John Fante Was L.A. and Bukowski Was L.A. and I Am L.A.

1.

I will always link Bukowski with smog and its antidote, the powerful Santa Ana’s, arid, down-

slope winds, born inland in Fall and Winter, that rush through mountain passes on their way to

the San Fernando Valley, “devil winds” that both fan wildfires and disperse toxic smog.

Bukowski carried the Santa Ana’s banner: if you face the gale, don’t bend in obedience

or resignation, and dare it to topple you, then you are defeating the forces committed to grind

you down. Most of those forces are human, (as Dylan put it) “the pettiness that plays so rough,”

but some of them are impersonal, such as alcoholism and confusion and the body’s decline and

death.

In the evenings I often walked from the stucco hovel Old Man Dengler provided our

family, down the dirt road that led to town, foregoing protection from the gritty dust that scoured

my skin and sometimes blinded me. We could have been living in the Dust Bowl. A lot of kids in

my school were children of Dust Bowl refugees. A generation had passed but (as in Leon

Russell’s lyric) we were still stuck in the Grapes of Wrath together.

The dust crept in everywhere; it respected no personal space. Neither did Bukowski. He

briefly substituted for my father and was also my first literary critic and my harshest teacher—he

let me know what he thought was bad, and found nothing good.

.

2.

I am L.A., though I have not lived there for many years. I am L.A., as the movie studios were

L.A. and the Rolls Royces were, and the dry washes are, and graffiti is, and as Nathaniel West

was, and as John Fante was L.A., and Fante was Bukowski’s God, and Bukowski was L.A.

As Fante wrote in The Road to Hell, When you go to Confession you must tell everything.

Anyone who hides a sin gets into trouble right away, for though you fool the priest it is not easy

to fool God. In fact, it can’t be done.

Bukowski never hid a sin, never bothered to fool a priest, never bothered to try to fool

God, never saw the need, never lied to make me feel better, made me feel as bad as he could.

Buk breathed in the smog, breathed it deep, and proclaimed: This is how I know I’m alive,

when the air burns my lungs. This is the corrupt air of the city that fills me, and that I fill. Let me

breathe smog, and walk along the broken pavements of Paradise.

About the time Bukowski came into my life I was making my last attempt to present

myself to the world as normal. I didn’t know I was abnormal, though all the pressures and forces

toward abnormality were already working on me. My friend Garcia convinced me to try out for

the football team with him. The day of the try-outs was a hundred degrees and heavy with smog.

Garcia fancied himself a tough guy, heir to Pancho Villa and Che Guevara. He wanted to kick

the asses of the black brothers who he knew (accurately) would be bussed in to humiliate us (I

remember one home scoreboard vividly: 87-3.) I didn’t want to try out for the football team, but

Garcia pressured me, challenged me to be a man, not a wuss. He pressured me like Pollo Murillo

and Hector Delgadillo pressured me to huff gasoline with them in Delgadillo’s dim garage, his

father’s motorcycle tools strewn all around. I had conflicting caucuses, conflicting pressures.

.

Garcia put on the football uniform Coach Trump gave him. I put on mine. I felt like I was

wearing a poison-gas suit from World War I, one that wouldn’t work, but would drag me down

to the bottom of a muddy trench. The inside of the football helmet had some jagged edges. I

started thinking that Trump had made them jagged just to get at me. Trump didn’t like me. He

thought I was a hippie. We hadn’t even invented hippies yet, but Trump knew all about them, as

if in a state of contemptuous clairvoyance. Trump got in my face and yelled: When the going

gets tough, the Tough get going, and Winners never quit and Quitters never win! His

philosophy was self-evident, and could not be contradicted.

We started running around the field. It was hot as Hell. Trump wouldn’t give me a glass

of water. I’d been smoking cigarettes I’d stolen from my father, when he was still around, before

he’d split and gone to live a different life in Sonora, Mexico. I’d stolen cigarettes from stores too,

and from gas stations. I’d stolen them from the purses of whores. I had the perfect early-

adolescent life in L.A. If I didn’t have the money for something I wanted, I stole it. I never got

caught. I considered myself a master criminal, a criminal mastermind. I think Bukowski

considered himself one too.

