Remembering The Buk

(Beat poet Al Winans posted a photo of Charles Bukowski on Facebook, with an amazing letter from the Buk for Al’s 50th birthday. I liked the letter (see below) which shed some light on his bad behavior, and with that, came understanding. But so much faux idolatry emanated from that post it made me gag as my reaction to meeting Bukowski was decidedly different. So I posted my own not-so-pretty two-cents-worth. And, thanks for the unexpected writing prompt, Al!)

I met Charles Bukowski around 1982, when he was crashing on a friend’s sagging couch in a farmhouse perched by the railroad tracks in Cotati. My friend wanted me to meet him to organize a reading at Sonoma State. So, Becca (Rebecca Clintron Osvald) took me over to her friend Ricky Appelbaum’s old white farmhouse over by the trailer court to meet the Buk.

Ricky‘s house was a crash pad for thespians, artists, and wandering poets. The rent was dirt cheap. Every time a freight train rumbled by, the house shook, we’d all scream Stella! like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, because Ricky was playing the lead at a local theater. 

Unfortunately, Charles Bukowski was dead drunk by early afternoon, nursing a gallon of cheap Red Mountain wine. He had been at it for a while as empty wine jugs circled the perimeter of the couch. The Buk was also in audition-mode on Ricky’s chintzy couch, already in training for his semi-autobiographical screenplay, Barfly. 

I guess by that point, the Buk had already thoroughly burned his bridges with his sole poetry publisher, my friend, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who wouldn’t let him crash at his place up in Healdsburg anymore. John, who had founded a successful office supply business in LA, hunted Bukowski down in 1966, and found him working as a letter clerk in a post office. 

In 1969, John sold his collection of DH Lawrence first editions to fund his Black Sparrow Press. And then he made an offer that Bukowski couldn’t refuse, $100 a month to write full time. A month later, Bukowski submitted his first novel, Post Office. John made Bukowski famous again—as a poet—after he had burnt his literary bridges as a writer with a 35-year-long drunken binge which led to a hiatus from the publishing world. 

Bukowski‘s myriad poetry books put the fledgling Black Sparrow Press on the literary roadmap. John, whose first words when he finally met Bukowski, were, “I worship you,” Buk’s reply was “That’s nice, you wanna beer?” But this time John was done with the Buk. (Note to self, need to find Barnes & Noble PR on John.)

I introduced myself. The grizzled, greasy-haired poet, enveloped in a thick grey cowl of cigarette smoke, didn’t even get up off the couch, but he grabbed my proffered hand, said something rather nasal, and then tried to drag me down to his level on the couch. 

Because I was living out of my car, I was rather formally dressed for the times, kitted out in a retro 1940s long teal pencil skirt, and my Irish grandmother’s peach-colored lace insert crepe silk blouse with a maroon leotard beneath. So you couldn’t exactly blame my demure wardrobe for his dirty old man social malfunction. 

I fought like a banshee, red lacquered claws extended, and I had some pithy words to say. I hissed like a car, escaped unscathed, but I was so furious, I was shaking. He was so lecherous that he literally had me puking, Though I was attractive, men rarely hit on me. Ricky used to call me the China doll because I was so pale and wan. It was my anorexic phase (I’d lost a lot of blood from an abortion), so I was fey, not quite of this world.

To be fair, Bukowski tried to call me back after my dramatic rebuke, quite possibly to apologize, but I was gone. I remember running out of the house, and throwing up in the rosebushes, tripping over an orange tomcat desperately weaving around my ankles. all I could think of was handcuffs. I sped off in my old rustbucket of a VW bug, a trail of gravel spluttering behind me. I never talked Charles Bukowski again.

I never could read Bukowski’s work after that. I was running a poetry series at Sonoma State. Ironically, all he wanted was a reading, but he thoroughly burned his bridges with me. Having growing up with far too many alcoholics in the family, I had zero tolerance or coping skills for that kind of behavior. You might say my judgment was colored by the deep well of the alcohol school. 

I ran into Bukowski later in 1984, he was celebrating the sale of his screenplay to Hollywood at the Inn of the Beginning in Cotati. It was drinks all around the house. A deep well at the bar. Needless to say, I gave him a wide berth. He never saw me leaving.

