Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 1

Howard Sounes.

drawings by Charles Bukowski.

PREFACE.

Recently a journalist emailed me from the New York Post to ask what I thought was the essence of Charles Bukowski's enduring appeal. I decided the answer was in a word: honesty. 'One thing about Bukowski: extraordinarily honest man,' Bukowski's publisher John Martin had once told me, knowing the writer better than anyone perhaps. 'He hated any kind of dishonesty. He hated deceit.' Bukowski edited and often exaggerated his life story to make works of fiction. Sometimes he changed his story quite considerably, as I explain in this book. Nevertheless, he faced himself squarely in the mirror each day, writing about himself with extraordinary candour even when the reflection was unflattering. Personal honesty shines through all of the writing, making Bukowski an author one learns to trust and indeed comes to love.

Humour is often the companion of honesty, and Bukowski was the first to laugh at himself, as he laughed at the crazy world around him. A heightened sense of the absurd is in almost everything he published. Reading Bukowski, one can imagine him chuckling as he wrote, the laughter in the stories and poems being one of the happy secrets that we, his admirers, share, while those yet to discover Bukowski's books regard him only too often as merely a 'dirty old man'.

He created and played up to that image, of course, writing a newspaper column for years called Notes of a Dirty Old Man, s.e.x stories mostly, that were collected in a book of the same name in 1969, a historically important publication in terms of his career and still a popular book with the public, but not, I would suggest, his very best work. Bukowski was always a bawdy writer, but these stories, and others he wrote for p.o.r.n magazines such as Hustler, were not truly characteristic of his oeuvre. Rather it was hack work, done for the money. Relationships between men and women are tackled in a much more engaging and convincing way in poetry books such as Love is a Dog From h.e.l.l and his superb third novel, Women. Here Henry Chinaski (Bukowski's recurring, autobiographical character) is not just getting laid, though he frequently is, he is a man alternately lifted up and defeated by love, often obsessional love, a subject Bukowski wrote about with tenderness and wit. Chinaski is an endearingly fallible lover: s.e.xually insecure, sometimes impotent and often jealous. Occasionally Chinaski is also violent, as was the case in life. The author broke the nose of one girlfriend, the sculptress Linda King, as I relate in Chapter 8 of this biography, while four chapters later I describe how he kicked another girlfriend during a TV interview. Both times he was under the influence of drink, and it is impossible to write about Bukowski without addressing his alcoholism.

Interestingly, Bukowski didn't cla.s.sify himself as an alcoholic, and neither did his widow Linda Lee (she who was kicked, later his second wife). Linda Lee told me that Bukowski was a 'smart drunk', making a distinction in her mind between people who are incapacitated by booze and those, like Bukowski, who drink to excess and yet still do their work. 'Hank remained prolific,' she argued, calling her husband by his pet name (Hank from Henry, Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr being his full name). 'I don't call that alcoholism. I think alcoholism is when you drink and you can't do anything anymore.' Despite what Linda Lee says, it may seem as clear to you as it is to me that Bukowski was indeed an alcoholic, literally a roaring drunk for much of his life. This book is filled to the brim with stories of his Baccha.n.a.lian misadventures. In a sense, his drinking was his way of putting two fingers up at society. Booze was also the author's escape from a world he found cruel and hurtful, for along with his other characteristics Bukowski was an exceptionally sensitive man. He writes a great deal about drinking, of course, and said in interviews that he felt he couldn't function without alcohol. Yet towards the end of his life, when he was ill with leukaemia, Bukowski was obliged to quit the bottle, and in doing so he found that he could write perfectly well sober. If he had made that discovery earlier he might have avoided a great deal of the ugliness, tedium and humiliation that comes with alcoholism, though he would not have got into the sc.r.a.pes that provided material for his stories. In any event, it is unfortunate that many people see Bukowski primarily as a drunkard, while it also seems regrettable to me that some impressionable fans make a fetish of his drinking. It was, in many ways, beside the point.

In the books, Bukowski's tone is often melancholy, sometimes very angry, but as mentioned he is invariably very funny, too, and is quick to recognise beauty and hope in the bleakest situation. Ultimately Bukowski's work is uplifting to read. Aside from relationships with women, and his own drinking, Bukowski has several major recurring themes. Above all else, he writes about himself, of course, obsessively so about his unhappy childhood in Los Angeles. The author lived virtually his whole life in LA, and the City of Angels is another theme. Importantly, he wrote about life in Los Angeles from a working-cla.s.s perspective, or perhaps more accurately from the viewpoint of the city's undercla.s.s. Until he was forty-nine, in 1969, when he made a deal with John Martin to write full-time, Bukowski supported himself by working manual jobs. Some of these jobs, such as 'coconut man' in a cookie factory, were comical. Others were back-breaking. All were soul-destroying. Most notably, Bukowski worked for the US Postal Service, as a delivery man and then for many years as a sorter of mail in downtown LA. He detested the job, resenting the fact that he had to drag himself away from what he saw as his real life writing and drinking in the privacy of his apartment in East Hollywood to put in long hours at the sorting office, simply in order to pay his rent. To Bukowski, who always had a great sense of his own worth, putting a high value on his time, it went against nature to answer to a boss eight hours a day simply to earn a living.

There is a scene in Bukowski's second novel, Factotum, which ill.u.s.trates this att.i.tude to work, which itself was a major theme of his writing as well as being integral to Bukowski's idiosyncratic way of looking at the world: Henry Chinaski is being berated by a boss at an auto-parts warehouse for not pulling his weight on the job. The boss gave him a break, because he pitied Chinaski, and now he feels let down as he tells Chinaski he is fired for his general laziness. Chinaski is unrepentant, telling his employer: 'I've given you my time. It's all I've got to give it's all any man has.' He finishes this speech by demanding the money he is owed, which he spends at the horse races and on booze, which he drinks with his woman in a cheap room. This is where he is happy, free from his lousy, boring, soul-destroying job, living on his own terms.

This refusal to conform to the capitalist convention of an honest day's work for an honest day's pay, also the refusal to try and 'get on' in life, makes Bukowski a radical American writer. In his book Against the American Dream, the academic Russell Harrison argues that Bukowski was in effect a political writer, 'the only major post-war American writer who has denied the efficacy of the American Dream'. He had no interest in party politics or ideology, but Bukowski saw that much was wanting in modern America. Viewed from the perspective of a run-down apartment court in East LA, the American Dream evidently excluded millions of people, those ordinary Americans who struggle by on low pay cleaning hotel rooms, doing factory jobs and driving trucks in order to make the country function. The patriotic American would say that any one of these people has the chance of becoming a millionaire, but in truth the vast majority are stuck in their place. Though he was too much of a loner ever to be regarded as a 'man of the people', Bukowski gave expression to this undercla.s.s. When he made money later in life, Bukowski moved into a better neighbourhood, bought an expensive car and enjoyed living well, but the author remained a critic of his homeland. One of the reasons Bukowski still commands our attention is because of this refreshing take on the USA, which is another of his great themes.

The final reason for Bukowski's lasting appeal is that he is 'such an easy writer to read', to quote his poem 'I'm Flattered'. Influenced in his youth by reading Ernest Hemingway and John Fante, he developed a distinctively direct style. His language is basic and unpretentious, the syntax uncomplicated, the lines short, paragraphs and chapters likewise. Whether he wrote poetry or prose, this was Bukowski's approach, while his poet's eye for the rhythm and symmetry of language lends elegance to everything he published.

Why did I write this biography? Indeed, is there a need for such a work when Bukowski wrote his own biography in more than fifty books of poetry and prose? This is a fair question.

Bukowski did tell his own story, and did so brilliantly of course, but by manipulating his experiences to create adventures for Henry Chinaski the biographical truth of Bukowski's life becomes tantalisingly obscure. Many of Bukowski's readers therefore develop a curiosity to find out the literal truth of the man's life: when and where the author was born, who his parents were 'and all that David Copperfield kind of c.r.a.p', as Holden Caulfield says so expressively in The Catcher in the Rye. Far from being c.r.a.p, such biographical facts are the skeleton of memory, and history. And because Bukowski made his art from his experiences, and those of his family and friends, there is very good reason to unravel his anecdotes, name the names, fix dates and put the author's life in correct chronological order.

