Charles Bukowski (21 page)

Reviewing
Factotum
in the
New York Times
, Richard Elman wrote: ‘Not since Orwell has the condition of being down and out been so well recorded in the first person.’ Elman also noted the novel was in striking contrast to the ‘callow journalism’ of Bukowski’s
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
column for which he had become notorious in Los Angeles.

The short stories Bukowski wrote for the
LA Free Press
, and pornographic magazines like
Adam, Screw, Fling
, and Larry Flynt’s
Hustler
, were far less crafted than the work Black Sparrow Press published. Bukowski commonly used extreme language to shock: women were ‘whores’ and intercourse was ‘rape’, pandering to his readers’ basest expectations. Not only was the work often poor, he didn’t enjoy writing it. On the morning he had to deliver his copy, he frequently telephoned John Martin complaining about not having written a word. ‘Why am I doing this?’ he asked.

Martin reminded him he did it for money and it was nobody’s idea but his own. Personally he didn’t think much of the
LA Free
Press
or the column. ‘All they wanted was sex stuff from him and that’s where that reputation came from,’ he says. ‘He was trying to be a dirty writer, not a literary person at all. He would call me – I think he had a 2 p.m. deadline on Thursday – he would call me moaning and groaning at 10 a.m. Thursday; he hadn’t written anything, and then he just whacked something out. I have gone through all that stuff to find stories for my books and a lot of it is poorly written, just piss poor. But if you read
Factotum
, there are no “whores”. They are all women he tries to relate to. He admires them from afar and thinks they are way beyond him.’

Occasionally Bukowski wrote a powerful story for the newspaper, or the sex magazines, although the subject matter was often distasteful. None was more shocking, nor more accomplished, than
The Fiend
in which Bukowski describes the rape of a child.

Martin Blanchard, an unemployed solitary drunk, spies on a young girl from the window of his apartment. She is aged between
six and nine years and he becomes aroused by glimpses of her underwear. He masturbates, gets drunk and then rapes the girl in a garage while her friends watch. Every detail is graphically described and the rape scene reads like pornography:

The Fiend
is the most extreme prose piece Bukowski ever wrote. He deliberately describes the rape to titillate his male readers and further manipulates them to sympathize with Blanchard by having him beaten by police at the end of the story. John Martin refused to publish it, but
Hustler
paid $1,000 to use it and, in an interview with the magazine, Bukowski tried to explain and justify the story.

He said he wrote
The Fiend
after seeing a little girl playing in a neighbor’s yard, just as he had written. He admitted masturbating himself and frankly said he had felt like raping her.
Hustler
asked what stopped him.

‘I didn’t do it, no. I felt like doing it,’ he replied. ‘I’m a potential rapist, but I know that I can’t get away with it. It doesn’t pay off. If I raped the kid, where do I end up? I don’t get any ass for fifteen years, right?’

He conceded that, by and large, little girls were frightened by the idea of having intercourse with men, but said he would let an eight-year-old suck his cock ‘if she wanted to’.

‘People tell me that it arouses them when they read it,’ he said
of the story. ‘So there must be some truth in it beyond just myself and my feeling, or the character’s feeling towards the child … They’re very nice, you know. They wear those little short skirts, and when they put on their roller skates, you see their panties.’

Bukowski’s justification in writing the story was that he was trying to get inside the mind of a rapist to show men something about themselves they might not care to acknowledge.

Most of the time he was bereft of ideas for his column, stealing or bastardizing stories from any source. His neighbor, Tina Darby, helped by regaling him with her adventures as an exotic dancer and by telling him what went on at the sex parties she and Brad went to. ‘We would tell stories to each other and they would be in the
LA Free Press
. He would take a conversation, twist it around a little and that would be his column,’ she says. He also got material from the low-life characters who lived in the court, like Sam who worked as doorman at a local massage parlor. He became Sam the Whorehouse Man in several stories.

