Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Charles Bukowski
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Copyright
Nicky Belane, private detective and career alcoholic, is a troubled man. He is plagued not just by broads, booze, lack of cash and a raging ego, but also by the surreal jobs he’s been hired to do. Not only does he have to track down French classical author Celine – who’s meant to be dead – but he’s also supposed to find the elusive Red Sparrow – which may or may not be real.
Pulp is Charles Bukowski’s brilliant, fantastical pastiche of a detective story. Packed with wit, invention and Bukowski’s trademark lowlife adventures, it is the final novel by one of the most enjoyable and influential cult writers of the last century.
Also by Charles Bukowski published by Virgin Books:
Novels:
Post Office
Factotum
Women
Anthologies:
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Tales of Ordinary Madness
Poems:
New Poems One
New Poems Two
New Poems Three
New Poems Four
Letters:
Selected Letters Volume 1: 1958–1965
Selected Letters Volume 2: 1965–1970
Selected Letters Volume 3: 1971–1986
Selected Letters Volume 4: 1987–1994
Charles Bukowski
Introduction by Michael Connelly
Dedicated to bad writing
CHARLES BUKOWSKI is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).
During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). Among his most recent books are the posthumous editions of What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999), Open All Night: New Poems (2000), Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli, 1960–1967 (2001), and The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems (2001).
All of his books have now been published in translation in over a dozen languages and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished.
Michael Connelly
OK, let’s start at the very beginning, with the first clue to the mysteries of this book. Dedicated to Bad Writing. In his life as a writer Charles Bukowski never took the pose of the great man of letters. He was a dirty realist. I think he liked to look at the work as craft, not art. A craft you work at, you hone. It takes time and dedication. An artist need not worry about such things.
But Bukowski, of course, did. He was a grinder. He was ham on rye, a pound-it-out guy who used words like a carpenter uses nails. To dedicate a book – his last book, at that – to poor carpentry in effect gives the nod to a life’s pursuit of building the perfect chair. It can’t be done, but the craftsman never stops trying.
I never met Bukowski. I wish I had. I surely was one of those who fell under his spell. I love the novels more than the poems because they are easier to grab onto, to see the pictures he’s drawing. They’re where the craftsmanship disappears beneath the surface. They’re where his ‘bad’ writing is so good. My favourite line, written in Hollywood to describe a Tom Jones-like Vegas showman: ‘His mouth was a horrible hole, torn in a pancake.’
It’s a line I can recall from memory, more than a decade after reading it. It is a line I have used often in conversation, to gain a laugh or to talk about the craft of writing. One line that sums up a character’s interior and exterior being. One line! Now that’s good ‘bad’ writing!
I never met Bukowski but I met Red Stodolsky, the writer’s friend, drinking pal, and owner of the bygone Baroque Books in Hollywood (both Red and the store play prominent parts in this book). Red was the primary keeper of the Bukowski flame after the writer passed on. A trip to the bookstore on Las Palmas, a half block down from Hollywood Boulevard and not far from Musso’s, another of the author’s treasured haunts, was an easy trek to the altar of Bukowski. Red seemed to have an endless stash of books marked by Bukowski with caricatures of himself and signed with the simple signature ‘Buk’. They were high-priced books but I bought a bunch of them and gave them away as gifts. There was a certain coolness to giving away signed Bukowski books after the man himself was dead.
But there is no signature inside my copy of Pulp. The novel was published posthumously and there seems to be a certain plan in that. Another clue. The book is a meditation on writing and death and no doubt the author, fighting leukaemia when he penned it, could see the gaping beak of the ‘Red Sparrow’ opening for him each day that he wrote. More so than this, the book reflects on the eternal questions of life. What are we doing? Why are we here? What and where is the meaning of it all?
For Bukowski – whose gravestone epitaph is Don’t Try – the answers were decidedly bleak.
In his last book Bukowski chose a form he had not previously inhabited to mount his investigation of these questions. He was confronting life’s biggest mystery, so he explored it as a hard-boiled gumshoe. He chose the noir detective novel. And in doing so he adopted a form known for its plot devices and traditional framework and turned it upside down. In his hands the detective novel becomes an existential rumination on the end of the line, the dark at the end of the tunnel. An absurdist descent into the death sparrow’s yellow beak.
To be sure, Bukowski brought in all the usual suspects: beautiful dames, gun-toting heavies, the loner private eye with a bottle in one drawer and a gun in the other. And he brought along the hard-boiled patter of the private dick: ‘It was a hellish hot day and the air conditioner was broken. A fly crawled across the top of my desk. I reached out with the open palm of my hand and sent him out of the game. I wiped my hand on my right pants leg as the phone rang.’
And so begins our story. Our narrator, Nicky Belane (as in Mickey Spillane?) is a down-and-out, six-bucks-an-hour dick hired by Lady Death to find a supposedly long-dead writer. A variety of other cases and clients ensue. One client wants Belane to find the Red Sparrow. One wants him to nail his cheating wife. Another wants him to expose an alien inhabiting the bodies of humans at a local funeral home. Belane works each case as dutifully as the obstacles allow. Along the way he dodges his brutal landlord and a bookie’s enforcers.
It’s the detective story as allegory and metaphor. Writers from Céline to Hemingway to Faulkner and Fante turn up and Belane has something to say about each. Considering Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, one character riffs: ‘In the old days … writers’ lives were more interesting than their writing. Nowadays, neither the lives nor the writing is interesting.’
Death is always close, in metaphor and reality. The novel is an existential stew and in the end a lot of swatting of flies. And that’s the point. The dying writer tells us that in the end it’s all just a lot of swatting of flies. Life’s about ‘the needed machinery of the moment’ and its many human parts.
As Belane himself explains: ‘Sometimes I felt that I didn’t even know who I was. All right, I’m Nicky Belane. But check this. Somebody could yell out, “Hey … Harry Martel!” and I’d most likely answer, “Yeah, what is it?” I mean, I could be anybody, what does it matter?’
Or as he says when confronted by three goons from ‘Acme Executioners’ with plans to introduce him to the Red Sparrow: ‘We’re talking about my life here, you know. It’s like it doesn’t matter, you know.’
Ultimately, that is the writer’s observation. That it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, we are just pulp. We are simply a part of the machinery of the moment.
And in telling us so, we come back to the beginning. Bukowski reveals the biggest clue to life’s biggest mystery was indeed handed to us in the first paragraph of the book. Bukowski tells us we are simply just here until that unseen hand swings down out of the heavens and sends us out of the game.
I WAS SITTING in my office, my lease had expired and McKelvey was starting eviction proceedings. It was a hellish hot day and the air conditioner was broken. A fly crawled across the top of my desk. I reached out with the open palm of my hand and sent him out of the game. I wiped my hand on my right pants leg as the phone rang.
I picked it up. ‘Ah yes,’ I said.
‘Do you read Celine?’ a female voice asked. Her voice sounded quite sexy. I had been lonely for some time. Decades.
‘Celine,’ I said, ‘ummm …’
‘I want Celine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to have him.’
Such a sexy voice, it was getting to me, really.
‘Celine?’ I said. ‘Give me a little background. Talk to me, lady. Keep talking …’
‘Zip up,’ she said.
I looked down.
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘Never mind. I want Celine.’
‘Celine is dead.’
‘He isn’t. I want you to find him. I want him.’
‘I might find his bones.’
‘No, you fool, he’s alive!’
‘Where?’
‘Hollywood. I hear he’s been hanging around Red Koldowsky’s bookstore.’
‘Then why don’t you find him?’
‘Because first I want to know if he’s the real Celine. I have to be sure, quite sure.’
‘But why did you come to me? There are a hundred dicks in this town.’
‘John Barton recommended you.’
‘Oh, Barton, yeah. Well, listen, I’ll have to have some kind of advance. And I’ll have to see you personally.’
‘I’ll be there in a few minutes,’ she said.
She hung up. I zipped up.
And waited.
SHE WALKED IN.
