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Charles Bukowski, the patron saint of L.A.’s seedy side, died 20 years ago today, on March 9, 1994, of Leukemia. He was a boozehound who was also sometimes a genius, or a boozehound who was also sometimes an asshole, or, more likely, both. It depends on how you look at it. It depends on which of his poems you happen to be reading. It depends on which parts of his persona you are willing to dismiss.
What’s clear is that the poet, novelist, and screenwriter was an unapologetic alcoholic, and a prolific writer. What Bukowski did not have in money—he was down and out for most of his life—he made up for in ego and drunken chutzpah. A night out in L.A. with Bukowski was guaranteed to be the kind of night you tell stories about 20 years later. And so, marking the 20th anniversary of Bukowski’s death, I reached out to some of Bukowski’s close friends (and ex-girlfriends), who were eager to feed Bukowski’s drunken ghost as he cruises around the city of angels, shouting eight different women’s names at the moon and throwing beer cans at walls.
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The San Pedro House
Address: 1148 W. Santa Cruz St., San Pedro, Calif. 90731
Date: 1978-1944
Remembered by: Harry Dean Stanton, award-winning actor (Repo Man, Paris, Texas, Alien ,and HBO’s Big Love, to name a few), and Larry “Ratso” Sloman, an author best known as Howard Stern's collaborator on Private Parts and Miss America, and a former editor of High Times.
Harry Dean Stanton: “I took him home one day with Sean Penn and [Bukowski] was so drunk he fell outside of his house in San Pedro, and cut his head. There was a lot of blood. All he said was, ‘This is bad.’
...[Someone] wanted to do a series about [Bukowski], and wanted me to play him...They came to interview me with Bukowski in San Pedro, and I told them they could make a movie, but never a television series because it would have to be censored, with all his language.
We were very close. He was an enlightened man, in the Asian tradition.”
Larry “Ratso” Sloman: “I was going out with this artist in, let's see, it had to be like 1979, 1980, and she was a big Bukowski fan and I really wasn't. We were out in L.A. and she said we should go to Bukowski’s house in San Pedro. I was editing High Times at the time, and I said, ‘Why don't I ask him to write for [the magazine]?’ So we went to his house and knocked on the door—and he let us in. High Times was going through hard times then. There was a government crackdown on paraphernalia, which was our advertising budget. I only had 100 dollars left in our budget. So I said [to Bukowski], ‘I could pay you 100 dollars for a column every month.’ Hank, as he preferred to be called, said, ‘I'll do it, just don't fuck with my copy.’
I just expected a column-length article every month, but he would send me these long 5,000 word stories. He would always send me a cover letter with the piece and he would draw his little Hank caricature holding the bottle of wine, and we got friendly. I would talk to him about my girl problems and he would give me advice about women.”
The (Last) Wedding
Address: A Thai restaurant in San Pedro, following wedding ceremony at the Church of the People in Los Feliz
Date: 1985
Remembered by: Larry “Ratso” Sloman
“So he invites me to his wedding in San Pedro, marrying Linda [Lee Beighle] and I fly there…The wedding [reception] was held at this tacky Thai restaurant at a strip mall. The most amazing thing about the wedding was that the minister who married him and Linda was Manly Hall, the great mystical writer, who at the time was 95 or something. He was literally so old that I didn't know if he could get through the vows.
I'll never forget Hank’s toast after they do the vows. He lifts up his glass and says, ‘This is Linda's first wedding and hopefully my last—here's to the bravery of the bride.’
Everybody was having a good time at the wedding reception and afterwards a small amount of people were invited over to Hank's house, so me and the girl Carmen I picked up [at the wedding] who was close friends with Linda go to the after party. After a few hours, Hank is just raging drunk on red wine, and he actually gets into a fight with one of his guests—at his own wedding—in the living room.”
