My sober evenings with Bukowski
The poet laureate of L.A.'s brothels and taco stands, who died in 1994, read his poetry, got drunk and put on his infamous one-man show for the last time in a Redondo Beach rock club. I was there.
April, 6, 1980
Charles Bukowski sat behind the table on the low stage and squinted under the spotlights at the 350 or so friends and fans surrounding him Monday night at Sweetwater, a Redondo Beach country and rock club.
"Tonight is going to be a very dignified reading," Bukowski began in his friendly, measured snarl. "I will not rejoin or have rejoinders with the audience. I shall read you dignified poetry in a dignified way. We will comport ourselves as ladies and gentlemen of culture."
Scattered snickers and hoots quickly gave way to handfuls of applause from Bukowski lovers who recognized the lie. They were just tuning up.
They knew what went on at Bukowski poetry readings. They knew the 59-year-old poet of L.A.'s seamy side, the hard-drinking womanizer who writes poetry and prose they understand, was going to read some poems, swap a lot of good-natured insults, have some laughs, and get drunk before their eyes.
They paid $6 each because they liked his short stories or novels or poems about bad horses and boozing and hard women and hangovers and dead-end jobs. They came to see in person the tough old guy who writes so clearly and so rawly about the Los Angeles of East Hollywood whorehouses, cheap hotels and carry-out chicken joints.
In his "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," Bukowski describes Los Angeles as "the greatest city in the universe. Where each man and woman had a special style and a natural cool …. L.A. was the end of a dead culture crawled west to get away from itself. L.A. knew it was rotten and laughed at it . . . While San Francisco chokes upon the glut of artists, L.A. wheels, stands at the corner of Hollywood and Western, munching a taco and enjoying the bluff and the sun. . ."
The title of one of his better-selling books, a collection of short stories called "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," explains his well-deserved raunchy image. Readers in America and Europe especially Germany have brought him commercial success: His recent novel, "Women," already has sold 100,000 copies.
His 30 works of poetry and prose, written in a direct, lean, often humorous conversational style, are accessible to almost everyone too accessible, many traditionalist poets feel.
And now new media are opening to him. Takoma Records, which videotaped Monday's reading, has reissued a 1975 recording of one of his San Francisco readings and film maker Barbet Schroeder wants to produce Bukowski's script "Barfly."
Bukowski is giving fewer and fewer readings, he says, because the money's getting better. He earned $1,000 Monday for 16 poems doing what he calls "burning time making money and drinking."
But he reads his poetry well. After the likes of "Jam" (a traffic tie-up caused by a flasher), "What Have I Seen" (race track and whores) and "Eating the Father" (cannibalism), "The Secret of My Endurance" briefly derailed the evening's scatological-sexual train of thought:
I still get letters in the mail
mostly from crack-up men in tiny rooms
with factory jobs or no jobs
who are living with whores
or no women at all
no hope, just booze and madness
. . . and they say they like my stuff
I’ve written from where its at
they recognize it truly
I’ve given them some chance
some recognition of where it’s at
it’s true, I was there
even worse off than most of them . . .
After two hours, 16 poems, a lot of locker room laughs and two bottles of Concannon Petite Sirah, Bukowski and a few of his patrons were just this side of drunk and disorderly.
Some words in his last poems slipped on the wine at times. And some of the verbal barbs tossed at him by the audience of mostly under-30 men and women had cruel edges now and seemed to sting a bit.
Bukowski staggered slightly as he stepped down from the stage to cheers and applause. No one seemed disappointed. He was the man everyone came to see.
In 1972 a young Bukowski was captured by PBS station KCET at his peak at a reading in San Francisco. And Silvia Bizio, the celebrated Italian journalist and actress who interviewed and became friends with Bukowski while she was in LA, recently produced You Never Knew It — An Evening with Bukowski. It’s a documentary based on a seven-hour interview/party she had at Bukowski’s house in 1981. She and I collaborated on the following Bukowski story for the LA Times.
Mr. Bukowski goes Hollywood, kind of
He hated movies, but in 1981 some his short stories were being turned into movies by foreign film makers
L.A. Times Sunday Calendar, July 12, 1981
Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate , of Los Angeles brothels, flop houses and taco stands, hasn't gone Hollywood, but some of his stories have.