Now, I mean, it just wasn’t fair. Her dress fit so tight it almost split the seams. Too many chocolate malts. And she walked on heels so high they looked like little stilts. She walked like a drunken cripple, staggering around the room. A glorious dizziness of flesh.
‘Sit down, lady,’ I said.
She put it down and crossed her legs high, damn near knocked my eyes out.
‘It’s good to see you, lady,’ I said.
‘Stop gawking, please. It’s nothing that you haven’t seen before.’
‘You’re wrong there, lady. Now may I have your name?’
‘Lady Death.’
‘Lady Death? You from the circus? The movies?’
‘No.’
‘Place of birth?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Year of birth?’
‘Don’t try to be funny …’
‘Just trying to get some background …’
I got lost somehow, began staring up her legs. I was always a leg man. It was the first thing I saw when I was born. But then I was trying to get out. Ever since I have been working in the other direction and with pretty lousy luck.
She snapped her fingers.
‘Hey, come out of it!’
‘Huh?’ I looked up.
‘The Celine case. Remember?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
I unfolded a paperclip, pointed the end toward her.
‘I’ll need a check for services rendered.’
‘Of course,’ she smiled. ‘What are your rates?’
‘6 dollars an hour.’
She got out her checkbook, scribbled away, ripped the check out and tossed it to me. It landed on the desk. I picked it up. $240. I hadn’t seen that much money since I hit an exacta at Hollywood Park in 1988.
‘Thank you, Lady …’
‘… Death,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now fill me in a little on this so-called Celine. You said something about a bookstore?’
‘Well, he’s been hanging around Red’s bookstore, browsing … asking about Faulkner, Carson McCullers. Charles Manson …’
‘Hangs around the bookstore, huh? Hmm …’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you know Red. He likes to run people out of his bookstore. A person can spend a thousand bucks in there, then maybe linger a minute or two and Red will say, “Why don’t you get the hell out of here?” Red’s a good guy, he’s just freaky. Anyway, he keeps tossing Celine out and Celine goes over to Musso’s and hangs around the bar looking sad. A day or so later he’ll be back and it will happen all over again.’
‘Celine is dead. Celine and Hemingway died a day apart. 32 years ago.’
‘I know about Hemingway. I got Hemingway.’
‘You sure it was Hemingway?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘Then how come you can’t be sure this Celine is the real Celine?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got some kind of block with this thing. It’s never happened before. Maybe I’ve been in the game too long. So, I’ve come to you. Barton says you’re good.’
‘And you think the real Celine is alive? You want him?’
‘Real bad, buster.’
‘Belane. Nick Belane.’
‘All right, Belane. I want to make sure. It’s got to be the real Celine, not just some half-assed wannabe. There are too many of those.’
‘Don’t we know it.’
‘Well, get on it. I want France’s greatest writer. I’ve waited a long time.’
Then she got up and walked out of there. I never saw an ass like that in my life. Beyond concept. Beyond everything. Don’t bother me now. I want to think about it.
IT WAS THE next day.
I had cancelled my appointment to speak before the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce.
It was raining. The ceiling leaked. The rain dripped down through the ceiling and went ‘spat, spat, spat, a spat a spat, spat, spat, spat, a spat, spat, spat, a spat, a spat, a spat, spat, spat, spat …’
The sake kept me warm. But a warm what? A warm zero. Here I was 55 years old and I didn’t have a pot to catch rain in. My father had warned me that I would end up diddling myself on some stranger’s back porch in Arkansas. And I still had time to make it. The Greyhounds ran every day. But busses constipated me and there was always some old Union Jack with a rancid beard who snored. Maybe it would be better to work on the Celine Case.
Was Celine Celine or was he somebody else? Sometimes I felt that I didn’t even know who I was. All right, I’m Nicky Belane. But check this. Somebody could yell out, ‘Hey, Harry! Harry Martel!’ and I’d most likely answer, ‘Yeah, what is it?’ I mean, I could be anybody, what does it matter? What’s in a name?
Life’s strange, isn’t it? They always chose me last on the baseball team because they knew I could drive that son-of-a-bitch out there, all the way to Denver. Jealous chipmunks, that’s what they were!