49'rs Tavern
Address: 5660 E Pacific Coast Hwy, Long Beach, Calif. 90814
Date: Circa 1970
Remembered by: Gerald Locklin, who teaches English at California State University at Long Beach, and is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet.
“The [California State University at] Long Beach department wanted me to put together a [poetry] reading. Bukowski had just quit his job at the post office and was being supported by [his publisher] John Martin. He said he needed at least 25 dollars [compensation for the reading], and Long Beach department head [gave him] 50.
[The day of the reading], I picked him up at his house. He was hungover and eating soft boiled eggs. I drove him down, and we went to the 49er tavern on the PCH...to have a couple beers to settle his stomach. They have big scooters of beer. When we left, he took one step outside and puked in the parking lot.”
The Funeral
Address: Green Hills Memorial Park, Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. 90275
Date: March, 1994
Remembered by: Gerald Locklin
“They brought [Bukowski’s] casket down the hill to his grave, now famous for the plaque which says “don’t try.” It almost got away and rolled down hill.
Linda was into Buddhism and [Bukowski] was supposedly into it at the end of his life. [The funeral] was performed by monks, three of them, in their own language, which of course no one could understand. At one point, Sean Penn, who was one of the pallbearers, whispered to the other pallbearer, John Martin, “Don’t they know we’re American—why aren’t they speaking Spanish?”
Linda had everybody back to their house in Pedro after burial, so an awful lot of his friends, some of the Hollywood people, and his publisher, went there. There was a little girl there who lived across the street from him, and [she] was the most moved and saddened by his passing out of anyone. He had been very kind to her, and loved her. She had lost a great friend.”
The Red Lion Tavern, Silver Lake
Address: 2366 Glendale Blvd, Los Angeles, Calif. 90039
Date: Circa 1971
Remembered by: Gerald Locklin
“[Bukowski’s then girlfriend] Linda King was giving a party in Silver Lake for her first book,so I piled some of my students in a car and drove them up there...Of course everyone was drinking, we always were, and one of [my students], a thoroughly handsome young man, was dancing with Linda. They were dancing too close for Bukowski, who gradually became more irate. He wasn’t a dancer, and at one point he hurled his beer against a wall...I don’t think he ever forgave me for inviting those students.
Silver Lake [with its steep hills] is not the place you want to be driving after drinking, and there was a lot of times when I wondered whether [Bukowski] would get home safe. Silver Lake is also where Linda King, when she was his girlfriend, was a sculptress, and she had done a bust of [Bukowski], and wanted to do a bust of me.
I had long black hair and long black beard back then...like a mugshot. [Bukowski] insisted on being there [while Linda made the bust] because he was a very jealous and possessive person. When it came out, he was irate because he said it made me look like a Greek God...She had transformed me, in terms of handsomeness. After they broke up, and she moved to Arizona, one night during some disturbance, it got smashed against a wall.”
Shakey's Pizza Parlor
Address: 5170 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, Calif. 90027
Date: 1965-1973
Remembered by: Neeli Cherkovski, poet, critic, and the author of the biography Bukowski: A Life.
“[I spent] night after night at De Longpre Avenue with Bukowski, talking literature and gossiping. We made many tape recordings of our [poetry] sessions and would fight for mic time. We drank Miller's beer from a liquor store off of Normandie Avenue, run by a salty old guy who also sold us cheap cigars. [We spent] nights at Shakey's Pizza parlor on Sunset. We would go for a beer, peanuts, and pizza special, swilling beer and stuffing pizza slices and peanuts into our greed youths.”
Terminal Annex Post Office
Address: 900 N Alameda St., Los Angeles, Calif. 90012
Date: 1958-1968
Mentioned in: Bukowski’s novel Post Office
Bukowski spent 14 years working as a carrier and sorter for the U.S. Postal Service, which provided the material for his first novel, Post Office, narrated by Hank’s thinly-veiled alter ego, Henry Chianski. In 1969, John Martin, publisher of the Black Sparrow Press, offered Bukowski 100 dollars a month for life to leave the Post Office and write full-time. The rest is history.
