![]() It was also the scene of Bukowski’s horrific childhood, with regular beatings from his father meeting only indifference from his mother. ![]() Mother and son proceeded to become Americanized: Katrina was known as Kate and the boy, Heinrich Karl, was thereafter called Henry Jr., or Hank (his middle name became Charles). The family settled in at 2122 Longwood Avenue, in South Los Angeles. In the twenties, the place had more in common with the Mexican pueblos from which it sprang than the undulating, traffic-stuffed, neon-lighted metropolis it would become over the next three decades. His parents still lived there, so he moved his family West, to what was then the sleepy, dusty village of Los Angeles. Baltimore had a strong German-speaking working class (it still has), but Henry the Elder, an American soldier who’d served in World War I and decided to stay on in Germany at war’s end, was born and raised in Pasadena. Home for Bukowski was almost Baltimore that’s where he and his father and mother landed from Andernach, Germany when little Heinrich was nearly three years old, in 1923. Hollywood, the dark underbelly of it, not the glittering bastion of the Entertainment Capital of the World, was his town. “Which clubs the syndicate ran, which one-arm restaurants served good coffee, which hotels a whore could use, which streets were safe to walk upon after midnight.” Those words fit Bukowski like a comfortable old jacket. ![]() “His special knowledge was of the jungle of the city at night,” film historian Richard Schickel wrote of Bogart in his 1962 book, The Stars. And if we can accept that, say, Ernest Hemingway was the Clark Gable of American letters – handsome, dashing, muy macho, an outdoorsman and globe-trotter – then Bukowski was akin to Humphrey Bogart. So Bukowski prowled Hollywood, its dive bars and run-down rooming houses, writing about it exclusively. He wasn’t a joiner, he didn’t like drugs (except booze), and while the Beats haunted San Francisco or New York’s Greenwich Village, Bukowski clung proudly – often on wobbly drunken legs – to his hometown, Hollywood, California. Charles Bukowski never considered himself part of the Beat Generation in fact, he frequently disparaged the idea. ![]()
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