Bukowski claimed the majority of what he wrote happened in his life.
To make himself more picturesque for the reader he did little to elaborate on himself.
Heinrich Karl Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in August 1920.
In 1924 the family of three left Germany and moved to LA. Young Charle's father bought a two bedroom bungalow on Jefferson Park Road not far from Hollywood. In 1924 LA was paradise, there was plenty of work in agriculture and building, but the palm trees and clean orderly ways of America 1924 passed the freaky immigrant family by.
A TWISTED CHILDHOOD FUCKED ME UP.
Bukowski’s mother dressed young Charles in velvet trousers, he was a mark from the start, getting shit canned from both ends. His old man, “The Nazi sergeant Hymie” would strap him endlessly if he missed a blade of grass after mowing the lawn. Buk would have to fight for his life at Virginia Road Elementary School as well.
Bukowski hated the world already as a young man, he would brew his juice while lying in bed looking at light patterns on the ceiling, listening to Brahms or Mahler. Like other outlaw literary geniuses, the struggle to get through daily life forced him to go into his inner mind.
Bukowski began writing as a boy, he sensed life wasn’t going to be a picnic. He was attracted to the solitary nature of writing, it helped him to gain perspective, writing became his foil, but his hammer was booze.
By the age of 15 he was a full-time alcoholic, he could buy booze anywhere, he looked 33, his face long and drawn like a deathly horse head, full of deeply rooted acme, people found him hard to look at.
One night he came home to the family house drunk, he broke a lock to get in unnoticed and was greeted by his old man. Hymie immediately began strapping Charles with a leather belt, the metal end. Bukowski puked on a new white carpet in the entryway (Perhaps the most famous puke scene in modern 20th Century American Literature). Somehow 15 year old Charles gathered the strength to get up, punching Hymie in the gut, ending the confrontation.
During the ruckus his mom packed a small cardboard suitcase, pushing young Charles out the door before Hymie could get up. This cheap cardboard suitcase would become a right of passage metaphor in Bukowski’s stories. He used the suitcase for years, too poor to buy another. At one point it became so worn he painted it with liquid shoeblack.
After graduating from LA High (he didn’t bother to pick up his diploma feeling the ceremony was superficial and inane) Buk enrolled in LA City College, now living free from his old man, the sadistic Hymie, free to drink whenever he pleased. He began his barfly life in a small dumpy room over the “Starlight Lounge” while studying journalism and literature. He liked true grit author’s like Upton Sinclair and Ernest Hemingway, supporting himself by working part-time as a janitor at Sears.
Buk was apolitical throughout his life. His twisted fucked up early life made him anti-social and he rooted for the bad guys out of spite. During World War II he wrote a short story in support of Hitler which got him in trouble at LA City College. Of course, Henry didn’t give a shit about Hitler, but he discovered the joy of tweaking and outraging the mainstream, it was easy for him and would bring him joy throughout his life.
After a year at LA City College in 1942 this butt ugly, outrageous and anti-social genius hit the road. He was writing full time now sending stories to the rags of the day, “Popular Mechanics” and “Thriller Detective.” He was in search of the glue of experience that would help sharpen his writing chops. Henry caught a bus from LA to New Orleans, he only had thirteen dollars in his pocket.
While traveling in the forties he would often run out of money and live on candy bars. Later in life at a reading, he was asked what the secret to his success was? Buk saying,” One candy bar a day.”
When he got to New Orleans he lived in a tar paper shack lit by a single light bulb. Buk couldn’t hold down a job, preferring to booze it up with bums and whores. Eventually taking a job on a railroad gang and leaving New Orleans. On the way to Texas, he found a paperback copy of “Notes from the Underground” by Dostoevsky. It related to the struggle of the Russian poor with the Czarist elite, reminding Charles of his days at LA City College.
BUKOWSKI WROTE BECAUSE HE WAS HURT AND PISSED OFF. WRITING, BOOZE, AND MAHLER WERE THE ONLY WAYS HE COULD DEAL WITH HIS CHILDHOOD.
The following is a bit from a Bukowski poem illustrating his rage against the machine as well as his frustration from being on the shit end of the capitalist system most of his life. It is from “Factotum,” written in the sixties.
“….the days of
the bosses, yellow men
with bad breath and big feet, men
who look like frogs, hyenas, men who
walk as melody has never been invented,
men who think it is intelligent to hire and
fire and profit, men with expensive wife's
they possess like 60 acres of ground to be
drilled and shown-off—“
By the early fifties, Buk had returned to his beloved LA. He had been writing since the forties, sending manuscripts to editors all over America. None were accepted, his work contained unheard of radicalism sex and realty, rarified stuff in the fifties.
On off hours Buk would write and listen to Mahler late at night in his room above “Sunlight Inn” He didn’t go to the beach once during all his years in California, he was light years away from “Muscle Beach” mentality. His toxic and mercurial voice was alive in the alley and on the bar stools of the “Sunlight Inn.”
