That Kind of Woman
She’s the one who turned me on to Post Office, then she lent me her copy of Ham on Rye. I think the one I still have might be hers. After that, I was stuck. I got as much as I could, I read like a wildfire, and I found someone I really related to. I think that’s what got to her most of all, how much I related to him, rather than being fascinated or disgusted by him as everyone else seemed to be.
Other people seemed to want to watch him burn. They felt his fire and they wanted to be around to watch him wither under its heat. He mesmerized them, not dying after vomiting blood for a week. Drawing these women with the power of his soul, and nothing else to speak of. Drinking, whoring, smoking, gambling. Shit job after shit job designed to such the art out of your skull through your eyes, and he just kept right on going. Over seventy years of that, and he never quite. There’s a neo-primitivist boxer on his gravestone, gloves up, ready for more. I don’t think you can imagine a better symbol for his life.
He spoke to me, often. In what he said and in what he thought. I remember hearing his voice for the first time, laying in bed with her and seeing the light flicker across her body, always at her best when she had an excuse not to talk. How fragile it sounded then, and how shocked I was that such pain and anger, such an oppressed soul should all be expressed through such a beautiful, lisping, gentle voice. Even his scream was something of a paradox. You never really bought into it.
I had hear about him from my father and his drunken, sociopathic friend. Evidently, he’d known the Great Writer, and would regale my dad with stories about his readings in Long Beach for hours on end. I knew all about Bukowski, I knew his history and I knew about his works, but had never read any of it, had never had the inclination to. My dad would tell me, repeatedly, about this story where a woman turns a man into a six-inch dildo, a story he said was called “The Six-Inch Prick.” Reading through The Most Beautiful Girl in Town I was a page or two into the story, actually titled “Six Inches” before I realized I was reading that very story I’d heard described, hastily and through an excited, embarrassed, be-moustached smile time and time again. It was good.
But she’s the one who showed him to me. She’s the one who gave me the book, who would talk about him with me. I remember being shocked that such a pretty little thing could find beauty in his ugliness, but I guess that was part of his majesty. Part of his talent. He was beautiful, which I don’t think he ever really understood. But we saw it, and we’d talk about it, myself animatedly in my frenzy. He’d said so many things, in his writings, that I’d tried to say throughout my life but had never been able to give words to. He lived a life without direction, without purpose, bumping from one bullshit job to the next and never worrying about his “potential.” Never worrying about his “prospects.” He lived as he lived, nothing more. He had his manners.
He should have been a king.
I wonder if she ever drew the connection, between what I was doing and him. I wonder, had I been him with all his manners and his ways, if that would have been enough to keep her around. I became inundated with his philosophy, with our philosophy, then. I dared the world to judge me for being out of work. For not realizing my potential. I stood in the face of critics and naggers, I stood and I took it and I think it affected me more than it ever would have affected him. I just care more than he did. I let it get to me more.
And, finally, it was too much for her. All that loneliness, all that lack of purpose, all that unmotivated motivation I had shunned and tried to see if I could live without, it caught up with me, and when she had the chance she took it and ran. And had I never lost the stupid job, had I always been a hard-working, get up early, attend and deliver, interest and action kind of guy, would she have stayed? Would we have gotten that stupid house and that stupid dog? Would she have been mine? Or is it just that if someone can leave you, if there’s any chance of them leaving you at all, they eventually will, because no two people can stand to be around each other forever. No two people can deal with each other for quite that long, not without deluding themselves or at least one of them being exceptionally stupid.
And she was never stupid, just short-sighted. Just foolish. Just naïve.
I read The Most Beautiful Girl in Town, a collection of his short-stories, the first of his works I’d read out of her sight. I saw there, in there, things that I hadn’t seen when I was with her. I saw the pieces he’d tried to put together, to make sense of. I saw the healing that the prose had given him.
And, finally, I saw that it had never been enough.
In the end, the only way out is to get out. In the end, you have to gut it out and sit tight and wait for the storm to pass. Ain’t no kind of writing or poetry or song or substance that’s going to make the wind blow any less or the rain fall any slower or your heart keep together any more than it was already gonna. You’re stuck with what you have, and man I have it.
