Charles Bukowski Read Online Free Page A

could hear him up there now being Bukowski the Bad. He was howling like a lunatic.
    ‘FUCK ALL THIS!’ he bellowed.
       
    Morning broke with beautiful warm autumn sunshine, a fresh breeze blowing in from the bay, and the sound of broken glass being swept up. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harold Norse came back to the apartment and picked their way upstairs, through the shards of glass and splintered wood, until they found Bukowski. He was sitting on the floor, still dressed in the clothes he had on the day before, his face smeared with dried blood, drinking a beer for breakfast. He had been in residence for only one night, but, as Ferlinghetti says, the place ‘looked like a nest of junkies had been living there a month.’
    Ferlinghetti greeted Bukowski remarkably affably, considering the state his home was in, and told him he had brought his money for the reading. His share was $400.
    ‘And to think I used to work for 35 cents an hour,’ said Bukowski in genuine wonder. He was talking about the factoryjobs he had worked at nearly all his adult life, most recently as mail clerk in Los Angeles, sorting letters while the supervisor yelled at him to hurry up. He held that terrible job almost twelve years before leaving, when he was forty-nine, to become a writer. Everybody said he was mad – what about his pension? – but this proved he had been right. He held the money to his face.
    ‘Poetry, I love poetry,’ he said, kissing the bank notes. He meant it seriously, but couldn’t help making a joke that lived up to his image. ‘It’s better than pussy,’ he added, ‘almost.’

1
TWISTED CHILDHOOD
     
    B ukowski claimed the majority of what he wrote was literally what had happened in his life. Essentially that is what his books are all about – an honest representation of himself and his experiences at the bottom of American society. He even went so far as to put a figure on it: ninety-three per cent of his work was autobiography, he said, and the remaining seven per cent was ‘improved upon’. Yet while he could be extraordinarily honest as a writer, a close examination of the facts of Bukowski’s life leads one to question whether, to make himself more picaresque for the reader, he didn’t ‘improve upon’ a great deal more of his life story than he said.
    The blurring of fact and fiction starts with the circumstances of Bukowski’s birth.
    ‘I was born a bastard – that is, out of wedlock,’ he wrote in 1971, and he repeated this story many times both in interviews and in his writing.
    His parents met in Andernach, Germany, after World War One. His father, Sgt Henry Charles Bukowski, was serving with the US army of occupation and Bukowski’s mother, Katharina Fett, was a local seamstress. She didn’t like Henry at first, ignoring him when he called to her in the street, but he ingratiated himself with her parents by bringing food to their apartment and by speaking with them in German. He explained that his parents had emigrated to America from Germany so, by ancestry, he was German too.Henry and Katharina started dating and Henry soon made her pregnant.
    There was a delay before they got married because Henry had to get demobbed from the army first. But Andernach city records show that they did marry, on 15 July, 1920, before their child was born.
    They rented an apartment at the corner of Aktienstrasse, near the railway station, and it was here Katharina gave birth to a boy at 10 p.m. on 16 August. A few days later the child was baptized at the Roman Catholic cathedral, at a font decorated with a bird very much like a black sparrow. The priest named the child Heinrich Karl Bukowski, like his dad.
    They stayed in Andernach for two years while Henry worked as a building contractor, and then moved to nearby Coblenz where they lodged for a while with a family named Gehrhardt on Sclostrasse. Gehrhardt family letters reveal that Katharina shocked them by telling sexy jokes, and that Henry kept postcards of