**To Abel Debritto, whose email out of the blue invoked this long ago night.**

It must have been mid-April, 1968. I had just published the second and last edition of a mimeo poetry mag called The Willie. It sold for a buck with a print run of about 100 copies, and featured, among others, Charles Bukowski, Doug Blazek, Steve Richmond, t l kryss, and Stanley Fisher, who was the first person to introduce me to the concept that earth is a planet of spiritual criminals. It still sounds good.

Since fleeing Haight-Ashbury after the Easter weekend in 1967 (the date most locals accepted as the beginning of the end of the hippie era), I managed to keep no fixed address with the greatest of ease, hitchhiking between scattered addresses in San Francisco, Sacramento and various burbs in LA.

Now, at their invitation, I was living with a family in Long Beach. Or did I invite myself? Yep, that must be how it went. In those days I was known to suddenly appear on people’s doorsteps without a cent and nowhere else to go.

These good people (a sociologist, a librarian, and their 14-year-old d-d-daughter) allowed me to get out the mag and decide what the hell I was going to do next. When I came up with the idea to hitchhike across country to visit the poets I’d been in contact with by mail for the last couple of years, they stepped in and gave me their old 1956 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a beige job on its last legs, but capable of at least another 3000 miles. I jumped for joy.

A couple of weeks before leaving, I decided to visit my oldest friend, then living in West Hollywood. We were the guys who drove our grade school teachers into frenzies of ruler abuse. We must have suffered from a shitload of pre-fashionable, mostly creative, disorders, because the clowning around and the pranks and the witty backtalk (or so we thought) never ceased. Grownup, our paths forked away to pretty much opposite directions. These days, he was a disc jockey and I was an itinerant, dope-smoking hippie. But we were still buddies.

From Long Beach, the nearest freeway exit to Dave’s apartment was close to Charles Bukowski’s digs on De LongPre Avenue in East Hollywood. I’d been there a couple of times before (the second time even got me into his short story, Beer and Poets and Talk). Why not get the old growler’s blessing for the trip?

When my amiable hosts heard of this, they stepped in again to present me with a bottle of Martel Medaillon for the occasion. It was the first but far from the last time I imbibed this elixir of the gods. Years later, my fondest wish was to become a cognacaholic somewhere in France, having paid homage to the noble muse-seducer by becoming a crazed genius in a smoking jacket holding forth in a great dark room lit only by a crackling fireplace and the worshipful bright eyes of creamy maidens.

Bukowski was on the toilet when I knocked. Funny thing, he’d been on the toilet on the other occasions as well. How do I know this? “Sorry, I was taking a crap,” he’d say with that wry drawl of his every damn time. He looked like the shit he was trying to get rid of, but then no one I’d known for a long time looked any better. I was getting some good meals in Long Beach, but back in The City it was mostly a diet of drugs, booze and boiled rice at St Anthony’s Mission in the Tenderloin.

“How’s it goin’ Chuck Buk,” I said, showing him the Martell. “If you’ve got the time, I’ve got some hotshot hooch. Nothing but the best for His Nibs.”

“You don’t look it, Willie, but deep down I can tell you’re a man of distinction. I’ll get a couple of Dixie cups.” He came back with Scotch glasses.

The enduring image I have of Charles Bukowski is of him sitting on his couch, the late afternoon blancmange glare of the smoggy LA sky coming in through the windows behind it, setting off a grin that told me he could have done without my intrusion, but he’d endured worse.

We shot the shit for awhile. I told him about the upcoming trip. He said it sounded like a bad idea. Poets, good or bad, were better left undisturbed. Especially by a space devouring, wife reamer, like me. “One thing I’ve learned, Willie. There are consequences.” He spoke the last bit even slower than usual. But what the hell. We were both Leo’s, guilty of crass crimes against the reality everyone hid behind. Big difference was: he had the gift, I was the fool.

I asked him if he was writing anything or just laying low. He said he was being laid low by piles the size of lawn gnomes. The writing was OK. Subject dropped.

After a few more snorts, I suggested he come along to visit Dave. He agreed, without much enthusiasm. By the time we got in the car I realised we could be heading for disaster. Dave’s recently acquired radio voice (honed at the Don Martin School of Broadcasting) would have won a nationwide competition for oily unctuousness. Bukowski barely tolerated the people he liked, so how would he react to someone who sounded like a full-blown phoney?

Buk seemed uncomfortable as we drove along Sunset. He must have been wondering what he was doing driving to West Hollywood in a dilapidated Cadillac with this skinny, no doubt dope-holding hippie with hair down to his coccyx and a full blown Fu Manchu beard. Worse yet, the Caddy’s rear suspension was shot, causing the back end to sway like a fat-assed drunk under the influence of Harry Owens and His Royal Hawaiians. Hell, the fascist antennae of just about every cop in the precinct must’ve been twitching like a rapist’s hard-on.

Dave and his wife Marian lived on Rangely Avenue, across from Carl’s Market. To me the place was ideal: two stories, with a split-level ground floor laid out in large black and white harlequin tiles. I’ve never lived in a place remotely like it. We knocked on his door around nine, the bottle half empty, with myself in a state of mild ecstasy that I was later to identify with Cognac in all its appellations. Bukowski looked to be in Bukgrowlski mode.

“Dave, this here is Charles Bukowski. Buk, this is my old friend Dave Williams.” They shook hands warily. Bukowski pushed his way in, already in Fuck You mode. Dave gave me a side-eye and whispered, “So. Now you bring tramps into my home? I, the numero uno at KGLA, 103.5 on your FM dial?”

Dave was already pissed, even more than us. He was stroppy about something, no doubt about it, but he was the kind of guy who could turn his edginess or anger into something sardonically funny. Me, I rarely lightened up when life put the teeth of a long-handled rake beneath my foot. Dave was born with one of those peaches ‘n’ cream complexions you’d have swooned over if he’d been a girl. The essence-dwarfing acne of adolescence passed him by completely, the lucky bastard, while I suffered a face somewhere between the craterous mugs of Jack Palance and our present company, Charles Bukowski. I finally grew out of it, but as hip teenagers driving to the Hollywood jazz clubs every weekend in Dave’s MG, the top down and the wind blowing through our Brylcreemed hair, he often attained heights of stentorian profundity as he minutely described the latest evidence of a pulsating furuncle or carbuncle on my scrawny neck.

“Where’s Marian?” I asked from the couch where Buk and I had already made ourselves comfortable. Marian was the one wife I’d never tried to seduce, even though there were a couple of Jules and Jim moments years earlier, when making life imitate art seemed like the thing to do. Like most wives who had to deal with their husbands’ best friends, she put up with me. She attained a certain expertise at rolling her eyes heavenward when Dave and I broke into frequent Laurel and Hardy routines. And then, maybe she harboured a wee resentment of my wedding present: the original cast spoken recording of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”. Watching them open it was one of the highlights of my life. (Recently he told me: “Your gift hung over us like a poison. We played it every chance we got. For many years we were spoofing it … then we were saying the lines for real. Finally, we had become George and Martha! Bastard!” To which I replied, “Nya-ha-ha-a-a-a.”)

“Marian fled to the upstairs bedroom at the sound of you,” he said frostily; no trace of the DJ soft-sell in that voice. “We were in the middle of a heated discussion on the topic of saving our marriage, thank you very much.” He went to one of those bars behind a short counter with a couple of stools that every one in those parts seemed to have and brought Bukowski and me a couple of cognac glasses. Then he made himself a Death in the Afternoon, the Hemingway concoction of champagne and Pernod. “I’ve been drinking these since sundown.”

“That’s a sissy drink,” opined Charles Bukowski, opening his innings cordially.

Well, what the hell, I thought, and rolled a two-papered wheat straw ZigZag of choice Michuacan.

“I see,” Dave said. “And your idea of a manly drink would be what, a poor boy of Santa Fe or Petri? They say, ‘everything tastes better with Petri’. Or they used to before it was banned.”

“Touché,” said Bukowski grinning through his worn out teeth. “But people in the know, like your friend Willie here, prefer Red Mountain Burgundy. Eh, Willie?

I lit the joint, took a long toke, and passed it to Buk. “As Arthur Godfrey used to say,” I wheezed, ‘buy ‘em by the gallon.’”

Bukowski grimaced as he took the joint. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here, but in a minute I won’t know that I don’t know. That ought to help.” He took a drag and passed it to Dave.

“So, Charles, what do you do?” Dave asked, toking gingerly and handing it back to me. He sucked noisily on a wide-brimmed American-style champagne glass.

“You fool,” I intoned dramatically, “Charles Henry Bukowski is one of our greatest poets. Get a copy of The Willie, the first one from San Francisco, and maybe he’ll read you something.”

“I’m not reading any goddamn poetry tonight,” Buk said.

“Let me read one of Bukowski’s poems then,” Dave shot back. He went to look for the magazine I’d mailed him last year. While he was gone, Buk downed another glass of cognac. He looked trapped.

“Hang in there, Buk.” I took one of the longest tokes of my life.

Dave was gone for a long time. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost the fucking thing?” I yelled. I found him in the next room, standing at a big desk covered with stacks of books, magazines and records. “You lay your records flat, one on top of the other? Why, they’ll warp, you corpulent swine.”

“I’m up to here, Bill.” He shot an inverse karate-chop towards his neck. We surveyed the mountainous mess without much hope. “Well,” he said, “here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.

“But Ollie…”

“Why can’t you do something to help me? Look over there in that bookcase. I don’t know where Marian put the damned thing. I assure you I haven’t looked at it.”

