Bukowski

by Nadine Darling

The ghost of Charles Bukowski appeared shortly before the divorce was finalized. He wore housewife slippers and a rose colored bathrobe that he operated with quite the lenient sash-tying policy. The bones in his ankles swelled like fists; he had legs like used flytraps, thin and pale and littered with short sooty hairs.

He slipped up through the vents to Nola’s apartment; he sat beside her at her desk and smoked.

“Ashtray, love?”
“I don’t smoke,” said Nola.
“You want to live forever? Your life is so good?”
“I’m nearly divorced.”
“Well, that’s not so bad. Anything, then? I’d hate to spill ash on any of this lovely… scenery.”
Nola took off her shoe and set it atop the desk. Bukowski tipped ash into the heel.
“Great girl,” he said. “I shan’t forget this.”

Nola rested her elbows on the desk and her face in her palms and watched him smoke. He closed his eyes, inhaling, and exhaled slowly.

“Divorced, eh? Well, who can blame you? I’ve never understood people, either. Vain, undignified creatures. Brilliant self-promoters but still virtually obsolete.”
“My husband is a saint,” said Nola.
“Who was talking about him?” Said Bukowski. He laughed then, once, like a warning shot. 

Nola took it upon herself to show Bukowski’s ghost a good time in San Francisco, but the main thing he wanted her to know was about color-safe bleach, the miracle of it, the dye transfer inhibitor epiphany of it. She took him to the laundromat; he drank from a pint of whiskey and showed her how to sponge stains from her wedding dress. Little stains- pen, blood, gunpowder. She wore the dress a lot.

“What is it like to be dead?” asked Nola.
“Bah. Very quiet.”

He knew all the scuttlebutt on dead celebrities, who was dating whom, who was coming back as what. Eudora Welty had all the makings of an orange starfish in her next life. You could tell, said Buk, by the way she spread herself out and stuck to walls.

“That’s just silly,” said Nola.
“I’ll tell you what’s silly,” said Buk, “the way you women dress today. Inexplicably ordinary. Nothing primal remains. Hemmingway used to say that the sexiest thing a woman could wear was a harpoon.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Nola.
“Yeah, well,” said Buk, “he liked to drink.” 

They walked a lot. She brought him to Fisherman’s Wharf, Pier 39, Coit Tower. She didn’t know any of the stories that went along with the places so she made them up.

“Here is where Marshmallow Fluff was invented,” she said. “Gunsmoke was filmed over there. This is the boyhood home of Fatty Arbuckle.”
“Fatty was quite the ladies man,” said Buk. He sat beside her on the Muni facing backwards; they plummeted beneath the city, he in his robe, Nola in her wedding dress.
“Is this frightening for you?” She asked.
“I know the subway,” said Buk. “Studs Terkel and I ride them all the time.”
“Studs Terkel is alive.”
“Yes, but is he living?” He laughed until he coughed, and coughed until he spat. “Death humor,” he said, “is so dignified.”

Bukowski stayed too long- he didn’t have to say it, but he did.

It was summer and hot. There were fewer and fewer places to take a ghost sightseeing. The divorce- final- became more final by the day, and Nola began to fancy herself something of a surrogate ghost. It didn’t seem so hard, she thought, to slip from world to world. Maybe it was rather like living in a foreign country- maybe being cute and quiet counted a great deal.

“Will you come back?” Said Nola.
“I’m not Pete’s Dragon, dear,” said Buk.
“But, Pete’s Dragon never came back.”
“Oh? Then maybe I am Pete’s Dragon.”

He smiled and chucked Nola under her chin. He tried to pull a quarter from behind her ear but money was tight. Quarters didn’t grow behind ears anymore.

“I’d like to tell you some great shit about life,” he said, “how it’s better than death. How death is a way station and we meet the people we love again and again, endlessly, into oblivion.”
“Yes,” said Nola.
“I’d like to,” he said.
“Well,” said Nola.
“I know San Francisco,” said Buk. He lit up- beautifully, gracefully. “I’ve seen it all before.”
“You should have told me.”
“That’s not a thing you can tell a person,” he said.

He sat beside her at her desk and crushed butts into her shoe.

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~ This piece was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 and was filed under Blog, Writing, Short Story, Featured. You can make comments on it below. ~