That's It. A Final Visit With Charles Bukowski. Gundolf S. Freyermuth
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 for the plush wolf and puts it in his lap. The picture resembles a strange and dialectical pietà: a wolf in sheep’s clothing rocked gently by Bukowski who, at this moment, could pass very well for a sheep in wolf’s clothing.
“We should produce the beasts en masse. We could become rich.”
His embarrassed gesture after the last sentence leaves no doubt. The wish Charles Bukowski just expressed belongs to another lifetime. He does not need more money. For quite some time now he has had enough on hand; and for sure, he is lacking nothing for the couple of months that remain to him.
What is he working on right now? Bukowski, who has published over forty books up to this day - novels, short stories and more than a thousand poems - defensively lifts his right hand, in which he still holds the wolf in the sheep’s clothing.
“The crime rate, our alarm systems, the constant annoyance by smokers - that’s all we talk about here in San Pedro. We don’t discuss literature and Hemingway.”
He stops short and watches me fumbling in my coat pocket for a note book.
“Damn!” Bukowski says to everyone and nobody. “I bet this guy’s got a tape recorder, too!”
Many who’ve met him have described his desperate countenance when bothered with literary questions. “A couple of friends and I had cornered him,” David Baker remembers a party in the early Seventies, “and we wanted to talk literature. He looked like he wanted to crawl off into a dark, quiet space and die like a wounded animal.”
For Bukowski there’s only one thing worse than being questioned by aspiring poets: being interviewed by a pro. Like so many authors, he hates to submit to the uppermost rite of fact-crazy journalism. For a while he scared off potential interviewers demanding: “One thousand dollars an hour.” He always refused to go on the talk-show circuit. And he advised Sean Penn, of course, when the actor was pestering him with questions: “So if you want to know about me, never read an interview. Ignore this one.” Since: “It’s embarrassing. So, I don’t always tell the total truth. I like to play around and jest a bit, so I do give out some misinformation just for the sake of entertainment and bullshit.”
Those who can write usually find little reason to have their unpolished words recorded. Bukowski thus completed the last question-and-answer session he agreed to in writing. Why, then, did he concede today to ...
“Well, certainly not to sell books.” Bukowski smiles. “I mean, wouldn’t it be much nicer if we could simply sit here and talk and then go out and eat something?”
Bukowski turns up his mouth in an indignation that seems shamelessly contrived.
“But it’s my birthday. I must be nice.”
He smirks at Michael Montfort. A father-to-son grin.
“Besides, I’d like people to say nice things about me later on ... I mean, as far as anybody is able to say nice