Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 14

Afterwards Bukowski's closest friends went back to San Pedro for more drinking. When he waved the last of his guests good-bye, he looked more like the Bukowski of old: s.h.i.+rt out, a wine stain down the front and his trousers hanging round his backside.

Sean Penn was a rising Hollywood star having recently appeared in the thriller, The Falcon and the Snowman, although he was more famous for being the husband of Madonna. When he saw the Barfly screenplay, he was so enthused about the film that he offered to play Henry Chinaski for the nominal fee of one dollar. He loved Bukowski's writing, and began composing poems of his own. His only stipulation was that Barbet Schroeder relinquish the director's chair to Easy Rider star Dennis Hopper, a good friend of his. This caused a problem and Bukowski invited Penn, Hopper and Schroeder over to San Pedro to talk it through.

Schroeder was offered a lucrative deal by Penn and Hopper to stay with the project as a producer, but he was less than pleased at being sidelined and reminded them that Barfly was his project, his first Hollywood film and he was determined to direct it. Bukowski was loyal to his friend. He didn't like Dennis Hopper anyway, distrusting his newfound sobriety, the look of his clothes, and jewelry and what he thought was the hollow sound of his laugh. 'One time something was said, and it wasn't quite funny, and he just threw his head back and laughed,' said Bukowski. 'The laughter was pretty false, I thought. The chains kept bouncing up and down, and he kept laughing.'

'You hear that f.u.c.king laugh, did you see those chains?' asked Schroeder when Hopper and Penn had left.

The meeting made Schroeder so anxious he telephoned his lawyer and dictated an addendum to his will that, whatever happened to him, Dennis Hopper would never be allowed to direct Barfly.

By saying no to Dennis Hopper, they also lost the services of Sean Penn which was a shame because he probably would have been good in the part, with his chippy manner and his love of Bukowski's work. It was not the last they saw of him, however.

The actor started visiting Bukowski socially and, despite a forty-year age difference, they became good friends. Penn admired Bukowski's uncompromising att.i.tude to his writing. He saw him as a true artist who lived on his own terms. They also both liked to drink. 'I loved the guy,' he says, simply.

'Sean wasn't such a huge star when we met him, although he was beginning to get there,' says Linda Lee. 'He was just sort of a kid. He used to call us his surrogate parents. He would just come over here and tell us his problems, sit and get drunk and chat and be away from that insane Hollywood. Sean liked Hank, and Hank liked Sean because Sean was willing to be with him in a natural way.'

Sean Penn began bringing his actor buddies over to meet Bukowski, people like Harry Dean Stanton who had recently starred in Paris, Texas. 'Harry Dean's a very strange fellow,' Bukowski said. 'He doesn't put on much of a hot-shot front. He just sits around depressed. I say, "Harry, for Chrissakes, it's not so bad." When you're feeling bad and someone says that, you only feel worse.'

M*A*S*H star Elliott Gould turned up one night in Sean Penn's pick-up truck. Penn presented Bukowski with Madonna's new alb.u.m and they talked about poetry. Gould says Bukowski reacted to meeting celebrities 'like a regular guy, totally normal'.

Bukowski was not overawed by film actors because he had little regard for their work. He could count on the fingers of one hand the films he liked. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All Quiet on the Western Front would be among them. Being more culturally sophisticated than is generally supposed, he also liked Akira Kurosawa's work and his all-time favorite movie was Eraserhead. Bukowski demonstrated his dislike for mainstream movies, and their stars, when he met Arnold Schwarzenegger in September, 1985, at a birthday party for Michael Montfort's wife. For no particular reason, other than he felt like picking a fight, Bukowski told Schwarzenegger he was a piece of s.h.i.+t. 'Hank was certainly not overly impressed with any of it,' says Harry Dean Stanton. 'He didn't care much for many movies, as I don't. Anybody who is perceptive is not going to talk about the thousands of great movies. It is relative to any art form. Excellence in any field is always a rarity.'

Sean Penn also brought Madonna over to San Pedro. She was at the height of her fame and her visit amazed neighbors who had thought of Bukowski as little more than the neighborhood drunk.

'Hank, is it really true Madonna came to see you?' asked a little girl who lived in the street. She was impressed, but a little suspicious it might be a put-on.

'Sure.'

'But why would Madonna come to see you, Hank?'

Although he had affection for Sean Penn, Bukowski didn't like Madonna at all. Linda Lee says the singer reminded him of some of the crazy women he had known, but he held back from saying so in case he hurt his friend's feelings. 'Hank couldn't stand her,' says Linda Lee. 'He did not like her because he didn't believe in her. He was sort of looking and going, "Oh f.u.c.k, you have got a good one here, man."' Still they went out together to eat and Bukowski and Linda Lee were invited to a party at their home.

'Everybody was excited at the notion that Charles Bukowski was coming to the party that they were coming to,' says Penn, recalling the evening when the poet lumbered into his lounge. 'He comes and spends about two minutes on his drink before he decides he is just going to prowl around [the] room and steal everybody else's drinks ... This was always the mode whenever you did go out with him somewhere, some circ.u.mstance when he wasn't just at home. The wine was no more to drink. Now it was mix everything and die.'

Penn's mother, actress Eileen Ryan, decided she wanted to dance with Bukowski and endeared herself to him by saying he was a big phony. 'The pants are coming off,' says Penn. 'He is trying to take my mother's clothes off. My mother, at this point, is in her late sixties, and everybody is sitting back and saying, "This is what he is supposed to do." It was the first time they had seen a legend actually behave like a legend.'

Sean Penn and Harry Dean Stanton were eating dinner at San Pedro one day when Bukowski forgot his self-imposed rule and came out with a crack about Madonna. It was so insulting that Sean Penn started getting up as if to fight him. 'Hey, Sean, sit down,' said Bukowski in his best tough-guy voice. 'You know I can take you.'

After years of hard work and disappointment, Barbet Schroeder finally found a company willing to back Barfly. Cannon Pictures was owned and run by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, Israeli-born cousins with a reputation in Hollywood for being mavericks. They were also financing another literary project Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance, which the Pulitzer Prize-winner was directing from an adaptation of his own novel. Bukowski got invited to meet Mailer at the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Strip.

Standing on the penthouse terrace, Bukowski saw an entirely new view of the city he had known since childhood the view the rich enjoyed. He could see the sweep of the s.h.i.+mmering city from Los Angeles airport to where the San Diego freeway emptied a stream of tiny lights into the San Fernando Valley. Helicopters fluttered back and forth, and way out there somewhere was the ocean. It was pretty impressive, certainly a better view than he used to have from his window at De Longpre Avenue.

They swapped stories Mailer told him a good one about meeting Charlie Chaplin and then they took the elevator down to the garage to get Bukowski's car. They were going to a birthday party for one of the executives at Cannon and Bukowski was driving. He was amused when Mailer told him he also drove a black BMW. 'Tough guys drive black BMWs, Norman,' he said.

As Bukowski described in his novel, Hollywood, he made a faux pas at the party, confusing one Cannon executive with another and Victor Norman (Mailer) made him painfully aware of his mistake.

I noticed Victor Norman staring at me. I figured he would let up in a while. When I looked again, Victor was still staring. He was looking at me as if he couldn't believe his eyes.

'All right, Victor,' I said loudly, 'so I s.h.i.+t my pants! Want to make a World War out of it?'

The story was true, as Mailer remembers.

'You know, Norman, you and me may have to go outside to fight,' said Bukowski.

Mailer says he felt a rush of adrenaline as he contemplated flying at Bukowski with murderous intent. 'It so happened that at the time I was in good shape and was still boxing, and Bukowski, by then, was in awful shape huge belly, bad liver, all of it,' Mailer recalls. 'I remember that I felt such a clear, cold rage at the thought of what I'd be able to do to him there are preliminaries to fights, mental preliminaries, where sometimes you think you're going to win and sometimes you think you're in trouble, and once in a while you think you have no chance. But this was one occasion when I felt a kind of murderous glee because I knew he had no chance. I was ready to go.'

He leaned forward and said: 'Hank, don't even think about it.'

Now that Cannon were behind the project, it was easier getting name actors interested in Barfly and it was soon decided that 9 1/2 Weeks star Mickey Rourke would play Henry Chinaski, although he was initially reluctant to take the part because of the subject matter. 'All the men in my family for a lot of generations were alcoholics,' he explains. 'It was sort of a disgusting character for me to play because a lot of the men in my family have never hit fifty, so I don't really have a lot of respect for boozers.'

