Charles Bukowski (23 page)

‘Yeah, baby, that was you,’ said Bukowski, reading another about how much he loved her. He didn’t notice that she had already left, wandering out onto Santa Monica Boulevard to cadge a lift home.

When the crowd thinned out, Bukowski was left with Joan and her boyfriend, but he was no longer interested in drinking, upset that Cupcakes had left like that. He was making his way out of The Troubadour when Linda Lee Beighle introduced herself, saying she loved his work and had been reading it for years. He looked her over. She was younger than him, but not very young. She was small and thin with a mop of blonde hair. Not bad looking. He wrote his telephone number on a scrap of paper, drawing a picture of a man with a bottle, and she wrote down hers. Then he went home.

Things were still rough with Cupcakes so, a couple of days later, Bukowski drove over to Linda Lee’s restaurant, the Dew Drop Inn. She fixed him a health food sandwich and he sat down to eat and take in the ambience of the place. It was decorated with painted rainbows and posters of Linda Lee’s guru, a curious-looking fellow with a fixed grin.

 Bukowski was in the middle of writing
Women
under the working title
Love Tale of the Hyena
. It was a thinly veiled account of his tangled love life since he quit the post office, inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s
The Decameron
. Linda Lee, whom he began to date soon after visiting the Dew Drop Inn, became the basis of the character, Sara. ‘I was basically one of his guinea pigs,’ she says, ‘one of those he researched like a curiosity.’ But there was a fundamental difference between her and most of the other women Bukowski knew, and included in his book – Linda Lee wouldn’t let him have sex with her. At least not at first. Apparently one of Meher Baba’s teachings was that
unmarried people should remain chaste, and she had been celibate for several years. Bukowski gently suggested Meher Baba might be mistaken, but all he could get from Linda Lee were kisses.

Reminded of Linda King, Bukowski flew to Phoenix to pay her a visit for old time’s sake and they spent a weekend together. He said she should come back to Los Angeles with him and battle it out with Cupcakes and his other girlfriends. Life was boring without her. ‘But I think we both knew it was over,’ says Linda. ‘He knew I wasn’t coming back.’

Their final farewell inspired the poem, ‘I am a reasonable man’. From reading it in isolation one would never know this was a woman Bukowski had been in love with:

‘That was the kind of poem he wrote that I hated,’ she says. ‘The tone of the poem, like he was above and beyond any feelings, but he might stick around another night for a blow job, if I begged him. He could be quite cruel and spare himself beautifully.’ They never saw each other again.

Back in LA, the new Linda was waiting for him. ‘He was doing all this stuff with all these women and we became good friends,’ says Linda Lee. ‘We drank together and we would talk on the phone all the time.’ Intercourse was still out of the question, just kissing and some rubbing up against each other in bed, if he was lucky. But Linda Lee was becoming emotionally involved. She sent Bukowski sentimental poems decorated with pictures of hearts broken in two, and wrote letters about how everything she saw, everything she did in her daily life, reminded her of him. She was falling in love with him.

Cupcakes would have been a formidable rival for his affections, but she’d started dating a dental student and woke up in his bed one morning knowing she was finished with Bukowski. She didn’t even bother saying good-bye. He was inconsolable, of course, and the unhappiness was evident when the German film maker, Thomas Schmitt, asked him to read a poem for a documentary he was making. He read ‘the shower’, a poem he had written about Linda King, but it was applicable to all the lost loves, and he broke down when he came to the last stanza:

‘This is Hank Bukowski,’ he said when Amber O’Neil answered the telephone. Amber was another of his fans. She had written from the San Francisco bay area saying how much she loved his stuff and would like to meet him. He told her he’d split with his girlfriend
who, he added, had a perfect body. He wondered if Amber wanted to come to LA.

‘I’m not the type of woman you are used to down there,’ she replied, a little intimidated by the description of Cupcakes. ‘I’m very short and not all tits and ass.’

‘Well, that doesn’t matter,’ said Bukowski, who had noticed that she had a very high voice, like Betty Boop. ‘Maybe you could come down and we could just talk.’

‘Hey! I’m not
that
short.’

‘Well, whatever,’ he laughed.

‘Are you inviting me down?’

‘Yeah, sure, I do this all the time.’

It was a Friday evening at Los Angeles airport and Bukowski watched the women coming off the Oakland flight, haughty creatures looking like they had come to conquer LA. He looked slyly at their legs and breasts. Linda Lee said he never looked directly at women and it was true; beautiful women scared him. He wondered which one was Amber. Then he heard that squeaky voice.

‘Hello, Mr Bukowski.’

He looked down at what he took to be a young girl: five feet nothing, 94 lbs, wearing jeans, wedges and a red cotton blouse with a low neck and puffed sleeves. He wrote about the meeting in
Women
, calling her Tanya:

‘Come along, granddaughter,’ he said to Amber, who was actually in her thirties, and led her out to where his car was parked.

Amber liked Bukowski’s ‘shit-brown’ apartment, a glorious dump of a place with old coffee cans full of grease in the kitchen, for frying steak and eggs, and a refrigerator loaded with white wine which he had started to drink because Linda Lee thought it better for him than beer and whiskey. Everything in the apartment appeared dark, because it was old and because there was only one forty watt bulb. But the bathroom had the unmistakable look that
a woman had been in and cleaned and Bukowski confirmed that Linda Lee had scrubbed it. Amber also discovered Linda Lee had made the wooden bed frame upon which rested the Cupcakes Memorial Mattress, actually constructed the frame out of pieces of lumber. This was the same bed, presumably, they were going to sleep on. If that wasn’t weird enough, Linda Lee telephoned to check Bukowski was all right.

Not knowing quite how to proceed with her hero, Amber unzipped his pants, took off her jeans and mounted the penis she had read so much about, working out her nervousness in a sweaty fuck. Bukowski wrote in
Women
that it felt like being raped by a child:

 ‘Mr Bukowski,’ she said afterwards. ‘I can barely hold my head up. Do you mind if I go and lay down in that homemade bed made by your beautiful friend?’

The following evening he decided to splash out and take her to his favorite restaurant, The Musso & Frank Grill, a landmark on Hollywood Boulevard since before he was born. Amber wanted to look special for their big date and had with her what she describes as a ‘Chinese hooker’ dress, but it needed ironing and there was neither iron nor ironing board in the apartment. So she heated up the steak pan.

‘That’s certainly a first,’ said Bukowski as he watched her burn a hole.

An easy peace and quiet pervaded the dining rooms at Musso’s, air-conditioned cool like a cave after the heat and tourist bustle of Hollywood Boulevard. He told Amber he took so many women
here that the barman probably thought he was a pimp. Ruben Rueda certainly knew Bukowski, and knew to watch out if he started drinking whiskey. ‘He was a little wild,’ he says. ‘I had to kick him out a couple of times. I could tell when he was drunk. The first thing I can see is the eyes. I talk and the eyes is gone some place.’

They sat at the bar and ordered drinks. It was a liquor night and Rueda watched Bukowski warily as he ordered whiskey and ordered the same again, but Bukowski was in a mellow mood. Looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, he said: ‘You know, I don’t look so bad.’ Amber realized how important his looks were to him. All his life he had thought of himself as ugly and now, in middle age, with his beard growing grey, he was starting to look good, like he ought to somehow.

‘You look very handsome,’ she said.

‘And you are one hell of a woman,’ he replied, tenderly. ‘And your eyes are beautiful, too.’

Back at the apartment, Amber found herself sitting in darkness on the couch with Bukowski opposite, the only light coming from the lamps outside in the court. He told her about Linda King teaching him to go down on her. He liked it and said he would like to do it with Amber, if she didn’t mind. She replied that she wouldn’t mind at all, thinking no man had ever asked so formally to have sex with her, and by the light of the moon, on Linda Lee’s homemade bed, he buried his old face between her legs.

Amber was not the only lover Bukowski took to the bed Linda Lee made. He also had an affair with Jane Manhattan, a well-spoken twenty-nine-year-old restaurant manager he met at a reading in Vancouver in November, 1976. They slept together then and later that month she flew to Los Angeles to spend a nine-day vacation at Carlton Way. ‘I think I was probably the most lady-like of all Bukowski’s friends,’ says Jane. ‘That was what was so funny. It was that contrast that made the relationship so hilarious.’

He took her to Musso & Frank and they went to watch the horses at Hollywood Park. Jane noticed the tellers and the barmen at the track all knew Bukowski, even if they didn’t know he was a writer. ‘He was one of the guys. That was the life that he loved. That was when he was happy.’

Shopping with Tina Darby in Hollywood, Jane bought a pair of black high heels. Bukowski was delighted when she showed him. He put his cock inside one shoe and began prancing round the bedroom, pretending to fuck it.

‘You don’t love me, bitch!’ he said and threw the shoe down, sending Jane into gales of laughter. ‘He was funny all day every day. A great love of life, and an enjoyment – always to be seeing the funny thing, and making a comment. He was a comedian.’

She saw a different side to him one afternoon when they passed a bar and she suggested a drink.

‘I can’t go in there,’ he said, starting to cry. ‘So many years were so terrible and all those hours and days and years that I spent in bars drunk out of my mind. I just feel sick to my stomach when I even look into a bar like that.’

Linda Lee began spending three days a week at the apartment, driving up from Redondo Beach on Saturday afternoon and staying until Tuesday, if Bukowski didn’t have any other women visiting. He realized she was falling in love with him. He liked her, too, although he sometimes felt she was becoming too possessive. She had begun to resent women telephoning, and he broke it off a couple of times because of this, but she reacted badly to being rejected. In a letter to Jo Jo Planteen in May, 1977, he wrote that Linda Lee went almost mad whenever they split. Still, he was skilled at deception. When he discovered that one of the leaders of the Meher Baba sect was coming to Redondo Beach in the first week in July, Bukowski suggested to Jo Jo that this would be an excellent opportunity for them to see each other. Linda Lee would be occupied playing host to her religious friend.

Despite his gripes about Linda Lee, they grew ever closer and Bukowski stopped trying to cheat on her. He liked the way Linda Lee looked after him, worrying about how much he drank and what cigarettes he smoked. After all, he was in his late fifties and starting to feel his age. She was attractive and bright and they had fun together, most of the time. Essentially they had become friends and he felt it was time he treated her better, as he wrote to Carl Weissner in August, 1977: