Charles Bukowski Read Online Free

Charles Bukowski
Book: Charles Bukowski Read Online Free
Author: Howard Sounes
Pages:
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drunk.
    ‘You want poems?’ he teased the college kids, disliking their expensive clothes and untroubled faces. ‘Beg me.’
    ‘Fuck you, man!’
    ‘Any other comments?’
    The more drunk he became, the more hostile he was towards the audience and the more hostile the audience got. ‘It ended up with them throwing bottles,’ recalls beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, who had Bukowski hustled out back for his own safety.
    There was a party afterwards at Ferlinghetti’s apartment in North Beach. The place was packed with poets, musicians, actors, members of the audience, and almost everybody was drunk or stoned. Bukowski had little time for drugs, but he was roaring drunk. He asked every woman he met whether they wanted tohave sex with him, and snarled at Taylor Hackford when Hackford tried to film a close-up:
    ‘What do you want, mother-fuck?’
    Bukowski was talking to his friend John Bennett when a fan came over to compliment him on a great show. They told him to get lost.
    ‘Fuck you, and your mother!’ said the fan.
    Bukowski didn’t mind people insulting his mother – he had disliked her himself – but Bennett took offence at the remark and threw the man down the stairs.
    ‘Oh God, here we go!’ exclaimed Linda King as she watched a chair smash through a window in the fight that ensued. Bennett put his fist through another window, gashing his hand, and soon half the men in the room were throwing punches at each other.
    Bukowski grabbed Linda’s hand and pulled her after him into the kitchen. She assumed he wanted to protect her, or maybe give her a kiss, but he accused her of flirting with John Bennett, saying she was no better than a whore, and tried to hit her over the head with a frying pan.
    ‘I looked in his eyes and it was like a creature who was not Bukowski at all,’ says Linda, who had been the victim of his jealousy many times in the year and a half they’d been together. ‘I always claimed he got possessed when he was drunk. I could see he was really going to get me.’
    He blocked her in a corner with his left arm, and was brandishing the frying pan in his right hand, ready to bang her on the head. She bit him hard on the hand, ducked and made a run for it. He lunged after her with the pan, but tripped and cut his face on the stove as he fell.
    ‘To hell with you, bitch, you’re out of my life,’ he screamed.
    Linda heard the familiar sound of police sirens wailing towards them through the city. This often happened when they went to a party, even though Bukowski promised to behave. In her frustration, she kicked a panel out of the door and clattered down the stairs into the street where a crowd was gathering. The police soon showed up, but Linda stayed back, knowing it was better not to get involved.
    Marty Balin, leader of the rock group Jefferson Airplane,wanted to make a movie out of Bukowski’s short stories and came to the party to meet him. ‘The windows were broken and glass was all over the floor,’ says Balin who arrived just after the fight. ‘Bukowski was on a mattress on the floor with no other furniture in the place, broken glass all over, bottles. His face was all cut up.’
    When he saw Marty Balin’s girlfriend, Bukowski scrambled to his feet and squared up to the couple.
    ‘You know, I could take that woman away from you like that!’ he said, snapping his fingers in Marty Balin’s face.
    The poet Harold Norse turned up to find Ferlinghetti outside on Upper Grant Avenue, apparently appalled at the goings on. Norse asked what had happened and the mild-mannered Ferlinghetti replied that Bukowski and Linda King were wrecking his place.
    ‘Didn’t I warn you?’ asked Norse. He knew Bukowski of old and that, when he was sober, Bukowski was quiet and polite, even deferential. But when he got drunk – especially in sophisticated company, which made him uneasy – he became Bukowski the Bad: mischievous, argumentative, even violent. They
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