Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 8

'You wanna come out?' he muttered.

'Sure!' Liza replied, brightly. She was intrigued by his personality, and thought she might find out more about what made him tick if they dated.

A few days later, Bukowski sent a special delivery letter to Linda in Utah, writing that he was with Liza. He didn't love her, he said, but she had fallen in love with him and he feared she might try and kill herself if he ended it, so he was going to stick with her for a while. He hoped Linda didn't mind.

Linda thanked him by reply: Dear Bukowski, ...

I was so happy to hear she is intelligent, kind loving, warm, but really I don't care for the details. Next thing I know you'll be letting me know how you ate her c.u.n.t and how she panted in pleasure ... It does sound like you have a lot in common ... at least you both believe in suicide ...

Just as Linda predicted, Bukowski was soon boasting in his letters about how good the s.e.x was (although Liza says the relations.h.i.+p was hardly s.e.xual at all).

Linda replied: b.a.s.t.a.r.d Bukowski, Just as I predicted you got me told, more or less, how you kissed Liza's p.u.s.s.y and how she panted in pleasure. Listen, you slob, I want you to know once and for all I don't want to hear how Liza trembled ...

GO p.i.s.s UP A ROPE ...

Linda While Linda was enjoying her 4 July holiday, Liza took Bukowski on vacation, at her expense, because she noticed he never went anywhere or did anything apart from drink, play the horses and write. They flew to the resort island of Catalina, twenty-six miles off the coast of California, and booked into the Hotel Monterey in the port town of Avalon, the best room in the house with a view over the bay. Bukowski's habits were unchanged by being away from home. He bought beer at the corner liquor store, stripped to his unders.h.i.+rt and shorts, tuned the radio to a cla.s.sical station and sat in an easy chair by the window to drink in his solitary, mournful way.

'Wait 'til I give you my purple turnip,' he muttered, taking a swig. It was a pet name for his c.o.c.k, but Liza had heard it all before.

'The relations.h.i.+p was not really s.e.xual at all, even though he talked a big s.e.x line, because he was always drunk,' she says. 'He might have liked to screw if he had been sober enough, but after drinking two six-packs, which would be his regular evening ration, he couldn't do anything.'

She went out exploring and he stayed in the room to write a poem, 'cooperation', about being taken on holiday by a wealthy woman and not knowing quite how to behave: she's going for a walk on the island or a boatride.

I believe she's taken a modern novel and her reading gla.s.ses.

I sit at the window with her electric typewriter and watch young girls' a.s.ses which are attached to young girls.

the final decadence.

When she got back laden with parcels, Liza told him about all the exciting things she had seen and done, and the fun they could have together.

'Oh Hank, I had such a great day,' she said. 'I ate ... and went on a boat taxi, and saw ...'

'The f.u.c.king boat taxi,' he said, dropping an empty can in the bin. 'Who wants to go on the f.u.c.king boat taxi? You're crazy.'

'Oh, well ... What did you do, Hank?'

'I wrote another immortal poem.'

The vacation continued in this desultory fas.h.i.+on for seven days. They toured the island, ate out and met friends of Liza's, but mostly Bukowski stayed in the room on his own writing poems. He spent so much time in the room, Liza bought a budgerigar to keep him company.

When they got back to LA, Bukowski spent a lot of time at Liza's house up on Tuxedo Terrace, in the Hollywood Hills. He lazed about in her double bed, drank cold beer from her refrigerator and goggled at programs on her color television while she was out at work. 'Hank, who had been bereft his whole life, thought he was living in a palace,' says Liza. 'It goes with a flash, music business lady.' Indeed when he came to write his third novel, Women, Bukowski made much of Liza's up-market lifestyle, using her as the basis of the character Dee Dee Bronson.

In the evenings, she took him to rock concerts, and hosted parties at her house where Bukowski met many of the most notable musicians and artists working in California. One of these was R. Crumb, famous for his Mr Natural and Fritz the Cat drawings.

'You know, your stuff is good, kid,' said Bukowski when Crumb came over to say h.e.l.lo. 'It's the real thing. Just keep away from the c.o.c.ktail parties.'

The advice stuck with the artist who shared many of Bukowski's negative feelings about society, and later became the most successful ill.u.s.trator of Bukowski's work, collaborating on books including Bring Me Your Love and The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the s.h.i.+p. 'The guy just says it right for me,' Crumb explains. 'I do believe that it takes a strong dose of alienation to make a good artist or writer in the modern world. You can't be too well-adjusted and still have anything interesting to say.'

When Liza saw Bukowski and Crumb getting along so well, she decided to introduce Bukowski to another artist, Spain Rodriguez.

'Spain's a cartoonist, too,' she said.

Bukowski took an instant dislike to Rodriguez, possibly because he was handsome and Bukowski tended to feel threatened by handsome men.

