Charles Bukowski (6 page)

When there was money, he didn’t work at all but hit the bars with Jane. Many of his best stories and poems are based on the adventures they had, including the richly comic poem, ‘fire station’, which he dedicated to her. It describes a day when the narrator and his girl wander into a fire station. She starts flirting with the firemen, and he settles down to play blackjack. The firemen slip upstairs to take turns having sex with the girl, and the boyfriend takes $5 from each man when they come back down. Then the alarm goes off.

The inference in this poem, and other pieces he wrote, is that Jane was a woman of such loose morality she was virtually a prostitute. Whether this was the case or not, the relationship left Bukowski with a very poor opinion of women. He often called his girlfriends ‘whores’ or ‘bitches’ and described sex in brutal language, frequently using ‘rape’ as a synonym for intercourse. Linda King believes he expected all his girlfriends to behave as Jane had. ‘It sounded like she was an absolute sleep-around what-ever,’ she says. ‘She was an alcoholic and she went out and fucked whoever would give her some booze. If he didn’t get home, his woman would be gone. He talked about her a lot.’

Bukowski first worked for the post office as a temporary mail carrier for two weeks over Christmas, 1950. As he would later write in his novel,
Post
Office
, it began as a mistake when the drunk up the hill told him they would take just about anybody.
Fifteen months later he was taken on as a full-time carrier at $1.61 an hour and he held this job for the next three years.

When he got back to the court on South Coronado Street, where he and Jane were living, she was often gone, the bed unmade and dirty dishes in the sink. Sometimes he found her in one of the bars on Alvarado Street, sitting with a man who had been buying her drinks. Maybe she went out back with him, too. When he couldn’t find her, he drank on his own, imagining her in bed with some sailor or salesman she was calling ‘daddy’.

Sometimes he invited the barflies back to his room to drink and keep him company, and one night he awoke to find a body in bed with him. He decided to take the opportunity to fulfill a long-held fantasy of having anal sex. ‘You know, I thought I screwed a woman in the ass one night, and I screwed a man in the ass,’ he said years later. ‘It was a friend of mine staying there, and I thought it was a girl called Mystery and, uh, you know, I was kinda drunk, laying there, and I tried a few motions, and I thought, “Well, she doesn’t seem to mind,” you know. I gave her a little more (I don’t have too much, you know), and pretty soon I gave her it all, and I heard … uh … I looked at the back of the head, and this was my friend, B––! I said, “God Almighty!” I drew that thing out.’

He had been drinking hard for more than ten years, cheap wine, green beer, whiskey when he could get it, not always eating well and smoking heavily. He was still a young man, but he had never been particularly healthy and in the spring of 1955 he paid the price for this dissolute life. He was at work at the post office when he began to feel ill, and went home to their new apartment on North Westmoreland Avenue. By morning he was vomiting blood and, as he had no medical insurance and no savings, the ambulance took him to the charity ward of LA County. He had a bleeding ulcer and needed a transfusion, but if he couldn’t establish any blood credit with the hospital, he was told he couldn’t get any blood. It seemed they were waging a war of attrition against him. Without blood, he would die. Once he was dead, he would cease to be a problem. Ironically, the one member of Bukowski’s family who did have blood credit was his father and it was because of Henry that Bukowski was given the transfusion which saved his life.

He went back to Jane afterwards and told her the doctors said if he ever drank again it would kill him, which was good straight advice, and maybe it was even true, but what the hell else was there to do?

Hollywood Park was the track, a huge arena in Inglewood near Los Angeles airport. The crowd put Bukowski off at first; so many people and all apparently mindless, drunk, yelling like maniacs. Then he began to get interested in the psychology of gambling and factored the stupidity of the crowd into a system of laying bets. He figured that whichever way they betted was probably wrong and, if he watched the odds changing on the tote board in the final minutes before the race, he might pick the winner. It was a system, one of many he tried over the years.

