The 1600 block of North Mariposa Avenue cut northsouth from Hollywood Boulevard to the broken down, busted-out east end of Sunset Boulevard in the rotten core of the district he adopted as his new home. He parked his "57 Plymouth and went into the Spanish-style rooming house at number 1623: two dozen cold water apartments arranged like prison cells along three landings. There was no elevator and no air conditioning. He took room 303 on the second floor. There were a couple of old chairs, a lamp with dented shade, chipped dining table, c.o.c.kroaches in the kitchenette, a Murphy bed that folded out of the wall and a shared bathroom down the hall.
Ned"s Liquor Store, at the corner of Hollywood and Normandie, was a short walk away. Bukowski stocked up on Miller High Life beer, boxes of White Owl cigars and cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes, went back to his room, turned his transistor radio to a cla.s.sical station, pulled the shade, flipped the top from a beer and sat at the typewriter, thinking of the other losers who had lived there before him. Then he began to type whatever came to mind, experimenting with putting down what Black Sparrow Press publisher, John Martin, calls a "series of images", as opposed to his mature work which mostly consisted of stories.
"Hank"s room was filthy," remembers Jory Sherman, a poet from St Paul, Minnesota, who became a close friend at this time. "He never cleaned up. Dishes in the sink and cigarette b.u.t.ts everywhere."
Grim though the surroundings were, Bukowski was free from his failed marriage, and the expectations of his ambitious wife. He was doing what he wanted, and had his job at the post office to keep him from starving. "... at the best of times there was a small room and the machine and the bottle," he wrote. "The sound of the keys, on and on, and the shouts: "HEY! KNOCK IT OFF, FOR CHRIST"S SAKE WE"RE WORKING PEOPLE HERE AND WE"VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!" With broomsticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines ..."
The landlord told him he would have to stop typing at 9.30 p.m. because the other tenants were complaining. That was precisely the time Bukowski was getting into the swing of it, with a few beers inside him, a cigar going and maybe some Mozart on the radio, if he lucked it. He put up with the noise of the other tenants: the canned laughter from their television sets, and "the lesbian down the hall" who played jazz records all evening with her door open. Why couldn"t he be allowed to write? But the landlord had made his mind up. It was a new rule. So Bukowski developed a system. He typed until 9.30 p.m. and finished his work silently in hand-printed block capitals. He became so skilful he could hand-print almost as fast as he could type.
For several years, contact with his parents had been limited to asking for money when he was broke, and it got so that they barely saw each other. Kate and Henry moved out of LA to the suburb of Temple City, buying a new bungalow on Doreen Avenue and often complained to their neighbours, Francis and Irma Billie, about their wino son. By Francis Billie"s account, Henry was the same bullying braggart Bukowski had always despised, remembering that he tried to boss the neighbors around and exaggerated his importance at the LA County Museum, describing himself as Art Director although he had never risen higher than a preparator, and that by posing as the author, Charles Bukowski.
Kate started to drink heavily. She ordered deliveries of wine from the corner liquor store when Henry was at work and Irma Billie says that, when Henry came home, he often found Kate pa.s.sed out drunk.
The last time Bukowski saw his mother she was in the Rosemead Rest Home, dying of cancer. Kate said he should have more respect for his parents, especially his father. "Your father is a great man," she told him.
Henry decided their son would make no further visits, and stopped giving him news of Kate"s condition. "Henry said it wouldn"t do any good anyway," says Irma Billie. "He would just come down there drunk, so he didn"t bother to tell him." On Christmas Eve, 1956, Bukowski went out and bought a rosary as a gift for his mother and drove over to the home. He was trying to open the door to her room when a nurse told him she had died the day before. To what extent the bereavement caused him pain is impossible to say for certain because Bukowski never dwelt on his feelings for his mother, either in his writings or in private conversation, but it seems to have made little impression on him. "It"s a very veiled sort of thing, barely there," says his widow, Linda Lee Bukowski.
Henry lost no time looking for a new wife. First he tried to seduce Anna Bukowski, widow of his late brother, John, but she didn"t want to know, so he got engaged to one of the women who worked at the Billies" dry-cleaning business. Late on the afternoon of 4 December, 1958 nine months after Bukowski"s divorce Henry"s fiance came by the house and found him dead on the kitchen floor having apparently suffered a heart attack. If Bukowski failed to grieve for his mother, the death of the father was positively a cause for jubilation. "... he"s dead dead dead, thank G.o.d," he wrote.
The old man"s corpse lay in a Temple City funeral parlor where his girlfriend wept over the casket. "No, no, no," she wailed. "He can"t be dead!" He had only been sixty-three, she said, a fit and strong man, with many years ahead of him. Bukowski, his Uncle Jake and Aunt Eleanor stood together looking at the corpse. Bukowski remembered his father beating him with the razor strop, telling him he would never amount to anything; trying to push his head down into the vomit on the rug; beating him while his mother stood by doing nothing; beating Kate until she screamed. He had a powerful compulsion to push the girlfriend aside and spit on his face.
A substantial block of granite marked the family plot at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena BUKOWSKI etched in capital letters. The older ones were almost all dead: Henry and Kate; Henry"s brothers, John and Ben, both broken by the Depression; Grandfather Leonard, the drunken veteran of the Kaiser"s army; and Grandmother Emilie, the hard-sh.e.l.l Baptist who cackled she would outlive them all. But Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr was left, whiskey on his breath and an uneasiness in his stomach as he listened to the prayers said for his namesake.
Back at Doreen Avenue, friends of his parents looked over bits of furniture and talked about lawn mowers and hedge clippers, and other oddments borrowed or promised over the years, things "Henry and Kate would have wanted us to have". Bukowski told them to take whatever they wanted, giving away pictures from the walls, silverware, anything they asked for. Women were practically fighting over his mother"s home-made preserves in the kitchen, and so much stuff was taken that the contents of the house was valued at only $100 when it was sold.
There was a perverse pleasure lounging around in the empty bungalow while "the old man was down in the dirt" and Henry"s attorney totted up what he would inherit. Bukowski remembered his father saying a family could get rich if the sons of each generation bought property and willed it to their heirs. It had seemed a stupid idea and he felt vindicated in his disdain for his father"s lifestyle when the attorney informed him that Henry had less than $300 in savings and still owed $6,613 to the Bank of America on his mortgage. Apart from the equity in the house, the only real a.s.sets were a pension fund, a painting by Erich Heckal and a four-year-old Plymouth. Still, when everything was settled, Bukowski received a little more than $15,000. After he became famous, he claimed to have drunk and gambled away the inheritance, but he never revealed he had inherited $15,000, a substantial amount in 1959, and it"s unlikely he frittered it all away. Friends remember him having thousands of dollars in savings within a few years of his father"s death, and the truth is that, from this point on, he became careful with money.
As Bukowski produced and submitted a greater volume of work never bothering to keep carbons so he had no copies unless the poems were published or returned his poems appeared more frequently in the little magazines. This was partly because he was writing darker, more realistic poems reflecting his recent experiences of loss and death. In 1959, he had poems accepted by magazines including Nomad, Coastlines, Quicksilver and Epos. Success fired up his ambition, as Jory Sherman recalls: "He said, "I want to beat them all, beat every one of them." He wanted fame, he really did."
His first chapbook was published in October, 1960, two months after his fortieth birthday. E. V. Griffith, a small press editor from Eureka, California, who had already published broadsides of two Bukowski poems, spent two years sweating over Flower, Fist and b.e.s.t.i.a.l Wail. "There were numerous delays in getting the book into print and the correspondence that ensued between poet and publisher was often testy," says Griffith. "But any ill-will dissipated quickly when copies were at last in Bukowski"s hands."
Flower, Fist and b.e.s.t.i.a.l Wail is little more than a pamphlet, twenty-eight pages long and only two hundred copies printed, a good proportion of which went to friends of the publisher and author, yet it had a special significance for Bukowski being his first book.
Many of the poems, like "soire"e", were dark and introspective: in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.
I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sounds against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.
Also in his fortieth year, Bukowski was show-cased in Targets, a New Mexico quarterly whose editors turned over an entire section of the magazine to "A Charles Bukowski Signature". This included a number of his most accomplished early poems, like "The Tragedy of the Leaves" which again is a gloomy, claustrophobic poem. It concludes with a confrontation between the poet and an angry landlady in a rooming house not unlike the place Bukowski was living: and I walked into the dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to h.e.l.l, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for rent because the world had failed us both.
