yeah, Jim, I saw something in the paper, no experience necessary.
and he said, h.e.l.l, you don"t want a job, and I said, h.e.l.l no, but I need money ...
Encouraged by the reception, he told stories about his life in Hollywood. "Where I live I drink a certain brand of wine, two or three bottles a night, and the liquor stores run out so I have two liquor stores stocking my wine. If one doesn"t have it, I run to the other. The liquor men love me. I"m making those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds rich and I"m killing myself!" There was more clapping. "You mustn"t applaud when I"m killing myself," he laughed.
Afterwards he signed books until his hand was sore and drank champagne as the promoter counted out his money in crisp one hundred-Deutschmark notes.
Montfort hired a white BMW and drove them to Andernach to see Heinrich Fett, Bukowski"s mother"s brother, whom he had been corresponding with on and off since was a child. Uncle Heinrich was ninety but he came bounding down the stairs with gusto, smartly dressed in jacket and tie, and exclaimed in English: "Henry! Henry! My G.o.d, I can"t believe it." Bukowski was close to tears as the old man embraced him. "It"s Henry. After all these years!"
They went to the house of Heinrich"s son, Karl, and his daughter-in-law Josephine. She served wine and cake, like Bukowski remembered his German-born grandmother doing in Pasadena.
It was when one sat and talked gently of things; it was the pause in the battle of life; it was necessary and good. Uncle began talking about his life, of the past ...
(From: Shakespeare Never Did This) Uncle Heinrich needed no translator as he regaled Bukowski with the family history, stopping occasionally to urge more cake on Linda Lee and to replenish his nephew"s gla.s.s. "Your father was a sergeant and he spoke perfect German," he said. ""That handsome Sergeant Bukowski," your mother used to say, "I"ll bet he tries to fool all the girls." A couple of nights later Sergeant Bukowski came up the stairway and knocked. He had meat, the good meat, cooked, plus the other things ... bread, vegetables. We ate it. And after that, late at night, every night he came up with his meat and we ate it. That"s how they met and became married." Bukowski nodded and emptied his gla.s.s. "Your father was a very intelligent man," said Uncle Heinrich.
They spoke about what Bukowski was doing in Germany and Uncle Heinrich said he had read some of his books. He liked most of them, but not The f.u.c.k Machine. "That"s all right, uncle, after I write something I try to forget it," Bukowski replied. "It doesn"t matter afterwards, even if they say it"s good."
Bukowski was concerned they might be tiring the old fellow, so he said they ought to be getting along, and they drove back across town to the Hotel Zum Anker, by the Rhine which had flooded the foresh.o.r.e as it often did at that time of year. Bukowski and Linda Lee went to take a nap while Montfort settled in the bar to label his film. Shortly after he started work, Uncle Heinrich walked in and rapped smartly on the floor with his stick.
"I demand to see Charles!" said the old man. The hotelier pointed to Montfort and suggested he speak to him. Uncle Heinrich banged the floor again. "I forgot something and have to talk to him now."
"He"s taking a nap."
Uncle Heinrich would not be dissuaded, so Montfort called the room and apologized, saying he didn"t know what to do but Bukowski"s uncle was there and demanded he see him right away.
The old man took Bukowski to see the house where he had been born and Bukowski was amused to learn that, until recently, it had been the town brothel. Then they went back to Uncle Heinrich"s home where the old man produced a case of letters and photographs Bukowski"s mother had mailed from America. There were black and white pictures of Bukowski and his parents at Santa Monica beach, a Stars and Stripes flag in the sand; posing with their Model-T Ford; and at Grandma Bukowski"s house yellowing windows into that terrible childhood. Bukowski couldn"t help but cry.
That evening at the hotel he drank like he was possessed, filled with emotion and memories of his parents. "I have never ever seen a man drink so much wine," said Rolf Degen, a journalism student who had come to Andernach to meet Bukowski. The film maker, Thomas Schmitt, also joined them in the bar where Bukowski drank at least seven bottles of wine.
There was a group of travelling salesmen singing traditional German folk songs and, although Bukowski did not understand the words, he sensed their pomposity and started dancing and singing in mockery, prancing on the tables and clapping his hands.
They went up to Bukowski"s room where Degen pretended to interview him using a shower head as a microphone. Bukowski played along with the game for a while and then hurled the shower head into the street, bringing the hotelier pounding up the stairs to see what was going on. Degen was thrown out and Thomas Schmitt was escorted from the building. Bukowski went out on the balcony and bellowed across the frigid Rhine to them. "Thomas, you marvellous motherf.u.c.ker, a long life to you!" he yelled. "A LONG LIFE TO GERMANY!"
It was book sales in Europe rather than success in the United States that earned Bukowski his first substantial royalties, so much money that his accountant advised him to get a mortgage to reduce his tax liability. This led Bukowski to take a closer look at his general finances and, for the first time, he began to question his business arrangement with John Martin.
At the time, Bukowski was being paid around $6,500 a year by Black Sparrow Press, advance royalties for the novels and books of poems and short stories published in America, apart from those published by City Lights Books which brought in extra income. It was not very much to live on. After paying child support and rent, Bukowski complained he was probably eligible for food stamps. He had also begun to resent producing original artwork for special editions of each new book, the habit he and Martin had established years before. He informed Martin in one angry letter that he felt like wet back labor and reminded him there were New York publishers interested in his work. Several friends had advised him to leave Black Sparrow and Linda Lee, in particular, felt he had been loyal enough. In a June, 1978, letter to Weissner, Bukowski wrote that Martin also took twenty per cent of foreign sales: He used to get 10. Linda dislikes him, thinks he is f.u.c.king me ... I appreciate her concern but I don"t want to end up like Celine ... b.i.t.c.hing and b.i.t.c.hing against editors and publishers, the idea is to write about something else.
His concerns came to a head late on the evening of 11 June, 1978, when he telephoned Martin at home. He said he was no longer happy with being sent a monthly check, currently $500. In future he wanted specific information about sales and a reckoning-up twice a year. If it meant he was paid less some months, that was fine. There was another complaint: he was frustrated with the delay in publishing Women, which he considered the best work he had done. The ma.n.u.script had been with Martin almost a year and still the book was not out.
"It was the only rancorous call, and he didn"t even remember it the next day," says Martin, but although he a.s.sured him they had never been more than a few hundred dollars apart, if that, he agreed to send a regular royalty statement twice a year in future. The monthly payments continued as before. "In the thirty years I published him we had remarkably few tense moments and I always understood that he was basically in charge."
Rea.s.sured his affairs were in order, and encouraged by a check for $9,000 from his publishers in France, Bukowski and Linda Lee began looking at property to buy. They went all over the Los Angeles area, going as far as Santa Monica and up into Topanga Canyon, before finding an old two-storey detached house in San Pedro, the port town at the southern edge of the Los Angeles sprawl.
The house, which had an asking price of a little over $80,000, had been built on the crest of a small hill overlooking the harbor. There was a hedge in front which Bukowski liked (privacy was becoming increasingly important now he was famous). The living room was large, with an open fire, and sliding gla.s.s doors led into a garden planted with roses and fruit trees. Upstairs he had never lived in a house with stairs before was a master bedroom and a box room with a balcony overlooking the harbor, a perfect place for writing.
It was strange to be buying property after a lifetime of renting. Frightening, too. What if he couldn"t make the payments? But he decided to take the risk and was soon pottering happily in his garden with Butch, the stray cat he brought with him from Carlton Way, a suburban home owner at last.
One night the telephone rang and a foreign-sounding fellow introduced himself as Barbet Schroeder, a film director. He wanted to meet to discuss a movie project. Bukowski"s number was unlisted, now he had got laid as much as the average man, and he did not take kindly to the intrusion. "f.u.c.k off, you French frog," he said.
