Bukowski in a Sundress

by Kim Addonizio

  Googled “useful parasites.” Stared in horror at a giant close-up photograph of a flea.

  After more googling, discovered there are worms that cause blindness or elephantiasis, that grow in your intestines, that can come out of not only the obvious exits, but also your nose and eyes. There are brain-eating amoebas and a blood-drinking catfish. Then again, parasites can help cure disease, be used to make dyes or ink, and help start a fire.

  So, most days I spend a few hours trying to make something happen in language. I stretch out in bed, or on the couch, and tap away—dreams, rants, what happened yesterday, what’s tugging shyly at me or having a tantrum trying to get my attention. I have organized my life around a belief in writing and a need to get it done, to spend long hours gazing up into the night sky of my brain, lit with memories and fugitive thoughts and propositions. Whatever the effects on the larger world, writing is a record of one consciousness trying to make sense of it all, or at least to transcribe some of the mysteries. It comes from showing up to the blank page, the empty file with its blinking cursor, and hoping the Muse will honor her end of the bargain and keep the appointment. What do writers do all day? Eventually, we get down to our true work, and keep at it.

  Untrammeled

  A NEW YORK photographer was doing a new book of portraits and asked to take my picture. His method was to give his subjects black paint and pieces of butcher paper and invite them to put down whatever phrases or images they felt moved to create. The whole idea immediately made me sick with anxiety. I can’t draw, and improvisation is something I try to avoid at all costs, even though I know that life requires it on occasion. I did my best to plan, asking friends for ideas, trying to think of clever things to do with paper and paint, resonant lines I could memorize and then pretend to come up with on the spot.

  “Maybe I’ll take off my clothes,” I said to my friend Donna.

  “Everyone does that,” she said. “Do something original.”

  By the time the appointed day rolled around, I was terrified. I’m going to the shoot, I’m going to the shoot, I told the part of myself that kept saying, I’m not going. I don’t want to be shot.

  I showed up at the photographer’s studio, a space cluttered with tripods and lights and books and his photographs, and we sat down next to his computer to talk. Talking was part of the process. So far, so good; this was something I could do. We discussed books, the disempowerment of women, the juggernaut of technology, and the end of the world. We watched a few YouTube music videos. I even played a little harmonica along with one. I’d brought my harmonicas hoping I could have them in the photograph in some way, as protection.

  “I thought I could spread them around me on the floor, or maybe hold one, or . . .”

  “No props,” he said.

  Reluctantly I put them back in my bag. He led me to one side of the room where a white backdrop hung. The floor was covered with a sheet of white paper he invited me to sit down on. He handed me a small brush, a can of black paint, and several torn pieces of paper that had been crumpled up and smoothed out again.

  “Take your time. Relax,” he said.

  I thought, You are going to shoot me.

  Here’s what I painted first, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his studio: a fat lady leaning out a window. I learned it in fourth grade, and it’s the only image I know how to draw. It looks like this:

  “This is all I can draw,” I said.

  “That’s a great start,” he said, as though it were going to resemble a Caravaggio at any minute.

  Now what? I was stuck. I was starting to sweat. Finally I painted I AM PARALYZED on another torn piece of paper.

  “Creative process,” the photographer said. “It’s all about making yourself vulnerable.”

  Why would I want to be vulnerable with a complete stranger? I thought. I have a hard enough time with people I actually know and care about. The photographer gave me a gentle smile and went to fiddle with his camera. My brain turned over once, seized up, and went completely dead. So this was the goal of meditation: No Mind. My mind was as blank and rumpled as the paper. All that remained was a primitive, wordless desire to go home, where I could conduct my vulnerable creative process alone, the way I was used to.

  The photographer wandered off to his computer to give me space for the next amazing thing I would produce. I sat there, occasionally painting a word or phrase. Periodically he came over to take a look, and then went away again.

  Earlier he’d told me that some subjects had spent time crying on his couch before making their breakthrough. He had photographed a number of famous actors and artists. Some of them had taken off their clothes. On his wall was an exquisite female specimen from the New York City Ballet, en pointe in nothing but her ballet slippers. That day, I was sure I would be neither a crier nor a stripper. Instead, I would impersonate an asylum inmate in a black-and-white movie, a catatonic in a padded room given simple art materials in the hope that she might reveal some clue for the doctor, some way to unlock a diagnosis. I realized that instead of my pretorn jeans and tank top and cowboy boots, I should have worn a hospital gown. Then I realized that what I was envisioning was a video, the one in the film where the little girl comes out of the screen and savagely murders people, who are found with their horrified faces twisted into sickening puttylike blobs. She’s small and has a sort of black-scribbled hole for her own face, what you can see of it behind her hair that’s fallen across it, and she’s wearing a white smock of a nightgown. She is in deep psychic pain, and even though she is a child, you want to annihilate her.

  The photographer came back and looked at what I’d done. “Good,” he said encouragingly. “I like this one,” he said. “Untrammeled.”

