Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Page A

bumming around the country, living in rooming houses and working at menial jobs, crazy jobs like being the oven man in a dog biscuit factory and ‘coconut man’ in a cake factory. These jobs may have been invented to add colour, as they are not recorded on the very detailed work experience forms Bukowski later completed for the post office.
    Of all the small press publishers Bukowski dealt with in these early years the most significant, by far, were Jon and Louise ‘Gypsy Lou’ Webb and their extraordinary Loujon Press.
    As a young man, Jon Webb took part in the hold-up of a jewellery store in Cleveland, Ohio, and served three years in a reformatory. It was whilst he was inside that he developed a passion for literature, editing the reformatory weekly and writing crime stories. Upon being paroled, he returned to Cleveland where he met and married an Italian girl who came to be known as Gypsy Lou because of her colorful clothes and long dark hair. In 1954 they moved to the French quarter of New Orleans where Jon Webb decided to become a publisher of avant-garde writing. He contacted William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller and other leading underground figures urging them to submit work to The Outsider , a journal he and Gypsy Lou were setting up. Jory Sherman was appointed West Coast editor and suggested theymight also publish Bukowski. The Webbs loved his work. As Gypsy Lou says, they were greatly impressed with, ‘the realness, you know, not phony at all. He was just very honest and down to earth.’
    The Webbs published eleven Bukowski poems in the first issue of The Outsider , some of the best he had written, alongside work by fashionable beat writers. The Bukowski selection was all the more impressive because Webb took a professional approach to being an editor, rejecting much of what Bukowski submitted as sub-standard. The best Bukowski poem in the issue was ‘old man, dead in a room’, which he meant as his own epitaph:
    and as my grey hands
    drop a last desperate pen
    in some cheap room
    they will find me there
    and never know
    my name
    my meaning
    nor the treasure
    of my escape.
    At times it seemed the poem might be prophetic. Bukowski was drinking hard, hitting the cocktail lounges night after night, getting into fights, and often waking up in city drunk tanks with the other ‘silverfish’, as he called his cell-mates. He retched so hard in the morning he saw blood in the toilet pan. Maybe he would die as the doctors had predicted, ripped apart by another hemorrhage. His drinking caused him to suffer small injuries and unpleasant ailments: he jammed a shard of glass in his foot when he was stumbling about drunk one night; and developed hemorrhoids to beat a world record. Thoughts of killing himself returned and he made an abortive attempt at gassing himself in his room one afternoon.
    Once again, he started seeing something of Jane who was in an even more desperate state than when they were living together. She was working as a maid at The Phillips, a dive hotel in Hollywood, in exchange for a room rent-free and a few dollars drinking money.Her legs had lost their shapeliness and her pot belly had grown to a grotesque size. Bukowski referred to her as ‘the old woman’ and they enjoyed the companionship of fellow alcoholics, as he wrote in ‘A Nice Place’:
    I uncap the new bottle
    from the bag and she sits in the corner
    smoking and coughing
    like an old Aunt from New Jersey
    Sometimes they had sex, but Jane was so far gone that intercourse repulsed him. He wrote to his pen friend, the Louisiana academic John William Corrington, that it made him think of a film he had once seen of a Cesarian operation.
    There was a sense of impending tragedy about Jane, that nothing much could help her. In Post Office , Chinaski visits Betty at her hotel a few days after the Christmas holidays and the scene Bukowski describes is probably an accurate description of how low Jane had fallen by January, 1962: