If Charles Bukowski Wrote Peanuts

By

For some reason, I’m in Santa Rosa at the moment, and it seems that Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, was from here. I’ve figured this out because everything is named after him and I can’t go three feet without running into a statue of Charlie Brown. I don’t really care much about Peanuts, except that I’m having trouble getting work done because I’m pretty sure that picture of Lucy inside my hotel room might come to life and murder me any second now.

So it was quite the coincidence when my friend William Taylor, Jr. (who has an excellent new book of poetry, by the way)  shared this brilliant link to “Peanuts, By Charles Bukowski.”.

Here’s a piece of excerpted dialogue from Schroeder (the piano playing kid): “There’s Lucy and Violet.  They’re some real pieces of work, Branaski.  They don’t get jealous of each other and sometimes one will come over while I’ve still got the other one in the sack!  It’s not like Frieda.  I think that Frieda would kill me if she ever found another woman over.  It’s nothing but trouble, all the time.  More trouble than it’s worth, I can tell you that much.”

This is what Peanuts should have been.

Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA. More from this author →