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.

BUKOWSKI IN ORANGE

Ever notice how the really orange cats, the ones with the tiger stripes tend to be male? I know, this is supposed to be about the Buk. Bukowski was orange. Nothing to rhyme with that. Savior's a nuisance to live with at home as Joan Baez once said. Not that I lived with him. I was living out of my car at the time. A rusted blue VW Bug. Bukowski was crashing on a friend's couch at a farmhouse by the railroad tracks in Cotati. I was running the poetry center, trying to hide my backstory. Bukowski wanted to lasso a reading but he was always drunk on cheap red wine by 3 PM, and he stank of stale cigarettes. I was recovering from an illness and they called me a China doll, taunting me as they grabbed at me as if in jest because I was pale & wan. Little did they know I was near death's door. Anorexic. An abortion gone south. A river of blood raged in a flood tide. Redredred. The edges of the world closing in. My periphery darkened before the clamping down. And the will to live had something to do with it. But they saw my slender self as desirable. And so they, showing their stripes, grabbed at life, grabbed at me, but I was dead inside. I felt lucky to make it back outside‚ gasping for breath, I doubled over. Puking in the weeds. An orange cat frantically wove his way between my ankles as if to shackle me too. But it was a clear fall day, facing south, the sunshine cradling me. That was before Rohnert Park overran Cotati and there were still vast tracts of adobe fields and blankets of oat hay surrounding the campus. George Rohnert's seed flower beds bloomed in wide ribbons of pink and red. Waiting for the harvest, fields wrapped like a present.

Intangible Instructions

There is always the desire to return. The tail of a blue fish emerged from her fingers, his arms were fins. Memories floated backwards in time to listen for the vestigial singing river in the dry riverbed. I never wanted the plane to land, but the Andes rose like a white dream to punctuate the sky. Faith in miracles. Here, Pizarro slept. There, Blake saw God in an apple tree. Time flowed backward, lined up like the homeless, like the basureños in makeshift houses along the Apurimac, or in Tijuana. Lined up like the locked eyes of death into the burning future on several continents. Myth: I carried a new gift of life. In the end, memory fails. Conquistador y amor. In Quito, the snake dancer from the selva cursed me. The bridge failed me. Coltrane’s sax defines qualities of night but the doors are locked. The six-legged nightmare rides on the smoke. Ask me what this means, I cannot read history written in the smoke of the victor. Say that in Selma, Dubrovnik, Darrio City, Bagdhad, Blake’s London, or L.A.

The descending fog envelops our feet. A warning call clearing the double-vision down the canyon past temptation. A gorge divides water from water, brings it together again. Except for the L.A. river. Do you know how to soar down through the dilemma, both following and leading? Counter-clockwise dance. Remembrance, resemblance. Which direction does the vortex choose? What carries us on and on? The child’s face buried in the moon’s path. They wander through the empty streets of Cusco, Moscow, San Francisco. In every voice, in every mirrored face, the bell toils for them. We speak with our hands. The gift of hands offered language to the children.

She stored apples under her bed. Illicit money whispered in the palms, Feel me! The teeth of graveyards are built on this foundation: the tail of the 20th century rendered in the useless orchestrations of Oppenheimer’s regret. The eagle keening. Living art in empty sheets. Riderless horses. Where is Schrödinger’s cat? Pandora? The blind mouse sleeping on the back of a dead bird dreams of angels. Clear the shelves of omnipotent windfalls and quantum malignancy. The marriage hearse reinvents the mother. Death reinvents the mechanics of fear. Open the box. Not.

Fear of the scent of money, fear of poverty. Fear of the telephone in the dead of night. Fear of needing glasses, fear of not enough time to read the face inside the eye of night. Fear of repeating the past, of paradoxes, of ambivalence, of love’s trap. I said I stayed in my dreams. Memorized floor patterns, but specific moments never came. The hunter flame burned celluloid memory. Imagery: Hopperesque scenes shot in black & white. The desire to return embedded in the fear of fear.

Fear of not growing up. Fear of control. Fear of growing up and not being in control. Or of growing up and being in control. What if I ran away and no one stopped me? That moment of star-crossed thresholds. Not saying, Now I lay me down to sleep. Saying, I see my future as nothing, becoming nothing. Becoming the breathing of the open door. The thrones of angels. Fish with the hearts of men. Each belabored breath blinded by the light, I open my eyes. Looking forward, looking back. My erotic dreams littered with scorpions. Carpe Diem. Descend with eyes open wide, like Beatrice.

Do you remember when we danced face-to-face? The way your mouth opened into my darkness. I’d asked to move forward. Just a little more time. I wanted him out of my vocabulary and into a room with no walls. We swam to the ceiling. You flew into the light, grew fins. We needed to rearrange definitions of speech, of the forgotten rain. The dance continues. Kiss me while the bones of humanity learn how to sleep in open doorways, and eyes learn not to see. Out of necessity, they bathe in the streets where privacy is closest held, yet farthest away. To suckle memory. Whose tongue in my mouth? Por el loro, he said. Van Gogh’s sunflowers weren’t gold enough in the city of bankers. I held a namesake lover who cried in front of Vincent’s Self Portrait. But my arms weren’t strong enough to hold back the digital madness. I thought of Rilke. Raucous words escape the phosphor screen, take flight, flock to the trees like wild parrots. The computer becomes the 13th muse.

Fear of your thoughts. Origins of a code trickling down my thigh. What I ought to have said. Or, if I said too much. Fear of my thoughts. Fear of the telltale beating of the apple heart. Fear of finding the naked dawn descending the fire escape, each step of light defining the canyons of man. Exponential dreams of sirens scream in prime numbers, the mellifluous sax, the real voice of street corners. Notes bleed from the page escaping a shipwreck of blood. Fear of blood enters into it, another equation.

Fear the exponential division of prime numbers. The audience dreaming of an audience dreaming. Fear the agony of doors destined to be reduced to numbers. Fear the stairwells destined for darkness, stolen lives, stale smoke. On bulkheads facing the sea, and in stairwells facing dark alleys, fear the semen trapped or not trapped in translucent orbs, a tangible sign on all the continents. The bridge becomes a flamenco skirt for the moon. Whose father swam in the Amazon with the piranha? Who wears the moon’s mask? Learn to describe doves, the twin orbs of a woman’s ass. The lover’s hand under my dress. No mermaid’s tail. Then the cunt. When I said love, I got religious. Learned to walk, then crawl. Desire silences the guitar strings with scissors. Think about post-modern love deconstructing beneath city clocks without hands. Orgasm is closest to art. I didn’t mention syringes or T-cells.

No need for voices from the void flung like arrows. Or the bell tower of the heart’s drum. What are we willing to accept? The clichéd rose asleep on the piano lid. Maxwell’s hammer descending in slo-mo. Kennedy shot again and again. Some are not yet dead. Others were never really alive. Fish trapped in the sheets. The approaching storm delivered in monotone. Or in natural speech. Bukowski, dead. The TV channel-surfing in an empty room. Think of random blue noise as a way of life. Intangible instructions. Love’s fascism, asleep in a pool of blood, wants touching, stroking, punctuation. The restless sky mounts the moon. When will blood learn how to become stone? Was it better than anything, walking on the moon? Were we ever in the garden? The endless pit? One thing is certain: Night is neither noble nor sacred; her indifferent legs are open wide.

© MAUREEN HURLEY 25 April 1994; rev. 6/21 Freewrite on the 1993 Poetry Film Winners