cheerfully lifted the wineglass.
“A toast?” Linda asked.
“To the asshole!”
“Well ...,” I hesitated.
“Come on, man!” Buk said. “Now that this Springer guy is dead, he cannot cause much damage anymore. Once we have stopped breathing, our bodies pollute the land, and that’s it.”
III
Life As a Test Case.
- Or: Bukowski’s Long Good-Bye -
Some people spend their lives closer to nature, and that is to say, closer to death; a man of medicine, for example, to the passing of his patients; an adventurer to his own demise. As long as he could remember, Charles Bukowski had lived as an adventurer; of the late modern kind. The dangers to which he exposed his body were not the anachronistic hazards of the desert or the jungle. He explored the threats of the second, the artificial nature; the one that was created by human beings to suppress and forget the neediness of their mortal existence. Bukowski’s terra incognita lay in the just humanly possible underground of the large cities: lost love and desperate sex, horse races, liquor and, the most daring and most perverse of all artificial ventures, literature.
On this last terrain Charles Bukowski had the critics as his natural enemies. The labels they gave him matched now and then the brutality and inconsistency of his own work. The officially appointed “outsider of the year” and “chronicler of the underground” was tagged as a “liquor-laced laureate of the gutter” and “sloppy Narcissus,” “sex- and booze-maniac,” “master of rut,” and “lazy bum with intellectual flair.” He was miscalled “fossil counterpart to the ‘couldn’t-care-less’ generation,” “elder statesman of down-and-drunken debauchery,” and “poet laureate of sleaze.” More benevolent experts proclaimed Bukowski a “Mayakovski of the Pacific” and “a proletarian American artist with well-developed survival instincts.” They revered him as “the patron saint of punk” and as the “patron saint of drinking writers, or writing drinkers.” They venerated him as the “bard of the barroom and the brothel, a direct descendant of the Romantic visionaries who worshiped at the altar of personal excess, violence and madness.” They admired the “survivor and unlikely literary lion,” the “tour guide to the nightmare of his own personality.” They praised the “philosopher of the streets,” the “historian of his own fuck stories,” and stated plainly and provocatively: “Bukowski is an old filthy swine.”
The spontaneous connection of Bukowski’s physical being with the fact that he played his part in the aberrations of the age does fit aptly. The picture of the artist as a hero has been shaped in modern times by another poet named Charles - Baudelaire, the high priest of Parisian extravagances. Walter Benjamin, developing his theory of modern experience as a succession of sensorial shocks striking and shaping the consciousness of urban men, wrote about Charles Baudelaire, the “rag-and-bone man” and “Apache,” what - mutatis mutandis - is true as well for the restless Sunset-Boulevardier Charles Bukowski: In his duel with the haphazard sensations of the metropolis, he has made it “his affair to parry the shocks with his mental and physical person wherever they might come from.”
Such an existence that declares itself a test case must revolve around survival. Death therefore is always standing by; in Bukowski’s poems and stories about the “American Way of Life and Death” as well as in almost every article ever written about his person. Retelling Bukowski’s near death experience, Glenn Esterly in his 1976 “Rolling Stone” cover story gave the leitmotif: “[...] at the age of thirty-five Bukowski almost died [...] from relentless boozing. Eleven pints of blood were pumped into him at LA County hospital to save him from a bleeding ulcer. When he left the hospital, his doctors told him he would be a dead man if he touched alcohol again. It made him so nervous that he walked to the nearest bar and tossed down a few beers ...” Describing then his own encounter with Bukowski, Esterly wrote: “The beer is disappearing rapidly, and his eyes are badly bloodshot in those deep sockets under the bushy brows. [...] He looks a little liverish ...”
From then on the same words were murmured in the press; in the United States, but more loudly in Germany where Charles Bukowski rose to be a super star of the literary scene. Esterly’s article was used as a preface in an extremely successful collection of Bukowski’s short stories, and in the German translation “He looks a little liverish” became: “He looks as if he started to decay ...” A writer facing death - the critics and reporters loved it. In the beginning, sympathy for the underdog prevailed. “Do not rush the old man too much,” the German poet Wolf Wondratschek wrote in 1977: “And let him drink his beer in peace. Transfer his royalties on time, before he finally visits his friend Ernie [Hemingway], his still unattained model.” And another writer worried the following year: “Knew he is a boozer and seriously ill. Went to see him, because I figured that otherwise I might miss him forever.”
Later impatience set in, hate against someone who wouldn’t go away although his time seemed to be running out. In the late Eighties some of his former fans thought of Bukowski as an undead. He reminded them of their own past and, thus, forced them to live with something they would rather prefer to forget: “And therefore go to hell, papa Buk; write never again,” one of the trendsetters ranted in 1990: “Your last book is just good enough for a stylish exit.”
Still whatever the pack scribbled down, they had “papa Buk”, the pop-modern Don Quixote, on their side. Since the first days of his fame, Bukowski eagerly helped to dig his own grave. In 1977 he met with Jörg Fauser - a young German poet and novelist who would have been a well-qualified successor to Bukowski, in life and in literature, if the German hadn’t bitten the dust long before his American idol. To Fauser, Bukowski showed the place in the Inglewood cemetery, next to the race tracks, where he wanted to be buried: “My grave shall lie towards the finish line.” A few years later Bukowski, for Michael Montfort’s camera, bedded himself in a newly dug vegetable patch: “Shed a shovel of sand on my body and put a flower on my face.” To Patrick Goldstein from the “Los Angeles Times,” he said in 1987: “But you carry in one hand a bundle of darkness that accumulates each day. And when death finally comes, you say right away, ‘Hey buddy, glad to see ya!” And in the same year, he complained angrily to Sean Penn: “I resent it. I resent death. I resent life. I resent being caught between the two. You know, how many times I’ve tried suicide? [...] Give me time, I am only sixty-six years old. Still working at it.”
IV
To San Pedro.
- On a Pilgrimage -
Nonetheless, how do you face a man who is already nearer to the dead than to us who will live? How, above all, can you talk to him about dying? The day of my last visit with Charles Bukowski is August 15, 1993, a sunny summer Sunday and the day before his seventy-third birthday.
“For the next one he may not be around anymore,” Michael Montfort says. The stream of cars on the Hollywood freeway is like thick broth. Michael drives faster than the flow of traffic, and the eyes behind his glasses are filled with tears. He can’t possibly see much anymore. “Hank has outrun death again and again. Again and again. But this time he will not be able to pull off that trick.”
Michael Montfort is Bukowski’s greatest fan. The same superlative might be adequate for the collection of manuscripts, books, pictures, and memorabilia that the photographer has put together in his gray little house in the Hollywood Hills, high above the smoggy bowl of Los Angeles. Year after year he smuggled German journalists into Bukowski’s pad; helping to establish the author’s fame in the country that his parents left when he was two years old. In the course of their long friendship, Michael Montfort, born in Germany twenty years after Bukowski, became a lot like the object of his admiration. At first