Years later, in an Amsterdam bookshop, circa 1992, I discovered I liked his work. He was wildly popular in Europe. People were amazed that I was probably the only person that ever refused to give the infamous Charles Bukowski a poetry reading. Sure, on some level I regret it. It would’ve been a booking coup. But between The Buk and Gene Ruggles, I was so fed up with the bad behavior of macho male alcoholic poets with flagging egos, I didn’t want to babysit them.

I did produce a couple of disastrous readings for Gene. Unfortunately, he was alway falling down drunk. I was humiliated and horrified. I had known Gene since I was a child, he was a friend of my mother’s, so I couldn’t say no. Only two people would call me up at 3 AM for crazy drunken phone calls in the middle of the night: Gene and my mom. I guess it was a good thing that the Buk did not have my phone number.

Facebook conversation (photo) Lyle Daggett & me on Bukowski, Black Sparrow Press, Doubiago

This was too good a Facebook thread to toss.

Long ago, and far away, at the Port Townsend Poetry Conference 1980. I was with Sharon Doubiago, Linda Macaluso, Tobey Kaplan, and Leonard Cirino. In this photo I'm listening to Meridel LeSueur, sitting on the floor at her feet. Her daughter Deborah LeSueur took the photo with my camera. I found it much later among some old slides. We crashed the Centrum conference—oh, how they tried to bust us, and Meridel said, “the California poets stay or I go.” Jane Bangs, whose middle name was spite, backed down fast. But then she spent the rest of the conference vociferously bad-mouthing us, and generally making our lives miserable. We were sleeping in the empty dorms, she had the janitors lock the doors, so we had no place to stay. We wound up sleeping on the beach in our sleeping bags. But it was the full moon, and then the tide came in, nearly floating us away. But the upshot was that Sharon Doubiago read from her new ms, Hard Country—it got published, and the rest is history. Meridel said, "I've waited all my life for this book and before I die I'm going to get it published."

Shout out from Sharon Doubiago on the publication of Hard Country.

Watching the Eclipse with a Black Sparrow, 9/26/1996 (journal entry)

John Martin & Najet at a reading I produced for Black Sparrow, Borders Books, Santa Rosa

I went to see my old friend, Lee Perron at Litton Station Road in Healdsburg to watch the lunar eclipse. Black Sparrow publisher John Martin and his new wife from Morocco came late, halfway through the eclipse. Najet looked as if she had stepped out of the painting, The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau. Only this time, the lion slept at her feet. Najet’s English had improved dramatical ly since the last time I saw her, and we can converse, as I speak no French or Arabic.

As we sat watching the earth's shadow slide across the moon's surface, I told my friends about my experiences at Poetry International, and I asked Najet if she knew Egyptian activist poet, Zein El’Abidin Fouad on a fluke, and she exclaimed, yes! I told her about a poem he had read in Arabic that gave me goosebumps, and the one word I recognized over and over again, that sounded something like sh-hilim. Dream.

I was stunned when she began to recite his poem from memory, apparently in the Arabic world, it’s a very famous poem. I could pick out the Arabic word for dream again and again. Her voice, as she incanted the poem, raised the hairs on my arms, and we were transfixed under the moonlight, mesmerized by the Arabic cadences.

She said the word was chulm, it was also a word for woman, and that women very much like this poet—for it was a poem for women. Not men. She said Zein was famously known as a woman’s poet, and champion for human rights. Especially for the disenfranchised who had no voice. Zein, whose epithet was “the singing bomb,” created a street play of poems with the untouchable women who gleaned Cairo’s garbage. For that, he had to flee for his life. In Egypt he has a price on his head. Yasir Arafat saved his life.

She talked about how in Morocco during the full moonlit nights, or during eclipses, how everyone gathered outside to have dinner and watch the celestial show. Like tonight. I was in the presence of an ancient, ageless memory, a time capsule of culture. Najet was John’s sleek black sparrow dreaming in the moonlight, dreaming of Morocco.

I was transported to North Africa, seeing the moonlight on the dunes, and I could almost smell the strange smoky odor of burning cattle dung, crushed mint, and the cry of the villagers, the drone of village dogs, a distant memory in the kingdom of imagination. That curious sensation of recognition and déjà vu.

