ss bukowski :: bukowski was l.a. and john fante was l.a. and i am l.a
DESCRIPTION
For a long time I only read Bukowski’s fiction, especially his short stories. Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness was a bible of decadence and self-denigration. I discovered Bukowski’s softer side when I began reading his poetry. When The Pleasures of the Damned, poems, 1951-1993, came out in 2007, “the definitive volume of Bukowski’s poems,” (NYT Book Review) I had a new bible to consult. The preface and postscript of this piece, along with the shorter extracts, are drawn from that book. My hope is that, as a reader, you will find my acquaintance not too much of an imposition, and will feel eager to move on from the small sample of Bukowski’s poetry contained here, to delve more deeply into the man’s poetic work. - M. Krochmalnik Grabois, for The Operating System's 3rd Annual NaPoMo Series, April 2014TRANSCRIPT
John Fante Was L.A. and Bukowski Was L.A. and I Am L.A.
1.
I will always link Bukowski with smog and its antidote, the powerful Santa Ana’s, arid, down-
slope winds, born inland in Fall and Winter, that rush through mountain passes on their way to
the San Fernando Valley, “devil winds” that both fan wildfires and disperse toxic smog.
Bukowski carried the Santa Ana’s banner: if you face the gale, don’t bend in obedience
or resignation, and dare it to topple you, then you are defeating the forces committed to grind
you down. Most of those forces are human, (as Dylan put it) “the pettiness that plays so rough,”
but some of them are impersonal, such as alcoholism and confusion and the body’s decline and
death.
In the evenings I often walked from the stucco hovel Old Man Dengler provided our
family, down the dirt road that led to town, foregoing protection from the gritty dust that scoured
my skin and sometimes blinded me. We could have been living in the Dust Bowl. A lot of kids in
my school were children of Dust Bowl refugees. A generation had passed but (as in Leon
Russell’s lyric) we were still stuck in the Grapes of Wrath together.
The dust crept in everywhere; it respected no personal space. Neither did Bukowski. He
briefly substituted for my father and was also my first literary critic and my harshest teacher—he
let me know what he thought was bad, and found nothing good.
.
2.
I am L.A., though I have not lived there for many years. I am L.A., as the movie studios were
L.A. and the Rolls Royces were, and the dry washes are, and graffiti is, and as Nathaniel West
was, and as John Fante was L.A., and Fante was Bukowski’s God, and Bukowski was L.A.
As Fante wrote in The Road to Hell, When you go to Confession you must tell everything.
Anyone who hides a sin gets into trouble right away, for though you fool the priest it is not easy
to fool God. In fact, it can’t be done.
Bukowski never hid a sin, never bothered to fool a priest, never bothered to try to fool
God, never saw the need, never lied to make me feel better, made me feel as bad as he could.
Buk breathed in the smog, breathed it deep, and proclaimed: This is how I know I’m alive,
when the air burns my lungs. This is the corrupt air of the city that fills me, and that I fill. Let me
breathe smog, and walk along the broken pavements of Paradise.
About the time Bukowski came into my life I was making my last attempt to present
myself to the world as normal. I didn’t know I was abnormal, though all the pressures and forces
toward abnormality were already working on me. My friend Garcia convinced me to try out for
the football team with him. The day of the try-outs was a hundred degrees and heavy with smog.
Garcia fancied himself a tough guy, heir to Pancho Villa and Che Guevara. He wanted to kick
the asses of the black brothers who he knew (accurately) would be bussed in to humiliate us (I
remember one home scoreboard vividly: 87-3.) I didn’t want to try out for the football team, but
Garcia pressured me, challenged me to be a man, not a wuss. He pressured me like Pollo Murillo
and Hector Delgadillo pressured me to huff gasoline with them in Delgadillo’s dim garage, his
father’s motorcycle tools strewn all around. I had conflicting caucuses, conflicting pressures.
.
