He's a celebrity in Europe, a best selling author in the third world, and to his publisher, the most gifted American writer since Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway. But to many critics in his own country, he's a prophet without honor, and a drunken one at that.


Bukowski is 67 years old with a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids
and a bulbous nose that looks like it's been assembled in a junk yard from
Buick fenders and Studebaker hoods. In the right light, his scarred face and
high flat cheekbones make him look like Neanderthal man. Yet his voice is so
soft and bemused that it's hard to take him seriously when he tells you: "I
don't like people. I don't even like myself. There must be something wrong
with me."

Although Bukowski has been living and writing in Los Angeles now for
over 60 years, outside of certain low-rent literary circles he's generally
only known as a hard drinking womanizer who knocks off some flashy poetry on
the infrequent occasions when he's not too drunk to type. In fact, he's a
disciplined and prolific writer who, over the last 30 years, has published
over a thousand poems, 32 books of poetry, five books of short stories and
four novels.

Although this hasn't done much for him at home, in countries
like Germany, France and Italy, his prestige is so enormous that his visits to
the continent are major cultural events. Newspapers run front page stories.
Fans follow him around like a rock star. Posters of his grizzled face appear
on street corners. And French television stations run brief pre-recorded
interview segments with Bukowski as a way of ending the broadcast day.
Despite a studious avoidance of Bukowski by establishment critics, his
long eclipse with the public may soon end, as this January French director
Barbet Schroeder will begin filming Faye Dunnaway and Mickey Rourke in
"Barfly," an original Bukowski screenplay about three days in his life when he
was 24.

Bukowski's problem up till now was that too many critics had seen his
work as "sordid, obscene and violent," characterized, one writer observed, by
a bleak fatalism and "imbued with the perverse romanticism of adolescent
disillusionment." His poems, they argued, were tossed off, "seemingly the
conversational raving of an entertaining maniac at the typewriter.

In fact, argue other writers, Bukowski is intense, alive and real. He
nails "the words to the page in intensely personal, rawly sensitive poems and
wild, raunchy, anecdotal short stories;" "they are "wrenched out of his own
ulcerated guts, flung onto paper between bouts on delirium tremens and
alcoholic fantasy;" "the voice is raspy, part of the beer can littered
landscape. The poems strike gut high, direct and hard, nailing the real world
down on tables of stained wallpaper and broken blinds;" he "sings in a voice
filled with bewilderment, compassion, hopeless needs and great booming
fried-chicken farts."

Compared to writers like J.D Salinger who regard their personal lives
as sacrosanct, Bukowski's life is literally an open book. Nearly always the
main character is a down and out writer (the stories are largely
autobiographical) who spends his time working at marginal jobs (and as often
getting fired from them), getting drunk and making love with an incredible
succession of floozies, bimbos who make their way to his door. The people he
meets are the people Bukowski has associated with for most of his life, which
is to say whores, child molestors, murderers, rapists, the down and out, the
under class, the people who lose their rent money at the race track, leave
notes of goodbye on dressers and have flat tires in Compton at 3 am.


One of the more attractive qualities about Bukowski is that he doesn't
have an image to protect. Instead, he takes the view both in his writing and
his life that if it's real, he's not ashamed of it. In a documentary made for
Germany television, Bukowski once allowed himself to be photographed sitting
on the can, drinking beer and reading Playboy. In another series of brief
interviews done by Barbet Schroeder (and soon to be released in this country
of videocassettes), Bukowski allows himself to be seen as a petulant bully. In
of the segments, which were originally made for French TV, Bukowski is shown
sitting on a couch late one warm summer night with girlfriend Linda Lee
Beighle (now his wife) and complaining about women.

"I've always been used because I'm a good guy," Bukowski tells the
camera as he sips what is obviously not his first glass of wine that night.
"And women, when they meet me, they say, "I can use this son-of-a-bitch. I can
push him around.'"

"Why do you let yourself be pushed?" injects Linda. "Why do you allow
yourself to be pushed by this sort of thing?"

"Because I'm kind-hearted. I give the other person another chance."

"You do?"

Suddenly, what started out as a mere philosophizing takes an
unexpectedly personal tone as Bukowski tells Linda that he has given her
"hundreds of chances. But you keep pushing, pushing and you keep laughing at
me. That's why I'm going to tell I'm going to get an attorney and get your ass
moved out of here. I don't need your Meyer Baba bullshit, your staying
out every night bullshit. I don't need your shit, baby. I don't
need it."

"I'm not out every night," Linda replies. "I don't want you to give
these people that impression. Because it's not true."

"The month of May you were out fifteen nights past midnight."

Linda throws back her head and laughs.

"That's true," says Bukowski. "The calendar is marked."

"So what?"

Suddenly Bukowski explodes. "What shit!" he tells her. "You
fucking cunt. You think you can walk out on me every fucking night? You fucking whore. Who do you think you are, you fucking shit?

It's a terribly painful scene to watch--especially since Linda has
been smiling gamely through most of it as if to say "He's really not serious.
We do this all the time." Astonishingly, Bukowski suddenly begins to kick her
off the couch. He looks like a spoiled kid having a temper tantrum. Wine
flies everywhere. Linda is thrown off camera and Bukowski lunges after her.
There are sounds of a struggle and a thud. It's positively embarrassing to
watch--humiliating for Linda and shameful for Bukowski.

Later, when Schroeder's cameraman, Paul Challacombe, edited the tapes
for television, he showed the scene to both Linda and Bukowski. And this is
the reason, says Challacombe, he respects the Bukowskis so much--when Challacombe asked them if they wanted that segment cut, they both agreed: "Hell no, it's the best part."

Bukowski has spent most of his life looking for the silver lining in
what most people would regard as an incredibly raw life. He was born in 1920
in Andernach, Germany, a small Rhine village near Cologne. His parents came
to the United States in 1922, living first in Baltimore, later in Pasadena and
eventually settling in Los Angeles at 2122 Longwood Avenue.

As a child, Bukowski was timid and shy. His father, who was milkman,
administered a tough Prussian discipline, beating the young Bukowski with a
razor strap for the slightest offense (such as missing so much as a single
blade of grass when mowing the lawn). This caused such tension in the young
Bukowski that he developed one of the worst cases of acne in medical annals
with boils the size of golf balls all over his body.

Bullied by the other boys for his small size and rejected by the girls
for his acne, Bukowski became a hardened (and more than a little insolent)
outsider who, much to his disgust, attracted hoards of "idiot" friends," one
of whom when Bukowski was 13 invited him down to his father's wine cellar and
served him his first drink of alcohol. "It was magic," Bukowski would later
write. "Why hadn't someone told me?" This was the universal answer to the
acne, his idiot friends, and his father's razor strap.

In 1939, Bukowski enrolled in Los Angeles Community College to study
journalism and English. Discovering that most of his professors were either
Marxist or left wing, he decided, he says, to make things more "interesting,"
by posing as a Nazi. "I was just entertaining myself," he says, "I had disciples and I wasn't even serious."

When war with Germany broke out, Bukowski dropped out of school and
moved to Philadelphia to become a writer. Forced to choose between working at
an eight-hour a day job but having no time to write or writing eight hours a
day but not eating, Bukowski went as long as four days without food at time in
order to buy stamps to send out his poems and stories. The first two days, he
once told an interviewer were the worst, but by the fourth day, "you're hardly
hungry at all. And the sunlight looks great."

In the meantime, with Bukowskian indifference to rules, he hadn't
bothered to keep the draft board informed his change of address. "So one day,"
he says, "two fellows knocked at my door. 'Are you Bukowski?' I was half nuts
at the time. I thought they were coming to give me the Nobel Prize for literature.

"They said, 'Put your coat on.'

"'What for?'

"'We're taking you in.'"

The two men, who were FBI agents, locked up Bukowski in Moyamensing
prison on charges of draft evasion. Making the best of a bad situation,
Bukowski quickly learned how to win at craps in the exercise yard. He dined
on first class fare, smuggled in the trustees. And within two weeks, he says,
he was making so much money that when they finally took him down to the
induction center, "I hated to leave."

Although Bukowski passed the physical easily enough, it was in the
psychiatric exam that his rebellious nature really shone. As Bukowski tells
the story, the psychiatrist asked him three questions:

"Do you believe in the war?"