I’d been smoking cigarettes, drinking cheap booze, huffing petrol with Murillo and

Delgadillo. Who knows what I was doing to my lungs. The air was thick with smog. It was a

thousand degrees. I fell to my knees and barfed. Every time I got up and started running, I

barfed. I barfed long after the food in my stomach was gone. Garcia ran by and kicked me with

his cleats, which made me bleed, and left a scar. I decided I hated Garcia, though we’d grown up

together and were best friends. I resolved to kill him. Soon. Trump came up and yelled slogans in

my ears. I became a Quitter, I never won. Later, Bukowski would tell me I was worthless, but for

different reasons. When I took off the helmet, blood ran down my forehead and into my eyes.

.

Winds of Santa Ana

1.

The Santa Ana winds shaped me

Their power snatched the cigarette from my fingers

and drove it deep into dry chaparral

The resulting fire was preordained

I could have lived in Hoboken NJ

and the fire still would have been preordained

still my fault

The western winds overwhelmed me

They blew my garage open

sucked my tuba out into the pebbly road

dragged it down the street

Sparks flew from its brass

I was trying to teach myself to play it

so I could join a Mariachi band

with Pollo Murillo and

Hector Delgadillo

My father was a half-Jewish Rumanian

but passed as Mexican

.

He knew all the love songs

that started with Mi Amor

and ended with

Mi Corazon

He never sang them to my mother

I knew he was not singing to her

though she was his wife

She was as beautiful and upright

as a statue of a Madonna

carved from pinyon wood

by a Colonial

When she was around he shut his lips tight

or twisted them like a bad ventriloquist

He sang his songs to someone else

someone in a different country

he hadn’t met yet

someone he was preparing for

like preparing for the Second Coming

My mother was a Christian woman

though she didn’t love Jesus

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in Him

She was merely indifferent

.

2.

My cap flew from my head

My grandfather’s fedora blew off his dead head

his head a block of grey clay

awaiting the pinching of my fingers

to truncate the seven generations

of suffering deemed necessary

by the Holy Book

to wear down sin

I’d take it down to

maybe four

My grandmother reclined on a tree limb

holding a Russian ukulele and

the eternal flame

of youth

It glowed orange

like the eyes of a tabby cat

The wind blew her out of her tree

The wind blew carom boards

down Topanga

.

out to the ocean

They skimmed across the surface

like plywood torn from houses

by a hurricane

I didn’t understand the meaning of youth

or age

All I understood was the wind

The wind would blow everything away

everything of value or lacking value

It would all end up stuck

on the branches of some bush

I didn’t need to go to high school

The wind was my teacher

The wind was the wisest teacher

The wind would get fiercer every year

All human life would disappear

The wind blew

like it never did in Patterson New Jersey

like Dr. Poet William Carlos Williams

never experienced

But Dr. Williams kept his wooden tongue depressors

.

locked in a glass jar anyway

He never knew what might be coming

The wind blew out the windows of our stucco shanty

the one Old Man Dengler allowed us to live in

3.

The Electrical Engineer

had come from New Jersey

to remake the San Fernando Valley

in the image of a Diode

had come to cast Aerospace

in the image of the Aztec gods

with his hordes of

self-replicating spawn

who enrolled in my school

and looked down on me

This engineer sat at his desk and

the wind

sucked open his drawers

scattered his papers

financial papers

technical papers

He had no idea wind could blow like that

.

Those papers were his life

4.

The wind turned coffee beans

into bullets

The Santa Ana winds stripped tomatoes from their vines

the grapes from theirs

Italians and Jews cried together

Tumbleweeds are weapons of mass destruction

In the future recreational marijuana would be legal

in my new home, Colorado

but in the meantime

I was going to prison

where I could not be touched

by the powerful

destructive wind

I can’t say

I wasn’t grateful

5.

