Bukowski in a Sundress

by Kim Addonizio

  It wasn’t exactly a message. The boys had called me sometime last night, before the call from them that I answered; I must have been in the shower. They had been so drunk they forgot they called me, or thought they’d clicked off the cell phone, so I was privy to their conversation. I wrote it down, word for word, before I erased it.

  Zach: Hang a right. No, chill out, it’s a cop.

  Svend: Whoa, street!

  Zach: Jesus Christ, Svend! Take a left. No, go straight.

  Svend: I’m going over there.

  Zach: You’re so close to going to jail. You’re closer to going to jail than you are to Kim’s.

  Svend: That’s cool.

  Zach: It’s over, man.

  Svend: It’s not over. It’s not even close to being over.

  Zach: She didn’t want us to come.

  Svend: Yes, she did.

  Zach: She didn’t ask us, man.

  Svend: Why?

  Zach: She knew we were looking for a place. She didn’t offer.

  Svend: Are you insane?

  Zach: Aka, she didn’t want us to come over.

  Svend: Fuck, we’re going there.

  Zach: Are you serious?

  Svend: We’re going to take a left here.

  Zach: We’re going to fucking hit the Embarcadero!

  Svend: God, she’s so fucking horny!

  Zach: Is she? I dunno.

  Svend: Okay, I’m turning around, I’m going to her house, you can get out if you want.

  Zach: You have no idea where you’re going!

  Svend: Fuck! This is insane. There’s no fucking Stop sign.

  Zach: Where? What?

  Svend: Are you insane? Are you fucking insane? There’s a cop right behind me.

  Zach: Good. I hope you go to jail.

  Svend: Fuck you, I’m going over there and you’re coming with me.

  Then the phone shut off.

  In Grizzly Man, there’s also a recording. We don’t get to hear it in the film, only see Herzog in headphones, listening to the idiot who thought he could live in harmony with the grizzlies being torn apart at his campsite, along with his girlfriend. What we imagine—is it worse, or better, than the reality? Aka, being so fucking horny, should I have slept with him after all, and given this story a different ending?

  How to Try to Stop Drinking So Much

  REMEMBER YOUR FATHER sitting in MacDonald’s Raw Bar, giving you rolls of quarters for the pinball machine and money to buy Whitman’s candies and outfits for your Skipper doll at the Drug Fair across the street. Remember how you felt in the dim, beer-smelling bar, listening to him laughing with his friends. His black hair curled on the back of his sunburned neck; his frosted mug caught the little circle of light coming in through the porthole on the door. Remember how the flippers on the machine sent the steel ball zooming back up to carom off the bumpers, the bells and numbers going crazy, colored lights flashing before your eyes.

  Hours later, your father drove you and your brothers home down Bradley Boulevard, the car occasionally straying to the wrong side of the road. You always sat rigid in your seat belt, afraid he would hit something: a car coming toward you around a curve, one of the trees that grew so close to the road. Once, when none of you were with him, he landed the car in a ditch not far from the house.

  So stop remembering how you loved the heavy feel of all those quarters in your hand. Remember how it felt when the ball shot straight to the bottom between the flippers and disappeared down the hole like a greased rabbit. Remember that every ball ended up going down that hole sooner or later. Think of the quarters running out, the pinball machine unplugged, silent in its sobriety. Tell yourself this silence is what you want.

  • • •

  DON’T KEEP ANY alcohol in the house. On evenings you feel the urge to drink, open the refrigerator several times to make sure there’s no white wine hiding in there behind the leftover Thai delivery. In the freezer, discover the two little airline bottles of vodka your friend Elizabeth left nestled behind an ice pack, between a box of coconut fruit pops and a year-old frozen crust for the pie you meant to make but never did. If you were a pie maker, you could be eating some right now. You are sure that with a mouthful of pie, really good pie, you would have no desire to drink. You vow to make some soon from one of the recipes your friend Kate published in her book that included interesting prose poems about fruit and pie along with the recipes. You wrote a blurb for it:

  How is a banana like a push-up bra? What’s the best way to thicken a berry filling? This book is the answer to the prayers of pie-lovers everywhere. Both whimsical and practical, it will charm your pants off—and your apron on.

  Kate’s pies are delicious, and you have helped her bake them occasionally. You have yet to make one alone, though, without actually being in Kate’s presence. You are a social pie maker, just as you are a social drinker.

  Though of course you also sometimes drink alone.

  You take out the little vodka bottles. Nothing this cute could possibly harm you. You pour them both into a coffee mug and look for a mixer, but there’s no juice, no tonic water, no bitters. You microwave a fruit pop for a few seconds until it’s mushy, and voilà: coconut cocktail. Maybe you could write a book of cocktail recipes, you think, but then you’d have to try them out, and that wouldn’t be helpful for your current plan, which is to try to stop drinking so much.

  You try to remember how a banana is like a push-up bra, but it’s been a while since you read Kate’s book. What should you call this cocktail? Hawaiian Happiness, maybe. Tropical Trouble. Sex on the Beach would be perfect, but that one’s taken. It seems like all the good cocktail names are taken: Bald Pussy, Cocksucking Cowboy, Sex on My Face. Maybe you could call this one Sex on the Kitchen Floor. It’s been way too long since that happened. Never mind. Think of interesting questions for your book: How is a vodka bottle like a curling iron? What’s the best direction to stir your drink: clockwise, counterclockwise, sideways figure eight? And most important, whose pants could you charm off?

  • • •

  DO SOME RESEARCH on drinking writers. Jack Kerouac, at forty-seven, died of an internal hemorrhage caused by cirrhosis of the liver. Dylan Thomas, at thirty-nine, comatose after beers at the White Horse Tavern. Hemingway, who celebrated the running of the bulls and the slaughter of same, accompanied by good red wine from a goatskin, grew increasingly belligerent and paranoid and shot himself at sixty-one. Dorothy Parker, one of your favorites: usually drunk and often suicidal. Elizabeth Bishop was pretty happy with her girlfriend, Lota, down in their Brazilian paradise, but that didn’t keep her from getting regularly sloshed. William Faulkner liked mint juleps; Hunter Thompson, Wild Turkey; Carson McCullers drank hot tea and sherry all day long, a mix she called “sonnie boy.” Marguerite Duras had a tendency to binge and pass out. Jean Rhys, often poor and depressed, was a lifelong alcoholic. These were great writers. In “how to be a great writer,” Charles Bukowski wrote, “beer is continuous blood./ a continuous lover.”

  Disbelieve the notion that writers drink more than other people because they are artists and unusually sensitive, whereas so-called normal people, those dullards, feel almost nothing at all. Then again, feel that you yourself are unusually sensitive. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but an article in the newspaper explained that people who seldom examine their lives are happier. Realize that most writers live overexamined lives.

  In a poem, you once compared gin to a lover. After your second marriage broke up, gin was your drink of choice. You felt kind of glamorous drinking it, weeping around your tiny apartment in the TV light, ordering the shit being touted in infomercials, wearing a long, flimsy white nightgown like a jilted creature out of Tennessee Williams. Williams, another major alcoholic. You don’t drink gin anymore. You don’t have a lover anymore, either. There isn’t even a Gentleman Caller, not that he wa
s exactly good news, dashing Laura’s illusions, breaking her glass unicorn and fragile heart.

  Try not to let your current lack of a love life be an excuse for getting drunker than a boiled owl. Wonder if you can be a great writer even though you rarely drink beer, even though The New Yorker just rejected those poems you sent that were your best ever. Screw The New Yorker. Delete their e-mail rejection and head to the liquor store up the street for a bottle of gin and one of Campari, then make a Negroni according to the recipe in the Harry’s Bar Cookbook you bought in Venice after an obscenely expensive meal at Harry’s with an ex-boyfriend. Remember the drunk you saw afterward, lurching in circles trying to make it to his hotel across the street. Remember how you loved that boyfriend. Remember that most of the poems in The New Yorker, let’s be honest, suck.

  • • •

  MIMOSAS BECAUSE IT’S Sunday brunch. Cabernet sauvignon because it goes with the pizza. Sancerre because it’s your favorite. House margarita, rocks, no salt, or else Patrón Silver with Cointreau and fresh lime juice, shaken and poured into a chilled martini glass. You drink because the dinner guests are boring and the conversation insipid. Because you’re anxious about your upcoming travel. Because you’re celebrating: a friend’s birthday, a new book, the world not ending. Because you bought napkins that say, IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE. Because you like a glass of wine on the counter as you chop the garlic. Because your friend’s sister’s cough turned out to be cancer. Because your mother gets Parkinson’s and spends a miserable ten years shuffling around in assisted living, and then dies. Because you are not with her when she does. Remember how fast she was on the tennis court, how she always jogged up stairs. Remember her enjoying a single bourbon and Coke almost every night with a bag of Fritos. The last time you played tennis with her was on a court near the retirement community in Florida where she stayed during the winters. Tall coconut palms beyond the chain-link fence, late afternoon light on their trunks and long fronds, your mother executing a series of perfect backhands. Afterward, you went out for drinks with your brother Gary. Remember giving vast quantities of whiskey to your brother Jon, when you and his girlfriend pierced his ear in high school.

  Because Jon died less than a year after your mother, which made you understand in a more visceral way that everyone disappears. Because there is a feeling you want, and it isn’t this one. Because a beer will help your hangover. Because you’re falling in love with a man and are afraid to tell him. Because you’re camping and the sun is going down over the river as you lie together on an old green blanket, in love, and when the wine spreads through you like melted blackberries, you will go into the tent and hold each other on top of the zipped-together sleeping bags. Remember saying, “Please don’t leave.” Because he left. Because fuck it. Because you’re bored, restless, angry, disappointed, scared. Because who are you without it?

  • • •

  STOP SEEING YOUR friends who drink. This would be nearly all of them. One works in the wine business. You spent many happy evenings at his table while he brought up special bottles from his basement. Your friends are having parties, meeting at bars, going to readings where, afterward, there are receptions featuring horrifyingly bad wine and cheese cubes and crackers and cookies. Take your mind off all that; binge on episodes of Scandal, a TV series about a woman named Olivia Pope who fixes scandals in DC and has a torrid, tormented relationship with the leader of the free world. In nearly every episode, watch Olivia Pope drink red wine from big goblet-size glasses and sometimes straight from the bottle.

  Grow depressed and isolated. Wonder if it’s time to get back on Celexa. It has helped you in the past, when you’ve felt hopeless and wondered why we are born only to grow old and ill and die and be turned into a heavy plastic baggie of ash or have our faces eaten away by crawling things under the ground. This is how you think when you are depressed. Only other depressed people can understand how you feel, hunkered down on your own private promontory of despair, vultures circling above you, blotting out the wan sun. A lot of great writers, of course, were also depressed. This thought does not comfort you. Nothing can comfort you in this state, except maybe alcohol. She would be there for you constantly if only you didn’t push her away sometimes and refuse to see her or even text her. She looks for you all over town. She’s hanging out with all the people you have stopped calling, waiting for you to forgive her for whatever she’s done. Don’t you love me anymore? she says.

  You are not supposed to drink while taking Celexa. When you were on it, you didn’t drink nearly as much. Celexa took the edge off, the edge you have teetered on most of your life, falling in sometimes, climbing back out to the land of green energy drinks and regular exercise, determined to find your balance, to be someone in control of your habits and not enslaved by a capricious master who is often kind but who sometimes, for no apparent reason, attacks you with savage fury and leaves you broken, your head like a seawall pounded by a storm surge, a vague sense of guilt for you know not what hideous transgression. Call for an appointment with a sympathetic psychiatrist, and walk in looking as though you have lost your best friend.

  • • •

  RUN INTO THE orange traffic cones and keep driving. Steal spoons from one restaurant, candles from another. Drink and dial and sob into the phone. Go home with a man from the bar and give him a blow job. He’s smart and interesting and witty and you think, Maybe, finally. He shows you the garden in back of his house and clips a rose for you. When you leave, you walk around to the driver’s side of your car and he stays on the sidewalk. That’s when he tells you that the woman he called his roommate isn’t. She’s his lover. He says, “You had a good time, right?” You throw the rose at him over the car roof, wishing it were a brick, then get in your car and drive away.