Mickey Rourke had never read Bukowski's work and was not particularly impressed with the screenplay when he saw it, or the low budget. 'It was nothing at first that turned me on as an actor, but once I saw the package being put together, and I saw the meticulous dedication that was surrounding this project, that stimulated me more.'

Mickey Rourke suggested Faye Dunaway for the part of Chinaski's girlfriend, Wanda Wilc.o.x, the character based on Jane c.o.o.ney Baker. Several years had pa.s.sed since Faye Dunaway's great success in Bonnie and Clyde and her career had declined to the point where she was being offered television work and second-rate films. She felt that, because of her age, she was 'becoming invisible' as she wrote in her autobiography, Looking for Gatsby, and that Barfly was the chance of a comeback.

Then Cannon unexpectedly pulled the plug on the deal, saying there was no money to finance the picture. They also set a prohibitive turnaround fee, the price another movie company would have to pay to take over the project. Schroeder responded with one of the most bizarre bargaining tactics in the history of Hollywood. He bought a Black & Decker circular saw, took it into Menahem Golan's office, plugged in, switched on and held the blade over his left hand, threatening to slice his finger off unless the film went into production. When Golan saw that he was serious, he told him he had a deal. Bukowski reflected that his past life seemed tame in comparison with this sort of madness.

When Mickey Rourke visited San Pedro for tips on playing his part, he noticed that although Bukowski lived comfortably, his typing room 'looked like a boarding house, like a piece of s.h.i.+t dive. It was very suburban except for the room that he wrote in.' He got another insight into how he would play the character by listening to Bukowski talk. 'He spoke in a very peculiar way, almost like he was speaking to himself where he didn't really give a f.u.c.k if anybody else understood him.' Bukowski boasted about the fights with Frank McGilligan in Philadelphia, but Rourke didn't take the posturing seriously. 'You can't be any sort of physical specimen if you live out of a beer can,' he says. 'I saw him as a man who was more physical with his mouth than his fists.'

Filming began in a bar in Culver City with genuine barflies as extras, although Bukowski didn't know them. Mickey Rourke invited Bukowski into his trailer on the first day and poured him a large whiskey. He was most hospitable, saying Bukowski was welcome to stay as long as he liked. 'OK, I'll stay forever,' Bukowski replied, having lived in smaller apartments.

Mickey Rourke was thirty-two, just a little older than Bukowski had been when he lived in Philadelphia. He came on the set unshaven, wearing dirty clothes, shuffling and talking in an approximation of Bukowski's peculiar voice, drawing words out for emphasis. It was a fairly good imitation. 'The guy was great,' Bukowski said of the actor's performance, although he later modified his praise. 'He really became this barfly. He added his own dimension, which at first I thought, this is awful, he's overdoing it. But as the shooting went on, I saw he'd done the right thing. He'd created a very strange, fantastic lovable character.'

They also filmed at a bar on the outskirts of downtown, around 6th and Kenmore, where Bukowski worked as a stock room boy in the early '50s. Bukowski had a cameo part as a barfly in the scene where Wanda and Chinaski meet. There was real booze in the bottles and Mick Collins, who played the barman, began fixing drinks for everybody, getting himself and Bukowski loaded. He recalls how important a figure Bukowski was on set, unusually so for a screen-writer in a Hollywood film (Schroeder didn't change a word of dialogue unless Bukowski agreed). 'Barbet, Mickey, Faye, everybody took second place. They all respected him,' says Collins.

The exterior shots for Wanda's apartment were filmed at the Maryland Royal Palms, a rooming house at 360 S. Westlake Avenue next door to the Aragon where Bukowski had lived with Jane. In one scene, Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke walk down the hill outside the building. She is going to look for a job, and he wants her to come back and drink with him. If they had kept going to 6th, turned right and walked another block, they would have been on Alvarado Street where Bukowski met Jane. The memories all came back as Bukowski watched the filming of his life, amazed at how his fortunes had changed.

Faye Dunaway tried to make herself like Wanda, described in the screenplay as '... once quite beautiful but the drinking is beginning to have its effect: the face is fattening a bit, the slightest bit of a belly is beginning to show, and pouches are forming under her eyes.' But the actress was still beautiful. Bukowski didn't like her at all. In Hollywood, he described Chinaski's irritation when a scene had to be rewritten so the actress playing Wanda could show off her legs.

Filming continued for six weeks, and Bukowski spent much of that time hanging around the set. Linda Lee had taken acting lessons, and was given a small part but, unlike Bukowski, didn't make it into the final cut. David Lynch and his girlfriend, Isabella Rossellini, visited the set and chatted to Bukowski about Eraserhead. Helmut Newton photographed Bukowski with Faye Dunaway on his knee. Having a movie made about his life was a heady experience, and Bukowski was not so cool that he failed to get excited by it. He found himself watching the dailies and wondered aloud whether Barfly would win an Oscar, an inst.i.tution he had once mocked in his poem, 'Another Academy'.

While Barfly was being edited, yet another film adaptation of Bukowski's work was released. Directed by Belgian film-maker Dominique Deruddere, Crazy Love (aka Love is a Dog From h.e.l.l) was premiered in Los Angeles in September, 1987. Bukowski watched it with Linda Lee and his new celebrity friends Sean Penn and Madonna, and Elliott Gould and his wife. Although he had nothing to do with the making of the movie, and it remains an obscure art house work, Bukowski came to regard this adaptation of three of his short stories as the most successful attempt to bring his work to the screen.

The theatrical release of Barfly was heralded by a publicity campaign and, for the first time in his career, Bukowski was sought after by the mainstream American media. It turned out he was a natural story for journalists: the b.u.m they made a movie about. A question and answer session conducted by Sean Penn was given a spread in Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, ill.u.s.trated with pictures by the famous photographer Herb Ritts. Bukowski and Linda Lee were pictured outside their house for the Los Angeles Times. Bukowski was also profiled in the gossip magazine, People, which ran the headline: BOOZEHOUND POET CHARLES BUKOWSKI WRITES A.

HYMN TO HIMSELF IN BARFLY, AND HOLLYWOOD.

STARTS SINGING.

The article described him as a 'potbellied old boozer' and the mythology of his life was embellished with the story that Linda Lee fed him thirty-five different types of vitamins to keep him alive. It amused them both because People was one of the low-brow publications Bukowski sometimes bought when he was shopping for beer.

He was also invited onto a number of television programs, including Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, but declined them all figuring his appearances on Apostrophes in France should be the beginning and end of his talk show career.

The finished film was a great disappointment. Bukowski thought Mickey Rourke quite good as Chinaski, but said he'd never looked that scruffy; no landlord would have rented a room to him if he had. Mickey Rourke defends himself, saying he looked as Schroeder directed him to and adds, probably with an element of truth: 'When you see yourself as you really are, sometimes that hurts.' Linda Lee thought the film awful, and Marina didn't think Mickey Rourke played anything that remotely resembled her father.

There was a party after the Hollywood premiere, with champagne served and photographers' flash lights popping. Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway congratulated Bukowski on his screenplay and reporters from the daily newspapers made a note of every slurred word he uttered. He enjoyed the attention for a while and then the booze kicked in and the scene began to seem phony. 'I've got to get out of here,' he told Linda Lee. She suggested they stay a little longer, but he was adamant. 'This place stinks,' he said. 'It's making me sick.'

The reviews in the morning papers were mixed and Barfly did only fair business when it opened across the United States, although it proved more popular in Europe. Yet despite the lack of box office success, and although the film is not truly representative of Bukowski's work, it is Barfly more than anything that he became known for among the general public.

* Linda Lee eventually inherited the entire estate.

15.

THE LAST RACE.

A side from almost bleeding to death when he was thirty-five, Bukowski had managed to abuse his body throughout his adult life with remarkably little ill-effect. He was certainly in bad shape paunchy and unaccustomed to exercise, other than sporadically lifting barbells but actual debilitating illness had not troubled him since that long ago hemorrhage after which, as he never tired of saying, the doctors warned he must never drink again. Of course, he had consumed rivers of alcohol since then. He had smoked heavily, used drugs, been beaten-up in bar fights and spent several nights in jail. And yet he did not appear significantly less healthy than most sixty-seven-year-old men.

But in the winter of 1987, following the premiere of Barfly and all the excitement and stress that went with the making of the film, Bukowski's health began to falter. At first he thought he simply had flu, but then weeks went by without him feeling better. On 17 January, 1988, he wrote to John Martin that he'd only drunk one bottle of wine since Christmas, a sure sign he was not himself. Blood tests showed him to have been run-down throughout the previous year, but no specific illness was identified and his doctor wanted to carry out further tests. In the meantime, he was forbidden from drinking, and he had little energy for writing the novel he had recently begun, Hollywood, which was based on his experiences making Barfly.

Luckily, Bukowski and John Martin had already decided that their next book would be a collection of early poems from obscure chapbooks and literary magazines, some dating back to the 1940s. It was published later that year as The Roominghouse Madrigals. As Bukowski wrote in the foreword, the poems were quite different from the anecdotal style he had developed in later years, 'more lyrical than where I am at now', but he did not agree with those who said the early work was better.

There was another reminder of the past when he received a telephone call from his cousin Katherine Wood, daughter of Bukowski's happy-go-lucky Uncle John. Bukowski had gone to the trouble of mailing a German language edition of his travelogue, Shakespeare Never Did This, to his Aunt Eleanor in Palm Springs. She thought little of the book and gave it to Katherine, who could not make out what it was about as the text was in German. She tried to guess by looking at Michael Montfort's photographs. 'In almost every picture he has a bottle of wine in his hand so I thought he was a wine salesman,' she says. When Barfly came out, she wondered if cousin Henry was the author and, after contacting Black Sparrow Press, she was invited to tea at San Pedro. 'He was a little hung-over,' she says. 'You could see he had a pretty darn rough life with the drinking and the smoking. He wasn't in very good shape.'

'You probably wouldn't like my books,' said Bukowski, who had not seen Katherine since they were children.

Katherine agreed she probably would not. She did not want to learn about the 'seamy side of life'.

Bukowski finished Hollywood late one Sat.u.r.day night in the early fall of 1988, despite his poor health. It is perhaps surprising what an upbeat and funny book it is, describing a domesticated and financially secure Henry Chinaski laughing at a world crazier than anything he had experienced in the factories, bars and apartment courts of Post Office, Factotum and Women.

The following morning he awoke with a blazing fever of 103 degrees which continued for a week. He could not eat or sleep and s.h.i.+vered until the bed shook, convinced he was dying. The fever stopped only to return a few weeks later, and then there was another attack three debilitating fevers in succession. His weight fell to 168 lbs.

BAR LIFE.

Barman Ruben Rueda who for many years served Bukowski drinks at the Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) 'beer / rivers and seas of beer,' Bukowski wrote, 'beer is all there is.' (picture by Richard Robinson. Courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Arizona Library. The quotation from the poem, 'beer', appears courtesy of Black Sparrow Press) The Seven-G's (sic) bar in downtown Los Angeles was one of the places Bukowski drank when he was living with Jane c.o.o.ney Baker and working as a s.h.i.+pping clerk at an art supply store. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) The Frolic Room on Hollywood Boulevard was a favorite bar with Bukowski in the early 1970s. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Bukowski poses proudly, in February, 1971, with the head sculpted by Linda King and presented to him as a gift. Their love affair was at its height. When they fell out, as they regularly did, Bukowski would return the head to Linda. (courtesy of Linda King) Linda King, the young sculptress Bukowski met and fell in love with in 1970 shortly after he quit his post offi ce job. (courtesy of Linda King) Relaxing in Barnsdall Park, Hollywood, in 1972, aged fi fty-two and free from the post offi ce at last. (courtesy of Linda King) In July, 1972, Bukowski went on a rare vacation to the island of Catalina, just off the coast of California. With him was record company executive Liza Williams whom he was dating after a break-up with Linda King. (courtesy of Liza Williams) Bukowski in the room at the hotel on the resort island of Catalina where he was staying with Liza Williams on vacation. Note the caged bird bought to keep him company. (courtesy of Liza Williams) THE WRITER.

In Santa Barbara with his editor-publisher John Martin and John's wife, Barbara, who designed Bukowski's Black Sparrow Press books. (courtesy of John Martin) Bukowski is beginning to enjoy modest success in 1974 when this picture was taken at his Carlton Way apartment during a magazine interview. On the shelves behind him are some of the many chapbooks and small literary magazines his work had already appeared in. (taken by William Childress) THE WOMEN ...

