Authors: Howard Sounes
Bryan’s recollection is that Bukowski was not quite so calm. ‘Bukowski had a fit,’ he says. ‘He started screaming, “Stop the car! Let me out!”’
‘Fuck you!’ shouted the pranksters from the front and, when they finally pulled to a stop, Bryan claims Bukowski had shit his pants.
Before they parted company, Bukowski told Cassady that Kerouac has written the main chapters of his life, but that maybe he would write his last one. It was sadly prophetic. A couple of weeks later they heard Cassady had died in Mexico.
Bukowski had John Bryan to thank for the book of
Notes of a
Dirty Old Man
. Bryan negotiated a $1,000 advance from Essex House, ‘the very finest in adult reading by the most provocative modern writers’, or ‘porny’ publishers as Bukowski called them, and he was grateful enough to promise Bryan ten per cent of the money. Despite the book deal, all was not well between Bukowski and ‘the beaded and the bearded’, as he called the staff of
Open
City
, partly because there was such a cultural and generation gap between them.
‘It was a period of great agitation and experimentation and Bukowski didn’t really fit in very well, coming from an earlier period,’ says Bryan.
The association came unstuck after Bryan asked Bukowski to edit a literary supplement. Bukowski chose to use an explicit short story by Jack Micheline about the sexual antics of an underage girl. The story,
Skinny Dynamite
, appeared in the seventieth issue of
Open City
, in September, 1968, and because of it Bryan was arrested on obscenity charges. Micheline protested that his story was simply about a girl who likes to fuck and got letters of support from Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Hubert Selby Jnr and Norman Mailer. The case dragged on into 1969 and, although the charges were eventually dropped, it was the beginning of the end for
Open
City
which folded shortly before its second anniversary.
To add insult to injury, Bukowski wrote a satirical short story,
The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper
, about a paper he called
Open Pussy
, and the pretensions of its editor. There were particularly crude comments about the editors’s wife. The story had obvious parallels with Open City and, when it was published in
Evergreen
magazine, it helped trash another friendship.
‘Bukowski was very talented,’ says Bryan, ‘but he was really an asshole.’ He had a new nickname for his former friend: Bullshitski.
One of Bukowski’s main objections to the beat writers was that so many were homosexual. ‘He would say, you go from one coffee shop to another and there are poets hiding out in the bathroom sucking on each other’s ass,’ says Jack Micheline. ‘He didn’t like Ginsberg. He didn’t like fags.’ But he overcame his prejudice in the case of the poet Harold Norse, author of
Beat Hotel
and other books. Norse was introduced to Bukowski’s work while living in Paris. ‘I thought it was marvelous,’ he says. ‘I sent him something of mine and, from then on, it was a very close correspondence, very warm indeed. He called me Prince Hal, Prince of Poets.’
By 1967, Norse had moved to London where he knew Nikos Stangos, poetry editor with Penguin books. Stangos edited the Penguin Modern Poets series, which had already published poets as diverse as Kingsley Amis, Allen Ginsberg and Stevie Smith, and was on the look-out for new writers. ‘My editorial brief, which was my own decision, was that the series should be very
eclectic and should not ignore any strong, interesting, avant-garde or experimental work,’ he says. He decided Norse should be the central figure in the thirteenth book in the series, each of which featured three writers, and Norse suggested that the other poets should be American surrealist Philip Lamantia and his new pen friend Bukowski. Stangos wrote to Bukowski from London asking if he was interested, and Bukowski replied that it would be an honor to be included with Harold Norse whom he went so far as to describe as a ‘Godhead’.
When Norse returned to the United States in 1968, Bukowski called him regularly on the telephone to ask when the book was coming out and to talk about how unhappy he was at work.
‘It’s super triple hell, baby,’ he’d say. ‘The post office is nailing me to the cross.’
Norse suggested they meet for a drink at his place in Venice Beach and, one night during a rain storm, Bukowski drove over.
Norse’s first impression was of, ‘a big hunchback with ravaged, pockmarked face, decayed nicotine-stained teeth, and pain-filled green eyes,’ as he wrote in
Memoirs of a Bastard Angel
. ‘Flat brown hair seemed pasted to an oversized skull – hips broader than shoulders, hands grotesquely small and soft. A beer gut sagged over his belt. He wore a white shirt, baggy pants, an ill-fitting suit, the kind convicts receive when released from prison. He looked like one, down and out.’
Bukowski was charming, at first, calling his friend ‘Prince Hal’ and extravagantly praised his poetry until Norse told him to knock it off. After a few drinks they decided to record their conversation on Norse’s reel-to-reel, thinking maybe they could sell the tape to a book dealer. Bukowski spoke first.
‘I’m sitting here with Hal Norse,’ he said, ‘a damn good writer … But I’m Charles Bukowski! … Number one!’
‘What are you doing?’ asked Norse, switching off the machine.
‘I’m only having a bit of fun, Hal,’ Bukowski laughed. ‘You know I think you’re the best. Turn it on.’
They tried again.
‘This is Charles Bukowski. I’m at Hal Norse’s pad. He thinks he’s a writer, but don’t they all? I’m the king!’
That was the end of the tape-recording idea.
They drank until 3.00 a.m. when Norse went to bed leaving Bukowski on the sofa. A couple of hours later, when Norse went to the toilet, he saw Bukowski sitting up, flashes of lightning illuminating his face as the rain lashed the windows. He was talking and chuckling to himself, and yelled out, as if demented: ‘Who are you anyway, you blond kid, you?’
It was companionable having someone of his own age to talk to, when most of his friends were so much younger, and Bukowski began to spend a lot of time hanging out with Norse. After one day together, he wrote: ‘You know, as you walked along the beach with me back to my car, well, I don’t wanna sound like a god-damn romantic, but I got a real feeling of human warmth for a change.’
There was another side to Bukowski’s character, as Norse was to discover. The good Bukowski was ‘sort of sad and not very aggressive or arrogant’, quick to praise the work of others and polite and courteous to strangers. But when he was drinking, a more troublesome Bukowski emerged: an egocentric braggart who picked fights and was not above antagonizing Norse with talk of ‘faaaaags’, a word he’d drag out in a sneering way, saying at least Norse was not one of those ‘swishy faaaaags’. Why, he was almost manly, like Bukowski himself. The homophobia irritated Norse and he believes it may have been a cover for Bukowski being bisexual.
Norse claims that when Bukowski was drunk he sometimes got his cock out and asked to see Norse’s cock. This did not appear to be meant as a joke. ‘He was fascinated to see other men’s cocks. It’s a sexual thing,’ says Norse. ‘You can’t get away from that.’ There was no physical contact, no move by Bukowski to have contact, or sign from Norse he would welcome it. In fact, Norse says he was revolted by the notion of sex with his friend. ‘I was having sex with the most beautiful youths in California and here’s this horrible-looking man with a purple pitted face, like the Phantom of the Opera, and his belly falling like blubber over his belt. If he sat down, his paunch went halfway down to his knees,’ he says. ‘I would blow my brains out if I ever had to touch Bukowski sexually.’
There is little doubt Bukowski would have been horrified to be
considered anything other than entirely heterosexual. ‘He would have punched you about that,’ says Norse, ‘which proves he was trying to keep something down.’ Friends like Jack Micheline are outraged by the suggestion Bukowski might have been bisexual, saying Norse’s recollections are tinged by jealousy and bitterness. It is true Norse later fell out with Bukowski, and was already slightly cross he had plagiarized one of his letters for use in
Notes
of a Dirty Old Man
, but his is not the only evidence Bukowski might have been bisexual.
There was the incident at his apartment in the early 1950s when he had anal sex with a male friend, apparently by some extraordinary mistake. And Sam Cherry’s son, Neeli Cherkovski, recalls an occasion when Bukowski was drunk and asked if he wanted to get into bed with him. Nothing happened and in the morning Bukowski made a joke of it.
‘Remember I came up to you and I asked, “You wanna go to bed with me?”’
‘Yeah,’ said Cherkovski.
‘I thought you were some woman I knew whose name was Nelly,’ said Bukowski, laughing.
‘Did Nelly have a moustache?’
It is also true that Bukowski enjoyed saying and doing outrageous things to shock and it is entirely possible he was teasing Cherkovski and Norse, both of whom are homosexual. Further more, there is ample evidence Bukowski was enthusiastically heterosexual when he had the opportunity, and was sober enough to perform.
As the ’60s came to an end, even the Beatles picked up on Bukowski. Paul McCartney had become interested in new writing and asked his friend Barry Miles to suggest poets whom The Beatles could record. Miles came up with a list that included Bukowski and, although McCartney had never read his work, he approved the suggestion. ‘He was just very interested in the avant-garde, very open-minded about these things and prepared to take my word for it if I said this guy was OK,’ says Miles who was appointed manager of Zapple, the spoken word section of Apple Corporation, and flew out to LA to make the recordings.