The first person to write a biography of Bukowski was his friend, the American poet Neeli Cherkovski, whose book Hank appeared in 1991. Bukowski was in the habit of regaling his buddies and interviewers with stories from his life, in much the same way as he wrote about himself: that is he mixed fact and fiction to spin a good yarn. Cherkovski reported his friend's well-worn stories in Hank, without testing their veracity for the most part, or seeking out other perspectives on the man, and where Bukowski himself wasn't able or willing to answer questions gaps remain in the story. Which is not to say that Hank isn't a valuable work; its charm is as a memoir of a literary friendship by which Neeli is able to convey to us what it was like to spend time with Hank.

In contrast to Cherkovski, I did not know Bukowski personally. In fact, I never met the man. Perhaps I should therefore explain how and why I came to write this book. My interest started, like yours, as a reader. I began reading Bukowski around the time of his death, which came in 1994. I was working as a newspaper reporter then, on the staff of the Sunday Mirror in London, travelling frequently on a.s.signments around the United Kingdom and abroad. Invariably I took a book with me, because there was so much time wasted simply hanging around. One day, sitting in my parked car, I opened a book I had bought on impulse. It was Bukowski's first novel, Post Office, his fictionalised account of working for the US Postal Service. I had never read anything by Bukowski before and was delighted by his terse, witty style. I also empathised with the hero. Like Henry Chinaski, I disliked my day job, thinking it trivial and tiresome. Like Chinaski/ Bukowski, I had come to resent being told what to do by bosses (editors in my case), placing a premium on my time. It is all we have, as Chinaski says. However, employers or rather middle managers seem to think our time is theirs. And here is the rub. In order to break free from the slavery of an unfulfilling job one needs other income. Luckily, I had prospects. It so happened that I was writing my first book, a non-fiction account of the Fred and Rosemary West murder case, which I covered extensively as a reporter. Like Chinaski, I now wanted to give up the day job to write books full-time, rather than kowtow to bosses who had come to seem as irksome and ridiculous to me as they were to Chinaski.

When my book Fred & Rose was published in 1995 it was sufficiently successful to encourage me to tackle another, more ambitious, literary project. I had it in mind to write a full-length biography of a cultural figure I admired. As I devoured Bukowski's books, it became clear that my new subject was under my nose: evidently Bukowski was writing about his own adventures in poetry and prose, but in doing so he had made so many little alterations and mixed up the order of events to such an extent that his life had become hopelessly entangled with the legend of Henry Chinaski. Reading between the lines, as a reporter, I saw that I could probably find the people he based his characters on, together with the doc.u.mentary evidence that would allow me to pin down the facts of the author's life, and that by this method I could compare the life of Bukowski with that of Chinaski, reveal the discrepancies between the two, and tell the resulting story as biography. This would be a valuable companion book for anyone interested in his writing, or indeed Bukowski as a personality.

I began work on this project in 1996 and within a short time it had taken over my life. Ten years on, having written several more books, I see that it is entirely natural for an author to become obsessional about his subject. In a sense, one has to be in the grip of an obsession to write well. Even so, Charles Bukowski got a hold on me that was exceptional, and this book became nothing less than a life-changing experience. As I got deeper into my research, I was increasingly reluctant to drag myself from the book to do my day job, which was now with the Daily Mirror. A national newspaper journalist is on call all the time, linked to the news desk by mobile phone and pager (as was then the system), liable to be dispatched almost anywhere at a moment's notice. This is part of the excitement of the work. That excitement can wear thin, however, and in my case it was replaced by wanting to do something else with my time, on my own terms, the 'urgent' calls from the office merely irritating distractions from my work as a writer. Without doubt, I was under the influence of Bukowski's personal philosophy here. In any event, I continued the unsatisfactory business of fitting my research around my day job, using my vacation time to travel to the USA to interview Bukowski's friends and family. During one of these trips I experienced what Americans like to call an epiphany.