The horses leapt from the gate and began pounding the dirt track, the crowd roaring them on, louder and louder as the horses turned into the final furlong and charged to the post – a crescendo of excitement – then a collective sigh of disbelief, of being gypped, because the crowd never won. But Bukowski found he held a winning ticket and, like many people trapped in low-paid work, he came to see racing as a way of getting free from everything that oppressed him. ‘I piss away time and money at the racetrack because I am insane. I am hoping to make enough money so I will not have to work any longer in slaughterhouses, in post offices, at docks, in factories,’ he said, explaining his love of the sport. ‘The track does help in certain ways – I see the faces of greed, the hamburger faces; I see the faces in early dream and I see the faces later when the same nightmare returns. You cannot see this too often. It is a mechanic of life.’

The great dream was that, if he studied the form and perfected his system (it was never exactly right), maybe he could quit the 8 to 5 and make it at the track. He tried it a couple of times, once enjoying a winning streak so long he walked off his job and followed the races round southern California, eating steak dinners in different restaurants each night, nice quiet places by the ocean, and then resting up in comfortable motels. He started to drink again, cautiously at first, diluting wine with milk in case the doctor had been telling the truth. But he didn’t die. So he had a beer, and then a whiskey. Soon he was drinking like old times. Even better, he was drinking and making it at the track. What did the doctors know?

But winning streaks always end and gamblers wind up broker than before. Rent money gone. Gas money gone. Busted. Things got so bad Jane had to get a job so they would have food on the table. But she began to suspect Bukowski was cheating on her, seeing another woman when she was out at work, so she left him. Now he had no money, no job and no woman. At least it helped his writing, as he explained: ‘After losing a week’s pay in four hours it is very difficult to come to your room and face the typewriter and fabricate a lot of lacy bullshit.’

T
here was a period of time in the early 1950s when Bukowski had trouble getting anything published, and became so desperate he stooped to using emotional blackmail. ‘He wrote to me and said to please publish his poems, else he was going to commit suicide,’ says Judson Crews, who edited literary magazines in New Mexico. ‘I simply turned around and sent his poems right back. He obviously didn’t mean it, or else he didn’t
really
mean it.’

So when Barbara Frye, the editor of
Harlequin
magazine, advertised that she wanted poems from new writers, Bukowski promptly sent a bundle of material to her address in Wheeler, Texas. And he was delighted when she wrote back saying she accepted the poems for publication and, moreover, considered Bukowski the greatest poet since William Blake.

A correspondence developed that quickly became intimate. Barbara wrote that she was a single woman with a slight physical deformity, a problem with her neck which she feared might prevent her finding a husband. She repeated this sad story in a number of letters, becoming quite plaintive on the subject of being left on the shelf, and Bukowski couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, especially as she had been so kind about his work. One night he dashed off a letter to Texas telling Barbara to relax, for Christ’s sake, and stop worrying about not finding a husband. She sounded like a really nice girl and, in fact, come to that, he’d marry her himself! He forgot about it the next day, but Barbara replied that she accepted.

She wrote to say she was quitting her job in Wheeler and catching a bus to Los Angeles, giving details of when Bukowski should meet her at the bus terminal. In the meantime, she sent photographs of herself, and when Bukowski saw the photographs he really started to worry.

Barbara had two vertebrae missing from her neck which, together with a slight curvature of the spine, gave the impression she was permanently hunching her shoulders. It also meant she couldn’t turn her head. She looked very odd indeed, as her cousin Tom Frye explains: ‘Hers was an obvious deformity because you could tell it as far as you could see her. Her chin sat right on the ribs of her chest. She was a plain girl, short with no neck.’

Bukowski prepared himself for the worst, but when Barbara stepped down from the bus he didn’t think she looked that bad, certainly attractive enough to go to bed with. So he took her back to his apartment on North Westmoreland and that evening they tried to make love.

He worked away for what seemed hours, but no matter what he did, or what fantasy images he conjured up, he couldn’t come and it was a relief when Barbara climaxed and fell asleep. Bukowski lay awake afterwards, smoking cigarettes, wondering what the hell was wrong. Finally, he decided that Barbara had ‘a big pussy’. This was the real reason no man would marry the poor creature. It was nothing to do with her neck. Her pussy was so big a fellow couldn’t feel what he was doing.

‘Barbara, I understand,’ he said, when she woke the next morning. ‘But we’ll go through with it. I won’t back out.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I mean, you’ve got this big pussy. You know, last night.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘You weren’t even in there.’

‘But what in the hell? You were moaning and groaning. I think you climaxed.’

