Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 15

When Marina visited San Pedro for Christmas, Linda Lee told her she was thinking of giving Bukowski a computer. He had changed from a manual to an electric typewriter, finding it easier and quicker, and without telling him her plans she'd ascertained he would be willing to try a word processor. Marina knew something about the technology and convinced Linda Lee she should buy an Apple Macintosh, because it was designed for people who knew little or nothing about computers. 'I had a feeling that, whatever it was, it had to be something he could mostly teach himself,' says Marina. Linda Lee was disconcerted by how bulky the box, screen, keyboard and printer were after the simplicity of a typewriter, and the price was a not inconsiderable $5,000 for what they wanted, but they bought it.

'Oh, s.h.i.+t,' said Bukowski, when he opened his gift on Christmas Day. 'I'm going to lose my soul.'

They took the computer up to his room and Marina began explaining how it worked. 'Just as I expected, he would listen to me, but it was really obvious he wanted to play with it and try it out and learn how things worked himself,' she says. He experimented most of the day, reluctant to go downstairs to eat.

'Oh this is a miracle!' he said. 'Look, it's correcting my mistakes. I don't know how to spell. I know what the words are, but I don't know how to spell them, and look what it's doing!'

The Apple Mac reinvigorated Bukowski as a writer. He liked the way his words appeared on the screen on a throne, as he put it and enjoyed printing in different fonts and sizes of type. But the greatest benefit was that he could write more. His routine had been to type at night, when he was drinking and listening to the radio, and go back the following evening to correct by hand, discarding poems he didn't like and laboriously re-typing those he did. Errors of spelling, syntax and fact still crept into the typescripts, mistakes which always embarra.s.sed him. Now he could correct his work on screen and the poems slid from the printer exactly as he wanted.

He had always been prolific, unusually so with more than forty books to his name, most published within the past twenty years, but after getting the computer he more than doubled his output, work he mailed to John Martin's new office in Santa Rosa, Northern California.

At Martin's suggestion, Bukowski also began a journal on the Apple Mac, posthumously published, in 1997, with ill.u.s.trations by R. Crumb, as The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the s.h.i.+p. In the entry of 22 November, 1991, Bukowski explains how the computer aided his work: Well, my 71st year has been a h.e.l.l of a productive year. I have probably written more words this year than any year of my life ... This computer that I started using on Jan. 18 has had much to do with it. It's simply easier to get the word down, it transfers more quickly from the brain (or wherever this comes from) to the fingers and from the fingers to the screen where it is immediately visible crisp and clear. It's not a matter of speed per se, it's a matter of flow, a river of words and if the words are good then let them run with ease.

There were problems, of course: nights when he had not correctly saved what he had written and lost everything, although he reflected this was a petty thing compared with knocking over a good bottle of wine; and one of the cats sprayed the disk drive, necessitating the return of the computer to the shop for repairs. In future he would put a beach towel over it when he went to bed. Despite these set-backs, the work piled up, ma.s.ses of poems for John Martin to make into books.

Approximately half the material Bukowski mailed to Santa Rosa was set to one side as unpublishable. John Martin describes the rejected work as not poems, but 'just some words on a page' and a good proportion of Bukowski's unpublished poetry is bad. Sometimes it is gratuitously offensive, without the saving grace of being funny, like a poem he wrote stating that Greek people stink. Leafing through what soon amounted to a sizable stack of rejected poems, Martin was forced to conclude that many were simply gibberish. Bukowski realized this, too. In 'as the poems go' he observed that the best writers have said little and the worst far too much, but he knew he became blocked if he tried to be perfect so it was better for him to keep writing and leave the editing to others.

Despite the uneven quality, much of this late outpouring of work was among the best poetry Bukowski ever wrote. And the first book he wrote using the Apple Mac, the 1992 anthology The Last Night of the Earth Poems, is one of his finest collections. Partly because he was turning out so much work, The Last Night of the Earth Poems is the longest Bukowski book published by Black Sparrow Press. He liked his poetry anthologies to be large and John Martin agreed, believing the poems worked better when they were gathered together in a substantial volume. War All the Time (1984) and You Get so Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense (1986) had both been long books. But The Last Night of the Earth Poems was over four hundred pages, 159 new poems, more than the collected works of some poets.

The method of editing The Last Night of the Earth Poems was the same as with all the other Bukowski books published by Black Sparrow. He gave John Martin carte blanche to choose what he wanted to publish. 'He didn't even know what I was going to put in, and then he never went back to look at his early work so he didn't know what I left out. He didn't care,' says John Martin, who usually arranged the poems in chronological order so the later anthologies start with poems about Bukowski's childhood, a subject he never tired of writing about, and end with him contemplating death. The Last Night of the Earth Poems is divided into four roughly chronological sections, each introduced with a phrase taken from one of the poems or from a poem Martin rejected as substandard but which had one striking stanza.

The book includes many wonderful poems, like 'we ain't got no money, honey, but we got rain', a supremely effective recreation of childhood containing a wealth of striking images, like the pa.s.sage describing the downpours Bukowski remembered from when he was young, and the sounds after the rain stopped: and then, at once, it would stop.

and it always seemed to stop around 5 or 6 a.m., peaceful then, but not an exact silence because things continued to drip drip drip and there was no smog then and by 8 a.m.

there was a blazing yellow sunlight, Van Gogh yellow crazy, blinding!

and then the roof drains relieved of the rush of water began to expand in the warmth: PANG! PANG! PANG!.