  I liked that one, too. I’d promised a friend I would try to use that word in a poem, and hadn’t been able to. I’d thought it meant “untrodden,” as in Wordsworth’s “She dwelt among the untrodden ways.” I’d said it of my friend’s forehead, because she thought she might be developing a line there, and I couldn’t see a thing. Her forehead was perfect; she was thirty. “Look at that untrammeled brow,” I’d said.

  I told this to the photographer, who appeared fascinated by the story of my friend’s forehead. He gave me a pleased look and went away again. He’d looked just as pleased when I’d shown him my fat lady looking out a window, and I’d felt proud. This is how monstrous egos are created. Children who are applauded by their parents for every little thing—I worry about them. Those children are going to grow up believing they can follow their dreams, no matter how badly equipped they are to actually fulfill them. They will grow up thinking that working hard for something is what other people do. Most of them are going to fail and be totally unprepared for it.

  I took another scrap of paper and wrote “Family Photograph” at the top. I wrote down my mother and father and the names of my four brothers, and then I drew lines through “Mom,” “Daddy,” and “Jon,” who were all dead. I have an actual photograph somewhere, one of those black-and-white Christmas card shots with all of us sitting before the fireplace. My parents are dressed up, and my brothers and I are in our pajamas. I don’t remember getting the photo taken; I was three. But I remember when my parents and brothers looked the way they do in the photo. Ever since my brother Jon had died the year before, I’d had that photo in my head. I imagined Death scratching out each face, maybe sitting cross-legged on the floor the way I was now, surrounded by wrinkled family photos, holding an X-ACTO knife.

  I waited for the photographer to come back and tell me what a brilliant piece of art I’d created so I could get my picture taken and leave.

  What I usually do when I get stuck in my writing, which is pretty much all the time, is to write “Nada, nada, nada” over and over. So I filled a piece of smoothed-out paper—it seemed more like a shard—with that word. The photographer came over.

  “Hmm,” he said.

 
“Can I paint on my arm?” I said.

  “You can do whatever you want,” he said encouragingly.

  So I wrote NADA down my left arm in block letters.

  Success at last. He came over, rubbed most of it off, and got behind his camera. He took several shots, and I loosened up a little. Maybe it helped that earlier I’d asked him if he had anything to drink, and he dredged up a shot’s worth of vodka and one of rum.

  “I like this idea of nada,” I said, as if my opinion had anything to do with it. The alcohol made me expansive, as alcohol tends to do. If I drank enough, I might happily have taken my clothes off for nada, even though I would have regretted it in the morning.

  “And what you did, rubbing most of it away?” I continued. “It’s a double negative. It’s ambiguous. It’s like, nothing erased. You know, it could mean nothing is ever erased, like it all continues to exist somewhere in the world, or in another world. Nothing is ever lost . . . On the other hand, it could be the erasure of nothing—that is, something.”

  “Let’s see what else you come up with,” he said.

  So maybe he took the photos only to fool me into thinking we were making progress. Now I was back to sitting on the floor, wondering if I could inveigle one more shot of rum.

  I was painting five wobbly staff lines and a treble clef when he showed up again.

  “Yes,” he said. “This is interesting.”

  I added the notes of the repetitive riff from “Mannish Boy.”

  “Great, great!” he said.

  So we were collaborating. Two artists in the midst of their creative process. “Mannish Boy” was written by Muddy Waters, record producer Mel London, and Bo Diddley. They worked together and created a blues classic. Look at all that was accomplished, throughout history, by collaboration: Lewis and Clark. Pierre and Marie Curie. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Masters and Johnson. Of course, there were also Hitler and Goering. And don’t forget Leopold and Loeb, who got together and decided to randomly murder a little boy on their block, just to see if they could.

  Please, I was thinking at my tormentor. Please get behind your camera again.

  He took a bunch of photos of me holding up my crudely painted musical notes. Then he gathered up all the scattered words and images off the floor and handed them to me, and I clutched them in front of me while he snapped away, sometimes with a “Yeah, baby,” and at last it was over. I had not stripped and donned antlers as one poet had done. I had not drawn an enormous naked woman behind me and crouched down before her vagina like the famous actor, or fashioned a wedding dress out of paper like another poet. It was possible that whatever images the photographer had taken would never even see the light of a portfolio.

  I thanked him, smiling my face off, and said good-bye. My left arm was a black smear. I took the piece of paper with untrammeled home with me. When I looked it up the next day, I discovered that it doesn’t mean smooth or untrodden. What it means is this: “not deprived of freedom of action or expression; not restricted or hampered. A mind untrammeled by convention.”

  I taped it over my full-length mirror and took a photograph of myself.

