CHARLES BUKOWSKI: The Poet as Entertainer; An Excerpt From Joan Jobe Smith’s New Book,“Charles Bukowski: Epic GLOTTIS: His Art & His Women (& me)”
By Joan Jobe Smith
Unbelievable to think that here I am, in 2012, half of my lifetime
plus two years later, rewriting this piece I first drafted in August 1975,
when I was a law student. Seventeen long years later, after I dropped
out of law school, received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing
from the University of California Irvine and married the poet Fred
Voss, a portion appeared in Sure—The Charles Bukowski Newsletter #4,
1992. In the spring 1994 issue of Chiron Review, “The Poet As Entertainer”
was published in toto as a column I wrote called “Swimming in
the Word Stew.”
In autumn 1974, when a near-graduate of California State University
Long Beach, I proposed the idea of “The Poet As Entertainer” as
a thesis subject for a master’s degree—with Charles Bukowski’s
hearty approval and his magnanimous offer of collaborative cooperation.
But the powers in charge at CSULB rejected my idea as not only
lacking sufficient literary merit to justify a thesis about such a controversial
writer of undocumented academic value but also derided the
concept of The Poet As Entertainer as inconsequential. Now here’s this
ancient piece I wrote long ago—my mere rosebud notion that never
bloomed, that a poet could be entertaining, precluding the 1990s
emergence of the performance poets and slam poets—originally inspired
by Charles Bukowski, one of the first entertainer poets, along
with Dylan Thomas. This might’ve evolved into a landmark and possibly
remarkable thesis, and exists now as merely a small piece of Bukowski
historical data for his many fans who never had the good
fortune to see and hear in person the amazing man read some of the
most extraordinary and entertaining poetry ever written or performed.
WOMEN WERE ESPECIALLY UNKIND TO CHARLES BUKOWSKI
that bright, blue, beautiful afternoon of August 15, 1975, the day
before Bukowski’s fifty-fifth birthday. Sunshine-made diamonds
danced at four o’clock p.m. on the aquamarine Pacific Ocean down
the road from the Moulton Theatre in Laguna Beach, California,
while Bukowski sat frowning in the far-corner seats of the dark last
row, watching the audience meander into the small theater.
“Feminists! Look at them—” Bukowski whispered to his girlfriend
Linda King and me as he sat between us. “Women’s libbers.
They’re gonna kill me, I know it.”
Already inebriated, drinking beer since breakfast, Bukowski
grabbed another pop-top can of his favorite red-and-white-labeled
cheap beer from his six-pack and flagrantly snapped it open—pop!
spit! spat the beer almost loud as gunfire as it echoed off the walls of
the Moulton Theatre and stunk up a wide circle with its skunkreeking
stench.
Some of the spew splattered nastily onto the pricy pale blue
denim pseudo-hippie-chick tatterdemalion jacket and bellbottom
jeans of one woman, the one with permed frizzy hair—a Billie Jean
King lookalike. She jerked her neck and gave Bukowski a dirty look
as he chugged a long drink of beer; quickly, Billie Jean King stepped
away to catch up with her female companions, many intellectuallooking
types wearing granny glasses, long skirts with beach-set,
mode-o-day, Birkinstock sandals.
A nattily dressed man who walked behind them—wearing an
ascot and a white tennis sweater shawl over the shoulders of his
pink Brooks Brothers shirt that was tucked neatly into white linen
trousers—stopped, eyed-up Bukowski’s casual apparel of navy blue
plaid shirt and dark tan corduroy pants, then glared at the noisy red
and white beer can that seemed to glow in the dark. The carefully
clad middle-aged gentleman shook his balding head as if he couldn’t
believe his eyes.
For sure, none of these fine, conservative, well-to-do folks of
Laguna Beach and surrounding Orange County areas who’d voted
for Richard Nixon in the last presidential election had ever seen the
likes of Charles Bukowski. I was surprised when I heard that the
Laguna Beach Arts Council had invited him to appear at their 3rd
Annual Poetry Week that coincided with the popular, crowdpleasing,
and jam-packed Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. Last year,
a dignified famous poet-&-Ph.D.-professor from a prestigious university
back East had appeared. If that sartorial man had known
that this drunken man chug-a-lugging a can of beer, this disheveled
factotum who looked like an off-duty janitor or postal clerk, was
the star of the show, he might’ve asked for a refund. Or possibly
called a policeman.
