Charles Bukowski Page 5

  The short story, The Reason Behind Reason, features a principal character named Chelaski, similar to the name Henry Chinaski which Bukowski used for the hero of most of his later prose. Matrix readers were promised another ‘slightly wacky sketch by Charles Bukowski’ in the next issue and, sure enough, he appeared that winter with a short story and two more poems. The story dealt with a mean-spirited father who bills his son for living at home, charging him for laundry, room and board. It was told simply with short paragraphs, plenty of dialogue and what can be seen in retrospect as a classic Bukowski title, Love, Love, Love. Matrix readers were unimpressed, however, one writing in to complain about Bukowski’s ‘puzzling’ style.

  Returning to LA, Bukowski lodged with his parents and, for the best part of the next two years, he worked at the Merry Company, downtown. Apart from a brief return trip to Philadelphia, he stayed home all this time and seems to have been trying to get back to a conventional way of life. A remarkable set of photographs taken at Longwood Avenue in July, 1947, bear this out. Two years into his supposed ten-year drunk, Bukowski is seen smartly dressed in a suit and tie, with hair neatly cut, and shoes shined, posing happily with his parents in their back garden. He looks like he is going for a job interview.

  When Henry saw Portfolio III, with his son’s name alongside Sartre and Lorca, even he could not fail to be impressed. He took it into the LA County Museum, where he was working as a guard, to show his work mates. A father might be excused for boasting about the achievements of his son, but Henry Bukowski must have had a devious mind indeed because he pretended to be the author of the article (a simple deception as they had the same name) and his bosses were so impressed they promoted him. Bukowski was disgusted when he found out, imagining the people at the museum looking at his father and saying, admiringly: ‘There goes the writer Charles Bukowski.’ It was too terrible to live under the same roof as ‘the beastly little prick’, so he left home and rented a room downtown, off Alvarado Street in the red light district.

  He was drowning his sorrows in The Glenview Bar one night when he met Jane Cooney Baker.

  Jane inspired much of Bukowski’s most powerful work: the poetry book The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills is suffused with her memory; she became Betty in his first novel, Post Office; and Laura in his second novel, Factotum. Most famously she became Wanda, the character played by Faye Dunaway in the film Barfly, for which he wrote the screenplay. With Barfly, and other pieces he wrote, Bukowski transformed Jane into a stock character of his fiction, second only to Henry Chinaski and his father. She died before Bukowski became famous and was never interviewed. Her picture has not previously been published. The only information about who she really was has come from the few biographical details Bukowski provided in interviews. He said she was a half-Irish/half-Indian orphan, raised by nuns after being abandoned by her parents, and that she married a wealthy Connecticut attorney. This colourful story was entirely fictitious.

  Jane was the youngest daughter of well-to-do St Louis doctor, Daniel C. Cooney, who contracted pneumonia in 1919, when Jane was nine. He moved his family to New Mexico where he hoped the dry air would be good for his health, settling in Glencoe, 170 miles south-east of Albuquerque. He died soon afterwards. Jane’s mother, Mary, was obliged to move the family to a more modest house in nearby Roswell where she went to work for the First National Bank.

  At Roswell High School, Jane was known by the nickname ‘Jacques’ and for her catch-phrase: ‘Isn’t that atrocious!’ Although not outstandingly pretty, being short with mousy hair and slightly boss-eyed, she had many boyfriends and managed to scandalize the town. ‘She liked to go out and party, drink and dance,’ says Orville Cookson, who knew the family. ‘But Mary was a devout Catholic and she was against all that.’

  Jane graduated high school in the spring of 1927 and almost immediately became pregnant by one of her boyfriends, twenty-one-year-old Craig Baker from the nearby hick town of Artesia. They married on 25 January, 1928, the licence having been granted the night before, and left for El Paso in the morning, soon returning with a young son, Jo. In 1931, Jane had a second child, Mary.

