Bukowski in a Sundress

by Kim Addonizio

  I realize I’m going against the grain here. I’ve never read The Artist’s Way, but I hear the author recommends something called Morning Pages. Well, if it works for her, or anyone, more power to them. My Morning Pages, if I wrote them, would still say, “Banana banana banana,” nine times out of ten. It’s that tenth one, I suppose, you get lucky on. But I’ve always been a quitter. I can handle about three days of freewriting garbage, and then I give up and feel hopeless.

  Which is what happened in the farmhouse. During the first three days, I typed a few tepid, inert statements and many clichés. My mind, at times a speakeasy teeming with fascinating ideas, now had been raided by the vice squad. The partygoers had all fled. The stale smell of dead cigarettes infected the curtains.

  I looked through some failed pieces of writing, combing through the rubble for any signs of life, but all was eerily silent. I read a book of poems about a love affair, hoping to trigger anything: a rhythm, a subject, a stray memory that might suddenly come to light. I needed inspiration. Soon I felt inspired to consider my loneliness. I turned to nonfiction and read pieces about dwarfs, Mexican storytellers, and prison meals, hoping a suitable essay topic would occur to me. I tried to think of what interesting things had happened lately. Let’s see: The bathroom here appeared to have a small leak. I found the Wi-Fi café in town, and got lost going to the grocery store. There were three little chicks out there in the birdhouse in the yard, cozy in their nest. Life, friends, was boring. I had absolutely nothing to say.

  I wish I could tell you that the next day I had a recovered memory of Satanic ritual abuse or went into town and witnessed something dramatic: a quarrel, then a stabbing, the victim falling backward, clutching the blooming wound in his chest, toppling into a bunch of orange tiger lilies. Or even that a chick made its way out of the round opening in its little house and plummeted into the soaked grass, that I carried it tenderly into the house and wrapped it in a dish towel and fed it with an eyedropper. That in each case I raced to my laptop and began to write, having at last found some subject matter to explore.

  But nothing happened. It rained some more. I watched twelve DVDs. I went to town for the Wi-Fi and read Facebook posts, and for the zillionth time I wondered why I’d ever wanted to become a writer. The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can’t count on it to be there just because you’ve made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear. You tell yourself you can’t write in the middle of your daily life, with all its distractions and commitments, and when you finally clear the decks, light off for someplace scenic or at least private, you sit there completely paralyzed. You have devoted yourself to writing, but it has not returned your devotion. If writing were a person, you would be in an abusive relationship. The healthy thing to do would be to get a restraining order and shut it right out of your heart.

  Another day passed, and another. I tried to think of some suitable figurative language for “Another day passed.” Another day slunk away into the dark woods and howled. Another day shook a slimy brown banana peel in my face, bared its teeth, and went to splash in the growing puddle in the driveway. The bathroom leak got a little bigger; water dripped steadily down into the kitchen. My time to write, like my time on earth, was running out. Though I had published books, though I had written many poems and stories and essays and even two novels, the truth now appeared in all its stark clarity: I would never write again. Writing had deserted me. I should say good riddance, but I was hopelessly in love with the bastard.

  Many people think that writers of published books never suffer this kind of difficulty. But virtually every writer I know has gone through long dry spells, through periods of not being able to face the work before them—or even having a clue about what that work might be. When we talk about the writing life, we don’t just mean getting words on the page; we also mean those times we desperately want to write, but can’t. It helps to know that many fine and even great writers experienced this dark night of the soul, and eventually came out the other side. Franz Kafka’s diaries are filled with anguished lines about his inability to find the Muse. The end of writing. When will it take me up again? one entry reads. Another puts it even more succinctly: Complete standstill. Unending torments. And here’s Virginia Woolf in her diary: I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the words. Yet these writers knew to keep at it, even if there were many bad days, even if they had to take a break now and then to let inspiration edge closer.

  On my last evening upstate, having polished off another box of cheese crisps and started in on a bag of cheddar Goldfish, I opened some wine. Wine was reliable. It cared about me deeply and listened sympathetically as I got drunk to the point of crying and muttering about my many failings, all of which it instantly forgave me for. I crawled into bed with a novel and was soon lost in a story about a remote cliffside village in Italy. At least I could still read. At least there were still books, though from this point on they would not be written by me.

  When I was sleepy, I put the novel aside and rolled over. A tiny laugh came from beneath me. It had emerged from the little stuffed animal I travel with. It’s about the size of my hand and has a giant head with enormous eyes, white fur, stunted thalidomide limbs, a pink-and-gray-striped tail. I think it’s supposed to be a lemur. It has a voice box, but it hadn’t laughed for months. I’d figured the thing had worn out, run down, whatever. I pulled my little lemur from beneath me and gave it a squeeze, but now it just looked at me with its Keane eyes, those huge, cheesy, roundly glittering fakes.

  But still, I thought. I heard you laugh.

  How I Write

  I WRITE BY osmosis. I write by divine decree. I write by heart, the heart shaking itself off like a dog that has nearly drowned in light. Or the heart dimly lit, sputtering and darkening, the heart shattering and held together again with duct tape and kindergarten paste. I write by memory, which is a beautiful liar. I write lies. I write in a secret universe, in bed, hating the world and the word I. I write at a desk and feel virtuous. I write without a thought in my head. I write groveling for love and attention, and also indifferent to everyone and everything. I write crap, shit, clichés, whiny complaints, black speculations, goofy formulations, and give up. I go back and write, “nada nada nada I suck why can’t I write anything,” and give up again. I write something I like, and the next day I realize it’s shit. I write a poem, a story, a novel, an essay, a play. Each time, I’m lost. Each time, I wish I hadn’t started down this road, where I can’t see my hand in front of my face, a ravine on my right, a swamp on my left; there’s no one else walking where I’m walking, sometimes I’m crawling, sometimes I stop and cry. Then there are stars, or a cloud shreds itself before the moon, and I get up and keep walking. Sometimes I run and there is no pleasure like running down this road in the near dark, the wind full of voices, the air alive and fluid. I write and it’s finally right, the intention rhyming with the result, the marvelous unforeseen surprise of a field flowering with kisses. I write and it’s good and I am queen of the kingdom and every flower is for me. I write and it’s not good enough; I go and read someone who is very, very good, and feel inspired, and go back and write again. Or feel so discouraged I give up for that day, for a week, for nearly a month, until I stop believing the kingdom exists. I am cursed, until one day, mysteriously, the curse lifts. I go back to writing over and over, the irresistible lover I have known for most of my life, the monster that controls me, the jabbering creature on my back, the mother who wounds me with grace. I persist. There is a road that doesn’t end until I end, and then there is another road, and another I, trying again to tell you something true.

  Simple Christian Charity

  THE SUBJECT HEADING of the e-mail in my in-box is just my oldest brother’s name. In the instant before I open the e-mail, I anticipate what it will say: “I’m sorry to be writing you with the news that your brother died tragically . . .” I imagine the possibiliti
es: accident, illness, or, possibly—in fact, likely—suicide. I also anticipate my feelings, in the following order: Relief. A flicker of loss, and then whatever the emotional equivalent of a shrug might be. Shit happens. Whatever. He’s dead. Good riddance.

  What the e-mail actually says is this:

  Hi Kim,

  I went to school with your brother. I have been talking with him once a month or so. He has lost almost everything and is trying to get some government benefits. He has had some teeth pulled because he cannot afford to have implants. He is depressed over his new predicament. He has moved to _______. I am including his phone number. Please give him a short call. I think it would mean a lot to him.

  Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Walter Morris

  My feelings now occur in this order: Disappointment. A flicker of sympathy, during which I entertain the idea of dialing the phone number Walter Morris has provided. Then I remember the last phone message I got from this brother: “I hate you, you fucking bitch. Don’t pretend like there is anything between us. Fuck you. Don’t ever contact me again.” That was seven or eight years ago, during a brief period I was working on Forgiveness, which was supposed to Free Me from the Past. During that period, I talked to my brother on the phone; or, rather, he talked to me, about his mentally ill life and whoever he believed was persecuting him. When he decided that person was me, the forgiveness experiment ended, and I realized that the best way to free myself was to change my phone number. I was in California, a continent between us, and unless he chose to look me up and come out and find me—possible, though not likely, given the money and engineering it would take to get him out of the pot-wreathed condo in Bethesda our mother had bought him before she died—I could pretty much write him off. I had three other, better brothers.

  Now, apparently, he has moved out of the condo. This is Condo Number Two; he accidentally burned down Number One, apparently from falling asleep on the couch with a lit joint, or possibly a cigarette. The fire spread to two other units in the building. There was a lawsuit, and some insurance claims to settle, which our mother took care of. From the real estate situation, you can guess what kind of relationship my mother and oldest brother had, without my needing to provide more examples, like a few totaled and new cars and endless checks made out to him, first in her excellent penmanship and later in the tentative, shivery scrawl of Parkinson’s and dementia. Even after she died, the checks, written now by a lawyer, continued for a time. But apparently the well has finally run dry, and my brother is again in need of help.

  The phrase in Walter Morris’s e-mail that catches my attention is “his new predicament.” This suggests they have been in touch for a while, long enough for there to have been several previous predicaments. Whichever one, for example, landed my brother in a small town in North Carolina. I google it and find it’s “the fastest-growing city in the state,” yet offers “the serenity of small-town living.” Not anymore, I’m thinking. They’re going to have to strike “serenity” and add some antonyms: agitation, turbulence, violence. Again, I could provide a few examples, some of which I’ve used in my fiction. In a short story, I describe a brother who often attacks his sister. Once, he tries to choke her and ends up kicking her repeatedly as she lies on the kitchen floor. He hears voices. He burns down his condo, and the fire spreads to two others. Fiction comes partly from scraps of life stitched together in new patterns; trouble and conflict are its engines, and he is some of the trouble I’ve experienced in my life.