I was gifted, am gifted. Sometimes I looked at my hands and realized that I could have been a great pianist or something. But what have my hands done? Scratched my balls, written checks, tied shoes, pushed toilet levers, etc. I have wasted my hands. And my mind.
I sat in the rain.
The phone rang. I wiped it dry with a past due bill from the IRS, picked it up.
‘Nick Belane,’ I said. Or was I Harry Martel?
‘This is John Barton,’ came the voice.
‘Yes, you’ve been recommending me, thank you.’
‘I’ve been watching you. You’ve got talent. It’s a little raw but that’s part of the charm.’
‘Great to hear. Business has been bad.’
‘I’ve been watching you. You’ll make it, you just have to endure.’
‘Yeah. Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Barton?’
‘I am trying to locate the Red Sparrow.’
‘The Red Sparrow? What the hell is that?’
‘I’m sure it exists, I just want to find it, I want you to locate it for me.’
‘Any leads for me to go on?’
‘No, but I’m sure the Red Sparrow is out there somewhere.’
‘This Sparrow doesn’t have a name, does it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, a name. Like Henry. Or Abner. Or Celine?’
‘No, it’s just the Red Sparrow and I know that you can find it. I’ve got faith in you.’
‘This is going to cost you, Mr. Barton.’
‘If you find the Red Sparrow I will give you one hundred dollars a month for life.’
‘Hmm. … Listen, how about giving me all of it in a lump sum?’
‘No, Nick, you’d blow it at the track.’
‘All right, Mr. Barton, leave me your phone number and I’ll work on it.’
Barton gave me the number, then said, ‘I have real confidence in you, Belane.’
Then he hung up.
Well, business was picking up. But the ceiling was leaking worse than ever. I shook off some rain drops, had a hit of sake, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled, then choked out a hacking cough. I put on my brown derby, turned on the telephone message machine, walked slowly toward the door, opened it and there stood McKelvey. He had a huge chest and looked like he was wearing shoulder pads.
‘Your lease is up, punk!’ he spit out. ‘I want your dead ass out of here!’
Then I noticed his belly. It was like a soft mound of dead shit and I slammed my fist deep into it. His face doubled over into my upcoming knee. He fell, then rolled off to one side. Ghastly sight. I walked over, slipped out his wallet. Photos of children in pornographic poses.
I thought about killing him. But I just took his Gold Visa Card, kicked him in the ass and took the elevator down.
I decided to walk to Red’s. When I drove I always seemed to get a parking ticket and the lots charged more than I could afford.
I walked toward Red’s feeling a bit depressed. Man was born to die. What did it mean? Hanging around and waiting. Waiting for the ‘A train.’ Waiting for a pair of big breasts on some August night in a Vegas hotel room. Waiting for the mouse to sing. Waiting for the snake to grow wings. Hanging around.
Red was in.
‘You’re lucky,’ he said, ‘you just missed that drunk Chinaski. He was in here bragging about his new Pelouze postage scale.’
‘Never mind that,’ I said. ‘You got a signed copy of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying?’
‘Of course.’
‘What’s the toll?’
‘2800 dollars.’
‘I’ll think about it …’
‘Pardon me,’ said Red.
Then he turned to a fellow thumbing through a first edition of You Can’t Go Home Again.
‘Please put that book in the case and get the hell out of here!’
It was a delicate-looking little fellow, all hunched over. Dressed in what looked like a yellow rubber suit.
He put the book back into the case and walked past us toward the street, his eyes clouding with moisture. And it had stopped raining. His yellow rubber suit was useless.
Red looked at me.
‘Can you believe that some of them come in here eating icecream cones?’
‘I believe worse than that.’
Then I noticed somebody else was in the bookstore. He was standing near the back. I thought I recognized him from his photos. Celine. Celine?
I walked slowly down toward him. I got real close. So close that I could see what he was reading. Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain.
He saw me.
‘This fellow has a problem,’ he said, holding up the book.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘He considers boredom an Art.’
