Charles Bukowski (4 page)

Soon many of the men on Longwood Avenue were out of work. The once proud and busy fathers of Bukowski’s schoolmates mooched around their yards, unshaven and cantankerous, or sat smoking endless cigarettes. They drove to the local bars to get drunk, until they ran out of money for gasoline and beer, and then sold the cars and took the last of their money into the alleys to play seven-up and twenty-one. Shorn of the virility of work, they
lost the respect of their sons who ran wild. A mood of stagnation pervaded the neighborhood, inspiring one of Bukowski’s most evocative poems about childhood, ‘we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain’:

Kate went out to work and they lived thriftily on makeshift meals, eating plenty of bologna, peanut butter sandwiches on day-old bread, fried eggs, canned beans, and stews made with what Bukowski joked was an ‘invisible chicken’. These meals were washed down with watery coffee. In a letter home to Germany for Christmas, 1936, Kate described how difficult life was. ‘I won’t forget the first eight months of 1936 in a hurry,’ she wrote. ‘We have suffered a lot. We nearly lost our house [and] couldn’t make any payments for a whole year.’ She added that Henry was depressed by his lack of work and felt he was ‘not a worthwhile man’, and that they had been reading with admiration how Hitler was returning Germany to virtually full employment.

Henry pretended to the neighbors he was working as an engineer, driving off each morning as if he was going to a job and then walking the streets until 5 p.m. when he drove home again. Bukowski knew about the deception and thought it pathetic. He
looked to outlaws like John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly and Pretty Boy Floyd as heroes, men who were not afraid to take what they wanted. He would always admire strong men, from writers like Hemingway to prize fighters, and champion jockeys, men he saw as the antithesis of his pitiful father.

The acne was so severe and needed such intensive treatment that he was excused the first semester of high school. From February through September, 1936, he stayed home alone while his mother was at her low-pay job and his father was at his imaginary job. He peeped through the drapes at the porch across the street where a woman sometimes sat with her skirt riding up around her thighs. Bukowski fetched his father’s binoculars and tried to see what magic thing was up there, masturbating himself.

He started visiting the public library at the corner of La Brea Avenue and Adams Boulevard, taking armfuls of novels home. He read Sinclair Lewis’
Main Street
, D.H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos’ USA, Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg
,
Ohio
and the early stories of Ernest Hemingway. There was a lot of time to read with no school to go to, and practically no friends to distract him, so he began reading the Russian novelists, too, sitting up until his father – whose own literary tastes stopped at Edgar Allan Poe, appropriately enough – came in and snapped off the bedroom light to save electricity.

The books which first excited Bukowski influenced his literary tastes for the rest of his life. He never got over his youthful passions and prejudices: loving Hemingway’s early stories, for instance, but having no time for his later novels; enjoying Turgenev, but never getting to grips with Tolstoy. Also, as an adult, he mispronounced words and names he had read in adolescence, but had never heard spoken. It was a trait noticed by friends like the poet Miller Williams. He says that if Bukowski came to understand that he had made a mistake he would pretend it was on purpose. ‘It would have been a source of embarrassment, but he would hide that embarrassment by saying, “this is how I pronounce it, god-damnit, if you don’t like it, you pronounce it your own fucking way.”’

When his parents went to bed at 8 p. m., as they did most nights, Bukowski climbed out his bedroom window and walked up to the
bars on Washington Boulevard where his acne scars made him look old enough to be served alcohol. One night he was too drunk to get back in through his window, so he came to the front door. His parents were horrified at his condition, and refused to let him in, so Bukowski burst the lock. He staggered into the living room and vomited on the rug. Henry came up behind him and pushed his head down.

‘Do you know what we do to a dog when it shits on the rug?’ he asked, forcing the boy’s head lower. ‘We put his nose in it.’

Bukowski had never retaliated before, but warned his father to stop. Henry continued to push his face down into the sick, so Bukowski spun round and punched him.

‘You hit your father! You hit your father!’ Kate exclaimed, clawing his face with her nails. Apparently it was OK for the father to beat the child, but not the other way round.

Henry’s snobbery was the reason Bukowski enrolled at Los Angeles High, the e´lite school of the city, after transferring from another high school which was nearer their home. LA High was built in the style of an Ivy League university on the outskirts of fashionable Hancock Park, and its students invariably went on to university and professional life. Bukowski had seen many of them at Mount Vernon; they were the same children who made fun of him in the
Minute Man
magazine, not because they were necessarily spiteful but because he seemed such an oddball. He later scorned these teenagers as ‘untested by life’, but confessed he often heard them snigger when he came into class.

The girls at LA High looked beautiful in their fashionably casual clothes, and the boys handsome and healthy. The in-crowd lived what appeared to be a golden life, catching the Big Red street cars to the beach after school, and borrowing automobiles for weekend dates. They went dancing at the Biltmore Bowl, or to a drive-in and on to Hugo’s hot dog stand. The school was so perfect it was used for the filming of a Jackie Cooper comedy,
What a Life
.

Bukowski hated LA High. His father made him join to fulfill a social fantasy, but he was never going to fit with the Hancock Park set. His family had significantly less money than most of the
students. His skin problem made him look strange at a time in life when looks are so important and, at this age, he was unable to overcome these handicaps with the force of his personality.

‘His acne was very noticeable,’ says former pupil Roger Bloomer. ‘He had a bad case and that was tough for a kid. That was why he was so quiet and a loner. He would be around, and say hello, but he never really joined in the circle. He wasn’t particularly happy. He wasn’t outgoing.’

Scared the other boys would see the boils on his back if he stripped for gym class, Bukowski opted to take ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps), a form of military training. Stephen Cavanaugh, the student who led Bukowski’s ROTC battalion, says he was neither rebellious nor troublesome. In fact, he got on well in their pretend army, being promoted to sergeant, just like his old man, and even won a drill competition.

Bukowski graduated high school in the summer of 1939. He hadn’t intended to go to the senior Prom, partly because he didn’t have a date, but found himself crouched in the bushes outside the gymnasium on the night, peering in at his fellow students. The roof beams had been decorated with blue and white crêpe paper and hundreds of balloons were suspended in a net over the stage where a band was playing the tune, ‘Deep Purple’. A mirror ball revolved slowly, reflecting lights onto the happy faces.

He had never had a girlfriend, or any sexual experience, apart from masturbating and weekend visits to the burlesque shows at The Follies and The Burbank on Main Street, so the sight of the girls in their ball gowns made a big impression on him. They all looked so beautiful and sophisticated, like grown women. As he explained in his novel
Ham on Rye
, he knew he would never be able to speak to one of them, let alone dance. He was amazed the other boys knew how. They had learned things he was ignorant of, and part of him craved to be included. Then he caught his reflection in the glass, and was shocked by how ugly and desperate he looked in comparison. There was no way a guy like him would ever be part of that normal world. It made him angry to be excluded. He hated them for it, but told himself that one day he would be just as happy.

T
he Los Angeles Public Library, on West 5th Street, became a sanctuary for Bukowski when he was downtown looking for a job – a grand, richly ornamented building with all the books he might want to read. There were even girls to peek at. He went as often as possible, hoping to find something which expressed how he felt as an unhappy and restless young man. Then one day he discovered a book that became so significant in his life he likened finding it to discovering ‘gold in the city dump’.

John Fante’s novel,
Ask the Dust
, is written in a strikingly spare and lucid style with short paragraphs and short chapters, but it was the subject matter that was, at least initially, more interesting to Bukowski. The hero, Arturo Bandini, is a twenty-year-old would-be writer, the son of immigrant parents, who feels cut off from society. He wants to write about life and love, but has little experience of either so he goes to live in a flophouse at a place called Bunker Hill where he meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl.

Bukowski was enthralled by the story – seeing himself in Arturo Bandini – and incredibly excited by the fact that Bunker Hill was a real place, a shabby district of rooming houses directly across the street from the library where he sat with the book in his hands.

The specific place Fante romanticized in
Ask the Dust
was Bunker Hill, but more generally he wrote about downtown Los Angeles which was very different to the drowsy LA suburbs
where Bukowski had grown up. Downtown bustled with garment makers, jewellers, street vendors, paper boys, cops, prostitutes, thieves and hawkers, all busy with some mysterious and important task. There were ethnic restaurants with crashing kitchens; back alleys where stock boys shared cigarettes; seedy bars; hotels both grand, like the Biltmore, and dives where the hookers worked. The funicular railway, Angel’s Flight, climbed Bunker Hill and then racketed down again, spilling him across the street into Grand Central Market.

When he had a few dollars, Bukowski drank in the local bars and imagined himself part of Fante’s world, inspired to try and become a writer himself. ‘Fante was my god,’ he later wrote, describing the intoxicating effect of
Ask the Dust
. ‘He was to be a lifelong influence on my writing.’

Bukowski made a perfunctory attempt to live the conventional life his parents expected, taking a job at Sears Roebuck, on Pico Boulevard. The department store was close to LA High and Bukowski was fired after he got into a fight with a student who came in and made fun of him. He’d hated the job, anyway, being contemptuous of the wage-slave mentality of the staff.

In September, 1939, he enrolled as a scholarship student at Los Angeles City College to study Journalism, English, Economics and Public Affairs with the vague idea he might become a newspaper journalist. LA City College had a more metropolitan feel than LA High, being in the heart of the city, on Vermont Avenue near Santa Monica Boulevard, and the curriculum was designed especially for students like Bukowski who wanted vocational courses, but he got poor to average grades, being put on ‘scholarship warning’ in February, 1940, and on ‘scholarship probation’ in June.

There was much talk of the war in Europe and of joining the army, but Bukowski upset his fellow students by speaking up for Hitler and Nazism. He wrote to newspapers expressing his extreme views, making his parents fear for their safety because he was still living at home, and he attended meetings of a neo-Nazi group. He later excused his behaviour, saying he simply enjoyed being controversial.

In ‘what will the neighbors think?’ he wrote:

Bukowski was basically apolitical, throughout his life, but he also enjoyed doing and saying outrageous things to shock and draw attention to himself, and was attracted to extreme characters.

‘He saw that Hitler was like fire,’ says FrancEyE, a girlfriend of his adult life, who remembers Bukowski talking about Hitler as an adult. ‘It was that fire that attracted him.’

On another level, he had heard his mother saying what a great man Hitler was, and some of it sunk in; Kate Bukowski openly admired Hitler, calling him a champion of ‘all us working class’, a leader whom she believed had made life better for ordinary German people like her parents.

Having failed to hold a job, and now fast becoming a failed student, there was increasing tension at home. When his father discovered he had been writing stories on the typewriter they bought to help with his college work, Henry tossed the manuscripts, the typewriter and his son’s clothes out onto the lawn. Bukowski took $10 from his mother and caught a bus downtown where he rented a room on Temple Street before moving to a ‘plywood shack’ on Bunker Hill. He dropped out of college soon afterwards, in June, 1941, and, after working manual jobs for six months, in the Southern Pacific railroad yards and at the Borg-Warner factory on South Flower Street, he set out to explore America so he could write about ‘the real world’ of rooming houses, factory jobs and bars, like John Fante.

He caught a bus to New Orleans and worked in a warehouse there, saving his money until he had enough to quit the job and
pay his rent in advance so he could stay in his room all day and write. When he ran short of money, he tried to live on candy bars to postpone getting another ‘eight-hour job of nothingness’. The only friend he made in New Orleans was a near-senile old man, and the only place he went was a depressing bar near Canal Street, ‘the saddest bar I was ever in’ as he wrote in his poem, ‘drink’.

In Atlanta, Georgia, he lived in a tar-paper shack lit by a single bulb. He was still trying to write, but the stories kept coming back from the New York magazines and he allowed himself to starve rather than get a regular job, believing that writing would save him, like the deluded hero of Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
, another favorite novel. Atlanta was the nadir of Bukowski’s time on the road, almost the end of him. Sick with hunger, he wrote to his father asking for money and, after getting a long letter of admonishment by reply, he considered committing suicide by touching a live electric wire. Then he noticed the blank margins on his newspaper and began writing in them. Looking at his life in retrospect, he said this was the moment that proved he was a writer. Although nobody would ever read what he had written, he felt compelled to scribble something.

He traveled west through Texas as part of a railroad gang. In the El Paso public library he read Dostoyevsky’s
Notes From
Underground
, one of the dozen or so novels which made a lasting impression. He empathized with the wretched narrator, who considers himself to be hideous, and yet yearns to be loved, and the descriptions of Czarist St Petersburg with its social e´lite reminded him of LA High.

By the spring of 1942 he was in San Francisco, driving a truck for the Red Cross. It was the most agreeable job he had yet had with good pay, easy duties and the company of young women. He had comfortable lodgings, too, in a boarding house overlooking Golden Gate bridge. The landlady gave him beer and allowed him to use her gramophone to play records he bought second-hand. Most people his age were interested in dance music or jazz, but Bukowski preferred symphony music.

He dutifully registered for the draft for World War Two and wrote to his father that he was willing to serve. He passed the physical examination, but after a routine psychiatric test he was
excused military service for mental reasons and classified 4–F or, as he put it, ‘psycho’. Bukowski later recalled that the psychiatrist had written on his draft card that he was unsuitable for service partly because of his ‘extreme sensitivity’.

Fired from the Red Cross for arriving late at a blood donor center, he drifted on across the country, sometimes choosing his destination by randomly pointing at places on a map. In this haphazard way he found himself in St Louis, Missouri, where he packed boxes in the basement of a ladies sportswear shop.

