Tales of an Extraordinary Mad Man
By LIONEL ROLFE  calclass@earthlink.net
http://www.pzaz.net/lionel/



Bukowski has finally been institutionalized.

Not long ago they held a salute at UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library for Black Sparrow Press, which was built by proprietor John Martin on the profits that came from the mighty pen of Charles Bukowski.

Rejected by East coast publishers, a lifelong personal and financial relationship developed between Bukowski and Martin. Martin turned his garage in Santa Monica into Bukowski's publishing empire under the name Black Sparrow Press.

Bukowski was quickly discovered by the Europeans, where thousands upon thousands of his books were sold and read.

New York had missed the boat.

But things change. Bukowski is dead. Nowadays Bukowski is published by Ecco, a division of Harper Collins, owned by of all people Rupert Murdoch. They already have more than 30 of his volumes in print. The new volume is a collection of Bukowski's poetry had not been published in a book. The book is called "Sifting Through The Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way." These are poems Bukowski would chose from time to time to give to Martin to save for an ultimate volume. The author thought they were his best, and they certainly are very good.

Many of the poems are devoted to Bukowski's tendency to confront and pick fights, often times fights he knew he was going to lose. He dwells on the fact that his father used to beat him up, so that's why he got a perverse satisfaction out of being beaten up in adult life.

Bukowski hated his father intensely. When he saw the corpse he muttered "dead men tell no more tales." And what made him most glad about that was that he had heard too many of his father's clichés and homilies -- mostly always wrong.

So they closed the lid on the coffin and Bukowski and his uncle Jack went out for hamburgers and fries.

"Your father was a good man," his uncle said.

"Good for what?" Bukowski replied.

I learned of his confrontational tendency firsthand when I spent a night drinking with Bukowski in preparation for my book "Literary L.A."

He put himself across from me and my then wife Nigey Lennon, proclaiming, "I hate intellectuals. I'm the toughest guy in town," he said, looking right at me -- the first time he uttered the phrase that would become his refrain in each of the three bars around Hollywood that we journeyed to that night.

I noticed that when I made some sort of barroom reply, Bukowski quickly backed down. We talked a bit and Bukowski seemed to warm up a bit. "You have an honest face, a good face, but behind it is a lot of bullshit, in the way you have dealt with people," he said to me. This undoubtedly was so of most of us in this life, I replied. "See what I mean," Bukowski rejoined, triumphantly. "All of mankind means nothing. Mankind is all cowardice. Has no courage. So let's drink."

Later in the evening we went to Lucy's El Adobe, the Mexican restaurant made famous by Jerry Brown, the eccentric, significant California governor. Bukowski became more raucous as we moved on. As we walked into the cafe, Bukowski was out and loudly demanding more booze. The management said no, which, of course, made Bukowski even angrier and more incessant in his demands. I jumped in with a compromise. I ordered three beers, and handed them to Bukowski. He quieted down for a while, happy with his liquor. Soon he was entertaining us with vulgar references and jokes about his and Linda's sex practices.

Then he suddenly eyed a group of big, muscular punks in the next booth. He cried out loudly, so that they could hear too. "Hey, look at the fags," he said. "Look at the fags." His voice rested awhile on the word fags. After a few minutes of this, he managed to succeed in getting what he wanted -- he had out grossed the punks; they left, muttering angrily among themselves and glaring at him out of the corners of their eyes. Bukowski really didn't give a shit, even if they had come over to start a fight. But something told the youths to keep their distance.
 
Next we drove through the rain to Dan Tana's, next to the Troubadour, on the literal edge of Beverly Hills. It wasn't long before the maitre d' was inviting Bukowski to leave the premises again, as Bukowski obstreperously demanded booze. Bukowski looked at the waiter's smooth face and said, "You have an empty face." The maitre d' came over and a compromise was reached -- Frank Cavestani, his boozing pal, would have responsibility for Bukowski, who was getting a little more subdued again.

Bukowski is particularly good at describing the eternal man woman thing, and in such poems as "You Never Liked Me," "She Was Really Mad," "The Simple Truth" and "This Dog," he vividly sums up the ultimate angst that plagues our relationships.

This volume, however, is valuable because it points up another side of Bukowski usually not discussed.

It's fair to say that Bukowski was not a "leftist" writer, because in fact he was an admirer of the French fascist writer Celine. But he also was influenced by Sartre, the great existentialist Marxist. And he most certainly was a proletarian writer -- which probably explains why he was never published on the East Coast.

He was, in fact, a proud proletarian writer, who proclaimed "they rip out your intestines and your brain and your will and your spirit, they suck you dry, then throw you away. the capitalist system, the work ethic. the profit motive." They appreciate you "only if you make much more for them than they pay you."

And that is at the heart of Bukowski. That's where the larger pain comes from. Bukowski described feeling sad for everybody, "for all the struggling people everywhere, trying to get the rent paid on time, trying to get enough food, trying to get an easy night's sleep."

Tellingly, one poem written several years ago is entitled "The Con Job." It describes a ground war in a faraway desert land fought by U.S. ground troops who are mostly made up of blacks, Mexicans and poor whites.

Bukowski is criticized for rarely seeing the beauty in things and people. But that's not really true. He admits to having had many heroes and he finds great beauty and solace in classical music, and rejects most popular music as crap.

But still he makes fun of composers who can never end their compositions; they don't know how to end them. As long as you can keep the orgasm coming, they do everything they can to make sure it never ends. He repeats most poets don't know how to end their poems, either.

"But I do," he says, in his ending to one of the poems.

*
Lionel Rolfe is the author of "Literary L.A.," Fat Man on the Left" and a new paperback edition of "Death and Redemption in London & L.A."

*

Lionel Rolfe is the author of the ebook, "Death and Redemption in London & L.A." (deadendstreet.com).  He also has authored "Literary L.A." and "Fat Man on the Left" Four Decades in the Underground," both from California Classics Books and available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble online.

Lorene

Lionel's daughter Hyla

Laura Huxley, the widow of the writer Aldous Huxley and Lionel

Lionel and Oliver

Lionel at Gladstone's

Return to DaBelly.com