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Graphic Victor Bonderott

AMERICAN POET/AUTHOR Charles Bukowski lived like he
-wrote: chronically drunk, broke and chasing women, He was
nearly 70 before he tasted any kind of real success. The
Malcolm Lowry Room is hosting a tribute to him this Friday.

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The death of poet/author Charles Bukowski
shouldn’t have come as a surprise —— but it did

THE GREAT man finally fell.

By Greg Potter

News Reporter

It had been a long time coming
and many anticipated it would come
considerably earlier. Like about 40
years ago.

But Henry Charles Bukowski,
the German-born, L.A.-raised voice
of the fow-life generation, fooled
them all, Until Wednesday, March
10, when it was announced that the
great poet and author died at age 73
in a Los Angeles hospital of pneu-
monia due to complications stem-
ming from Jeukemia treatment.

It was a dark day for literary
communities around the world and
it's fairly certain a few pints were
hoisted to the old boy up and down
Skid Rows stretching from the
seedy side of West Hollywood to
the truly dredgy areas around L.A.’s
Sixth and Seventh avenues that
played host to Buke’s prodigiously
decadent lifestyle in such notable
establishments as the Firefly, Bob’s
Frolic Room and Boardner’s.

Bukowski — or Hank, us he
called himself in his intensely bio-

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vraphical and bluntly pornographic
works -— was a wino and damn
proud of it,

Sure, there was guill, remorse,
long-standing bouts of depression,
feelings of failure and desperation,
related both to him and to society as
a whole.

But there was also, as he
described it, a lot of good times, and
the good times certainly rolled
despite abject poverty and a fairly
regular diet of daily pursuits that
should have (as they told him when
he entered an emergency ward in his
mid-30s vomiting blood) done him
in long, long ago.

But that was all part of the
shtick.

fie published his first story at
age 24 and, by the time of his
demise, had published almost 50
books of poetry and prose and more
than 1,000 poems.

Nonetheless, he failed to see any
real recognition until he was 48,
with the poetry collection Ar Terror
Street and Agony Way. He was near-
ly 70 before he achieved financial
success with the 1987 film Barfly.

In between, there were Women,
Post Office, Erections, Ejaculations,
Exhibitions and General Tales of

Ordinary Madness, and a lot of
other titles that can’t be printed .
here.

Chronically broke, he worked at
various times aS 2 whorchouse
guard, dog-biscuit baker and post
office clerk.

‘So why was it 4 surprise when he
died? Because, like Keith Richards
and Hunter S. Thompson alongside
him, he seemed to possess a cock-
roach-like constitulion.

You kind of had to believe he
wus immortal, or at least invincible.
Ironically, he didn’t die of cirrhosis.

He influenced a lot of people,
including Dennis Hopper, Tom
Waits, U2’s Bono, Roger Ebert,
Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn and
Lester Bangs.

Burnaby’s Malcolm Lowry
Room is hosting a tribute reading,
for him Friday, April 8, featuring
Art Bergmann, Lisa Marr, Les
Wiseman, John Lekich, Hank Bull '
and a handful of News writers,
among several others.

_ .In the end, his success finally
enabled him to be a happily married
homeowner and pay otf his debt to
the IRS. Nonetheless, he still
referred to his fame as, “all flash
and shadow.” RIP, Buke. .

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