At night, after he had stopped writing, Bukowski sometimes strolled up to the coffee stand on the corner of Hollywood and Western. He might wander into Le Sex Shoppe, the long-established pornographic book store where Brad Darby was manager. They smoked cigarettes and Brad usually gave him some magazines to take home. Other times Bukowski stood and watched the street prostitutes, some of whom he came to have a nodding acquaintance with.

‘I think he felt at home there, and he thought of himself as a tough guy, so he liked sometimes to go up to the corner, stand around, watch the lights change,’ says Darby. ‘Everybody knew him, so everybody would wave at him and call his name out. He liked that.’

When he was at the coffee stand, Bukowski often met comic book distributor, George Di Caprio, who lived at a court on the opposite corner of Hollywood and Western with his wife, Irmelin, and their baby son who grew up to become the film star, Leonardo Di Caprio.

The Christmas of 1975 was the first the Di Caprio family had spent with their new baby. George decorated the bungalow, bought
a tree and invited his mother to dinner. Christmas Eve, when they were washing up, there was a knock at the door and in burst the diabolical figure of Bukowski, his face fiery with drink.

‘You know, it’s just a few inches that separates a man from paradise,’ said Bukowski, enigmatically, when he had taken in the scene: the tree, the cards with snow scenes, and baby Leonardo sleeping peacefully in a bassinet. George Di Caprio pondered this cryptic statement, assuming it had a festive meaning. His mother, who was a little deaf, asked what Bukowski had said.

‘Yeah, hmm, it’s just a few inches …’ Bukowski began again, and then he yelled: ‘THAT PREVENTS A MAN SUCKING HIS OWN COCK!’

In his relentless search for new material, Bukowski often got together with Brad and Tina the night before he had to write his column. These evenings invariably culminated in some drunken prank: Bukowski once announced that any writer should be willing to eat his own words, so he tore up the
LA Free Press
and swallowed it. Then he vomited over Tina’s carpet. Another night he shot himself in the leg with a pistol. Yet another session ended with Brad discovering Tina and Bukowski in bed together, and Linda King went almost mad with jealousy when she found Polaroid photographs of Tina sitting naked on Bukowski’s lap.

He also took inspiration from fans who came to Carlton Way to pay homage to him, people like the folk-singer Bob Lind who had a hit in 1966 with ‘Elusive Butterfly’. Lind first contacted Bukowski after watching a television rerun of Taylor Hackford’s documentary. He gave Bukowski his number and said he would enjoy meeting him. A few days later, at three in the morning when Bukowski was feeling lonely after another split with Linda, he telephoned Lind and invited him to get some beer and come over.

‘The first thing I noticed about him, other than that dramatically ugly mug of his, were his shoulders. As I shook his hand, I put my left hand on his shoulder. It felt like cement. You don’t expect muscles like that on a man so clearly dissipated,’ says Lind. Bukowski explained it was from years of slinging mail bags around at the post office.

He was drinking whiskey and chasing it with Heineken. Lind
got out some cocaine, arranged two lines on the kitchen table and started rolling a dollar bill, assuming Bukowski did coke regularly.

‘What is that, kid? What do I do?’ asked Bukowski, who had never snorted before.

‘It just makes you sharper,’ said Lind. When it was Bukowski’s turn, he was so nervous he exhaled when he should have inhaled and blew the powder all over the kitchen.

‘Oh no, that shit’s expensive, kid.’

It had been a dream come true for Bob Lind to meet Bukowski, even if he did waste his cocaine, so he was mortified to open the
LA Free Press
the following week and see himself parodied in Bukowski’s column. ‘He called me some hippy-dippy name and reduced me to a flower child cliché. He put stupid dialogue in my mouth along the lines of “Groovy Daddio, I’m on cloud nine.”’ Bukowski further humiliated Lind in his novel
Women
, turning him into the annoying character of Dinky Summers.

