Bukowski’s San Pedro 1

by Angela “Romee” Romero

Originally published in San Pedro Today, July 30, 2020

 “I type my first poem here / switchblade in pocket / I type this / for my tax accountant / for the girls in Omaha . . . I am broke again / I own ¼ of this house . . . /  everybody is worried about my soul now / I am worried about my soul now”

Charles Bukowski’s decision to move to San Pedro in 1978 was strictly business. He needed both figurative and literal space from his old stomping grounds in Hollywood to get some of his most celebrated work completed. He also needed a tax write-off. And although his house on the hill made him somewhat broke again, at least he had equity and his beloved second-floor sanctuary where he could punch out his prolific prose.

This month, on August 16, we celebrate Charles Bukowski’s 100th birthday. For sixteen of those years, he wrote his heart out in his San Pedro home; books, short stories, movie scripts, and hundreds upon hundreds of poems. Bukowski wrote with an intensity for the brutal and beautiful honesty of life, and it is the legacy of his life’s work that we honor for his centennial. While he didn’t come here to write about San Pedro, the town couldn’t help but sneak its way into his heart and his art.

Origami Frog Prayer

After “Love Song of Reynaldo” by Abe Lyman

Where do you come from, Christian?

I come from San Pedro.

I don’t think about you all the time,

            but I hope you beat cancer

And where do you live in San Pedro?

I live in a house by the bay.

I don’t think about you all the time,

            but I hope you beat cancer

Si, si, Padre. I live in a house by the bay

Bukowski in Bronze

“we need our own newspaper”

–Charles Bukwoski’s “the weather’s been fair”

When my sister started her campaign

to build a statue of Hank for the locals

to know their neighbor was a writer

and tourists to have something to look at

besides his headstone--lying flat like

all the dead, to be towered over

by a single traffic cone--the closest thing

to a Pedro paper said don’t sanitize him

for tourist consumption; instead, pimp out

his image like they do with t-shirts

and posters even though he was uneasy

about his face, and his widow

doesn’t see a damn penny.

When my sister started her campaign,

she wasn’t a fan of Hank, but cried

cancer-filled tears at the request for miles

in exchange for inches. She wanted the one

statue and was countered with a list of

should-be statues and parks and museums

and how-to-go-about-its with stickers

and shirts the widow and Hank wouldn’t

approve of, and you need approval from

the sideshow act to make a couple pennies

off their alligator-face. Drive down Pacific,

past Slavko’s giant chicken and see the local

paper posterize Hank on their storefront

window, bigger than his life and with a factoid

impossible to prove but for one posed picture.

When my sister died, Bukowski in Bronze

probably went with her because Pedro wanted

an army of statues and for one radiation-weak

woman to read, remember, and build them

without hosing them down to see how memory

is like property already staked, claimed, gated.

Why Bukowski Matters to San Pedro

The famous writer brought our port town to the world, a bronze statue is well-deserved.

Angela Romero

February 27, 2020

 Growing up, I always wondered how a lot of adults could be so clueless about celebrities that I couldn’t know enough information about. Would I ever be that clueless? Yes. It’s happening right now. I don’t know who anyone is. 

It’s okay that I don’t know who the hottest TikTok or YouTube stars are. But if any of them were from San Pedro, you better believe I would make it my business to know who they were and what they did. It is literally my job to know it. Part of the mission of the San Pedro Heritage Museum is to celebrate the contributions that San Pedro residents have made to local, national, and global history.

Our first major attempt to fulfill this part of our mission is to dedicate a bronze statue to Charles Bukowski, the world-famous writer who has an impressive body of work that includes novels, short stories, screenplays, and thousands of poems. It was an extremely ambitious first step out of the gate for a fledgling organization, but Bukowski’s cult icon status made the effort seem less daunting. Bukowski’s work elicits strong feelings among its readers and so many fans feel it speaks to them in a very personal way.

Bukowski’s worthiness for a statue was not an issue any of the committee members thought we would have to address. We’re not making a statue for German tourists. We’re marking the spot where inspiration and genius met to create prose and poetry that will resonate with laughing hearts long after all of us are gone. Bukowski’s contribution to San Pedro might not be something tangible beyond the seekers who come here to feel close to him, but he has inserted San Pedro into millions of imaginations around the world simply by writing about his life here.

In his poem “Fear and Madness,” Bukowski proclaims his intention to get to the heart of his new adopted hometown:

San Pedro I will wring you out like a wet rag

San Pedro I will break you like a wild stallion

I will write about your bridge and your ships

I will skin your people down to the bone

I will make my stand here as I have made my stand elsewhere

I will learn these walls

Charles Bukowski brought San Pedro to the world through his poetry. All we want to do is honor that gift of art with a fitting work of our own that we can share with the world.

We don’t have to erect a statue to get Bukowski fans to come to San Pedro; they already come here looking for some sign of their hero. The statue is for San Pedrans to start seeing their worth. There is so much to celebrate about San Pedro, things that we take for granted or shrug our shoulders about until someone from out of town tells us it’s worthy of celebration. The museum is absolutely set on changing that. Going forward, it’s totally fine if Bukowski isn’t your cup of tea, but it will be the museum’s job to educate San Pedrans about him, his work, and ultimate contribution to the community. The statue is just the beginning.

Famous San Pedrans like Charles Bukowski, Misty Copeland, Robert Towne and Mike Watt make my job as a historian easy. Their work and fame won’t let them be forgotten any time soon, and San Pedro will always have its place in their legend. I’m more concerned about the great San Pedrans who are being forgotten as we lose the older generations who knew them best and felt their impact on the community the most. If the San Pedro Heritage Museum has the chance to be successful, no one will ever forget local icons like The Sepulveda family, Martin J. Bogdanovich, and John Olguin.

Big changes are on the horizon. Long-time Pedro families are capitalizing on the housing market and leaving town for more affordable communities, while home buyers from out of town are flocking to San Pedro because their money goes further here than anywhere else in L.A. Meanwhile, we’re losing that cohesive generation that connects us to this land and the memory of those great San Pedrans who made this town such a wonderful place to live. If we don’t start getting our history out there to younger generations and new San Pedrans, it will continue to die with those people.

I’m not afraid of all the new faces coming to town. Every one of them represents an opportunity for me to share our history and to invite them to adopt it as their own. When people feel connected to their community, they get involved. Luckily, there are enough great stories here for them to connect to. Will it be telling them about Martin J. Bogdanovich and StarKist, so they feel the history in every bite the next time they have a tuna sandwich? We’ve got military history, labor history, famous musicians, athletes and artists. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a poem at the Charles Bukowski statue.

The San Pedro Heritage Museum exists because there is a need to actively get our history out into the public. We can’t afford to be passive collectors anymore. 

Not a Bukowski Statue

Introduction

The Little, Three Hearted Town/Cataloging the Unfinished

One partner in my beginnings without end is my best friend and hanai sister Angela “Romee” Romero, founder of the San Pedro Heritage Museum, who’d love my excitement and research ways to make it possible. She was there shortly after I started my bookstore and looked for spaces to rent when I wanted it to grow, she hosted my writing workshop and attended my poetry readings, she got me into Charles Bukowski’s house and introduced me to his wife, Linda, she dropped my poetry in her San Pedro Today column, and brought me whiskey. She knew the more improbable the beginning the more my mind would catch fire, like writing a city memoir of San Pedro that was both historic and reflective to match the complexity of a city that isn’t a city or like trying to build a statue in the face of a pandemic and multiple uprisings to a person we were “meh” about.

Romee and I were going to contextualize Bukowski’s version of San Pedro by highlighting references to this city in his poems, sharing snippets of the history of those places as he knew them, and reflect on how they have changed. That structure is still here, only where the history of Hank’s San Pedro would have been more robust, my response, as a person of color born the year Hank moved to Pedro, takes up more space.

This book is a map circumnavigating the boundaries of San Pedro defined by the three of us, Romee, Bukowski, and me. It starts with the freeway and the bridge where they spit Hank out from the race track and where my first Pedro home sits, along the waterfront and downtown where he ate and shopped, to Beacon Street where his P.O. Box was with its view of the port, up to Vista Del Oro and the hospital where I live, Romee stayed, and where he died, to his neighborhood, Holy Trinity, where he and Romee lived (my first house is there, too), and ending in Green Hills Cemetery.