It was because of my actions that I lost her. She was a good woman, for the kind of woman that she was. I guess I just wasn't up to trying to keep that kind of woman around.
He would have understood.
Other people seemed to want to watch him burn. They felt his fire and they wanted to be around to watch him wither under its heat. He mesmerized them, not dying after vomiting blood for a week. Drawing these women with the power of his soul, and nothing else to speak of. Drinking, whoring, smoking, gambling. Shit job after shit job designed to such the art out of your skull through your eyes, and he just kept right on going. Over seventy years of that, and he never quite. There’s a neo-primitivist boxer on his gravestone, gloves up, ready for more. I don’t think you can imagine a better symbol for his life.
He spoke to me, often. In what he said and in what he thought. I remember hearing his voice for the first time, laying in bed with her and seeing the light flicker across her body, always at her best when she had an excuse not to talk. How fragile it sounded then, and how shocked I was that such pain and anger, such an oppressed soul should all be expressed through such a beautiful, lisping, gentle voice. Even his scream was something of a paradox. You never really bought into it.
I had hear about him from my father and his drunken, sociopathic friend. Evidently, he’d known the Great Writer, and would regale my dad with stories about his readings in Long Beach for hours on end. I knew all about Bukowski, I knew his history and I knew about his works, but had never read any of it, had never had the inclination to. My dad would tell me, repeatedly, about this story where a woman turns a man into a six-inch dildo, a story he said was called “The Six-Inch Prick.” Reading through The Most Beautiful Girl in Town I was a page or two into the story, actually titled “Six Inches” before I realized I was reading that very story I’d heard described, hastily and through an excited, embarrassed, be-moustached smile time and time again. It was good.
But she’s the one who showed him to me. She’s the one who gave me the book, who would talk about him with me. I remember being shocked that such a pretty little thing could find beauty in his ugliness, but I guess that was part of his majesty. Part of his talent. He was beautiful, which I don’t think he ever really understood. But we saw it, and we’d talk about it, myself animatedly in my frenzy. He’d said so many things, in his writings, that I’d tried to say throughout my life but had never been able to give words to. He lived a life without direction, without purpose, bumping from one bullshit job to the next and never worrying about his “potential.” Never worrying about his “prospects.” He lived as he lived, nothing more. He had his manners.
He should have been a king.
I wonder if she ever drew the connection, between what I was doing and him. I wonder, had I been him with all his manners and his ways, if that would have been enough to keep her around. I became inundated with his philosophy, with our philosophy, then. I dared the world to judge me for being out of work. For not realizing my potential. I stood in the face of critics and naggers, I stood and I took it and I think it affected me more than it ever would have affected him. I just care more than he did. I let it get to me more.
And, finally, it was too much for her. All that loneliness, all that lack of purpose, all that unmotivated motivation I had shunned and tried to see if I could live without, it caught up with me, and when she had the chance she took it and ran. And had I never lost the stupid job, had I always been a hard-working, get up early, attend and deliver, interest and action kind of guy, would she have stayed? Would we have gotten that stupid house and that stupid dog? Would she have been mine? Or is it just that if someone can leave you, if there’s any chance of them leaving you at all, they eventually will, because no two people can stand to be around each other forever. No two people can deal with each other for quite that long, not without deluding themselves or at least one of them being exceptionally stupid.
And she was never stupid, just short-sighted. Just foolish. Just naïve.
I read The Most Beautiful Girl in Town, a collection of his short-stories, the first of his works I’d read out of her sight. I saw there, in there, things that I hadn’t seen when I was with her. I saw the pieces he’d tried to put together, to make sense of. I saw the healing that the prose had given him.
And, finally, I saw that it had never been enough.
In the end, the only way out is to get out. In the end, you have to gut it out and sit tight and wait for the storm to pass. Ain’t no kind of writing or poetry or song or substance that’s going to make the wind blow any less or the rain fall any slower or your heart keep together any more than it was already gonna. You’re stuck with what you have, and man I have it.
It was because of my actions that I lost her. She was a good woman, for the kind of woman that she was. I guess I just wasn't up to trying to keep that kind of woman around.
He would have understood.
posted by DeadLanguage at 11:15 PM
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