The Zapple deal was set up via John Martin, who was assuming the additional responsibilities of being Bukowski’s agent, but when it came to cutting the record Bukowski was too shy to go into the studio at Capitol Records in Hollywood. ‘He didn’t want anybody to watch him because he hadn’t done any reading,’ says Miles. So he took a reel-to-reel tape machine over to De Longpre where he found Bukowski with what looked like an old-time hooker, slowly putting her stockings back on.
He gave Bukowski the tape machine and a box of twelve blank tapes, and a couple of days later Bukowski settled down on his sofa, opened a beer and started recording. He read more than fifty poems, pausing to give a commentary on the state of his life, and to gripe about Francis Crotty who was working noisily on a car outside the window. All the tapes were full by the time Miles returned a week later. In fact, Bukowski had enjoyed himself so much he had tried to record on both sides, not realizing professional tape only goes one way, and had erased half his work. The highlight was an eight-minute rendition of ‘fire station’ which, in Miles’ opinion, showed a natural talent for dramatic reading. ‘He builds it and reads it just brilliantly.’
At the end of the decade, Bukowski had the Zapple record to look forward to
*
, the Penguin Modern Poets book coming out in Britain and
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
out in paperback in the United States. A visitor from Germany, Carl Weissner, was even talking about translating his stories for publication in Europe. A small press in Berkeley had brought out a new chapbook,
Poems
Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Storey Window
, and John Martin was compiling another poetry anthology. Bukowski still found time to launch his own little magazine, an alternative to what he saw as the self-conscious cleverness of the Black Mountain School. He loathed the Black Mountain poets, even though John Martin was an admirer and published some of their work.
‘He would get a little jealous of somebody like Robert Creeley, who he didn’t understand, and he had some sharp things to say [about him],’ says Martin. ‘He was threatened by them. He didn’t understand what they were doing and maybe what they were doing was the right way and what he was doing was silly. Bukowski didn’t realize that there were different types of poetry.’
He wanted to call his magazine
Laugh Literary and Man the
Fucking Guns
, but co-editor Neeli Cherkovski persuaded him to change ‘fucking’ to ‘humping’. The cover carried a manifesto written by Bukowski: ‘In disgust with poetry Chicago, with the dull dumpling pattycake safe Creeleys, Olsons, Dickeys, Merwins, Nemerovs and Merediths – this is issue one volume one of
Laugh
Literary and Man the Humping Guns
.’
Bukowski was no better dealing with submissions than he had been back in the 1950s, when he co-edited
Harlequin
with Barbara Frye. Most of the stuff sent in was very bad and Bukowski began defacing manuscripts, scrawling insults like ‘These won’t do, baby’ or ‘Shove it, man.’ He poured beer over poems he didn’t like, or dipped them in egg, before mailing the rejected work back to the authors.
The new book John Martin had been working on was
The Days
Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills
. It was a retrospective of poems that had first appeared in chapbooks and little magazines, with an emphasis on the grief poems written after Jane died, and was one of the milestone books of Bukowski’s career. It came out in a beautiful edition with a simple but striking jacket devised by Barbara Martin. There was no blurb on the back, no quotes from other writers saying what a brilliant fellow Bukowski was, just the ten words of the title running down the cover, like a poem.
‘Bukowski’s titles are wonderful,’ Barbara says. ‘They make the cover. I always look at his title and I don’t have to do any more.’
Inside was a photograph of Bukowski as a grim-faced hobo, riding a box car. It looked authentic, but had been carefully posed because he wanted to appear as someone who had lived the hard times he wrote about. Sam Cherry, who really had been a hobo, took Bukowski down to the railroad yard behind Union Station and told him to climb up into a derelict wagon so he could get the shot. The ladder was several feet above the ground and Bukowski made a great performance of trying to get onto the car, even though he’d told Cherry he’d ridden box cars many times. Cherry noticed the awkward way Bukowski grasped the bars, and decided he had
never ridden a boxcar in his life. ‘It was not the professional way to get on a train,’ he says. ‘He didn’t know what he was doing.’ Bukowski finally managed to pull himself up, with Cherry and his son pushing from below, and stayed there just long enough for the photograph.