Schroeder was thirty-seven, born in Iran and raised in France. He had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before becoming a promoter of jazz concerts, then a journalist, an actor and finally a director of underground movies. He was a charming man, both in person and on the telephone, and managed to persuade Bukowski to meet him, telling him he had read all his books and wanted to make a ninety-minute film from one of his stories, not to exploit the work but to pay homage to it. Bukowski was not sure, wondering whether any of his stories could stretch to such a long adaptation. Schroeder seemed sincere, however, and Bukowski liked him. He said he would think it over but first he had to go to Paris to appear on a TV show.
Apostrophes was a discussion program broadcast on national French television. It was hosted by Bernard Pivot, a well-known personality in France, and had an audience of several millions. The TV company were so eager to have Bukowski on the show that they paid for flights from Los Angeles, for him and Linda Lee, and put them up in a hotel in Paris. Bukowski figured the show would help his European sales, and he and Linda Lee planned a holiday around it, hoping to visit Carl Weissner and Linda Lee"s mother who was staying in the South of France.
Bukowski arrived at the Channel 2 building forty-five minutes early. He had stipulated he wanted two bottles of good white wine delivered to him before he went on the show and the first arrived while he was in make-up. He was soon drinking wine from the bottle, and was very drunk indeed when he was led through to meet his fellow guests. These included a distinguished psychiatrist, who had treated Antonin Artaud, and an attractive female author, of what exactly Bukowski was never sure. They were seated round a coffee table on which were arranged several of Bukowski"s books.
Bukowski was the star guest, so Pivot began by asking him how it felt to be feted in Europe, to be on French television.
"I know a great many American writers who would like to be on this program now," replied Bukowski, speaking even more ponderously than usual. He was puffing on a sher bidi, a type of Indian cigarette Linda Lee had introduced him to. It looked like a joint and smelt awful. He was also obviously drunk, slurring his words and nodding his head. "It doesn"t mean so much to me ..." he said.
Pivot tried to develop a discussion from this unpromising start, but Bukowski seemed to have trouble following the translation so Pivot turned to the lady writer. After a few minutes Bukowski broke into the conversation, saying he would like to see more of the woman"s legs. More specifically, he wanted to examine her ankles. That way he felt he might know how good a writer she was.
Pivot gave him a withering look and Bukowski told him he was a "f.u.c.king son of a f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h a.s.shole" which set the translators an interesting problem as the show was going out live. Pivot fully understood what Bukowski had said. He put his hand over the American"s foul mouth and told him to shut up.
"Don"t you ever say that to me," Bukowski growled.
He pulled the translation device from his ear, rose unsteadily to his feet and turned to leave. Pivot bid him au revoir with a Gallic shrug. The other guests watched in astonishment. Bukowski stumbled momentarily, steadied himself by touching the head of the man next to him, and then tottered off, as the translators and audience rocked with laughter.
Bukowski and Linda Lee made their way down to the reception area where they were met by police. "When Hank saw that, he got this crazy little fiction going in his head, like the enemy is approaching," says Linda Lee. He pulled out his blade, a small hunting knife he always carried, and brandished it at them. There was a scuffle, but Linda Lee kept her cool and watched where Bukowski"s hands went. She grabbed his blade from him and then they both got the h.e.l.l out of there.
The TV appearance was punk-like at a time when punk music and att.i.tudes were fashionable in Europe. (He had been interviewed the day before by a punk journalist who endeared himself to Bukowski by asking for heroin Bukowski said he wasn"t carrying and by saying he liked pollution, which Bukowski thought very funny.) Consequently his antics on Apostrophes made headlines in France"s daily newspapers. Some took the view that it was a scandal. Others were of the opinion Bukowski had been a breath of fresh air on an establishment show.
"You were great, b.a.s.t.a.r.d," said the excitable journalist who rang from Le Monde. "Those others couldn"t m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e."
"What did I do?" asked Bukowski, his hangover obscuring the events of the previous evening.
"He didn"t remember anything, of course, but the whole of France was running to book shops to buy his books," says Barbet Schroeder. "In a few hours they were all sold out."
