Charles Bukowski (33 page)

The San Pedro house had been further improved with expensive furniture, an elaborate security system in case they were burglarized, even a lap pool to go with the jacuzzi. Bukowski found a swim and a plunge in the tub was relaxing when he came home from the track, and he had no compunction about enjoying his wealth in this way. ‘I have nothing against money; give me all the money you want. I will not refuse it,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve been dead broke so many times, I’ve been so dead broke, starved so long, I realize the value of money. It’s tremendous. Money is magic. I’ll take all I can get. I hope I never miss a meal again.’

He enjoyed picking up the check when he went out for dinner with friends, paying with one of his various gold cards, although he was disgruntled about paying for one particularly expensive evening with Sean Penn and Madonna considering they were a ‘couple of millionaires’.

After the divorce of his celebrity friends, Bukowski’s sympathies remained with Sean Penn and he turned Madonna down when her agent asked if he would pose with the star for her book, Sex. He told friends she behaved like she’d discovered the subject.

He refused other offers of work that would bring in big money, but which would inconvenience him in some way, including $25,000 to make a television programme with PBS and $10,000 to give two readings in Holland. He said he didn’t want to travel, and was now rich enough not to.

A producer wrote to Bukowski, asking to talk to him about a television series. He attached two $100 bills to the first page of the letter and a third $100 bill to the second page, to hold his interest. Bukowski took the $300 to the track and, when he returned home, he called the producer’s number. The idea was to make a sit-com based on the life of a disreputable old writer, someone like Bukowski, with Harry Dean Stanton starring. Bukowski knew the actor, so he called and asked what he thought. Stanton said he didn’t know anything about the project, but would like to see Bukowski anyway so it was arranged that they would meet the producer for a drink at the house in San Pedro.

Bukowski got in early from the track and relaxed in the hot tub before receiving his guests, already having doubts about the project:

When they met that evening, Harry Dean Stanton warned Bukowski that network sit-coms used canned laughter, which sounded bad, and the content was inevitably censored because of the sponsors. Maybe if they could take the project to Home
Box Office, where they would have more freedom to portray Bukowski’s work honestly, it might work. The talking went on for several hours and finally the producer lost his temper, muttering it wasn’t fair the way movie actors had a downer on television.
They
made plenty of lousy films. ‘I remember saying that in that format, network television, there is no way you could do Hank’s work or do anything about Hank,’ says Harry Dean Stanton. ‘Actually the producer wasn’t all that happy about it. But I think I was dead right.’

Another evening Bukowski, Linda Lee and Harry Dean Stanton went out on the town with Sean Penn. They had tickets for a concert by the rock band U2 and made the trip to the show by limousine.

Dodger Stadium was pulsating with light and sound when they took their seats in the VIP section. The lead singer, Bono, was a fan of Bukowski’s work and the group had recorded a tribute song, ‘Dirty World’, using words from
The Days Run Away Like Wild
Horses Over the Hills
.

‘This concert is dedicated to Linda and Charles Bukowski!’ Bono shouted, and the multitude roared their approval as if they knew who Bukowski was. It made him laugh.

They went to the bar afterwards and Bukowski got loaded on vodka-7s. He nodded hello to celebrities he had come to know since
Barfly
, although he worried about hanging out with film directors, pop singers and actors. He mostly disliked their work and, after years of being true to his art, he hoped he wasn’t being
sucked into the show business maw. The only solution was to have another vodka-7. He ended up having so many he couldn’t remember a word Bono said to him, and Bukowski later collapsed drunk on the front steps of his house.

He decided to cut back on schmoozing with celebrities, everyone except Sean Penn whom he felt close to. ‘Most of these people have pretense and Hank was not somebody who accepts pretense,’ says Linda Lee.

If he had to, he was ready to give it all up and go back to the tar paper shack in Atlanta and live on candy bars, so long as he could write the way he wanted, without selling out. And he kept writing, turning out five hundred poems a year. He also began thinking about a new novel, something different. After all, he had exhausted the events of his life. It would be a detective story, of sorts,
Pulp
– a homage to bad writing.

He was still not wholly well, complaining of occasional pains in his head, stiffness in his back and neck and, in the summer of 1992, he underwent an operation to remove cataracts which seriously impaired his vision.

There were other irritants, too: readers he called ‘Chinaski freaks’. They turned up at his door demanding autographs, giggling on his porch while he explained he did not receive uninvited visitors. One group of fans parked a camper van in the street and had a party so they could say they had been drunk at Bukowski’s house. It drove him half-mad. ‘He hated people coming round and just sitting there wanting to have beers with Charles Bukowski,’ says Linda Lee. ‘It horrified him to think about doing something like that.’

Although these people said they had read his work, they seemed to have no understanding of who he was. Several wrote to say they liked his books so much they stole them from public libraries, as if that was something he would approve of. Bukowski was disgusted. If it hadn’t been for the public library system, he might never have discovered
Ask The Dust
.

Fans who approached him with consideration, and did not impose on his privacy, were often rewarded with letters, poems and sometimes drawings. He also continued to support small magazines by submitting work to editors across America and also
in Britain, writing his return address on the front of the envelope in case they were rejected, which still happened on occasion.

Book dealer Ed Smith wrote asking if he could publish a Bukowski news letter, which he wanted to call
Sure
, a word Bukowski often used when he signed off at the end of his letters. Bukowski agreed so long as he didn’t have to contribute anything. The news letter’s circulation grew until there were hundreds of subscribers around the world, a cross-section of society ranging from laborers to doctors, but with an emphasis on white collar workers, ‘people who were the exact opposite of him’, as Smith says.

At times, Bukowski became irritated by Linda Lee’s sociability and the people she wanted them to entertain at the house. Linda’s mother visited several times and stayed for Christmas causing Bukowski to reflect upon the best Christmas he ever had. It was in Philadelphia. He saw no one, pulled the shades down and went to bed.

The date he looked forward to each year was 2 January, the anniversary of his $100-a-month deal with John Martin. It was the luckiest break of his life. Twenty-three years later Martin gave Bukowski his latestraise, bringing the pay check to $7,000-a-month. Nineteen of his books were in print, each title selling at least ten thousand copies a year in America, and new markets were opening up around the world all the time with his books being translated into more than a dozen languages, including French, German, Spanish, even Japanese.

Black Sparrow printed a Bukowski poem in a booklet each New Year, as a gift for friends. The 1993 poem was ‘those marvelous lunches’ and Bukowski sat down to sign the series of 226, making them worth several hundred dollars each. It was only a couple of years since he had staggered drunk into Book City on Hollywood Boulevard and offered to sign any of his books in exchange for the price of a beer.

‘Those marvelous lunches’ recalls school days during the depression when Bukowski’s parents gave him peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, because they were short of money. Bukowski had been so hungry he forced himself to make friends with
Richardson, a fat ‘sissy’ whose parents sent him to school with a lunch pail stocked with ham sandwiches, beef sandwiches, fruit, and a thermos of chocolate milk. Richardson gave Bukowski potato chips and, in exchange, Bukowski kept him company on the way home.

It rained that afternoon as Bukowski autographed the books, adding a drawing of a man with a bottle of booze. When he was finished, he wrote a covering letter to John Martin sincerely thanking him for the raise to $7,000 a month which he considered an astonishing amount of money especially as they had not set out to become rich, but to publish books that they liked. He had lived through the Depression and now they had both made it through the recession and were still on top of their game. Maybe better than ever. He warned he was getting old and might slip in the future, but believed that, even with slippage, they would continue to have luck so long as the gods remained kind.

P
ulp
was the first novel Bukowski had written which was not explicitly autobiographical, or even addressed his usual interests. Indeed, it broke all his rules, being conceived as a pastiche of a Mickey Spillane crime story. The plot, such as it is, concerns down-at-heel private eye Nicky Belane who is hired by two clients to investigate cases that are semi-surreal and also have metaphorical meaning. Lady Death asks him to find the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose melancholy novel
Journey to the End of the Night
was one of Bukowski’s favorite books. The second client, John Barton (a character based on John Martin) asks Belane to find The Red Sparrow.

Belane starts his search for Céline at a Hollywood book store run by Red, a character based on Bukowski’s friend, Sholom ‘Red’ Stodolsky. When Belane walks into the store, Red tells him he has just missed ‘that drunk Chinaski’ and that Céline is in back. Belane goes over to talk to him and Red, a crusty old fellow in real life, also the proprietor of a Hollywood book store, gets upset and shouts at them:

Even though he was apparently writing a crime story and had dispensed with the character of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski was still writing about his own life, and
Pulp
is full of in-jokes that only really make sense to those readers who are familiar with both his previous books, and something of his life story. He had been working sporadically at this peculiar project since 1991 and it was not going smoothly. A crime story, even one as unorthodox as
Pulp
, has to be plotted and Bukowski kept writing his hero into corners. When this happened, he abandoned the novel and wrote poems, which he said kept coming like ‘hot turds’. By the spring of 1993, two years after starting
Pulp
, he was still only three quarters of the way through, and then he fell ill again.

He had myelogenous leukemia. A white blood cell had mutated and replicated itself, spreading the disease throughout his body. Cancer was another word for it. The doctor told him the bleak truth was that, without treatment, he might only live six months. Or they could try chemotherapy, which often had unpleasant side effects and still might not save him. Bukowski
said he would do whatever they suggested and checked into the San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, a place he had driven by many times.

He must have dropped off to sleep because, when he opened his eyes, he saw yellow flowers. Bukowski once wrote he liked yellow so much he could eat it.

‘Frances?’ he asked, focusing on the mother of his child. He had never got used to her new name, FrancEyE. ‘Frances, what are you doing here?’

‘I just thought you should have some flowers,’ she said. Marina had told her he was sick and she caught the bus from Santa Monica, wanting to see him before the chemotherapy started.

‘Well, you know, I don’t want visitors.’

‘I know. I just thought you should have some flowers … and I love you,’ she said. She patted his hands, the hands which had held their daughter, and said good-bye to him.

A catheter was inserted into a main vein and the chemotherapy started. Bukowski lost his strength and his hair fell out in long silvery strands on the pillows. Linda Lee brought food from home each day and hugged and kissed him. She often stayed through the night watching the IV lines to make sure there were no air bubbles, calling the nurses when he wanted help. Bukowski was bleeding from different parts of the body, the strangest parts, including his
forehead. He spent sixty-four days in hospital over the following months, going home between treatments. Then the doctors said the cancer was in remission.

Taylor Hackford was in New York producing a movie when he called home to Los Angeles to get his messages. ‘Hello, Taylor Hackford, you don’t know me,’ said a man’s voice on his answer machine, ‘but I’m a friend of Hank’s and I just thought you should know Hank died tonight at 8.05.’ The caller hung up without leaving his name.

Not sure quite what to do, Hackford called Bukowski’s number and, when the answer machine clicked on, he left a cautious message.

‘Linda, this is Taylor. I’m in New York. I just got a really horrible message about Hank. I’m not going to say what it is, but I would appreciate you calling me back …’

‘Taylor, baby, what’s happening?’

‘Shit! Hank?’ asked Hackford.

‘Yeah, baby.’

‘You won’t believe this, but some guy called my house and left a message on the machine you died tonight.’

‘What an aaaasss-hole,’ said Bukowski.

‘I sat on the bed and I just wept.’

‘I’m touched, baby. I’m touched.’

Rumors of Bukowski’s death had gone round on four occasions in recent months. Nobody knew for certain how it was happening, but Bukowski believed it to be malicious and wrote a poem about the jealous, failed writers he presumed were responsible for upsetting his family and friends.

It was a long time since Hackford had seen Bukowski, and the sorrow he felt when he heard he might be dead reminded him how much he cared, so they arranged to meet at San Pedro. ‘He had cancer. He talked about that,’ says Hackford. ‘He had been in the hospital once. He said, “It’s slow-moving and I’m writing every day.”’ Hackford brought champagne and two bottles of red wine over to the house and introduced Bukowski and Linda Lee to his girlfriend, the actress Helen Mirren, whom Bukowski had watched in Peter Greenaway’s sexually explicit movie,
The Cook, The Thief,
His Wife & Her Lover
.

