Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 7

When he got home, his pen friend Ann Menebroker called to say she was in San Bernadino at a poetry conference and suggested they meet. They had been corresponding for years in such an affectionate way that their letters const.i.tuted a platonic love affair. 'I have grown to love that part of you that comes over the phone or through the mails,' she wrote. Now Bukowski was intrigued to find out what she was like.

When he arrived at Ann's hotel, she introduced him to a group of poets who Bukowski roundly insulted, inviting one to go outside and have a fist fight with him. Then they drove back into Los Angeles, Bukowski rapping about the characters they pa.s.sed on the sidewalk, making his world come alive for Ann.

'He was exactly the way I pictured him,' she says. 'I thought he was very interesting. I fell in love with the man. I loved him for years.' Even though she did not find him physically attractive, she decided his personality transcended his looks and they went to bed that night and the following night, although Ann didn't let him have full intercourse because she was married.

Bukowski found Ann very attractive and said he knew she was married with children, up in Sacramento, but he wanted her to come and live with him in LA. He needed her; she was the first woman for a long time he had felt comfortable with. But she turned him down.

'There was a very strong pull, but I couldn't do that,' she says. 'I had a normal sane life where I was.'

With Ann gone, and hardly any money to play the horses, he found himself stuck at home all day with his poems, and his paper, and his crayons, like a child. He became increasingly frustrated and irritable. When new tenants began blocking his Plymouth with their cars, he convinced himself it would end in a fight and sent away for a $3 switchblade.

He saw the knife advertised in the cla.s.sified section of one of the p.o.r.nographic magazines he was buying having decided he could make extra money writing 'dirty stories'. The editor of Fling magazine, which specialized in photo-spreads of women with huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, replied with an encouraging letter saying he would welcome submissions with a lot of kinky s.e.x. Bukowski began churning out short stories that, while being set in his regular low-life milieu, contained scenes of bizarre and often violent s.e.x including sado-masochism, rape, even b.e.s.t.i.a.lity.

He put his problems aside in August for his fiftieth birthday, which he celebrated by getting drunk for a week. Then he sobered up to the bleak realization that he was fifty, unemployed and broke.

When Carl Weissner finished translating Notes of a Dirty Old Man into German, he and Bukowski decided to invent a review quote by Henry Miller in a desperate attempt to boost sales. As Bukowski wrote to Weissner, rather guiltily, things were so bad they had little choice but to pull such a stunt: I'm not too happy with the fake H (enry) M (iller) quote, and I would not tell (John) Martin about it or he'd flip maybe.

But if you think it will make the difference in selling 2000 or 5000, go ahead. It's best that we survive.

Because the book was published in an expensive hard cover edition, it still sold only twelve hundred copies and earned Bukowski next to nothing. He grew ever gloomier about his freelance writing career. Post Office had not been published yet. He was having trouble collecting money from the s.e.x magazines, which had printed some of his dirty stories. And he had been pinning his hopes on getting a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts, working on the theory that most writers they gave money to didn't deserve it. Then they sent a letter saying he'd been turned down. It was one disappointment after another and all the time his bank balance was diminis.h.i.+ng. At his lowest point, which came in September 1970, he considered using the $3 switchblade to cut his throat.

'I thought the life of a writer would really be the thing,' he wrote in a letter to Neeli Cherkovski, 'it's simply h.e.l.l. I'm just a cheap twittering slave.'

8.

LOVE LOVE LOVE.

After Jane c.o.o.ney Baker, probably the greatest love of Bukowski's life was the sculptress Linda King whom he met in 1970.

Linda's first impression of Bukowski was that he was too old, too fat and too drunk to be of interest to her. She didn't even want to tell him her real name.

'It's Morona,' she said, when Peter Edler introduced her to Bukowski at De Longpre Avenue.

'OK, Morona, sit down,' said Bukowski. 'So you write poetry?'

'Yes, I like to SCREAM mine.'

She got up on the coffee table and declaimed a poem about a nervous breakdown she'd suffered. Yes, she was a looker, thought Bukowski, but wouldn't you know she'd be crazy, too? He turned up the radio so he wouldn't have to listen, and Peter Edler was so embarra.s.sed he tried to put his hand over her mouth.

When Edler said he had to go, Linda said she'd go with him.

'Oh no, you're staying here with Hank,' he said, and left them together.

There not being much else to do, they kissed, just lightly, almost without interest.

'You're a tease,' said Bukowski.

'Yes, I'm a tease.'

He tried to kiss her again, but Linda got up to go, pausing in the doorway for one more touch before skipping out the door and along the avenue to her car. As she drove away, she told herself she was definitely not going to get involved with 'that old troll'.

Linda was a thirty-year-old brunette, raised as a Mormon on a ranch near Bryce Canyon, Utah. Shortly after getting married, she had a severe mental breakdown, receiving electro-convulsive therapy, and afterwards came to Los Angeles to try and become an actress. After her marriage ended, she settled with her two children in the suburb of Burbank, renting a place on Riverside Drive, and, when her acting ambitions came to nothing, she began concentrating on her sculpting and poetry, both of which she was good at. Hanging out at The Bridge, she met Peter Edler and got to hear about Bukowski. He sounded like an interesting man whom she'd like to meet.

After that first visit to De Longpre, Linda read more of Bukowski's work and was surprised to discover he rarely wrote about women, and what he did write betrayed some ignorance. So she sent him a poem of her own: come out of that hole, you old Troll come and frolic with the liberated Billies we'll put some flowers in your hair Also enclosed was a letter asking if he would sit for a sculpture of his head. He replied that he would, and she was welcome to come over when she liked.

It was around 11 a.m. when Linda came back to De Longpre. She found Bukowski coughing up blood.

'You want me to come back later?' she asked.

Bukowski said it was alright, he went through this every morning.

'When I first met him he really was pretty ugly,' says Linda. 'He was 240 lbs and his hair was really short, like an old Will Rogers haircut.' But the more she saw of him, as she worked at modelling the head, the more attractive he seemed. 'He was very funny. He had a way of living, making each moment real. Sometimes he would be real stubborn and not talk at all, but for the most part, if you were around him, you felt this aliveness.' Their conversation and body language became increasingly flirtatious as the weeks went by, and Bukowski wrote her romantic letters. Linda's friends warned her not to get involved with a man so much older, a drunk with no money who didn't even have a proper job, but she found herself casting coquettish looks at him as they worked on the head, which began to mimic his slightly suggestive smile. 'I fell in love with him,' she says. 'We kind of fell in love over the clay.'

'Bukowski, you're a good writer,' she said one day, when she was working. 'But you don't know anything about women.' He admitted he hadn't had much experience. The last time he had had s.e.x was after the reading in New Mexico and, other than a couple of one night stands, he had basically only had three lovers in his whole life: Jane c.o.o.ney Baker, Barbara Frye and FrancEyE. Linda said she thought as much.

She was in the kitchen when he came and pressed himself against her. He got a quick kiss. Then Linda pushed him away, saying if they ever became lovers, which he should know was highly unlikely, he would have to go down on her.

'I'll never get mixed up with a man again who doesn't like to eat p.u.s.s.y,' she said. Bukowski was forced to admit he had never done such a thing. 'Oh well, you know, ha ha, too bad for you,' said Linda, who often spoke with a peculiar chuckling laugh. 'Forget it.'

Bukowski couldn't stand the teasing any longer. He scooped her up in his arms, carried her to the bed and proceeded to 'eat her c.u.n.t like a peach', as he wrote in an unpublished love poem.

After a difficult first year as a freelance writer, 1971 started well for him. Post Office was published in February, in a beautiful edition designed by Barbara Martin, the cover made to look like a letter. Bukowski's friend Gerald Locklin gave it a rave review in the Long Beach Press Telegram, saying he doubted a better novel would be published in America that year. February was also the month Bukowski started sleeping with Linda.

They got off to a shaky start. He was using the tranquilizer drug Valium, to help him sleep at nights, and the c.o.c.ktail of booze and pills rendered him impotent. Linda gathered it had happened before, because he didn't seem at all surprised or worried. Instead he had a good time letting her squeeze the blackheads that covered his back and chest. He said it felt almost as good as s.e.x, but she wanted more than that out of a relations.h.i.+p.

She made him cut back on his drinking, told him to stop taking Valium and put him on a diet and exercise regime. He slimmed down to 160 lbs, losing so much weight cheekbones appeared on his face for the first time in thirty years. Linda found she had to sc.r.a.pe some clay from the head. He grew his hair and beard long, in keeping with the fas.h.i.+on, and she encouraged him to buy bell-bottom trousers and floral-print s.h.i.+rts. When the make-over was complete, she said they could try again.

Bukowski a.s.sured her there was no need to use a rubber because, even if he got an erection, and held it, he would withdraw in time.

'You came inside!' she yelled in a rage, jumping up and down on the bed. 'Jesus Christ, man!'

'I was too hot. It just happened. What do I do?'

'Do? You're fifty years old. You're supposed to know things.'

They were soon having s.e.x every day, like young lovers, and Bukowski became infatuated with her. He told Linda he loved everything about her, even the way she walked. She made him feel so strong he believed he could knock down walls with his hands. One morning, when he was cooking eggs for breakfast, he was so befuddled by love he put the pan of water in the refrigerator, rather than on the stove. Linda was taken aback by the intensity of his feelings. 'I didn't want a man loving me that hard; it was like it was obsessive instead of natural.'

With obsessive love came jealousy. Bukowski invited Linda to parties at his place, but couldn't cope with the way she danced and flirted with his friends. There was a New Year's party and a party for the third and final issue of his magazine, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.

'It's a collating party,' he said, when he asked if she would come.

'A copulating party? No, really, what did you say?'

'Putting the magazine together, that's collating.'

'Oh, sure. Who's going to be there?'

'A bunch of half-a.s.sed poets, myself.'

'Now if it was a copulating party ...'

'It will be. You and me after.'

She danced like she was having s.e.x. Her favorite step was the White Dog Hunch, named after a dog in her home town of Boulder, Utah, that tried to mount every human being it met. Bukowski was driven half-mad with jealousy as he watched her gyrating and rubbing up against his guests, a jealousy fueled by alcohol. He wanted to kill the sons of b.i.t.c.hes she was dancing with. He wanted to kill Linda, too.

When everybody had gone home, he told her she was a s.l.u.t, one of the wh.o.r.es of the centuries, just like Jane. And being a fiery young woman, a feminist who believed she was within her rights to dance with whoever she liked, however she wanted, Linda told him to f.u.c.k off. They were finished. To h.e.l.l with Bukowski!

Linda would leave Bukowski and come back to him countless times during their relations.h.i.+p and when they were apart, they continued their battles by mail. After this first break-up, she wrote that her name was not spelt J A N E, but L I N D A, and that he should get her out of his 'smelly Jane bag' because she couldn't 'live with dead bones and dead memories'.

She wrote that he was denying the genuine love she had to offer, 'to protect yourself from pain ... or maybe you're just glommed [sic] onto the word pain to excuse your self-indulgence of drinking. The pain is false. It's a drama. It's the show ... You sometimes talk like you're the only man with feeling in the whole world. It probably comes from only caring how Charles Bukowski feels. You have intense interest in the pain of yourself. I don't think that you can care that much for anyone else including me ...'

Referring to the way he wrote about women, she added: 'your women are all weak and floppy and untrue. My heart is a wild sensuous white bird and it's always wanting to fly. Fly Bukowski. you're afraid to fly.'

They soon got back together and went to another party where Linda flirted and Bukowski became jealous again. He drove her home in a fury afterwards, accusing her of having affairs behind his back. A day or so later she received a bizarre letter from Bukowski, saying he wanted to have fun as well so he'd picked up a man on the way home. At the time, Linda thought he was trying to rile her, but she later wondered whether he meant he'd had s.e.x with a man.

'I think that if he [did] it was like this drunken thing. When he got real drunk he would do anything.'

She typed out her reply on a length of Lady Scott toilet paper, writing that she hoped he'd had a good time, whoever he was with. She wanted him to know she had not been unfaithful, and that whichever woman Bukowski ended up with she listed women she was jealous of, including Ann Menebroker she hoped they had a good screw. They could thank Linda for teaching him how. She ended the toilet paper letter by telling him to blow his nose with it.

Although enraged by Linda's flirtatious behaviour, Bukowski had no compunction about trying to screw any woman who looked at him twice and, now he was getting better known as a writer, more women were interested in him. 'He had double standards, typical of the chauvinist world. He p.i.s.sed me off regularly,' says Linda. 'He needed to be fought!'

She accused him of stirring up trouble to get material for his writing, which turned out to be true, and in a letter, in May, 1971, described a cruel streak in her lover: 'It runs down the middle of you and pretty wide, too ... even if you had an easy woman with twelve soft pillows to sleep on you'd still find some reason it wasn't enough ... I hope you can write your novel now with one more s.h.i.+ta.s.s woman for material.'