Bukowski was L.A.

Fante was L.A.

.

I was L.A.

The father who abandoned me was L.A.

The rundown VFW hall where he drank was L.A.

My mother took Bukowski to the VFW Hall. Nobody there knew who Bukowski was.

This was the Valley, not Hollywood. No one gave a shit. When my mother got wasted and

started yelling: Do you know who this is? This is Bukowski! the bartender told her to go fuck

herself. Bukowski sat on his barstool with his shit-eating grin.

In the early 1950’s, the painter Roberto Chavez came out to the Valley to paint bucolic

scenes. Later he switched to scenes from the lifeblood of La Raza, scenes from the ghetto, scenes

from Hell, from Los Dias de los Muertos, scenes illustrating sexual fantasies involving Frida

Kahlo.

By the time I came on the scene in the far northwestern corner of the San Fernando

Valley, the bucolic was gone or fast disappearing. Greasy smog sat heavily on everything. There

were four gas stations on every corner. Some of them had attendants, some were self-serve. But

then the Santa Ana winds came up and blew the smog away, and you could see the white rocks

of Chatsworth’s foothill park, just beginning to lose their purity to Mexican graffiti.

4.

THE BIRTH OF PERSISTENCE

.

My father was one of the last hired hands on the dusty pocket ranches of the northwest San

Fernando Valley, ringed by eucalyptus trees and shoved against the foothills by encroaching

suburbia. In his ragged jean jacket, he looked as Mexican as his compadres, but was actually a

half-Jewish Rumanian. He was sinew, gristle and rope, and pissed away his evenings in the

rundown bar next to the hall for the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

One night, he failed to come home. After eleven days, we got an aerogram from Sonora,

the folded paper blue like a washed out sky and dry as a taco shell, wishing us luck. The wizened

owner of the Double D Ranch, Old Man Dengler, allowed Ma and me to remain in our shanty for

free. Ma began cooking for him, and I spent grumbly evenings alone. It was then, at age

fourteen, that I started writing poetry, which featured the smell of hand-rolled cigarettes and the

power of the Santa Ana winds. Ma, who had been mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenic and

spent some time on a locked ward in Camarillo, lost what remained of her control over me.

At fifteen I began hitchhiking into the seedy side of Hollywood for basement readings by

beat poets. A few of them, like Jack Michelene, had achieved minor fame, but not at the level of

Charles Bukowski, whom they all talked about but who never showed. (Micheline was mostly

living in San Francisco, but, as he put it, was taking a “sabbatical” in L.A.)

One day I got a ride with a drunk who crashed his Cadillac while trying to grope me.

After I got the casts off my leg and wrist, I persuaded Ma to drive me to the readings, because

they were “educational.” Though her twenty-year-old Studebaker Lark was a death trap, it was

safer than catching rides with the freaks attracted by my thumb. I figured Ma would drop me off

and make herself scarce, but she wanted to see what I was up to, so she joined the group.

Because she was actually bipolar (and manic after the freeway ride, all teeth and seduction), she

.

was, according to Michelene, “a fun gal” and accepted by the poets, who invited her to their

parties.

In that way she met Bukowski.

(from Bukowski’s the young lady who lives in Canoga Park)

she has a neck like a swan,

could be a movie star,

twice in the madhouse,

a mother in the madhouse, and a sister in prison.

you never know when she is going to

go mad again…

I was aware of Bukowski’s work from an underground rag that also featured comix by R.

Crumb. “Buk” started showing up at the ranch. He and Ma swam in Dengler’s pool. Bukowski

was butt ugly in clothes, but twice as repulsive in baggy red bathing trunks.

and

I said,

I was beaten down

long ago

in some alley

in another

world

(from Bukowski’s when you wait for the dawn to crawl through the screen like a burglar to take

your life away)

.