He put the book back in the case and just stood there looking like Celine.
I looked at him.
‘This is amazing,’ I said.
‘What is?’ he asked.
‘I thought that you were dead,’ I told him.
He looked at me.
‘I thought that you were dead too,’ he said.
Then we just stood there looking at each other.
Then I heard Red.
‘HEY, YOU!’ he yelled, ‘GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!’
We were the only two in there.
‘Which one to get the hell out?’ I asked.
‘THE ONE THAT LOOKS LIKE CELINE! GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!’
‘But why?’ I asked.
‘I CAN TELL WHEN THEY’RE NOT GOING TO BUY!’
Celine or whoever it was began to walk out. I followed him.
He walked up toward the boulevard, then stopped at the newsstand.
That newsstand had been there as long as I could remember. I recalled standing there two or three decades ago with 3 prostitutes. I took them all to my place and one of them masturbated my dog. They thought it was funny. They were drunk and on pills. Then one of the prostitutes went to the bathroom where she fell and banged her head against the edge of the toilet and bled all over the place. I kept wiping the stuff up with big wet towels. I put her to bed and sat with the others and finally they left. The one in bed stayed for 4 days and nights, drinking all my beer and talking about her two children in East Kansas City.
The fellow – was it Celine? – was standing at the newsstand reading a magazine. When I got closer I noticed that it was The New Yorker. He put it back in the rack and looked at me.
‘Only one problem there,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘They just don’t know how to write. None of them.’
Just then, a cab came idling by.
‘HEY, CABBY!’ Celine yelled.
The cab slowed and he leaped forward, the back door opened and he was inside.
‘HEY!’ I yelled at him, ‘I WANT TO ASK YOU SOMETHING!’
The cab was brisking toward Hollywood Boulevard. Celine leaned out, stuck out his arm, gave me the finger. Then he was gone.
First cab I had seen around those parts in decades. I mean, an empty one, just lolling by.
Well, the rain had stopped but the pain was still there. Also, there was now a chill in the air and everything smelled like wet farts.
I hunched over and moved toward Musso’s.
I had the Gold Visa Card. I was alive. Maybe. I even began to feel like Nicky Belane. I hummed a little passage from Eric Coates.
Hell was what you made it.
I LOOKED UP Celine in the Webster. 1891–1961. It was 1993. Saying he was alive, that would make him 102 years old. No wonder Lady Death was looking for him.
And that fellow in the bookstore had looked between 40 and 50. So, that was it. He wasn’t Celine. Or maybe he’d found a method to beat the aging process. Look at the movie stars, they took the skin from their ass and stuck it on the face. The skin on the ass was the last to wrinkle. They all walked around in their later years with buttock faces. Would Celine do that? Who would want to live to be 102? Nobody but a fool. Why would Celine wish to linger? The whole thing was crazy. Lady Death was crazy. I was crazy. The pilots of airliners were crazy. Never look at the pilot. Just get on board and order drinks.
I watched two flies fucking, then decided to call Lady Death. I unzipped and waited for her voice.
‘Hello.’ I heard her voice.
‘Ummm …,’ I said.
‘What? Oh, it’s you Belane. You getting anywhere on the case?’
‘Celine is dead, he was born in 1891.’
‘I’m aware of the statistics, Belane. Listen, I know that he is alive … somewhere … and the guy in the bookstore could be him. Are you closing in on anything? I want this guy. I want him badly.’
‘Ummm …’ I said.
‘Zip up!’
‘Huh?’
‘You fool, I said, “zip up!”’
‘Uh … all right …’
‘I want positive proof whether this guy is or isn’t! I’ve told you that I’ve got this crazy mind block on this matter. Barton recommended you, he said you were one of the best.’
‘Oh yes, I’m also working for Barton right now, as a matter of fact. Trying to locate a Red Sparrow. What do you think about that?’
‘Listen, Belane, you solve this Celine thing and I’ll tell you where the Red Sparrow is.’
‘Oh will you, Lady? Oh, I’d do anything for you!’
‘Like what, Belane?’