lives a little bit like Bukowski.
“Damn, Michael has caught me in the supermarket when I had my hands on a watermelon, you know.” Bukowski told Jörg Fauser in 1977: “Michael had his cart filled up with six packs and potato chips, and what did I have? Peaches! Grapes! Lettuce! And I was fondling a watermelon! Of course, I played the cool daddy and grinned, but, damn it, he saw through me! Bukowski had flipped!”
The skeletons of cranes that arise along the freeway revolve idly in the soft coastal wind. In the docks container ships bob up and down, and at the end of the horizon the white clouds are driven swiftly over the empty crests of the Pacific. We are approaching the harbor of San Pedro.
“When Hank moved out here in 1978, we all thought that he had really flipped!” Michael Montfort says: “I thought living in San Pedro was ridiculously inconvenient for him. He had to drive for one hour just to have dinner at ‘Musso and Frank’s’ on Hollywood Boulevard, where he was a regular. Suddenly Hank lived in suburbia and became a kind of amusement-commuter.”
The run-down houses along the road, most of them kind of like furnished garbage piles, gradually disappear. Soon after we have left the freeway, San Pedro looks as if the inhabitants had scrubbed the streets, soaped the houses down and subsequently dissolved into hot air. A clean ghost town, dressed in its Sunday best, friendly and peaceful and a little tedious.
“Hank had earned his first real money,” Michael Montfort continues: “And his accountant wanted him to do something to avoid taxes. Buy some real estate.” Michael laughs. “Hank hated to look at other people’s homes. So without a moment’s hesitation he bought the second house his broker dragged him into.”
Few cars are on the road, and almost no pedestrians. We have entered a solid middle-class area, a no-man’s land somewhere between well-to-do and wealthy. Like elite garden gnomes, blue and white signs of private security companies line the lawns.
“Hank ... really ... is ...,” Michael Montfort says searching his feelings for words, as we arrive at Bukowski’s house.
The empty side-street smells of Sunday roasts. Hidden behind high trees, the old medium-sized house lies at the end of a narrow driveway. “And there is nothing short of dying ...,” Johnny Cash suddenly sings in my head: “... half as lonesome as the sound on the sleepin’ city sidewalks, Sunday mornin’ comin’ down ...”
As soon as the motor noise of our car dies away, a sunken and rather frail old gentleman appears and waves to us. His movements are tortoise-like, the movements of a survivor. Beaming, Michael Montfort raises his hand and finds the words he was looking for:
“Hank is too good-natured. A sweetheart.”
V
With a Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing.
- First Words -
“Quite a neighborhood, huh?”
Charles Bukowski smiles wearily, more wearily than ever, maybe weary of life itself. His bully, weather-beaten face has become narrow, his tremendous beer belly has disappeared, his handshake feels almost soft. Buk wears sneakers, light blue slacks with baggy pockets, which hang loosely around his emaciated body, and a wide shirt checkered in blue and green.
“Yeah, quite a neighborhood,” he repeats breathing hard, “better than living in a rotten apartment in East Hollywood. Here you can make a lot of trouble before the neighbors call the cops.”
His laugh is short and betrays malicious delight, some habitual schadenfreude. The characteristic melody of his voice still sounds like Bob Dylan singing: in and out of tune at the same time. The gestures accompanying his growling mockery, however, are executed with the minimal delay of a satellite transmission - as if the commands that control his limbs would come from a remote source beyond our planet.
“Don’t get deceived by the looks,” Bukowski says. “We have our adventures. A few nights ago two hundred shots were fired. In the Mexican ghetto. Just a few blocks away.”
He waves us to go ahead, and he follows slowly, placing his steps carefully.
“I mean, in LA no one cares about something like that. In San Pedro it makes a great topic for discussion. Even though nobody got killed.”
We pass the two dark Acuras that block the driveway. Suddenly, Charles Bukowski has to support himself; and doing so, he looks as if he is facing death in a way humans only dare in some stories Hemingway wrote long ago.
The inevitable downfall in the duel with death is not very different from the fate of those who place their stakes on horses. In both cases even the most successful bettor dreads the impending loss until it happens. In 1992, when he was seventy-two years old, Charles Bukowski developed leukemia. The chemotherapy made his hair fall out. He lost weight, his movements became slower, even slower than they had been for many years, and his carriage bent even more forward. Bukowski started to wear a hat. Following the advice of his doctor, he quit smoking from one day to the next. He also stopped drinking alcohol and now coldly orders hot herb tea for dinner. The hair had barely grown halfway back when again the regular blood tests showed increased counts. Bukowski underwent a second session of chemotherapy, which made him an even older man.
Charles Bukowski himself is very well aware of that; and nothing proves his knowledge better than his equanimity. “Time is there to be wasted,” he once stated. Yet, the shorter his time runs, the more generously he seems to spend it. Previously his eyes sometimes displayed a hectic void not unlike the 00:00 flashing on VCRs that have lost their programming. Today he appears more relaxed and serene than ever.
“I really didn’t have much luck until I was fifty,” he says. “Then the good times started. Lasted quite some time.”
He glances at Linda Bukowski who is walking down the stairs from the second floor. His eyes give away how much his lucky streak and the relative peace of his last years depended on her.
“I don’t know whether I do Linda any good,” Bukowski once said, “but without her I wouldn’t be here.”
Linda, who has introduced him to vitamins and provided every other kind of care for seventeen years, is slim, graceful and looks a little bit irritated and lost. In his novel “Hollywood,” Bukowski describes her as a witty Nora Charles of a wife (out of the screwball-movies after Dashiell Hammett’s “Thin Man”). Quick-witted and able to hold her drinks very well, Linda Bukowski had no problems keeping up with her husband year after year. The Seventies-like dress she wears today leaves much of her hips and waist exposed, generating thoughts that have nothing to do with literature and death.
“It is homey; it resembles a contractor’s place after hours,” a renowned German reporter wrote after he visited the Bukowskis in San Pedro a few years ago. To me his house looks more like the home of an elderly professor. The floor in the open kitchen area is tiled in a dark red. A bookshelf filled with translations of Bukowski’s works into exotic languages like Japanese and German blocks the view towards the living room. In the remainder of the ground floor dark colors prevail: a thick green carpet, a couple of black painted rattan chairs, two love seats - and the notorious couch. It stands in front of the fire place, perfectly clean, without any sperm spots or remnants of hemorrhoid ointment. But in the south corner a large plush animal is sitting, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. For me it is lust at first sight.
“Yeah,” Charles Bukowski says. “Everybody sees the beast and wants to have it.”
He slowly sinks into the couch, reaches