"No," said Bukowski.

"Would you go to the war?"

"Yes," said Bukowski.

"I can tell you are a very intelligent man. I'm having a party at my
house next Wednesday night for writers and painters. Would you like to come?"

"No," said Bukowski.

At that point, says Bukowski, the psychiatrist excused him from the
draft on the grounds that "I was too anti-social to be in the Army."

Bukowski spent the next couple of years traveling around the country
and writing compulsively. If he had to hock his typewriter, he'd print his
stories by hand. He wrote as many as 10 poems a night, 5 short stories a week.
"He needed to write so much," says his daughter Marina, "he'd write with a
pencil on a brown paper bag." His suitcase bulged with manuscripts. And the
overflow he stacked in piles on the closet floor.

In 1944, at the age of 24, he sold a short story to Story Magazine.
This was a prestigious publication in those days and an agent who wanted to
represent him wrote to ask if she might take him out to dinner.

Bukowski wrote back, "I am not ready yet. Thank you." For one thing,
he says, the offer seemed too "hoity toitey" and he didn't want to get mixed
up in what he regarded as the corrupt New York literary world. Besides, he
says, "I was still too bitter from the streets."

Encouraged by his success at Story magazine, Bukowski began submitting
short stories to Harper's, the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. Although he
didn't write in a literary manner, he thought if he wrote with enough power
they might overlook his "raw blunt" style." But as the stories continued to
come back time after time, Bukowski decided to stop writing.

It wasn't so much that he doubted his talent as he felt that at this
point in his life he was so inexperienced he didn't have anything to write
about. Besides, he says, the writing in the major literary magazines was so
"pompous and false" that you had to read a story five times to discover
discover that "the woman had an abortion or the guy committed suicide." If
that was what it took to be a successful writer, Bukowski didn't want any part
of it. "So I said the hell with it," says Bukowski. "I'll just concentrate
on drinking."

Starting in 1946, Bukowski went on a binge that took over around most
of the country and lasted until he was 35 years old. Then in 1955, after a
decade of cheap whiskey, bad food and sleepless nights in cheap hotels,
Bukowski ended up in LA County General Hospital death ward" bleeding from both
ends. When he didn't die, the doctors released him with the warning not to
drink again, whereupon, says Bukowski, "I went into a bar and ordered two
beers."

Afterwards, his life changed in unexpected ways. First of all, he met
the first woman who had ever shown him the slightest tenderness and suddenly
he realized that it was possible simply to lie in bed with a woman on a Sunday
morning, drink coffee and read the papers. You didn't always have to make
violent drunken love to hard-eyed stranger and then wake up to find your money
gone.

The other thing he discovered was a new way of writing. "I was
supposed to die and didn't," he says. "So I started writing again. But instead
of short stories, they came out as poetry."

As is typical of Bukowski, he never had any grand theories about
writing poetry, explains old friend and fellow poet, Neeli Cherry, "He would
simply say, 'you put it down in blood on the line. Put it down hard, baby.
Lay it down the way you feel.'" The result was a direct, gutsy, style of
writing that seemed less like poetry and more "like a guy sitting across the
bar talking to you."

Furthermore, unlike those poets who tended to regard poetry as the
highest form of artistic endeavor, Bukowski would publish anywhere, including,
as director Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman" and "The Idol
Maker") once discovered while getting a haircut, barber trade journals.

Bukowski's first success as a poet came in 1960, when a poetry
aficionado in Eureka, California, published Bukowski's first book of poetry
("Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail.") But it was only a 40 page mimeographed
edition. Only 200 copies were printed and no one ever saw it.

By this time, Bukowski had also begun to realize that if you wanted
people to read your poems you had to be noticed first. "So," he once said in
an interview with former Free Press editor, Penny Grenoble, "I got my act up.
I wrote vile (but interesting) stuff that made people hate me, that made them
curious about this Bukowski. I threw bodies off my porch into the night. I
pissed on police cars, sneered at hippies. I was in an out of drunk tanks. A
lady accused me of rape, the whore."

Three years later, a small specialty publishing house out of New
Orleans named Loujon Press published "It Catches My Heart In Its Hand" in a
magnificent edition on quality paper. Suddenly, Bukowski discovered, there
were literally hundreds of small poetry magazines magazines ready, even eager,
to run his stuff.

By the mid-sixties, says Neeli Cherry, Bukowski was "the king, the
undisputed master, the grand champion, the one who would go 15 rounds and was
ready for 15 more." Unfortunately for Bukowski's reputation, these
publications were mimeographed editions, stapled together in runs of anywhere
from 250 to 1,000 copies. The publishers were nearly as broke as the poets
and few if any could pay for submissions.

Despite his reputation as an underground poet, acceptance by the
critics still eluded him. For one thing, says Gerald Locklin, he was still a
bit too rough and raw. For another, he made it look too easy. Ever since
Wordsworth, academic poets had been talking about the need to restore poetry
to its original function, which was to tell a story in an accessible
conversational voice. And then, while they were sitting around worrying about
it, says friend and fellow poet Long Beach State professor Gerald Locklin,
Bukowski came along "and just sort of went out and did it."

In 1965, Bukowski met John Martin and his life changed dramatically.
Today, Martin is the acerbic, no-nonsense founder of Black Sparrow press, but
in those days, he worked for a Los Angeles office supply and printing firm.
And then his spare time he hung out in little book stores, where, says Martin,
"I kept seeing this great work by a man named Charles Bukowski." Learning that
Bukowski lived in Los Angeles, Martin called him up and asked if he could come
and talk to him.

According to Bukowski, their first meeting was downright embarrassing
as Martin walked in the door and told Bukowski "I worship you."

"That's all right," said Bukowski. "Would you like a beer?"

Explaining that he wanted to publish Bukowski poems, Martin asked if
he had any material. Bukowski opened the closet door and Martin was astounded.
He had a stack of manuscripts four feet high.

Martin was so enthralled, says Bukowski, he got down on his hands and
knees and started reading the poems on the spot: "This one's great. This one's
not so good. This one's immortal."

Three years later, in 1968 Martin's newly founded Black Sparrow press
was ready to publish its first book of poetry by Bukowski--"At Terror Street
and Agony Way."

"With my heart in my mouth, I printed 500 copies," says Martin,
"because all the other people had done 100 and 200 and 300 copies and had
never sold them out. And snap, it was just gone."

There was so much material, the following year Martin published
another book--"The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills." It too sold
out. After that, says Martin, "we never looked back."

For most of his writing career, Bukowski supported himself by a
lengthy succession of marginal temporary jobs (including polishing brass hand
rails at the Los Angeles Times). One reason was that he was afraid if he took
a job that demanded any intelligence or feelings it would sap his energy for
writing. And the other reason, he says, was those were "the only jobs I could
get." But by 1958, the strain of making the rent and paying child support (he
now had a young daughter) had broken down his resolve and he took a job with
the US Postal Service, sorting mail at the Terminal Annex in downtown Los
Angeles.

For someone of Bukowski's sensibilities, the monotony was deadening.
(In order to memorize zip codes he matched them with obscene names). Even more
importantly, it left him almost no time for writing. "He used to call me late
at night from the post office," says John Martin, "and say, 'I am going to die
if I don't get out of here.'"

In December of 1969, Martin offered him a deal. "I told him that I
would give him $100 a month for life he would quit the post office and write
full time." For Bukowski, it was the biggest decision of his life. The amount
of money he had made off his writing up to this point was insignificant. He
had no savings, no resources and the only thing he had to look forward to for
his old age was his post office pension.

Before making a decision, says Martin, Bukowski "agonizingly sat down
and figured out what he could live on. His rent was $29, $32 for food, $15
child support. And he figured if he could cut back on beer and cigarettes and
didn't use the phone, he could live on $100 a month."

In December, 1969, Bukowski quit the post office and began to write
full time. "In January," says Martin, "he called me up a couple of times to
let me know I was getting my money's worth and that he was working every day.
Then on the 21st of January--I'll never forget it--he called me up to say,
'It's done.'

"I said, 'What's done?'

"He said, 'My novel. Come and get it.'"

"'What's the title?'

"He said, 'Post Office.'

