Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Page B

it is early in the morning when Chinaski calls at her room, but Betty is already drunk, surrounded by bottles of liquor given as Christmas gifts by the tenants, all cheap brands. Chinaski fears she will keep drinking until the bottles are empty, or until she is dead.
    ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I ought to take that stuff. I mean, I’ll just give you back a bottle now and then. I won’t drink it.’
    ‘Leave the bottles,’ Betty said. She didn’t look at me. Her room was on the top floor and she sat in a chair by the window watching the morning traffic.
    I walked over. ‘Look, I’m beat. I’ve got to leave. But for Christ’s sake, take it easy on that stuff!’
    ‘Sure,’ she said.
    I leaned over and kissed her goodbye.
    A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday, Bukowski went back to see her. There was no answer when he knocked at her door, so he went in and saw the bottles were gone, the bed covers had been pulled back and, when he came closer, he saw blood on the sheet.Frenchy, the landlady, told him an ambulance had taken Jane to Los Angeles County Hospital.
    Her body was riddled with cancer; she also had cirrhosis of the liver. She had suffered a massive hemorrhage, and was in a semi-coma when he arrived, in a ward with three other women, one of whom was laughing loudly as she entertained her visitors. Bukowski pulled a curtain round Jane’s bed for privacy and sat beside her holding her hand, saying her name over and over. He got a rag and wiped away some blood from the corner of her mouth.
    ‘I knew it would be you,’ she said, rousing herself for a moment.
    Jane died on the evening of 22 January, 1962, while Bukowski was trying to place a telephone call to her son in Texas. She was fifty-one.
    After the funeral at the San Fernando Mission, north of LA, Bukowski went on a five-day drunk and, when he couldn’t stand his own company any longer, drove over to see Jory Sherman in San Bernadino. They worked their way through a six-pack of Miller High Life as he talked about how it had only been ‘half a funeral’ because there had been a mix up about whether Jane was a bona fide Catholic – the priest didn’t want to do the full service. Bukowski said more of Jane’s family should have been there. Just because she was a scrub woman in a cheap hotel didn’t mean she was nothing. He said he wished he had telephoned her more often; maybe if he had called after he saw her that morning, with the bottles, it might have made a difference. ‘Hank felt he had lost someone that he allowed himself to get very close to, which was rare for him,’ says Sherman. ‘I have seldom seen a person so grief-stricken. He was weeping and he was drinking heavily and his world had just crashed.’
    In the morning, Bukowski drove to the races where he picked up a girl he knew from the post office, but he was unable to have sex when they got back to her place because he imagined Jane was watching. He returned to his room on North Mariposa where he still had some of her belongings: black beads which he moved through his fingers like a rosary while listening to the silence of the telephone, the telephone he used to pack with a matchbook coverso he wouldn’t be disturbed when he was working. The closet door was half open, more of her things hanging there – blouses, skirts and jackets, the lifeless fabric her body had given shape and movement to. When the hangover cleared on 29 January, he began to write a series of grief poems which are among his most affecting work.
    …. and I speak
    to all the gods,
    Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
    chips of blinking things,
    idols, pills, bread,
    fathoms, risks,
    knowledgeable surrender,
    rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
    without a chance,
    hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
    I lean on this,
    I lean on all of this
    and I know:
    her dress upon my arm:
    but
    they will not
    give her back to me.
    He called the poem, ‘for Jane, with all the love I had, which was not