Charles Bukowski (27 page)

It’s certainly true that he remained productive. Apart from the
Barfly
screenplay, Bukowski quickly completed the text for the travelogue,
Shakespeare Never Did This
. He was working on a new novel, and Black Sparrow published a new anthology of his poetry.

Play the Piano Drunk/Like a Percussion Instrument/Until the
Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit
is an off-putting title for a book, but this 1979 anthology includes some of Bukowski’s best and most unusual poetry, great work like ‘blue moon, oh bleweeww mooooon how I adore you!’ which treats the subject of infidelity with typically dark Bukowskian humor:

He never published love poems about Linda Lee equal in passion to those he wrote about Linda King, Cupcakes or Jane Cooney Baker. Indeed the most heartfelt poems in the new Black Sparrow anthology were for Jane, seventeen years after her death. But the book was, at least, dedicated to Linda Lee and contained some work specifically about their relationship, like ‘mermaid’ in which he describes finding her soaping herself in the tub:

Compared with calling her a fucking cunt, and kicking her off the sofa, this shows some tenderness towards his girlfriend, but it was not necessarily a truer reflection of their daily life. ‘We had a lot of crazy arguments, verbal arguments and stuff like that,’ she admits. Bukowski complained to friends that she had been a good woman when he met her, but had changed. He said she wanted ‘soul-expansion’ and sometimes he feared she was unbalanced.

In the summer of 1981, Bukowski wrote to Joan Smith, the former go-go dancer, that he was finished with Linda Lee and had given up the search for the perfect mate, but hinted it would be nice to see Joan. ‘I thought, well, this might be my big chance, you know, to finally be alone with Bukowski,’ says Joan, who had always held a torch for the writer.

She telephoned Bukowski and he said she should come over to see the new house. A date was set and, a few days later, Joan called again to confirm. A woman answered and handed the telephone to Bukowski. ‘Joan Smmmiiiiiiittthhhh?’ he said, giving her two-syllable surname about twenty syllables, as if he couldn’t quite remember who she was.

It seemed that Linda Lee was back.

Bukowski’s fourth novel,
Ham on Rye
, his thirty-seventh book, was published in the summer of 1982. It addresses his childhood and relationship with his father. The title is a pun on
The Catcher
in the Rye
, one of Bukowski’s favorite novels, as well as meaning Chinaski was trapped between his parents, like ham in a sandwich. The novel is the most straight-forwardly autobiographical of all his books, taking Chinaski from his earliest memories of living in America, going to grammar school, junior high, high school and delivering him at the beginning of World War Two a frightened and bitter young man. Bukowski was writing with the objectivity of hindsight, rather than having his nose up close to the mirror, as he said of
Women
, and the book is better for it. At the same time it lacks humor, dealing with the one area of his life where he found almost nothing to laugh about.

There was irony in writing a long book about his disgust for his parents and their suburban lifestyle when Bukowski was now living the suburban dream himself – even more so – and the irony was not lost on Linda Lee. One day when Bukowski was cutting the lawn with his new electric mower she decided to test whether he was over the traumas of his past, got down on the grass and pointed to something. Finally Bukowski switched off the mower and asked what the hell she thought she was doing.

‘You missed a blade!’ she said.

‘Oh shit,’ he sighed, ‘my father has gone but you are here.’

M
ost week days, Bukowski drove to wherever the horses were running at that time of year: Hollywood Park in the mainly black district of Inglewood; Del Mar, just north of San Diego; or Santa Anita, near Temple City where his father died. He went to the maiden races and harness racing. He even went to the track when the races were telecast from out of state, feeling that something was missing from life if he didn’t get a bet on.

The inside lane was best if he had to take the freeway. He opened the sun roof and tuned the radio to a classical station, driving at a leisurely speed while the other fellows raced to their appointments.

He arrived at the track mid-morning and had the BMW valet-parked, its bodywork glistening after its wash.

‘Hey, champ!’ the valets greeted him. ‘Got any tips?’

Bukowski smiled and took his ticket. He bought the
Daily
Racing
Form
, a program, a cup of coffee and went and sat in the
grandstand, away from the finishing line crush, but within view of the tote board. Then he studied the morning line and handicapped the runners, marking the program with one of the Pentels he carried in his shirt pocket. Bukowski liked long shots, horses not fancied to win, but which paid better odds if they did. A few minutes before the first race he placed a regular win bet, between $10 and $40 depending on how sanguine he was. He never bet heavily so he rarely won more than $300, and there were plenty of times he didn’t win. By 1982, after nearly thirty years studying horses, he estimated he was $10,000 in the hole. As he was making more than ten times that every year from writing, it hardly mattered. The track was just a way of passing the time because, prolific though he was, he couldn’t write all day and all night.