A couple of days later Bukowski and Linda Lee were in Nice on the French Riviera, visiting Linda Lee"s mother, when a waiter in a cafe recognized Bukowski and asked for his autograph. He signed obligingly and then glanced across at the neighboring cafe where he saw five more waiters watching him. When they saw that Bukowski had noticed, the waiters bowed solemnly in unison to show their respect, and then went about their business again. It was a remarkable moment for a man who had spent more than half his life as an unknown writer, a humble postal clerk, but then so many things were new and strange now Bukowski was a success.
* The travelogue, Shakespeare Never Did This.
13.
CHINASKI IN SUBURBIA.
Most of Bukowski"s former girlfriends had no idea he was using them as material for a novel, and he certainly never asked permission to write about their s.e.x lives. So when Women was finally published after a long delay, in December 1978, it was the cause of some consternation to those women who had shared his life before he settled down with Linda Lee Beighle. The embarra.s.sment was further compounded by the fact that Women sold more than any of his other books.
Linda King was not fooled by the prominent disclaimer: This novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead.
The fact that he had changed names Linda to Lydia in her case, hardly an impenetrable disguise and made this disingenuous claim that it was all fiction was a joke as far as she was concerned. "Everybody knew everything he wrote was a real thing," she says. At least Linda had been aware of what Bukowski was up to; he made no secret of it during their time together. But the book came as a rude shock to women like Amber O"Neil whom he had not bothered to warn.
Since spending a weekend with him in February, 1977, Amber had continued to buy each new Bukowski book and was leafing through Women when she came across the character of Tanya, a comically diminutive girl Chinaski meets at Los Angeles airport and takes back to his apartment. She realized, to her acute embarra.s.sment, that Tanya was meant to be her. "I didn"t like the way he said, "All these women got off the plane, and then this girl got off with a long nose and round shoulders," and so on and so forth, "cos actually I"m kinda cute! So I immediately took offence there, and then I didn"t like what he said about the b.l.o.w. .j.o.b." Bukowski described two occasions when Tanya gave Chinaski oral s.e.x, once so awkwardly Chinaski concludes: "... she knew nothing about how it should be done. It was straight and simple bob and suck."
"I thought, G.o.d, why did he write that? There were so many good things we had." She also thought the book denigrated women generally. "He said so many things about women in there that were painful, I just don"t understand that. Whereas in Post Office there was something about humanity. My frank feeling about it is this: most of his life he felt rejected by women and suddenly he was sought after by women and I don"t think he trusted that, and he was pretty cynical about it. He somehow got back all the anger he must have felt." This was unjust because, by and large, as Amber points outs, women had been good to him.
Joanna Bull first read the novel when she ducked into Papa Bach Book Store in West Los Angeles to get out of the rain. She saw a shelf of Bukowski books and flipped through a couple to see if there was anything that reminded her of some of their experiences, and she found one. She had become the basis for the character of Mercedes. Once again, it was not the most flattering description: That evening the phone rang. It was Mercedes. I had met her after giving a poetry reading in Venice Beach. She was about 28, fair body, pretty good legs, a blonde about 5-feet-5, a blue-eyed blonde. Her hair was long and slightly wavy and she smoked continuously. Her conversation was dull, and her laugh was loud and false, most of the time.
This was positively not how Joanna remembered their time together, or how she perceived herself. "We talked like mad and I had a beautiful body!" she says, indignantly. But she forgave him, realizing he had to ginger things up to get a story. "What was he going to say, that we had a sane relationship, that we sat like two civilized people having refined conversation?"
Ruth Wantling thought Bukowski"s portrayal of her as Cecelia, including the physical description of her as being "a cow of a woman, cow"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s, cow"s eyes", was so wide of the mark it was risible. And although Bukowski had written about the evening in the motel at Laguna Beach, and her refusal to have s.e.x with him, it was noticeable that he had left out the crucial details of the circ.u.mstances surrounding her husband"s death.