"That was his first novel. He wrote it once and I published it early
the next year. It has sold perhaps 75,000 copies domestically and probably
500,000 additional copies worldwide."

During the late sixties and early seventies, Bukowski lived in east
Hollywood at 5124 De Longpre Avenue between Fountain and Sunset down near
Hoover. It was a court apartment with a total of perhaps 500 square feet--a
small front room, kitchenette and a bedroom.

Although Bukowski was personally fastidious, taking up to five hot
baths a day ("I was nuts," says Bukowski), his apartment was incredibly
filthy--an encrusted toilet bowl, rumpled sheets and a halo of pork fat on the
floor around the stove. "Women would go to his apartment," says Bukowski
biographer Ben Pleasants, "and gasp at the way he lived."

Because not even Bukowski could live on $100 a month (there was always
the problem of buying alcohol), he earned extra money writing for the low rent
men's magazines--Hustler, Adam and Knight--and the underground
newspapers--"Open City" and the "Free Press." The newspaper editors, he said,
not only didn't edit his copy, they didn't even read it before giving it to
the typesetters. "I never got that much money--$15 a column when I could get
it. But it wasn't the money." It was exhilarating to know that you could
write something one day and three days later there it was on the streets. It
was great. The hippies loved me. I would walk in the newspaper and they would
start screaming 'Bukowski! Bukowski!" I was some kind of damn hero to them,
even though I didn't agree with any of their views."

Deciding that his star was rising, in 1969 Bukowski called his good
friend, Neeli Cherry, with what he thought was a great idea.

Cherry in some ways is as much an original as Bukowski--wild,
exuberant, articulate and funny. Although he later became a speechwriter for
George Moscone and a biographer of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, in the late sixties
and early seventies, he was perhaps Bukowski's closest friend. "I lived for
the times I could be with him," says Cherry. "He had this Bogart-like voice
and ravaged face. I had never seen anyone like him. He was an older person who
thought like a young person--he was rebellious; he was irreverent; he didn't
believe in traditional American values and he saw through the phoniness of
life around him.

"One day," Cherry says, "I was sitting in my apartment and I got a
call from Bukowski and he said, 'I got a great idea.' We're going to do a
magazine and we're going to call it The Contemporary Review of Art, Music and
Literature, a Non-Snob Compilation of Active Creativity Now.'

"I said, 'What?'

"He said, 'Yeah, I met this millionaire I used to go to school with.
And he's going to put up the bread for it. It's going to be a big slick magazine. We're going to be famous, kid. We're going all the way.'

"I said, 'Well, there is just one problem.'

"He said, 'What is it?'

"I said, 'The name. The Contemporary Review? It just doesn't fit.'

"He said, 'You know, you're right.'

"Seventy-two hours later, I get a call at two or three in the morning
and it's Bukowski. 'I got it, kid.'

"'What?'

"'I got the title--Laugh Literary and Man The Humping Guns, published
by the Hatchetman Press.'"

Over the next three years, Bukowski and Cherry put three editions of
Laugh Literary. "We had one subscriber," says Bukowski. "I was very proud of
him."

To their surprise, they received a some 70 or 80 poetry submissions
from college professors along with their resumes and what Cherry says were
unusually pretentious cover letters. "And one night we were sitting around in
Bukowski's little place on De Longpre and I don't know who started it, but
Bukowski wrote on the back of one of the envelopes, 'This won't do. Fuck you! Bukowski.'

"Then I took some of the poems and crumpled them up and tore the edges
and wrote, 'We wouldn't publish this if our lives depended on it!' And we kept
doing it and I went to the kitchen and I got an egg and broke it open and
smeared a manuscript with it. Then we would soak some in beer. It got more and
more outrageous."

Later, when he sobered up, Bukowski felt ashamed (by the time they
were finished, he says, they had urinated on the manuscripts and set fire to
them.)

"It was just a moment of madness," he says.

Although Bukowski continued to write profusely during the decade of
the 70's, publishing three novels, three collections of short stories and 12
books of poetry, he now discovered he could make several hundred dollars in a
single evening simply by giving a poetry reading. Since he didn't particular
care for public readings and in fact thought they stiffled his creativity, he
could only get through them by getting drunk beforehand. The crowd reciprocated in kind. And as a result, his readings tended to be wild, raucous affairs.

