well-weathered face, which, as an admirer had put it, would look well on Mount Rushmore, next to Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington and Roosevelt, was shaved clean. Charles Bukowski wore a windbreaker and a plaid shirt. The protective cover for his pens was in his breast pocket; one pen stood out. In his pant’s pockets were his comb - and a love note Linda had written. Bukowski looked ready to go to the race track, where he would place his bets during the half hour between starts as he had done so often before.
“I sometimes ask myself,” he wrote a couple of years ago, “whether on my deathbed (if I am lucky, I’ll die in one) I will long for that thirty minute break between the races.”
“Come on, Michael! Be a man!” Michael Montfort heard Linda Bukowski saying. Her voice was firm and certain. The slim, delicate woman stood next to her late husband: “Touch him!”
“I think Michael just couldn’t take it. He is such a Hank freak! He has his mythology about Hank, which continues on. And in this mythology, everything is a little bit exaggerated ...,” Linda Bukowski says. “I saw him hovering over, and so I just told him, ‘it’ll be alright, try to relax, you can touch him ...’”
“I felt Hank’s fingers. They were hard, hard like cold cement,” Michael Montfort says. “The others embraced each other looking silently at Hank. I left the room and smoked a cigarette.”
“I had brought in another pen that night,” Linda Bukowski says. “Hank never took just one when he went to the track. He had to have two. In case one of them didn’t work.”
Linda Bukowski stuck the second pen in the little pocket. Then she gently touched Hank’s face.
“It was all hard and cold. But his eyebrows were still Hank’s. The same. They hadn’t changed. These big bushy eyebrows, especially the left one. It was sort of funky, so I sort of pushed it into, you know, which I always did anyhow ... But everything else was cold and hard, though the skin was still moveable. You knew, there was nothing in that form. It was devastating. It was just the form.”
II
First Encounter.
- A Flashback -
When I first met Charles Bukowski, we were surrounded by glamour and death. It was September 23, 1985. Beyond the broad glass façade Los Angeles sparkled. On our side of the looking glass the tables were covered snow white and the guests showed great beauty. At that time no Hollywood-birthday could be celebrated more spectacularly than at “Spago,” Wolfgang Puck’s illustrious restaurant above Sunset Boulevard. The party was more or less a German affair, arranged by Michael Montfort in honor of Frances Schoenberger, his then wife. Arnold Schwarzenegger, now and again his arm on Maria Shriver’s shoulders, kept sucking enthusiastically on an enormous cigar and didn’t say much. Actress Hildegard Knef, frail and drunk and suffering from cancer, ruled the room. Her daughter, so pale and waxen that it worried you, never left her side. George Hamilton drifted through the crowd like a tanned angel, always chaperoned by two or three female stars of “Dallas” and “Dynasty” who since then have fallen into oblivion.
The unhappy few who were not beautiful or famous kept to themselves. Charles Bukowski was notorious; yet he was not slender, but beer-bellied. His face was not soft, but battered. He was not aesthetic, but had a great deal of intelligence, which gave him ugly ideas. Linda Lee Beighle, his long-time companion, whom he had married only a few months before, was very attractive. However, she was merely the former owner of a health-food joint - her beauty was discreet and not of the shrill show business variety. And besides that, she was not world-famous. So Linda and Charles Bukowski got a table at the edge - next to me.
I had discovered Bukowski’s stories and poems for myself when I was still in school; though not in class. When I finally met him, my notion of Bukowski was prejudiced like that of his average German reader: The life of this underdog as well as his work had to be a unique and wonderful load of filth. His screwing-couch, for example, I imagined to be quite similar to the strange image conjured up by a book reviewer a couple of months before: the sofa, he wrote, “as I would like to maintain without having ever seen it,” had to be “a little messy with stains from sperm and hemorrhoid ointment. The man who crouches on it, at the beginning of his seventh decade, has a face that is scarred from acne, a red veined boozer’s nose, and a smile that uniquely mixes the expressions of a goat and a fox. He may not inspire confidence, but he is the North American poet of the second half of our century.”
When the Bukowskis took their place next to me, I thus thought to know all about them and their life. There was no reason for many words. To begin with, Mister Bukowski thrust his menacing skull with the heavy jaws forward till he almost touched my face, demanding that I stopped calling him “Mister” Bukowski. “Hank” was OK; “Buk” as well. Thereafter, our boozing became quite taciturn. The long pauses, which were interrupted by short sentences only now and then, created more mutual agreement than the few meaningless words we exchanged.
Charles Bukowski looked and behaved exactly as his numerous visitors had described him. He was a little under six feet tall, but he appeared to be “smaller and sturdy, because he draws his head with its Buffalo-Bill-hairstyle between his shoulders and has the symmetrically round stomach of a well-fed baby.” His damaged face was “friendly, good-natured, melancholic like a lump of old baboon meat.” His mouth was frozen in a permanent satiated smirk, and his movements showed a tiredness that betrayed not a sleeping disorder, but existential exhaustion. A fitting description of it, I had found only in the words of his best portraitist - Hank himself: “Looks very tired. Does not talk much, and if he says something, it is somehow flat and meaningless. You would never think that he has written all these poems. He has been sorting letters in the post office way too long.”
The real Charles Bukowski with his “sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it was assembled in a junkyard from Studebaker hoods and Buick fenders,” resembled indeed “one of the Beagle Brothers who had been barred from Disneyland.” Behind his slow motion gestures, however, I felt a constant strain, an uneasiness and anger. His pointed composure seemed to vibrate from inside.
Later on in the evening, Bukowski would be drunk as a skunk. He then would start looking for the strongest man in the room. This, of course, would be Arnold, the cigar-smoking muscle-monster. Bukowski would walk over and stand up in front of his table, showering him with a torrent of insults: “You little piece of shit! You and your big shitty cigar, who do you think you are? Just because you make these shitty little movies, you’re nothing special, you megalomaniac piece of shit ...” And Arnold Schwarzenegger, looking startled, would listen helplessly.
But for now, Charles Bukowski showed nothing but taut indifference. He was only preparing himself, by drinking methodically, for what would be the highlight of the evening. Amid all the hilarity of the birthday crowd, the silence at our table thus simulated the deceptive calm in the eye of the hurricane. I at least enjoyed it. Until the big news of the day was announced.
Axel Caesar Springer Dead! There were but a few Germans in the room who had not at some time sold their soul to the conservative press czar. For decades Springer had been the Antichrist to liberals. When the seventy-three year old self-made mogul died, the villain of a whole generation pegged out. Therefore, the excitement was considerable.
Charles Bukowski, who was born in 1920 as the son of a German mother and a Polish-American GI-father in Andernach, a small port on the Rhine, understood little German. He had, of course, never heard of the late media tycoon. I took great pains to explain to him the colossal political importance the deceased had achieved in the Sixties, when he became the favorite object of the rebellious students’ hate. Bukowski listened to my stammering about “someone like Hearst” and “Citizen Springer”, until his wineglass was empty and a waiter