Bukowski also entertained a succession of female fans who telephoned or wrote to him, often sending photographs of themselves in the nude. Many were young mothers who had been through a bad relationship and were looking for an older man to look after them. Others were groupies trying to bed someone famous. They had no trouble reaching Bukowski, as he explained in his poem ‘how come you’re not unlisted?’:

He invariably invited his callers over, whatever their motivation, so long as they could bring a six-pack of beer, and Brad and Tina Darby often saw young women following Bukowski up the path to the door of his apartment. ‘It would just amaze me sometimes,’ says Brad. ‘Some of them were gorgeous and he had a constant parade.’ Bukowski told these girlfriends he was already seeing someone, but she was not the kind of woman he needed. But if Linda King showed up, he quickly bundled them over to Brad and Tina’s place and they had to stay there if Linda didn’t leave.

One night around closing time Bukowski received a telephone call from a young woman with a particularly sexy voice. She said she was with a girlfriend at Barney’s Beanery, the bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. Her girlfriend was a fan of Bukowski’s writing and, as it was her thirtieth birthday, she wondered if they could meet him. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Pick up a six-pack and come on over.’

Two women duly showed up, both spaced-out. The birthday girl was Georgia Peckham-Krellner. A match-thin brunette dressed like a hooker, she was the woman later immortalized by a famous photograph in which she poses with Bukowski in front of his refrigerator. The other woman, the one who had telephoned, was Pamela Miller. She was twenty-three years old and built like the girls in
Fling
magazine. She was not tall, but she had a big chest and a very pretty face, not unlike the actress Ann-Margret, with green eyes that glittered merrily (partly because she was stoned) and long glossy reddish-blonde hair. She was a girl to drive a man crazy. ‘I guess you could say I was attractive,’ she says, coolly, recalling her impression on Bukowski. ‘I’ve never had too many problems attracting the opposite sex.’ She told Bukowski her friends called her Cupcakes, because of her chest. It was 38 D. He could call her Cupcakes, if he wanted.

Listening to them talking, Bukowski decided that although Cupcakes was the looker, Georgia was the more likable of the pair. Cupcakes seemed to have the personality of a shark.

He told Georgia: ‘I wish I could take your soul and merge it into her body.’ He looked at Cupcakes, all that red hair, flaming sex. ‘I would have the perfect woman.’ Cupcakes giggled thinking she was being paid a compliment.

After they left, Bukowski lay on his filthy mattress, and thought about Cupcakes. He had never known a real redhead before. Her hair was like fire.

Cupcakes was working as a cocktail waitress at The Alpine Inn, a German theme bar in Hollywood, and she began coming by Carlton Way after her shift. The conversation was mostly about her – she had no interest in his poetry, which made a change. He discovered she had been born in San Francisco, in 1952, the daughter of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father, a newspaper journalist who left home when she was two. When she was fifteen, Cupcakes became pregnant by her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend. She dropped out of school, had the baby, lost the husband and went to work for Pussycat Theaters, a chain of cinemas showing sex films. She was Miss Pussycat Theaters, 1973.

Life was an endless party and she didn’t care about anything much so long as she was having a good time and could get stoned on diet pills, which she was dependent on. She also liked to date older men. ‘I suspect that is the main reason I was attracted to Hank. I’m sure it’s that classic textbook looking for the father.’

When Bukowski met her, she was living in a beat-up Hollywood bungalow with her daughter, Stacey, driving around town in a ruined Camaro filled with the detritus of her life: cans, pill bottles, clothes, shoes, magazines and cigarette packets. She was behind on the rent. She didn’t always have enough money to buy Stacey clothes and was stoned from morning to night on pills she wheedled out of doctors on prescription.

When Stacey didn’t have anything suitable to wear to a friend’s birthday party, Bukowski took pity and bought the child a yellow dress. Pamela kissed him thank-you. It was so sweet of him.

He took her to the fights at the Olympic Auditorium and the crowd hooted at Cupcakes almost as loudly as they yelled at the contenders; she was bursting out of that damn dress. Bukowski dreamt of burying his face in her hair, those breasts, slipping the dress over her head and ripping her apart.