‘Yeah, I saw you taking it all …’ he said mischievously as he greeted her, ‘lying there in that freezer …’

She laughed and they were soon emptying bottles like old times. They went out for Thai food, drinking beer at the restaurant, and came back to the house for more wine. ‘I stumbled out of there at a quarter to six in the morning,’ says Hackford. ‘Helen and I and Hank had drunk seven bottles of wine – Linda had stayed on rum and coke – seven bottles of regular wine and a bottle of champagne.’

After the initial euphoria of being in remission, Bukowski gave up alcohol altogether and drank only herbal tea and mineral water. He had been cutting back ever since his bout of TB and found that he didn’t miss the booze at all. He quit smoking, too.

An emaciated old man, invalided out of the struggle of life, he spent the days quietly in the garden sitting under the walnut tree. He took up transcendental meditation, at Linda Lee’s suggestion, and agreed to try the alternative healing treatments of the self-help guru, Deepak Chopra: mind over matter and rubbing oil into the body to remove impurities. He had always scoffed at New Age ideas in the past, but with ‘the dark angel’ of death hovering, he was willing to try anything, as he wrote in ‘decline’:

He decided to complete
Pulp
while he could, knowing in his heart it would probably be his last book, and killed off Nicky Belane with four gun shots to the gut. Bukowski then wrote an ending which was partly a contemplation of his own death. As the detective lies dying, the Red Sparrow appears before him like a vision of God, metaphorically recalling the Black Sparrow which had transformed his own life.

Bukowski was proud of all his books, but
Pulp
had a unique place in his affections and those close to him draw attention to its metaphysical aspects. ‘To me, it was incredible,’ says Linda Lee, ‘funny and poignant, sort of surrealistic.’ But aside from addressing impending death, it is hard to find much to commend
Pulp
. In abandoning the subject matter he knew about and could write convincingly about – low-paid work, relationships between men and women, and the predicament of the urban under-class – he seemed lost. It is significant that such a fluid writer, who did not like revising his manuscripts, had so much trouble getting the book how he wanted it. ‘He completely rewrote it after he finished the first draft,’ reveals John Martin. ‘He just didn’t like it. He said it was bad writing.’

There was little to do after the book was finished, ‘horseless days’, not particularly uncomfortable but without action. He listened to Linda Lee vacuuming, the telephone ringing. A salesman called, trying to sell them the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. He watched his cats basking in the sun on the red brick patio. The
fattest, Craney, lay with its paws in the air oblivious to danger and its master’s illness. Bukowski followed shadows as the sun moved round the house, and he drank gallons of water to try and wash away the metallic taste that had stayed with him from chemotherapy.

In the evenings, when he had enough strength, he went upstairs and wrote contemplative end-game poems:

In August, Bukowski and Linda Lee drove down to a San Pedro store, Vinegar Hill Books, where Bukowski was presented with an elaborate birthday cake. He signed books and allowed himself to be the center of attention as his fans made speeches in his honor and fussed over him. It was peculiar to have become respectable at last. But never wholly so. As he prepared to leave, Bukowski froze the smile on the face of a newspaper journalist, saying: ‘I can see your headline: “Old man of seventy-three signs his last books.”’

When Michael Montfort visited the house, Bukowski spoke to him about
Pulp
, which John Martin was planning to publish
after a volume of letters. ‘I finally finished it,’ he told Montfort and Montfort’s friend, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, who had come to interview him, revealing his doubts about the work. ‘It’s going to ruin my reputation. Lot of bad stuff in it. I hope I’ve done it on purpose,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what made me write it. I guess I got tired of writing about myself, about what happened to me. So I wrote this entirely fictional thing about this fifty-five-year-old detective. Of course, part of the way he acts and talks is also me. I couldn’t get away from it.’

Montfort had heard the doctors thought Bukowski might make a sustained recovery, but it didn’t seem possible. ‘I thought their view was way too optimistic. So I had kind of mixed feelings meeting my best friend, kind of knowing he is dying, and the doctor says he is not.’

‘Michael, we haven’t paid the hospital bills yet,’ said Bukowski.

‘You are insured, Hank. What’s the problem? Even if it’s $100,000, you’ve got the money.’

Bukowski agreed, but he still seemed worried, never having come to terms with the fact he would not have to think about money again, with the house and cars paid for, and hundreds of thousands in the bank. If he sold everything and pooled his capital, he would have the best part of a million dollars.