  Far from living in luxury, as Bukowski said, Jane and Craig moved in with her mother because Craig was doing so poorly in business. There were arguments and Craig started to drink heavily. The night before Mary Cooney’s funeral, in 1947, Jane and Craig had dinner with neighbors who recall the condition he was in. ‘Craig was royally drunk. Jane wasn’t drinking, but he got stinko,’ says Lavora Fisk. ‘She begged him to eat, but he wouldn’t because he was so stowed-up with liquor.’ Craig died shortly afterwards, in an automobile accident for which Jane blamed herself, and she began to drink heavily, too.

  It was a year later that she met Bukowski in LA. Jane was thirty-eight, an alcoholic who had lost touch with her family. She was also getting a little crazy, and had a reputation for attacking men she took a dislike to. But she allowed Bukowski to drink with her and they left The Glenview together, picking up two fifths of bourbon and a carton of cigarettes before going back to his place.

  ‘Say, I don’t know your name. What’s your name?’ asked Bukowski, when they were in bed.

  ‘What the hell difference does it make?’ she said.

  Although Bukowski was twenty-seven, Jane was his first serious girlfriend, only the second woman he had slept with (the first being a Philadelphia prostitute when he got out of prison). He was initially attracted by her looks, particularly her legs which she liked to show off, but he probably would have fallen for Jane whatever she looked like because she was the first woman who had ever paid him any attention and, once he had ‘cured’ her of smashing a glass in his face when the urge took her, he found they had much in common. ‘She had a strange mad kind of sensibility which knew something, which was this: most human beings just aren’t worth a shit, and I felt that, and she felt it,’ he said. Then there was the booze. If anything, Jane hit the bottle harder than he did, so they were drinking partners as well. ‘I thought I really had something,’ he said. ‘I did, I had lots of trouble.’

  They lived together in a succession of apartment houses around Alvarado Street. The first place, 521 South Union Drive, was on a hill round the corner from MacArthur Park. The landlady welcomed them as a respectable married couple (they had to pose as such to get a room), gave them a new rug and fussed over their comfort. It was exciting having a writer in the place – Bukowski always made sure to tell them he was a writer – and more than once Jane’s beer belly was mistaken for her having a baby on the way, but it wasn’t long before they smashed the place up in a drunken fight and found themselves evicted.

  Another place they stayed was The Aragon apartment building on South West Lake Avenue, a block over from Alvarado Street. It had once been quite a grand residence, four storeys high with an ornamental fountain out front to give it class, but had degenerated into a dive. There was no air-conditioning and in the summer, when the windows were open, everyone could hear everything that went on, including the fights in the room Mr and Mrs Bukowski were renting. One day Bukowski found a note under their door:

  Notice to Quit

  Apartment occupied by Mr and Mrs C Bukowski.

  Said apt to be vacated for reasons: excessive drinking, fighting

  and foul language, disturbing other tenants.

  Most of the fights started because Jane flirted with men whom she thought would buy her drinks, and this made Bukowski jealous. He decided she was little better than a whore, and was not above slapping her around. When the fights got really vicious, dangerous to themselves and others, the police took him to the drunk tank. He was arrested for drunkenness in 1948, 1949 and 1951, and held in the cells overnight each time.

  The hangovers were monumental. The worst he ever had was one morning after they’d been drinking cheap wine, many bottles of it, at a room overlooking MacArthur Park. Bukowski was at the window trying to get some air. He felt like a steel band was around his head. Then h
e saw a body, a man fully dressed even wearing a necktie, fall past him in an apparent suicide attempt.

  ‘Hey, Jane. Guess what?’ he called out.

  ‘What?’ She was in the bathroom, throwing up.

  ‘The strangest thing just happened. A human body just dropped by my window.’

  ‘Ah, bullshit.’

  ‘No. It really happened. Come on out here. Come to the window and stick your head out the window and look down.’ She took some persuading, but she came and looked down.

  ‘Oh God Almighty!’ she exclaimed, and ran back to the bathroom where she puked and puked.