(Left) Linda King at Flo's Place, a bar she worked in on Sunset Boulevard. (courtesy of Linda King) Joan Smith, a former go-go dancer friend of Bukowski's. She is also a poet, and published a tribute book to Bukowski after his death called Das ist Alles. (courtesy of Joan Smith) Amber O'Neil cleverly got her own back on Bukowski for what he wrote about her in his third novel, Women, by writing a hilarious roman-a-clef of her own called Blowing My Hero. (courtesy of Amber O'Neil) Joanna Bull felt so ill after having s.e.x with Bukowski she threw up. (courtesy of Joanna Bull) Poet Ann Menebroker, a close female friend and long-term correspondent of Bukowski's. He wanted her to leave her husband and come to live with him in LA. (courtesy of Ann Menebroker) Jo Jo Planteen, a young fan whom Bukowski tried to seduce in the late 1970s. (courtesy of Jo Jo Planteen) Pamela Miller, aka Cupcakes, the redhead Bukowski fell madly in love with when he met her in 1975. (taken by Howard Sounes in 1997) With Georgia Peckham-Krellner, Cupcakes' best friend, in Bukowski's kitchen at Carlton Way. ( Joan Levine Gannij) With Brad and Tina Darby, Bukowski's neighbors at Carlton Way. Tina worked as an exotic dancer at a go-go club and Brad managed a s.e.x shop. They spent many evenings together. (courtesy of Linda King) William and Ruth Wantling. Poet William Wantling drank himself to death after his friend Bukowski published a sarcastic short story about him. Bukowski tried to seduce his grieving widow, Ruth, who has never forgiven him for his behavior. (courtesy of Ruth Wantling) The artist R. Crumb drew this brilliant portrait of Bukowski after referring to photographs taken on his wedding day in August, 1985. Bukowski was marrying his second wife, Linda Lee Beighle, and wore a new pin-stripe suit, snake skin shoes and a fl oral tie for the occasion, presenting a considerably smarter appearance than friends were used to. (Portrait by R. Crumb, 1986, Water Row Books. Used with permission of Water Row Books.) Bukowski at work (Joan Gannij) SAN PEDRO.

In August, 1985, when Bukowski was sixty-fi ve, he married for the second time. His bride, Linda Lee Beighle, was forty-one and had been running a health food restaurant in Redondo Beach. They set up home together in a detached house in the port town of San Pedro, south of Los Angeles. (taken by Eric Sander, Frank Spooner Picture Agency) When the actor Mickey Rourke visited Bukowski's San Pedro home to talk about making the movie, Barfly, he noted that the house was very neat and suburban except the upstairs work room where Bukowski wrote his stories. The work room was like a 'piece of s.h.i.+t dive'. Here Bukowski is seen at his desk, kissing his typewriter for luck. (taken by Eric Sander, Frank Spooner Picture Agency) With his friend John Thomas, and John Thomas' wife Philomene Long. (courtesy of John Thomas/photo credit: Sheri Levine) Bukowski relaxes at home in San Pedro in the summer of 1987. His books were selling well and he was working with fi lm director Barbet Schroeder on the script for the movie, Barfly. (taken by Eric Sander, Frank Spooner Picture Agency) FAME.

In the movie Barfly, which was released in !987, Mickey Rourke played the Bukowski-like character of Henry Chinaski and Faye Dunaway was Wanda Wilc.o.x, a character based on Bukowski's former girlfriend, Jane c.o.o.ney Baker. The book of the screenplay was ill.u.s.trated with a photograph of Bukowski and the two stars. He liked Mickey Rourke but was less keen on Faye Dunaway, d.a.m.ning her performance with faint praise. (The Movie: "Barfly" published by Black Sparrow Press, 1987) Reunited with his cousin Katherine Wood (left) and her sister Eleanor (right) at his San Pedro home in August, 1988, just as his health was beginning to fail. (courtesy of Katherine Wood).

DEATH IS NOT THE END.

Bukowski's grave at the Green Hills Memorial Park, south of Los Angeles. (taken by Howard Sounes) In July, 1997, three years after Bukowski's death, Marina gave birth to her fi rst child, Bukowski's grandson. He was named Nikhil Henry Bukowski Sahoo and is seen here with Marina at her home in Northern California. (courtesy of FrancEyE) He consulted some of the best doctors in Beverly Hills, telling them his symptoms: he had no appet.i.te and had lost weight; he was dizzy; he could not sleep; he was anemic and had a hacking dry cough. He felt so weak in the mornings, he had trouble walking to the toilet. The doctors told him he had a low hemoglobin count and an iron deficiency, for which he could take pills, but they couldn't say exactly what was wrong with him.

The mystery was solved when Bukowski took one of his cats to the vet, and the vet suggested he get checked for TB. 'He had gone to all these Beverly Hills doctors who were unable to diagnose what was wrong,' says John Martin. 'They said he was just run down, and they gave him pills and told him to take it easy, and not to drink. He had tuberculosis! But none of these highly paid pract.i.tioners had seen a case of tuberculosis in their lives because the rich don't get tuberculosis very often.' Bukowski probably contracted the disease as a child from Uncle John, who died of consumption in 1933. It had been dormant and surfaced because he was run-down. A six-month course of antibiotics was prescribed and a complete recovery expected.

One thing the illness taught him, although the lesson came somewhat late in life, was that he could live perfectly well without alcohol. He had been sober on and off since the illness began and became practically teetotal by necessity during the course of antibiotics. 'I didn't even feel like lifting a bottle,' he told a German interviewer who came to the house. 'I had no feeling for drinking. It was no great sacrifice.' Apart from the occasional lapse, his hard-drinking days were behind him.

The illness left him looking very much older: he had lost a lot of weight, making his face gaunt; his nose seemed more prominent; there were unsightly growths around his eyes; his silver hair now receded right back to the crown of his head; and his beard grew white around a ruination of yellow teeth. He moved differently, too, walking cautiously as if scared of falling. As official confirmation that he had entered an irreversible state of decrepitude, the government informed him, in August, 1990, that he was now eligible for his old age pension.

The reviews for Hollywood were good and John Martin was able to sell foreign rights around the world. Writing in the Toronto Star, Jim Christy described it as a great book about the making of a mediocre movie. The critic from the Los Angeles Times liked it, too. Even The Times in Britain, where Bukowski had never enjoyed the same success he had in continental Europe, gave grudging praise to his account of the vanities of movie stars, saying the prose displayed 'a mean clarity of description'.

His next book also enjoyed a warm reception. Septuagenarian Stew was published in 1990 to coincide with Bukowski's seventieth birthday, a collection of poetry and prose which showed him still raging at the world. The short stories were the particular strength, and The Life of a b.u.m is one of his best ever, demonstrating a mastery over the form he had been practicing since adolescence. He drew from a lifetime of experience to create a vivid and sympathetic character in Harry, the b.u.m who rejects the 8 to 5 routine, preferring to drink and sleep in the park.

Bukowski's critique of society had special resonance as America entered the recession of the early 1990s, with workers being laid off to face credit card debts and repayments on over-valued homes. He even antic.i.p.ated the 'slacker' culture that emerged in college society as a reaction to the decade of greed, using the term in The Life of a b.u.m when a troop of soldiers yell at Harry: The convoy moved slowly. The soldiers saw Harry sitting on the park bench. Then it began. It was a mixture of hissing, booing and cursing. They were screaming at him.

'HEY, YOU SON OF A b.i.t.c.h!'

'SLACKER!'

As each truck of the convoy pa.s.sed, the next truck picked it up: 'GET YOUR a.s.s OFF THAT BENCH!'

'COWARD!'

'f.u.c.kING f.a.gGOT!'

'YELLOW BELLY!'

It was a very long and a very slow convoy.

'COME ON AND JOIN US!'

'WE'LL TEACH YOU TO FIGHT, FREAK!'

The faces were white and brown and black, flowers of hatred.

In the story, Harry knows something the soldiers do not, or chooses to face a reality they would rather not think about: that they are marching towards death, and for no good reason, so they might as well get off the truck and join him on the bench. It is a philosophy of non-partic.i.p.ation that runs through Bukowski's work and is one of the reasons he appeals to the young and disaffected.

Attendances were down at the race track and Bukowski noticed the punters did not spend money drinking like the old days, when everybody was out to have fun. The change in the times was brought home to Bukowski when Marina and her husband, Jeffrey Stone, whom she had married the previous fall, both of them college-educated, intelligent people working as engineers in the aeros.p.a.ce industry, lost their jobs on the same day. It seemed like the depression all over again with jobless men, 'failures in a failing time' and now jobless women, too.