Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Read Free Book Online

military service for mental reasons and classified 4–F or, as he put it, ‘psycho’. Bukowski later recalled that the psychiatrist had written on his draft card that he was unsuitable for service partly because of his ‘extreme sensitivity’.
    Fired from the Red Cross for arriving late at a blood donor center, he drifted on across the country, sometimes choosing his destination by randomly pointing at places on a map. In this haphazard way he found himself in St Louis, Missouri, where he packed boxes in the basement of a ladies sportswear shop.
    Bukowski resented it when his co-workers volunteered for overtime, so they had money to take their wives and girlfriends on dates. He did meet girls who were interested in him, but was too shy and awkward to form a relationship. He expressed his alienation in his autobiographical novel, Factotum , where a girl tries to strike up a conversation with the hero: ‘I simply couldn’t respond. There was a space between us. The distance was too great. I felt as if she was talking to a person who had vanished, a person who was no longer there, no longer alive.’
    Instead of going out, he locked himself in his room and wrote stories which he mailed to prestigious magazines like The Atlantic Monthly , not knowing any other way of getting published. ‘… and when they came back I tore them up. I used to write eight or ten stories a week. All I’d do was write these stories and drink as much as possible.’
    Whit Burnett was a magazine editor known as a patron of new talent. He had famously discovered William Saroyan, first publishing him in Story magazine. Bukowski was greatly impressed by Saroyan’s The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze , so he submitted one of his own pieces to the magazine. Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip was an autobiographical account of having a submission rejected by Burnett and, possibly by merit of his cheek, it was accepted with a payment of $25. The byline he chose for this, his début as a writer, was Charles Bukowski, dropping his first name because it reminded him of his father.
    He went to New York in the spring of 1944 to see his name in print and excitedly bought the magazine for forty cents in a Greenwich Village drug store, but his story was not among the main body of the magazine. It appeared in the end pages as anovelty item and he was crushingly disappointed, feeling he had been made a fool of.
    He took a job as a stock room boy in Manhattan so he could rent a room, but didn’t find the city to his liking. He was cold in his lightweight clothes. His landlord ripped him off. And he was alarmed by the el’ train that ran past his window. Intimidated by the city, and so angry with Whit Burnett that he never submitted to Story again, Bukowski left New York deciding he wanted to live in a ‘nice, shady, quiet city where everything is calm, where people are decent, where there’s no trouble’. He chose Philadelphia because it was known as The City of Brotherly Love.
       
    It was lunch time when he walked into the bar on Fairmount Avenue, near downtown Philadelphia. A bottle whistled past his head.
    ‘Hey, you sonofabitch,’ said the man beside him, talking to another man down the bar. ‘You do that again, I’m gonna knock your goddamn head off.’
    A second bottle spun towards them, and the men went out back to fight. Bukowski was thrilled by this action. He decided to stay in the neighborhood, and drink in this bar.
    He rented a room at 603 North 17th Street in the Spring Garden district where there were many Irish and Polish families and a fellow named Bukowski could fit in, and he worked briefly as a shipping clerk at Fairmount Motor Products. When he wasn’t working, which was most of the time, he hung around the bar. He was the first customer in the morning, drinking the sops from the night before, and the last out the door at night. ‘I’d go home and there’d be a bottle of wine there. I’d drink half of that and go