Garcia put on the football uniform Coach Trump gave him. I put on mine. I felt like I was
wearing a poison-gas suit from World War I, one that wouldn’t work, but would drag me down
to the bottom of a muddy trench. The inside of the football helmet had some jagged edges. I
started thinking that Trump had made them jagged just to get at me. Trump didn’t like me. He
thought I was a hippie. We hadn’t even invented hippies yet, but Trump knew all about them, as
if in a state of contemptuous clairvoyance. Trump got in my face and yelled: When the going
gets tough, the Tough get going, and Winners never quit and Quitters never win! His
philosophy was self-evident, and could not be contradicted.
We started running around the field. It was hot as Hell. Trump wouldn’t give me a glass
of water. I’d been smoking cigarettes I’d stolen from my father, when he was still around, before
he’d split and gone to live a different life in Sonora, Mexico. I’d stolen cigarettes from stores too,
and from gas stations. I’d stolen them from the purses of whores. I had the perfect early-
adolescent life in L.A. If I didn’t have the money for something I wanted, I stole it. I never got
caught. I considered myself a master criminal, a criminal mastermind. I think Bukowski
considered himself one too.
I’d been smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap booze, huffing petrol with Murillo and
Delgadillo. Who knows what I was doing to my lungs. The air was thick with smog. It was a
thousand degrees. I fell to my knees and barfed. Every time I got up and started running, I
barfed. I barfed long after the food in my stomach was gone. Garcia ran by and kicked me with
his cleats, which made me bleed, and left a scar. I decided I hated Garcia, though we’d grown up
together and were best friends. I resolved to kill him. Soon. Trump came up and yelled slogans in
my ears. I became a Quitter, I never won. Later, Bukowski would tell me I was worthless, but for
different reasons. When I took off the helmet, blood ran down my forehead and into my eyes.
.
Winds of Santa Ana
1.
The Santa Ana winds shaped me
Their power snatched the cigarette from my fingers
and drove it deep into dry chaparral
The resulting fire was preordained
I could have lived in Hoboken NJ
and the fire still would have been preordained
still my fault
The western winds overwhelmed me
They blew my garage open
sucked my tuba out into the pebbly road
dragged it down the street
Sparks flew from its brass
I was trying to teach myself to play it
so I could join a Mariachi band
with Pollo Murillo and
Hector Delgadillo
My father was a half-Jewish Rumanian
but passed as Mexican
.
He knew all the love songs
that started with Mi Amor
and ended with
Mi Corazon
He never sang them to my mother
I knew he was not singing to her
though she was his wife
She was as beautiful and upright
as a statue of a Madonna
carved from pinyon wood
by a Colonial
When she was around he shut his lips tight
or twisted them like a bad ventriloquist
He sang his songs to someone else
someone in a different country
he hadn’t met yet
someone he was preparing for
like preparing for the Second Coming
My mother was a Christian woman
though she didn’t love Jesus
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in Him
She was merely indifferent
.
2.
My cap flew from my head
My grandfather’s fedora blew off his dead head
his head a block of grey clay
awaiting the pinching of my fingers
to truncate the seven generations
of suffering deemed necessary
by the Holy Book
to wear down sin
I’d take it down to
maybe four
My grandmother reclined on a tree limb
holding a Russian ukulele and
the eternal flame
of youth
It glowed orange
like the eyes of a tabby cat
The wind blew her out of her tree
The wind blew carom boards
down Topanga
.
out to the ocean
They skimmed across the surface
like plywood torn from houses
by a hurricane
I didn’t understand the meaning of youth
or age
All I understood was the wind
The wind would blow everything away
everything of value or lacking value
It would all end up stuck
on the branches of some bush
I didn’t need to go to high school
The wind was my teacher
The wind was the wisest teacher
The wind would get fiercer every year
All human life would disappear
The wind blew
like it never did in Patterson New Jersey
like Dr. Poet William Carlos Williams
never experienced
But Dr. Williams kept his wooden tongue depressors
.
locked in a glass jar anyway
He never knew what might be coming
The wind blew out the windows of our stucco shanty
the one Old Man Dengler allowed us to live in
3.
The Electrical Engineer
had come from New Jersey
to remake the San Fernando Valley
in the image of a Diode
had come to cast Aerospace
in the image of the Aztec gods
with his hordes of
self-replicating spawn
who enrolled in my school
and looked down on me
This engineer sat at his desk and
the wind
sucked open his drawers
scattered his papers
financial papers
technical papers
He had no idea wind could blow like that
.