  The Process

  I WANT TO thank you for inviting me here to your low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program and asking me to deliver the keynote speech. Shortly after receiving your invitation, I began thinking, with a mounting sense of anxiety, about drafting an essay for the keynote. I realized that I had nothing to say on the subject of developing as a writer, and that whatever I might have to impart had been imparted by others before me, more forcefully and gracefully than anything I was likely to muster. Quickly I arrived at a state of paralytic dread at the prospect of failure. I found it difficult to open the blank Word file on my desktop that I had optimistically titled “Keynote.” Instead, I spent my time on YouTube, watching a clip titled “evil laughing baby,” watching a kitty flush a toilet over and over, and teenagers high on Salvia hallucinate in a moment of brief bliss before a look of horror appeared on their features. I knew that horror. How to face that empty file, that pristine field of electronic snow? It was so eerily silent there. It was a dead world, and I was its God. I might so easily fuck things up. But I had to begin, to find a first principle.

  The first principle is simple: you just sit down to write. But this means finding time. And there is no time. There are the dirty clothes, the bills, the taxes (oh God, the taxes), that ominous rattling sound in the car; there is the dentist, the bank, the plane reservations, the Bundt pan—you need a Bundt pan! In an uncharacteristic fit of culinary zeal, you promised to make a chocolate applesauce Bundt cake for the potluck tonight! Well, fuck it, you will buy a cake, since the upscale grocery store is closer than the Bundt pan store; no one will ever know. You get gas for the car, drive to the grocery store, wait in line, have your debit card declined; you have no cash, your Visa was canceled last week and you didn’t get it reinstated yet—fine, okay, whatever, store-bought cakes are a rip-off. You leave and go to the bank for money and drive across town for the Bundt pan and another day has run away like one of Bukowski’s wild horses over the hills and you will pour yourself a drink before preheating the oven and getting on the phone with Visa to listen to that fucking bloodless automated voice. You have not gotten around to writing anything. You will begin tomorrow.

  Tomorrow arrives, a wild horse approaching, its long mane rippling in a fresh breeze. You can do this! But you need space, quiet, and especially cleanliness, so before you begin, you must deal with the cat’s dirty litter box. There is not only the clumped litter you have to remove, but also the mess of granules to be swept from the bathroom floor. Although you bought the covered box to avoid just this kind of mess, still the litter flies out of that little door. You really should dump all the litter out and scrub and wash the box—how long has it been since you did that? You keep meaning to clip the cat’s claws, too—look at the state of the furniture. Also, the cat needs to go to the vet to get its teeth brushed, and the vet is open at odd hours. Better get to the computer and google to see when you can take her in. Then at least, you will be at the computer and can begin to write.

  But while you are at your computer, 147 duplicate e-mail messages land in your in-box, and then your screen goes suddenly dark. You press all the keys, the On/Off, the Reset button: impossible, it was working a second ago, there are lines of a poem on there you didn’t back up—you managed to write a little the other night when you were sleepless, worrying about your taxes at 4:00 a.m. You need the computer so you can write, and it is just sitting there stonewalling you, playing dead, or maybe it is actually dead, and what can you do? You stare at the blackness. You are helpless when it comes to computers. The Apple Store terrifies you. The cat goes into its box and pees and begins scattering the clean litter in all directions.

  So already writing is not the easiest thing.

  Then, assuming you are able to begin writing, there is the task of staying with it through false starts and wrong turns. The tone, for one thing: the tone is all wrong. You are supposed to say something encouraging, something useful, a cry to rally the troops. The tone is definitely wrong. And maybe the point of view. Is second person too affected? But you’re so sick of the pronoun I. You are self-absorbed already, and using I makes it even worse. Maybe we would be better, more inclusive. Though don’t you always just write about yourself anyway? No one wants to hear you whining about the litter box keeping you from writing. Everyone else has little kids, abusive spouses, demanding jobs, flooded houses in foreclosure. There are real obstacles in their lives.

  And past those issues, you are going to have to say something wise, when in truth you are clueless. You are simply mucking around in the swamp of your overwhelmed life. Maybe you can mention Keats and negative capability, or drag in Yeats and the circus animals’ desertion. No, scratch Yeats; the Yeats poem is about something other than being in uncertainties without the irritable reaching after facts o
r reason. It’s more about writer’s block—or maybe inspiration; you haven’t read that poem in a while. Should you find it and read it now to make sure you know what you’re talking about? Anyway, we’re past that, we’re on to the disaster of the next step.

  Maybe your poem—this is you now, I’m trying out direct address—doesn’t yet know what it wants to be about. Or the dialogue in your novel is stilted, the characters no more than caricatures drawn by some loser artist on the boardwalk. The memoir, fucking God, the memoir—this is me now, never mind you—there is so much, and how to organize it all? Where does my story start? Where does the part about my violent brother fit, and how to talk about my mother’s depression, or that night in high school doing coke and wandering around the local golf course? Does that even belong in the story? Why can’t there be a GPS for writers, a little electronic gizmo that says “Your plot is going the wrong way! Turn here!” Can’t we all just go north toward bipolar disorder, make a U-turn at the Lodz Ghetto, pass our grandparents’ feed and grain store, and end up with a lucrative publishing contract from a major house?