When they got back to LA, Linda began to suspect he was seeing other women, partly because he kept disappearing for hours on end, "to go to the supermarket", he claimed. It seemed a most unlikely excuse.

One afternoon in September, he took her to the Olympic Auditorium to watch the boxing and then rushed her home before going off to do more shopping. Feeling extremely insulted, like she had been party to a double-booking, Linda drove over to a house on Santa Monica Boulevard where she thought one of Bukowski"s girlfriends lived and, sure enough, she saw him. He was walking back from the liquor store with a brown paper bag full of bottles, whistling a happy tune.

He heard a familiar sound, like the engine of Linda"s car. Bukowski stopped whistling and turned to see that it was Linda"s car, the Volkswagen which was so ugly they called it The Thing. She had The Thing up on the sidewalk and was driving at him. The VW was just narrow enough to get between the lamp posts and the buildings. It was on a collision course. "I backed him up against the wall," says Linda. "I wasn"t going to kill him. I was mad though." Bukowski was so frightened he dropped his bag and the bottles smashed on the concrete.

He was bending down to pick up the broken gla.s.s when she came round again, stopped the car, got out and marched up to Bukowski. He was holding one solitary bottle of beer he had saved. Linda s.n.a.t.c.hed it and hurled it at the house where Bukowski"s lover was peering out at them. It went through her window like a bullet.

Lydia ran off and I walked up the stairway. Nicole was still standing there. "For G.o.d"s sake, Chinaski, leave her before she kills everybody!"

I turned and walked back down the stairway. Lydia was sitting in her car at the curbing with the engine running. I opened the door and got in. She drove off. Neither of us spoke a word.

Taylor Hackford"s doc.u.mentary about Bukowski was given a preview screening at the Munic.i.p.al Art Gallery Theater, in Hollywood, on 19 October. Bukowski arrived with Linda and Jory Sherman and his wife, taking seats in the front of the auditorium. He had been nervous about the evening and was astounded by how large his face appeared on screen. There were his fights with Linda, the love triangle with Liza Williams, the drunken reading in San Francisco and, finally, Bukowski mulling over his experiences and philosophizing laconically that he "wouldn"t advise women to anybody". It was a well-made and entertaining film and the reviews were good when it was shown on KCET, a local public television station.

Most of Bukowski"s old friends gathered for the party afterwards, but some felt success was beginning to change him. Steve Richmond had been deeply hurt by Bukowski"s poem, "300 Poems", published in a new Black Sparrow Press collection, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck. Bukowski had insinuated that Richmond"s "gagaku poems", written to the rhythm of j.a.panese folk music, were lousy and Richmond was so upset by it he almost took an overdose.

Neeli Cherkovski, also at the party, had been taken aback when Bukowski told him, apparently seriously: "I am getting more well-known with these Hollywood people. I don"t know how much time to spend with you guys." So when Cherkovski met John Martin that evening there was already a degree of estrangement. As Cherkovski recalls the conversation, he suggested Black Sparrow Press might consider publishing other poets like Harold Norse, John Thomas, Jack Micheline, Jack Hirschman and some day maybe himself. The way Bukowski heard it, Cherkovski said: "You ought to print me and Norse and Micheline and Richmond. Why do you print Bukowski? He"s like a worn-out tape machine saying the same things over and over." The next time he saw Cherkovski, Bukowski cut him dead, saying he wasn"t talking to the a.s.shole.

William Wantling was one of several long-standing friends Bukowski had corresponded with for years, but never met. He was a former Marine who had served in Korea, done time in San Quentin for fraud, and had developed a fearsome drink and drug problem all of which gave him material for writing the sort of gritty poetry Bukowski admired. So when Wantling invited him to read at the Illinois college where he taught English, in the spring of 1974, Bukowski was happy to accept and arranged to meet Wantling and his wife, Ruth, at Chicago"s O"Hare airport.

Despite arriving at O"Hare wearing his dead father"s overcoat, which made him look like a b.u.m, Bukowski was beginning to enjoy considerable success. Another volume of short stories, South of No North, had recently been published by Black Sparrow Press while the earlier books were being reprinted regularly. City Lights was paying a $10,000 advance for a new edition of Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Bukowski was corresponding with Doubleday about a possible collection of poems. He"d given sold-out readings across the United States and been awarded a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, after years of trying.

Wantling"s career, in comparison, had fizzled out. To Bukowski"s disappointment, he"d taken a teaching job and stopped writing the type of primal poetry Bukowski so admired. "He thought it was terrible that Bill was in the university. He thought it was ruining his writing," says Ruth.

Bukowski gave a bad reading, while members of the audience whispered to each other that the poet was obviously drunk, and afterwards endured a reception in his honor, saying little to Wantling and his wife and being downright rude to every one else. From Bukowski"s point of view, he considered he"d done enough for his $500 fee ($300 of which went on the air fare) and didn"t want to answer questions as well.

William Wantling felt badly let down. He was having a lot of problems at the time with his marriage falling apart, and ha.s.sles with the police because of his drug habit, and had looked forward to meeting Bukowski, whom he idolized. Now it was all spoilt. "He was extremely disappointed in Bukowski as a person," says Ruth. "He said he didn"t know why Bukowski came, and that he wished he had never met him."

When he got back to LA, Bukowski did what he had done so many times before and wrote a nasty, snide column about his trip, totally trashing his friend. He described visiting a provincial poet named Howard Stantling, an obvious variation on the name Wantling, a man who had once been wild and exciting, a former convict and talented poet, but who was now a f.u.c.ked-up impotent junkie who pedaled round a university campus on a push bike and wrote poetry that was only popular in Australia. It was a vicious, underhand piece of work and was published in the LA Free Press in two instalments on 12 April and 19 April, 1974, as his Notes of a Dirty Old Man column. Although there is no direct evidence that Wantling read the stories, Ruth believes it is likely he did find out about them. He had a number of friends in LA who would have called to tell him about such an obvious and outrageous character a.s.sa.s.sination.

Less than two weeks after the second instalment appeared, Wantling was dead.

Always a compulsive and unstable personality, he started drinking heavily after Bukowski left town, and went into a manic phase, telling Ruth he couldn"t get his brain to shut off. Letters he wrote to friends show him to have been depressed, questioning his worth as a man and a poet. He told small press publisher, A.D. Winans, that he felt so lousy he wanted to drink himself to death. That"s precisely what he did: drinking day and night until he suffered a heart attack and was taken to hospital, screaming in the ambulance that he was old. He was forty-one when he died on 1 May.

Ruth believes that the stories Bukowski wrote about her husband probably had some effect on his behavior in the final weeks of his life, although she does not believe it is the primary cause for what happened because he was already so unstable. Whatever the reason for Wantling"s final and fatal bout of drinking, Bukowski felt guilty about his behavior towards an obviously vulnerable friend. He telephoned A.D. Winans and spoke about how he had rejected some poems Wantling submitted to Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns, writing back that he had seen better from him and his work had never been very good to begin with. He regretted the letter now, and said he hoped Wantling hadn"t taken it seriously.

Bukowski also telephoned Steve Richmond to talk about Wantling"s death. "He would usually call at 4 a. m., drunk," says Richmond. "But this time he was dead serious and it was like four in the afternoon. He knew: you write something, and the person you write about dies. It"s a responsibility."

Soon after the tragedy, Ruth came through LA on her way to San Francisco and arranged to spend some time with Bukowski, who was one of the few people she knew in the city. He picked her up in his blue "67 Volkswagen and took her to the races before going back to an apartment he was renting on Carlton Way, having finally left De Longpre Avenue. It was another tatty court, a dark and shabby dump of a place, not far from the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, one of the seediest junctions in all Los Angeles. Ruth slept on the couch and, in the morning, she and Bukowski went on a trip to Laguna Beach with a young couple, Brad and Tina Darby, who managed the court. Brad also managed a p.o.r.nographic book store on Hollywood Boulevard, and Tina worked as a go-go dancer.

It was the first time Ruth had seen the Pacific Ocean, which her husband had talked so much about from when he lived in California, and she found herself looking out at the rollers, thinking about her husband, their marriage and the way he"d died. She began weeping, quietly, but this seemed to irritate Bukowski.

"Bill"s dead," he said. "He can"t suck your p.u.s.s.y, but I can."

As the day wore on, he became more abusive, saying he expected to f.u.c.k Ruth and that she was a f.u.c.king fool if she didn"t give him what he wanted. Her husband couldn"t help her now. Brad Darby asked Bukowski to back off, but Bukowski didn"t seem to care what he said. When the day came to an end, Ruth found herself cowering beside Bukowski in his bed in the motel room they had taken for the night; there was no couch and she had to sleep somewhere. They didn"t have intercourse, but she feels she suffered an emotional rape. "That was the ugliest experience I have ever had in my life," she says. "He was unbelievable."

