STILL DISCOVERING BUKOWSKI : INTEREST GROWS IN WORKS, LIFE OF LATE AUTHOR.

Byline: John Hughes Orange County Register

On a San Pedro hillside opposite the Pacific, dirt covers the man whose once-expressive appetite for life continues to sustain his cult hero status beyond this grave where movie stars and drinkers laid him three years ago this month.

The simple headstone of Henry Charles Bukowski, 1920-1994, tells those who visit him: ``Don't try.''

Good advice rarely followed, that ambiguous message from his grave is a challenge outlasting the man whose life and art compels thousands to try, try, try to understand, analyze and even emulate the illegitimate father of poetic intemperance.

In more than 60 books of poetry, short stories, novels and a screenplay (``Barfly'') about a brief but remarkable period of his life, Charles ``Hank'' Bukowski wrote from the twisted guts of his own incredible life, fashioning those experiences into provocative shapes for our amusement.

Since his death, Bukowski has become something of a worldwide industry, with copies of his work multiplying in value, new fans finding him on dozens of Bukowski-related Internet sites and old ones sporting Team Bukowski sweat shirts. His publishers plan at least one book of previously unpublished work a year for the next five years.

Bukowski gave the finger to poetry as effete intellectualism and replaced adorned sentiment with naked, disturbing, compelling, repulsive, vicious truth.

He was a drunk and a genius, and he beat life to hell and lived longer than most expected and better than most knew.

He was a Southern California god, but even before this country acknowledged him, Europeans were already treating Bukowski with the pop iconoclasm of movie stars. Now his work is translated into at least 21 languages, with his newest fans building a Bukowski movement in Japan.

An Orange County college professor claims Bukowski as an influence. So does an Irish rock star.

To his fans, the mythic man who settled with a view of the grimy harbor of San Pedro is an adorable bastard, a voice that rumbled from a blue collar to offend, challenge and stimulate the complacent, and to console the disenfranchised for whom labor was survival.

To Linda Lee Bukowski, he is the man whose passing left a bottomless hole in her heart.

There are women who dismiss Bukowski as chauvinistic, as misogynistic.

The woman who loved him for many years and was married to him for his last nine says this:

``To you,'' Linda Lee Bukowski says, ``he is the great writer. But to me, first, he is the great man.

``I cry every day and night. It's horrible, horrible, horrible. Right down in the human gut level, it's terrible. I miss him like, boy, half of me is gone.''

There is little middle ground with Charles Bukowski.

Critics dismissed his writing as abusive and indulgent, about which he wrote to a friend:

``We don't write to be judged, we write to get it out of us so we don't do something worse.''

And those who loved him became disciples.

Bono of U2 dedicated a Los Angeles show to Hank and Linda and sent a limo to bring them to the concert, along with other devotees, actors Harry Dean Stanton and Sean Penn, whom the Bukowskis referred to as their ``surrogate son.''

He was gentle to animals, mean to those who crossed him, encouraging to younger talents and never too far from an immigrant child whose father beat him with a razor strap.

At 13, Bukowski discovered alcohol; he said it saved his life.

To his friend Gerald Locklin, a writer and professor at California State University, Long Beach, Bukowski (in one of a volume of letters over two decades) wrote:

``I don't trust men who don't drink. There is something about drinking which opens a man to extraordinary disaster: you meet all the wrong women and you step out into alleys to duke it with all the wrong men. It's kind of a lesson in stupidity but you learn more in that kind of life than most men who live 10 lives.''

That life, glorified by the Mickey Rourke-Faye Dunaway characters of ``Barfly,'' is as much a part of the Bukowski legacy as are his poems, novels, recordings and even paintings.

But those who focus on his love of drink, his tolerance for abuse, and his impulse toward denigration of the cognoscenti - without considering the effect of these things on his sizable contribution to literature - miss, sadly, a greater part of Charles Bukowski.

In his novel ``Ham on Rye'' Bukowski chronicles a childhood full of severe and capricious punishment by his father.

A central element of the Bukowski house in an L.A. neighborhood was his father's razor strap, which hung above the bathroom sink area where young Charles Bukowski would be forced to disrobe and be lashed, often for minor childish indiscretions.

The stress of his life caused a nervous reaction that resulted in boils over his body, leaving his skin pockmarked for life.

His rough appearance contributed to his aloofness from other kids, which in later years would become a general distaste for people whose allegiance to mainstream existence Bukowski saw as a betrayal of the soul.

His legend as a barroom fighter, as a drinker, a womanizer and a proud maverick who rejected self-restraint was well earned.

But even when he was flopping in dirtbag hotels and working day labor for liquor, Bukowski was no bum.

His life was a notebook in which he documented experiences few could survive but millions found meaningful.

``People like to ask me, `Did that really happen to you?' '' he wrote to Locklin. ``And I used to tell them. Now, I don't. I think it's good for them to wonder. OK. Then most did and what didn't should have.''

Although he drew on experiences beginning with the earliest moments of his life, Bukowski, who at times had been a shipping clerk and a postal employee, was middle-aged before he was ``discovered.''

Near the end of his life, he meditated: twice a day, 20 minutes at a time.

And for all his reputaTtion as a devotee of cheap liquor and easy women, the older Bukowski enjoyed good wine and imported beer and was loyal to the woman he loved.

There are, in the Bukowski household, relics to mark his presence everywhere:

``Linda will ya be my Valentine,'' says one of many childlike paintings that reveal a side of the man more capable of common feeling than his sandpaper exterior would suggest.

One Bukowski painting - a poem really - reveals a man we might have suspected but rarely find exposed this way through his writing:

``Arrange for me this splendid insecurity.''

``I don't even want to go into that,'' Linda Bukowski says. ``It means what it means.''

Linda Lee Bukowski laughs at her husband's epitaph, on the grave that she refers to as another room of the house.

``I think it means, if you spend all your time trying, then all you're doing is trying. So, the thing is to do. Don't try. Just do.''

He tried. He did.

And Henry Charles Bukowski left us richer for the effort.

We read him like watching a daredevil, from the safety of complacent comfort.

We revel in his lifestyle. But we dishonor his powerful voice if we leave him and his work at the bottom of a bottle.

``People are always pointing out things about me,'' Bukowski wrote to Locklin. ``I'm a drunk or I'm rich or I'm something else. How about the writing? Does it work or doesn't it?''

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Photo: Publishers are planning at least one book of previously unreleased Charles Bukowski works every year for the next five years. The author died in 1994.