Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski

  

          Early in 1970, after I’d stopped working full time for Zappa and Herb Cohen, a friend of mine who worked as a doorman at the Troubadour gave me a paperback book called Notes of a Dirty Old Man, by Charles Bukowski. It had a black-and-white photograph of a naked girl (tasteful: not full-frontal), amongst other things, on its cover. I thought it was porn and prepared myself for such. The first chapter puzzled me. It wasn’t porn, but I wasn’t sure what it really was. The second chapter, which was a short story, blew me away. It was, to my mind, the best thing I’d ever read.

          I devoured the rest of the book. I re-read it. I held on to it and did stupid things to retain it in my possession. It made me redefine the way I thought about life and about writing, two concepts which were then somewhat foolishly mixed together in my mind.

          Then, late in April 1972, my friend Susannah asked me one day if I wanted to go with her to meet Bukowski. The Bukowski. Charles Henry ‘Call me Hank’ Bukowski. The Dirty Old Man whose Notes were like sacred texts to me. She’d got an invitation to drop by and see him off an introduction from another ex-groupie who was a mutual friend. I could tag along.

          Okay. I’d read enough of his work by then (two more books of prose in addition to Notes) to know that he’d be pissed off if I drank his beer, and in a good mood if I’d bring a six-pack of half-quarts along with me. And I was right. We got along great. I took to driving over to his slummy little bungalow in the bowels of Hollywood, always bringing half-quarts, about once or twice a week. And we’d drink and talk and laugh. We engaged in laughter frequently. Both of us. The Master and his disciple; rather like Robert Crumb’s Mr Natural and Flakey Foont.

          At the time, his writing regime consisted of sitting down at his typewriter with a six-pack of half-quarts on a Friday evening and writing until the beer ran out. I don’t know how he did it. I’ve never been able to write at all when under the influence of alcohol.

          Once, when we were yakking, I’d told some story about some little shitty thing that’d happened lately, and Hank had laughed in a reassuring way and told me, in his hipster’s drawl, “It’s all ma-teerial, baby. It’s all just mateerial.” All this shit — y’know: life — is just stuff to write about.

          Of course, not all the advice that Hank gave me was what could reasonably be called good advice. For example, at my 26-years-of-failure party I’d met an intelligent and decorative woman named Lynne. She sang in a hey-nonny-no Renaissance music ensemble with another friend of mine, an Echo Park soul singer named Nolan Porter. I started seeing her at about the same time as I’d started seeing Bukowski. She lived right across the street from the studio where they filmed Let’s Make A Deal. Often when I’d go to see her I’d have to pass by battalions of people in bizarre get-ups queued up on the sidewalk, waiting to be let in to beg, “Choose me, Monty!” at the tops of their voices.

          Maybe it was mostly physical, but it seemed to me that I was becoming rapidly attached to Lynne. She had a little kid, who I also became fond of. But it must have dawned on her that I was an underemployed loser living in a grotty basement and going nowhere, and she decided we should Just Be Friends. And my emotions got in the way.

          I went over to Bukowski’s, and we drank maybe more than a few half-quarts of Schlitz. He advised me not to skulk away to lick my wounds, which is what seemed natural to me, but to let my hurt out as anger directed at her. Specifically, he advised me to hit her. But when I went over there with his instructions ringing in my ears, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just snarled out something angry and spit on the ground in her general direction. She said, “Richard, I don’t think I like you any more,” and that ended that. At least no more Just Friends.

          When I told Hank about it, he thought it was enormously funny.

          After I left LA, I lost touch with Bukowski when my first wife destroyed all my contact information with everybody I knew from before.