In the morning, Brad Darby drove them all back to LA, Bukowski refusing to speak to Ruth even though they sat side by side "this ma.s.sive, pouting, brooding, hating energy". She got out at the airport, never to see him again.

A couple of years later, Ruth picked up a copy of his novel Women and, flicking through it, realized it was about women Bukowski had known, women like Liza Williams and Linda King and Joanna Bull, and that he had included her as well. He had changed her name to Cecelia Keesing and wrote that she was fat and boring.

We continued drinking. Cecelia had just one more and stopped.

"I want to go out and look at the moon and stars," she said. "It"s so beautiful out."

"All right, Cecelia."

She went outside by the swimming pool and sat in a deck chair.

"No wonder Bill died," I said. "He starved. She never gives it away."

Nasty though this is, the novel did not give an honest account of the events surrounding William Wantling"s death. Bukowski did not admit to writing the story that appeared in the LA Free Press. He also left out the viler things he said to Ruth at Laguna Beach. But Ruth never forgot what happened. "That was a horror," she says. "That is a rape in my life I haven"t got over yet."

* As described in the Prologue.

10.

GETTING FAMOUS.

"Does this face bother you?" Bukowski asked the young woman. They were at a party in Santa Cruz after a benefit reading where he had appeared with beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder. "I mean, you find it revolting?" he asked, touching his bulbous nose and oatmeal complexion.

"No," she answered carefully. "I think you should judge a man by the inside of him."

"Well good," he said. "Let"s go and f.u.c.k then."

Although nervous to the point of sickness earlier in the evening, drinking from a flask of vodka and orange to steady himself on stage, "one shot for each poem he read" recalls Ginsberg, Bukowski manipulated the crowd of sixteen hundred with consummate skill, asking them disarmingly: "Isn"t this boring?" before giving a captivating reading.

Ginsberg came on afterwards and was chanting a blues litany when he was told there had been a bomb threat. "So I turned to rhymed improvisation and explained the situation in friendly song, the audience began to understand and began filing out of the theater calmly. All the poets followed, after the audience left, and Bukowski looked at me and said, surprisingly, "Ginsberg, you"re a good man." I was a little apprehensive he"d disapprove of me as "academic" or a four-eyed queer, but he was agreeable and friendly."

When Ginsberg arrived at the party that evening, Bukowski announced with mock-seriousness: "Ladies and Gentlemen, we"ve got Allen Ginsberg as guest of honor tonight. Can you believe it? Allen Ginsberg!" He called for the music to be turned down and, when it wasn"t, said to Ginsberg, whom he"d put in an affectionate headlock: "A man of genius, the first poet to cut through light and consciousness for two thousand years and these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds don"t even appreciate it."

Ginsberg rubbed Bukowski"s back to try and calm him.

"That feels good, Allen, real good," said Bukowski. "Have a drink."

Ginsberg said he"d already had enough.

"Everybody knows that after Howl you never wrote anything worth a s.h.i.t," said Bukowski, angry his offer of a drink had been rejected. He turned to the people around them, and asked: "Has Allen written anything worth a s.h.i.t since Howl and Kay-dish?"

"Kaddish," Ginsberg corrected him.

"Allen, you"re tearing me apart. You"re a barracuda, Allen, eating me up with your tongue," he laughed, contemptuously, and reeled off into a drunken bear-like dance with, as Ginsberg recalls "his big pants falling down halfway from his behind".

He was getting quite famous now, although still not as famous as he would become, accepted as an equal by established writers like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He"d even been asked to read at the beats" de facto club, The Naropa Inst.i.tute, in Colorado, although he declined the invitation. The furthest thing from his mind was joining that gang, no matter how friendly they were towards him. Of the beat writers, only William Burroughs had given him the cold shoulder, snubbing him at a reading, which was ironic because Burroughs was the only one he admired. Bukowski muttered about going outside and fighting him.

"I could push him over with one punch," he told Harold Norse, who knew them both.

"Yeah, but you"d be dead," said Norse. "He"d shoot you."

It was all starting to happen for Bukowski. His books were selling well; a friend in Los Angeles was working on his biography*; Rolling Stone magazine even ran a feature-length profile of Bukowski, informing its readers that the great French intellectuals, Jean Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, were fans of his work. Sartre and Genet had apparently named Bukowski as the "greatest American poet alive today". This plaudit was widely reported in the underground press, becoming one of the most famous remarks about Bukowski, yet it is almost certainly another myth, possibly one created by Bukowski himself.

Leading world experts on the lives and work of both Genet and Sartre have no knowledge of either writer ever having said anything about Bukowski. "I do not think Bukowski was in the literary tastes of Jean Genet," says Albert Dichy, director of the Genet archive in Paris. Edmund White, whose biography is the pre-eminent work on Genet, says he is also unaware of any connection between Genet and Bukowski. Sartre experts in Europe and America similarly dismiss the remark and, faced with this evidence, John Martin concludes the quotation is no more than apocryphal. There is certainly no doc.u.mentary evidence for it in any of the various archives of Bukowski"s papers, leading one to wonder whether Bukowski simply made it up, as he had colluded in making up the Henry Miller plaudit, to get publicity. However the quotation came into circulation, and its origins are still mysterious, the supposed praise of Genet and Sartre added to Bukowski"s burgeoning fame.*

It was as much Bukowski"s personality as his work that attracted attention, and he became the subject of poems by other writers who found him a fascinating character. Jack Micheline, Harold Norse and Steve Richmond all published work about Bukowski. At Santa Cruz, Linda King kept the audience in gales of laughter with salty poems about their s.e.x life. Writers outside Bukowski"s circle wrote about him, too, most notably the short story writer and poet Raymond Carver who met Bukowski at a university reading in California.

"I look around this room and see plenty of typers, but I see no writers for you guys don"t know what love is," Bukowski sneered at the faculty, when he got up on the podium to read. He included Carver in the insult, and proceeded to drink him under the table when invited back to his house after the reading.

Carver took the encounter in good spirit, respecting Bukowski"s "raw honesty and living out of extremities" as his widow Tess Gallagher says, and was inspired to write "You Don"t Know What Love is (an evening with Charles Bukowski)" which brilliantly, and affectionately, describes Bukowski in his cups: You don"t know what love is Bukowski said I"m 51 years old look at me I"m in love with this young broad I got it bad but she"s hung up too so it"s all right man that"s the way it should be I get in their blood and they can"t get me out They try everything to get away from me but they all come back in the end They all came back to me except the one I planted I cried over that one but I cried easy in those days Don"t let me get onto the hard stuff man I get mean then I could sit here and drink beer with you hippies all night I could drink ten quarts of this beer and nothing it"s like water But let me get onto the hard stuff and I"ll start throwing people out windows I"ll throw anybody out the window I"ve done it But you don"t know what love is You don"t know because you"ve never been in love it"s that simple "Man, that night he wrote about me I was drunk, naturally, and screaming at all these professors and college kids," Bukowski said. "Oh boy, I was singing that night and Carver caught that."

He upped his appearance fee to $1,000, quite a sum compared to the $25 he asked back in 1970 when he started reading. Bukowski a.s.sumed most universities and clubs would be unable to afford him at this price and he would therefore be spared the ordeal of performing so often. But still he got asked and, the more he got paid, the less respect he had for the crowds. They certainly weren"t interested in hearing serious work, as he found out when he appeared at Baudelaire"s nightclub in Santa Barbara.

"Let"s get this G.o.d-d.a.m.ned reading over with," he said, wearily, as he climbed on stage.

John Martin had relocated Black Sparrow Press to Santa Barbara, an hour"s drive north of LA, and was in the audience with his wife, Barbara. He rarely attended Bukowski"s readings and had requested the poem "one for the shoeshine man" as a special treat. It was one of Bukowski"s greatest works, surprisingly tender and optimistic: I am bitter sometimes but the taste has often been sweet. it"s only that I"ve feared to say it. it"s like when your woman says, "tell me you love me," and you can"t.

But subtlety was lost on this crowd. They expected an exhibition of crudity from the dirty old man: s.e.x poems, drinking poems and scatology.

"Cliche! Cliche!" a heckler called out.

The normally mild-mannered John Martin was so offended he pulled the back of the heckler"s chair sending him sprawling onto the floor. They squared up for a fight as Bukowski ploughed on: the best of you I like more than you think.

the others don"t count except that they have fingers and heads and some of them eyes and most of them legs and all of them good and bad dreams and a way to go.

