Charles Bukowski (8 page)

A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday, Bukowski went back to see her. There was no answer when he knocked at her door, so he went in and saw the bottles were gone, the bed covers had been pulled back and, when he came closer, he saw blood on the sheet.
Frenchy, the landlady, told him an ambulance had taken Jane to Los Angeles County Hospital.

Her body was riddled with cancer; she also had cirrhosis of the liver. She had suffered a massive hemorrhage, and was in a semi-coma when he arrived, in a ward with three other women, one of whom was laughing loudly as she entertained her visitors. Bukowski pulled a curtain round Jane’s bed for privacy and sat beside her holding her hand, saying her name over and over. He got a rag and wiped away some blood from the corner of her mouth.

‘I knew it would be you,’ she said, rousing herself for a moment.

Jane died on the evening of 22 January, 1962, while Bukowski was trying to place a telephone call to her son in Texas. She was fifty-one.

After the funeral at the San Fernando Mission, north of LA, Bukowski went on a five-day drunk and, when he couldn’t stand his own company any longer, drove over to see Jory Sherman in San Bernadino. They worked their way through a six-pack of Miller High Life as he talked about how it had only been ‘half a funeral’ because there had been a mix up about whether Jane was a bona fide Catholic – the priest didn’t want to do the full service. Bukowski said more of Jane’s family should have been there. Just because she was a scrub woman in a cheap hotel didn’t mean she was nothing. He said he wished he had telephoned her more often; maybe if he had called after he saw her that morning, with the bottles, it might have made a difference. ‘Hank felt he had lost someone that he allowed himself to get very close to, which was rare for him,’ says Sherman. ‘I have seldom seen a person so grief-stricken. He was weeping and he was drinking heavily and his world had just crashed.’

In the morning, Bukowski drove to the races where he picked up a girl he knew from the post office, but he was unable to have sex when they got back to her place because he imagined Jane was watching. He returned to his room on North Mariposa where he still had some of her belongings: black beads which he moved through his fingers like a rosary while listening to the silence of the telephone, the telephone he used to pack with a matchbook cover
so he wouldn’t be disturbed when he was working. The closet door was half open, more of her things hanging there – blouses, skirts and jackets, the lifeless fabric her body had given shape and movement to. When the hangover cleared on 29 January, he began to write a series of grief poems which are among his most affecting work.

He called the poem, ‘for Jane, with all the love I had, which was not enough––’

F
or months after Jane’s death, Bukowski was profoundly depressed, and unable to get her out of his mind. Women he saw in the street reminded him of Jane. He saw her face in his mind’s eye when he woke, and she was there again at night when he tried to sleep.

‘Even though he hadn’t been living with her at the time, he mourned her. He really had an attachment,’ says Ann Menebroker, a poet from Sacramento who began corresponding with Bukowski at this time. He felt so depressed he hid knives, scissors and razors out of sight, saying he couldn’t remember the last time he’d suffered such a serious attack of his suicide complex, and Ann believes the desire to kill himself was real enough. ‘I’m sure he felt he wished he was dead sometimes, with his drinking and his going back and forth to jail. It was a terrible existence. I think the writing and the drinking was all that he had to keep things going and, yes, I think he meant it. His whole life was an extended suicide.’

He drank to try and forget his problems and spent hours touring the bars of East Hollywood, sometimes visiting the burlesque shows on Sunset Strip where he yelled at the go-go girls.

‘SHAKE IT IN MY FACE, BABY!’ he would holler, the beads on the girl’s top flicking up an erotic wind of promise as she bent down and jiggled herself for Bukowski, hoping he would tip her well.

‘YEAH, SHAKE IT!’

After a while, management gathered, correctly, that he was mocking the performance and kicked him out.

When he woke in his room the following morning, with a pounding head and dry mouth, Bukowski discovered the $450 he had won at the track the previous afternoon had gone from his pocket. Another calamity: Jane’s goldfish, which he had taken from her room at the Phillips Hotel after she died, was not in its bowl on the table. It was on the floor having apparently leapt out during the night, either trying to catch a fly, he presumed, or in an attempt at suicide. Looking at its discoloring body, he was reminded of Jane and all the regrets he had about her death.