Those papers were his life
4.
The wind turned coffee beans
into bullets
The Santa Ana winds stripped tomatoes from their vines
the grapes from theirs
Italians and Jews cried together
Tumbleweeds are weapons of mass destruction
In the future recreational marijuana would be legal
in my new home, Colorado
but in the meantime
I was going to prison
where I could not be touched
by the powerful
destructive wind
I can’t say
I wasn’t grateful
5.
Bukowski was L.A.
Fante was L.A.
.
I was L.A.
The father who abandoned me was L.A.
The rundown VFW hall where he drank was L.A.
My mother took Bukowski to the VFW Hall. Nobody there knew who Bukowski was.
This was the Valley, not Hollywood. No one gave a shit. When my mother got wasted and
started yelling: Do you know who this is? This is Bukowski! the bartender told her to go fuck
herself. Bukowski sat on his barstool with his shit-eating grin.
In the early 1950’s, the painter Roberto Chavez came out to the Valley to paint bucolic
scenes. Later he switched to scenes from the lifeblood of La Raza, scenes from the ghetto, scenes
from Hell, from Los Dias de los Muertos, scenes illustrating sexual fantasies involving Frida
Kahlo.
By the time I came on the scene in the far northwestern corner of the San Fernando
Valley, the bucolic was gone or fast disappearing. Greasy smog sat heavily on everything. There
were four gas stations on every corner. Some of them had attendants, some were self-serve. But
then the Santa Ana winds came up and blew the smog away, and you could see the white rocks
of Chatsworth’s foothill park, just beginning to lose their purity to Mexican graffiti.
4.
THE BIRTH OF PERSISTENCE
.
My father was one of the last hired hands on the dusty pocket ranches of the northwest San
Fernando Valley, ringed by eucalyptus trees and shoved against the foothills by encroaching
suburbia. In his ragged jean jacket, he looked as Mexican as his compadres, but was actually a
half-Jewish Rumanian. He was sinew, gristle and rope, and pissed away his evenings in the
rundown bar next to the hall for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
One night, he failed to come home. After eleven days, we got an aerogram from Sonora,
the folded paper blue like a washed out sky and dry as a taco shell, wishing us luck. The wizened
owner of the Double D Ranch, Old Man Dengler, allowed Ma and me to remain in our shanty for
free. Ma began cooking for him, and I spent grumbly evenings alone. It was then, at age
fourteen, that I started writing poetry, which featured the smell of hand-rolled cigarettes and the
power of the Santa Ana winds. Ma, who had been mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic and
spent some time on a locked ward in Camarillo, lost what remained of her control over me.
At fifteen I began hitchhiking into the seedy side of Hollywood for basement readings by
beat poets. A few of them, like Jack Michelene, had achieved minor fame, but not at the level of
Charles Bukowski, whom they all talked about but who never showed. (Micheline was mostly
living in San Francisco, but, as he put it, was taking a “sabbatical” in L.A.)
One day I got a ride with a drunk who crashed his Cadillac while trying to grope me.
After I got the casts off my leg and wrist, I persuaded Ma to drive me to the readings, because
they were “educational.” Though her twenty-year-old Studebaker Lark was a death trap, it was
safer than catching rides with the freaks attracted by my thumb. I figured Ma would drop me off
and make herself scarce, but she wanted to see what I was up to, so she joined the group.
Because she was actually bipolar (and manic after the freeway ride, all teeth and seduction), she
.
was, according to Michelene, “a fun gal” and accepted by the poets, who invited her to their
parties.
In that way she met Bukowski.
(from Bukowski’s the young lady who lives in Canoga Park)
she has a neck like a swan,
could be a movie star,
twice in the madhouse,
a mother in the madhouse, and a sister in prison.
you never know when she is going to
go mad again…
I was aware of Bukowski’s work from an underground rag that also featured comix by R.
Crumb. “Buk” started showing up at the ranch. He and Ma swam in Dengler’s pool. Bukowski
was butt ugly in clothes, but twice as repulsive in baggy red bathing trunks.
and
I said,
I was beaten down
long ago
in some alley
in another
world
(from Bukowski’s when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the screen like a burglar to take
your life away)
.
One day, Bukowski barged into my room and demanded to read my poetry. Instant
fantasies flashed like fireworks: him hooking me up with a big New York publisher. He read
each poem, dropped it on the floor and dripped on it. The reek of chlorine and beer and cheap
whiskey made my head spin. When he was done, the great Bukowski pushed his grimace of a
face into mine. His breath was putrid. “Even for a kid, this is pathetic,” he said. “Unadulterated
horseshit.” I count that moment as the beginning of my persistence in the face of rejection.
a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers
filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen…
a poem is a city of poets
most of them quite similar
and envious and bitter…
(from Bukowski’s a poem is a city)
5.
So that was my youth, and Bukowski’s contribution to it.
Okay. We change fast at that age. Or we remain the same. Or both. Four years later I was
in the SF Bay area. I thought of looking up Jack Michelene, but didn’t feel like it. I felt he was
complicit in getting Bukowski and my mother together, and in Bukowski dissing my early work.
I was full of spite, not unlike Bukowski.
I can’t remember if I was in college, or had dropped out again. I alternated states.
Sometimes when I was in college I thought I had dropped out. Sometimes when I was a drop-out
.
I wandered into college buildings trying to locate my assigned classroom. Sometimes I read
more when I was not enrolled. My drug consumption always seemed to be about the same,
though I was more paranoid when I was enrolled.
Once I was hitchhiking across the country and got picked up by a dangerous drunk. I was
scared to death he was going to kill me in one way or another. I had him drop me off on a
country road, pretending I lived there, anything to get out of his car. As soon as he drove away
three bristling Doberman Pinschers came running up to menace me. They were the kind of dogs
who chewed on metal fencing for fun, and to keep their teeth sharp. I walked backwards away
from them. They pursued me, their naked muscles trembling with anticipation, looking for an
opening, waiting for me to trip and expose my belly. Then they’d leap on me and tear me apart.
It was classic Ape vs. Wolves. Then their owner called them, and they turned and ran, looking
for a cow bone to gnaw on. The owner didn’t even know I was there. At that moment I realized
that I was supposed to be delivering a presentation that day, but I couldn’t remember what it was
supposed to be about or even what class it was for.
I was living in J.H’s house at the time. It was sort of a commune. When I got back I
boiled some Top Ramen noodles on the stove. I found an old carrot and was slicing it up to add
to the noodles.
J.H. came in and asked: What are you doing?
Cooking dinner.
Not much of a dinner, he said.
I’m dieting.
You look like you’re dying.
.
I had a part-time job mucking out horse stalls. I didn’t get paid, just got to ride for free. I
jumped off my horse and co-eds swooned. I was pure libido, in and out of the saddle. I was an
animated Mexican skeleton, its joints burning day-glo red and orange. Young women knew that I
was the More Life God had promised them when He stroked them between their legs. I was the
candy-flake redemption their parents had tried to keep them from.
I was Big Daddy Roth and Big Daddy Roth was L.A. and L.A. calls me back like a
spurned lover, calls me back with the promise of melodrama and violence and all the events
Bolano included in his book 2066 and the ten thousand pages he edited out (and which were
snatched by the Santa Ana winds when they threw open my garage and my tuba went scraping
down the pebbled road (the flames from my tuba lit Bolano’s discarded pages on fire.)
I should have been in the rodeo. If my dad hadn’t split to Sonora, I was convinced I
would have been. My dad would have tied me to a bronc, to a bull, pulled the cords tight and
sent me to Hell. Instead, his abandonment detoured me into a suck-ass literary side yard.
Bukowski was giving a reading at the Armory in San Francisco. I hitchhiked over there. I
got picked up by a woman in a Cadillac convertible who wanted to take me home and feed me
mung beans. I had already learned that the worst events begin with a ride in a Cadillac. I told her
I didn’t eat mung beans. She looked awfully disappointed.
