In the late 60s I began to write for the LA Free Press. One of their writers, an underground icon who was still unknown to the mainstream at that time, was Charles Bukowski. This story recounts the time I decided to stop by his house.

I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but with Bukowski you can guess it turned out to be quite a night. We went on to become regular friends and drinking buddies until heroin addiction took me out of the world of human affairs for a number of years. When I finally came to one day, I was living in Rio de Janeiro and Bukowski was a dead legend.

This piece, which I'd like to share with you today –– on the anniversary of Charles Bukowski's death –– is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir, Scabvendor: Confessions of A Tattoo Artist.

–– Jonathan Shaw




Remembering Buk Part 3
By Jonathan Shaw

Stubby fingers pound away at an old Royal typewriter. Classical music is playing from a radio on a kitchen counter next to an empty whiskey bottle...Bukowski is sitting at a cramped breakfast nook by a window in his kitchen, wearing a wife-beater and boxer shorts, writing. He moves his head in a strange rhythm to the music, like a prizefighter, bobbing and weaving in a motion so subtle, only the benevolent spirits of his poetry respond...

He stops typing just long enough to fish a half-smoked cigar out of an overflowing ashtray, surrounded by a dozen empty Miller beer bottles. He shoves the cigar stub into his battered, junkyard face, lights it, and resumes his work. He hears a timid knock on the living room door...

"Go'waaay!" he shouts automatically, as he types on.

Several short raps on the window beside him get his attention.

"Who arrre yaaaa, whaddya waaant?" he growls.

"Hey, I'm sorry to bother ya," I say. "I write for the Free Press..."

Bukowski mumbles distractedly.

Standing on the dirty concrete porch, I talk to the window, playing my last card, "I got some beer..."

Bukowski starts to say something, then stops, editing himself. He surveys the empty beer bottles standing like little ghosts around his typewriter. Finally he speaks, in a weary, W.C. Fields-like drawl.

"Yeahh, alriiight... just hold onnnaa minnit." He pounds out a last line and stops. He grabs a dirty kitchen towel off the counter, throws it over his work, and gets up. The big man steps into a pair of ratty slippers and walks, slouching, across the little living room to the door.

I'm standing on the porch, looking down at the cement...hallowed ground. No welcome mat. Shivering nervously, shifting my weight from foot to foot, holding the heavy case of beer. It feels cold in my hands in the summer air that smells of cat piss and night-blooming jasmine. I hear classical music playing behind Bukowski's window. A baby cries and a television blares from apartments across the courtyard. A gunshot pops off in the distance...Awkward as a schoolboy on a blind date, I stand by the dirty screen door and wait...

Suddenly, the door opens and Bukowski's big, battered face is there before me. I'm standing in the presence of Genius...and it looks like it's about to knock me flat on my ass.

Without ceremony, Bukowski reaches into the cardboard box I'm holding like a temple offering. He casually extracts a can of beer and cracks it open. Without giving me another look, he turns and disappears into the little bungalow. My eyes scan the cement porch, my brown leather boots, the cuffs of my dirty jeans...

"Jeee-sus, kid, ya just gonna staaaand out there? Bring it in-siiiide," he drawls from the darkened room.

I step over the threshold.

Later, I'm sitting around a cheap coffee table covered with empty cans. An empty pint bottle of whiskey sits on Bukowski's end like a captured Queen in a chess match. A pile of my poetry sits out on the table between us. I reach into the empty cardboard box and crack open the last can of beer.

"Heeey, giii-me thaat", Bukowski protests. I ignore him, drinking the beer.

"Soooo, yer a wriiiiiter, haaah?" he says finally.

I pass the half-finished can over. Bukowski takes it and guzzles it down.

He burps.

"Weeeelll", he says, looking drunk and rather nasty now. "If yer a wriiiter, what ya do is ya wriiiite, get it? What ya don't do is sit aroooouund taaalking abooouuut wriiiting with other guys who wriiiite. You wriiiite. And then, ya wriiiite some moooore. That's it, baby. But... if ya got nothing to saaaaay, then youre just another bum with a ten dollar typer, with alotta taaaalk, and shit for braaiiins...And, to be brutally honest, Jono, yoooou impress me as a self-conscious punk who needs to do some liiiiiving..."

"Who you callin' a punk? Ya old fart...," I hear myself say, instantly regretting it. Too late...

"YOU! YA LITTLE CUNT LICKIN, FISH LIPPED MOMMA'S BOY. PUNK. PUNK. PUUUUUNNNNK!!!"

"Motherfucker," I yell, rising to my feet, fast, knocking beer cans off the table.

"Yeeeaahhh, I fucked your mother. And I'll fuck you too, fish fucker," Bukowski taunts, coming at me like a train.

Drunk and crazed, I take a swing at him and feel my fist connect with the rough, bearded skin of his face. Not phased, Bukowski clobbers me in the ear. I see stars. Now it's two of us, drunken poets, trading drunken blows. I taste blood in my mouth and keep hitting him, but Bukowski is getting the best of me, pounding away with those big, red, ugly mitts.

I crouch low, defending my face, and try to head butt him in the gut, but he grabs me like a bear, and we both wrestle to the floor, toppling over the coffee table which cracks and splinters. I'm rolling round on the dirty wall-to-wall carpet in a spinning chaos of beer cans, pages of poetry flying, pissed and gasping like some savage, lumbering beast of old, an ugly, deformed, drunken puppet, breaking everything in it's terrible path...

Finally, breathing hard, bloody and sweating we both stop, laughing hysterically...

"Geeeeez, kid," he says finally, "Ya fiiiight just liiike a giiiirl I useta fuck in a toiiii-let..."

"Was that before, or after she shit in yer mouth?" I snap back.

"Shit, I shiiiit bigger than you... Look at my beautiful cofffeeeee taaa-ble. You oooowe me for that, ya little shit..."

We end the night sitting on the floor, drinking, trading insults, reading poetry, and toasting to each other's speedy demise as the sun rises, emerging like a punch-drunk sea monster over the smoggy purgatory of Bukowski's doomed Los Angeles...



(c) Jonathan Shaw 2009.

Jonathan Shaw began writing as a contributor for the LA Free Press in the late 60s. In the early 70s, he trained as a tattoo artist in Long Beach under the legendary Bob Shaw. He opened his own joint, Fun City Tattoo, in 1976 in New York's East Village. After traveling the world extensively as a tattoo artist and managing editor of tattoo magazines, he retired from tattooing in 2001, moving to Rio De Janeiro to begin his next chapter as a full time writer. His first book, Narcisa: Our Lady of Ashes, is available from Amazon.com. To read more of Jonathan's writing check his blog at ScabVendor.com. You can also follow Jonathan on Twitter @jsfuncity.

Click HERE and HERE for more of SG's intermittent series, "Remembering Buk."