A further step towards what Judson Crews calls the "Hank persona" came with the chapbook, Longshot Pomes (sic) for Broke Players, published in New York. There were poems about prost.i.tutes, the race track and cla.s.sical music, not the best work Bukowski ever wrote on these subjects, but getting closer to what he would become famous for. The change of direction was indicated by the cover art of a man playing cards at a table while a woman waits in bed. Inside was a brief biography giving the salient points of the emerging Bukowski mythology: his unhappy childhood; the years b.u.mming around the country, living in rooming houses and working at menial jobs, crazy jobs like being the oven man in a dog biscuit factory and "coconut man" in a cake factory. These jobs may have been invented to add colour, as they are not recorded on the very detailed work experience forms Bukowski later completed for the post office.
Of all the small press publishers Bukowski dealt with in these early years the most significant, by far, were Jon and Louise "Gypsy Lou" Webb and their extraordinary Loujon Press.
As a young man, Jon Webb took part in the hold-up of a jewellery store in Cleveland, Ohio, and served three years in a reformatory. It was whilst he was inside that he developed a pa.s.sion for literature, editing the reformatory weekly and writing crime stories. Upon being paroled, he returned to Cleveland where he met and married an Italian girl who came to be known as Gypsy Lou because of her colorful clothes and long dark hair. In 1954 they moved to the French quarter of New Orleans where Jon Webb decided to become a publisher of avant-garde writing. He contacted William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller and other leading underground figures urging them to submit work to The Outsider, a journal he and Gypsy Lou were setting up. Jory Sherman was appointed West Coast editor and suggested they might also publish Bukowski. The Webbs loved his work. As Gypsy Lou says, they were greatly impressed with, "the realness, you know, not phony at all. He was just very honest and down to earth."
The Webbs published eleven Bukowski poems in the first issue of The Outsider, some of the best he had written, alongside work by fashionable beat writers. The Bukowski selection was all the more impressive because Webb took a professional approach to being an editor, rejecting much of what Bukowski submitted as sub-standard. The best Bukowski poem in the issue was "old man, dead in a room", which he meant as his own epitaph: and as my grey hands drop a last desperate pen in some cheap room they will find me there and never know my name my meaning nor the treasure of my escape.
At times it seemed the poem might be prophetic. Bukowski was drinking hard, hitting the c.o.c.ktail lounges night after night, getting into fights, and often waking up in city drunk tanks with the other "silverfish", as he called his cell-mates. He retched so hard in the morning he saw blood in the toilet pan. Maybe he would die as the doctors had predicted, ripped apart by another hemorrhage. His drinking caused him to suffer small injuries and unpleasant ailments: he jammed a shard of gla.s.s in his foot when he was stumbling about drunk one night; and developed hemorrhoids to beat a world record. Thoughts of killing himself returned and he made an abortive attempt at ga.s.sing himself in his room one afternoon.
Once again, he started seeing something of Jane who was in an even more desperate state than when they were living together. She was working as a maid at The Phillips, a dive hotel in Hollywood, in exchange for a room rent-free and a few dollars drinking money. Her legs had lost their shapeliness and her pot belly had grown to a grotesque size. Bukowski referred to her as "the old woman" and they enjoyed the companionship of fellow alcoholics, as he wrote in "A Nice Place": I uncap the new bottle from the bag and she sits in the corner smoking and coughing like an old Aunt from New Jersey Sometimes they had s.e.x, but Jane was so far gone that intercourse repulsed him. He wrote to his pen friend, the Louisiana academic John William Corrington, that it made him think of a film he had once seen of a Cesarian operation.
There was a sense of impending tragedy about Jane, that nothing much could help her. In Post Office, Chinaski visits Betty at her hotel a few days after the Christmas holidays and the scene Bukowski describes is probably an accurate description of how low Jane had fallen by January, 1962: it is early in the morning when Chinaski calls at her room, but Betty is already drunk, surrounded by bottles of liquor given as Christmas gifts by the tenants, all cheap brands. Chinaski fears she will keep drinking until the bottles are empty, or until she is dead.
"Listen," I said, "I ought to take that stuff. I mean, I"ll just give you back a bottle now and then. I won"t drink it."
"Leave the bottles," Betty said. She didn"t look at me. Her room was on the top floor and she sat in a chair by the window watching the morning traffic.
I walked over. "Look, I"m beat. I"ve got to leave. But for Christ"s sake, take it easy on that stuff!"
"Sure," she said.
I leaned over and kissed her goodbye.
A couple of weeks later, on a Sat.u.r.day, Bukowski went back to see her. There was no answer when he knocked at her door, so he went in and saw the bottles were gone, the bed covers had been pulled back and, when he came closer, he saw blood on the sheet. Frenchy, the landlady, told him an ambulance had taken Jane to Los Angeles County Hospital.
Her body was riddled with cancer; she also had cirrhosis of the liver. She had suffered a ma.s.sive hemorrhage, and was in a semi-coma when he arrived, in a ward with three other women, one of whom was laughing loudly as she entertained her visitors. Bukowski pulled a curtain round Jane"s bed for privacy and sat beside her holding her hand, saying her name over and over. He got a rag and wiped away some blood from the corner of her mouth.
"I knew it would be you," she said, rousing herself for a moment.
Jane died on the evening of 22 January, 1962, while Bukowski was trying to place a telephone call to her son in Texas. She was fifty-one.
After the funeral at the San Fernando Mission, north of LA, Bukowski went on a five-day drunk and, when he couldn"t stand his own company any longer, drove over to see Jory Sherman in San Bernadino. They worked their way through a six-pack of Miller High Life as he talked about how it had only been "half a funeral" because there had been a mix up about whether Jane was a bona fide Catholic the priest didn"t want to do the full service. Bukowski said more of Jane"s family should have been there. Just because she was a scrub woman in a cheap hotel didn"t mean she was nothing. He said he wished he had telephoned her more often; maybe if he had called after he saw her that morning, with the bottles, it might have made a difference. "Hank felt he had lost someone that he allowed himself to get very close to, which was rare for him," says Sherman. "I have seldom seen a person so grief-stricken. He was weeping and he was drinking heavily and his world had just crashed."
In the morning, Bukowski drove to the races where he picked up a girl he knew from the post office, but he was unable to have s.e.x when they got back to her place because he imagined Jane was watching. He returned to his room on North Mariposa where he still had some of her belongings: black beads which he moved through his fingers like a rosary while listening to the silence of the telephone, the telephone he used to pack with a matchbook cover so he wouldn"t be disturbed when he was working. The closet door was half open, more of her things hanging there blouses, skirts and jackets, the lifeless fabric her body had given shape and movement to. When the hangover cleared on 29 January, he began to write a series of grief poems which are among his most affecting work.
.... and I speak to all the G.o.ds, Jewish G.o.ds, Christ-G.o.ds, chips of blinking things, idols, pills, bread, fathoms, risks, knowledgeable surrender, rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad without a chance, hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance, I lean on this, I lean on all of this and I know: her dress upon my arm: but they will not give her back to me.
He called the poem, "for Jane, with all the love I had, which was not enough"
4.
CONVERSATIONS IN CHEAP ROOMS.
For months after Jane"s death, Bukowski was profoundly depressed, and unable to get her out of his mind. Women he saw in the street reminded him of Jane. He saw her face in his mind"s eye when he woke, and she was there again at night when he tried to sleep.
"Even though he hadn"t been living with her at the time, he mourned her. He really had an attachment," says Ann Menebroker, a poet from Sacramento who began corresponding with Bukowski at this time. He felt so depressed he hid knives, scissors and razors out of sight, saying he couldn"t remember the last time he"d suffered such a serious attack of his suicide complex, and Ann believes the desire to kill himself was real enough. "I"m sure he felt he wished he was dead sometimes, with his drinking and his going back and forth to jail. It was a terrible existence. I think the writing and the drinking was all that he had to keep things going and, yes, I think he meant it. His whole life was an extended suicide."
He drank to try and forget his problems and spent hours touring the bars of East Hollywood, sometimes visiting the burlesque shows on Sunset Strip where he yelled at the go-go girls.
"SHAKE IT IN MY FACE, BABY!" he would holler, the beads on the girl"s top flicking up an erotic wind of promise as she bent down and jiggled herself for Bukowski, hoping he would tip her well.
"YEAH, SHAKE IT!"
After a while, management gathered, correctly, that he was mocking the performance and kicked him out.
When he woke in his room the following morning, with a pounding head and dry mouth, Bukowski discovered the $450 he had won at the track the previous afternoon had gone from his pocket. Another calamity: Jane"s goldfish, which he had taken from her room at the Phillips Hotel after she died, was not in its bowl on the table. It was on the floor having apparently leapt out during the night, either trying to catch a fly, he presumed, or in an attempt at suicide. Looking at its discoloring body, he was reminded of Jane and all the regrets he had about her death.