'I bet you can't cartoon worth a s.h.i.+t,' he said. Rodriguez slammed his fist down and challenged Bukowski to step outside. 'Oh, I bet you are a great cartoonist really,' Bukowski said, backing down. He later wrote a poem, 'trouble with spain', describing the meeting and how he made a fool of himself in front of Liza's friends: met this painter called Spain, no, he was a cartoonist, well, I met him at a party and everybody got mad at me because I didn't know who he was or what he did.

.... I said: hey, Spain, I like that name: Spain.

but I don't like you. why don't we step out in the garden and I'll kick the s.h.i.+t out of your a.s.s?

... everybody's angry at me.

Bukowski, he can't write, he's had it.

washed up. look at him drink.

he never used to come to parties.

now he comes to parties and drinks everything up and insults real talent.

I used to admire him when he cut his wrists and when he tried to kill himself with gas. look at him now leering at that 19 year old girl, and you know he can't get it up.

Bukowski and Liza met Gypsy Lou Webb who came though LA in 1972 after Jon Webb died. Bukowski had written an outrageous column in the Free Press based on Jon's death, calling the Webbs 'Clyde and June'. In the story, he wrote about how June was almost demented with grief, s.n.a.t.c.hing Clyde's false teeth as a keepsake and pus.h.i.+ng her hand into his vault to touch the body. The narrator of the story tries to seduce her after the funeral, saying Clyde can do nothing for her now, that his body is only fit for medical students to practice upon. The students would chop him up like a frog. This was a particularly unpleasant reference to Gypsy Lou donating Jon's organs to a teaching hospital.

'June, the dead are dead, there's nothing we can do about it. Let's go to bed ...'

'Go to bed?'

'Yes, let's. .h.i.t the sack, let's make it ...'

'Listen, I knew Clyde for 32 years ...'

'Clyde can't help you now ...'

'His body's still warm, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d ...'

'Mine's hot ...'

'Everybody knew it was me even though he disguised my name,' says Gypsy Lou. 'I got mad and told him off: "That's a dirty, lousy trick."'

When she finished telling him off, Gypsy Lou told Bukowski and Liza a story even more bizarre than the one he'd made up. Hanging around her neck was a chain strung with a silver pill box and a pair of red dice, the type used in casinos.

'These are Jon's dice,' she said.

Bukowski said he remembered them.

'And these are Jon's ashes,' she said opening the lid of the box. She took a pinch of ash and tossed it in her mouth. 'Every day I eat a bit of him. I dug up my little baby, too ... then I mixed his ashes in with Jon's, so now I'm eating both of them. When I die, we will be together, forever.'

Although he and Liza had fun together, Bukowski was still in love with Linda and spoke to her frequently on the telephone. Liza was angry when she found out about the calls.

'Here you are living with me, and when she phones you forget everything!' she said. 'I was with Linda sixteen months. I loved her and things grow between people,' Bukowski said, defending himself. 'I still love her.'

'But you said you loved me. You said if I helped you through it that you'd never leave me. Now you want to leave. Is it because she's younger? Maybe you just like women who treat you mean. You've gotten used to that kind of woman.'

'I didn't say she treated me mean. I want to go see her. I want to find things out.' 'All right, you go on up there. But I can't promise how I'll feel about you when you get back.'

Bukowski and Linda were reunited in San Francisco when he read at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poets' Theater and, although they had a terrible fight at the party afterwards,* Bukowski decided he couldn't live without her and told Liza it was over. They were in bed at De Longpre Avenue and she reacted by becoming almost hysterical, weeping, beating on his chest and demanding to know why. He said Linda had a special hold over him and he guessed he was a louse.

'I loved him with great enthusiasm and then I was heartbroken with great enthusiasm,' says Liza. 'I could never understand why he was going back to Linda. I always thought of her as being rather trashy. I thought she was some kind of shrew with a magic v.a.g.i.n.a.' Liza got so upset she threw up in the bed, and out came her false teeth. She knew he would write about it in his column, no matter how much she begged him not to. 'He was so happy,' she says, 'it was my full set.'

Linda took out a mortgage on a detached house in the LA suburb of Silver Lake, and she and Bukowski set up home together as a surprisingly domesticated couple. She forbade him from drinking in the house and he managed to stay sober for weeks at a time. He did his share of the household ch.o.r.es and they started having Marina over to stay at weekends.

Marina and her mother had settled in Santa Monica and Bukowski made a point of attending open days at her school, just like a regular dad. Marina was particularly pleased to look out from the stage at her first school pageant to see him in the audience. 'I remembered at the time that he gave poetry readings and he had to get up on the stage and do that sort of thing,' she says. 'It was nice to have him there.'

When she came over to Silver Lake, Marina played with Linda's two children, Gaetano and Clarissa, baking cookies, playing in the large back yard and painting pictures with Bukowski who kept them amused with stories. 'He did make me laugh a lot,' says Marina. 'But it was more of a feeling of being able to play with him and laugh and also being able to tell him anything, that he really knew who I was. I just always felt happy and safe.'

Marina knew Bukowski was different from most fathers, partly because all the adults treated him as if he was special, and partly because he was so different from the traditional fathers she saw on television and in story books. 'I remember reading some story with a very traditional father in it that wore slippers and a robe and smoked a pipe and behaved in a very cliched kind of way, a very appealing story to a child and thinking: that's sort of your regular kind of father. If you could choose your father, would I trade my father for a regular father?' She decided there was no question. 'I thought, no, I'm really lucky to have the father I have because he may have been really unusual, but he always talked to me just as another person. He didn't talk down the way a lot of adults do to their children and, as a result, I felt much closer to him.'

Linda's daughter, Clarissa, was not such a big Bukowski fan, and often told him off. 'I hate you!' she would say, emphatically. 'You are ugly! You've got a big red nose!'

'I love that kid,' Bukowski told Linda. 'She's the only honest person around.'

Bukowski took Linda to the races, driving across the city using the boulevards never the freeways, and usually sitting in the less popular sections of the grandstand, arriving early and leaving before the last race everything calculated to avoid the crowds which he couldn't stand. He said he didn't even like it when people brushed up against him. 'If we won, we would go out and have a great dinner afterwards. If we lost, we would say, what the h.e.l.l, let's have a good dinner anyway,' says Linda. He liked chain restaurants which weren't too expensive, particularly The Sizzler on Hollywood Boulevard where he ordered medium rare T-bone steak with baked potato and side salad. When he craved a drink, Linda took him to Baskin-Robbins' ice cream parlor, hoping he'd be content with a sticky dessert. It worked for a while, as he wrote in 'the icecream people': the lady has me temporarily off the bottle and now the p.e.c.k.e.r stands up better, and there is much use for the p.e.c.k.e.r ...

however, it changes the nights instead of listening to Shostakovitch and Mozart through the smeared haze of smoke and scotch and beer, these nights change complexities: we drive down to Baskin-Robbins, 31 flavors Rocky Road, Bubble Gum, Apricot Ice, Strawberry Cheesecake, Chocolate Mint ...

and later that night there is use for the p.e.c.k.e.r, use for love, and it is a glorious f.u.c.k, long and true, and afterwards we speak of easy things our heads by the open window with the moonlight looking through, we sleep in each other's arms.

the icecream people make me feel good, inside and out.

give me 2 quick shots of vanilla.

'He was nice when he was sober,' says Linda. 'I think his true self was when he was sober. But when he was drunk it was like a demon took him over Bukowski the Bad.'

One weekend they had a big party at the house and, when Bukowski was drunk, he accused Linda of being a lesbian, which infuriated her so much she pulled him out of his chair and threw him in the fireplace. He landed on his backside with his beer in his hand, not having spilt a drop.

'She gets so ... angry,' he said, refusing to lose his cool. 'It fascinates me how ... angry she gets.'

Linda hurled herself at him and they brawled on the floor until dragged apart by their guests.

'Get out!' she screamed. 'All of you are getting out.'

Bukowski slowly got himself ready to leave, making remarks about Linda as he put his jacket on and did his shoes up. He said she had thick ankles, something she was very sensitive about. While he was bent over tying his laces, she picked up a bottle of Jack Daniels and held it over his head. She was shaking.

'You better kill me when you hit me,' he said. 'Because if you don't, I'm going to kill you.' Then he straightened up and faced her. 'You ain't s.h.i.+t,' he said.

Another night a man came over to the house to talk to Linda about her poetry. She was so flattered to be the center of attention, for a change, she relaxed the no-drinking rule and they had 'boiler makers' (whiskey washed down with beer). As the evening wore on, it became apparent the visitor was really only interested in talking to Bukowski and Linda pushed them both out of the house.

'OK, you guys, if you want to see each other, leave together,' she said.

The front door was made up of little panes of gla.s.s and, when Linda refused to let them back in, Bukowski took off his shoe and began knocking out the gla.s.s piece by piece. The visitor joined in, too, thinking it great fun. Linda flung the door open and they fell into the hall, breaking one of her sculptures. 'That's what infuriated me,' she says. 'I came out like a tiger, and drove them back out the door and they fell down the steps.' There was such a racket the neighbors called the police who arrived to find Bukowski back inside the house holding Linda's couch over his head, saying he was going to toss it through the window.

'Don't throw the couch!' said the cops, pulling their guns.

'He's wrecking my place! He's wrecking it!' screamed Linda.

'Put the couch down.'

On the way to the station, Bukowski began to charm the officers, telling them he was a famous writer. He wanted to call his publisher to bail him out. His publisher was an important man, they'd see.

The last thing John Martin wanted was to drive across town at 2 a.m. He told Bukowski he would call Linda, smooth things over between them, and get her to bail him out.

'There's no way I'm going to go and get that son of a b.i.t.c.h,' she said, when he called. 'He was wrecking the place!'

'You know he loves you, Linda. He really loves you. If you go down and get him, you will have his eternal grat.i.tude. He will never do this again.' Martin knew it wasn't true. Their relations.h.i.+p was like the Hundred Years War an end to hostilities was not in sight. 'And I'll pay for the gla.s.s,' he said. 'Don't worry about it.'

Linda wanted Martin to come over and talk about the horrendous things she was going through with Bukowski. 'I thought Martin took this att.i.tude, you are the low-life people. I don't want to get my hands dirty. I publish it, but I don't want to get involved.' But, reluctantly, she agreed to collect Bukowski from the station.

Martin called the police back to let Bukowski know Linda was on her way.

'Oh yes, Mr Martin, just a moment please,' said the desk sergeant, unctuously. 'Charles!' he called. 'Oh Charles, it's for you.'

Martin heard somebody asking Bukowski if he cared for a cup of coffee, and Bukowski replying: 'Yeah, put it down there, thank you.' It seemed to be a very civil evening in the drunk tank. When he came on the line, Bukowski thanked Martin for fixing things and said the superintendent wanted a word.

'Mr Martin,' said the superintendent. 'We are taking good care of your friend here. We are all big admirers of his work.'

It turned out the cops were all avid readers of Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man column, which had a much wider readers.h.i.+p now it was appearing in the LA Free Press. They hadn't even bothered to lock him up.

Bukowski was starting to get quite a lot of fan mail, some of it from women who were attracted to the honest way he wrote about s.e.x and relations.h.i.+ps, now Linda King had taught him a thing or two. 'He had the capacity to love and love deeply and a lot of men don't even have that capacity,' she says. 'He wasn't afraid of that. He let his emotions loose. Bukowski let himself feel all kinds of things.'

One of these women was Joanna Bull, a voluptuous blonde former girlfriend of rock star drummer Levon Helm. She sent samples of her poetry and began visiting Bukowski at the bungalow on De Longpre Avenue, which he had kept as a bolt-hole for when he wanted to get away from Linda.

Joanna was more interested in Bukowski's mind than his body, but she knew he wanted to sleep with her and one night, when she had stayed later than normal, and smoked a lot of dope, she resigned herself to it. But her subconscious was apparently set against the idea. 'When we got to the moment of truth, and we were all wrestling around and doing stuff and preparing ourselves, he realized I hadn't taken off my panties! He was absolutely disgusted.' Afterwards she went into the toilet and threw up. 'It was unbearable to me,' she says.

In July, 1973, Bukowski accompanied Linda on her annual trip to Utah. He was looking ahead to writing his novel, Women, and needed to collect material, as he explained in a letter to John Martin: 'I'm making a study on [Linda]. If I ever get it down right some day you'll see the female exposed as she has never been exposed.'

On their first night in Boulder, the King sisters threw an uproarious party. 'Every wild character we knew we had there, and I think he was a little taken aback,' says Gerry King. 'He was used to being the wildest person at a party and he had compet.i.tion at that one.' A couple of days later, Bukowski, Linda and Gerry, together with their children, drove to where the family had a trailer on the side of Boulder Mountain.

Bukowski and Linda slept in a tent the first night, but it rained so hard they had to squeeze into the trailer with Gerry's family. By the third day the cramped conditions were getting on everybody's nerves. What was worse, the beer Bukowski had brought up the mountain was gone. He wanted to go into town for more and, when Linda said he couldn't, he grumpily stomped off into the pines as if he were back in Hollywood, taking a walk along Sunset.

When he had been gone a couple of hours, the King sisters began to wonder what had happened. As Gerry says: 'At first we were annoyed and didn't believe it. Surely he didn't get lost.' Of course he had and it made for one of the funniest pa.s.sages in Women, and one of the most comical accounts in modern fiction of a city dweller being lost in the countryside: falling into lakes, being attacked by giant flies, sinking into a bog and all the while hollering for Lydia (as he called Linda in the novel) to rescue him. Finally she did: ... 'I tracked you. I found your red notebook. You got lost deliberately because you were p.i.s.sed.'

'No, I got lost out of ignorance and fear. I am not a complete person I'm a stunted city person. I am more or less a failed drizzling s.h.i.+t with absolutely nothing to offer.'

'Christ,' she said, 'don't you think I know that?'