We are
Born like this
Into this
Into these carefully mad wars
Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness
Into bars where people no longer speak to each other
Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings
Born into this
Into hospitals which are so expensive that it's cheaper to die
Into lawyers who charge so much it's cheaper to plead guilty
Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed
Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes
- from Dinosauria, We

(2003) Henry Charles Bukowski Jr (1920-1994) - his friends called him Hank while he thought Charles looked better on the spines of his books - was a hard-drinking, uncompromising writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. His publisher and admirer John Martin referred to Bukowski as "today's Whitman," a man of the street writing for the man in the street.

In his youth he was afflicted with acne vulgaris, which turned his face into a cratered moonscape; but in his middle age he somewhat reminded me of the actor Jason Robards. A friend described Hank as having "a heavy face with heavy features that have to grow on you."

Ham on Rye revealed the "horror story" of his childhood at "the house of horrors," 2122 Longwood Ave. in Los Angeles, where his cruel father frequently beat him with a razor strop from the age of six until he was eleven and no longer screamed when struck. His father's lessons of "pain without reason" later served as forceful source to write what he really meant.

He attended LA City College, skipping most of his classes, for two years as a journalism major. In 1941 a draft-board psychologist exempted him from military service. Bukowski left LA on a Trailways bus for Florida in search of life experiences and "the golden sentence; he claimed to have subsisted on a single Payday candy bar while producing a short story everyday. The first of his short stories to be accepted for publication occurred in 1944. He never worked for a mainstream newspaper (John Bryan hired him in the '60s to write a column in Open City, and later in the LA Free Press, called "Notes of a Dirty Old Man"), but after various odd jobs he was employed as a postal worker.

In 1955 he resigned from the post office after three years there and suffered a near-fatal bleeding ulcer. The medical experts warned him that one more drink would kill him, which served him as proof that doctors lie to their patients. He tried substituting gambling at racetracks for alcohol, but became addicted to both.

In the late '50s he became the poet-king of little magazines. Publisher William Packard praised him for his de-disneyfied perspective on life; Bukowski said: "Mickey Mouse doesn't have a soul." Though he hated the job, hated rules, and refused to show enthusiasm, he applied for and was given another position as a postal clerk in 1958: an admission that he couldn't make a living from writing poems and stories.

Throughout the '60s his routine was to "get up, drink, and write," along with sorting mail. His first novel, published in 1970, was Post Office (written in fear in three to four weeks and opens: "It began as a mistake."), when John Martin, his publisher at Black Sparrow Press, offered to pay him $100 a month to write full time.

After he became famous as a writer, women threw themselves at him, which astonished the writer with "a face like a ravaged lion" and a lion's fierce heart; he wrote Women after researching (engaging in numerous sexual relationships, giving his "purple onion" a long-overdue workout) this phenomenon. His first sexual encounter was with a 300-pound whore when he was about 24; they broke his bed, and he mistakenly accused her of stealing his wallet. His first girlfriend was Jane Cooney Baker, who had beautiful legs and ten years on him. His daughter Marina was born in 1964 to his girlfriend Franceye. His first wife was Barbara Fry, editor of the Harlequin literary magazine and a wealthy divorcee, but after a few years divorced Hank after realizing she couldn't control him with her money.

In 1975 he wrote his second semi-autobiographical novel, Factotum (made into a movie in 2005), about the slavery and stupidity of having to work for others. More novels and poetry followed. In 1985 he married Linda Lee, who remained with him to the end. After a bout with tuberculosis nearly KOed "the good duker" in 1988, he eventually quit drinking. His final novel Pulp, the effort of a dying writer, was pure fantasy. "As the spirit wanes the form appears." He succumbed to leukemia.

Footage from Bukowski's reading at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco in 1972; various interviews with Bukowski (while reading a poem inspired by Linda King, his spouse of five years, this tough old buzzard got teary-eyed and cursed himself for displaying sentimentality); more recent interviews with Bono, Sean Penn ("It's all about making mistakes in a messy world"), Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton, various other friends and former wives were compiled by filmmaker John Dullaghan.

Of the movie Barfly, Bukowski thought it was "too exaggerated" and "kind of misdone" in portraying the lead character, himself; from the experience he wrote a realistic novel, Hollywood.

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

Patrick Ivers can be reached via e-mail at .