But she forgave him in the end. In a note addressed to her 'darling insane lover', a few days later, she said she simply had to write and tell him how much she loved his 'crazy a.s.s'.

Each summer Linda went home to Utah for 4 July. After doing the White Dog Hunch in town, with the local cowboys, she and her sisters went camping on land the family owned. Before she left for her holiday, Bukowski gave her a novelty ring with a horse's head on it, as a token of his love. A couple of hours later he found himself staring at the remains of their last breakfast. Her egg sh.e.l.ls seemed special somehow. He tried to work at his typing table, but every woman that pa.s.sed by reminded him of Linda, so he stopped work and got drunk for six days.

When he sobered up, he began to bombard Linda with love letters and long-distance telephone calls. If she was out when he called, he wouldn't leave the bungalow until she phoned back. Then he stopped going out at all in case he missed her. Having better things to do with her time than make endless long-distance calls, days went by without any word from Linda and Bukowski imagined the worst. Even Marina, a devoted six-year-old with braces on her teeth, could not cheer him up. He apologized for his depression, saying he loved Marina more than the 'hair in his ears' but Linda would be away for two weeks!

One morning he woke from a nightmare that Linda was with another man. He got up and wrote an anxious letter, asking what she was doing. A couple of hours later he wrote a second letter, a.s.suring her that all the women in his life had been like grains of sand compared with her, even Jane. He went out to post the letters and then started drinking. When he was good and drunk, he telephoned Boulder, but Linda's sister said she was out. When he finally reached her, Linda a.s.sured him patiently that she loved him. There was nothing to worry about. She would be back soon. He put the phone down and wrote his third love letter of the day, just to let her know he felt better.

Although she placated him on the telephone, the letters Linda sent from Utah seemed designed to make him jealous.

She sent this on 1 July, 1971*: Dearest Buk ...

I'm saving my p.u.s.s.y for you. Talking ... dancing ... flirting don't count. It's who gets the p.u.s.s.y that counts. You should know that. Now if you don't want the p.u.s.s.y I'm sure there's others who would, but the only thing is that it's got to liking your kind of petting REAL GOOD. There's n.o.body who can make it purr quite like you ... When I get back to town I'm going to kiss you about an hour before I do anything else ... I'm just going to tease that s.h.i.+T out of you ... I'll run my tongue along over the top of your p.e.n.i.s and just tickle it. Not really touch it. G.o.d d.a.m.n you ... I'll tease you so much that you'll have to kiss my p.u.s.s.y like you've never kissed it before ... G.o.dd.a.m.n I love you ... I want that crooked c.o.c.k of you're hard. I want to bite it all the way up and down in a hundred little bites that don't hurt, just feel good. I'm going to kiss that thing so much. And I'm going to kiss you so much, I'm going to tease you until you're a madman and you finally lose all sense of what real and what isn't real and you finally have to rape me or go screaming and pulling the hair from your head. Yah, that's what I'll do. You're going to have to make that rape scene in your head a reality. I'm not going to kiss you. I'M NOT going to kiss you. YOU'RE going to have to MAKE me ... if you think you can. You Son of a b.i.t.c.h. If I had you up here right now I'd take you out and rape you right in these Boulder pines. I'd throw you down in the dirty and get on top and ride you until you had sand, pine needles, ants and rocks glued to your a.s.s ... I tie you to one of these G.o.dd.a.m.n trees bare-a.s.sed with only a dangling set of c.o.c.k and b.a.l.l.s free and then I'd work them over until they were no longer dangling, but looked like part of the branches of the tree. And while you are tied to the tree I'd bring four guys and dance with them all right in front of you ...

See you in LA Linda There were many other letters like it. In one she wrote that, when she danced with men in Utah, she didn't think about him at all. Bukowski almost went mad when he read it. He smashed his hand down and cut himself so deeply he could see bone.

The affair continued after she returned to Los Angeles, and they split many times. Whenever this happened Bukowski got the head she had made, and given to him, and took it back to her, leaving it on the doorstep if she wouldn't let him in. Linda responded by mailing him venomous letters.

'p.i.s.s on you Bukowski,' she wrote in September, 'you've been puking on the woman race too long.' She wrote that she would never have s.e.x with him again, and he should know a few home truths, now they were finished: he had never faced up to his drinking for what it was, a weakness. Her mistake was not realizing he was doing exactly what he wanted, 'killing yourself a drink at a time'. She also harangued him for writing for p.o.r.nographic magazines: 'you men sell the dirty mags. men buy them. write for the men they'll love you.'

