Linda Lee was travelling with him along with their photographer friend, Michael Montfort, who was hoping to put together a journal of the trip.The complimentary drinks trolley came down the aisle and they started on the white wine and then they drank all the rosé before moving on to the red. ‘Michael, you have a deal,’ said Bukowski, when he was pleasantly drunk. ‘I’m going to write the book.’*With business concluded, he set about drinking all the complimentary beer as they sped onward over the ocean he had last crossed as a child on the SS President Fillmore. The first Bukowski book published in translation in Germany was Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in 1970, with the bogus Henry Miller quote on the cover. Undeterred by its poor sales, Carl Weissner and publisher Benno Käsmyr put together Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Storey Window, borrowing the title from one of Bukowski’s early chapbooks. It quickly sold fifty thousand copies by word of mouth. Three books of short stories followed, all taken from Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, the most outré work collected in The Fuck Machine.