  That my parents took him to a psychiatrist when he was ten years old is telling. They didn’t believe in that kind of thing, so it must have been an act of desperation. I don’t know what the psychiatrist said. All I knew, as a kid, was that my brother was angry and violent and that, as the only girl, I was the weak one in the herd, given to crying not only from being hit but from the constant stream of toxic adjectives—ugly, stupid, spastic—directed my way. I spent a lot of time hiding in my father’s bedroom closet. I got familiar with his shoes, lined up beside the electric silver buffer with its red-and-black brushes. I studied the patterns on his sports jackets and ties, as if they contained some secret to escaping my brother’s rage. My mother had a closet, too, but I felt safer among the bigger shoes, inhaling the faint smell of my father’s feet and cologne. Also, there was sometimes money in his jacket pockets, which I stole.

  “I am including his phone number.” I seriously consider calling my brother, but I’m not sure how much I’m motivated by this line of thinking: Well, he’s sixty now, and all that was a long time ago; his friend says it would mean a lot to him. I might be able to alleviate just a little of his suffering. Or by this one: I could get some great material out of this. He’ll tell me all about his fucked-up life, and I’ll use it in some way.

  The second line of thinking feels a little more motivating.

  The first feels like simple Christian charity. Simple, though, is not one of my go-to adjectives, unless used in a specific context: simple cocktail recipes, say. Nothing in life, especially our relationships with family, is straightforward or easy. There’s so much love and pain mixed together, so many grievances held on to or finally let go, bonds that tie us in knots or attenuate to mere threads that can snap, a final sting, then relief and loss and longing and disappointment, all intertwined. “Please give him a short call.” Just pick up the phone for five minutes, and let the fear and humiliation of your childhood back into your life. As for Christian charity, it conjures—unfairly, I know, but this is what I imagine—groups of badly dressed soldiers for Christ descending on villages in faraway lands to distribute Bibles and gather the starving, big-eyed children for infomercials; it smacks of condescension. Poor people need empowerment, not charity. Had my mother understood that idea in regard to my brother, she might have helped him learn some better survival skills. But he was her firstborn, a pudgy baby with a head of red curls, an obstinate little boy, a cherub in exile. There was something wrong at the center of him, churning like a tornado. There are days I understand that feeling all too well, when I’m spiraling in my own whirlwind, when being inside it is intolerable.

  My brother is, or at least was for a while, a God-fearing Christian. The last time I saw him, about ten years ago in the kitchen of our mother’s condo—he’d come by to get money for a dental appointment—he was fearing for his immortal soul. “I’m trying to be born again so I can get into heaven,” he said. He said of our brother Jon, “He professes Jesus, but he won’t get in, because he’s divorced.” He gave me a pamphlet that told me I was debased, that hell was factual, that the heart was deceitful above all things and beyond cure. “I’m nearly fifty and I’m getting worried,” he said. With good reason, I thought. Given he’d been eighty-sixed from plenty of tennis tournaments for throwing his racket, sometimes directly at his opponent, it was hard to imagine he’d be welcome in the gated community of the Afterlife. At the time, though, I was glad he’d found the Lord. Let the Church take care of him, and leave our mother alone. She wrote him a check for the dental work. He asked if I wanted to go for drinks later, and I made some excuse. I knew what that would mean: his drinking too much, my wanting to leave before he was ready. Being afraid to insist because there was still the chance he would attack me physically.

  Right now, though, he wanted to play the piano for us. He sat at our mother’s white baby grand while we assumed postures of interest on the sofa. He was self-taught and played well, though with an overabundance of trills and florid arpeggios. Following the concert he gave a reading of his latest poem, a modern medieval romance. A knight tethered his stallion to a Dr Pepper machine. His lady love’s eyes shone like oiled marbles. The knight shook in solitary silence, whispering gently to the bottle top. Next he showed me a Washington Post review that he’d penned himself, declaring him “a refreshing voice” and adding that “most of the good poets are dead.” He suggested to our mother that he bring a priest over to talk to her abo
ut her soul, before it was too late, and she mumbled that she would think about it.

  I forward Walter Morris’s e-mail to my brother Gary, who, like everyone else in our family, hasn’t spoken to him in years.

  A minute after I press Send, my phone rings.

  “Don’t answer the guy,” Gary says. “I’ve heard from a social worker who’s trying to unload him on anyone she can.”

  Apparently, our brother had sold Condo Number Two and run through whatever money he’d made. The social worker had found him a place and a roommate, but he lost the roommate after some sort of violent altercation. “I’m not sure what happened,” Gary said. “Someone hit someone with something.” This sounded like my oldest brother’s MO. He’d once cracked me over the head with a 7Up bottle.

  There was more news: He had cancer at some point. He had a kidney removed, and can’t walk anymore. (This makes me remember an earlier report, a couple of years before, about him needing a cane to get around. He beat a taxi driver with it.) Now he’s in some kind of public housing, living on food stamps. In a few months he’ll have to leave and will have no place to go.