Saving Bukowski's Los Angeles Home

In his lifetime, Charles Bukowski wrote some beautiful poetry and funny stories and novels
like Post Office and Ham on Rye and basically challenged the everyday turkeyneck boring reality of American life through his writing. For some weirdos, a lot of them, actually, Bukowski's poetry and fiction is life-enhancing. He's funny and he puts American life in perspective. That's liberating.

In recent months there's been a stir about how a place where he lived in L.A. that was threatened with possible demolition might just become a kind of Bukowski monument -- a cultural landmark. I'm glad. But how would Buk feel? Buk might've been amused or might've, as
his last wife, Linda Bukowski, wrote in a recent letter to the L.A. Weekly, not cared at all.

Monuments were not what Buk was about. He wasn't into grand things, hero worship, building things up to be worshipped, nationalism, etc. For the most part he's a voice against all that. He
was for living rather modestly, listening to music, making art, and enjoying life and wine.

Buk (a nickname, rhymes with puke), particularly knew that wine was good, even if sometimes you drink so much that you hurl. (His friend, the poet Harold Norse, said to me in San Francisco that he called Bukowski "Pukowski.") Buk also liked the sand dabs at Musso Frank Bar and Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. He liked good food.

Luckily, Bukowski became a bestselling author in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s and this helped him live a more comfortable life later in life. When he was younger, he lived on the edge all the time, with few comforts.

Bukowski lived from 1920 to 1994 and spent in his last years in San Pedro, a port town just north of Long Beach and south of Hollywood (by about twenty miles), a town with the easy-going funkiness that port towns have. The house has a big hedge in front and is protected
from the street. He loved his cats and his nice pad, and wanted to enjoy it without a lot of strangers popping in.

My love of Bukowski's work goes back three decades to my years in San Francisco when I first became a fan of his work. I've written about Buk on and off over the years; in fact, my first published short story is called The Real Bukowski and appeared in Deadbeat Magazine in San Francisco in 1986. (It's a story about the myth of Bukowski and the stories people tell about
him.)

When I moved to Los Angeles in 1990, I got a place in his old neighborhood, East Hollywood, a few blocks from his Mariposa apartment. At the time, East Hollywood wasn't gentrified. Los Feliz was funky and Thai Town didn't yet exist. I could step out onto the balcony of my "bachelor" apartment on New Hampshire and look south to Hollywood Boulevard and see
hookers hanging out. Neon crosses on nearby churches burned against the night sky and sirens wailed all the time. There were plenty of dive bars around, and even an old diner called George's across from the post office on Vermont. It was run by a moody Russian immigrant lady who would be very sweet sometimes but could also suddenly become quite mean. Post
office workers hung out there, something less likely now that the place is a retro-chic joint called Fred's 62, run by the chef Fred Eric.

So the area had an old-school, ungentrified charm. Yeah, it was Hollywood, but it was East Hollywood - the grungy part of Hollywood, not the upscale area in the hills nor the nicer area known as West Hollywood which borders on Beverly Hills and is much fancier. I liked it so much that over the years as I've come and gone from L.A., I've always lived in East Hollywood or right in downtown Hollywood. There's a cool sense of history there. I carried a list of Buk's addresses in my wallet and looked up those places as I drove around L.A. Sometimes I'd even take friends on Bukowski mini-tours and show them places where he'd lived.

In the summer of 2006 I was visiting Bukowski sites. I was thinking about putting together a book about Bukowski's places, and I saw a small eviction notice from the city of L.A. on the outside wall of the front building at 5124 De Longpre. This was the place where Bukowski lived during one of the most significant times of his life. It was the 1960s and early 1970s, when he was finally breaking through to significant success as a writer. The notice said that tenants had to leave due to some kind of problem with the building, a code violation or something.

