"The Crossing Guard" (1995), directed by Sean Penn, concludes with a dedication to "My friend, Charles Bukowski. I miss you, S.P."
According to Jim Christy's "The BUK Book: Musings on Charles Bukowski," when Bukowski made his first trip to Canada in October 1976, organizers for his Western Front reading in Vancouver, British Columbia were surprised that the men in the audience were far outnumbered by women. Bukowski, who was physically unprepossessing due to the acne scars on his face and his generous potbelly, proved to be catnip to women. According to reading organizer Ted Laturnus, at a post reading party, Bukowski "was besieged with offers of congress." No matter where Bukowski went during in Vancouver, he "had to fight the women off." Bukowski wrote about the Vancouver reading in his 1978 novel "Women."
Bukowski was arrested for being drunk in public by the Los Angeles Police Department on May 14, 1948, December 17, 1962, and on August 12, 1963. The fear of being tossed in the L.A.P.D.'s drunk tank features in his writing.
Bukowski was arrested for draft evasion and jailed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1944. He was released when the FBI determined it was his uncle John that they were looking for. Bukowski had been rated 4-F by the Los Angeles draft board for being psychologically unfit.
Headstone reads "Don't Try"
His body is interred at Green Hills Memorial Park, Los Angeles, California
His favorite movie was Eraserhead (1977), though he disliked director David Lynch after he met him, thinking that he and his significant other, Isabella Rossellini, put on airs of superiority around him. Although Bukowski often claimed he hadn't seen any movie since The Lost Weekend (1945) (1945) until he got involved in making Barfly (1987), other films he said he liked were One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).
His literary influences included the Roman poet Catullus, the French fascist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Fyodor Dostoevsky, John Fante, Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound and James Thurber.
His only child, Marina Louise Bukowski Stone, was the product of his liaison with the poet Frances Smith, who wrote under the name FrancEyE.
His widow, Linda Lee Bukowski, donated his papers to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, near Pasadena. Linda Bukowski chose the genteel Huntington, which contains a Gutenberg Bible, as she frequently visits the library. "It's going to be scandalous. This would tickle my husband. It would crack him up," Linda Lee Bukowski said of her donation, which was worth as much as $1 million. The collection of more than a thousand items includes a typed draft of his novel "Ham on Rye" (1982) with handwritten corrections, his screenplay for the 1987 autobiographical movie Barfly (1987), his first poetry journals from the 1940s, and scratch forms from horse races at Santa Anita Park.
Loved to listen to classical music on the radio as he wrote (and drank).
Once called the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline's "Journey to the End of the Night" the greatest book ever written.
Was a cat fancier. One of his finest poems, "The Mockingbird," is about a cat dispatching a bird.