He was so upset he called Jory Sherman to tell him what had happened. ‘It crushed him; he couldn’t stand to see animals die. He was just emotionally overcome because that was a part of Jane,’ says Sherman, who was a little put out by the call because Bukowski hadn’t been much of a friend to him during a recent crisis. ‘He was a very tender-hearted guy – not towards people necessarily, but towards goldfish…’

Bukowski wrote an extraordinary poem about the death of the fish, ‘I thought of ships, of armies, hanging on …’, describing how he tried to revive the fish by putting it back in the water, but it floated dead so he had to flush it down the toilet. The tone is so sombre, it becomes comical, although that was almost certainly not his intention:

There were many sad, hung-over days like these when he stayed in his room watching the birds in the trees on North Mariposa, laying on the bed with a bottle in his hand listening to classical music. Late in the afternoon the other tenants returned from what he assumed were their miserable jobs, and began scampering up and down the concrete stairs like rodents. He was convinced he would die alone in that ‘1623 place’, his stomach ripped apart after a heavy night drinking, gobs of blood staining the sheets round his head, empty bottles in the wastebasket, the yellow bathrobe Jane
had worn hanging like a shroud in the closet, flies shuttling about on the screen. Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Jake were his next of kin, now both parents were dead, but what would they care about his work, his chapbooks and collection of magazines? They would probably throw the mags out with the garbage, along with the racing forms and old newspapers.

He tried to write himself out of his depression, firing off submissions to editors all over the country, including newspaper journalist, John Bryan, who recalls how amazingly productive Bukowski was: ‘He started sending me boxes of material. He sent cartons, a couple of hundred poems, thirty or forty short stories. I could pull anything I liked out of it, which was a nice choice, and I would send back the rest.’

John Bryan visited Mariposa three months after Jane died and found Bukowski in a dreadful state, broke, hungover and suffering all manner of ailments. ‘He had a waste basket full of hemorrhoid Preparation-H tubes. He apparently had the worst case of hemorrhoids in the world.’ Bukowski gave him some more poems, four of which Bryan printed in his magazine,
Renaissance
. The work was punk-like in its nihilism. The poem ‘an empire of coins’ concludes with the words ‘fuck everybody’, and ‘the biggest breasts’ ends with these sneering lines:

This sort of provocative material added to his growing notoriety and a number of editors, critics and academics began to champion Bukowski as a fresh new voice. Small press publisher R.R. Cuscaden wrote an essay in
Satis
magazine likening Bukowski’s estrangement from society to that of Baudelaire. It was Cuscaden who also published the third limited edition Bukowski chapbook,
Run with the Hunted
, dedicated to John William Corrington, the Louisiana-based poet and English teacher who wrote a thank-you letter so effusive it made Bukowski cringe: ‘I just got immortal: at least a footnote when they write up Charlie.’

The sound of Bukowski bashing out all these poems on his manual ‘typer’ continued to irritate his neighbors, even when he tried to work within the hours agreed with the landlord, and the old woman downstairs began thumping the ceiling with her broom again. This made him very angry because
he
had to listen to the canned laughter coming from her television. He didn’t think those television shows were funny, anyway, except
The Honeymooners
which he enjoyed whenever he caught an episode in a bar. He took a page of a letter he’d been writing to the Webbs and scrawled his neighbor a note which he took downstairs and slid under her door:

He wrote to Ann Menebroker: ‘Doesn’t she know I am the great Charles Bukowski? The bitch!’

The old woman in 203 replied:

He took a month’s unpaid leave from the post office to play the
horses, but they were ‘running like salami’ and he lost his money. He became so low that suicide seemed the only logical solution to his problems. He began putting his affairs in order: mailing Jane’s bobby pin to Ann, boxing up the letters he had received from Corrington and mailing them back to Baton Rouge ‘before something happens’, as he explained.

He had always hated Christmas, appalled by the behavior of what he called ‘amateur drunks’. Bukowski believed it was a time of year when professional drinkers like himself should stay indoors. ‘I hate to go out on the streets on Xmas day. The fuckers act like they are out of their minds,’ he wrote to the Webbs. But a few days before Christmas, 1962, when he was particularly low, he broke his rule and downed three fifths of Scotch in the local bars before passing out on a neighbor’s lawn. The police locked him up for the night in the drunk tank and, when he came to, Bukowski found himself frightened by his own excesses, as he wrote on 18 December to Ann:

Most evenings around 6 p.m. he had to stop work and drive along Sunset Boulevard to his post office job. The setting sun bled the sky in the rear view mirror as he rolled east out of Hollywood, past Echo Park, across Alvarado Street and into downtown, forking left on Alpine Street to the Terminal Annex – the ‘post office’ made famous in his novel of that name – a gigantic sorting office ornamented with carved eagles and US Postal Service decals.