"You never saw a poetry reading like Bukowski's poetry readings," says
Ben Pleasants. "It was full of madcap people, some of whom loved him. Some of
whom hated him, screaming and yelling and jumping up and down."

"They were horrible for him," says John Martin. "He only did them out
of a kind of desperation and because it was $200. Afterwards he would slink
home, utterly destroyed. He is a very shy person. That's why he became an
alcoholic in the first place." Then for two weeks following the reading, says
his daughter Marina (now a senior in mechanical engineering at Long Beach
State), he couldn't even look at a typewriter again.

As with many writers, there is a vast difference between the persona
Bukowski creates for himself in his stories and his real self. The first time
Neeli Cherry and his father went to meet Bukowski (Cherry was just a teenager
then), he came on real tough. "He said, 'Sam, I've killed five men with these
hands,'" says Cherry. "When my father questioned it, he said, 'Well, maybe
three men.' Finally, it was down to none."

Although Bukowski likes to portray himself as a loner, an outsider and
someone who doesn't need anyone, "there were plenty of times," says Cherry,
"when he would call me up and say, 'Come on over. I've got the deep blues,
man.'

"I remember once when he had been really drunk. We had been out to
visit a friend in Venice. And for some reason we stopped in Westwood. And he
ran down the main street with his zipper down and he kept saying he was going
to expose himself. I was running after him. I was so fearful for him I was
almost in tears. He was really wild and out of control.

"I finally got him in the car. And I remember this long horrible rap
going home on the freeway because he was revealing himself in a way he rarely
did--the pain of working, and just wanting to make it with his writing. And he
very rarely did that."

Despite Bukowski's reputation as someone who doesn't suffer fools
gladly, actually, says long time Bukowski photographer, Michael Montfort, "he
is a sweet and reliable man." For decades, friends and strangers have been
coming to his door with sixpacks in their hands in order to sit and drink and
talk about writing. And although Bukowski would often be hard at work, he
would go along with it, not because he wanted to but because his first
instinct is to accommodate, go along and not hurt people's feelings.

This is not to say, says Cherry, that Bukowski couldn't be "very
insulting and cruel." There were times when Bukowski would call him up at
times and invite him over. And then Cherry would drive all the way across
town, he says, only to be told, "What are you doing here? I don't need you."

Or he would say things like, "When I first met Neeli, he was 16 and I
was Bukowski."

"A couple of times we had a fight,"says Cherry, "and he said, 'You
know what will happen to you if you leave this room, baby?'

"I said, 'What?'

"'You'll be committing literary suicide.'"

Making matters worse was Bukowski's lifelong habit of writing his
friends into his stories and not always in a flattering light. On one
occasion, says Cherry, Bukowski wrote that there were three famous women poets
in the world. "He made up two names and the third name was mine (Cherry is
gay). In reaction I wrote this savage review of him in a little magazine in
Los Angeles."

Film director Taylor Hackford says it is a mistake to read a Bukowski
story as straight autobiography. When Hackford's documentary on Bukowski was
broadcast, says Hackford, Bukowski praised the work as an honest and direct
film. Nevertheless, Bukowski later wrote a short story about it in which he
portrayed himself as a sensitive artist beset by all these phoney Hollywood
types. "And I said to him, 'It didn't happen. I was there. I have it on film.'

"He said, 'It doesn't matter what happened. What I write is what
happened. And guess what? I'm always the hero.'"

Although Bukowski claims to love being attacked--"When I read a
critical review, I say, 'Ahhh, I got them excited."--when the attack is too
personal, he is as deeply stung as anyone else. "Some newspaper ran a story,"
he says. "The headline said, 'CHARLES BUKOWSKI IS REALLY A VERY NASTY PERSON.'
I said, 'Hey, this is good.' But they weren't kidding. It made me sick.

The truth is, says Bukowski, he is hated by a lot of people who knew
him when he was a poor starving poet. "They have me on their minds. They go
to sleep at night and they go 'Buk, Buk, Buk.' I have a BMW and it drives
them mad. So they write stories about me: 'Bukowski is making it. He raided my
icebox and pissed on my cat. Bukowski was afraid I would steal his woman. Bukowski was afraid some young writer would take his place.'

