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I Taught Charles Bukowski All About Oral Sex

On the twentieth anniversary of the writer's death, I interviewed the people who knew him best.

Linda King and Charles Bukowski.

Yes, she says, she is the one who taught Charles Bukowski how to perform oral sex. Linda King still remembers the conversation; Bukowski said he'd never done that because no one had asked him to. She wasn’t having it.

“I expect a man to do unto me as he would have done unto him,” says the 73-year-old sculptor. I’m on the phone with King, who dated the famed gutter poet off and on for several years during the 1970s. I want to know if the man who became famous for writing minimalist prose about getting drunk and sleeping with women was any good at the stuff he wrote so much about. “Oh yeah,” she says. “It was good. Very good. Except when he was drinking.” But wasn’t he drinking all the time? “No, he wasn’t getting drunk all the time. He stopped for two months once. I thought that was great. But he didn’t stick with it.”

Annons

Bukowski wasn't the type of guy most would peg as ambitious. He was, after all, the man who coaxed a literary oeuvre out of a life of hangovers, losing money at the horse track and having unprotected sex with legions of women, among other bad decisions. He also disliked cutting his hair or beard and worked menial jobs for decades. Film critic Roger Ebert once summed him up: “A million guys start out to get drunk and become great writers, and one makes it. Now a million more guys are probably getting drunk trying to figure out how Bukowski did it. He isn't a survivor. He's a statistical aberration.”

This is not the profile of a driven social climber. But to hear King tell it, Bukowski was ambitious. She recalls him working on his writing almost every night. “I don’t think people realise how hard he worked at it,” she says. “He used to say he was the greatest writer ever. He had no qualms about telling people who the greatest writer was; it was him.”

The man now considered to be a poet laureate for the disaffected died 20 years ago yesterday – the 9th of March, 1994. Some scholars have dubbed his style “dirty realism”, which is just another way of saying his writing was marked by minimalism and vignettes of working class life.  He was a guy with a pockmarked face, beer belly and greasy hair who managed to sleep with women decades his junior. He wrote about that sex in brutal and detailed terms: the shape of the vaginas, descriptions of the cunnilingus, the bucking, the stroking, the pumping. The post or pre-coital bowel movements. Whether he ejaculated or not. He has been labelled a misogynist. There are instances where Henry Chinaski, the protagonist in several of his books and a sort of literary surrogate for Bukowski, rapes women with no repercussions. But when you bring up the misogyny tag with his defenders, things get weird.  King, for instance, rejects the notion that Bukowski was a misogynist, moments after recalling the time he hit her in the face, giving her a black eye. They were coming back from a boxing match, they were arguing – which was not unusual – and he was blackout drunk, she says. He didn't remember it the next day. It was the only time he struck her, she says. But when I ask her if Bukowski hated women, she is insistent:

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“No.”

John Martin, who edited Bukowski’s writing for 40 years, acknowledges that Bukowski’s work could be interpreted as misogynistic. He’s quick to add, “Personally, he had a very healthy respect for women.” He then offers an explanation that surprises me because it undermines the whole Bukowski myth: the man who skewered all that is phoney in this world and whose fans love him for his unflinching honesty was apparently a poseur. In the 1970s, when Bukowski became more successful, the depictions of misogynistic behaviour in his work “became more of a pose than a conviction. If you’re doing something and suddenly people are talking about you because of what you’re saying, you’re tempted to keep saying it,” says Martin.

Bukowski and his bust.

Bukowski’s behaviour and the writing that it birthed paved a path to fame and fortune. Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke have portrayed his alter ego, Chinaski, in film. Numerous rock bands have checked his name in song. Bars bear his surname on both US coasts. Two decades after his death, he is still firmly ensconced in cult hero status. People continue to be drawn to him, says David Calonne – a literature professor at Eastern Michigan University who has written a book about Bukowski – because he writes about love and sex in a way that they find both humorous and tragic. “He doesn’t really write characters,” says Calonne. “He writes little smidgens. Broken pieces of people that just go along in life. They aren’t fully-rounded, striving, self-actualised people on a Jungian journey to wholeness. They’re broken.” One of his works that's littered with broken people is Women. Martin tells me that the details of the book accurately reflect Bukowski’s lifestyle at the time he wrote it. The protagonist is Bukowski’s alter ego, Chinaski, whose chief girlfriend through much of the book is Lydia Vance. Vance is unstable and irrational, and based on Linda King. King met Bukowski when she was sculpting faces of poets and people told her that he was the best poet in Los Angeles. She asked to sculpt him, he agreed and they started seeing each other. Over the phone, I want to know about the accuracy of specific parts of the relationship that were outlined in the book.  Martin has warned me to take everything King says with a grain of salt. King, after all, could have married Bukowski, but he ended up marrying another woman named Linda. “She would have ended up married to a millionaire,” says Martin. “It didn’t happen. So naturally there’s a certain amount of chagrin and jealously.”

Annons

Still, she's the only person who can really verify all the details of their relationship.

Yes, she says, they would exchange the sculpted bust of his head when they broke up and when they got back together, just like in the book. Yes, she would go over his body and pop his zits, as Bukowski details in Women. “It was a sexual thing, kinda. You know, going over someone’s body, that whole thing.”

She confirms that she tried to run him over in her car once. She also threw a beer bottle through one of his windows. Yes, he thought she was a flirt – a source of aggravation for them both. “I always thought he was lacking in confidence. If he'd been a real good looking man and had a lot of success with women, I don’t think he would have ever thought of that. I was a bit of a flirt, probably, but not taking it to the extent that he imagined.” No, she says, she did not need to have sex five times a week. “That’s an exaggeration.”

King isn’t thrilled with her depiction in the book, saying Bukowski downplayed his own feelings towards her in the novel. She says he was angry with her when he wrote it. “It was almost like he wanted to trash me to the whole world, and so he did,” she says. It’s been 36 years since King’s relationship with Bukowski was laid bare in Women. In the two decades since his death, Bukowski’s work has been picked apart ad nauseam, and there doesn’t seem to be much left to say. So I ask King to tell me something about Bukowski that would surprise me. “I once mentioned that he had a new shirt on and he blushed,” she says. “Most people wouldn’t think that Bukowski would blush.”

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