The cognac and weed had me in an ebullient mood. If only the weed were hashish and I’d also dropped one of Dave’s Dexamyl’s, pure unadulterated ecstasy would have been at hand, despite the impending confrontation between he and Bukowski.

“Here, here be the wretched item,” he said, extracting The Willie from the middle of a pile. He waved it disdainfully in my face as a dozen Down Beat and Metronome magazines fell to the floor.

“Hey,” I admonished, “do not crumple, bend, fold, or otherwise mutilate this ejaculatory masterpiece featuring some of the finest poets known to no one in America today. It might be worth a fortune in some weird future.”

“I’ll kill ya, Bill.”

Buk was sprawled on the couch looking at us as if we were a two-headed geek about to bite the head off a two-headed chicken. “I haven’t had this much fun since I put a mirror under my ass and found a triangle of tenpin haemorrhoids ready to be bowled up the alley of my asshole,” greeted he.

Laugh? I thought I’d die. We all laughed, even Bukowski.

Dave finished Hemingway’s sissified death drink and poured a double-malt whiskey from some uppity place in Scotland. In homage to Ernie Kovacs’ many “odes” as Percy Dovetonsils, Dave pursed his lips, prissily waggled his head and began to lisp his way through “The Kiss-Off,” from TW1.

“The Kith-Off, by Charles Bukowthki,” he commenced, his head in full Parkinson’s mode.

“It was one of those
half-ass
literary gatherings…”

Here he proceeded to clear his throat in a manner that, a few years later, would be immortalised by John Cleese as Anne Elk. This went on for close to a minute, while Buk brought the cognac bottle’s level dangerously low and I made frustrated noises that, a few years later, would be immortalised by Graham Chapman as the interviewer of John Cleese as Anne Elk.

“and this maiden did droppeth to her
roundy little knees upon the rug,
which receiveth’d them
and their stiff and golden hairs
with a warp and a woof-erecting love…”

I interjected: “Hey, that’s not how it goes. You’re supposed to make fun of the actual poem.”

“Keep going, Dave, I like this,” said Buk. “It’s worthless crap anyway. You should never’ve accepted it, Willie.”

“No,” I protested, “it’s a hoot. It’s literary gatherings to a tee in — how many lines is it?” I grabbed the mag from Dave. “Nineteen. They’re all like that. There’s no way they can be any different.”

Dave’s throat clearing went into overdrive as he snatched it back. “OK, I’ll read it as is, but I insist on exaggerating certain words.” He resumed:

“and this girl dropped to her
knees on the rug and
unto him said…”

“Just a minute there,” I cut in, “you’re changing it again. And besides, Him Said was a horse who always ran last at Santa Anita–”

“Curse you, Bill O’Hageman,” Dave thundered.

Buk’s turn to cut in. “You know, I remember that horse. I cleaned up on him one fine day in the last race. I always do well in that eighth race. The one where the also-rans, animal and human, get their chance for glory. Kept me in Preparation H for months.”

“OK, I’ll read without the emphasis, if that’ll satisfy a certain emaciated twig who is now, always was and always will be the bane of my life.”

“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” I squeaked.

This time he read it like Orson Welles in Othello, his voice threatening to disappear in a twilight of dread. I gave up.

“and this girl dropped to her
knees on the rug and
said to
him:
“‘O, Mr. C., let me kiss
that thumb
that great amputated thumb
that appeared in that great American novel
ON THE ROAD!’”

(Of course, Mr. C. was Neal Cassidy, who would only have shown up to ball the girl with the knees, which was why she was there. And so…)

“Mr. C. held out his amputated thumb
and she kissed
it
and we all came
all around all
around, we all came all
around.”

Dave looked up. “Well, I tried. But I couldn’t ruin it.”

“I appreciate the effort,” Buk slurred, taking a toke of the relit joint.

We sat there for another hour, three unlikely people drinking, smoking and toking. Dave and Bukowski ended on good terms; they talked about Santa Anita and Hollywood Park and the horses that had come in for them, though from somewhat different perspectives. Except for the few times I joined him, Dave went to the races with his father, a man who routinely hobnobbed with the Mayor of the town and the gents from the Chamber of Commerce. Bukowski…well, it was different with him.

Somehow, I managed to drive the poet back to De Longpre. I crashed on the couch, waking now and then to Bukowski’s groans, the intermittent sound of his typewriter, the toilet flushing, the whish of a bottle cap popped from a bottle of suds, the flick of a Bic as another cigarette was lit, and finally, snores from the bedroom.

The next morning he was still snoring when I cranked the Coupe de Ville to life and headed off for the rest of my own. Over the next dozen or so years I sent Bukowski odds and ends from various parts of the world — the program from Meerut race track in Uttar Pradesh was one item I thought he’d get a big kick out of — but I never heard if he received anything. And I never saw him again.

Technorati Tags: bukowski, humor, short story, sixties

Blog Tags: bukowski, humor, short story, sixties