"It's only what they would have thought if they had been Bukowski, and
that's why they weren't Bukowski."

According to writer Ben Pleasants, who is working on a biography of
Bukowski, it is really amazing that the man has never been sued, as he makes
no effort whatsoever to disguise the people he writes about. "I once had a
discussion with him about this. I said, 'You know, just because you write this
thing at the bottom that says these people are completely fictitious, if a person can prove that that is actually them they can sue you.'

"He said, 'No.' He was astounded. He thought that little caveat was
enough to protect him."

Because of the kind of stories he writes and the way he used to act at
poetry readings (he doesn't give them anymore), Bukowski has a violent
reputation. Although most of it is exaggerated (usually by Bukowski himself),
there was a time, says Bukowski, when "my writing wasn't going anywhere so I
had to release some creative energy into beating people up and fucking women.

"Now," he says, "I've mellowed. I'm kind and gentle. We have five
cats. I love them all."

This is not to say that Bukowski doesn't enjoy confrontation.
According to director Barbet Schroeder, Bukowski once got so drunk at a one of
Schroeder's parties that Bukowski, who is very insightful, then went around
the room telling everyone exactly what was wrong with their character. "Everyone left but the vacuum cleaner."

Neeli Cherry remembers an occasion when Bukowski walked into Barney's
Beanery and began making fun of the all the poseurs and people in leather
jackets. "And he went up to the bar and said, 'I'm Charles Bukowski and I'm
the toughest son-of-a-bitch in the house.' And down at the other end a couple
of big guys started coming toward him. And before I knew it, Bukowski was out
in the street and getting in the car."

Actually, says Bukowski, "I'm not nearly as tough as I pretend to be.
But I'm tough enough."

There are several reasons why Bukowski has never received his due from
critics and none of them, says Gerald Locklin, reflect well on the eastern
literary establishment. For a while, says Locklin, Bukowski "seems to have
been perceived . . . as an enemy of women and gays. Actually he is simply an
abhorrer or orthodoxies. He has not given people used to respect--professors,
for instance--the respect that they are used to."

Locklin also maintains that among the eastern literary establishment
there is tremendous prejudice against southern California writing. "They love
people," he says, "who reflect the eastern view that everyone out there is
nuts. This is why they loved Bret Ellis's book, Less Than Zero, which
essentially says that everyone is a phoney."

Finally, says Locklin, and this is the one thing the eastern literary
establishment will never forgive Bukowski for, "he likes LA."

As a result of "Barfly" going into production at Cannon, Bukowski has
recently met such celebrities as Sean Penn and Madonna, Elliot Gould, Harry
Dean Stanton and Norman Mailer. Bukowski had a long dinner with Mailer in
which, according to his publisher, they talked about writing and what a drag
it was to be considered a tough guy in literature. To his surprise, says
Bukowski, he liked Mailer--no matter what the subject was he always had
something worthwhile to say. "But I still don't care for his writing though."

As for Sean Penn, he and Bukowski got along well enough that Bukowski
now allows Penn to accompany him to the track (an almost unheard of honor in
Bukowski circles). Penn, he says, is a nice kid, quiet and low key. And Penn
returns the compliment saying, "The delicate way he lights his cigarettes
somehow tells the whole story with me. You know who you are with him. You
don't have to say anything." And although Bukowski isn't really comfortable
with other people, "his charm is that he humors and tolerates me. He does have
a big heart. He tries to do it right. It's like a genius trying to tie his
shoes."

Although Bukowski made virtually no money from writing until age 50,
within 10 years money was coming in over the transom (mostly from his European
translations. In this country his sales have always been fairly modest). "I
walked into H&R Block one time," says Bukowski, "and the man said, 'What are
you coming here for? You make $100,000 a year. You don't need Block."

In 1979, on the advice of his accountant, Bukowski moved from a small
three room bungalow on Carlton way off Western and bought a large hillside
home in San Pedro overlooking the harbor. ("In this country, if you don't
spend your money, they take it away," says Bukowski.) There in a house
surrounded by fruit trees, rose bushes, potted plants, wind chimes and an
outdoor barbecue, Bukowski drinks his wine, writes his poems, plays the horses
and relishes his solitude.

Despite his reputation as the enfant terrible of the Meat School
Poets, in person Bukowski is modest and deferential. When a reporter came to
see him early one evening last November, he came stumbling barefoot down the
stairs, holding up his pants with one hand and pulling on a shirt with the
other. The collar was turned under and his belly stuck out through the open
shirt. Due to some mixup in communications, the reporter had arrived an hour
and a half sooner than expected and, as a result, Bukowski hadn't had his
dinner yet. Still he was so embarrassed, he offered to put it in the
refrigerator and get right to the interview.

Later that evening he sat on the couch in front of his fireplace,
sipped red wine, smoked mangalore ganesh beedies and talked about his current
life which, he says, is simple and sedate. At his wife's urging, he has given
up hard liquor and red meat. Now he takes 40 vitamins a day, eats lots of fish
and only drinks expensive wine (according to his doctor, he says, he has the
liver of a young man.) If the horses are running, he invariably spends the day
at the track. "Racing," he says, "is the ultimate character test. Anyone can
lose. It takes a certain amount of character to win." (Actually, says his
daughter Marina, he operates on the assumption that the crowd is always wrong.
"So he figures out where they are and then does the opposite. And if that
system doesn't work, he always has another one.")

For the most part, says Bukowski, not many unexpected visitors come to
see him any more. But when he first moved to San Pedro, one of the local intellectuals once came to his door.

"He said, 'Are you Charles Bukowski?'

"'Yes.'

"'Great. We are opening a poetry center here and we want you to come
and read for us.'

"I said, 'I don't read poetry anymore.'

"'Oh, well, we want you to know it's there.'

"'Okay.'

"'Well, we want to invite you to dinner.'

"'I don't eat.'

"He turned his back. 'Son-of-a-bitch. God damned bastard.' But I was
happy he was gone. The word has gotten out--don't bother Bukowski. He's nuts.
He doesn't want to be bothered. And it's true. I don't."

At night, Bukowski does his writing in a small upstairs room. In
contrast to the airy spaciousness of the rest of the house, his writing room
is a dingy cell, not unlike, one suspects, the rooms in which he spent most of
his life. He hasn't made the slightest attempt to make the room warm or cozy.
It looks as if it hasn't been painted in 30 years. There is a stationary
bicycle with a shirt thrown over it, overflowing cardboard boxes in one corner
filled with letters and manuscripts, a poster of a German Folker on the way, a
dim overhead light, and on the scarred desk in the corner, a ceramic Buddha
and and an old typewriter.

"The wine," he explains, "does most of my writing. I just open a
bottle and turn on the radio and it just comes pouring out. I only type every
third night. I have no plan. My mind is a blank. I sit down. The typewriter
gives me things I don't even know I'm working on. It's a free lunch. A free
dinner. I don't know how long it is going to continue. I mean, maybe the Gods
are listening. 'Listen to him talking like that. I'm going to snap his balls
off.' But so far there is nothing easier than writing."

Although Bukowski uses the first bottle of wine to get the words
rolling, the second bottle, he explains, requires a good deal more judgement.
"When I get to the end of the second bottle I think I'm writing immortal stuff
and I'm really pounding away and I say, 'Oh, my God! I'm really at the apex of
everything now!" But then the next morning when I look at it, it's terrible.
beginning writer stuff."

It may be long after Black Sparrow is gone, says John Martin, but one
day Bukowski is going to be published by the big eastern presses, whereupon
the reading public will suddenly recognize what the Europeans have known all
along--Bukowski is an authentic voice of the magnitude of a Walt Whitman or
Herman Meville. "He has the best style since Hemingway. "In fact he's better
than Hemingway, sharper and cleaner."

People, observes Martin, read for different reasons. "Some read to be
entertained. Some read to be uplifted. And then there is a special kind of
writer you read because he makes you come alive." And that, says Martin, is
Bukowski's appeal--"he is constantly throwing a cold glass of water in your
face and telling you to think about what you are and what life is all about.

"Wait till Bukowski clicks in. It's going to be incredible."