One day Bukowski got a letter from Barbara Frye, editor of the “Harlequin Review” out of Wheeler, Texas. She told him that she thought he was the greatest poet since William Blake. They corresponded for two days and she asked him to marry her. Barbara was missing two vertebrae from her neck and couldn’t move her neck from side to side, she looked neckless. She came to LA and Charles married her, the next edition of “Harlequin Review" had eight of Henry’s poems in it.
In seven years the marriage was toast, the years of marriage were like scenes out of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” Frye would constantly talk shit to him barking,” Why don’t you get off your ass and stop drinking? Go get a job.” Bukowski was published in the “Paris Review” by this time, next to Sartre.
John Webb spent three years in jail for a dope charge and robbing a bank. Inside jail, he developed a love for literature and poetry and became the editor of the prison paper, which was used mostly for ass wipe and rolling joints.
When Webb was paroled he contacted William Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Lorenzo Ferlinghetti as well as other underground writers of the time, urging them to contribute to his new avant-garde rag “The Outsider.” His wife who called herself Gypsy Lou worked with John on the rag.
In the early sixties, John and Gypsy Lou contacted Bukowski saying, “ We love the realness of your work, it’s not phony at all, you seem honest and down to earth.” In short time the couple published Buk's first book of poetry, “Factotum,” a crafted and artfully bounded edition made with handmade paper.
FUCK SCREAMING I DON’T WANT TO GO THERE.
Bukowski took to the flower power scene of the sixties like a dog takes to a cat. He was hired to write short stories for a rag called the "LA Free Press" published by John Byran. He loved to ass whip the other writers calling them, "Scummy, commy, hippy shit. Buk's thinking was more in line with the Hell's Angels than the hippies.
Bukowski met Neal Cassidy of Beat fame through John Bryan. Cassidy was on his way to Mexico in a Plymouth V8 wagon. The three of them went for a ride, Cassidy the X parking lot attendant could back a semi truck into a donut hole. Cassidy took the wheel, Buk sat in the back seat and Bryan rode shotgun. Buk offered Cassidy some whiskey from a pint and Neal slugged it like a pro, Buk then saying, “ Have another taste?” Charles felt OK with Cassidy because he drank.
By the early seventies “ Notes of a Dirty Old Man” was published by Ferlinghetti’s “Black Sparrow Press.” This wasn’t Charles best book but it was a big seller and brought him world fame and moderate wealth. He continued to live the barfly life, drinking 24/7. He bought a track house in San Pedro, a mansion compared to the rooming house shit holes of the last thirty years. He also bought his first car, a BMW which he kept till he died.
He would drive the BMW to the Santa Anita Race Track and drink beer covered in a paper sack as he watched the working stiffs driving in the opposite direction to work on the freeway. The crotch of his chinos would often get wet with beer by the time he got to the track. He would walk to the betting window looking like he pissed his pants, he liked the look.
BOOZEHOUND POET CHARLES BUKOWSKI WRITES A HYMN TO HIMSELF IN HOLLYWOOD AND STARTS SINGING.
So ran the profile in “People Magazine” on Charles Bukowski when the publicist of the film “Barfly" sent out the media blitz. A film which would have never been canned without the help of Dennis Hopper’s Venice Beach friend Barbet Shroeder. The stories surrounding the production of the film are legendary, Shroeder was part Mossad hitman and part insane. He pushed the film through, showing up at Golan and Globus’s suite in the Beverly Hill’s Hotel with a chainsaw threatening to saw the room up if they didn’t give him the money for the film.
When “Barfly” began screening in theaters around the country it changed Buk, he would strut around his house loaded, feeling the part of the sheik of Sunset Blvd. But his constant inner companion was a sad man that pussy and booze couldn’t kill. The part in “Barfly” where Henry Chinowski (hilariously played by Mickey Rourke) is up late at night musing, listening to Mahler, feeling his heart and life around him, was spot on Bukowski, there was a sensitive and hurt soul inside the wild man.
Bukowski respected Hollywood Stars as much as he respected hippies. The only films he liked were,”All Quiet on the Western Front” and “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” He once met Arnold Schwarzenegger at an industry party and called him a “Piece of shit” in German. And there was the time Sean Penn, who was in awe of Bukowski and a regular visitor, brought his wife Madonna to Buk’s Sand Pedro place. His neighbors knew him only as a weird drunk, a little girl who lived next door later asked,” Mr. B was that Madonna at your house?”
By 1987 Bukowski's health was getting worse, years of boozing was catching up with him. He was writing his last novel “Hollywood” about the making of “Barfly,” amazed still that he made it in Hollywood.
Writing kept his pain at bay for a while but his body finally gave in to booze in March of 1994. Considering the voracity of abuse he directed at himself it was amazing he lived as long as he did.
He wrote to find a way to cope with everyday life, he reveled with losers, he was a 1000 to one punch drunk champ driving in the opposite direction who beat the odds.