Charles Bukowski (20 page)

Wantling’s career, in comparison, had fizzled out. To Bukowski’s disappointment, he’d taken a teaching job and stopped writing the type of primal poetry Bukowski so admired. ‘He thought it was terrible that Bill was in the university. He thought it was ruining his writing,’ says Ruth.

Bukowski gave a bad reading, while members of the audience whispered to each other that the poet was obviously drunk, and afterwards endured a reception in his honor, saying little to Wantling and his wife and being downright rude to every one else. From Bukowski’s point of view, he considered he’d done enough for his $500 fee ($300 of which went on the air fare) and didn’t want to answer questions as well.

William Wantling felt badly let down. He was having a lot of problems at the time with his marriage falling apart, and hassles with the police because of his drug habit, and had looked forward to meeting Bukowski, whom he idolized. Now it was all spoilt. ‘He was extremely disappointed in Bukowski as a person,’ says Ruth. ‘He said he didn’t know why Bukowski came, and that he wished he had never met him.’

When he got back to LA, Bukowski did what he had done so many times before and wrote a nasty, snide column about his trip, totally trashing his friend. He described visiting a provincial poet named Howard Stantling, an obvious variation on the name Wantling, a man who had once been wild and exciting, a former convict and talented poet, but who was now a fucked-up impotent junkie who pedaled round a university campus on a push bike and
wrote poetry that was only popular in Australia. It was a vicious, underhand piece of work and was published in the
LA Free Press
in two instalments on 12 April and 19 April, 1974, as his
Notes of
a Dirty Old
Man column. Although there is no direct evidence that Wantling read the stories, Ruth believes it is likely he did find out about them. He had a number of friends in LA who would have called to tell him about such an obvious and outrageous character assassination.

Less than two weeks after the second instalment appeared, Wantling was dead.

Always a compulsive and unstable personality, he started drinking heavily after Bukowski left town, and went into a manic phase, telling Ruth he couldn’t get his brain to shut off. Letters he wrote to friends show him to have been depressed, questioning his worth as a man and a poet. He told small press publisher, A.D. Winans, that he felt so lousy he wanted to drink himself to death. That’s precisely what he did: drinking day and night until he suffered a heart attack and was taken to hospital, screaming in the ambulance that he was old. He was forty-one when he died on 1 May.

Ruth believes that the stories Bukowski wrote about her husband probably had some effect on his behavior in the final weeks of his life, although she does not believe it is the primary cause for what happened because he was already so unstable. Whatever the reason for Wantling’s final and fatal bout of drinking, Bukowski felt guilty about his behavior towards an obviously vulnerable friend. He telephoned A.D. Winans and spoke about how he had rejected some poems Wantling submitted to
Laugh Literary and
Man the Humping Guns
, writing back that he had seen better from him and his work had never been very good to begin with. He regretted the letter now, and said he hoped Wantling hadn’t taken it seriously.

Bukowski also telephoned Steve Richmond to talk about Wantling’s death. ‘He would usually call at 4 a. m., drunk,’ says Richmond. ‘But this time he was dead serious and it was like four in the afternoon. He knew: you write something, and the person you write about dies. It’s a responsibility.’

Soon after the tragedy, Ruth came through LA on her way to
San Francisco and arranged to spend some time with Bukowski, who was one of the few people she knew in the city. He picked her up in his blue ’67 Volkswagen and took her to the races before going back to an apartment he was renting on Carlton Way, having finally left De Longpre Avenue. It was another tatty court, a dark and shabby dump of a place, not far from the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, one of the seediest junctions in all Los Angeles. Ruth slept on the couch and, in the morning, she and Bukowski went on a trip to Laguna Beach with a young couple, Brad and Tina Darby, who managed the court. Brad also managed a pornographic book store on Hollywood Boulevard, and Tina worked as a go-go dancer.

It was the first time Ruth had seen the Pacific Ocean, which her husband had talked so much about from when he lived in California, and she found herself looking out at the rollers, thinking about her husband, their marriage and the way he’d died. She began weeping, quietly, but this seemed to irritate Bukowski.

‘Bill’s dead,’ he said. ‘He can’t suck your pussy, but I can.’

As the day wore on, he became more abusive, saying he expected to fuck Ruth and that she was a fucking fool if she didn’t give him what he wanted. Her husband couldn’t help her now. Brad Darby asked Bukowski to back off, but Bukowski didn’t seem to care what he said. When the day came to an end, Ruth found herself cowering beside Bukowski in his bed in the motel room they had taken for the night; there was no couch and she had to sleep somewhere. They didn’t have intercourse, but she feels she suffered an
emotional
rape. ‘That was the ugliest experience I have ever had in my life,’ she says. ‘He was unbelievable.’

In the morning, Brad Darby drove them all back to LA, Bukowski refusing to speak to Ruth even though they sat side by side ‘this massive, pouting, brooding, hating energy’. She got out at the airport, never to see him again.

A couple of years later, Ruth picked up a copy of his novel
Women
and, flicking through it, realized it was about women Bukowski had known, women like Liza Williams and Linda King and Joanna Bull, and that he had included her as well. He had changed her name to Cecelia Keesing and wrote that she was fat and boring.

Nasty though this is, the novel did not give an honest account of the events surrounding William Wantling’s death. Bukowski did not admit to writing the story that appeared in the
LA Free Press
. He also left out the viler things he said to Ruth at Laguna Beach. But Ruth never forgot what happened. ‘That was a horror,’ she says. ‘That is a rape in my life I haven’t got over yet.’

‘D
oes this face bother you?’ Bukowski asked the young woman. They were at a party in Santa Cruz after a benefit reading where he had appeared with beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. ‘I mean, you find it revolting?’ he asked, touching his bulbous nose and oatmeal complexion.

‘No,’ she answered carefully. ‘I think you should judge a man by the inside of him.’

‘Well good,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and fuck then.’

Although nervous to the point of sickness earlier in the evening, drinking from a flask of vodka and orange to steady himself on stage, ‘one shot for each poem he read’ recalls Ginsberg, Bukowski manipulated the crowd of sixteen hundred with consummate skill, asking them disarmingly: ‘Isn’t this boring?’ before giving a captivating reading.

Ginsberg came on afterwards and was chanting a blues litany when he was told there had been a bomb threat. ‘So I turned to rhymed improvisation and explained the situation in friendly song, the audience began to understand and began filing out of the theater calmly. All the poets followed, after the audience left, and Bukowski looked at me and said, surprisingly, “Ginsberg, you’re a good man.” I was a little apprehensive he’d disapprove of me as “academic” or a four-eyed queer, but he was agreeable and friendly.’

When Ginsberg arrived at the party that evening, Bukowski
announced with mock-seriousness: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve got Allen Ginsberg as guest of honor tonight. Can you believe it? Allen Ginsberg!’ He called for the music to be turned down and, when it wasn’t, said to Ginsberg, whom he’d put in an affectionate headlock: ‘A man of genius, the first poet to cut through light and consciousness for two thousand years and these bastards don’t even appreciate it.’

Ginsberg rubbed Bukowski’s back to try and calm him.

‘That feels good, Allen, real good,’ said Bukowski. ‘Have a drink.’

Ginsberg said he’d already had enough.

‘Everybody knows that after
Howl
you never wrote anything worth a shit,’ said Bukowski, angry his offer of a drink had been rejected. He turned to the people around them, and asked: ‘Has Allen written anything worth a shit since
Howl
and
Kay
-
dish
?’

‘Kaddish
,’ Ginsberg corrected him.

‘Allen, you’re tearing me apart. You’re a barracuda, Allen, eating me up with your tongue,’ he laughed, contemptuously, and reeled off into a drunken bear-like dance with, as Ginsberg recalls ‘his big pants falling down halfway from his behind’.

He was getting quite famous now, although still not as famous as he would become, accepted as an equal by established writers like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He’d even been asked to read at the beats’ de facto club, The Naropa Institute, in Colorado, although he declined the invitation. The furthest thing from his mind was joining that gang, no matter how friendly they were towards him. Of the beat writers, only William Burroughs had given him the cold shoulder, snubbing him at a reading, which was ironic because Burroughs was the only one he admired. Bukowski muttered about going outside and fighting him.

‘I could push him over with one punch,’ he told Harold Norse, who knew them both.

‘Yeah, but you’d be dead,’ said Norse. ‘He’d shoot you.’

It was all starting to happen for Bukowski. His books were selling well; a friend in Los Angeles was working on his biography
*
;
Rolling Stone
magazine even ran a feature-length profile of Bukowski, informing its readers that the great French intellectuals, Jean Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, were fans of his work. Sartre and Genet had apparently named Bukowski as the ‘greatest American poet alive today’. This plaudit was widely reported in the underground press, becoming one of the most famous remarks about Bukowski, yet it is almost certainly another myth, possibly one created by Bukowski himself.

Leading world experts on the lives and work of both Genet and Sartre have no knowledge of either writer ever having said anything about Bukowski. ‘I do not think Bukowski was in the literary tastes of Jean Genet,’ says Albert Dichy, director of the Genet archive in Paris. Edmund White, whose biography is the pre-eminent work on Genet, says he is also unaware of any connection between Genet and Bukowski. Sartre experts in Europe and America similarly dismiss the remark and, faced with this evidence, John Martin concludes the quotation is no more than apocryphal. There is certainly no documentary evidence for it in any of the various archives of Bukowski’s papers, leading one to wonder whether Bukowski simply made it up, as he had colluded in making up the Henry Miller plaudit, to get publicity. However the quotation came into circulation, and its origins are still mysterious, the supposed praise of Genet and Sartre added to Bukowski’s burgeoning fame.
*

It was as much Bukowski’s personality as his work that attracted attention, and he became the subject of poems by other writers who found him a fascinating character. Jack Micheline, Harold Norse and Steve Richmond all published work about Bukowski. At Santa Cruz, Linda King kept the audience in gales of laughter with salty poems about their sex life. Writers outside Bukowski’s circle wrote about him, too, most notably the short story writer and poet Raymond Carver who met Bukowski at a university reading in California.

‘I look around this room and see plenty of typers, but I see no writers for you guys don’t know what love is,’ Bukowski sneered at the faculty, when he got up on the podium to read. He included Carver in the insult, and proceeded to drink him under the table when invited back to his house after the reading.

Carver took the encounter in good spirit, respecting Bukowski’s ‘raw honesty and living out of extremities’ as his widow Tess Gallagher says, and was inspired to write ‘You Don’t Know What Love is (an evening with Charles Bukowski)’ which brilliantly, and affectionately, describes Bukowski in his cups:

‘Man, that night he wrote about me I was drunk, naturally, and screaming at all these professors and college kids,’ Bukowski said. ‘Oh boy, I was singing that night and Carver caught that.’

He upped his appearance fee to $1,000, quite a sum compared
to the $25 he asked back in 1970 when he started reading. Bukowski assumed most universities and clubs would be unable to afford him at this price and he would therefore be spared the ordeal of performing so often. But still he got asked and, the more he got paid, the less respect he had for the crowds. They certainly weren’t interested in hearing serious work, as he found out when he appeared at Baudelaire’s nightclub in Santa Barbara.

‘Let’s get this god-damned reading over with,’ he said, wearily, as he climbed on stage.

John Martin had relocated Black Sparrow Press to Santa Barbara, an hour’s drive north of LA, and was in the audience with his wife, Barbara. He rarely attended Bukowski’s readings and had requested the poem ‘one for the shoeshine man’ as a special treat. It was one of Bukowski’s greatest works, surprisingly tender and optimistic:

But subtlety was lost on this crowd. They expected an exhibition of crudity from the dirty old man: sex poems, drinking poems and scatology.

‘Cliché! Cliché!’ a heckler called out.

The normally mild-mannered John Martin was so offended he pulled the back of the heckler’s chair sending him sprawling onto the floor. They squared up for a fight as Bukowski ploughed on:

‘Charles,’ came a cultural female voice, when he’d finished. She obviously didn’t know nobody called him that. ‘Charles, what do you think of women with big noses?’

‘Jesus Christ. I have to sit here and try to answer your dumb shit questions?’ He shook his head sadly. Was he a comedian, a clown? There was a muffled thud as the doormen threw the heckler against a parking meter outside. ‘What do I think about big-nosed women? I’m not interested in their noses.’ There was a ripple of laughter. ‘Fuck off!’ he said.

It seemed like they wanted him to insult them. ‘You disgusting creatures,’ he said, obligingly. ‘You make me sick.’ They laughed like hyenas at that.

He said he knew he was giving a bad reading, but he couldn’t care less. If they didn’t like it, they could leave. There would be no refund. ‘I’ve already got your money in my pocket,’ he said. He appeared slightly demented as he licked the microphone, making a huge slurping sound, and then shuffled his papers into a pile and got up to go.

‘Fuck you guys,’ he said, as he left the stage.

Claire Rabe, the owner of the club, had watched the performance in astonishment. ‘People were absolutely glued,’ she says. ‘He was the first kind of punk event.’ Like many women, she found herself attracted to Bukowski, and although she thought him dreadfully ugly and a ‘real slob’ (he was so drunk snot was running from his nose) she invited him home and went to bed with him. ‘He was wonderfully homely, impressively so,’ she says. ‘I found him very desirable.’

For all his boozing and womanizing, Bukowski continued to work hard to try and boost his income above the monthly stipend he received from John Martin, recently raised from $100 to $300 in line with the increasing sales of his books. He reviewed a Rolling Stones concert for
Creem
magazine, the closest he came to straight journalism, although much of the article was taken up with meditations on horse racing, and he concluded that Beethoven was
much more satisfying to listen to than Mick Jagger. He agreed to
City Lights
releasing an album of the 1972 San Francisco reading. His poems continued to appear in numerous small magazines and as broadsides. And, most importantly, he published a powerful second novel.

Factotum
is the story of a young man working at a series of menial jobs, a fictionalized version of Bukowski’s own experiences in the 1940s and early 1950s, before he joined the United States Postal Service. It was inspired by
Down and Out in Paris and
London
, George Orwell’s autobiographical account of being destitute in England and France between the wars. Orwell seems to have suffered greater hardship than Bukowski, if for a shorter period (he certainly didn’t have money to waste in bars) yet Bukowski saw the reverse as being true. ‘This guy thinks something has happened to him?’ he said. ‘Compared to me, he just got scratched. Not that it wasn’t a good book, but it made me think that I might have something interesting to say along those same lines.’

The defining scene in
Factotum
comes halfway through the novel when Henry Chinaski is fired from an auto parts warehouse by a boss who has been kind to him and who reproaches Chinaski for his laziness:

The refusal to conform to the convention of honest work for honest pay, to take a subservient position in society because that is the capitalist order, is close to Orwell’s socialist ideas. In
Down
and Out in Paris and London
, he wrote that the tenet that all
work is good had resulted in ‘mountains of useless drudgery’. In Bukowski’s case, the rejection of society went further and was almost anarchistic, although such terminology would have stuck in his throat. ‘My writing has no meaning,’ Bukowski said, disingenuously. ‘It has no moral aspect, it has no social aspect.’