivot bid him au revoir with a Gallic shrug. The other guests watched in astonishment. Bukowski stumbled momentarily, steadied himself by touching the head of the man next to him, and then tottered off, as the translators and audience rocked with laughter.

Bukowski and Linda Lee made their way down to the reception area where they were met by police. ‘When Hank saw that, he got this crazy little fiction going in his head, like the enemy is approaching,’ says Linda Lee. He pulled out his blade, a small hunting knife he always carried, and brandished it at them. There was a scuffle, but Linda Lee kept her cool and watched where Bukowski’s hands went. She grabbed his blade from him and then they both got the hell out of there.

The TV appearance was punk-like at a time when punk music and attitudes were fashionable in Europe. (He had been interviewed the day before by a punk journalist who endeared himself to Bukowski by asking for heroin – Bukowski said he wasn’t carrying – and by saying he liked pollution, which Bukowski thought very funny.) Consequently his antics on
Apostrophes
made headlines in France’s daily newspapers. Some took the view that it was a scandal. Others were of the opinion Bukowski had been a breath of fresh air on an establishment show.

‘You were great, bastard,’ said the excitable journalist who rang from
Le Monde
. ‘Those others couldn’t masturbate.’

‘What did I do?’ asked Bukowski, his hangover obscuring the events of the previous evening.

‘He didn’t remember anything, of course, but the whole of France was running to book shops to buy his books,’ says Barbet Schroeder. ‘In a few hours they were all sold out.’

A couple of days later Bukowski and Linda Lee were in Nice on the French Riviera, visiting Linda Lee’s mother, when a waiter in a café recognized Bukowski and asked for his autograph. He signed obligingly and then glanced across at the neighboring café where he saw five more waiters watching him. When they saw that Bukowski had noticed, the waiters bowed solemnly in unison to show their respect, and then went about their business again. It was a remarkable moment for a man who had spent more than half his life as an unknown writer, a humble postal clerk, but then so many things were new and strange now Bukowski was a success.

M
ost of Bukowski’s former girlfriends had no idea he was using them as material for a novel, and he certainly never asked permission to write about their sex lives. So when
Women
was finally published after a long delay, in December 1978, it was the cause of some consternation to those women who had shared his life before he settled down with Linda Lee Beighle. The embarrassment was further compounded by the fact that
Women
sold more than any of his other books.

Linda King was not fooled by the prominent disclaimer:

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:

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:

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 …