When they made up, as they always did, she brought the head back to De Longpre Avenue. Bukowski's friends got to know that if the head was missing there was trouble with Linda. If it was at his bungalow, everything was OK between them.

'It was exciting,' says John Martin, who watched with amus.e.m.e.nt. 'She was young and she was probably the first real s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p he'd ever had in his life and he was in his fifties. He had Jane, but that was a drinking relations.h.i.+p. I don't know how s.e.xual it was.'

Although he loved her with all his heart, there was a distinctive admixture of misogyny in Bukowski's relations.h.i.+p with Linda. He was never quite sure whether she was an angel come to save him, or a devil who wanted to humiliate him in front of his friends. He expressed his ambivalent feelings in an extraordinary letter to Steve Richmond, in November, 1971: ... don't wait for the good woman. she doesn't exist. there are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. the female loves to play man against man. and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will not resist. the male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. the female is skilled at betrayal. and torture and d.a.m.nation. never envy a man his lady. behind it all lays a living h.e.l.l.

The police were called to Bukowski's bungalow three times in November, 1971, once to the b.l.o.o.d.y aftermath of another party. Before the guests arrived, Bukowski and Linda had promised each other that, whatever happened, they would stick together during the evening. They were sick and tired of fighting. But he got drunk and insulted her so viciously she had no choice other than to go outside and cool off. When she came back, Bukowski asked everybody to leave. When the room was cleared, he came towards Linda as if to kiss her, at least that's what she thought he was going to do, to say he was sorry for carrying on. Instead he punched her in the face. He punched her so hard he broke her nose.

In the morning she woke with two black eyes. She remembered Bukowski saying he'd never hit a woman, and despised men who did. That was a laugh. He had probably done it many times, probably hit Jane when he thought she'd stepped out of line.

Linda wrote him a farewell letter: Well Bukowski, it's really sad that our relations.h.i.+p had to end with so much violence. I hated to see that last display of weakness on your part ... My nose will heal ... maybe a little wider and a little crookeder and my black eyes will go away in time, but there's something in you that isn't going to heal ... You're sick ... You really wanted to wipe my face out didn't you. That had nothing to do with your feelings for me. It was hatred inside of your coming out. I didn't even raise up my hand to defend myself ... You'll have to do some tall writing spiced with a lot of lies to get around this one, but you'll do it. You'll glorify Bukowski for whatever he does. I guess that's it. Linda It wasn't the end. Not long afterwards, Linda moved into bungalow number four at the back of Bukowski's court. She began getting more involved in writing poetry herself. She contributed to a chapbook, An Anthology of LA Poets, which Bukowski edited, and she and Bukowski collaborated on Me and Your Sometimes Love Poems, a chapbook which, as she wrote, doc.u.mented: ... our kisses and fights and f.u.c.kings Mad and wonderful By this stage, the fights arrived daily for their sustenance, like breakfast pancakes, sweetened with jealousy. He accused her of having s.e.x with a host of people, even a blind priest he believed she was seeing, and became convinced she was having an affair with her dentist. He said her bad tooth was not the only part of her that got filled when she went to the surgery.

Indignant that this was untrue, and furious that Bukowski was flirting with other women when he got the opportunity, Linda took off for Utah in the spring of 1972, leaving behind a pair of her panties and a note: Hank I'll be gone by the time you get back. You used to have all of me, but now all you have are my yellow panties to smell when you jerk off.

Yellow, as she knew, was his favorite color. It would give him something to write about until she got back.

* Spelling, syntax and grammar have not been changed in Linda's letters, or in Bukowski's.

9.

WOMEN.

Liza Williams was watching Bukowski poke round her office. He was an ugly old buzzard, for sure, but she found him strangely attractive and knew he was on the prowl for a new girlfriend.

Bukowski and Liza had known each other since they wrote for Open City and, when the paper folded, the LA Free Press picked up both their columns. Liza had a day job as well; she was a senior executive with Island Records.

She was not as s.e.xy-looking as Linda King, and she was almost as old as Bukowski himself, but Liza was smart and funny and Bukowski knew Linda was jealous of her. He leaned over the desk and gave her a great big kiss, which shocked Liza because she thought him so ugly.