  ‘I told you so, baby,’ he said. ‘I told you so.’

  He worked as shipping clerk at places where he could slip down the back alley to a bar between orders. He worked for a while at Milliron’s, a department store at the corner of 5th and Broadway, and in various small factories in the garment district, ‘shit jobs’ where he connived to waste as much time as possible before he was fired, jobs which became material for the novel, Factotum, and for poems like ‘Sparks’ which is about working for The Sunbeam Lighting Company:

  and after ten hours

  of heavy labor

  after exchanging insults

  living through skirmishes

  with those not cool enough to

  abide

  we left

  still fresh

  we climbed into our old

  automobiles to

  go to our places

  to drink half the night

  to fight with our women

  to return the next morning

  to punch in

  …

  those filthy peeling walls

  the sound of drills and

  cutting blades

  the sparks

  we were some gang

  in that death ballet

  we were magnificent

  we gave them

  better than they asked

  yet

  we gave them

  nothing.

  When there was money, he didn’t work at all but hit the bars with Jane. Many of his best stories and poems are based on the adventures they had, including the richly comic poem, ‘fire station’, which he dedicated to her. It describes a day when the narrator and his girl wander into a fire station. She starts flirting with the firemen, and he settles down to play blackjack. The firemen slip upstairs to take turns having sex with the girl, and the boyfriend takes $5 from each man when they come back down. Then the alarm goes off.

  she stood there waving goodbye to the

  firemen but they didn’t seem

  much interested

  any more.

  ‘let’s go back to the

  bar,’ I told

  her.

  ‘ooh, you got

  money?’

  ‘I found some I didn’t know I

  had …’

  The inference in this poem, and other pieces he wrote, is that Jane was a woman of such loose morality she was virtually a prostitute. Whether this was the case or not, the relationship left Bukowski with a very poor opinion of women. He often called his girlfriends ‘whores’ or ‘bitches’ and described sex in brutal language, frequently using ‘rape’ as a synonym for intercourse. Linda King believes he expected all his girlfriends to behave as Jane had. ‘It sounded like she was an absolute sleep-around what-ever,’ she says. ‘She was an alcoholic and she went out and fucked whoever would give her some booze. If he didn’t get home, his woman would be gone. He talked about her a lot.’

  Bukowski first worked for the post office as a temporary mail carrier for two weeks over Christmas, 1950. As he would later write in his novel, Post Office, it began as a mistake when the drunk up the hill told him they would take just about anybody. Fifteen months later he was taken on as a full-time carrier at $1.61 an hour and he held this job for the next three years.

  When he got back to the court on South Coronado Street, where he and Jane were living, she was often gone, the bed unmade and dirty dishes in the sink. Sometimes he found her in one of the bars on Alvarado Street, sitting with a man who had been buying her drinks. Maybe she went out back with him, too. When he couldn’t find her, he drank on his own, imagining her in bed with some sailor or salesman she was calling ‘daddy’.

  Sometimes he invited the barflies back to his room to drink and keep him company, and one night he awoke to find a body in bed with him. He decided to take the opportunity to fulfill a long-held fantasy of having anal sex. ‘You know, I thought I screwed a woman in the ass one night, and I screwed a man in the ass,’ he said years later. ‘It was a friend of mine staying there, and I thought it was a girl called Mystery and, uh, you know, I was kinda drunk, laying there, and I tried a few motions, and I thought, “Well, she doesn’t seem to mind,” you know. I gave her a little more (I don’t have too much, you know), and pretty soon I gave her it all, and I heard … uh … I looked at the back of the head, and this was my friend, B––! I said, “God Almighty!” I drew that thing out.’

