Free Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Page B

around and exaggerated his importance at the LA County Museum, describing himself as Art Director although he had never risen higher than a preparator, and that by posing as the author, Charles Bukowski.
    Kate started to drink heavily. She ordered deliveries of wine from the corner liquor store when Henry was at work and Irma Billie says that, when Henry came home, he often found Kate passed out drunk.
    The last time Bukowski saw his mother she was in the Rosemead Rest Home, dying of cancer. Kate said he should have more respect for his parents, especially his father. ‘Your father is a great man,’ she told him.
    Henry decided their son would make no further visits, and stopped giving him news of Kate’s condition. ‘Henry said it wouldn’t do any good anyway,’ says Irma Billie. ‘He wouldjust come down there drunk, so he didn’t bother to tell him.’ On Christmas Eve, 1956, Bukowski went out and bought a rosary as a gift for his mother and drove over to the home. He was trying to open the door to her room when a nurse told him she had died the day before. To what extent the bereavement caused him pain is impossible to say for certain because Bukowski never dwelt on his feelings for his mother, either in his writings or in private conversation, but it seems to have made little impression on him. ‘It’s a very veiled sort of thing, barely there,’ says his widow, Linda Lee Bukowski.
    Henry lost no time looking for a new wife. First he tried to seduce Anna Bukowski, widow of his late brother, John, but she didn’t want to know, so he got engaged to one of the women who worked at the Billies’ dry-cleaning business. Late on the afternoon of 4 December, 1958 – nine months after Bukowski’s divorce – Henry’s fiancé came by the house and found him dead on the kitchen floor having apparently suffered a heart attack. If Bukowski failed to grieve for his mother, the death of the father was positively a cause for jubilation. ‘… he’s dead dead dead, thank God,’ he wrote.
    The old man’s corpse lay in a Temple City funeral parlor where his girlfriend wept over the casket. ‘No, no, no,’ she wailed. ‘He can’t be dead!’ He had only been sixty-three, she said, a fit and strong man, with many years ahead of him. Bukowski, his Uncle Jake and Aunt Eleanor stood together looking at the corpse. Bukowski remembered his father beating him with the razor strop, telling him he would never amount to anything; trying to push his head down into the vomit on the rug; beating him while his mother stood by doing nothing; beating Kate until she screamed. He had a powerful compulsion to push the girlfriend aside and spit on his face.
    A substantial block of granite marked the family plot at the Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena – BUKOWSKI etched in capital letters. The older ones were almost all dead: Henry and Kate; Henry’s brothers, John and Ben, both broken by the Depression; Grandfather Leonard, the drunken veteran of the Kaiser’s army; and Grandmother Emilie, the hard-shell Baptist who cackled she would outlive them all. But Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr wasleft, whiskey on his breath and an uneasiness in his stomach as he listened to the prayers said for his namesake.
    Back at Doreen Avenue, friends of his parents looked over bits of furniture and talked about lawn mowers and hedge clippers, and other oddments borrowed or promised over the years, things ‘Henry and Kate would have wanted us to have’. Bukowski told them to take whatever they wanted, giving away pictures from the walls, silverware, anything they asked for. Women were practically fighting over his mother’s home-made preserves in the kitchen, and so much stuff was taken that the contents of the house was valued at only $100 when it was sold.
    There was a perverse pleasure lounging around in the empty bungalow while ‘the old man was down in the dirt’ and Henry’s attorney totted up what he would inherit. Bukowski remembered his father