At that moment, this was as good as it was going to get; that is,
as good as Bukowski was going to be—etiquette-wise. For the past
five years that he’d been doing poetry readings in bars, little theatres,
colleges, and universities, he’d been accruing quite a poetry
résumé, thanks to his notorious reputation for unpredictable, if not
unsuitable behavior. Irrepressible, usually drunk at his readings, he
had more surprises inside him than a psychotic Pandora’s box.
Sometimes, during a standing ovation of lit majors and profs, he’d
inexplicably left the stage and didn’t come back. Once, he vomited
into a baby grand piano valued at ten thousand dollars.
In spite of such maniacal mythology, here he was in the mainstream.
Undoubtedly, the 1972 Taylor Hackford documentary
shown frequently on PBS and the fact that Bukowski’s books of
poetry and fiction starring superego-id Hank Chinaski were becoming
well-read among the literati as well as readers-at-large were the
main fascinating facts that prompted the genteel intelligentsia
Laguna Beach art connoisseurs to stick their necks out and invite
the most controversial American poet of 1975—or any year then or
since—to read his poetry on their small, intimate, nearly parlorsized
stage, where a red-velvet-covered Baroque throne chair
awaited the arrival of featured poet Charles Bukowski.
The women in the bright front row, the feminists, the women’s
libbers, buzzed competently, loudly, like a busy swarm of queen
bees. Together, a rehearsed chorus, the ten or so of them pointed
accusingly at us sitting in the dark back row.
“See? What’d I tell ya?” Bukowski groaned. “They wanna tear me
a apart. That one with the frizzy hair. She’s the ringleader. She’s
gonna give me shit. I‘m sure of it.”
They looked remarkably like the feminists I’d seen, autumn
1973, at Bukowski’s CSULB reading—an entire front row that
walked out in the middle of him reading a lascivious segment from
his novel-in-progress, Factotum.
Almost his birthday, nervous and drunk to boot, he hadn’t
wanted to accept this gig in Laguna Beach.
“Goddamned red-necked country. They voted for Barry Goldwater
and then that son of a bitch Richard Nixon, who lives just
down the road in San Clemente,“ he grumbled to Linda King and
me. “They’re not gonna dig me. And it’s a helluva long way from
L.A. You’re gonna have to drive me home, Linda. Maybe right now,
baby. I’m drunk. I’ve had too many goddamn beers. I’m out of it.
Look at those libbers. They keep looking at me. I feel like I‘m
gonna puke.”
Instead, he snapped open another pop-top, the noise making
others turn around to look at the dark last row. Bukowski toasted
them with his foaming beer can. One of the front row women’s libbers
turned all the way around and shook her head at him, disgusted
by the sight of him. “That one—” Bukowski spearheaded his beer
can at her; she wore a Jane Fonda Hanoi Jane shag hairdo. “She
wants to cut my balls off. She‘s probably got a switchblade in her
purse. These women‘s libbers are mean babes, tough cookies.”
Usually the middle-class suburban males gave Bukowski the
most rowdy feedback. Backlash. Heckling, actually. Or the inebriated,
young university frat boys. Most of his readings back then
took place in bars. Bukowski’s favorite habitat—next to his typewriter
or bedroom. In May 1975, I’d seen him torn into, verbally
abused by a pack of drunken Marines in Huntington Beach, at a
nightclub across the Pacific Coast Highway from the Pier, the famous
Golden Bear where ten years before, in May 1966, Lenny
Bruce had given one of his last performances, busted for obscenity
right on the stage, dragged off to jail in handcuffs. The next night, I
went to see Lenny Bruce only to find him replaced by the sweet,
sedate—and blind—Jose Feliciano with his gentle guide dog resting
at his feet. Bukowski’s style and content back then was sometimes
likened to Lenny Bruce’s high-strung, strung-out prodigal son,
world-weary, raunchy wit and grit.
On that May 1975, night, the young Marines hadn’t liked Bukowski’s
serious, philosophical poetry, the Celine-ironic, surreal existentialism
he felt like reading—in a depressed mood because his
girlfriend Linda King had just left him again. “Read your good shit!”
the biggest, mouthiest of the Marines yelled.
But Bukowski held his own, was having a good timed drinking
because the management had humorously, generously placed on the
stage an old Frigidaire packed full of Bukowski’s favorite German
beer. A laugh-making prop, the fridge arm’s distance close so Bukowski
could reach for a beer whenever the one he was chugging
was empty. When he did, the standing-room only crowd roared
with delight. Bukowski’s pilsner runneth over while he joked amicably,
paternally with the young jar-headed Marines, told them how
good they had it now that Vietnam was over. Told them they’d
helped win the war over there. They cheered at that schmoozy hyperbole.
“Semper fi!” Bukowski shouted the abbreviation of the Marine
Corps motto Semper Fidelis, making the microphone rattle and
roar. The Marines roared back.
“Hey, bartender—” Bukowski yelled. “—bring these Marines
more drinks, on—” Bukowski did not offer to pay for the drinks;
instead he pointed at one of the Marines, the biggest one, the
mouthiest of the hecklers who’d heckled him and said: “—on him!
Harharharrrr!” The Marines roared some more, semper fine and
mellowed, won over in the Heckle War. Booed, no more. Shut up
and let Bukowski read on. Bukowski knew how to keep control and
had the genius knack to make his audience happy—he let them be
co-stars of his show. Plus he had his new love poems, one titled
“Kiss Me” he’d written about him and Linda King published in
Wormwood Review:60 that would appear in his 1977 Black Sparrow
edition Love Is A Dog From Hell.
“…kiss me like you’ve kissed all the guys I haven’t heard about
lately—guys under piers, at dances, on horseback, in pool halls and
bowling alleys, in Mercedes-Benzes, in closets, waiting rooms, madhouses
and gas stations…”
(In the spring of 1975, Bukowski had recommended I send
some of my poetry to Wormwood Review editor Marvin Malone, who
had just accepted three of my poems, which would appear in
Wormwood Review:68; Billy Collins, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate
from 2001-2003, appeared in the same publication. The issue also
featured my benefactor Leo Mailman, editor of Maelstrom Review and
Nausea, who in 1973 had obtained funding at CSULB for the first
two issues my small press magazine Pearl.)
Then Bukowski read what was always a crowd-pleaser, his hilarious
“The Closing of the Topless and Bottomless Bars,” with
the surefire laugh-getting punch-lines: “…just got to believe those
Supreme boys…just can’t get it up anymore.” (Bukowski wrote
that poem after reading my 1974 poem “Vice,” from the first draft
of my go-go girl memoir, then titled, The Crotchwatchers.) The Marines
roared, stood up tall and strong, and gave him a standing
ovation. It was one of Bukowski’s best readings I’d ever seen—or
would ever see.
Finally, August 15, 1975, when Bukowski decided the Moulton
Theatre full enough and the management would let the late-comers
in for free, he walked—staggered—down the aisle, yanking on the
saggy butt of his drooping corduroy pants, without waiting to be
introduced by the confused mistress of ceremonies who’d looked
around and asked, not meaning it for the microphone, “Where is
he? Where‘s Charles Bukowski?”
When Charles Bukowski stepped up onto the stage carrying the
remainder of his six-pack, the mistress of ceremonies looked more
confused. After all, he looked like a Factotum, possibly the janitor
come to mop up after a leaky faucet, someone you might need to
call for a policeman to eject. When Bukowski sat his droopy-clad
tush down, not an officious working-class intermeddler after all, in
the red velvet Baroque throne chair, he sat tall, regal, entitled, like a
king might who owned the place, shuffling a pack of typewritten
papers, as the M.C. quietly, obsequiously stepped off the stage. The
audience, the ones who recognized this alleged hired help, presumed
reprobate as the featured—and famous—poet Charles Bukowski,
clapped politely, apprehensively.