It was the afternoon of 4 January, 1997, about 2.00 p.m. local time, and I was driving east across Arizona to Phoenix to meet Bukowski's former girlfriend, Linda King (a wonderful person who you will meet in the following pages). The previous day had been my thirty-second birthday, and I had celebrated with a Bukowskian meal of a steak dinner, washed down with many drinks, in a ratty joint on the California border (curiously, I had started to copy Bukowski's personal habits). The next day was cold, but bright and clear, and as I drove across the desert to see Linda I realised with great relief that I was finally out of range of the Daily Mirror, with its constant, impertinent phone calls, and rather than chasing stories for the paper I was engaged in a project I considered worthwhile; I was pursuing it in the way I thought best (as opposed to the life of a hack journalist who is forever being told what to write and how to write it); and I was being paid for it. This, I decided, was the life for me.

My career as a newspaper reporter was over then, essentially, though I endured another eight months, during which time I completed most of my research and started to write the ma.n.u.script. Writing demands even more concentration than researching a book: months sitting quietly at a desk working without interruption. This proved extremely difficult with a demanding full-time job. At home in London in August 1997 I was looking forward to the bank holiday weekend, because I needed three clear days to get on with the ma.n.u.script, which I had to deliver to the publishers fairly soon. As I dressed for work on the Friday morning before the long weekend, my mind on the book rather than the job, or the other job as it were, the Daily Mirror news desk rang to tell me to drive immediately to the Lake District to cover a murder. If I set out on this trip, I knew I would not be back in London before the end of the weekend and would therefore be unable to do any writing. So I refused to go. As I did so I knew I was being entirely unreasonable, and that I had to either apologise and do what I was told or quit the Mirror. The book had come to mean so much to me that this was a simple decision. Automatically, I sat down and typed my resignation letter which I faxed to the office that morning, thereby leaving the world of normal employment and casting myself into the life of a full-time author. As Bukowski himself noted, this change comes as something of a shock to the system (see Chapter 7).

As touched upon, I believe that good books are written by authors who, for some reason, feel compelled to tell a story, whatever it may be. The fact that I quit my job (well-paid as it was, with a car, a pension and all the other perks that go with being a company man) in order to finish this biography proves how a story can take over an author's life, and make one behave in ways that, perhaps, are not entirely rational.

Fortunately, I had one successful book under my belt, some money in the bank and good publishers who shared my enthusiasm for Bukowski. Although the princ.i.p.al deal was with Grove Press in New York, the British edition of this book came out first, published by Canongate of Edinburgh, with whom I worked closely. We went out of our way to create a book that was more than a run-of-the-mill biography, rather a book in the spirit of Bukowski. The t.i.tle, for instance, is not exactly snappy, not obviously commercial. But Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life is an apt quote from a Bukowski poem, as Bukowski himself used long poetic t.i.tles for his own books (The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills for example). So the t.i.tle was in his style. For the same reason we reproduced his line drawings as chapter headings, and because yellow was Bukowski's favourite colour we made the jacket of the first UK edition yellow.

It is also worth adding a few words on the way the book was written. Like Bukowski, I used short, simple sentences and brief chapters. Like his novels, the biography is a slim volume. Furthermore, I adopted an American voice, using US spellings and the terms and phrases Bukowski himself employed. I am English, moreover a Londoner, and do not normally speak or write as I do in the body of this book, but I didn't want my Englishness to jar against Bukowski's idiomatic American style of speaking and writing, which I quote from liberally. I also refrained from discussing my sources in the text, because I didn't want to interrupt the flow of the story. (There are fulsome source notes at the end.) In short, I did everything I could to write a book in Bukowski's style, or at least one in which his own voice wouldn't seem out of place. The result is a biography that, while being very revealing about the life, reads at times like fiction. In fact, one of the most pleasing reviews came when a critic in the magazine Deluxe wrote that Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life 'reads like a great lost Bukowski novel'.

Because the book reads like fiction please do not a.s.sume, however, that it cannot be relied upon for accuracy. Despite my background as a tabloid journalist, I was scrupulous not to sensationalise Bukowski's life, though I didn't shy away from stories that reflected badly on him either. In writing the biography I was leaving behind the hyperbole and other vices of tabloid journalism and seeking to tell a story completely straight. I do not pa.s.s judgement on Bukowski's behaviour in the book, as newspapers are so fond of doing. Rather I saw my job as presenting you, the reader, with the facts of Bukowski's life in an entertaining but always reliable way. The research is as good as it could be. It's up to you, having read the story, to decide what sort of man you think Bukowski was, though of course we both start off from the point of admiring the books, and thereby the author. I wouldn't have written the biography if I didn't feel warmly towards him, and you would be unlikely to be reading it unless you shared my enthusiasm.

As I say, I never met Bukowski and as a result I am asked occasionally: 'How can you write a biography of somebody you never knew?' In reply I point out that many eminent biographers and historians would be made redundant by this logic. Evidently Vincent Cronin didn't interview Napoleon for his 1971 biography of the emperor; Peter Ackroyd wasn't able to sit down with William Blake. Yet both got to know their subjects by a process of deep research and as a result they wrote compelling lives of these men. In fact, there are at least two significant advantages for the biographer not to have his or her subject around. Firstly, and very importantly, they can't influence you to write about them in the way they would prefer to be portrayed. (Many biographies written with the co-operation of the subject are bad because the author is hamstrung in this way, the result being hagiography.) Secondly, without direct contact with the subject, one is obliged to dig deep for material, and interview widely, which is healthy and helps one get at 'the truth' (though lives always remain slightly mysterious, which is as it should be). I travelled extensively to meet and interview virtually everybody of significance in Bukowski's life, much more so than anybody else who has written about Bukowski, and this book is the concatenation of many memories. I also turned up a small mountain of doc.u.mentary evidence, including hundreds of letters and previously unpublished photographs, many of which appear in this book, others in my companion book Bukowski in Pictures. So I didn't meet the man, but like Cronin and Ackroyd I got to feel I knew my subject, and I hope you get that feeling too, reading the book.

My interest in Bukowski faded after the biography was published in 1998, as happens when you finish a book that has been a central part of your life and other subjects and concerns take its place. Rereading the biography recently was like looking at the work of a stranger. I was amazed by it. Part of the magic of books is that, if they are any good, they have a life of their own beyond that of their author, and that has been the case with Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. It was well-received when first published and has made its own way in the world successfully ever since, selling steadily in the UK, the USA and in translation in more than a dozen languages, the translations ranging from j.a.panese to Hebrew. My best hope is that it will come to be seen as the cla.s.sic biography of this remarkable American author, entertaining and informing readers while also returning them to Bukowski's own marvellous stories and poems.

Howard Sounes.

London, 2006.

PROLOGUE.

Charles Bukowski raised himself up from his chair and got a beer from the refrigerator behind him on stage. The audience applauded as he drank, tipping the bottle until it was upside down and he had drained the last golden drop.

'This is not a prop,' he said, speaking slowly with a lilt to his voice, like W.C. Fields. 'It's a necesssssitty.'

The crowd laughed and clapped. A young girl in front exclaimed that he was a 'funky old guy'. Indeed, at fifty-two, Bukowski was old enough to be the father of most of the kids who had come to hear him read, and his behavior was all the more amusing because of it.

Bukowski looked odd, as well as speaking in a peculiar way. He was a tall man, a quarter-inch under six feet, heavyset with a beer belly, but his head seemed too big for his body and his face was alarming, like a Frankenstein mask: a long jaw, thin lips, sad slitty eyes sunk into hollows; a large boozer's nose, red and purple with broken veins; and a scraggly grey beard over greasy skin mottled with acne scars, skin so bad he looked like he'd been in a fire.

He had been flown up to San Francisco, in September, 1972, by his publishers, City Lights Books, because of the success of a collection of his short stories, Erections, e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. The book was dedicated to his young girlfriend, Linda King: who brought it to me

and who will take it.

away.