"Charles," came a cultural female voice, when he"d finished. She obviously didn"t know n.o.body called him that. "Charles, what do you think of women with big noses?"

"Jesus Christ. I have to sit here and try to answer your dumb s.h.i.t questions?" He shook his head sadly. Was he a comedian, a clown? There was a m.u.f.fled thud as the doormen threw the heckler against a parking meter outside. "What do I think about big-nosed women? I"m not interested in their noses." There was a ripple of laughter. "f.u.c.k off!" he said.

It seemed like they wanted him to insult them. "You disgusting creatures," he said, obligingly. "You make me sick." They laughed like hyenas at that.

He said he knew he was giving a bad reading, but he couldn"t care less. If they didn"t like it, they could leave. There would be no refund. "I"ve already got your money in my pocket," he said. He appeared slightly demented as he licked the microphone, making a huge slurping sound, and then shuffled his papers into a pile and got up to go.

"f.u.c.k you guys," he said, as he left the stage.

Claire Rabe, the owner of the club, had watched the performance in astonishment. "People were absolutely glued," she says. "He was the first kind of punk event." Like many women, she found herself attracted to Bukowski, and although she thought him dreadfully ugly and a "real slob" (he was so drunk snot was running from his nose) she invited him home and went to bed with him. "He was wonderfully homely, impressively so," she says. "I found him very desirable."

For all his boozing and womanizing, Bukowski continued to work hard to try and boost his income above the monthly stipend he received from John Martin, recently raised from $100 to $300 in line with the increasing sales of his books. He reviewed a Rolling Stones concert for Creem magazine, the closest he came to straight journalism, although much of the article was taken up with meditations on horse racing, and he concluded that Beethoven was much more satisfying to listen to than Mick Jagger. He agreed to City Lights releasing an alb.u.m of the 1972 San Francisco reading. His poems continued to appear in numerous small magazines and as broadsides. And, most importantly, he published a powerful second novel.

Factotum is the story of a young man working at a series of menial jobs, a fictionalized version of Bukowski"s own experiences in the 1940s and early 1950s, before he joined the United States Postal Service. It was inspired by Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell"s autobiographical account of being dest.i.tute in England and France between the wars. Orwell seems to have suffered greater hardship than Bukowski, if for a shorter period (he certainly didn"t have money to waste in bars) yet Bukowski saw the reverse as being true. "This guy thinks something has happened to him?" he said. "Compared to me, he just got scratched. Not that it wasn"t a good book, but it made me think that I might have something interesting to say along those same lines."

The defining scene in Factotum comes halfway through the novel when Henry Chinaski is fired from an auto parts warehouse by a boss who has been kind to him and who reproaches Chinaski for his laziness: "You haven"t been busting your a.s.s, Chinaski."

I stared down at my shoes for some time. I didn"t know what to say. Then I looked at him.

"I"ve given you my time. It"s all I"ve got to give it"s all any man has. And for a pitiful buck and a quarter an hour."

"Remember you begged for this job. You said your job was your second home."

"... my time so that you can live in your big house on the hill and have all the things that go with it. If anybody has lost anything on this deal, on this arrangement ... I"ve been the loser. Do you understand?"

The refusal to conform to the convention of honest work for honest pay, to take a subservient position in society because that is the capitalist order, is close to Orwell"s socialist ideas. In Down and Out in Paris and London, he wrote that the tenet that all work is good had resulted in "mountains of useless drudgery". In Bukowski"s case, the rejection of society went further and was almost anarchistic, although such terminology would have stuck in his throat. "My writing has no meaning," Bukowski said, disingenuously. "It has no moral aspect, it has no social aspect."

Reviewing Factotum in the New York Times, Richard Elman wrote: "Not since Orwell has the condition of being down and out been so well recorded in the first person." Elman also noted the novel was in striking contrast to the "callow journalism" of Bukowski"s Notes of a Dirty Old Man column for which he had become notorious in Los Angeles.

The short stories Bukowski wrote for the LA Free Press, and p.o.r.nographic magazines like Adam, Screw, Fling, and Larry Flynt"s Hustler, were far less crafted than the work Black Sparrow Press published. Bukowski commonly used extreme language to shock: women were "wh.o.r.es" and intercourse was "rape", pandering to his readers" basest expectations. Not only was the work often poor, he didn"t enjoy writing it. On the morning he had to deliver his copy, he frequently telephoned John Martin complaining about not having written a word. "Why am I doing this?" he asked.

Martin reminded him he did it for money and it was n.o.body"s idea but his own. Personally he didn"t think much of the LA Free Press or the column. "All they wanted was s.e.x stuff from him and that"s where that reputation came from," he says. "He was trying to be a dirty writer, not a literary person at all. He would call me I think he had a 2 p.m. deadline on Thursday he would call me moaning and groaning at 10 a.m. Thursday; he hadn"t written anything, and then he just whacked something out. I have gone through all that stuff to find stories for my books and a lot of it is poorly written, just p.i.s.s poor. But if you read Factotum, there are no "wh.o.r.es". They are all women he tries to relate to. He admires them from afar and thinks they are way beyond him."

Occasionally Bukowski wrote a powerful story for the newspaper, or the s.e.x magazines, although the subject matter was often distasteful. None was more shocking, nor more accomplished, than The Fiend in which Bukowski describes the rape of a child.

Martin Blanchard, an unemployed solitary drunk, spies on a young girl from the window of his apartment. She is aged between six and nine years and he becomes aroused by glimpses of her underwear. He m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es, gets drunk and then rapes the girl in a garage while her friends watch. Every detail is graphically described and the rape scene reads like p.o.r.nography: Martin Blanchard got her panties off, but at the same time he couldn"t seem to stop kissing that small mouth, and she was in a faint, had stopped hitting his face, but the different lengths of their bodies made it difficult, awkward, very, and being in pa.s.sion, he couldn"t think. But his c.o.c.k was out large, purple, ugly, like some stinking insanity run away with itself, and no place to go.

And all the time under this small light bulb Martin heard the boys" voices saying, "Look! Look! He"s got that big thing and he"s trying to stick that big thing into her slit!"

"I hear that"s how people have babies."

"Are they going to have a baby right here?"

"I guess so."

The Fiend is the most extreme prose piece Bukowski ever wrote. He deliberately describes the rape to t.i.tillate his male readers and further manipulates them to sympathize with Blanchard by having him beaten by police at the end of the story. John Martin refused to publish it, but Hustler paid $1,000 to use it and, in an interview with the magazine, Bukowski tried to explain and justify the story.

He said he wrote The Fiend after seeing a little girl playing in a neighbor"s yard, just as he had written. He admitted masturbating himself and frankly said he had felt like raping her. Hustler asked what stopped him.

"I didn"t do it, no. I felt like doing it," he replied. "I"m a potential rapist, but I know that I can"t get away with it. It doesn"t pay off. If I raped the kid, where do I end up? I don"t get any a.s.s for fifteen years, right?"

He conceded that, by and large, little girls were frightened by the idea of having intercourse with men, but said he would let an eight-year-old suck his c.o.c.k "if she wanted to".

"People tell me that it arouses them when they read it," he said of the story. "So there must be some truth in it beyond just myself and my feeling, or the character"s feeling towards the child ... They"re very nice, you know. They wear those little short skirts, and when they put on their roller skates, you see their panties."

Bukowski"s justification in writing the story was that he was trying to get inside the mind of a rapist to show men something about themselves they might not care to acknowledge.

Most of the time he was bereft of ideas for his column, stealing or b.a.s.t.a.r.dizing stories from any source. His neighbor, Tina Darby, helped by regaling him with her adventures as an exotic dancer and by telling him what went on at the s.e.x parties she and Brad went to. "We would tell stories to each other and they would be in the LA Free Press. He would take a conversation, twist it around a little and that would be his column," she says. He also got material from the low-life characters who lived in the court, like Sam who worked as doorman at a local ma.s.sage parlor. He became Sam the Wh.o.r.ehouse Man in several stories.

At night, after he had stopped writing, Bukowski sometimes strolled up to the coffee stand on the corner of Hollywood and Western. He might wander into Le s.e.x Shoppe, the long-established p.o.r.nographic book store where Brad Darby was manager. They smoked cigarettes and Brad usually gave him some magazines to take home. Other times Bukowski stood and watched the street prost.i.tutes, some of whom he came to have a nodding acquaintance with.

"I think he felt at home there, and he thought of himself as a tough guy, so he liked sometimes to go up to the corner, stand around, watch the lights change," says Darby. "Everybody knew him, so everybody would wave at him and call his name out. He liked that."