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Why You Should Never Date Boys Who Like Charles Bukowski
by Miriam Parker
My name is Miriam and I have a Charles Bukowski problem. Not an addiction to the author, more an unstoppable inclination toward falling for boys who are Bukowski enthusiasts. And there’s no worse quality in a boyfriend than liking Charles Bukowski.
A writing teacher told one of my classes once that if we ever needed to describe a character really quickly, and that character was the kind of guy who was afraid of commitment and regularly used non life-threatening drugs, we should write a set of Charles Bukowski books onto his bookshelf. Everyone laughed, but I knew that she was telling the truth.
It’s a shortcut, sure, but this describes almost every guy I have ever dated. It all started with a guy I’ll call Dick. Dick was my college boyfriend. He'd never been to college, so it might be more accurate to say that Dick was my boyfriend for about six months while I was in college. He was smart, though, and in between Bukowski books he read Dosotovesky and Kafka.
When I started dating Dick, I didn’t know anything about Charles Bukowski. At the time I was happy his favorite author was not Phillip Roth. At the time I had a rule that one should not date boys who like Phillip Roth because they’ll always love their mother more than they love you.
When Dick told me the main conversation he had with his mother when he went to her house was her saying, “Dick, roll me a joint” and his response was always, “what happened to the ten I rolled you last weekend?” I was intriqued. When he told me his favorite author was a guy named Bukowski, I was interested.
But I was young and naïve. I had never heard of this Bukowski and figured he was just another writer like the ones I enjoyed, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jane Austen. Aside from the aforementioned Philip Roth, I hadn’t really come across any controversial literary authors. Although I’d read my share of steamy romance novels as a frustrated teenager, I could never have imagined the contents of a Bukowski book.
When Dick gave me a copy of Post Office, I opened it, looked at the first page and read “What I mean by big was that her ass was big and her tits were big and that she was big in all the right places. She seemed a bit crazy, but I kept looking at her body and I didn’t care.” I closed the book and said I hated Charles Bukowski. “I hate Charles Bukowski,” I declared. As you can imagine, the problems in my relationship with Dick where there from the very beginning. In all his actions and even in his words, Dick imitated Bukowski. He didn’t have much experience with women, so I think that he may have thought the way Bukowski's characters interacted was the way of all couples.
As a result, many of our conversations centered around the size and attractiveness of my ass and the percentage of my body weight that it took up. He estimated about fifty percent. The rest of our conversations revolved around how good we looked together, and while this sounds like it might be a fun conversation to have, and it is at the beginning, I became so worried about us not looking good together that I turned into a very meek, very thin, very mousy person looking to Dick and only Dick for approval. Not that healthy.
It was a dificult relationship to get out of. In the end, I dreamt up a scenario in which I was still in love with my high school boyfriend, the one on whom the Phillip Roth rule was based, and as a result I was forced to break up with Dick.
For various reasons, some related to circumstance and some related to personal trauma, I didn’t have sex for almost two years after the Dick debacle. This gave me a lot of time to think up theories. One of them was: You Should Never Date Boys Who Like Charles Bukowski. It was a good theory. My experiences with Dick, extrapolated to all humanity, showed clearly that boys who like Charles Bukowski are only interested in women only for their looks, will always cheat on them without remorse and will never listen to what they say. Result: these boys make bad boyfriends.
Having instituted the rule, when I could no longer withstand my extended celibacy I began dating again. But I had learned my lesson, so I interrogated my potential lovers about what they liked to read. Among their responses:
From a cute banker type I met at a party: “I don’t read, I’m like, illiterate.” We didn’t even make it to the first date.
During my phase of going out with ugly guys because I thought they would be nicer to me than attractive guys, one of the chubbier ones said, “I like to read trash.”
I responded, “Oh, really, what kind?” I’m always up for trash.
He named the popular author of formulaic crime novels on whose website I happen to work and for whom I have a particular dislike. After I teased this date mercilessly about his interest in the worst writer around, I let him pay the check and then didn’t return his calls.
A date recently told me, after I told him I enjoyed Ann Patchett’s book Bel Canto, that he thinks all contemporary literature is crap. He then proceeded to name every author read in a college “History of Literature” survey course as his favorite. When I said, “Yeah, I thought Ulysses was pretty good, although the chapter that’s written as a play was a little bit hard to get through,” he stopped talking pretty quickly. He didn’t call me again. Despite the fact that he didn’t mention Bukowski in his list, I was pretty sure that he would like Bukowski if he deigned to read anything written after 1875.
After various false starts, last year, I managed to be involved for a few months with a guy, I’ll call him Frank, who I actually liked. We actually had very similar taste in books. Frank suggested that I read Tama Janowitz, who I enjoyed. I suggested that he read Augusten Burroughs, who he found hilarious. Come to think of it, he still has my copy of Dry. We both liked David Sedaris. And then he revealed that in addition to our shared tastes, he also liked Bukowski. I thought about my rule, now almost seven years old. What should I do? Can I break up with someone with whom I have so much in common just because I have a rule?
As a stalling tactic, I read Post Office. I liked it. I liked Henry Chinaski. While he was a bit vile, as I expected, in relation to women, he was an engaging character. And, as many men had told me but that I had never believed: Bukowski is a pretty good writer. I understood why the women in the books fell for the Hank Chinaski character. He was suave, sweet and he was good at not really listening to what women said to the point that they didn’t even really notice.
And then I realized that, if I had met him in the 50’s, I would have fallen for Charles Bukowski. I can picture the phone call I would have had with my friend Marge now:
“I met a nice guy,” I would have said.
“That’s great,” she would respond. “What does he do?”
“He works in the Post Office.”
“Oh,” she would say, disappointed.
“But he’s really a novelist,” I would have said.
Her voice would brighten.
“Oh?”
“But he’s got a little bit of a drinking problem.”
Sad again, she would respond, “Really? That’s too bad.”
Unflappable, I would say, “But I think I can change him. He’s just unhappy. He’ll be so much happier when we’re together.”
This is just a fantasy.
For various reasons I’m still not entirely clear on, they had something to do with sex and something else regarding a model, Frank broke up with me just as I was deciding I might be able to break my rule about boys who like Bukowski. In the future, I think I’ll stick to my guns.
But I don’t think it’s all as cut and dry as I make it out to be. The engaging thing about Charles Bukowski is that below his bluster, he was a really sweet guy. He really loved the women he was with. He really meant the things he said about their asses and their tits, and he meant them as true compliments. I think that the guys I’ve dated interpret Bukowski literally, but there’s so much more to the writing. There's so much more than just tits and asses. There’s pain and love and sorrow and a little glimmer of hope that things might be better tomorrow. I have become a girl who likes Charles Bukowski. What are the rules about that?
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No, no dejéis cerradas las puertas de la noche, del viento, del relámpago, la de lo nunca visto.
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27 Maj 2005 14:52
Forumi Horizont > Tema Shoqërore > Gjuhët e Huaja > Gjuha Angleze > Poetic Path (Rruga Poetike) > Charles BUKOWSKI