Bukowski waved for them to stop. Then, also apprehensive, he
began to read his “subtle stuff”—as he called it—the stuff that
sounded “more poetic.” Poems with a romantic flourish similar to
the work of Robinson Jeffers, with an Ernest Hemingway narrative
reality—two writers whom Bukowski read and greatly admired and
emulated in his early days.
“Read ‘The Closing of the Topless and Bottomless Bars,’” I’d
requested of Bukowski before he went onto the stage.
“No, no, kid. This crowd wouldn’t get that poem. There aren’t
any topless or bottomless bars in Laguna Beach. Like I told you,
Richard Nixon lives around here. Besides, I didn’t bring it with me.“
“But you know it by heart,” I reminded him. “I saw you read it
at the Golden Bear last May.”
“No, kid, I won’t be reading any of my Real Stuff.”
He meant his vignette, Runyonesque poems about the crazy
men and women he’d known on Skid Row, met at the racetracks
and scruffy bars. Nor would he read his screams-from-thebalcony
poems about his women—making love, lust, and war
with them. Nor would he read poems with four-letter words;
Lenny Bruce got thrown in jail for his blue material—and an arrest
might happen here, too, in conservative Laguna Beach. He
had a handful of new poems, most of which would soon be published
in Wormwood. He was so prolific; he seldom read the same
poem twice at any of his readings.
So, Bukowski was Being Good, reading philosophical poems—
and the audience responded mildly, if at all. Soon Bukowski began
to feel the tension in the theatre and he got tense, too. His recitation
lacked flamboyance—and fun. His usual nasal, playful sotto
voce and falsettos sounded contrived, uninspired, mundane,
monotonal—and worse…
“Uh oh. Bukowki‘s bored,” Linda King said to me. “Bukowski’s
dangerous when he’s bored.”
Often, for comic relief and to give himself a break from the
pressure of a difficult audience, Bukowski’d pause, take an on-stage
intermission, chat with the audience, break the ice, which would unleash
a flood of questions—and often praise. “We love you!“ a
group might shout out, starting a barrage of accolades and requests
for favorite poems. That night, I’d asked Bukowski to read one of
my favorites, “Law,” which he’d read in the 1972 Taylor Hackford
documentary, a poem that ends: “…well, all right, then, let’s get on
with it.” Another favorite that I’d asked for at that 1975 reading was
his “True Story” from Steve Richmond’s infamous 1965-printed
Earth Rose tabloid Fuck Hate about a self-mutilating lover cutting
off his own genitalia to please his harridan woman. Richmond was
arrested for obscenity, but later exonerated in a famous court trial.
In that small Moulton Theatre arena, however, filled with the
well-bred, well-fed, and obviously uptight suburbanites emitting
conspicuous smatterings of coughs, uptight throats being cleared,
amidst the static emptiness of No Good Vibes, as if caught
amongst the ellipses of a bad review, Bukowski frowned, clicked
open another beer and chugged the entire contents gone. Finally the
Hanoi Jane Fonda-shag-hairdo’d woman sitting in the front row,
arm’s length from Bukowski’s shoe, aborted the proverbial Pregnant
Pause when she shouted out:
“Why are all your poems about yourself?”
“What do you write about?” Bukowski fired back, sly to answer
a question with a question.
“I don’t write,” she sneered.
Silence. Bukowski shrugged. He had not smiled once during
the reading. Bukowski without a smile on his face was like a dark
day with a tornado on the way. He lit a cigarette. “Any more questions?”
he asked and puffed hard to catch the flame on the match.
”I’m ready for you tonight,” he said, a good-natured warning, then
finally, he half-smiled, finally drunk enough to see the angst of it
all, get jolly over the absurdity of these readings. He was beginning
to hate readings and vowed each time this reading would be his
last. His finale came in 1980, at the Sweetwater Club in Redondo
Beach, California, where he’d read poetry in public for the last
time, though he‘d keep writing for fourteen more years until his
death, March 9, 1994.