The most critical portrait was of Cupcakes who Bukowski used as the basis of Tammie, a pill-popping single mother. "I come across as an air-headed, c.o.c.k-sucking nothing, which I wasn"t at all," she says, "a woman without any substance who is just consumed with getting high. I was very disappointed." The Tammie of Women is promiscuous bordering on being a prost.i.tute. When she first meets Chinaski, she offers to have s.e.x with him for $100. In letters to friends, Bukowski wrote that he believed Cupcakes was dating a string of men and implied she did have s.e.x for money. Cupcakes says this is absolutely untrue and that, apart from the dental student whom she was sleeping with towards the end of her relationship with Bukowski, the infidelities were all in his mind. "I remember reading Women and thinking what the h.e.l.l is he talking about, why in the world is he portraying me in that way? He was so jealous, and so paranoid, and just thought the worst of me."
But although Bukowski dealt with his female characters in a critical, almost misogynistic way, at times, he did not spare his male characters either. The men in Women are almost all weak, dishonest and s.e.xually insecure. None more so than Chinaski himself. As Gay Brewer points out in his critical study, Charles Bukowski, the Henry Chinaski of Women is far from being a virile he-man figure; he is frequently impotent with drink, made to look foolish, spurned and mocked and cuckolded by young women who are clearly his superiors. Indeed, the very first lines of the novel reveal Chinaski to be a pathetic, inadequate man: I was 50 years old and hadn"t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I pa.s.sed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.ed regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman even on non-s.e.xual terms was beyond my imagination.
There is great humor in this. Like Post Office, Women is a very funny book, containing some of Bukowski"s very best comic writing, and it was to prove popular with both male and female readers.
Bukowski name-checked John Fante in Women as being Henry Chinaski"s favorite author, and indicated his enduring respect for Fante"s work by hailing Ask the Dust as a great book. John Martin had never heard of Fante, whose books were all long since out of print, and a.s.sumed the name of the writer and the novel were purely fictional, especially as Bandini (the name of Fante"s hero, whom Bukowski also name-checked) is a well-known supplier of garden fertilizer in California. "I thought this was just a metaphor for s.h.i.t." But when they spoke about it, Bukowski a.s.sured him Fante"s novels existed, so Martin made a point of seeking them out and liked the work so much he set out to discover if Fante was still alive, thinking he might publish him.
John Fante had turned to screen-writing after his early fiction was published in the late 1930s, and enjoyed a successful career in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s, including the filming of one of his own novels, Full of Life. But in later years he found it increasingly hard to make a living, partly because of his uncompromising att.i.tude to his work, and, by the 1970s, he was unable to finalize any movie deal. He was forgotten as a writer and, to make matters worse, his health failed. Fante had suffered from diabetes for many years and became blind in 1978 when he was sixty-nine. When John Martin tracked him down to his home in Malibu, north of Los Angeles, he was at the lowest ebb, a sick and unhappy old man.
They struck a deal to re-print Ask the Dust, and Bukowski wrote a new preface describing how he had discovered the book in the Los Angeles Public Library all those years ago, like finding gold in the city dump. He went on to praise Fante"s prose style warmly, writing: "Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it. The very substance of each line gave the page a form, a feeling of something carved into it. And here, at last, was a man who was not afraid of emotion. The humor and the pain were intermixed with a superb simplicity. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me."
It was forty years since Bukowski first read Ask the Dust and now, thanks to that casual line in Women, he was finally about to meet his hero at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital where Fante was recovering after a double amputation of his legs. Bukowski was very nervous about seeing Fante, partly because he felt he had stolen from him the idea of dividing his novels into very short chapters, to give pace, but this hardly mattered as Fante had never read any of his work and, when Fante"s wife, Joyce, read to him from Women, he was unconcerned by Bukowski"s use of his ideas.
Conversation was stilted when the two writers met, but some of Fante"s bulldog spirit came through to Bukowski.
"The doctor came in today, told me, "Well, we"re going to have to lop off some more of you." I like that, "lop". That"s what he said, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Fante told him.