The organizers of the reading had set up a bare wooden stage with a table, a chair, and an
old refrigerator stocked full of cans of beer. It was Pabst Blue Ribbon, the kind I drank, the kind
.
Bukowski got me started on. The organizers of the reading wanted to beer him up and get him to
do the Bukowski Dance, like getting a trained bear to shimmy.
The last I’d seen him he was wearing that obscene red bathing suit and swimming in Old
Man Dengler’s pool with my mother. Somehow I remembered my mother as being much more
beautiful than she was, thin and shapely, untrammeled, her mind clear, as if the Santa Ana winds
had blown away her red hot/ice cold madness.
This was the first time I had seen Bukowski since he’d been with my mother. I watched
him and didn’t know how I felt about him. I believed I should hate him. If he hadn’t abandoned
her I don’t believe she would have killed herself. That was the final blow, the last straw.
Bukowski had made her love him, then thrown her away. But I didn’t hate him. To be honest, I
wouldn’t have stuck with her either, any more than my father had.
Bukowski drank a lot of the beer from the fridge onstage in the Armory and smiled his
shit-eating smile. I felt sorry for him. He thought he’d resisted all the shit in life and had ended
up a winner, but he was a loser. He was as much of a loser as I was when Coach Trump leaned
on me and yelled in the ear holes of my football helmet. Bukowsi was on the stage sucking up
their beer. They were feeding him beer to punish him for being better than them, a better writer.
They were a bunch of goons, and poets authorized by universities.
Intermission came. I had to take a piss. I didn’t want to comingle with pathetic mankind.
I went far down the hall to an out-of-the-way bathroom I knew about. Some friends and I had
broken into the Armory a couple times to explore it. We were just dumb kids, no better than we
were in the San Fernando Valley crawling into water pipes six feet in circumference , exploring
them by lighting hair spray on fire as it came out of the can. We could easily have blown
.
ourselves up, but didn’t. Not through intelligence, just dumb luck. We all had nicknames. Mine
was Lucky Krochmalnik. Murillo’s was Lucky Murillo. Delgadillo’s was Lucky Delgadillo.
I didn’t think anyone else was in that bathroom. I figured no one else at the reading knew
about it. I turned from the urinal just as Bukowski exited a stall. I stopped and stared at him. He
stared back. He turned and went to the sink to wash his hands. (I wouldn’t have figured
Bukowski would bother to wash his hands after taking a shit, though I’d seen him do it before.)
He turned away from the sink and found me still there, still staring. He must have thought I was
another dumb idol-worshiper. I wanted to ask him why he let the reading organizers treat him
like that, with disrespect. But I couldn’t get the right words to come out of my mouth, any words.
He finally said, “It’s not so bad.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. I didn’t have one.
Only after he left the restroom did I wonder if he recognized me, if he knew me as my
mother’s son, knew me as the kid whose poetry he had read and judged atrocious, unadulterated
horseshit. I remembered those words, remembered how he looked when he delivered them to
me, remembered his alky smell.
I had hated him then, but I didn’t now. In some stupid way, I had made him my father.
My father had left, gone to a country where they spoke a different language, but Bukowski had
hung in.
For the first time, in the wake of Bukowski’s exit from that restroom, the smell of his shit
in the air, his beery stink, I wondered why I had never gone down to Sonora to look for my
father, for that matter why I had never gone to see Bukowski, to show him my recent writing, to
.
ask him if he still thought it was shit, or whether it had gained some redeeming value, maybe get
his approval and respect, maybe knee him in the balls.
I went back to the reading. Bukowski muttered more poems. They all began to run
together. His voice got more gruff and slurred until he was no longer understandable. In the
audience, contempt grew, outweighing admiration. But they had helped do that to him. The
organizers’ secret wish had come true—they had brought down Bukowski.
6.
Except for providing the steel in my persistence, I never thought Bukowski had affected my
work. I’d never tried to write like Bukowski. Never wanted to. But then I came across this poem.
I don’t remember when I wrote it.
