Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Read Free Book Online Page A

to sleep,’ he said.
    In exchange for free beer or a shot of whiskey, he ran errands for the other customers, laying bets and fetching sandwiches. Sometimes he and the bar man, burly part-time laborer Frank McGilligan, ‘a big ox with a cruel streak’, went out back to see who was toughest. Mostly Bukowski got thrashed, but that always earned him a couple of drinks. ‘I was hiding out,’ he said of the two and half years he spent in the bar. ‘I didn’t know what else to do. This bar back east was a lively bar. It wasn’t a commonbar. There were characters there. There was a feeling. There was ugliness. There was dullness and stupidity. But there was also a certain gleeful high pitch you could feel.’
    One Saturday evening in July, 1944, he was resting up in his room, drinking port wine, with Brahms’ 2nd Symphony on the radio, when two FBI agents barged in wanting to know why he hadn’t reported for the draft. He told them he was 4–F. But why hadn’t he kept in touch with the draft board? They suspected he was a draft-dodger and took him to jail.
    Although it looked impressive with its castellations and granite walls, Moyamensing was a low-security prison holding men awaiting trial, and men serving short sentences for non-payments of fines. But it was the first prison Bukowski had been in and he wrote about the experience many times afterwards, giving the impression of having been in a veritable Alcatraz.
    The guards took him to a whitewashed nine-by-thirteen-foot cell, with a single barred window, occupied by a chubby fellow who looked like an accountant and introduced himself to Bukowski as Courtney Taylor, ‘public enemy number one’. Bukowski introduced himself, saying he had been accused of draft dodging and Taylor tried to menace the new boy saying draft dodgers were the one type of criminal cons didn’t like. Bukowski presumed this is what was meant by honor among thieves.
    ‘What d’you mean?’ Taylor asked.
    ‘Just leave me alone.’
    Taylor was thirty-six, a fraudster who had operated under more than fifty aliases and spent literally half his life in jail. From 1941 to 1943, he was incarcerated in Wisconsin. When he was released, he moved to a basement off Fairmount Avenue where he was arrested in June, 1944, for manufacturing and passing bad checks and, ironically, considering what a hard time he gave Bukowski, for forging draft cards. As for being public enemy number one, he did feature on the FBI’s ‘ten most wanted’ list but not until years later.
    It seems they were put in the same cell because the authorities wanted to keep the mental cases together. Bukowski was 4–F, which put a question mark against his sanity, and Taylor was an oddball who demanded to be seen by a psychiatristand, when he was sentenced, asked the judge for an extra eight years.
    Taylor cheerfully explained to Bukowski that if he wanted to kill himself – as many try to do on their first night inside – he could stand in the slopping out bucket and jam his hand in the light socket. That would do it. Bukowski thanked him, because he had been thinking about it, but perhaps not right now. Instead, they spent a convivial evening betting dimes on who could capture the most bed bugs. Taylor, the veteran swindler, won by breaking his bugs in half and stretching the pieces to double his score.
    Bukowski was released from prison as soon as he failed a second psychiatric test, and went back to the ‘good old scum bar’ on Fairmount Avenue. McGilligan welcomed him home by asking him outside for a fight.
    ‘The schtick, of course, was to let him beat me up for the entertainment of the customers,’ said Bukowski. ‘I got tired of that game and decked the bastard and they promptly 86’d me. There I was, on the streets, and out of a job just like that.’
    He claimed that for the next ten years of his life he abandoned writing to become a drunk, a barfly, but the truth is he continued to work on short stories and