"John, whatever happened to Carmen, the lady in your first novel?" asked Bukowski.
"That b.i.t.c.h. She turned out to be a lesbian," he replied. "Got a cigarette?"
Fante was blind. His limbs cut from him. He was forgotten as a writer, but Bukowski was impressed to see that he was still undefeated by life. "The most horrible thing that happens to people is bitterness," Fante told him. "They all get so bitter."
Fante returned home to Malibu, his spirits lifted by the deal with Black Sparrow Press, and felt strong enough to dictate a final instalment of the saga of Arturo Bandini to Joyce. It was one of the happiest times in their marriage.
One evening Bukowski and Linda Lee made the drive up from San Pedro for dinner and found Fante sitting up at the table, having made a special effort on their behalf.
"I know that you"re a drinker, Hank, so I"m going to have a gla.s.s of wine with you," he said.
"There was a close bond of friendship," says Joyce Fante. "It would have been stronger had the circ.u.mstances been different. It was very difficult for John not being able to see and feeling ill, as he did all the time. I think they would have been close friends if they had met in earlier years."
Because of the interest and patronage of Bukowski and John Martin, several volumes of Fante"s work were re-published and, at his readings, Bukowski urged his fans to buy Fante"s books, calling him "my buddy out of nowhere". The books sold well, particularly in Europe, and left Joyce well-provided for in her old age.*
The Internal Revenue Service presented Bukowski with substantial tax demands now he was making big money from his writing. He hired an accountant who urged him to spend, spend, spend before Uncle Sam took it in taxes. He should buy a new typewriter, a car, office supplies. He even tried to make a case for deducting Bukowski"s liquor as a work expense. The accountant also advised him to invest in land deals and other speculative schemes. But Bukowski was essentially conservative when it came to money, other than gambling on the horses, and preferred to use what he had to minimize debt, so he made additional repayments on his mortgage instead. However, when his "67 Volkswagen finally broke down he saw the sense in buying a new car. It would be a fifty-two per cent tax write-off and, as he wrote in the poem, "notes on a hot streak", he"d been driving "the worst junk cars/imaginable" for thirty years. He deserved something good.
The salesman at the BMW dealership eyed Bukowski suspiciously, noting his cheap clothes and the pens in his top pocket. He didn"t look like the sort who could afford a new BMW. He looked more like a working guy who would buy a second-hand Chevrolet, with a trade-in. The salesman was so reluctant to stir himself to talk to the loser in his show room, that Bukowski had to call him over.
"I think I like this car," he said, pointing at a black BMW 320i.
"With sun roof, radio and air-conditioning, this automobile costs $16,000," the salesman told him, stiffly.
"OK, I"ll take it."
The salesman asked, rather superciliously, what kind of arrangements sir would be making.
"I"ll write a check," said Bukowski, casually.
It was the punch-line to a routine he had been working on for weeks because, far from being a casual buyer, he had actually read up on BMWs in advance and knew exactly what model and extras he wanted, and how much he was prepared to spend. He was just enjoying the fun of confounding the salesman"s preconceptions, and derived huge pleasure from watching his expression change to one of respect after he telephoned the bank and discovered there was enough cash in Bukowski"s checking account to more than cover the price of the car.
Bukowski did not attempt to disguise the fact that he had bought a house and a BMW, removing himself from the low-life world he had always written about, but used these symbols of his newfound wealth to comic effect. In the poem, "the secret of my endurance", he wrote that he still received mail from men with terrible jobs and women trouble, men like he had been. The letters were often written in blunt pencil on lined paper "in tiny handwriting that slants to the/ left". He wondered if they knew their letters were delivered to a mail box behind a six-foot hedge at a two-storey house with a long driveway ...
... a two car garage, rose garden, fruit trees, animals, a beautiful woman, mortgage about half paid after a year, a new car, fireplace and a green rug two-inches thick with a young boy to write my stuff now, I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a typewriter, feed him whiskey and raw wh.o.r.es, belt him pretty good three or four times a week.
I"m 59 years old now and the critics say my stuff is getting better than ever.
It was wonderful to lay on the lawn under his fruit trees and do nothing while his neighbors worked. Who would have thought he would be living like this after all those nights at the post office, all those years in c.o.c.kroach-ridden court apartments? Who would have guessed he would be stretching out like a cat in his own garden under his own guava tree, sunlight through the leaves dappling his belly? He would never get tired of the free hours. It was glorious to have nowhere to go and nothing to do, but wait until dinner, wondering what type of wine he would drink.
He turned sixty in August, 1980, and signed a $10,000 contract with Barbet Schroeder to write a screenplay based on his life, with a promise of more money if the film went into production. The screenplay which had the working t.i.tle, The Rats of Thirst, later changed to Barfly was an amalgam of the years Bukowski lived in Philadelphia, hanging out at the bar on Fairmount Avenue, and also when he lived with Jane in Los Angeles. He finished it in the spring of 1979 and Schroeder flew to Europe to try and raise the money.
Schroeder was not the only filmmaker interested in bringing Bukowski"s work to the screen. An Italian consortium, eager to cash in on Bukowski"s popularity in Europe, negotiated a $44,000 deal with Lawrence Ferlinghetti for rights to some of the City Lights stories, and yet another consortium was talking about an adaptation of Factotum. As the months pa.s.sed, Bukowski found himself increasingly embroiled in the machinations of the movie business, for which he had intense distrust. Apart from anything else, he believed Hollywood had been the ruination of John Fante.
people who hang around celluloid usually are.
("the film makers") There were several long discussions about who would play Henry Chinaski in Barfly, the film which remained Bukowski"s favorite project and the one he had most to do with. He met James Woods who had recently starred in The Onion Field. The singer Tom Waits came over to San Pedro for drinks. Kris Kristofferson was also suggested for the part, but Bukowski was horrified to learn he would sing and play his guitar in the movie. In the end none of them committed to the project and, without a definite star name, one film company and then another flirted with the idea of financing the movie before pulling out.
Months went by without anything being finalized, and Schroeder found himself spending many evenings drinking with Bukowski and Linda Lee at San Pedro, listening to Bukowski"s stories about when he was younger. He decided he should make a permanent record of these sessions and so began to film what became The Charles Bukowski Tapes, a remarkable four-hour doc.u.mentary of Bukowski talking about his life and work.
Most of the doc.u.mentary was filmed with Bukowski speaking directly to the camera at his home in San Pedro, but they also revisited locations from his past life including the house at 2122 Longwood Avenue. Bukowski showed Schroeder the place in the living room where his father tried to force his face into the vomit on the carpet, and they went into the bathroom where his father had beaten him so many times with the razor strop.
"Here we have the torture chamber," said Bukowski, looking round sadly. "This is a torture chamber where I learned ... something ... This place holds some memories all right. I don"t know, it"s just a terrible place to stand and talk about it ... you don"t want to talk about it too much ..."
Schroeder began to ask a question, but Bukowski turned away.
"Let"s forget it," he said.
Linda Lee was a fan of the British rock group, The Who, and that summer she had been attending every one of their concerts in Los Angeles, partly because Pete Townshend was a fellow devotee of Meher Baba and an acquaintance of hers. Bukowski decided he hated The Who. He didn"t like their music, but mostly he hated them because he thought Pete Townshend and Linda Lee were having an affair, which was untrue. One evening when Barbet Schroeder was filming at the house in San Pedro, Bukowski decided to confront Linda Lee about coming home late from the concerts.
"I"ve always been used because I"m a good guy," he said. He and Schroeder had been drinking and filming all afternoon in the garden, getting through four bottles of wine, and Bukowski was in a volatile mood. "Women, when they meet me, they say, "I can use this son of a b.i.t.c.h, I can push him around, he"s an easy-going guy," so they do it ... But, you know, finally I get to resent it a bit."
"What do you resent?" asked Linda Lee, who had also been drinking.
"Just being pushed."