Charles Bukowski (5 page)

‘What d’you mean?’ Taylor asked.

‘Just leave me alone.’

Taylor was thirty-six, a fraudster who had operated under more than fifty aliases and spent literally half his life in jail. From 1941 to 1943, he was incarcerated in Wisconsin. When he was released, he moved to a basement off Fairmount Avenue where he was arrested in June, 1944, for manufacturing and passing bad checks and, ironically, considering what a hard time he gave Bukowski, for forging draft cards. As for being public enemy number one, he did feature on the FBI’s ‘ten most wanted’ list but not until years later.

It seems they were put in the same cell because the authorities wanted to keep the mental cases together. Bukowski was 4–F, which put a question mark against his sanity, and Taylor was an oddball who demanded to be seen by a psychiatrist
and, when he was sentenced, asked the judge for an extra eight years.

Taylor cheerfully explained to Bukowski that if he wanted to kill himself – as many try to do on their first night inside – he could stand in the slopping out bucket and jam his hand in the light socket. That would do it. Bukowski thanked him, because he had been thinking about it, but perhaps not right now. Instead, they spent a convivial evening betting dimes on who could capture the most bed bugs. Taylor, the veteran swindler, won by breaking his bugs in half and stretching the pieces to double his score.

Bukowski was released from prison as soon as he failed a second psychiatric test, and went back to the ‘good old scum bar’ on Fairmount Avenue. McGilligan welcomed him home by asking him outside for a fight.

‘The schtick, of course, was to let him beat me up for the entertainment of the customers,’ said Bukowski. ‘I got tired of that game and decked the bastard and they promptly 86’d me. There I was, on the streets, and out of a job just like that.’

He claimed that for the next ten years of his life he abandoned writing to become a drunk, a barfly, but the truth is he continued to work on short stories and submitted successfully to magazines.

His most notable success came in the spring of 1946 when he received a letter from the socialite, and patron of the arts, Caresse Crosby, who together with her husband had founded the Black Sun Press, publishing many of the greatest names in modern literature including James Joyce and Henry Miller. Bukowski had submitted a short story,
20 Tanks from Kasseldown
, to Crosby’s
Portfolio
magazine. It was about a man in prison awaiting execution and Crosby was sufficiently intrigued to write asking who Bukowski was. He claimed to have replied, enigmatically:

The story was accepted for publication in the third issue of
Portfolio
which appeared in the spring of 1946. The contributors, who included Jean Genet, Garcia Lorca, Henry Miller and
Jean-Paul Sartre, were given space for a biographical note and Bukowski emphasized his blue collar credentials by writing: ‘I am employed sandpapering, puttying and packing picture frames in a warehouse. This is not as bizarre as it sounds, but it almost is.’

Influenced by reading the work of poets including Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, he decided that ‘poetry is the shortest, sweetest, bangingest way’ to express what he wanted to say. Two of his earliest efforts were accepted by
Matrix
, a Philadelphia mimeographed magazine, and published in the summer of 1946 along with a short story. The poems are interesting in that they deal with the subject matter which became his stock-in-trade: rooming house life, bar life and unfaithful women. They also have the distinction of being his first published poetry, appearing a full nine years before he generally said he started writing poems.

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:

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 he 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: