When he was at the coffee stand, Bukowski often met comic book distributor, George Di Caprio, who lived at a court on the opposite corner of Hollywood and Western with his wife, Irmelin, and their baby son who grew up to become the film star, Leonardo Di Caprio.

The Christmas of 1975 was the first the Di Caprio family had spent with their new baby. George decorated the bungalow, bought a tree and invited his mother to dinner. Christmas Eve, when they were washing up, there was a knock at the door and in burst the diabolical figure of Bukowski, his face fiery with drink.

"You know, it"s just a few inches that separates a man from paradise," said Bukowski, enigmatically, when he had taken in the scene: the tree, the cards with snow scenes, and baby Leonardo sleeping peacefully in a ba.s.sinet. George Di Caprio pondered this cryptic statement, a.s.suming it had a festive meaning. His mother, who was a little deaf, asked what Bukowski had said.

"Yeah, hmm, it"s just a few inches ..." Bukowski began again, and then he yelled: "THAT PREVENTS A MAN SUCKING HIS OWN c.o.c.k!"

In his relentless search for new material, Bukowski often got together with Brad and Tina the night before he had to write his column. These evenings invariably culminated in some drunken prank: Bukowski once announced that any writer should be willing to eat his own words, so he tore up the LA Free Press and swallowed it. Then he vomited over Tina"s carpet. Another night he shot himself in the leg with a pistol. Yet another session ended with Brad discovering Tina and Bukowski in bed together, and Linda King went almost mad with jealousy when she found Polaroid photographs of Tina sitting naked on Bukowski"s lap.

He also took inspiration from fans who came to Carlton Way to pay homage to him, people like the folk-singer Bob Lind who had a hit in 1966 with "Elusive b.u.t.terfly". Lind first contacted Bukowski after watching a television rerun of Taylor Hackford"s doc.u.mentary. He gave Bukowski his number and said he would enjoy meeting him. A few days later, at three in the morning when Bukowski was feeling lonely after another split with Linda, he telephoned Lind and invited him to get some beer and come over.

"The first thing I noticed about him, other than that dramatically ugly mug of his, were his shoulders. As I shook his hand, I put my left hand on his shoulder. It felt like cement. You don"t expect muscles like that on a man so clearly dissipated," says Lind. Bukowski explained it was from years of slinging mail bags around at the post office.

He was drinking whiskey and chasing it with Heineken. Lind got out some cocaine, arranged two lines on the kitchen table and started rolling a dollar bill, a.s.suming Bukowski did c.o.ke regularly.

"What is that, kid? What do I do?" asked Bukowski, who had never snorted before.

"It just makes you sharper," said Lind. When it was Bukowski"s turn, he was so nervous he exhaled when he should have inhaled and blew the powder all over the kitchen.

"Oh no, that s.h.i.t"s expensive, kid."

It had been a dream come true for Bob Lind to meet Bukowski, even if he did waste his cocaine, so he was mortified to open the LA Free Press the following week and see himself parodied in Bukowski"s column. "He called me some hippy-dippy name and reduced me to a flower child cliche. He put stupid dialogue in my mouth along the lines of "Groovy Daddio, I"m on cloud nine."" Bukowski further humiliated Lind in his novel Women, turning him into the annoying character of d.i.n.ky Summers.

Bukowski also entertained a succession of female fans who telephoned or wrote to him, often sending photographs of themselves in the nude. Many were young mothers who had been through a bad relationship and were looking for an older man to look after them. Others were groupies trying to bed someone famous. They had no trouble reaching Bukowski, as he explained in his poem "how come you"re not unlisted?": for a man of 55 who didn"t get laid until he was 23*

and not very often until he was 50 I think I should stay listed via Pacific Telephone until I get as much as the average man has had.

He invariably invited his callers over, whatever their motivation, so long as they could bring a six-pack of beer, and Brad and Tina Darby often saw young women following Bukowski up the path to the door of his apartment. "It would just amaze me sometimes," says Brad. "Some of them were gorgeous and he had a constant parade." Bukowski told these girlfriends he was already seeing someone, but she was not the kind of woman he needed. But if Linda King showed up, he quickly bundled them over to Brad and Tina"s place and they had to stay there if Linda didn"t leave.

One night around closing time Bukowski received a telephone call from a young woman with a particularly s.e.xy voice. She said she was with a girlfriend at Barney"s Beanery, the bar on Santa Monica Boulevard. Her girlfriend was a fan of Bukowski"s writing and, as it was her thirtieth birthday, she wondered if they could meet him. "Sure," he said. "Pick up a six-pack and come on over."

Two women duly showed up, both s.p.a.ced-out. The birthday girl was Georgia Peckham-Krellner. A match-thin brunette dressed like a hooker, she was the woman later immortalized by a famous photograph in which she poses with Bukowski in front of his refrigerator. The other woman, the one who had telephoned, was Pamela Miller. She was twenty-three years old and built like the girls in Fling magazine. She was not tall, but she had a big chest and a very pretty face, not unlike the actress Ann-Margret, with green eyes that glittered merrily (partly because she was stoned) and long glossy reddish-blonde hair. She was a girl to drive a man crazy. "I guess you could say I was attractive," she says, coolly, recalling her impression on Bukowski. "I"ve never had too many problems attracting the opposite s.e.x." She told Bukowski her friends called her Cupcakes, because of her chest. It was 38 D. He could call her Cupcakes, if he wanted.

Listening to them talking, Bukowski decided that although Cupcakes was the looker, Georgia was the more likable of the pair. Cupcakes seemed to have the personality of a shark.

He told Georgia: "I wish I could take your soul and merge it into her body." He looked at Cupcakes, all that red hair, flaming s.e.x. "I would have the perfect woman." Cupcakes giggled thinking she was being paid a compliment.

After they left, Bukowski lay on his filthy mattress, and thought about Cupcakes. He had never known a real redhead before. Her hair was like fire.

Cupcakes was working as a c.o.c.ktail waitress at The Alpine Inn, a German theme bar in Hollywood, and she began coming by Carlton Way after her shift. The conversation was mostly about her she had no interest in his poetry, which made a change. He discovered she had been born in San Francisco, in 1952, the daughter of an Italian mother and an Anglo-Irish father, a newspaper journalist who left home when she was two. When she was fifteen, Cupcakes became pregnant by her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend. She dropped out of school, had the baby, lost the husband and went to work for p.u.s.s.ycat Theaters, a chain of cinemas showing s.e.x films. She was Miss p.u.s.s.ycat Theaters, 1973.

Life was an endless party and she didn"t care about anything much so long as she was having a good time and could get stoned on diet pills, which she was dependent on. She also liked to date older men. "I suspect that is the main reason I was attracted to Hank. I"m sure it"s that cla.s.sic textbook looking for the father."

When Bukowski met her, she was living in a beat-up Hollywood bungalow with her daughter, Stacey, driving around town in a ruined Camaro filled with the detritus of her life: cans, pill bottles, clothes, shoes, magazines and cigarette packets. She was behind on the rent. She didn"t always have enough money to buy Stacey clothes and was stoned from morning to night on pills she wheedled out of doctors on prescription.

When Stacey didn"t have anything suitable to wear to a friend"s birthday party, Bukowski took pity and bought the child a yellow dress. Pamela kissed him thank-you. It was so sweet of him.

He took her to the fights at the Olympic Auditorium and the crowd hooted at Cupcakes almost as loudly as they yelled at the contenders; she was bursting out of that d.a.m.n dress. Bukowski dreamt of burying his face in her hair, those b.r.e.a.s.t.s, slipping the dress over her head and ripping her apart.

Then she disappeared for days on end. She said she went to stay with her mother out in the San Fernando Valley, but Bukowski was convinced she was seeing other men (not that he"d slept with her yet). "I was a little flighty thing who would go away and come back," says Cupcakes. "That is enough to make any man nuts."

In the poem, "huge ear rings", Bukowski expressed his ambivalent feelings about her: each time I see her she looks better and better 200 years ago they would have burned her at the stake When Linda King became pregnant she didn"t know if the father was Bukowski, or whether it was one of two other men she had been dating to get her own back on Bukowski for cheating on her. Whoever the father was, she knew Bukowski would not support her or the baby. Fed up with the cycle of splitting and getting back together, Linda resolved to break from him once and for all. She quit her job, sold her house and decided to move to Arizona.

After a day shifting furniture and packing boxes, she went into premature labor and miscarried the baby, almost bleeding to death in the process.

Linda was at home recovering from the miscarriage when Bukowski called on the telephone. She told him what had happened, but he didn"t care. "He didn"t think it was his, so there was no reaction." He had news of his own. Cupcakes had been at his apartment earlier, he said. She"d finally agreed to sleep with him, but told him to get a new mattress first because the old one was so disgusting. A store had delivered a $35 mattress within a couple of hours and he"d given Cupcakes money to go and get champagne to celebrate. He wanted to know whether Linda thought Cupcakes would run off with the money? Linda hung up in disgust.

When Cupcakes returned with the champagne, Bukowski told her how upset Linda had been and they laughed themselves silly.

The following evening Linda King was drinking a bottle of rose wine, which a boyfriend told her was good for replenishing blood, and the drunker she got the more she brooded on what Bukowski had said. "The idea of him celebrating with champagne while I was upset and suffering from my loss of everything so upset me." She decided to go over to his place and do some damage.

There was no answer when she knocked at his door on Carlton Way, so she wriggled in through the kitchen window, found his Royal typewriter, carried it out through the window and hid it behind a bush. She went back and stole his radio, his drawings, paintings, old photographs and, most precious of all, the first editions of his books. It was everything she thought he loved.

Bukowski came home early from the track and found Linda crouching in the bushes. She was trembling with rage, like a lunatic, and the fight that ensued was extravagant even by their standards. Tina Darby, who came out to see what was going on, says Linda seemed to have gone out of her mind. Bukowski was worried for Tina"s safety, after the business with the Polaroids, and told her to go back in the house and close the door.

"I don"t deserve this," he told Linda. "These are all my books. I wrote them. You need to give me back my books."

Linda got an armful from The Thing and started flinging books at the windows of his apartment. As the gla.s.s shattered, she shrieked at him: "THIS IS FOR THAT WOMAN! ... AND THAT WOMAN! ... AND THAT"S FOR THAT WOMAN!"

I stood there as she screamed and broke gla.s.s.

Where are the police? I thought. Where?

Then Lydia ran down the court walk, took a quick left at the trash bin and ran down the driveway of the apartment house next door. Behind a small bush was my typewriter, my radio and my toaster.

(From: Women) "She is screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder and she"s got his typewriter," recalls Tina, who watched from her window. Linda swung it round her head and brought it down so it hit a parked car and bounced onto the road.

... The platen and several other parts flew off. She picked the typer up again, raised it over her head and screamed, "DON"T TELL ME ABOUT YOUR WOMEN!" and smashed it into the street again.

"I actually did Bukowski a favor," says Linda. "John Martin had to buy him a new typewriter. He needed one."

She was so out of control that Bukowski felt he had no choice but to call the police, and Linda was dragged off to the station sobbing her heart out about how she"d lost their baby. Bukowski said he wouldn"t press charges, because she might lose custody of her children, but she had to realize she couldn"t behave like that any more. It was over, positively the end of their relationship and they both knew it. If things got any crazier, they would end up killing each other.

Linda went home and made plans to move to Arizona, slightly regretful about what they had lost. "We really did have a love relationship which he diminished by adding other women with it, acting like it was nothing," she says. "We had a very great love, really, but when he got famous he had to have the fruits of his fame. That"s what men get famous for, right? All the women in the world. I didn"t want to be part of a hundred women."

* Ben Pleasants later abandoned the project.

* Further background about this mysterious quotation can be found in the source notes to this chapter.

* In fact, he was almost 24 before he lost his virginity to a Philadelphia prost.i.tute.

11.

RED DEATH SUNSET BLOOD GLORY GALS.

Within weeks of meeting Cupcakes, Bukowski was besotted with her, hopelessly in love with a woman less than half his age who was quite indifferent to him. She laughed at his depressions, flirted with other men, vanished for days on end and then popped up again as though nothing had happened to find him in a funk of depression with a face like the Siege of Stalingrad.

"Cups, I can"t do this any more," he would say, miserably. "It"s tearing me apart."

this time has finished me.

I feel like the German troops whipped by snow and the communists walking bent with newspapers stuffed into worn boots.

my plight is just as terrible.

maybe more so.

victory was so close victory was there.

as she stood before my mirror younger and more beautiful than any woman I had ever known combing yards and yards of red hair ("the retreat") Cupcakes was unimpressed by his love poems. They were doggerel, in her opinion, and she enjoyed tormenting Bukowski by parodying his work in a bored, sing-song voice: So I woke up in the morning and I puked in the toilet and then I shaved ...

"You see," she said. "I can write what you write, but better."

"That"s funny, Cups," he said with a hollow laugh. "Very funny, yeah. But we really have to end this."

"Why?"

"Because it"s killing me."

"What are you talking about?" she asked, speaking as if he were a stupid child. "You"ve watched too many soap operas." She grabbed his hand and pulled him up from the sofa. "Come on, let"s go. Let"s go to the track." She had a way of jerking him out of his depressions. Some redhead magic.

They got in Bukowski"s Volkswagen which now had a hole in the windscreen where Cupcakes had put her foot through it and drove to Hollywood Park to catch the first race. Cupcakes said to keep an eye on her because she sometimes wandered off when she was on pills and, sure enough, when he came back from placing his bet she was gone. He went to the ladies toilet, the first aid station and finally found her with another man.

The most any poet could do was write something about his beloved, and Bukowski wrote a whole book about Cupcakes, Scarlet, published in a limited edition by Black Sparrow Press. The four poems in the book show that l.u.s.t was a large part of the attraction he felt for her: when she walked in I grabbed her and pulled her to my lap.

I lifted my gla.s.s and told her, "drink this."

"oh," she said, "you"ve mixed wine with Jim Beam, you"re gonna get nasty."

"you henna your hair, don"t you?"

"you don"t look," she said and stood up and pulled down her slacks and panties and the hair down there was the same as the hair up there.

("red up and down") In Cupcakes" own copy he wrote: "For the girl who made me write these poems, for the girl who made me feel that feeling which comes so seldom in a lifetime." He presented it to her as a token of his adoration, a book all about her. She barely looked at it. "I didn"t have a tremendous amount of respect for his writing," she says. "His poetry was often negative and not complimentary. I thought I was just fodder." The book was tossed aside to get dusty and dog-eared, something she pulled out now and again to show friends.

Bukowski had to go away for a few days and tried to see Cupcakes to say goodbye, but she was nowhere to be found. He cruised Hollywood looking for her Camaro and, after he had been everywhere he could think of, he unhooked the Maltese military cross Grandfather Bukowski had given him it hung from the rear view mirror of the Volkswagen and draped it from the handle of her front door, as a sign that he had been trying to contact her.

I keep searching the streets for that blood-wine battleship she drives with a weak battery, and the doors hanging from broken hinges.

I drive around the streets an inch away from weeping, ashamed of my sentimentality and possible love.

a confused old man driving in the rain wondering where the good luck went.

("i made a mistake") Each time he heard the clicking of heels on the concrete path of his court, he stopped typing, hoping the sound would bring Cupcakes to him, but the women always pa.s.sed by. Whenever the telephone rang, it was like the excitement he felt when his horse was in among the leaders heading for the post, but he was not a winner. In the middle of the night he drove back to her bungalow and, seeing that the cross was still there, left a note: 1.30 a.m. Sunday morning Red death sunset blood glory gal Why is it that you are the one woman I have met who has not loved me entirely, madly and out of context? It confuses me. You must be my superior. Well, that"s all right. I mean, if I can win 8 races out of 9 I can expect to be upset by a longshot.

Blubberboy Charley.

In the morning, when there was still no word, he went back and left a second note: Pam: I HATE YOU FOR NOT ADMITTING YOU LOVE ME.

you are acting like a stupid c.u.n.t.

Hangover remorse followed: Pam I didn"t mean it. I still love you. It"s just that you never show any feeling toward me, and Jesus Christ that sometimes cuts in pretty deep.

I don"t mean to load myself on you. I"ll work it out. It"s just going to take me a bit of time to figure out what the h.e.l.l"s happening. Hank And when she still didn"t call: Pam Thanks a h.e.l.l of a lot of s.h.i.t for nothing.

This behavior seemed excessive to Cupcakes, as it had to Linda King when Bukowski first fell for her. He was loving too pa.s.sionately, considering the very short time they"d been together. However, Cupcakes would come to regret that she hadn"t appreciated the depth of his affection. "I didn"t take him seriously. I didn"t take myself seriously. I was just carefree and elusive and everything that drives a man crazy," she says. "I was just a silly kid." If Bukowski forced her to confront his feelings, if he tried to make her hear what she meant to him, she laughed it off. "I would make light of it, change the subject, because I wasn"t capable of loving anyone deeply, or getting attached to anyone then."

They went to New York for a reading, booking into the room at the Chelsea Hotel where Janis Joplin had liked to stay, high above cacophonous West 23rd Street. It was one of the hottest days of the year and Cupcakes sat on the balcony to try and keep cool. Bukowski watched her from the bed, her red hair glowing in the late afternoon sun. He was feeling particularly close to her because she had fallen asleep on the flight over from Los Angeles, resting her head on his shoulder. He thought it was one of the most tender moments they had shared, even though he knew she had pa.s.sed out because she was stoned. He couldn"t even wake her up for landing.

I looked at her enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I watched for some sign of breathing. They didn"t move. I got up and found a steward ess.

"Please take your seat, sir. We are preparing to land."

"Look, I"m worried. My girlfriend won"t wake up."

"Do you think she"s dead?" she whispered.

(From: Women) "You know, Cups, the nicest thing you have ever done, the moment I will always remember, is when you laid your head on my shoulder during our plane ride," he said.

Cupcakes looked at him quizzically. "I remember thinking, "I can"t deal with this; what do I do with this?" I was too young." Instead of talking to him about his feelings, she decided to distract his attention. "Look!" she shouted. "NO HANDS!" She flung her arms out so she was balanced on the edge of the iron railing with nothing but the cheeks of her backside to stop herself falling. "Wheeeeeeee!"

Bukowski saw that her eyes were glittery from pills and booze. "Come on, Cups, come back in," he coaxed her, like a dog. "Get down now."

"Wheeeeeeeee!"

Then she fell, just catching herself before spinning down into the garbage cans.