There was much about the track he didn’t like. He hated the thirty minutes between races, time for the crowd to buy hot dogs and beer. It was dead time. He tried writing in a note book, but found himself reading the newspaper instead: Ann Landers, the financial pages, sports and crime stories. ‘I am up to date on all the crap in the world,’ he wrote in
Horsemeat
, a limited edition book about racing. He disliked his fellow gamblers, ‘the lowest of the breed’, florid with stress and chewing on cigars. They were always yelling, like his father yelled throughout his life, yelling between races about which horse would win, behaving like maniacs when the animals were running and then cursing the ‘salami’ when their horses lost, tearing betting slips into confetti, even eating them. They didn’t seem to know there was nothing generous about the track. ‘It is not a place to go to jump up and down and holler and drink beer and take your girlfriend,’ Bukowski wrote in
Horsemeat
. ‘It is a life–death game and unless you apply yourself with some expertise, you are going to get killed.’

Above all else, he became irritated when punters spoke to him, either because they were fans, or because they wanted company.

If they were really persistent, he put rubber plugs in his ears.

After eating an evening meal with Linda Lee at home in San Pedro, Bukowski usually took a bottle of wine up to his study where he worked late into the night. Sometimes Linda Lee complained, saying she was alone when he went upstairs. He replied that when she was out late with her friends, in the $10,000 sports car he’d bought her, he was alone. In the late summer of 1982 they split again.

With only his cats for company – as he grew older Bukowski became increasingly fond of stray cats – and little more than drinking and horse racing for recreation, he became melancholy about the man–woman conflict which had taken up so much of his time in recent years. He complained to friends that women thought they were doing him a favor by living with him. They made excessive demands, inviting friends over and wanting him to accompany them to parties. In a letter to Linda King he wrote that he knew why men died earlier than women, it was because women killed them.

With little to distract him, he worked harder than ever, writing on a sophisticated IBM Selectric typewriter, which his accountant said was tax deductible, and drinking expensive French wine. If there was Mozart on the radio, or ‘The Bee’ as he affectionately called Beethoven, he kept going into the early hours of the morning, producing a new book of short stories,
Hot Water Music
, and a large anthology of poems,
War All the Time
, the last Black Sparrow book he did original paintings for.

R. Crumb was commissioned to illustrate two Bukowski short stories which were published in individual editions.
Bring Me
Your Love
concerns a man whose wife is in an asylum.
There’s
No Business
describes the declining fortunes of cocktail lounge comedian Manny Hyman. His old-fashioned routine is failing to entertain the customers at Joe Silver’s lounge at the Sunset Hotel:

Although these new stories were written in the third person about characters other than Henry Chinaski, showing a greater sophistication in Bukowski’s prose style, there was still a strong element of autobiography underlying the work. John Martin believes that in creating a loser like Manny Hyman, Bukowski was writing about what he feared he might become if people stopped buying his books. He had been down so long it seemed logical hard times might return. And the impression that Manny
is
Bukowski is reinforced by R. Crumb’s illustrations, as Crumb explains: ‘The character Manny Hyman was such a close variation on Bukowski’s own self-portrayals, I ended up making him look Bukowski-like, but maybe a little more Jewish, not quite so heavy-set or seedy-scruffy as Bukowski.’

Bukowski and Linda Lee lived apart for much of 1983, although he saw her regularly and helped with her domestic crises and depressions. He felt she was not coping well without him and
decided to alter his will in her favor to give her some long-term security if he dropped dead. In April, 1984, Bukowski informed his attorney that Linda Lee was to receive one third the value of his estate, including royalties and property, upon his death. Marina, who had previously stood to inherit everything, was not informed. In August he amended his will again, increasing Linda Lee’s share to half. This was not an inconsiderable sum as Bukowski earned in excess of $110,000 in 1984 alone, and most of his income was saved.
*

He was making so much money he was able to write a check to clear his mortgage. Bukowski remembered how his father nagged at him when they lived at Longwood Avenue, saying he had no ambition. ‘Son, how are you ever going to make it?’ he repeatedly asked. Well, he had made it. The car was paid for. The house was paid for, and there was money in the bank.