He was so upset he called Jory Sherman to tell him what had happened. "It crushed him; he couldn"t stand to see animals die. He was just emotionally overcome because that was a part of Jane," says Sherman, who was a little put out by the call because Bukowski hadn"t been much of a friend to him during a recent crisis. "He was a very tender-hearted guy not towards people necessarily, but towards goldfish..."
Bukowski wrote an extraordinary poem about the death of the fish, "I thought of ships, of armies, hanging on ...", describing how he tried to revive the fish by putting it back in the water, but it floated dead so he had to flush it down the toilet. The tone is so sombre, it becomes comical, although that was almost certainly not his intention: I put the bowl in the corner and thought, I really can"t stand much more of this.
There were many sad, hung-over days like these when he stayed in his room watching the birds in the trees on North Mariposa, laying on the bed with a bottle in his hand listening to cla.s.sical music. Late in the afternoon the other tenants returned from what he a.s.sumed were their miserable jobs, and began scampering up and down the concrete stairs like rodents. He was convinced he would die alone in that "1623 place", his stomach ripped apart after a heavy night drinking, gobs of blood staining the sheets round his head, empty bottles in the wastebasket, the yellow bathrobe Jane had worn hanging like a shroud in the closet, flies shuttling about on the screen. Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Jake were his next of kin, now both parents were dead, but what would they care about his work, his chapbooks and collection of magazines? They would probably throw the mags out with the garbage, along with the racing forms and old newspapers.
He tried to write himself out of his depression, firing off submissions to editors all over the country, including newspaper journalist, John Bryan, who recalls how amazingly productive Bukowski was: "He started sending me boxes of material. He sent cartons, a couple of hundred poems, thirty or forty short stories. I could pull anything I liked out of it, which was a nice choice, and I would send back the rest."
John Bryan visited Mariposa three months after Jane died and found Bukowski in a dreadful state, broke, hungover and suffering all manner of ailments. "He had a waste basket full of hemorrhoid Preparation-H tubes. He apparently had the worst case of hemorrhoids in the world." Bukowski gave him some more poems, four of which Bryan printed in his magazine, Renaissance. The work was punk-like in its nihilism. The poem "an empire of coins" concludes with the words "f.u.c.k everybody", and "the biggest b.r.e.a.s.t.s" ends with these sneering lines: the waiter came smiling with his watery mouth but I sent him running right off for a couple of motherf.u.c.king drinks.
This sort of provocative material added to his growing notoriety and a number of editors, critics and academics began to champion Bukowski as a fresh new voice. Small press publisher R.R. Cuscaden wrote an essay in Satis magazine likening Bukowski"s estrangement from society to that of Baudelaire. It was Cuscaden who also published the third limited edition Bukowski chapbook, Run with the Hunted, dedicated to John William Corrington, the Louisiana-based poet and English teacher who wrote a thank-you letter so effusive it made Bukowski cringe: "I just got immortal: at least a footnote when they write up Charlie."
The sound of Bukowski bashing out all these poems on his manual "typer" continued to irritate his neighbors, even when he tried to work within the hours agreed with the landlord, and the old woman downstairs began thumping the ceiling with her broom again. This made him very angry because he had to listen to the canned laughter coming from her television. He didn"t think those television shows were funny, anyway, except The Honeymooners which he enjoyed whenever he caught an episode in a bar. He took a page of a letter he"d been writing to the Webbs and scrawled his neighbor a note which he took downstairs and slid under her door: You knock on my floor when I type within hours. Why in the h.e.l.l don"t you keep your stupid t.v. set down at 10.30 tonight? I don"t complain to the managers, but it seems to me that your outlook is very one-sided.
H Bukowski.
Apt 303 He wrote to Ann Menebroker: "Doesn"t she know I am the great Charles Bukowski? The b.i.t.c.h!"
The old woman in 203 replied: Sir: It is not my TV set you hear, I don"t have it loud at any time.
I was told you work from 5.30, but your machine is going day and night and Sunday. It is like living beneath an a.r.s.enal.
This is an apartment house not a business establishment... It sounds as if you have all kinds of machinery up there.
You would not be allowed all that noise and racket in any apt house where people live for peace and quiet.
I have been in this house 26 years, and have inquired from many people, and you are out of line. Apt 203.
He took a month"s unpaid leave from the post office to play the horses, but they were "running like salami" and he lost his money. He became so low that suicide seemed the only logical solution to his problems. He began putting his affairs in order: mailing Jane"s bobby pin to Ann, boxing up the letters he had received from Corrington and mailing them back to Baton Rouge "before something happens", as he explained.
