Charles Bukowski
was a real asshole. Or at least that is the impression I get when I read his
angry writing, gritty songs from the sewer. His voice always on the outside of
society and mired in a drunken misery. A poem of his has stood out to me for
sometime now, flashing in and out of my consciousness. It has the
quintessential Bukowski title – “To the Whore Who Took My Poems” and the quintessential
Bukowski scenario – a prostitute has made off with twelve of his poems (and his
best paintings!) leaving him to plead, alone (and drunk I presume), to cry out,
desperate and defeated, “Are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?”
No girl ever stole
my poems. Or my paintings. I could hardly even give any of those away.
Sometimes when I did, they ended up coming back. I don’t even really want them
anymore, but what am I supposed to do, throw them away?
No girl ever stole
any of my books either. I just always lent them out, and they never ended up
coming back. I won’t cry alone about them like Bukowski in defeat. I don’t look
at the vacancies on my bookshelf as all-powerful cosmic forces that are
leveling themselves against me, as I imagine Chuck felt. Instead, whenever I
think of the Bukowski poem, I ponder about each of my missing books, where they
might have ended up, and that every girl I ever dated and lent a book to,
disappeared from my life. Just like the books.
First off, I lent
Summer my copy of On the Road. I was
deep in my wild Kerouac phase, back then all of seventeen years old with
“nothing to offer to anyone but my own confusion[1],”
and a copy of On the Road. She seemed
to love it as much as I did. We would go to our town’s only all-night diner and
order coffee and apple pies and talk late into the suburban night about those
wild beat characters, both of us envious of the maddening freedom painted in
words on each page. Eventually, we sought out other company and more exciting things
than apple pie and talking about Dean Moriarity and Sal Paradise. And I never
got my On the Road back.
Nikki said she wanted to read a book. It
seemed like this might have been something novel for her. I didn’t want to
overwhelm her so I lent her something easy to digest but was also one of my
all-time favorites, Skipped Parts, by
Tim Sandlin. Anyone would love Sandlin’s straightforward story-telling and
laugh-out-loud humor. Nikki said she didn’t get it. I think she lent it to a
friend. I never saw that copy again.
I lent The Picture of Dorian Grey to some girl
in a college class of mine to try to impress her. It didn’t work. And I can’t
remember her name or why I never got my book back.
Heather wanted to
borrow Love in the Time of Cholera,
and I was pleased to lend it out. In some strange sense of the symmetry of
life, I had read this book because another girl had suggested it a few years
before. Or maybe there’s actually no symmetry there at all. Not long after
Heather finished the book, we were finished too.
Lauren asked me
what my favorite book of all-time was. I told her One Hundred Years of Solitude. She asked to borrow it. I knew as
soon as I handed it to her that I was never going to see that book again.
The last book I
ever lent to a girl I was dating was to Kimberly. She wanted something to read
and so I recommended Highwire Moon, by
Susan Straight. Kimberly loved the book and the way Straight could weave
beautiful scenes together with words. She ended up taking the book with her on
a trip for work to San Francisco. Kimberly called me from Frisco, upset, and
said that she left the book in the backseat of a cab. I told her not to worry
about it. She ordered another hardcover copy of Highwire Moon for me, and later became my wife.
[1]
Gratuitous Kerouac quote, from On the
Road