August 15, 1975, Linda King sighed a sigh of relief. “Thank
God, he’s mellowing out.” When a hostile audience irritated Bukowski,
he would tell them to go get fucked and walk off the stage.
He sometimes spit on people in the audience. Once he urinated
into an empty wine bottle and pretended to pour it on someone
who’d heckled him.
Another question from the Angry Young Feminist: “Would you
come to hear Charles Bukowski read poems about himself?”
“I wouldn‘t waste my time,” Bukowski said, watching his cigarette
smoke snake dance, blowing around his face in the wind from
the overhead air conditioner. From the audience came some ironic
laughter, some deep-chested male guffaws.
“Why don’t you write poems about your mother?” another
feminist asked.
“My mother died of cancer when she was three.”
No laughter.
“Why do you always use dirty words?” asked the Billie Jean
King lookalike.
“Give me an example of a dirty word,” he said.
Silence. No laughter. Everyone was so soporifically serious that
afternoon. As if they had dozed off, Siesta Time. Bukowski opened
yet another beer, his penultimate can, and chugged it down, staring
at the ceiling, as if to say, “Fuck ’em.”
“Is there any word you find offensive?” the frizzy-haired
woman asked.
“Love!” he bellowed, breathing it into the microphone, making
the word rattle Luuuuuuv—!”
Nervous laughter.
Then Linda King, the helpmate she often was at his readings
when they got dismal or down-and-dirty, hollered, in her lighthearted
Utah, down-home, home-girl drawl: “Then why are you always
tellin’ me you love me, Bukowski?”
Honest laughter—and loud. Finally. Some scatterings of applause.
They were warming up to him. When they turned to look at
Linda King in the dark back row, she waved at them and smiled big.
A cross between an Annie Oakley and Aphrodite, Linda King
that night wore a sexpot-teaser mini skirt that showed off her long,
athletic legs. Bukowski was a Leg Man. Linda King, in her early thirties
then, loved being part of the Bukowski Show. An able, giddy
sidekick in the call-and-response shtick they often performed when
reading together, the vivacious, voluptuous Linda King also shined
as a solo act, was as much an entertaining poet as Bukowski.
I’d just seen Linda read in July on the bill with Diane Wakowski,
who’d read from her fabulous-feminist book Dancing On The
Grave Of A Son Of A Bitch at the Laguna Beach Unitarian Church,
where Linda King, flinging her long, thick, curly hair around up on
the stage, a la groovy go-go girl—wiggled and giggled to her feisty,
feel-good poem recently in Wormwood Review:60: “I feel
good…oooooohhhh I just feel good all inside…like bees
buzzzzz… flapp’en my wings jump’en up and down…and you ain’t
even going to like this poem it’s just too good…” The previous January
(1974), Linda King had enacted on stage the female’s response
to Bukowski’s two-character poem “The Kiss,” when she and Bukowski
had read at California State University Long Beach: “…kiss
me, she said, like you’ve kissed all the whores in the world…mmm,
she said, that’s good…we’ve really been fucking around too much.”
At the Laguna reading, a young baritonal male heckler sounded
out: “Who’s your whore this week, Bukowski?”
Bukowski pretended to ponder, scrunched his pockmarked face
to look like a wad of newspaper. Then, like W.C. Fields outsmarting
another sucker, Bukowski replied—sounding like a cross between
the comedian and a parish priest: “Ahhhhmmm, I don’t know any
whores.” The Feminists, the Women’s Libbers in the front row
should’ve fallen in love with Bukowski for the genuine sweetness of
that revelation—Bukowski really loved Women; Women were always
his Main Muses, his loving leitmotifs—but those tough-cookie
feminists, unforgiving of dirty deeds perped by Other Male Chau50
vinist Pig Men, were indifferent to Charles Bukowski’s warm praise
of chaste womankind. Then he became indifferent to them. He
belched into the microphone, fed up once and for all at trying to be
nice. Abruptly, predictably unpredictable, Bukowski let it all hang
out with—
“Man, I gotta piss,” he said, seriously, then stood up and set his
beer can—like a cockroach in a king’s kitchen—onto the seat of the
red velvet Baroque throne chair and staggered off the stage down
the aisle and out to the men’s room in the lobby of the Moulton
Theatre—people grumbling, whispering or giggling at Bukowski’s
bad, super-bad manners. While he was gone, half the people in the
audience left—most of them white- or gray-haired—one, an art patron,
my former professor at CSULB; and, of course, leaving the
lascivious scene: the entire front row of the women‘s libbers, the
fractious, fed-up feminists.