  He had been drinking hard for more than ten years, cheap wine, green beer, whiskey when he could get it, not always eating well and smoking heavily. He was still a young man, but he had never been particularly healthy and in the spring of 1955 he paid the price for this dissolute life. He was at work at the post office when he began to feel ill, and went home to their new apartment on North Westmoreland Avenue. By morning he was vomiting blood and, as he had no medical insurance and no savings, the ambulance took him to the charity ward of LA County. He had a bleeding ulcer and needed a transfusion, but if he couldn’t establish any blood credit with the hospital, he was told he couldn’t get any blood. It seemed they were waging a war of attrition against him. Without blood, he would die. Once he was dead, he would cease to be a problem. Ironically, the one member of Bukowski’s family who did have blood credit was his father and it was because of Henry that Bukowski was given the transfusion which saved his life.

  He went back to Jane afterwards and told her the doctors said if he ever drank again it would kill him, which was good straight advice, and maybe it was even true, but what the hell else was there to do?

  ‘We’ll play the horses,’ she said.

  ‘Horses?’

  ‘Yeah, they run and you bet on them.’

  She found some money on the boulevard. We went out. I had 3 winners, one of them paid over 50 bucks. It seemed very easy.

  (From: ‘Horsemeat’)

  Hollywood Park was the track, a huge arena in Inglewood near Los Angeles airport. The crowd put Bukowski off at first; so many people and all apparently mindless, drunk, yelling like maniacs. Then he began to get interested in the psychology of gambling and factored the stupidity of the crowd into a system of laying bets. He figured that whichever way they betted was probably wrong and, if he watched the odds changing on the tote board in the final minutes before the race, he might pick the winner. It was a system, one of many he tried over the years.

  The horses leapt from the gate and began pounding the dirt track, the crowd roaring them on, louder and louder as the horses turned into the final furlong and charged to the post – a crescendo of excitement – then a collective sigh of disbelief, of being gypped, because the crowd never won. But Bukowski found he held a winning ticket and, like many people trapped in low-paid work, he came to see racing as a way of getting free from everything that oppressed him. ‘I piss away time and money at the racetrack because I am insane. I am hoping to make enough money so I will not have to work any longer in slaughterhouses, in post offices, at docks, in factories,’ he said, explaining his love of the sport. ‘The track does help in certain ways – I see the faces of greed, the hamburger faces; I see the faces in early dream and I see the faces later when the same nightmare returns. You cannot see this too often. It is a mechanic of life.’

  The great dream was that, if he studied the form and perfected his system (it was never exactly right), maybe he could
quit the 8 to 5 and make it at the track. He tried it a couple of times, once enjoying a winning streak so long he walked off his job and followed the races round southern California, eating steak dinners in different restaurants each night, nice quiet places by the ocean, and then resting up in comfortable motels. He started to drink again, cautiously at first, diluting wine with milk in case the doctor had been telling the truth. But he didn’t die. So he had a beer, and then a whiskey. Soon he was drinking like old times. Even better, he was drinking and making it at the track. What did the doctors know?

  But winning streaks always end and gamblers wind up broker than before. Rent money gone. Gas money gone. Busted. Things got so bad Jane had to get a job so they would have food on the table. But she began to suspect Bukowski was cheating on her, seeing another woman when she was out at work, so she left him. Now he had no money, no job and no woman. At least it helped his writing, as he explained: ‘After losing a week’s pay in four hours it is very difficult to come to your room and face the typewriter and fabricate a lot of lacy bullshit.’

  3

  DEATH WANTS MORE DEATH

  There was a period of time in the early 1950s when Bukowski had trouble getting anything published, and became so desperate he stooped to using emotional blackmail. ‘He wrote to me and said to please publish his poems, else he was going to commit suicide,’ says Judson Crews, who edited literary magazines in New Mexico. ‘I simply turned around and sent his poems right back. He obviously didn’t mean it, or else he didn’t really mean it.’

  So when Barbara Frye, the editor of Harlequin magazine, advertised that she wanted poems from new writers, Bukowski promptly sent a bundle of material to her address in Wheeler, Texas. And he was delighted when she wrote back saying she accepted the poems for publication and, moreover, considered Bukowski the greatest poet since William Blake.