Librarian
The fat Cuban library director
wanted me to read
at her college
but after she invited me
a higher administrator
took her aside and told her
that inviting someone like me
would be dangerous
.
a poet abrasive and volatile
with no loyalties
owing nothing to anyone
accustomed to telling ugly truths
a man who likes the
feeling of telling them
So the fat Cuban library director
called me back and told me
her assistant would be in touch
but I had already seen through her
I already knew the game
but I played along
pretended she wasn’t a liar
lying for convenience
and for the sake of her career
like all the rest of the liars
I let her wallow in her stupidity
and opened a bottle of whiskey
good whiskey my son had given me
from when he worked in a distillery
not some cheap crap
.
Bukowski would have drank
in his dirty apartment
on the seedy side of Hollywood
I took a careful sip
Greed comes in many forms
and I wasn’t going to be a party to it
I didn’t need to read at that crappy backwater college
I didn’t need the money
didn’t need the recognition
didn’t need to tell truths
or lies
Our society is like a chain-restaurant halibut
stuffed with the greasy cheese
and fake crab of Greed
and all I was going to do was eat a sandwich
one slice of Pepper Jack on oat bread
with a little mustard
I was going to eat it slowly
and I was going to sip the whiskey slowly
I was going to feel the planet settle
in the darkness
and I was going to hear the faint whisper
.
of the ocean
I was going to feel grateful that I live in Los Angeles
home of Nathaniel West and John Fante and Charles Bukowski
and that I live in California
home of Henry Miller
who didn’t care fuck-all
about the bullshit of the world
but slowly sipped absinthe
and walked down garbage-strewn alleys
feeling satisfied with his lot
“a man with no money, no resources, no hopes
the happiest man alive”
And I felt sorry for that fat Cuban library director
another victim
another human trapped in the jaws
of organizational life
Yes, there was Bukowski shining through my work
his cynicism illuminating my perspective
7.
the last time I saw him he was not walking.
.
it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and
hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent
the pack still strapped on his back
I slowed down to look at his face
I had seen one or two other men in my life
with looks on their faces like
that.
I speeded up and turned on the
radio
I knew that look.
I would never see him again
(from Bukowski’s on the sidewalk and in the sun)
8.
My father was a half-Jewish Rumanian
but passed for Mexican
He was one of the last hired men
on the pocket ranches crammed up against
the foothills of the San Fernando Valley
As the years went by
.
he became less Jewish
more Mexican
and finally split for Sonora
I heard he married a Mexican woman down there
and had a few kids
He stole away my base
took my equilibrium
Bukowski claimed that base for a while
but the relationship was short-lived
and when he left my mother
she killed herself
I wondered why she hadn’t killed herself
when my father left
never even tried
never lay in a room half-dead for me
to discover
and heroically save
not even calling 911
because I knew a 911 call
would put her back in the state mental hospital
Was Bukowski that special
him and his ugly puss
and his self-built myth that he was special,
.
above the mass of working men?
My father was a working man
That’s what he was all about
My father was solid
just who he was
nothing more
clean and hard
In Sonora my father sat on the porch in the evening
and carved figures from wood
He never did that in the San Fernando Valley
If he did
he could have taught me
I could have learned
to become a wood carver
maybe done that for a living
I could have become a silent man
Silence is truth
instead of becoming like Bukowski
full of words
words coming out like water from a sprinkler
on a parched L.A. lawn
My father’s Mexican wife was taciturn
I heard
.
from a friend of his who
passed through the Valley briefly
My father was just as taciturn
so they never argued
over stupid shit
like most couples do
with all the words
tripping them up
Bukowski argued
He was a big arguer
engaged in a ceaseless argument with the world
with himself
with my mother
but my father knew
there was no point in arguing
with the ones you love
or the ones you hate
What were you going to accomplish?
I wish my family was still together
but my parents are both dead
and I’m half dead
like Bukowski was
when he was alive
.
and now Bukowski is totally dead
like everyone else
I wish I had never attended a reading of beat poets
wish I’d never met Bukowski
never become a poet
never cemented tragedy
and disappointment
in words
9.
(from Bukowski, dark night poem):
they say that
nothing is wasted:
either that
or
it all is
#
.