‘I thought that was a new way of doing things … I didn’t know.’

‘You mean I wasn’t even inside of you?

‘No.’

Bukowski later confessed he was so sexually naïve that, unless
a woman placed his penis inside her, he was not at all sure what to do. They tried again, with Barbara guiding him in, and he was relieved to find the fit was snug and he was able to ejaculate. Satisfied everything was as it should be, they drove across the desert to Las Vegas, Nevada, where they married on 29 October, 1955.

Like most of the women in Bukowski’s life, Barbara became the subject of many poems and works of prose – most notably she was Joyce in
Post Office
– but little he wrote about her matched up with reality.

Barbara’s great-grandfather was a pioneer settler of the west who arrived in the Texas panhandle in 1877 to claim eight thousand acres as The Frye Ranch. The family ran cattle, bred horses and struck oil, although that was not the limit of their achievements. Barbara’s cousin Jack Frye invented an airplane called The Frye Interceptor, and co-founded TWA with Howard Hughes. Another cousin made a fortune training pilots. Barbara Nell Frye was born on 6 January, 1932, making her eleven years younger than Bukowski. Her parents divorced when she was two, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents, Lilly and Tobe Frye, whom she called Mummy and Daddy Tobe just as Joyce in
Post Office
calls her father ‘Daddy Wally’. (Bukowski writes: ‘Silly bitch … he wasn’t her daddy.’) She graduated high school, went to college and, through Daddy Tobe’s influence, was elected Wheeler court clerk.

Barbara had never had a regular boyfriend and she told no one of her decision to marry Bukowski, just taking off for California with the little money she had in her savings account and, despite Bukowski persistently referring to her as ‘the millionairess’, this was the only money she had all the time they were together. Her father said she was crazy to marry a man she didn’t know, but other members of the family were more understanding. ‘It didn’t surprise me too much because I guess that was her only chance,’ says her cousin, Sunny Thomas.

In
Post Office
, Bukowski writes about Chinaski visiting Joyce’s home town and the impression given is that they settled in Texas for a while. Although Bukowski and his bride did visit after getting married, it was only for a couple of weeks when her grandparents, who didn’t approve of the marriage, were on vacation. Bukowski
arrived in his regular city clothes and had to be fitted out in a set of Daddy Tobe’s cowboy duds, which made him look ridiculous. His next shock was discovering that Wheeler was in a dry county.

When they got back to LA Barbara published a special issue of
Harlequin
featuring eight of Bukowski’s poems, including the accomplished ‘Death Wants More Death’, and they co-edited issues of
Harlequin
with Bukowski dealing out rough treatment to contributors he didn’t like, which was most of them, and getting his own back on poet-editors who had rejected his work. One of his first victims was Judson Crews whose poems he rejected as pay-back for the snub he’d received. Another victim was Leslie Woolf Hedley, a poet who had responded to Barbara’s advertisement. Bukowski thought Woolf Hedley’s poems awful and told Barbara they couldn’t publish them, even though they were already accepted. ‘She wrote me a letter that she wasn’t going to use the poems because Bukowski refused to do so. He was against it,’ says Woolf Hedley, who considered taking legal action against them. ‘Mine were not quite as avant-garde as he would like. He was a professional alien, a person who liked to be alienated, and I think he played that to the hilt.’

Barbara was not content to live in a downtown apartment building, so they moved to a little house in the LA suburb of Echo Park. She also made it clear they wouldn’t be living on her family’s money, telling Bukowski she intended to prove to the folks back home they could make it on their own. Bukowski, who had been forced to resign from the post office after his hemorrhage, would have to start thinking about a career. He was working at a typical ‘shit job’ at the time, shipping clerk at the Graphic Arts Center on West 7th Street. He despatched consignments of ink, paper and pens from the warehouse to trucks that pulled up in the alley and spent a good part of each shift swigging beer in the Seven-G’s (sic) bar round the back. It was the same old routine and he liked the people at Graphic Arts, but Barbara said it wouldn’t do at all and got it into her head he might become a commercial artist. He had a modest talent for drawing and, with some schooling, maybe he could get himself a job in an advertising agency, or with a newspaper. She persuaded him to enroll in classes at Los Angeles City College, and started taking him out to galleries.

The college work involved designing Christmas advertisements
for Texaco gas stations and Bukowski’s idea, which he thought a good one, was to have a Christmas tree with the Texaco star at the top. The teacher told him he didn’t want designs featuring Christmas trees because Christmas trees were passé. Although he had been doing reasonably well until then, scoring a B average, he lost interest after this and eventually dropped out of the course. But when Christmas rolled around, he was amused to see Texaco stations had posters with a star on a tree.

‘Look, baby, my drawing,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you proud of me?’

‘You’re always laughing at yourself,’ Barbara replied, exasperated with his lack of ambition.

She was unable to understand how a man who had been published in a magazine with Jean-Paul Sartre could laze round the house drinking beer and reading the racing form, and was less than impressed when Bukowski went back to work for the post office as a trainee distribution clerk for $1.82 an hour.

‘You didn’t turn out the way I thought you would,’ she told him when they were several months into the marriage. ‘I expected you to be more fiery, more explosive.’

For his part, Bukowski was becoming irritated by what he perceived as Barbara’s phoniness. He noticed she affected a fake English accent to answer the telephone. She never knew when he was being funny. Conversely, she thought he was joking when he was serious. In fact, the more he thought about her personality, the less he liked it. She was a ‘cold, vindictive, unkind, snob bitch’.

‘He was a screwball,’ says Barbara’s aunt, Leah Belle Wilson, who received a visit from the couple in San Bernardino. Bukowski was surly and uncommunicative and, when she tried to engage him in conversation about his work, just chit chat – did he like his job? – he grunted that he didn’t want to talk about it and began reading a comic book instead. Barbara attempted to excuse her husband saying he was a writer, a dreamer, ‘a child who has never grown up’. But Aunt Leah Belle thought him plain rude. It certainly wasn’t the way folks carried on back in Texas. ‘He wasn’t very friendly,’ she says. ‘He was like an outsider.’

When they had first got married, sex was so good Bukowski decided Barbara was a nymphomaniac. Then she frightened him by saying they should be thinking about having children. He was
set against the idea and began to withdraw before ejaculation, the only form of contraception he was willing to try. It wasn’t easy to get the timing right and he worried Barbara would trick him into coming inside her. When she did become pregnant, she miscarried their baby. Bukowski blamed himself, believing the amount of alcohol he had drunk over the years had damaged his sperm in some way. Barbara blamed him, too. She took a lover and began divorce proceedings, accusing Bukowski of subjecting her to mental cruelty, a charge which upset him because, whatever his shortcomings, he didn’t feel he’d mistreated her.

The divorce was finalized on 18 March, 1958, two years and four months after their wedding. It seemed he wouldn’t be getting his hands on those Texas millions after all, as he wrote in one of his most sardonic poems, ‘The Day I Kicked Away a Bankroll’:

Triple X cinemas. Cocktail lounges. Apartment courts with cracked swimming pools. Boulevards lined with diseased palm
trees sagging in the smog. This was the other Hollywood, what Bukowski called East Hollywood, the area he moved to after leaving Barbara. It was only a couple of miles from the mansion homes of the movie stars in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, but had more in common with the seedy end of downtown where he had lived with Jane, and which it was also near to.

The 1600 block of North Mariposa Avenue cut north–south from Hollywood Boulevard to the broken down, busted-out east end of Sunset Boulevard in the rotten core of the district he adopted as his new home. He parked his ’57 Plymouth and went into the Spanish-style rooming house at number 1623: two dozen cold water apartments arranged like prison cells along three landings. There was no elevator and no air conditioning. He took room 303 on the second floor. There were a couple of old chairs, a lamp with dented shade, chipped dining table, cockroaches in the kitchenette, a Murphy bed that folded out of the wall and a shared bathroom down the hall.

Ned’s Liquor Store, at the corner of Hollywood and Normandie, was a short walk away. Bukowski stocked up on Miller High Life beer, boxes of White Owl cigars and cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes, went back to his room, turned his transistor radio to a classical station, pulled the shade, flipped the top from a beer and sat at the typewriter, thinking of the other losers who had lived there before him. Then he began to type whatever came to mind, experimenting with putting down what Black Sparrow Press publisher, John Martin, calls a ‘series of images’, as opposed to his mature work which mostly consisted of stories.