Back from the men’s room, his butt plopped back onto his redvelvet
throne, Bukowski sank deeply into it as if embracing an old
friend: “Man, that felt gooooood.” Then he laughed, sincerely
happy for the first time during this difficult reading that looked as if
it were getting better now that the offended women’s libbers were
gone and his fans, admirers, and avid readers had moved forward to
fill up the vacant front-row seats the feminists had left behind. Miscreants,
heretics, and naysayers begone from the king’s domain the
day before his fifty-fifth birthday, twelve years before he’d become
world famous for writing the movie Barfly and spend his sixtyseventh
birthday with celebs born on August 16, too—Madonna
and Sean Penn (well, August 17, but close enough)—Charles Bukowski
rattled like a golden scepter his handful of paper poems and
roared into the microphone, “All right! Let’s get on with it, then—
I’m out of beer!” Har-har-har, he laughed and the entire audience,
glad to be there, laughed with him.
“This next poem I’m gonna read, from memory, is for whatsername
out there who requested it: ‘The Closing of the Topless and
Bottomless Bars’—” And every one from the front row to the very
dark back corner of the Moulton Theatre applauded so loudly that
echoes bounced off the stucco walls, as thunderously as an impending
earthquake—all the Bukowski poetry lovers there that bright
blue afternoon obviously liking that poem as much as I did.
After the Moulton Theatre reading, Bukowski had been invited by a
group of broadminded, liberal ladies of a local Laguna Beach church to be
Guest of Honor at a 6:00 p.m. fundraiser tea—finger sandwiches, cookies,
no alcohol—a real tea. Any Bukowski fan with the least bit of imagination
can envision how he expressed his great and grave reluctance to attend this
teetotaling event. Which he didn’t. I drove him to the church on time in my
white VW Bug, with Linda King following in her yellow VW, his highness
in the front passenger seat, his head hanging out the window.
When he saw the nice, do-good church ladies and gentlemen dressed in
their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes squinting into the sun, standing on the
neat-green, newly mown church front lawn, awaiting the arrival of the famous
poet amongst the church gardens abloom with flaming bougainvillea,
bright blue and gold Bird of Paradise plants, pink geraniums and gardenias
and yellow daisies amongst the religious icons, none of them recognizing his
gargoyle face sticking out my VW Bug window, Bukowski yelled to me,
“Drive on! Quick! Get me the hell away from here!” “Are you sure?” I
asked. “Look at them waiting for you, Bukowski. They all want to meet
you. You’re a Famous Poet.” “No! No!“ So, not even his favorite flowers
(yellow ones) could entice him, mellow him out during this yellow-orange
sunsetting twilight time.
Bukowski’d had it, he’d o.d.’d on the loud—and laud—and he needed
an antidote that did not include tea and cookies. So, in spite of his swelling
guilt (they‘d prepaid him a hundred dollars—but he‘d give it back), he told
me to stop at the nearest liquor store, where he bought two six-packs of
cheap beer and I bought a gallon jug of cheap Chianti, and we all drove to
Santa Ana to my girlfriend Suzi Q’s house who fixed us all a big spaghetti
dinner and baked Bukowski a chocolate layer cake which cooled and was
frosted just a bit past midnight—Charles Bukowski’s fifty-fifty birthday—
and we all merrily sang Happy Birthday and drank cheap beer and wine
and talked and harharhar’d till the dawn’s early light of August 16, 1975.
The preceding italicized portion, as a poem titled “Beercan in
the Garden,” was published 2012 in the New York Quarterly and reprinted
on October 11, 2012 in the San Diego Reader.