Bukowski in a Sundress

by Kim Addonizio

  Yet babies do stand, and eventually walk, and soon no one thinks anything of it. Of course, some babies will never learn to walk, and if you are one of these unfortunates, it is true that you may never reach step one. If so, be grateful that you don’t face the challenges of those who must make their way on two legs. Cats and dogs, opossums and peccaries, rabbits and armadillos and scarab beetles—these are all more content than humans, and all are equally valuable—are, in fact, beneficial to the earth rather than a blight upon it. Humans who are writers are a devastation. Writers plunder, excavate, and strip-mine without regard for the consequences to others. They suck their loved ones dry of vital fluids, revealing their deepest fears and yearnings. They expose the most precious secrets of their friends and families, then take all the credit and get all the applause. But if you can manage to stand, and are willing to be such a vampire, a succubus from the realms of depredation and darkness, read on.

  Step two is to win some small, local awards, and then, after half a lifetime of literary labor, finally to be nominated for a major award. For the ceremony at which the winners will be announced, fly to New York City with the miles it has taken you seven years to accrue. Bring your boyfriend with you, even though the two of you are breaking up, because you are afraid to go alone. Spend an afternoon having your makeup professionally done for a taping of a Barnes & Noble interview in which you say things like “If you want to be a writer, you must simply persist.” Say this while looking directly at the camera, like an actor in a movie who has dropped all pretense of being a believable character, like a politician feigning sincerity while laying the groundwork to rip away every freedom you hold dear. This interview will never air. Try to get through the next twenty-four hours without washing or even touching your face, so your makeup will be intact for the ceremony.

  At the ceremony, held in a big hotel, stand beneath an enormous black-and-white photograph of your face. The photo is very flattering, and perfectly lit, like a shot of a designer handbag. In front of it, your actual face looks like a bad knockoff. Smile. Later you will weep in the empty ballroom—everyone else will be at the cocktail party—while your almost ex-boyfriend (all wrong for you, not to mention fourteen years younger, but what an amazing body; you will never feel those muscled arms holding you again, sob, weep, weep) goes around to each table loading up on the leftover stacks of free books. Later still, you will watch a revered male writer, honored earlier with a Lifetime Achievement Award, relieve his compromised old bladder in a potted plant in a corner of the lobby. When asked by a concerned publisher if he needs help, he will respond, “What, do you want to hold it for me?” and you will weep again. Not because of the frailty of human beings no matter the scope of their accomplishments, but because when the winner of the major award was announced, it was not your name that was spoken by the celebrity emcee, not your folded-up speech thanking your mother that was heard by the hundreds of people pushing the berries-and-chocolate dessert around on their plates.

  It is crucial not to win the major award, because then you might feel too great a sense of achievement. Be a finalist, but not a winner. This will keep you forever unsure of the scope of your talent, and you will be able to continue the habits of excruciating self-doubt and misery that stood you in such good stead during the many years you received no recognition at all. Notice that all around you, people of little imagination and even less heart are being honored with prizes, with obscene sums of money, with publications of their execrable twaddle in prestigious magazines like The New Yorker. Hold fast to the simultaneous sense of moral superiority and abject failure this observation inspires.

  At this juncture, pay close attention to your e-mail. (Your account name should be chosen from among these: hatemyjob, writergrrl, rimbaudsister54.) Check your in-box compulsively to see if anyone wants to offer you money to give a reading or workshop. These offers will be few and far between, so you will find yourself reading spam to justify running to the computer every three minutes. You will begin to seriously consider adjusting the size of your nonexistent penis, or giving your bank account number to the stranger in Nigeria offering to split his inheritance with you. You will become fascinated by strange strings of words such as bullyboy bangorcumberland jehovahmonetarist antares driftdeadline embeddable ephesusmyrtle, and wonder if you can use them somehow in a piece of writing. Ordering a large, unaffordable prescription of anxiety-relieving drugs will be a constant temptation. Resist that temptation, and steal your new boyfriend’s Xanax instead.

  Once or twice a week, drink a little vodka mixed with lemonade in the middle of the day, while your boyfriend is at his real job, making four times as much money as you. You are a poet, after all; a little something to take the edge off is allowed. You work part time in order to write, and lately you aren’t writing much of anything. What you do write, you realize, is crap, garbage, shit. That major award nomination, which once seemed to promise such a heady future, was in fact the apex of your career. From here you are on a downhill slide. Since the nomination, you have received numerous form rejections, no grants or fellowships, and several fan e-mails from people who clearly meet the legal definition for insanity. These are the people who want to date you. They have pored over your poems and concluded that you will not only share your naked body with them, but also read their demented poetry and thrust it into the hands of editors they are sure you must see socially, or how else would you have become a recognized writer in the first place?

  Occasionally, the subject heading of the e-mails will say, OFFER OF READING or WE WOULD BE HONORED . . . Open these e-mails and respond immediately. Don’t wait the few days you give the insane fans so that they will assume you are a busy, wildly successful writer with no time to correspond. Accept with alacrity all offers that contain the magic word honorarium. Reject the others, no matter how nice and gushing the offer, because you are likely to end up sitting through a three-hour open mic during which someone will sing, someone else will break into cathartic sobs, a third person will drum, and the technician recording the evening will step out from behind the camera to read his first-ever poem that he just now wrote, he was so moved and inspired. When formulating your rejection, it is acceptable to lie. If the reading is nearby, respond, “I’m so sorry, but I have a previous commitment.” If the reading is farther away, say, “I’m so sorry, but I was recently injured and my doctor has not cleared me for travel.”

  Once a bona fide, i.e., paying invitation has been extended, try to obtain as high a fee as possible. Tell yourself you are worth every penny, but secretly feel the way you did when you were on food stamps: other people need and deserve this more than you. Feel anxious about the upcoming trip because you hate to travel. Feel anxious because you are basically a private person and can’t live up to the persona that is floating out there in the world acting tougher and braver than you. You are a writer, after all, and prefer to be alone in your own house with your cat. You don’t really like your fellow humans, except for your boyfriend, whose stories and mannerisms can be usefully stolen and put into your writing. When he traveled with a carnival as a young man, he learned to eat fire and put a nail up his nose. Sensibly, he left the carnival to work in sales, while you suspect that you have become a sideshow act, a fake mermaid shriveling in her tank, uselessly flipping her plastic tail.

  As the event approaches, ramp up your level of anxiety and focus on these specific possibilities: The presenters will not have obtained a single copy of your books to offer for sale. There will be an audience of three in a six-hundred-seat auditorium. You will miss your ride from the airport and end up lost in a strange city late at night, in the winter rain, trying to climb in the window of a private citizen’s apartment you have mistaken for the university guest residence. Two teenage girls will come to the window and ask you for cigarettes, and then their redneck father, who thinks you are a prostitute, will show up and tell you to get the fuck away from his daughters and drive you back out into the freezing
elements. These things have all happened to you, so your anxiety will be well founded.

  Go ahead and have a little more vodka with lemonade and get slightly drunk by dusk. Try to write a few good lines and then give up in despair. Tell yourself you are foolish, feeling terrible when you have actually been asked to share your work with other people. It is the work that you love, and sometimes you even get paid for it. Tell yourself you are lucky, that people envy you. Tell yourself this is what you toiled and sweated your whole life to be able to do, and now you are doing it, and above all, don’t be such a goddamned little baby.

  A Word of It

  WHEN I WAS young and living with my parents, my father still living and my mother still young, though I was too young then to understand how young she really was—when I was a girl and did not yet have a girl myself—when I was a young girl, my lovely living father owned a copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald. The book had a soft brown leather cover, and its title was in gold, so it felt exotic. My father read to me from that book: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, / Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” And in his voice, which I found beautiful, my young and beautiful father said, “A Jug of Wine, a loaf of Bread, and Thou,” and I could nearly taste the bread’s sun-warm crust and didn’t yet know the taste of wine or what it meant to have a beloved. That book, those words, that afternoon when we were all so young—that was possibly the start of it for me, that glimpse of a possible rent in what I thought was the whole fabric of life. Portal, threshold, door in a tree.

  In my twenties, after I’d left home in Bethesda, Maryland, and moved across the country to San Francisco, I sat reading in an attic room and was dumbstruck by something that was called poetry: a fragment of Plath, though I can’t remember which poem it was, only that some internal tectonic shift made me know I needed this thing, needed the way it changed my experience of life. I had fallen into plenty of novels as a child, and through them had entered places I preferred to the one I found myself in looking up from the page. Narnia was far superior to Bethesda. I loved the magical pull of other, parallel worlds: traveling through the universe in A Wrinkle in Time, or sailing a model boat with Stuart Little. Part of the pleasure I took in Stuart Little came from my father reading me the story at bedtime, though he had a macabre way of wrapping things up when he was tired of reading, or decided I should get to sleep. “And they all fell down in a pool of blood,” he joked, “and that’s the end of the story.” It was an ending from classical tragedy, but the next night everyone would be back where they belonged, ready for further adventures.

  But I hadn’t quite realized there was yet another parallel world that would place me under a spell so profound that more than thirty years later I have yet to wake up.

  That poem I first encountered in San Francisco must have been in Ariel, gateway drug for so many young women coming to modern poetry for the first time. The book has since been lost. Soon after reading it, I would begin to lose my father. That year he suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him. I flew back to visit him in the hospital, and read him my first poem. He listened with his eyes closed, and I thought he might have fallen asleep. When I finished, he struggled upright in bed, pointed a shaking finger at me, and said, “Write!” Then he fell back exhausted on the pillows. He recovered somewhat, but soon more strokes sent him to a nursing home for a year. I spent the morning he died rereading his letters, many of which had encouraged me to give up music, which I was pursuing at the time, and to write instead. Though he was a sportswriter, he occasionally wrote poetry and had a deep romantic streak.

  Over the next years, the town I grew up in would virtually disappear, every building downtown razed and replaced except for a ramshackle wooden structure that still advertised vacuum cleaners for sale. My mother would sell the house we grew up in, and grow old, and I would understand something about this whole process, though not really. I would struggle to feel the deep joy in the mystery of change, not simply the terror and loss, and poetry would help with this. I would discover other poets, fellow singers and raconteurs and black-humored travelers, and find my way to writing more poems of my own.

  Once on a visit, before the house was sold, I found that copy of the Rubáiyát and brought it home with me. It now has hundreds of other volumes, some of them mine, as companions. There is a framed broadside of one of my poems, a poem about desire and a red dress, written after I had tasted the wine, had found and lost the beloved, was struggling still to understand. I can still see my father sitting on the edge of my bed, holding the book in his hands, reading to me.

  In the fifteenth century, the Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “In truth, everyone is a shadow of the Beloved.”

  “And Thou / Beside me,” my father read, “singing in the Wilderness.”

  Necrophilia

  NECROPHILIA IS A TERM that is commonly misunderstood. You probably think it means being so attracted to dead people that you skip the dating part and go straight to their place with a little wine. You probably imagine walking into a cold, smelly basement with awful feng shui, spritzing the hell out of it with a good air freshener, and boinking away.

  I misunderstood this particular word until one day, a year or so after the breakup of a long-term relationship, I realized it must be meant as a metaphor—that is, representative or symbolic of something else. Just like the Bible. When Jesus said to become as little children, he didn’t mean, for instance, to throw your burned pork chops on the kitchen floor of the apartment you rented after letting your ex keep the house. He didn’t mean you should stomp on your dinner, screaming and crying. As for the wine that is Christ’s blood, if I may offer an explication—which is the same as an explanation, only more complete. What it means is: go ahead and drink the whole fucking bottle of pinot if it makes you feel less lonely. Just so we’re clear on that.

  What necrophilia is, really, is this: sexual obsession for men who are incapable of having a real relationship because they have no heart in their chest cavity. What they have is an empty socket that will electrocute you if you try to get close and touch it or maybe just point a flashlight that way to see what’s wrong. These men can’t have feelings for anything but girl-on-girl porn, American League baseball, and the thought of the fortune they are going to make when their ship, which is lost at sea and listing badly with several leaks in its rotting hull, finally comes in.

  Exempli gratia (aka “e.g.,” which means “free example,” like in the better markets where you can get cubes of cave-aged Gruyère and pieces of artichoke sun-dried tomato pesto sausage and make a slim but upscale meal of it): in my single, i.e., oppressively solitary, state, I developed a crush on this dead guy—of course, before I realized he was dead. That’s how you get in trouble: they look so lifelike. He was charming and talented, and about a week after we met he e-mailed me “U r beautiful,” and that’s pretty much all it took. I’d been alone for a year at that point, and—how shall I phrase this correctly?—living alone is a hellish nightmare (i.e., id est, a dream arousing feelings of intense fear, horror, and distress: e.g., you feel as though you are trapped in a small, dark crawlspace with someone who is hitting you repeatedly on the forehead with a hammer) from which I am still trying to wake up (cf. nonketotic coma, vegetative state).

  Tell me U r beautiful and I’ll probably fall for you, dead or alive.

  Anyway, after this guy and I saw each other three times and I gave him two prolonged courtesy sucks—I am not one to tire easily, but even I was reaching the limits of my politeness—followed by one bouncing of the Brillo, or dancing of the buttock jig, without ever experiencing my own petite mort; after he didn’t call for two weeks only to tell me, when he did, about playing paintball with his friend who sounded moronic, well, then I finally realized I had encountered a bona fide dead guy and that I might be suffering from necrophilia. This was confirmed
by The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary: I had an “abnormal fondness” for being in his presence; I had “sexual contact with” and “erotic desire for” his body. I was, in short, a textbook case. I had all the symptoms. No cure was mentioned.

  I consoled myself with the thought that while I was definitely sick, he was definitively dead—asleep, belly-up, bloodless, blooey, checked out, cut off, gone, paralyzed, spiritless, stiff, torpid, unresponsive. So maybe he had carried me to bed once and was a really good (in fact, excellent) kisser; to him I was only a pair of breasts and a nice ass in tight jeans, heavy combat boots, and a cute hoodie. The e-mails I agonized over, trying to hit just the right tone—provocative nonchalance—were living side by side with the pervy forwards passed along by his infantile, also deceased or at least comatose friends. Smiling snowmen with carrots for dicks. Jokes about hillbillies. “Why do they always have sex doggy style?” “Because their womenfolk don’t like watching NASCAR upside down.”

  Hahaha.

  When I realized how stupid I’d been—that is to say, how brainless, dazed, foolish, naïve, and obtuse—I wanted to put a stake through his heart.

  Then I remembered he didn’t have one.

  A corpse, let’s face it, is pretty much empty. The blood gets drained out, the organs are harvested, the brain is plopped into a jar for the benefit of science. It’s not even really a body, only the outside of one. A lot of them look pretty sexy when they’re embalmed: beautiful, unreachable models of imperfection. To a certain kind of person, they may present a challenge, a hope, a profound messianic desire: to raise the dead, to lift them from their graves and rented rooms and broken couches, brush them off, and dress them in better clothes.