Eight hundred people paid to get into a gymnasium on Telegraph Hill, eager to see the author of Life in a Texas Wh.o.r.ehouse and the other outrageous, apparently autobiographical stories. The idea of appearing before them terrified Bukowski. Although he looked intimidating, he was chronically shy and hated himself for hustling his a.s.s in the home town of the beat writers, a group he neither liked nor considered himself part of.

He'd been drinking all day to get his courage up, on the morning flight from Los Angeles, in the Italian restaurant where he and Linda King had lunch, and behind the curtain while waiting for his cue to go on. His face was grey with fear, and he vomited twice.

'You know it's easier working in a factory,' he told his friend, Taylor Hackford, who was filming a doc.u.mentary. 'There's no pressure.'

The crowd knew him for his short stories, but Bukowski read poetry. Poems about drinking, gambling and s.e.x, even going to the c.r.a.pper he knew that the t.i.tle alone, 'p.i.s.s and s.h.i.t', would make them laugh.

'Listen, some of these poems are serious and I have to apologize because I know some crowds don't like serious poems, but I've gotta give you some now and again to show I'm not a beer-drinking machine,' he said. He chose a poem about his father, whom he had hated with a pa.s.sion. It was called 'the rat': with one punch, at the age of 16 and 1/2, I knocked out my father, a cruel shiny b.a.s.t.a.r.d with bad breath, and I didn't go home for some time, only now and then to try to get a dollar from dear momma.

it was 1937 in Los Angeles and it was a h.e.l.l of a Vienna.

me? I'm 30 years older, the town is 4 or 5 times as big but just as rotten and the girls still spit on my shadow, another war is building for another reason, and I can hardly get a job now for the same reason, I couldn't then: I don't know anything I can't do anything.

It seemed he might cry as he finished the last sad lines. But he snapped out of it and began playing the wild man again.

'Do I know you?' he asked a fan who called out a request. 'Don't push me around, baby ...' he threatened, breaking into a grin. 'One more beer, I'll take you all.' He threw his head back, showing ruined teeth, and cackled. 'Ha Ha Ha. Watch out!'

Another fan tried to get up on the stage.

'What the h.e.l.l you want, man? Get away from me,' said Bukowski, as if talking to a dog. 'What are you, some kinda creep?' The crowd whooped with laughter.

Somebody asked how many beers he could drink. Others were less impressed, demanding that Bukowski stop wasting time; they had paid to hear poetry, not to watch a drunk.

'You want poems?' he teased the college kids, disliking their expensive clothes and untroubled faces. 'Beg me.'

'f.u.c.k you, man!'

'Any other comments?'

The more drunk he became, the more hostile he was towards the audience and the more hostile the audience got. 'It ended up with them throwing bottles,' recalls beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, who had Bukowski hustled out back for his own safety.

There was a party afterwards at Ferlinghetti's apartment in North Beach. The place was packed with poets, musicians, actors, members of the audience, and almost everybody was drunk or stoned. Bukowski had little time for drugs, but he was roaring drunk. He asked every woman he met whether they wanted to have s.e.x with him, and snarled at Taylor Hackford when Hackford tried to film a close-up: 'What do you want, mother-f.u.c.k?'

Bukowski was talking to his friend John Bennett when a fan came over to compliment him on a great show. They told him to get lost.

'f.u.c.k you, and your mother!' said the fan.

Bukowski didn't mind people insulting his mother he had disliked her himself but Bennett took offence at the remark and threw the man down the stairs.

'Oh G.o.d, here we go!' exclaimed Linda King as she watched a chair smash through a window in the fight that ensued. Bennett put his fist through another window, gashing his hand, and soon half the men in the room were throwing punches at each other.

Bukowski grabbed Linda's hand and pulled her after him into the kitchen. She a.s.sumed he wanted to protect her, or maybe give her a kiss, but he accused her of flirting with John Bennett, saying she was no better than a wh.o.r.e, and tried to hit her over the head with a frying pan.

'I looked in his eyes and it was like a creature who was not Bukowski at all,' says Linda, who had been the victim of his jealousy many times in the year and a half they'd been together. 'I always claimed he got possessed when he was drunk. I could see he was really going to get me.'

He blocked her in a corner with his left arm, and was brandishing the frying pan in his right hand, ready to bang her on the head. She bit him hard on the hand, ducked and made a run for it. He lunged after her with the pan, but tripped and cut his face on the stove as he fell.

'To h.e.l.l with you, b.i.t.c.h, you're out of my life,' he screamed.

Linda heard the familiar sound of police sirens wailing towards them through the city. This often happened when they went to a party, even though Bukowski promised to behave. In her frustration, she kicked a panel out of the door and clattered down the stairs into the street where a crowd was gathering. The police soon showed up, but Linda stayed back, knowing it was better not to get involved.

Marty Balin, leader of the rock group Jefferson Airplane, wanted to make a movie out of Bukowski's short stories and came to the party to meet him. 'The windows were broken and gla.s.s was all over the floor,' says Balin who arrived just after the fight. 'Bukowski was on a mattress on the floor with no other furniture in the place, broken gla.s.s all over, bottles. His face was all cut up.'

When he saw Marty Balin's girlfriend, Bukowski scrambled to his feet and squared up to the couple.

'You know, I could take that woman away from you like that!' he said, snapping his fingers in Marty Balin's face.

The poet Harold Norse turned up to find Ferlinghetti outside on Upper Grant Avenue, apparently appalled at the goings on. Norse asked what had happened and the mild-mannered Ferlinghetti replied that Bukowski and Linda King were wrecking his place.

'Didn't I warn you?' asked Norse. He knew Bukowski of old and that, when he was sober, Bukowski was quiet and polite, even deferential. But when he got drunk especially in sophisticated company, which made him uneasy he became Bukowski the Bad: mischievous, argumentative, even violent. They could hear him up there now being Bukowski the Bad. He was howling like a lunatic.

'f.u.c.k ALL THIS!' he bellowed.

Morning broke with beautiful warm autumn sunshine, a fresh breeze blowing in from the bay, and the sound of broken gla.s.s being swept up. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harold Norse came back to the apartment and picked their way upstairs, through the shards of gla.s.s and splintered wood, until they found Bukowski. He was sitting on the floor, still dressed in the clothes he had on the day before, his face smeared with dried blood, drinking a beer for breakfast. He had been in residence for only one night, but, as Ferlinghetti says, the place 'looked like a nest of junkies had been living there a month.'

Ferlinghetti greeted Bukowski remarkably affably, considering the state his home was in, and told him he had brought his money for the reading. His share was $400.

'And to think I used to work for 35 cents an hour,' said Bukowski in genuine wonder. He was talking about the factory jobs he had worked at nearly all his adult life, most recently as mail clerk in Los Angeles, sorting letters while the supervisor yelled at him to hurry up. He held that terrible job almost twelve years before leaving, when he was forty-nine, to become a writer. Everybody said he was mad what about his pension? but this proved he had been right. He held the money to his face.

'Poetry, I love poetry,' he said, kissing the bank notes. He meant it seriously, but couldn't help making a joke that lived up to his image. 'It's better than p.u.s.s.y,' he added, 'almost.'

1.

TWISTED CHILDHOOD.

Bukowski claimed the majority of what he wrote was literally what had happened in his life. Essentially that is what his books are all about an honest representation of himself and his experiences at the bottom of American society. He even went so far as to put a figure on it: ninety-three per cent of his work was autobiography, he said, and the remaining seven per cent was 'improved upon'. Yet while he could be extraordinarily honest as a writer, a close examination of the facts of Bukowski's life leads one to question whether, to make himself more picaresque for the reader, he didn't 'improve upon' a great deal more of his life story than he said.

The blurring of fact and fiction starts with the circ.u.mstances of Bukowski's birth.

'I was born a b.a.s.t.a.r.d that is, out of wedlock,' he wrote in 1971, and he repeated this story many times both in interviews and in his writing.

His parents met in Andernach, Germany, after World War One. His father, Sgt Henry Charles Bukowski, was serving with the US army of occupation and Bukowski's mother, Katharina Fett, was a local seamstress. She didn't like Henry at first, ignoring him when he called to her in the street, but he ingratiated himself with her parents by bringing food to their apartment and by speaking with them in German. He explained that his parents had emigrated to America from Germany so, by ancestry, he was German too. Henry and Katharina started dating and Henry soon made her pregnant.

There was a delay before they got married because Henry had to get demobbed from the army first. But Andernach city records show that they did marry, on 15 July, 1920, before their child was born.

They rented an apartment at the corner of Aktienstra.s.se, near the railway station, and it was here Katharina gave birth to a boy at 10 p.m. on 16 August. A few days later the child was baptized at the Roman Catholic cathedral, at a font decorated with a bird very much like a black sparrow. The priest named the child Heinrich Karl Bukowski, like his dad.

They stayed in Andernach for two years while Henry worked as a building contractor, and then moved to nearby Coblenz where they lodged for a while with a family named Gehrhardt on Sclostra.s.se. Gehrhardt family letters reveal that Katharina shocked them by telling s.e.xy jokes, and that Henry kept postcards of nude girls hidden in the wash stand in his room.

Henry and his bride probably would have settled in the town if it hadn't been for the collapse of the German economy in 1923. Everyday life became so difficult after the crash that Henry had little choice but to return to the United States, and so they set sail from Bremerhaven, on the SS President Fillmore, on 18 April, 1923.

When they arrived in Baltimore, Bukowski's mother started calling herself Kate, so she sounded more American, and little Heinrich became little Henry. They also changed the p.r.o.nunciation of their surname to Buk-cow-ski, as opposed to the harder European p.r.o.nunciation which is Buk-ov-ski. Henry worked hard and they soon saved enough to move out to California where he had been born and raised.

His father, Leonard, had done well in the construction boom but had turned to drink and was separated from Henry's mother, Emilie, a strict Baptist. She lived alone in Pasadena, matriarch of a quarrelsome, bad-natured tribe described as 'the battling Bukowskis' by cousin Katherine Wood 'because none of them got along'. The siblings, in particular, couldn't stand each other. Henry had no time for his brother, John, who drank and was often out of work. He also disliked his brother, Ben, who was confined to a sanatorium. Neither was he keen on his sister, Eleanor, being jealous of the little money she and her husband had saved. Emilie Bukowski made things more difficult by showing favoritism to Henry and his wife. 'My grandmother thought Kate was really something,' says Katherine Wood. 'She thought she was kind of above us. It was a sn.o.b thing.'

They moved to nearby Los Angeles in 1924, first to a small house on Trinity Street, not far from downtown, and three years later to a two-bedroom bungalow on Virginia Road in the Jefferson Park area. Apart from his travels around America in the 1940s and early '50s, Bukowski lived his whole life in and around LA and the city became an integral part of his writing. Indeed, few writers of literature have been so closely a.s.sociated with, or so lovingly described the city, a place often dismissed as ugly, dangerous and culturally desolate.

LA was quite beautiful in 1924, almost a paradise; the sky was unclouded by smog, and there were still orange groves between the boulevards. The neighborhoods were safe enough for Angelenos to leave their doors unlocked, and for children to ride bicycles to the beach after school. It was a city of just over a million people, a fraction of what it became, and there was a heady boom town atmosphere, partly because of the film studios in Hollywood. Henry wanted his share of the good life. But the best job he could find was with the LA Creamery Company, delivering milk by horse and cart.

Henry and Kate dressed their son in velvet trousers and shirts with frilly collars, in the German style. 'Isn't he sweet?' Kate wrote home on the back of a photograph. 'When you ask him who he likes the best, he says, "I like mother as much as father and father as much as mother".'

Kate called her husband 'my biggest treasure' in her letters, but dropped hints he was not an easy man to get on with. One set of photographs she sent home to Germany was from a day at Santa Monica beach. Kate wrote that Henry wanted her to send these pictures to prove they were having fun in America. Included was a snap of Bukowski, sitting on the sand with a Stars and Stripes flag. He looked thoroughly miserable.