One day, Bukowski barged into my room and demanded to read my poetry. Instant

fantasies flashed like fireworks: him hooking me up with a big New York publisher. He read

each poem, dropped it on the floor and dripped on it. The reek of chlorine and beer and cheap

whiskey made my head spin. When he was done, the great Bukowski pushed his grimace of a

face into mine. His breath was putrid. “Even for a kid, this is pathetic,” he said. “Unadulterated

horseshit.” I count that moment as the beginning of my persistence in the face of rejection.

a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers

filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen…

a poem is a city of poets

most of them quite similar

and envious and bitter…

(from Bukowski’s a poem is a city)

5.

So that was my youth, and Bukowski’s contribution to it.

Okay. We change fast at that age. Or we remain the same. Or both. Four years later I was

in the SF Bay area. I thought of looking up Jack Michelene, but didn’t feel like it. I felt he was

complicit in getting Bukowski and my mother together, and in Bukowski dissing my early work.

I was full of spite, not unlike Bukowski.

I can’t remember if I was in college, or had dropped out again. I alternated states.

Sometimes when I was in college I thought I had dropped out. Sometimes when I was a drop-out

.

I wandered into college buildings trying to locate my assigned classroom. Sometimes I read

more when I was not enrolled. My drug consumption always seemed to be about the same,

though I was more paranoid when I was enrolled.

Once I was hitchhiking across the country and got picked up by a dangerous drunk. I was

scared to death he was going to kill me in one way or another. I had him drop me off on a

country road, pretending I lived there, anything to get out of his car. As soon as he drove away

three bristling Doberman Pinschers came running up to menace me. They were the kind of dogs

who chewed on metal fencing for fun, and to keep their teeth sharp. I walked backwards away

from them. They pursued me, their naked muscles trembling with anticipation, looking for an

opening, waiting for me to trip and expose my belly. Then they’d leap on me and tear me apart.

It was classic Ape vs. Wolves. Then their owner called them, and they turned and ran, looking

for a cow bone to gnaw on. The owner didn’t even know I was there. At that moment I realized

that I was supposed to be delivering a presentation that day, but I couldn’t remember what it was

supposed to be about or even what class it was for.

I was living in J.H’s house at the time. It was sort of a commune. When I got back I

boiled some Top Ramen noodles on the stove. I found an old carrot and was slicing it up to add

to the noodles.

J.H. came in and asked: What are you doing?

Cooking dinner.

Not much of a dinner, he said.

I’m dieting.

You look like you’re dying.

.

I had a part-time job mucking out horse stalls. I didn’t get paid, just got to ride for free. I

jumped off my horse and co-eds swooned. I was pure libido, in and out of the saddle. I was an

animated Mexican skeleton, its joints burning day-glo red and orange. Young women knew that I

was the More Life God had promised them when He stroked them between their legs. I was the

candy-flake redemption their parents had tried to keep them from.

I was Big Daddy Roth and Big Daddy Roth was L.A. and L.A. calls me back like a

spurned lover, calls me back with the promise of melodrama and violence and all the events

Bolano included in his book 2066 and the ten thousand pages he edited out (and which were

snatched by the Santa Ana winds when they threw open my garage and my tuba went scraping

down the pebbled road (the flames from my tuba lit Bolano’s discarded pages on fire.)

I should have been in the rodeo. If my dad hadn’t split to Sonora, I was convinced I

would have been. My dad would have tied me to a bronc, to a bull, pulled the cords tight and

sent me to Hell. Instead, his abandonment detoured me into a suck-ass literary side yard.

Bukowski was giving a reading at the Armory in San Francisco. I hitchhiked over there. I

got picked up by a woman in a Cadillac convertible who wanted to take me home and feed me

mung beans. I had already learned that the worst events begin with a ride in a Cadillac. I told her

I didn’t eat mung beans. She looked awfully disappointed.

The organizers of the reading had set up a bare wooden stage with a table, a chair, and an

old refrigerator stocked full of cans of beer. It was Pabst Blue Ribbon, the kind I drank, the kind

.

Bukowski got me started on. The organizers of the reading wanted to beer him up and get him to

do the Bukowski Dance, like getting a trained bear to shimmy.

The last I’d seen him he was wearing that obscene red bathing suit and swimming in Old

Man Dengler’s pool with my mother. Somehow I remembered my mother as being much more

beautiful than she was, thin and shapely, untrammeled, her mind clear, as if the Santa Ana winds

had blown away her red hot/ice cold madness.

This was the first time I had seen Bukowski since he’d been with my mother. I watched

him and didn’t know how I felt about him. I believed I should hate him. If he hadn’t abandoned

her I don’t believe she would have killed herself. That was the final blow, the last straw.

Bukowski had made her love him, then thrown her away. But I didn’t hate him. To be honest, I

wouldn’t have stuck with her either, any more than my father had.

Bukowski drank a lot of the beer from the fridge onstage in the Armory and smiled his

shit-eating smile. I felt sorry for him. He thought he’d resisted all the shit in life and had ended

up a winner, but he was a loser. He was as much of a loser as I was when Coach Trump leaned

on me and yelled in the ear holes of my football helmet. Bukowsi was on the stage sucking up

their beer. They were feeding him beer to punish him for being better than them, a better writer.

They were a bunch of goons, and poets authorized by universities.

Intermission came. I had to take a piss. I didn’t want to comingle with pathetic mankind.

I went far down the hall to an out-of-the-way bathroom I knew about. Some friends and I had

broken into the Armory a couple times to explore it. We were just dumb kids, no better than we

were in the San Fernando Valley crawling into water pipes six feet in circumference , exploring

them by lighting hair spray on fire as it came out of the can. We could easily have blown

.

ourselves up, but didn’t. Not through intelligence, just dumb luck. We all had nicknames. Mine

was Lucky Krochmalnik. Murillo’s was Lucky Murillo. Delgadillo’s was Lucky Delgadillo.

I didn’t think anyone else was in that bathroom. I figured no one else at the reading knew

about it. I turned from the urinal just as Bukowski exited a stall. I stopped and stared at him. He

stared back. He turned and went to the sink to wash his hands. (I wouldn’t have figured

Bukowski would bother to wash his hands after taking a shit, though I’d seen him do it before.)

He turned away from the sink and found me still there, still staring. He must have thought I was

another dumb idol-worshiper. I wanted to ask him why he let the reading organizers treat him

like that, with disrespect. But I couldn’t get the right words to come out of my mouth, any words.

He finally said, “It’s not so bad.”

He didn’t wait for a reply. I didn’t have one.

Only after he left the restroom did I wonder if he recognized me, if he knew me as my

mother’s son, knew me as the kid whose poetry he had read and judged atrocious, unadulterated

horseshit. I remembered those words, remembered how he looked when he delivered them to

me, remembered his alky smell.

I had hated him then, but I didn’t now. In some stupid way, I had made him my father.

My father had left, gone to a country where they spoke a different language, but Bukowski had

hung in.

For the first time, in the wake of Bukowski’s exit from that restroom, the smell of his shit

in the air, his beery stink, I wondered why I had never gone down to Sonora to look for my

father, for that matter why I had never gone to see Bukowski, to show him my recent writing, to

.

ask him if he still thought it was shit, or whether it had gained some redeeming value, maybe get

his approval and respect, maybe knee him in the balls.

I went back to the reading. Bukowski muttered more poems. They all began to run

together. His voice got more gruff and slurred until he was no longer understandable. In the

audience, contempt grew, outweighing admiration. But they had helped do that to him. The

organizers’ secret wish had come true—they had brought down Bukowski.

6.

Except for providing the steel in my persistence, I never thought Bukowski had affected my

work. I’d never tried to write like Bukowski. Never wanted to. But then I came across this poem.

I don’t remember when I wrote it.

Librarian

The fat Cuban library director

wanted me to read

at her college

but after she invited me

a higher administrator

took her aside and told her

that inviting someone like me

would be dangerous

.

a poet abrasive and volatile

with no loyalties

owing nothing to anyone

accustomed to telling ugly truths

a man who likes the

feeling of telling them

So the fat Cuban library director

called me back and told me

her assistant would be in touch

but I had already seen through her

I already knew the game

but I played along

pretended she wasn’t a liar

lying for convenience

and for the sake of her career

like all the rest of the liars

I let her wallow in her stupidity

and opened a bottle of whiskey

good whiskey my son had given me

from when he worked in a distillery

not some cheap crap

.

Bukowski would have drank

in his dirty apartment

on the seedy side of Hollywood

I took a careful sip

Greed comes in many forms

and I wasn’t going to be a party to it

I didn’t need to read at that crappy backwater college

I didn’t need the money

didn’t need the recognition

didn’t need to tell truths

or lies

Our society is like a chain-restaurant halibut

stuffed with the greasy cheese

and fake crab of Greed

and all I was going to do was eat a sandwich

one slice of Pepper Jack on oat bread

with a little mustard

I was going to eat it slowly

and I was going to sip the whiskey slowly

I was going to feel the planet settle

in the darkness

and I was going to hear the faint whisper

.

of the ocean

I was going to feel grateful that I live in Los Angeles

home of Nathaniel West and John Fante and Charles Bukowski

and that I live in California

home of Henry Miller

who didn’t care fuck-all

about the bullshit of the world

but slowly sipped absinthe

and walked down garbage-strewn alleys

feeling satisfied with his lot

“a man with no money, no resources, no hopes

the happiest man alive”

And I felt sorry for that fat Cuban library director

another victim

another human trapped in the jaws

of organizational life

Yes, there was Bukowski shining through my work

his cynicism illuminating my perspective

7.

the last time I saw him he was not walking.

.

it was ten thirty a.m. on north Bronson and

hot, very hot, and he sat on a little ledge, bent

the pack still strapped on his back

I slowed down to look at his face

I had seen one or two other men in my life

with looks on their faces like

that.

I speeded up and turned on the

radio

I knew that look.

I would never see him again

(from Bukowski’s on the sidewalk and in the sun)

8.

My father was a half-Jewish Rumanian

but passed for Mexican

He was one of the last hired men

on the pocket ranches crammed up against

the foothills of the San Fernando Valley

As the years went by

.

he became less Jewish

more Mexican

and finally split for Sonora

I heard he married a Mexican woman down there

and had a few kids

He stole away my base

took my equilibrium

Bukowski claimed that base for a while

but the relationship was short-lived

and when he left my mother

she killed herself

I wondered why she hadn’t killed herself

when my father left

never even tried

never lay in a room half-dead for me

to discover

and heroically save

not even calling 911

because I knew a 911 call

would put her back in the state mental hospital

Was Bukowski that special

him and his ugly puss

and his self-built myth that he was special,

.

above the mass of working men?

My father was a working man

That’s what he was all about

My father was solid

just who he was

nothing more

clean and hard

In Sonora my father sat on the porch in the evening

and carved figures from wood

He never did that in the San Fernando Valley

If he did

he could have taught me

I could have learned

to become a wood carver

maybe done that for a living

I could have become a silent man

Silence is truth

instead of becoming like Bukowski

full of words

words coming out like water from a sprinkler

on a parched L.A. lawn

My father’s Mexican wife was taciturn

I heard

.

from a friend of his who

passed through the Valley briefly

My father was just as taciturn

so they never argued

over stupid shit

like most couples do

with all the words

tripping them up

Bukowski argued

He was a big arguer

engaged in a ceaseless argument with the world

with himself

with my mother

but my father knew

there was no point in arguing

with the ones you love

or the ones you hate

What were you going to accomplish?

I wish my family was still together

but my parents are both dead

and I’m half dead

like Bukowski was

when he was alive

.

and now Bukowski is totally dead

like everyone else

I wish I had never attended a reading of beat poets

wish I’d never met Bukowski

never become a poet

never cemented tragedy

and disappointment

in words

9.

(from Bukowski, dark night poem):

they say that

nothing is wasted:

either that

or

it all is

#

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