Charles Bukowski Read Online Free Page B

nude girls hidden in the wash stand in his room.
    Henry and his bride probably would have settled in the town if it hadn’t been for the collapse of the German economy in 1923. Everyday life became so difficult after the crash that Henry had little choice but to return to the United States, and so they set sail from Bremerhaven, on the SS President Fillmore , on 18 April, 1923.
    When they arrived in Baltimore, Bukowski’s mother started calling herself Kate, so she sounded more American, and little Heinrich became little Henry. They also changed the pronunciation of their surname to Buk- cow- ski , as opposed to the harder European pronunciation which is Buk- ov - ski . Henry worked hard and they soon saved enough to move out to California where he had been born and raised.
    His father, Leonard, had done well in the construction boom but had turned to drink and was separated from Henry’s mother, Emilie, a strict Baptist. She lived alone in Pasadena, matriarch of a quarrelsome, bad-natured tribe described as ‘the battling Bukowskis’ by cousin Katherine Wood ‘because none of them got along’. The siblings, in particular, couldn’t stand each other. Henry had no time for his brother, John, who drank and was oftenout of work. He also disliked his brother, Ben, who was confined to a sanatorium. Neither was he keen on his sister, Eleanor, being jealous of the little money she and her husband had saved. Emilie Bukowski made things more difficult by showing favoritism to Henry and his wife. ‘My grandmother thought Kate was really something,’ says Katherine Wood. ‘She thought she was kind of above us. It was a snob thing.’
    They moved to nearby Los Angeles in 1924, first to a small house on Trinity Street, not far from downtown, and three years later to a two-bedroom bungalow on Virginia Road in the Jefferson Park area. Apart from his travels around America in the 1940s and early ’50s, Bukowski lived his whole life in and around LA and the city became an integral part of his writing. Indeed, few writers of literature have been so closely associated with, or so lovingly described the city, a place often dismissed as ugly, dangerous and culturally desolate.
    LA was quite beautiful in 1924, almost a paradise; the sky was unclouded by smog, and there were still orange groves between the boulevards. The neighborhoods were safe enough for Angelenos to leave their doors unlocked, and for children to ride bicycles to the beach after school. It was a city of just over a million people, a fraction of what it became, and there was a heady boom town atmosphere, partly because of the film studios in Hollywood. Henry wanted his share of the good life. But the best job he could find was with the LA Creamery Company, delivering milk by horse and cart.
    Henry and Kate dressed their son in velvet trousers and shirts with frilly collars, in the German style. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ Kate wrote home on the back of a photograph. ‘When you ask him who he likes the best, he says, “I like mother as much as father and father as much as mother”.’
    Kate called her husband ‘my biggest treasure’ in her letters, but dropped hints he was not an easy man to get on with. One set of photographs she sent home to Germany was from a day at Santa Monica beach. Kate wrote that Henry wanted her to send these pictures to prove they were having fun in America. Included was a snap of Bukowski, sitting on the sand with a Stars and Stripes flag. He looked thoroughly miserable.
    In his autobiographical writing, in interviews and letters to friends, Bukowski made it plain that his childhood was joyless and frightening and, about this part of his life, at least, he seems to have told the unvarnished truth. ‘A twisted childhood has fucked me up,’ he wrote. ‘But that’s the way I am, so I’ll go with it.’ He said he was forbidden to mix with other children because, in their snobbery, his parents considered themselves better than the