Richard Schave runs a Bukowski bus tour of Los Angeles, and The Terminal Annex Post Office is one of the first stops. While conducting research for his tour, Schave, who runs the Esotouric tour company with his wife, interviewed postal workers who knew Bukowski when. “[They] said he was the worst civil servant,” Schave told me. “He blew it. A normal response to having problems [on the job] is asking friends for help. If a friend has another supervisor who likes you, maybe you can get transferred. There are ways to work the system to make your time better and [Bukowski] failed to do any of those. He made it so much harder.”
Clifton's Cafeteria
Address: 648 S Broadway, Los Angeles, Calif. 90014
Date: Circa 1941
Mentioned in: Bukowski’s novel Ham on Rye
Bukowski frequented Clifton’s Cafeteria in Downtown Los Angeles, which opened in 1935, and remained open until 2011, when it closed (temporarily) for remodeling. “Clifton’s Cafeteria was nice,” Bukowski wrote in Ham on Rye. “If you didn’t have much money, they let you pay what you could. And if you didn’t have any money, you didn’t have to pay.”
Hollywood Park Racetrack
Address: 1050 S Prairie Ave, Inglewood, Calif. 90305
Date: Circa 1969
Mentioned in: Bukowski’s columns for Open City
During and after the Post Office days, Bukowski became a regular at the then-seedy Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood. “The horses look the same and the people a little worse,” he wrote in a column called “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” in the underground newspaper Open City, which, like the racetrack, recently closed up shop. “The horse player is a combination of extreme conceit, madness and greed...Checking out ladies (between races) I do find the same oddity: before the first race they sit with their skirts down as much as possible, and as each race proceeds the skirts climb higher and higher...”
Los Angeles Public Library
Address: 630 W 5th St. Los Angeles, Calif.
Date: Teenage Years
Mentioned in: Bukowski’s poem “The Burning of the Dream”
“I had a library card and I checked books in and out large stacks of them always taking the limit allowed,” Bukowski wrote of the library where he discovered John Fante, the writer he would grow to emulate. “Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, e.e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, Fyodor Dos, Dos Passos, Turgenev, Gorky, H.D., Freddie Nietzsche, Art Schopenhauer, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and so forth...I always expected the librarian to say, "you have good taste, young man...but the old fried and wasted bitch didn't even know who she was let alone me...that wondrous place the L.A. Public Library.”
The Job Boards
Address: East 5th St. and Los Angeles St.
Date: Circa 1950
Mentioned in: Bukowski’s novel Ham on Rye
“Skid row in 1930s was a place where migrant laborers would line up to find work,” Schave said. On his Bukowski tour, he stops by the intersection of Los Angeles St. and 5th St., the site of former job boards Bukowski mentions in Ham on Rye. “He [watched other workers line up and] wished he had a skill,” Schave said. “Bukowski’s skid row was not going from bar to bar…[He was] trying to figure out how to get it together.”
The Pink Elephant Liquor Store
Address: 1836 N Western Ave, Los Angeles, Calif. 90027
Date: Circa 1965-1979
Mentioned in: Bukowski’s novel Women
Another stop on Schave’s Bukowski tour is the oft-mentioned Pink Elephant Liquors, which used to have a collage of Bukowski in the window. It was Bukowski’s favorite liquor store, in part, because of the delivery service. “At some point in the 70s, Bukowski had so many DUIs that his lawyer said he would not be able to keep him out of jail if he got another DUI,” Schave said. “[He told him to] just have the liquor store deliver.”
California State University at Long Beach
Address: 1250 Bellflower Blvd, Long Beach, Calif. 90840Date: August 15, 1975
Remembered by: Joan Jobe Smith, poet, author of Charles Buksowski Epic Glottis.
“A lot of feminists would come to his readings in the 70s and sit in the front row dressed in tie dyes and jeans skirts and Jane Fonda Hanoi haircuts, like, ‘Ok, piss us off.’ So, when Bukowski started reading the passage from Women where he’s receiving oral sex from a very willing woman, all of these feminists in the audience at Cal State Long Beach got up and stomped out with their big boots—all at the same time.”
The Apartment on Carlton Way
Address: 5437 Carlton Way, Los Angeles, Calif. 90027
Date: 1976
Remembered by: Joan Jobe Smith
“We talked on the phone a lot. Me, from my house in suburbia and Bukowski from his dilapidated bungalow on Carlton way. He was a good listener. He would call me at midnight, and we would talk for two or three hours, while he would drink and I would drink. He would sleep during the day, which helped with the hangovers, and write in the evening, so we always talked very late. On his birthday in 1976, he had a fight with his girlfriend at the time, and we talked on the phone all night, drinking. We fell asleep with the phone to our ears, so I can say that I spent the night with Bukowski, once.
It was a literary friendship. He encouraged me to write [about my experience as] a go-go dancer. He said, ‘You gotta write about this madness, kid.’ So I did.”
The Troubadour
Address: 9081 Santa Monica Blvd, West Hollywood, Calif. 90069
Date: July 11, 1976
Mentioned in: Charles Bukowski Epic Glottis by Joan Jobe Smith
“[Bukowski was] in a good mood—because he was In Love with Cupcakes...this sweet, sexy little redheaded thing thirty-two years his junior...At the microphone, he said: ‘Harrr. That’s my new gimmick! They just keep getting younger and younger!’...When Bukowski began to read his Cupcake Poems, she shouted out from the back area near the back exit, ‘That’s about me!’ And everyone laughed. Then Bukowski replied, lovingly, almost paternally in his deep...voice...'Yes, dear, that was about you.' He smiled, showing big white teeth. And then he read on. This call and response always entertained.”
Musso and Frank Grille
Address: 6667 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, Calif. 90028
Date: Circa 1980s
Mentioned in: Charles Bukowski’s novel Hollywood
Later in his life, when Bukowski was hanging around the likes of Sean Penn, Dennis Hopper, and (at least once), Madonna, he became a regular in the back room of Musso and Frank Grille, a classier establishment than the dives he previously frequented. Ruben Rueda, one of the the longest continually serving bartenders in Hollywood, told The Los Angeles Times that he would often drive Bukowski home, so that he would not risk another DUI.
Bukowski wrote about the bar in his novel Hollywood: “I was leaning against the bar in Musso’s. Sarah had gone to the lady’s room. I liked the bar at Musso’s, bar just as bar, but I didn’t like the room it was in. It was known as the ‘New Room.’ The ‘Old Room’ was on the other side and I preferred to eat there. It was darker and quieter. In the old days I used to go to the Old Room to eat but I never actually ate. I just looked at the menu and told them ‘Not yet,’ and kept ordering drinks.”
Bukowski's Childhood Home
Address: 2122 Longwood Avenue, Los Angeles, Calif. 90016
Date: 1931-1939
Mentioned in: Bukowski's novel Ham on Rye
When Bukowski was two years old, his family moved to the United States from Andernach, Germany. After moving around L.A. for a few years, they settled into a house on Longwood Avenue, near the Santa Monica Freeway. Bukowski once said in a magazine interview that he began drinking at 13 to dull the pain of being beaten continually by his father. Around this same time, he developed severe acne that would leave him with lifelong facial scars. Bukowski’s novel Ham on Rye is based on these rough early years in his family home.
The De Longpre House
Address: 5124 De Longpre Avenue, Los Angeles, Calif. 90027Date: 1964-1972Remembered by: Lee Mallory, poet and performer
Mentioned in: Charles Bulkowski’s Scarlet by Pamela “Cupcakes” Wood, author of (and portrayed as “Tammie” in Bukowski’s novel Women.)