When their relationship was really rocky, Linda Lee went on a hunger strike refusing to eat or talk to him. Bukowski wrote to a friend that he feared she might die, so he asked her to marry him. That cheered her up. She was very nice again. A more romantic version of the proposal appeared in the limited edition book,
The
Wedding
, where Bukowski wrote that he and Linda Lee were in the garden with their four cats when he suddenly said: ‘Let’s get married!’ as the perfect end to the perfect day.

Linda Lee knew they would never have children together. She was still only forty-one, but Bukowski was sixty-four, ‘old enough to be my father’, and had absolutely no desire to go through fatherhood again. ‘I knew I had to make a very big choice in my life: marry Hank and not have children, or not marry Hank. It was tough.’ But she chose to marry and the wedding was arranged for the first Sunday after Bukowski’s birthday.

Plants were brought in to prettify the house. A room was specially prepared for Linda Lee’s mother. Timber arrived for the construction of a screen to hide the trash cans. A Persian rug was purchased to cover stains where Bukowski had spilt wine. Meanwhile builders were knocking through a wall so there would be easy access to the hot tub being installed in the garden.

Bukowski became anxious about paying for so much extravagance. The dollar was high against the European currencies, and he feared foreign royalties were declining, so he went back to writing for the porn magazines. Some of the stories were incredibly strange and one, about three men having intercourse with a pig, was rejected as too strong even for
Hustler
.

It was while he was preparing for his second marriage, after almost thirty years as a bachelor, that Bukowski discovered the fate of his first wife, Barbara Frye. For a couple of years after they split she had sent Christmas cards and the occasional note about how well she was getting on with her new husband in Aniak, Alaska. They had two beautiful daughters and were very happy. She was writing children’s books and had discovered she was psychic. Then there was a telephone call, but nothing since.

It turned out that one of Barbara’s daughters developed a drug problem and burned down the family home. Unable to face rebuilding, Barbara and the daughter travelled to India where they became involved in a weird religious group and where Barbara died in mysterious circumstances. The daughter returned to the US without the body and the family never received a death certificate. The final macabre twist came when the daughter committed suicide.

The wedding was scheduled for 1 p.m. on Sunday 18 August, 1985, at the Church of the People in Los Feliz, east of Hollywood. As the big day approached, with thousands of dollars spent, and guests arriving from out of state to stay with them at the house, Linda Lee took to her bed with the flu, leaving Bukowski to cope with the arrangements on his own. She asked him to pray for her recovery. ‘FUCK IT ALL!’ Bukowski exploded. ‘DON’T YOU REALIZE THAT THERE ISN’T A GOD?’

He smashed a full-length mirror to the floor in exasperation. Linda Lee’s mother, Honora, looked at him like he was the devil.

Marina arrived with her boyfriend, Jeffrey Stone. Michael Montfort and his wife arrived. Barbara and John Martin came down from Santa Barbara. They found that Bukowski had undergone an astonishing sartorial transformation. For the first time
since anyone could remember he was dressed in a suit. It was cream-colored with a blue pinstripe. He was also wearing a floral tie and snake skin shoes.

John Martin was best man and Bukowski insisted they had a glass of champagne together, even though Martin had never drunk alcohol in his life. He became dizzy after one sip and decided the room was spinning.

‘I don’t understand it,’ growled Bukowski, as if encountering a form of alien life. ‘How can you go your whole life without drinking?’

‘How can you drink all your life?’ asked Martin.

A doctor had been summoned to see Linda Lee and told Bukowski to take her to a clinic because she was not well enough to get married. Meanwhile the house was filling with people, all talking excitedly and looking at their watches. Just when it seemed Bukowski would have to tell them the wedding was called off, Linda Lee appeared on the stairs, in her wedding dress. ‘Ladies and gentleman, the bride!’ announced Bukowski, mightily relieved.

He led her out to a white Rolls Royce which whisked them along the freeway to the church. Handel’s
Water Music
played and sunshine streamed in through the glass.

There was a reception afterwards for eighty friends and family at a Thai restaurant in San Pedro. As he passed through the room greeting his guests, and accepting their congratulations, Bukowski reminded them that he was paying for everything so they better enjoy it. He also treated his friends Steve Richmond and Gerald Locklin to an impromptu speech about the shortcomings of women, perhaps not an entirely appropriate subject for a wedding reception. The bride and groom drank and ate, cut a giant cheesecake and danced to a reggae band. ‘He was in a happy mood and laughing.’ says Martin. ‘People would jostle him and he would spill wine on himself.’