The man who shot Charles Bukowski

"He was an immensely private person," says Montfort. "He didn't want to be bothered, he didn't want to meet new people -- he just wanted to go to the track and go home at night to write. If I'd had the nerve, I would have bothered him a lot more. Maybe I should have. But I respected his privacy."

Even to his friends, Bukowski could be a right bastard when he got tanked.

"He could get nasty and loud," says Montfort. "There were some weird instances, too. Once, in his old apartment on Carlton Way in Los Angeles, my ex-wife and I were visiting. His girlfriend was there and we were all drinking. I had a conversation going on with her, when he got up to go to the bathroom. She went into the kitchen to fix something, and so I followed her."

"Bukowski comes back from the bathroom and immediately accuses me of having sex with his girl in the kitchen. While my wife is sitting in the living room! I think it took a year to get that off his mind."

Montfort's got a million of them -- like the time Bukowski was thrown out of the Beverly Hills Hotel for threatening the cook with his penknife or the one where Buk, at Montfort's wedding to his second wife, got pissed because someone parked too close to his BMW and proceeded to ram his car repeatedly into a brick wall. But the best is the one where a great German actor came to visit.

"While everyone was busy setting up the lights, he was sitting with this actor," recalls Montfort. "The actor was asking him about the Iron Cross that was once hanging on the mirror of his VW Beetle. That was the only present that his beloved grandfather ever gave him -- ever could give him -- because he was dirt poor, his Iron Cross from World War II.

"So this actor somehow, I don't know all the details, accused him of being a Nazi because he was driving around with this Iron Cross. Bukowski stretched his hand out to this guy, and apparently the German actor thinks this is a goodwill sign and gives him his hand. Bukowski pulls his hand over, spits in it, folds it and gives it back to him. The German actor was so pissed, he was sitting outside the house in San Pedro for the rest of the night" and wouldn't come back in to talk with Bukowski.

Montfort points out that though Bukowski was erratic and abusive when he drank, he was never dangerously violent. The only fistfights Montfort was aware of were in Bukowski's past -- part of the legend enshrined in his poems and novels.

"He was a very shy man, actually," says Montfort. "His drinking was part insecurity when he had to deal with strangers. It may also have been part of an act. Maybe he thought people expected the wild, drinking man. Otherwise, he was a very wise, kind, considerate human being. I wish I were so wise."

Viewing Montfort's photos, you get a taste of why Bukowski was such a colossal talent. Even in the posed shots, there's something uncompromising, raw and authentic about the way he looks that is mirrored in his writings.

"Being photographed does not make a man a good writer," Bukowski wrote. "It does not make him anything." Perhaps, but would it be too bold to suggest that there might be something about a great writer that carries over into photographs of him?

Call to mind a pantheon of giants such as Malcolm Lowry, Carson McCullers, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Paul Bowles and William S. Burroughs. There's something fascinating about photos of them -- aside from who they were -- something in their physiognomy that indicates their imaginative and intellectual power.

Conversely, the mediocre look mediocre, and there's nothing to be done about it. Check out our reigning literary lights: Joyce Carol Oates looks like a schoolmarm; Reynolds Price looks like he should be teaching Sunday school; and T.C. Boyle, like a hopelessly constipated English prof.

"I think he was a giant," Montfort says of his lost friend. "And his influence is very underestimated, if you judge by the book reviews in the Sunday papers. The establishment always hated him. But he didn't give a shit, and I think he was right not to give a shit."

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