Pamela “Cupcakes” Wood: “...He opened the door [to the De Longpre house] and invited us in. He was fairly tall and fairly old, with a large head and a ravaged face...I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by staring at his scarred, pockmarked skin. Wow, I thought, this guy has had a rough life. It looked like a road map to hell imprinted on his face.
…His eyes moved from my face, to my chest, to my empty hands. “You’ve got the cleavage, but you don’t got the six-pack,” he said.
…[The De Longpre House] was the most rundown-looking dump I’d ever seen: An old sofa with a faded red blanket thrown over it; across from the sofa sat an over-stuffed, worn-out, mustard and brown striped chair with blotchy stains; in-between was a round coffee table, which was too big for the room and covered with debris, including overflowing ashtrays and empty beer bottles. The rug was stained and covered in lint—dust was everywhere, and newspapers were strewn about. To my right was the entrance to the kitchen. The wall connecting the two was partially painted in a chocolate brown. It looked as though someone got too tired to finish the job….The entire place was approximately five hundred square feet and a hundred miles from bohemian. It was just plain seedy.”
Lee Mallory: “I was pretty young, just 23 or so, and I remember being introduced to him by Tom Kerrigan, poet and lawyer, who was already friends with him...In Hollywood, Kerrigan and I would visit, but in the beginning, Buk wouldn't let us in unless we brought lots of beer. Later though, the beer didn't seem to matter, but we brought it anyway. At our knock, he'd pull the door shades open a crack, peering out to see if we had the ‘goods.’ Inside was dark, with spare, cheap furniture, and often with a lot of papers and cans around. Also, the big typewriter, and a phonograph. We'd drink, laugh, and he enjoyed...teasing us. To him...we were ‘sharks,’ the young writers...who wanted to hang out with the ‘big guy.’
Once...he got right in my face, and pointed to his own face screaming, ‘Mallory, what do you think of my face?’ Being younger, somewhat in awe of him, I didn't want to hurt him. But as everyone knows, it was pretty bad. Still, if I flinched, to show weakness, I thought he'd throw me out. This was, indeed, another test. So I got in really close to him—absolutely nose to nose—summoned all my courage, and screamed back: ‘Your face is so ugly, it looks like it's been bitten by red ants! It's a flare-scored face, just the worst!’
At that, everyone in the room grew silent, mostly him, and we were still nose to nose…He seemed really angry, and for what seemed interminably long seconds, we just stared, unblinking, at one another. He was bigger than me, and in the heat of the moment, I honestly thought he was going to kill me...Everyone was just so quiet, and I thought. ‘This is it!’ Then suddenly, he threw his head back and roared with laughter. I'd passed the test!”
The Edgewater House
Address: 2440 Edgewater Terrace, Los Angeles, Calif. 90039Date: 1973Remembered by: Linda King, poet, sculptor, painter, and one of Bukowski’s ex-girlfriends (depicted as “Lydia” in his novel Women.)
“He lived with me for a while on Edgewater Terrace. It was my house. We had a beautiful bedroom set up high and I didn’t have any curtains in the windows and the backyard had big trees and bamboo. The house was decorated with my sculptures. I was broke at the time and, do you know those squares of carpet they sell as samples? I found them for 25 cents apiece and made a carpet by patching them all together. So we had a patchwork carpet. It was very artistic.
We had some of our huge fights there. During one of them, he broke all the windows out.
But mostly, it was one of the times when we actually got along for a while, while we lived there. Then he started going out and seeing other women, and that was the end of it, because it was my house, and I wasn't gonna let him do that in my house.
I wrote a lot of poems about him in that house. One of them is called, The Great Poet. I wrote, ‘He lumbers from the bed like a 300 lb orangutan. He can’t find his glasses. He can’t find his shirt...Bellowing...He scratches his ass...He can’t find his wallet...Making strange noises to himself...He belches loudly in restaurants and announces he is going to take a crap.'"