Italian film maker Marco Ferreri is in Rome wrapping up production of "Tales of Ordinary Madness," a feature-length film composed of six Bukowski short stories. The movie stars Ben Gazzara and Susan Tyrrell, with Gazzara playing Hank Chinaski, Bukowski's fictional persona.
In Hollywood, Patrick Roth, a young German-born-and-raised director, recently completed "The Killers," the first film adapted from a Bukowski work.
Roth's 40-minute movie features Jack Kehoe and Raymond Mayo as a pair of Mission Street bums who burglarize a mansion in Beverly Hills and end up knifing to death the owner and his wife-after each rapes the woman. Tyrrell and Ann Ramsey appear as Skid Row rag ladies.
It's no accident that Europeans are the first to translate Bukowski to film. His poetry, short stories and novels such as "Women" about 30 books in all have found their broadest literary acceptance and greatest commercial success in Europe, where bookstores have Bukowski corners and sell posters of his grizzled face.
He's been elevated to cult-figure levels by the youth of Germany, France and Italy, who rank him in Henry Miller's league for his raw, often vulgar, often graphic but honest tales about some of the less sparkling citizens of East Hollywood — a neighborhood that Bukowski inhabited for years before moving recently to San Pedro.
Bukowski, who calls his characters “the mad and simple people of the streets,” has been poking around in the periphery of the film world for a while. He wrote the English subtitles for Jean-Luc Goddard's "Every Man for Himself" and has written an autobiographical screenplay, "Barfly," which his pal, French film maker Barbet Schroeder, hopes to produce some day. Yet, despite these ventures and despite the attentions of Roth and Ferreri, Bukowski is in no danger of becoming a cineaste.
At a recent late-night screening of "Killers" at the Gordon Theater in Hollywood, Bukowski, the guest of honor, grumbled from behind his wine cup, "I never go to movies. I hate 'em."
And when someone wondered if he'd seen any dailies of "Tales of Ordinary Madness" while Ferreri and his French-Italian crew were shooting exteriors here in March, Bukowski reverted to form. "I drink all night and I play the horses in the daytime. I don't fool around with film makers."
However, he did admit he got drunk with Ferreri one night. "We had a lot of fun," he said. "He's too fat and too round, but he has a pleasant face. I imagine he's a minor genius, about one step below me. I don't know if he can make movies or not, but he can hold his drink."
Ferreri's film based on stories taken from "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness" is scheduled for a fall release in Italy and Germany but does not yet have an American distributor.
As for "Killers," Bukowski said he was happy with the way Roth handled it. "Basically," Bukowski said in the Gordon's lobby, "I think the kid has a touch of something, and it's not malaria. I didn't like suddenly flashing that guy with his throat cut. It looked like a rubber doll with ketchup. But listen, all in all I think he hit 91. What the hell more can you ask, right?"
"Killers" is taken from Bukowski's collection of stories, "South of No North" which is subtitled — as is Roth's movie — "Stories of the Buried Life." Shot for $60,000 on location in Los Angeles, the 16mm film is stark, coldly realistic and tense. Most of the violence occurs off camera.
In a parody of "Hitchcock Presents" and Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone," Bukowski himself introduces the film from the inside of a railroad boxcar. His short monologue ends with, "Seems a man has only two choices: Get in on the hustle or become a bum … like Harry."
Roth, a former USC film school student, said he hopes to sell "Killers" to TV or cable here or in Europe. It's a pilot for a proposed series of seven TV dramas taken from "South of No North" that "might be too strong for American TV," Roth said, "but I'm hoping someone in the cable market might take a chance. "
"People reject Bukowski because of the squalor and the depressed scene," Roth said, "but his words are drenched in experience. He makes you feel he's gone through it. I want to transfer that world, package the experience of a man who's lived that squalor and depressed scene."
Roth said Bukowski already has encouraged him to proceed with the next film, a farce based on Bukowski's "You Kissed Lilly," a short story about a couple who blow up after 20 years of marriage and kill each other in an all-night duel.
Additional research for this article was provided by Silvio Bizio.
My 2017 history book 30 Days a Black Man retells the amazing, forgotten and true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. My 2013 true nonfiction book Dogging Steinbeck exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. Blogs, photos, a definitive 1960 Steinbeck/Charley trip timeline and more are at TruthAboutCharley.com