Bukowski resented it when his co-workers volunteered for overtime, so they had money to take their wives and girlfriends on dates. He did meet girls who were interested in him, but was too shy and awkward to form a relationship. He expressed his alienation in his autobiographical novel,
Factotum
, where a girl tries to strike up a conversation with the hero: ‘I simply couldn’t respond. There was a space between us. The distance was too great. I felt as if she was talking to a person who had vanished, a person who was no longer there, no longer alive.’

Instead of going out, he locked himself in his room and wrote stories which he mailed to prestigious magazines like
The Atlantic
Monthly
, not knowing any other way of getting published. ‘… and when they came back I tore them up. I used to write eight or ten stories a week. All I’d do was write these stories and drink as much as possible.’

Whit Burnett was a magazine editor known as a patron of new talent. He had famously discovered William Saroyan, first publishing him in
Story
magazine. Bukowski was greatly impressed by Saroyan’s
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
, so he submitted one of his own pieces to the magazine.
Aftermath
of a Lengthy Rejection Slip
was an autobiographical account of having a submission rejected by Burnett and, possibly by merit of his cheek, it was accepted with a payment of $25. The byline he chose for this, his début as a writer, was Charles Bukowski, dropping his first name because it reminded him of his father.

He went to New York in the spring of 1944 to see his name in print and excitedly bought the magazine for forty cents in a Greenwich Village drug store, but his story was not among the main body of the magazine. It appeared in the end pages as a
novelty item and he was crushingly disappointed, feeling he had been made a fool of.

He took a job as a stock room boy in Manhattan so he could rent a room, but didn’t find the city to his liking. He was cold in his lightweight clothes. His landlord ripped him off. And he was alarmed by the el’ train that ran past his window. Intimidated by the city, and so angry with Whit Burnett that he never submitted to
Story
again, Bukowski left New York deciding he wanted to live in a ‘nice, shady, quiet city where everything is calm, where people are decent, where there’s no trouble’. He chose Philadelphia because it was known as The City of Brotherly Love.

It was lunch time when he walked into the bar on Fairmount Avenue, near downtown Philadelphia. A bottle whistled past his head.

‘Hey, you sonofabitch,’ said the man beside him, talking to another man down the bar. ‘You do that again, I’m gonna knock your goddamn head off.’

A second bottle spun towards them, and the men went out back to fight. Bukowski was thrilled by this action. He decided to stay in the neighborhood, and drink in this bar.

He rented a room at 603 North 17th Street in the Spring Garden district where there were many Irish and Polish families and a fellow named Bukowski could fit in, and he worked briefly as a shipping clerk at Fairmount Motor Products. When he wasn’t working, which was most of the time, he hung around the bar. He was the first customer in the morning, drinking the sops from the night before, and the last out the door at night. ‘I’d go home and there’d be a bottle of wine there. I’d drink half of that and go to sleep,’ he said.

In exchange for free beer or a shot of whiskey, he ran errands for the other customers, laying bets and fetching sandwiches. Sometimes he and the bar man, burly part-time laborer Frank McGilligan, ‘a big ox with a cruel streak’, went out back to see who was toughest. Mostly Bukowski got thrashed, but that always earned him a couple of drinks. ‘I was hiding out,’ he said of the two and half years he spent in the bar. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. This bar back east was a lively bar. It wasn’t a common
bar. There were characters there. There was a feeling. There was ugliness. There was dullness and stupidity. But there was also a certain gleeful high pitch you could feel.’

One Saturday evening in July, 1944, he was resting up in his room, drinking port wine, with Brahms’ 2nd Symphony on the radio, when two FBI agents barged in wanting to know why he hadn’t reported for the draft. He told them he was 4–F. But why hadn’t he kept in touch with the draft board? They suspected he was a draft-dodger and took him to jail.

Although it looked impressive with its castellations and granite walls, Moyamensing was a low-security prison holding men awaiting trial, and men serving short sentences for non-payments of fines. But it was the first prison Bukowski had been in and he wrote about the experience many times afterwards, giving the impression of having been in a veritable Alcatraz.

The guards took him to a whitewashed nine-by-thirteen-foot cell, with a single barred window, occupied by a chubby fellow who looked like an accountant and introduced himself to Bukowski as Courtney Taylor, ‘public enemy number one’. Bukowski introduced himself, saying he had been accused of draft dodging and Taylor tried to menace the new boy saying draft dodgers were the one type of criminal cons didn’t like. Bukowski presumed this is what was meant by honor among thieves.