  These are your memories. These are what you consist of, the lines on your palm that map your history and potential, the synapses in your brain flashing and buzzing like neon. Colored gas in a tube, so bright when lit, and then gray, dull when the plug is pulled. It’s early morning. You’re in someone’s bed. The street outside looks ugly; the trash cans are pulled to the curb and overflowing. Where were you last night? Where are you now?

  • • •

  ONCE YOU WERE a child who knew her place in the world. It was a world brightened by Budweiser signs and pinball lights, a land with endless rivers of Shirley Temples carrying bushels of brightly dyed cherries. Your Skipper doll owned a pink coat with a matching umbrella, several flowered dresses, one-piece red-and-white-striped bloomers with a beribboned sun hat. She owned a skating outfit and a dirndl and a pony with a blue plastic saddle. You had undreamed-of wealth, though at the time it seemed but a handful of coins. Then you were exiled from that world forever. There is no going back. Not even a river of pure alcohol could take you there; not even writing can ferry you across. The river keeps carrying things away, and you remain planted beside it like a cottonwood, or a willow. This is where you belong now. Pay attention. Listen to what is passing.

  Pants on Fire

  AS A WRITER occasionally tarred with the brush of being a “confessional poet,” feathered with disdain and once even tied to a maypole by roving bands of critics, I’d like to reveal a few transgressions to you here and now. I hope you will forgive me. I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life. This may be because I’m a woman, which means I am an emotional land mine waiting to be stepped on, a weeping, oversharing harpy whose inner weather fluctuates wildly. And women, as everyone knows, often lack that quality of imagination men have in such abundance.

  In any case, I clearly have an inordinate, some might say excessive, need to kneel in a small dark space, separated from you by a little mesh screen, and reveal to you my impure thoughts and the number of times I dishonored my parents or coveted my neighbor’s donkey. And now I must tell you how many times I have been guilty of lying my head off in my poems and of just plain making shit up. Although I hope you will see
that I have also told the God’s honest truth on occasion, because a writer must tell the truth at least some of the time, or who would ever want to listen to her bullshit?

  • • •

  I KILLED MY mother before she died. The poem was about death, and the conclusion was more satisfying if hers arrived suddenly in the last stanza, about ten years early. It’s true the shapes of the clouds terrified me, but I did not smell “the bacon fat from breakfast,” as the poem claims. I had seven-grain toast with blackberry preserves that day. I confess I feel ambivalent about bacon because pigs are intelligent animals, often cruelly treated on their way to slaughter and sometimes during the act itself. Yet I will not pass up roasted brussels sprouts if there happens to be a little bacon—or, better yet, prosciutto—wrapped around them after they have been steamed and then seared with oil in a pan with lots of garlic.

  The dead friend in the poem was truly dead. I don’t remember ever calling her and getting her answering machine, so I never heard her recorded voice say anything, let alone “Hello I’m not here,” but it is certainly true that she was not there in her apartment by the lake in Oakland. She had moved to her daughter’s house in Sacramento to die, and that is where I saw her last and read poems to her while she drifted in a morphine haze.

  As for the UPS man: the driver really did wear brown, and I admit I found him attractive, especially when he wore shorts, but in the rigor of revision, I took that part out.

  • • •

  ANOTHER POEM CORRECTLY identified the woman making my cappuccino as a former girlfriend of the man I was seeing at the time. But I was the one who had his heart. After all, he brought me a sunflower he had stolen from a neighbor’s yard. New love proved to be a boring subject, so in the interest of a good conflict, I wrote the poem as though I didn’t know he was mine, or at least wasn’t sure. In this way I managed to extend an idle thought as I waited for my cappuccino—There’s his ex—into a lengthy meditation. Of course, eventually he would no longer be mine, so by that point the poem might as well have been true, and I would need to write several more poems about him, including one that described his private parts as accurately as my skills allowed. And his face, in all honesty, did close “like a failed business.” I passed that place on my way to the bar and there he was, floating behind the dusty glass of the window. It is also true that as his former girlfriend handed me the change for my cappuccino, our fingers touched, but I don’t remember what I was thinking about at that moment—certainly not the two of them. Maybe having to teach that graduate poetry class I hated.