Free Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Page A

can take all these
    and your weekly newspaper
    and your tornadoes,
    and your filthy floods
    and all your yowling cats
    and your subscription to Time ,
    and shove them, baby,
    shove them.
    Triple X cinemas. Cocktail lounges. Apartment courts with cracked swimming pools. Boulevards lined with diseased palmtrees sagging in the smog. This was the other Hollywood, what Bukowski called East Hollywood, the area he moved to after leaving Barbara. It was only a couple of miles from the mansion homes of the movie stars in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, but had more in common with the seedy end of downtown where he had lived with Jane, and which it was also near to.
    The 1600 block of North Mariposa Avenue cut north–south from Hollywood Boulevard to the broken down, busted-out east end of Sunset Boulevard in the rotten core of the district he adopted as his new home. He parked his ’57 Plymouth and went into the Spanish-style rooming house at number 1623: two dozen cold water apartments arranged like prison cells along three landings. There was no elevator and no air conditioning. He took room 303 on the second floor. There were a couple of old chairs, a lamp with dented shade, chipped dining table, cockroaches in the kitchenette, a Murphy bed that folded out of the wall and a shared bathroom down the hall.
    Ned’s Liquor Store, at the corner of Hollywood and Normandie, was a short walk away. Bukowski stocked up on Miller High Life beer, boxes of White Owl cigars and cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes, went back to his room, turned his transistor radio to a classical station, pulled the shade, flipped the top from a beer and sat at the typewriter, thinking of the other losers who had lived there before him. Then he began to type whatever came to mind, experimenting with putting down what Black Sparrow Press publisher, John Martin, calls a ‘series of images’, as opposed to his mature work which mostly consisted of stories.
    ‘Hank’s room was filthy,’ remembers Jory Sherman, a poet from St Paul, Minnesota, who became a close friend at this time. ‘He never cleaned up. Dishes in the sink and cigarette butts everywhere.’
    Grim though the surroundings were, Bukowski was free from his failed marriage, and the expectations of his ambitious wife. He was doing what he wanted, and had his job at the post office to keep him from starving. ‘… at the best of times there was a small room and the machine and the bottle,’ he wrote. ‘The sound of the keys, on and on, and the shouts: “HEY! KNOCK IT OFF, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE WE’RE WORKING PEOPLEHERE AND WE’VE GOT TO GET UP IN THE MORNING!” With broomsticks knocking on the floor, pounding coming from the ceiling, I would work in a last few lines …’
    The landlord told him he would have to stop typing at 9.30 p.m. because the other tenants were complaining. That was precisely the time Bukowski was getting into the swing of it, with a few beers inside him, a cigar going and maybe some Mozart on the radio, if he lucked it. He put up with the noise of the other tenants: the canned laughter from their television sets, and ‘the lesbian down the hall’ who played jazz records all evening with her door open. Why couldn’t he be allowed to write? But the landlord had made his mind up. It was a new rule. So Bukowski developed a system. He typed until 9.30 p.m. and finished his work silently in hand-printed block capitals. He became so skilful he could hand-print almost as fast as he could type.
       
    For several years, contact with his parents had been limited to asking for money when he was broke, and it got so that they barely saw each other. Kate and Henry moved out of LA to the suburb of Temple City, buying a new bungalow on Doreen Avenue and often complained to their neighbours, Francis and Irma Billie, about their wino son. By Francis Billie’s account, Henry was the same bullying braggart Bukowski had always despised, remembering that he tried to boss the neighbors