He had always hated Christmas, appalled by the behavior of what he called "amateur drunks". Bukowski believed it was a time of year when professional drinkers like himself should stay indoors. "I hate to go out on the streets on Xmas day. The f.u.c.kers act like they are out of their minds," he wrote to the Webbs. But a few days before Christmas, 1962, when he was particularly low, he broke his rule and downed three fifths of Scotch in the local bars before pa.s.sing out on a neighbor"s lawn. The police locked him up for the night in the drunk tank and, when he came to, Bukowski found himself frightened by his own excesses, as he wrote on 18 December to Ann: Have been laying here in horrible fit of depression. My drinking days are over. This is too much. Jail is a horrible place. I almost go mad there.
I don"t know what is going to become of me. I have no trade, no future. Sick, depressed, blackly, heavily depressed.
Write me something. Maybe a word from you will save me.
Most evenings around 6 p.m. he had to stop work and drive along Sunset Boulevard to his post office job. The setting sun bled the sky in the rear view mirror as he rolled east out of Hollywood, past Echo Park, across Alvarado Street and into downtown, forking left on Alpine Street to the Terminal Annex the "post office" made famous in his novel of that name a gigantic sorting office ornamented with carved eagles and US Postal Service decals.
"How"re you doin" tonight?" called out a.s.sign clerk, Johnny Moore, when Bukowski punched on for the graveyard shift.
"Alright, Big John," he shouted back.
The work floor was the size of a football field, floodlit and busy with hundreds of clerks sticking mail, sorting parcels and lugging sacks while the supervisors yelled for them to keep moving. The noise was incredible. Cancelling machines clattered, huge conveyor belts moved an endless river of mail and there was muzak playing from speakers high up in the roof. It was hot, too, even when Bukowski arrived in the evening, a heat generated by the toil of human beings.
Johnny Moore a.s.signed Bukowski to one of the many booths that made up Sanford Station Letters* or to Parcels where two men together worked tossing boxes around like basketb.a.l.l.s. Parcel work was rotated and, if Bukowski had a hangover when it was his turn, he would ask to work on letters because sorting letters was easier.
"He used to come in loaded sometimes," says Johnny Moore. "That was dismissal right there, but we took care of it." He would a.s.sign Bukowski to a place where the supervisors were unlikely to find him, because the clerks thought of themselves like family, and Bukowski was one of them. "We knew the ropes, see, we was there a long time, and we don"t want no supervisor firing n.o.body when they"re a friend of ours."
There were ten black workers to every white worker on the night shift, which was the most unpopular shift of all at the Annex. "The whites saw it as beneath them," says former clerk Grace Washington. Bukowski could have moved to a day shift, if he wanted, but he stayed on nights for years, coming in around 6.30 p.m. and leaving around 2.30 a.m., because it gave him time during the day to write and go to the track and, perhaps surprisingly, his former co-workers say he was one of the least prejudiced whites in the whole building.
The mail clerks worked in booths leaning on a rest bar made of wood. "What you did, you rested your b.u.t.t on this thing," says David Berger, Bukowski"s union rep. "That would keep you in a permanent position so you weren"t actually standing on your feet, you were at an angle. It kind of took the weight off your feet and made it easier to work." The mail arrived in long trays which had to be sorted within a time limit or else the clerks were "written up" by the supervisors. There were other rules: clerks were only allowed to use their right hand to throw mail, and the mail had to go into the relevant cubby holes so the stamps were "up" and the return addresses "in". Bukowski was not exaggerating when he described in Post Office how this system ground the clerks down over the years. It was a brutal regime and many, including Bukowski, suffered chronic back and shoulder pains.
"KEEP MOVING!" called the supervisors as they marched along beside the rows of clerks. "PICK IT UP NOW!" they yelled, as new mail came down the conveyor belts. Up above in what the clerks called "the spy gallery" other supervisors watched for pilfering. Bukowski knew that if he took one stamp home he would be fired.
The clerks chattered incessantly to pa.s.s the time, about sport mostly, football games and baseball scores. They also bet to see who could clear their trays fastest, each throwing a dollar in a pot and then sticking mail as fast as possible until one clerk finished. But there was no way of beating the clock, as David Berger says: "Just about the time you figure you had cleaned up what was in front of you, here came somebody with another tray, so it never ended."
Bukowski was unusual because he didn"t talk while he was working. He didn"t joke or race the other clerks or try and get the trays that seemed to have less mail. He worked steadily, without joy or complaint, with the stoicism he had learned as a boy. "He wasn"t grumpy, he just never started any conversation," says Berger. "If you talked to him, he would probably answer you, but he would never really carry a conversation." Grace Washington actually wondered if he was r.e.t.a.r.ded.
In his break, Bukowski either went downstairs to the cafeteria or across the street into Chinatown where the clerks could get a late night beer at Mama"s Bar. Sometimes when he was in Mama"s, he would tell the clerks he was a writer, but this only confirmed their opinion that he was a way-out fellow and Johnny Moore says they never believed him anyway. Then it was back to the Annex until 2 a.m., or later in the run-up to Christmas.
For the best part of twelve years Bukowski held this backbreaking job, working two weeks straight and then taking a four-day weekend and, as the years went by, he became convinced it would kill him.
It was a Friday night in the spring of 1963, the start of a long weekend after working ten days at the post office, and Bukowski was drinking in his room. Not having had any female company to speak of since Jane died over a year ago, and feeling lonely, he decided to call a woman who had written to him saying she loved his work. She was from somewhere back east but had recently come to stay with her mother in Garden Grove, a suburb of LA.
"I have to see you right now," Bukowski insisted, when he got her on the line. "You have to come at once."
She said she would love to, but had no transport because her mother was using the car.
"How about tomorrow?"
"No, come now."
There was a Greyhound leaving Anaheim around midnight. If she walked to the station, she might catch it. But she wouldn"t be in LA until at least 2 a.m. Bukowski said he would be up.
His new friend was born Frances Elizabeth Dean in San Rafael, California, in 1922, but later changed her name to FrancEyE. Her father was an electrical engineer from a well-to-do family who made a fortune inventing a type of boiler. He died when FrancEyE was eight and she was brought up in Lexington, Ma.s.sachusetts, home of her paternal grandparents. She went to Smith College where she joined the poetry club and started to write about what she describes as "my bitterness and despair". She married a soldier and settled in Michigan, raising a family of four daughters, but continued to write poetry and to correspond with other poets.
One of her pen friends was Stanley Kurnik who ran a writers" workshop in LA and knew Bukowski. He would go over to North Mariposa and look at his poems, the pile of old work he kept in the closet, and pick out some good ones to read to his workshop group. Sometimes Kurnik sent copies to FrancEyE and she was so thrilled by them that she wrote to Bukowski expressing her admiration. When her marriage ended, and she moved to Garden Grove, FrancEyE wrote again, this time asking to meet him. It was this letter Bukowski was turning over when he called her on the telephone.
"Of course he was drunk," she says. "He was drunk out of his mind. I didn"t realize this at the time. But I do remember thinking in the cab that brought me from the bus station, I hope he does follow through because I don"t have enough money to pay this cab driver."
The next thing FrancEyE knew she was at North Mariposa in the still of the early morning with Bukowski, sobered up a little, coming down the steps with the money for the driver. "Bukowski seemed like this giant, this gorgeous giant," she says. "His hair was all slicked back ... His gaze was very direct. He had a very symmetrical face. His nose was kind of smashed, but I just thought he was gorgeous."
He was not supposed to have female visitors in his room out of hours, so they sneaked up to 303 and whispered together until dawn. "We would sit and not say anything and he would get nervous because he could never stand silence. He would always say something to start the conversation again." They discussed their mutual feelings of depression and isolation. "I was desperately lonely and grief-stricken and on the edge of suicide all the time because I didn"t have my kids," she says. "I didn"t have a life. And he was in much the same situation." Bukowski spoke about Jane"s death, and all the guilt and grief he felt, and how much he regretted being cruel to a dog they had, when he was drunk one time. When they had worn each other out with their misery, they climbed into the Murphy bed.
The following afternoon Bukowski took FrancEyE to Santa Anita to watch the horses. An incorrigible spendthrift herself, she noticed that, although he was clearly addicted to gambling, he was cautious with the amount of money he spent. "His rent was paid. His savings were in his savings account and he would gamble what he had left," she says.
They began to see each other regularly and she moved into Los Angeles to be near him, taking a cheap room on North Vermont Avenue, a couple of blocks up from the Phillips Hotel. The Hollywood Freeway ran under the apartment building and when she opened her window in the morning she was engulfed in a cloud of exhaust.