And earlier, as John and I leaned on his car to steady the binoculars, I recalled that I had a dream fragment, staring at an orange moon like this, and there were others gathered in the moonlight, they were speaking in language, I did not understand. I couldn't see them very well. In that moment, I realized it was John and his lovely new wife in the dream.

Perhaps it was John and Lee in the dream as well. We seem to have a strange and wonderful connection. Call it kismet. I don't even know how long ago the dream was, or where it was set, or even who was in it. Did I write it down? I usually wrote down my dreams. What I do remember was the moonlight glowing orange, and our game of moon tag. And the stories.

Then I begin to wonder if the reason why I was so profoundly affected by Zein’s poem was because I'd already met them in the secret story in a dream, such as this night. And then, when the poem unfolded for the third time, I was merely returning to the mortal plane of reality, for I had already experienced it within the dreamscape.

When Zein had read that poem, I was riveted to my seat, listening with every pore of my body to the Arabic. I was transfixed. Time, telescoping, backwards and forwards at a furious rate, leaving me breathless. 

I would never have told Najet about the story or the dream, but out of the blue, she had asked if I'd heard him read the poem in Arabic. So she's part of the dream landscape, too. I watched her transformed under the moonlight as she recited the poem. I was bearing witness to something both holy and profound.

Perhaps John was also seeing a new side of her too, it was like a surprise gift. He’d begun to think he knew her and then she surprised him with this poem beneath the full eclipse moon. In that male-dominated world of putting people in their place, the bonds between women are forged in something ancient and tribal, we had an intimacy and rapport that men seek, but can never find. For a moment they were jealous.

Was it because she and I had sat huddled together in lawn chairs beneath my down sleeping bag? I felt it again when she hugged me goodbye, the aha factor, the deep connection of the woman’s world of the harem, perhaps. Not sexual, but deeply connected. Of course, I am curious about her. It's not often one gets to meet a Moroccan woman on such familial, or intimate circumstances. 

But that night, under the blood-red moon, we were sisters. She didn’t know that Lee and I were once a couple, but Lee and John are best friends, and I am included in this extended family by proximity. I wonder if John knows about our past. Men do talk. I am sure he does.

John’s smoker’s cough is much worse now, I am worried about him, his heart is not good, and his voice, his lovely voice, is hoarse. He says his eyesight is also bad, but  he tells me, that for $60 you can go to UC Med Center and be tested for 50 different ailments. 

He and I joke about the moment when we knew our eyes were failing us. Unable to read a map at night, unable to help ourselves if we were lost in the streets of Amsterdam. We giggle. Lee is somewhere else in his own world. And we laugh some more, saying we couldn't even read our own star maps in order to to help ourselves.

Maybe the landscape of the dream unravels, unavailable to us during our conscious moments, and we let go of the other feeling of defeat and helplessness. Rights of passage. I gaze upon a middle-age man at 43 going on 44, a man who once meant the world to me, and now I am too clearly moving towards middle-age, and my eyes are lazy dogs.

John told us us the moon looks like a side profile of a sheik. I shrieked, look there's John Martin in the moon! and we all laughed. He told us a convoluted story about being stuck in Rotterdam between trips when he was working on freighter ships, I assumed this was during his vagabond days, staying in some funky hotel or fleabag flat that hadn't yet been bombed in World War II. 

He said there was an alley that had a library of sorts. John said that he found a copy of the Mein Kampf with a Berkeley public library card stuck inside, dated 1932, that was 25 years overdue he brought it back to the Bay Area, and returned it to the Berkeley Public Library with a note. Wow.

Rotterdam was, of course, destroyed by the Nazis, and very little old architecture still exists. The fact that the book survived so long is amazing. Even more amazing, the book was from Berkeley, there's a communist republic of memory simultaneously developing the bomb and giving birth to red diaper babies.

What American communist sympathizer was visiting Rotterdam in 1932? Most likely a man. And why, for Rotterdam was merely a huge industrial port, with no artistic aspirations, not like Amsterdam. No Chet Baker falling over and over again from that second store window in the Hotel Prins Hendrix in the Red Light District.