‘How’re you doin’ tonight?’ called out assign clerk, Johnny Moore, when Bukowski punched on for the graveyard shift.

‘Alright, Big John,’ he shouted back.

The work floor was the size of a football field, floodlit and busy
with hundreds of clerks sticking mail, sorting parcels and lugging sacks while the supervisors yelled for them to keep moving. The noise was incredible. Cancelling machines clattered, huge conveyor belts moved an endless river of mail and there was muzak playing from speakers high up in the roof. It was hot, too, even when Bukowski arrived in the evening, a heat generated by the toil of human beings.

Johnny Moore assigned Bukowski to one of the many booths that made up Sanford Station Letters
*
or to Parcels where two men together worked tossing boxes around like basketballs. Parcel work was rotated and, if Bukowski had a hangover when it was his turn, he would ask to work on letters because sorting letters was easier.

‘He used to come in loaded sometimes,’ says Johnny Moore. ‘That was dismissal right there, but we took care of it.’ He would assign Bukowski to a place where the supervisors were unlikely to find him, because the clerks thought of themselves like family, and Bukowski was one of them. ‘We knew the ropes, see, we was there a long time, and we don’t want no supervisor firing nobody when they’re a friend of ours.’

There were ten black workers to every white worker on the night shift, which was the most unpopular shift of all at the Annex. ‘The whites saw it as beneath them,’ says former clerk Grace Washington. Bukowski could have moved to a day shift, if he wanted, but he stayed on nights for years, coming in around 6.30 p.m. and leaving around 2.30 a.m., because it gave him time during the day to write and go to the track and, perhaps surprisingly, his former co-workers say he was one of the least prejudiced whites in the whole building.

The mail clerks worked in booths leaning on a rest bar made of wood. ‘What you did, you rested your butt on this thing,’ says David Berger, Bukowski’s union rep. ‘That would keep you in a permanent position so you weren’t actually standing on your feet, you were at an angle. It kind of took the weight off your feet and made it easier to work.’ The mail arrived in long trays which had to be sorted within a time limit or else the clerks were ‘written up’ by the supervisors. There were other rules: clerks were only allowed to use their right hand to throw mail, and the mail had to go into the relevant cubby holes so the stamps were ‘up’ and the return addresses ‘in’. Bukowski was not exaggerating when he described in
Post Office
how this system ground the clerks down over the years. It was a brutal régime and many, including Bukowski, suffered chronic back and shoulder pains.

‘KEEP MOVING!’ called the supervisors as they marched along beside the rows of clerks. ‘PICK IT UP NOW!’ they yelled, as new mail came down the conveyor belts. Up above in what the clerks called ‘the spy gallery’ other supervisors watched for pilfering. Bukowski knew that if he took one stamp home he would be fired.

The clerks chattered incessantly to pass the time, about sport mostly, football games and baseball scores. They also bet to see who could clear their trays fastest, each throwing a dollar in a pot and then sticking mail as fast as possible until one clerk finished. But there was no way of beating the clock, as David Berger says: ‘Just about the time you figure you had cleaned up what was in front of you, here came somebody with another tray, so it never ended.’

Bukowski was unusual because he didn’t talk while he was working. He didn’t joke or race the other clerks or try and get the trays that seemed to have less mail. He worked steadily, without joy or complaint, with the stoicism he had learned as a boy. ‘He wasn’t grumpy, he just never started any conversation,’ says Berger. ‘If you talked to him, he would probably answer you, but he would never really carry a conversation.’ Grace Washington actually wondered if he was retarded.

In his break, Bukowski either went downstairs to the cafeteria or across the street into Chinatown where the clerks could get a late night beer at Mama’s Bar. Sometimes when he was in Mama’s, he would tell the clerks he was a writer, but this only confirmed their opinion that he was a way-out fellow and Johnny Moore says they never believed him anyway. Then it was back to the Annex until 2 a.m., or later in the run-up to Christmas.