Read between Faulkner’s Collected Short Stories and the wonderful Martin Millar’s Lonely Werewolf Girl, it was time for prose that slapped me in the face and welcomed me with a beer.
Charles Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski character is starting to emerge as a successful poet, and consequently has a bit more money to buy booze, a bit more time to write, and a lot of time to be the philandering sensitive brute with women (think Shrek, rated R).
Bukowski gives insight on how becoming a famous writer helped him compensate for the lack of sex during his younger years; now, at fifty, an old man with a strong pickled libido, he is falling in an out of love faster than he penetrates and orgasms. This story has him encounter a variety of different muses: some crazy, some rich, some ugly, some with “big vaginas”, some smart, some plain, some with kids, and some that live in Texas. We experience a man go through a circus of sexual romps, alcoholic fits of anger, seldom joy, and moments of sensitivity and beauty revealed in between grunts and swigs.
But Bukowski’s most loyal braud, the one that he calls home, is Los Angeles. Bukowski is the anthropologist of LA. He writes about it with a fervent desire to see her immortalized through the people, the liquor shops, Vermont ave, Santa Monica, and Hollywood; all LA has been caught in the spell of his writing and it is Los Angeles, the city without a writer, a city found mostly in the mystery section of the book store, that is given its proper due.
I finished this book and one thought came to mind: this was one of the most romantic books I have ever read. A love story written in prose that is real to the love experience: revealing and sudden as a slap in the face, raw as hot pink sex, hungered for like a 2:00 am hot dog wrapped in bacon, and fast and fleeting as the next moment. Some have criticized this book as being misogynistic with boasts of sexual conquest by a dirty old man. But its not a boast as much as a confession. The man wants to love, the man wants to be smoothed; there is a scene in the book where one of his women is enjoying bursting the blackhead zits on his body, a ritual she does before they have sex, and it almost left me weeping. A story of a man searching through vaginas and beer bottles in order to find love and happiness. Or, at the very least, a threesome with Los Angeles and a whore.