I wanted to find out more. I talked to a nice guy who lived in one of the nearby bungalows (small duplex houses in a row). He was a musician and Grateful Dead fan who shared his pad with a friend. He said that he had been told to move out. I got the impression from him that the buildings were in danger of being demolished. He let me walk around in his apartment, a
mirror image of the one Bukowski had nearby. It was fun to be in a pad almost exactly like Bukowski's. It had a fair-sized living room, a kitchen at the back with a window over a big sink, a pantry, a small bathroom, and a good-sized bedroom. That was it. Not spacious, but
comfortable. Of course, it was in a rather shabby area south of Sunset in the flatlands of East Hollywood - not a particularly flowery area, but not a ghetto either.

I was upset when I thought about Buk's De Longpre pad being torn down. I didn't like the idea of losing a piece of L.A. history and Bukowski's history. I thought it would be so cool if someone like Sean Penn, who was a pal of Buk's and is no doubt very rich, could buy up the small group of buildings and turn the small courtyard group into some kind of writer's colony where rents would be kept cheap and writers could apply to live there for a year at a time or six months.  Perhaps the front unit would be kept as it is and set up with Salvation Army furniture and old appliances (nothing much needed to be changed) so as to recreate how it was in Buk's days. It could be a sort of mini-museum.

I immediately thought that if anyone could help with all this, it was the poet Neeli Cherkovski. Neeli had spent many hours with Bukowski in that pad on De Longpre in the late 1960s and later spent a fair amount of time in Cafe Trieste in San Francisco's North Beach. That's where
I met him when I was going to the San Francisco Art Institute and studying filmmaking and art. I was writing poetry too and was a big fan of the Beat writers. I hung out in City Lights a lot. I also went to the Fab Mab and the Deaf Club and other venues and listened to punk bands
like the Avengers and the Dils and Pink Section and Tuxedo Moon.

Meanwhile, at the Trieste, Neeli talked about Bukowski quite a bit and got me interested in his work. I started reading his books in City Lights and loved the humor, the Beat feeling (even though he said he wasn't a Beat) of looking for an alternative America...

I ended up leaving San Francisco and hadn't been in touch with Neeli for years, but when I saw that the Buk pad might be demolished, I wrote to a friend who knows Neeli, the poet David Plumb, and got Neeli's email address and wrote to him about the crisis on De Longpre. The next time he was in town we went over there to take a look. Along the way, Neeli shared stories about Buk and what his place was like and where they went for booze  -- information which was fun to hear.

Oddly enough, when we got there, the official city eviction notice had been removed and people were still living in Buk's apartment. All seemed fine. So I dropped the whole summer of 2006
"save the De Longpre pad" idea. No need - things looked fine.

Then, last April or so, the issue began to be a cause and now there's a lot of press about it. At some point the whole property was listed on Craigslist for sale for 1.3 million dollars - and the ad said it would be easy to demo the buildings since they were empty. Eventually they were
boarded up and a chain link fence went up around the property.

Luckily a woman named Lauren Everett began working to preserve the bungalow and headed a campaign to save it. The Cultural Heritage Commission inspected the place and voted to give it landmark status. Everett has been helped by Richard Schave (who gives a tour called Haunts of a Dirty Old Man), Buk documentary maker John Dullaghan, Jordan Jones, the co-owner of
Musso-Frank's restaurant (a Bukowski hangout - along with many other writers from Faulkner to Jim Thompson), and many others. And, now Neeli, who lives in San Francisco, is getting involved.

The house has been recommended for cultural landmark status but it still has a ways to go
before it's all official and we'll know that the place will be saved. But things are looking up. It won't be a monument, really, but more of a way of keeping in mind the kind of places where Bukowski lived... not in the comfort of his last years, but in the belly of the beast, sort of -
that is, the L.A. flatlands of East Hollywood, where the sirens still sound in the night and the crash of beer bottles was as routine in Buk's pad as the beautiful sound of Classical music from the radio.

For more about Buk's places, check out my blog:

http://bukowskila.wordpress.com/