BY LIONEL ROLFE
IN 1972, when I saw fellow Los Angeles Free Press writer Charles Bukowski’s book in the window of a bookstore in West Hampstead in London, my first reaction was one of jealousy The book was called Notes of a Dirty Old Man, the same title as his column in the paper. It was a City Lights book, with Bukowski’s amazing pocked alcoholic face adorning its cover. I viewed Bukowski as only doing a limited shtick—he rarely came into the office himself, but I knew all about him because my friend Judy Lewellen, the city editor, used to go pick up the column. I guess I hadn’t understood how popular Bukowski was getting until I was confronted by a book display in London. Years later, I came to realize that this guy had paid far more dues in his life than I had.
He was more than just a good offbeat columnist. Everyone knows about Bukowski, who for many years was able to walk the decaying, slummy streets of Los Angeles—as a mailman, a hobo, an alcoholic on Skid Row —while his writing was beginning to sell by the thousands—in Europe. He was especially popular in his native Germany. In the United States he was selling only in the hundreds. Bukowski was an ethnic Polish-German, but in the latter years of his life he did become famous in his hometown of Los Angeles. Even though the movie “Barfly” didn’t do well at the box office, it helped draw more attention Bukowski’s way. Mickey Rourke did a good job playing Bukowski, and Faye Dunaway was his girl. In an earlier movie, “Tales of Ordinary Madness,” Ben Gazzara also did a fine job of playing a slicked up Bukowski.
Let me tell you about the time I reconstructed Bukowski.
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It was one of those rare moments when it really was impossible to figure out whether art imitates life, or life imitates art. The occasion was an informal, lightly-attended afternoon movie premiere of “Tales of Ordinary Madness” at a theater in West Los Angeles. “Tales” was an Italian-made film about a mad and drunken Los Angeles poet, based on various autobiographical short stories by Bukowski.
As the movie began, Ben Gazzara appeared on the screen taking a swig from a brown-bagged wine bottle. I turned around to see what the real Charles Bukowski thought of all this—he was sitting three or four rows back. He, too, was swigging away from a “freeway bag” full of wine in sync with the character on the screen.
Bukowski had lived in Los Angeles since 1923. His parents brought him to L.A. from his native Andernach, Germany, when he was two. For most of his young years he was an unknown: a day laborer, a postman, and, for more than a decade, an out-and-out Skid Row bum. He ended up with his stomach hemorrhaging at Los Angeles County’s General Hospital where the doctors warned him that unless he stopped drinking he would die. Characteristically, the minute Bukowski was discharged, he found a bar. He never apologized for his drinking; he reveled in it. “Two things kept me from suicide - writing and the bottle,” he said.
He began writing seriously in the fifties. “To have the nerve to attempt an art form as exacting and unrenumerative as poetry at the age of 32 is a form of madness,” Bukowski explained. “But crazy as I was, I felt I had something to say, as I had lived with degradation, and on the edge of death … what had I to lose?”
Bukowski’s poetry began appearing regularly in little literary magazines, but it wasn’t until the sixties that he came to public prominence with his raunchy, outrageous and often hilarious prose column, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” in the “underground” Los Angeles Free Press. “Notes” described the misadventures of Bukowski’s alter-ego, a fellow named Henry Chinaski. One woman after another hopped in and out of Chinaski’s bed. All this occurred on Bukowski’s turf, the underbelly of L.A., mostly downtown and Hollywood and various states in between. Read the rest of this entry »