The style he had been working at for years, writing one simple line after another with as little ornamentation as possible, was perfectly achieved.

There were poems that consisted of words arranged one, two or three to a line, like a list, but Bukowski chose the line breaks carefully and managed to convey interesting images and ideas. They were often funny as well. In 'pulled down shade' for example, a woman reflects upon the failings of her partner: ... I've known you for 6 months but I have no idea who you are.

you're like some pulled down shade ...

a woman can drop out of your life and forget you real fast.

a woman can't go anywhere but UP after leaving you, honey.

There is also an apocalyptic feeling pervading The Last Night of the Earth Poems. It is signalled by the t.i.tle, which Bukowski feared might be mistaken for having a wholly ecological meaning, and is present in all the vignettes of Los Angeles life, whether writing about the Depression era with nightmare visions of his uncle 'running down the street with a knife in his back'; about his father, saying for the first time that he must have been insane; or modern Los Angeles: crime-ridden, divided by racial conflict and economic inequality, choked with pollution, its citizens 'slapped silly' by heat waves, frustrated to the point of violence by traffic congestion, and all to pay taxes to a government drowning in debt. When Angelenos rioted that year following the acquittal of four white policemen for attacking a black man, Rodney King, Bukowski's vision became terribly real. In 'Dinosauria, we', he wrote that, 'there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets.' In real life, fifty-eight people were killed, many beaten to death in broad daylight.

In the poem, 'transport', he allowed himself a rare late use of (mixed) metaphor, reviewing his life in terms of successive modes of travel: the railway journeys of his youth, the junk-yard cars he drove when he lived at De Longpre Avenue, and the foreign automobiles of his later success, like the Acura he bought for cash after the BMW. The poem ends with a vision of the future when people will be able to fly like birds. Another poet, especially one of Bukowski's mature years, might have used this image to sentimental effect, as an ascension to heaven perhaps, but Bukowski liked to subvert expectations: one night not so long ago I had a dream that I could fly.

I mean, just by working my arms and my legs I could fly through the air and I did.

there were all these people on the ground, they were reaching up their arms and trying to pull me down but they couldn't do it.

I felt like p.i.s.sing on them.

they were so jealous.

all they had to do was to work their way slowly up to it as I had done.

such people think success grows on trees.

you and I, we know better.

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, s.e.x. 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: My work was finally getting recognized. And I was still writing the way I wanted to and felt that I had to. I was still writing to keep from going crazy, I was still writing, trying to explain this G.o.d-d.a.m.ned life to myself. And here I was being talked into a tv series on commercial tv. All I had fought so hard for could be laughed right off the boards ...

(From: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the s.h.i.+p) 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 mult.i.tude roared their approval as if they knew who Bukowski was. It made him laugh.

There was a vibrancy there but it was short-lived. It was fairly simplistic. I suppose the lyrics were all right if you could understand them. They were probably speaking of Causes, Decencies, Love found and lost, etc. People need that anti-establishment, anti-parent, anti-something. But a successful millionaire group like that, no matter what they said, THEY WERE THE ESTABLISHMENT.

(From: The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the s.h.i.+p) They went to the bar afterwards and Bukowski got loaded on vodka-7s. He nodded h.e.l.lo 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 t.i.tle 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 j.a.panese.

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 b.u.t.ter 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.

... I would carry the pail as I walked Richardson back to his house.

we never spoke.

as we got to his door I would hand him the lunch pail.

then the door would close and he would be gone.

I was the only friend he had.

sissies live a hard life.

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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.ds remained kind.

16.

END OF THE NIGHT.

Pulp 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 Celine, 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.

The Red Sparrow? What the h.e.l.l is that?'

'I'm sure it exists, I just want to find it, I want you to locate it for me.'

'Any leads for me to go on?'

'No, but I'm sure the Red Sparrow is out there some where.'

'This Sparrow doesn't have a name, does it?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, a name. Like Henry. Or Abner. Or Celine?'

'No, it's just the Red Sparrow and I know that you can find it. I've got faith in you.'

'This is going to cost you, Mr Barton.'

'If you find the Red Sparrow I will give you one hundred dollars a month for life.'

Belane starts his search for Celine 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 Celine 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: 'HEY YOU!' he yelled, 'GET THE h.e.l.l OUT OF HERE!'

We were the only two in there.

'Which one to get the h.e.l.l out?' I asked.

'THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE Ce LINE! GET THE h.e.l.l OUT OF HERE!'

'But why?' I asked.

'I CAN TELL WHEN THEY'RE NOT GOING TO BUY!'

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 t.u.r.ds'. 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.

... I sat there and watched the cars pa.s.s on the street and I thought, those lucky sons of b.i.t.c.hes don't know how lucky they are just to be dumb and driving through the air while I sit here on top of my years trapped, nothing but a face in the window that n.o.body ever saw.

('the observer') 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. 'h.e.l.lo, 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?'

's.h.i.+t! Hank?' asked Hackford.

'Yeah, baby.'