Charles Bukowski: Los Angeles Poet

My first encounter with Charles Bukowski was in the late 1980s at Dutton’s Books in North Hollywood.  Davis Dutton had a rack of Black Sparrow Press editions next to the door of the shop, and it was there I picked up the poet’s work and was instantly hooked.  His words were profane and often misogynistic, but also bloody and heartfelt.  I scanned through several poems that lit up my nervous system like 50,000 volts off a live wire.  I tried to read everything I could find by him and about him.  For sheer testosterone, he outdid Hemingway by a long shot.  Somewhere in his more than 60 books, I remember a scene in a stairwell in an old Skid Row hotel.  The character is trying to make it to the hospital when he realizes it is too late.  Blood vomits from his mouth and down his shirt as he collapses, suffering from a ruptured stomach due to an untreated ulcer.  Alcohol and hard living finished him and left him to rot in that tenement hotel.  It was powerful stuff.  That was Bukowski, brutal and bloody, but clinging to life.

He was born 94 years ago this month in Germany, but his family relocated to Los Angeles in the 1930s where he grew up and lived most of his life.  He is truly a Los Angeles poet, having lived in Hollywood, Downtown, East L.A., and San Pedro, often in cheap boarding houses, rundown apartments, and seedy motels.  He wasn’t a pretender; he lived life as he wrote it.

As a child, his father beat him and abused him physically and verbally.  His mother was powerless to stop the violence, but Bukowski often said the beatings helped his writing later in life because it forced him to understand the suffering of others.  He also was inflicted with a severe case of cystic acne that left him with deep pock marks and a craggy face that looked boiled and angry for his entire life.  Every sin the man committed was plain in his scarred complexion.  A handsome gent, he was not.

Alcohol played a major role in his art and life.  His alcoholism mirrored that of his characters in his writing.  The drinking started in high school and continued throughout his life.  In 1955, he nearly died from a bleeding ulcer, most likely similar to the one he assigned to a character in the work I read so long ago.  He worked for the United States Post Office until the age of 49 when he quit to devote himself to writing full time.  The books—novels, poems, plays nonfiction, chapbooks—rolled out of his typewriter at a blistering pace.  His was scorched earth writing; he took no prisoners while pointing his pen at Hollywood, drinking, whores, pimps, losers, transients, and other down-on-their-luck denizens of the streets of L.A.  All of it in writing that was on fire with nerve and emotion:  brazen, angry literature.

The first book I plucked off the shelves at Dutton’s was The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (Ecco, 2002; originally published 1969).  It sits on my shelf to this day, as well as several other works collected over the years. What I love to do when procrastinating from some writing project or a set of papers needing comments is to browse one of the online databases of quotes from him.  I have many, many favorites.  Here are a few:

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered.  But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written.  We adjust to new conditions and discoveries.  We are pliable.  Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum.  I am my own god.  We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system.  We are here to drink beer.  We are here to kill war.  We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way.  An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

My final thought about Charles Bukowski concerns his gravestone.  The poet is buried in Rancho Palos Verdes down near Long Beach and the harbor of Los Angeles.  On his stone one will find the words, “Don’t try.”  It was the poet’s own philosophy of life, a way of accepting the fact that we have little control in this world.  There is fate and the choices we make, but in the end, life takes us where it will, and we can either be dragged, kicking and screaming, or we can do our best where we are with what we have.  Bukowski had his bottle, his pen and typewriter, and his life experiences to steel him against the vagaries and disappointments, the sheer violence of being alive.  And in that dark existence, he found true beauty in the profane, the decayed, the broken down.  We are lucky that he shared his vision with the world.  We have his poetry to get us through the rain and for that, I am grateful.

My Tarzan Summer

My twelfth summer was notable for many reasons.  I participated in my first accordion festival at a big hotel down near LAX and won several trophies that became the kind of junk you can never get rid of.  I mean, what secondhand shop wants a marble and gold-plated monument to achievement topped with a metal accordion?  Old bowling trophies, yes, but old accordion awards, not so much.  However, when I wasn’t pumping the squeezebox, I was plowing my way through Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels.  And that is where our story begins.

Tarzan has become a cultural icon in America, as famous as Superman and the Lone Ranger, although occasionally he is portrayed as having the speech pattern of the Masked Man’s faithful Indian companion Tonto.  That is not true to Burroughs’ vision.  In the original, Tarzan was highly gifted both athletically and intellectually.  He knew multiple languages, many of them learned on the fly, and he could also communicate across the animal kingdom.  He was the most famous “noble savage,” raised by Great Apes after he was orphaned, and upon being reintroduced into human society, found he preferred the jungle and all its creatures over homo-sapiens.  He loved swinging through the trees wearing his loincloth and large hunting knife and he loved his Jane, the only human woman who could tame the savage breast wherein the savage heart beat.

Tarzan’s creator wrote for pulp magazines in the early part of the twentieth century.  At one point before fame came calling, Burroughs sold pencil sharpeners, but after Tarzan was published for the first time as a novel in 1914, he became wealthy and could afford to live the celebrity life.  He bought a ranch out in the San Fernando Valley sometime between 1915 and 1919, and named it Tarzana.  The name stuck, and the community remains at the western end of Ventura Boulevard.  Burroughs died in 1950 of a heart attack.

So there I was that summer of 1975, reading my way through Tarzan’s adventures mostly at night after my parents and siblings were asleep.  The small house was just too hot.  My parents had an old refrigerated air conditioner in their window, so they cranked that on and closed the bedroom door to keep the cold air in while the rest of us sweltered.  I lay up in my top bunk bed reading away and sweating off the pounds while Tarzan swung through the trees in my head.

It was on one such hot night that I had enough of reading about Tarzan and wanted to become Tarzan.  I waited until everyone was asleep, and then I dressed in my corduroy shorts and strapped on my Dad’s hunting knife.  I thought about going barefoot in true Tarzan fashion, but I’d seen the Ron Ely Tarzan on television reruns wearing sandals, so I modified my Tarzan footwear to tennis shoes without socks.  I stealthily crept through the hot house and eased the deadbolt open on the backdoor.  Suddenly, I was out in the night as Tarzan.

I climbed up on our cinder block wall to stare at the nearly full moon.  The Great Dane next door leaped out of the darkness and I was forced to jump backward off the wall into nothingness, but I landed on my feet.  Tarzan had faced his first lion.  The Dane slunk back into the night.  I ran down the side of the house and out onto the quiet residential street.  Nothing stirred, but mockingbirds sang in the trees, a regular southern California chorus at night.  I ran with speed and agility across the shadowy lawns of suburbia, ducking around cars and trucks parked on the still steaming asphalt, feeling the heat rise up in my face.  I slid between two houses farther down the block and ventured into their backyards.  A leopard launched itself over the wall, deciding not to challenge me.  I heard his meow plaintively calling under the house.  I leapt over into the next block and crouched stock-still in the owner’s vegetable garden.  I had moved toward the house when suddenly, I was bathed in light:  motion-activated floodlights.  I ran like quicksilver and vaulted the next wall and landed in some thick shrubbery.  My chest was heaving as I clutched the hilt of the knife on my belt.  I was about to move when a light snapped on in the house.  I sprinted down the side of the house and out onto the much busier street in the next block.  Here there were cars and people, and I considered them big game hunters who must be avoided at all costs.

I ran down three houses and cut through another backyard to jump over a wall and land in rose bushes that cut and scratched my legs.  I untangled myself and crept out onto my street again, although now I was a good block away from my house.  I had enough of a taste of the life of Tarzan to know what it was like, so I decided to walk home and go back to my reading.  I had walked about half the distance when a car turned onto my street up ahead of me, right near my own driveway.  I jetted into the bushes and huddled down, waiting.  The car came to a stop about four houses away, and I saw a spotlight illuminate the bushes in the front yards on the opposite side of the street.  The car was slowly rolling toward me, and the occupants were methodically shining the spotlight first on one side of the street and then on the other.  I frantically looked for a way to escape.  The car was close enough now that I could see the distinctive light bar on the roof and the black and white color scheme.  The cops were also now close enough that if I ran, they would easily spot the movement in their headlights or with the roving spotlight.

I threw myself down under the shrubbery on the cool earth and tried to make my body as flat as possible.  I could hear the hum of the car’s engine and the crackling of the police radio.  They were almost on me.  The radio crackled, and I heard someone say, “Let’s go,” and the police car accelerated down the street and squealed around the corner.  I jumped up and sprinted down the sidewalk, through my gate to the unlocked door of my house.  But something seized me, and a surge of Tarzan-like courage flooded my veins.  I turned to the moon, cupped my hands around my mouth, and gave my best Tarzan yodel-yell into the night.  Smiling, I crept into the house and bolted the door.

Brother Ray

Ray Bradbury died this week.  He is the last of the greatest generation of speculative fiction writers, a group that included Isaac Asimov, Phillip K.Dick, Douglas Adams, and Robert Heinlein, to name just a few.  Bradbury was a Los Angeles writer, through and through, although his stories often centered on distant worlds and parallel universes.  Much has been made of his time spent in the UCLA library typing his stories on rented machines, feeding dimes in as his pages came out.  I have some tapes of him discussing his work where he talks about taking long walks on the beach at Santa Monica and dreaming up his fantastic and poetic tales.  For many years, he was the main attraction at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.  One of my students, an aspiring writer, once arrived in class on a Monday following the festival nearly incoherent with joy because Ray Bradbury had posed for a picture with him and signed his books.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of teaching many of Bradbury’s books and short stories.  I still consider the first sentence of his story, “Tomorrow’s Child,” to be one of the best in literature:  “He did not want to be the father of a small blue pyramid.”  Even now, I want to keep reading, regardless of the fact that I know how it ends and have read it a million times.  That was the thing about Bradbury’s writing.  His words twisted around and pulled you in.  They were poetic and descriptive, but not at the expense of story.  His poetry prose is what set him apart from other writers.

 

I think the best book about writing has to be Bradbury’s Zen In The Art of Writing:  Essays On Creativity (Capra Press, 1989).  “And what, you ask, does writing teach us?” he writes in the Preface.  “First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that is a gift and a privilege, not a right.  We must earn life once it has been awarded us.  Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.”  He goes on to say that “Not to write, for many of us, is to die.”  And write, he did.

My favorite Bradbury novel is Something Wicked This Way Comes (Avon Books, 1998).  In it, a carnival comes to town, bringing a malevolence that threatens the very existence of the characters.  In addition to the carnival tent, the games, the funhouse, a library also plays a major role in the plot.  It is a thread running through all of Bradbury’s work:  reading.  Of course, Fahrenheit 451 (Del Rey, 1991) was a staple in my classroom when I taught high school.  Los Angeles adopted the book as a One Book One City reading project several years ago.  I still have my commemorative pin.  According to Bradbury, he wrote only one science fiction book:  Fahrenheit 451.  “All the others are fantasy,” he said.  “Fantasies are things that can’t happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen.”

 

Whatever the classification, Ray Bradbury’s work is literature, and should be included in the books kids should read before leaving high school, right up there with Shakespeare and Salinger, Twain and Tolstoy.  Science fiction has long been considered a lesser art, but when done well, this literature is prophetic, insightful, and exciting.  I find Bradbury’s work appeals to boys, especially, although I am loathe to classify literature as “boy books versus girl books.”  How is it that stories set among aliens on a distant planet can reveal secrets of the human condition?  How is it that we can recognize our humanity, or lack thereof, in characters so unlike us?  Bradbury knew the secrets to those riddles.

“It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious,” Bradbury writes at the end of Zen In The Art of Writing.  “And not only knows it but lets it speak of the world as it and it alone has sensed it and shaped it to its own truth.”  Ray Bradbury did all of that and more.  His imagination, poetic use of language, his incredible insights into the human condition will continue to thrill audiences for years to come.  Brother Ray, however, has journeyed on.