Bukowski, Dad and Me
Monologue for a woman
Raise your hand if you come from a broken home... if your parents were, are divorced. Keep them up. Keep them up. Now slap high five to the person next to you.
My dad’s name was Paul. He was born on an orchard in Southern Oregon in 1941. His father had hasty unprotected sex with his mother before coming of age serving as a medic for the allies in North Africa. When he got back to Oregon, I’m sure Rodrick, my grandfather, saw in his family the same strange mortality he’d seen in countless corpses in Europe, so instead of feeling the shame of picturing my grandmother and Paul as bullet hole riddled bodies, he drank everyday at the Elephant Ear Inn in Medford Oregon. My dad showed me a picture of my grandfather on veteran’s day, barely filling his old uniform, hoisting a drink to the camera looking as if the beer were almost too heavy to hold. That was about 1962, my father told me. My father and I were throwing out old photographs when my mom remarried and refused to keep any of his stuff in their garage... that’s not important to this story though.
Dad served in Vietnam. He never talked too much about that. He married my mother when he got home and they settled in Portland Oregon. Paul delivered kegs of Budwieser. Mom had me in 1979. Dad went to jail for manslaughter after running a woman over in the beer truck. He was drunk. That was when I was five.
Mom dated. She left the house smelling strongly of perfume. She had a routine of getting ready for work, getting ready for dates, sneaking into the apartment and starting the cycle again in the morning. She was distant and measured like the tides coming in and out.
My teachers weren’t stupid. Political correctness was a god send. It made me the cool kid in class to be apart of the psycho babble protected set. “Class, today we’re making valentines for our guardians.” What the hell is a guardian? Sounds like a football team. My Guardian can kick your dads ass. Dear Guardian. Be my Valentine. That sounded cold and abstract. Sounds like: Dear Librarian. Please be my Labor day Honoree.
I hated My mother. When dad, Paul got out of prison he called me. He worked at 7-11 and I was 16. I carried myself under many layers of cotton sweaters and sweat pants. Warily I agreed to meet him after work. He said I was beautiful and he started to cry. No body ever said that to me, so I looked down at the pavement. There was a used condom and smoked cigarettes next to a turd on the cracked pavement. They looked like clues to some gruesome crime.
Him Crying made me feel like he was another artifact washed high and dry from the tide of my mother. I didn’t cry with him, but I was hooked on the feeling I got being around him.
He looked like prisoner under the florescent lights in his stark red uniform. I felt like a prisoner in my high school. We both loved to read. One day I visited him at work and I smelled booze on him. He was quiet. I stayed anyway. The next day I visited and he smelled like booze again. He began to drink infront of me regularly. He lived off what was in the hot case and malt liqour. He began to cough violently. When he wasn’t working, he read.It seemed like a kind of nirvana.
“Are you having sex?” my father asked me one day. “Not right now, no.” I said, looking around. “Do you drink?” he then asked. “Only when thirsty,” I said. He gave me a book of Bukowski poems, noded and turned away.
Soon I was drinking, but not having sex. No man seemed worthy of ‘fucking.’ As ‘fucking,’ was all I learned from my Bukowski sex Ed class.
Years have passed. I now have a job at a catering company. Last year on Valentines day I visited my dad one last time at the VA hospital. He had had a heart attack and was suffering successive organ failure. He mustered his strength for one final walk. After dialysis, he showed me how to follow him with his oxygen tank. We went down to the cold concrete parking lot, the only place the clean faced college educated perfect life doctor bitches allow vets to smoke is hidden away. Assholes. Fuckers. Fuck you guys with your perfect looking buildings with no room for... Paul smoked next to his oxygen tank, worried he might blow me up, hopping he might blow himself up...
He spoke, “Before your mother... I met a girl. She was crazier than anything I ever knew. I was back from Vietnam and drinking fast... drinking enough so I could slow down and then try to put a life together... this girl read. She had the darkest angriest eyes. But when she looked at Bukowski’s poems, her eyes seemed soft. I asked her about that one day. She said she had met old Buck once. She was seventeen and she drove to LA to meet him and fuck him. He was home. She brought him beer. He sat in his lounge chair at the other end of the room, pale faced. He wouldn’t say anything to her. She threw herself at him, but he just seemed catatonic. Wouldn’t budge. She stripped naked, which caused him to cry. She cried with him, curled up naked on his lap. She left. She took a bottle of sleeping pills and drank a bottle of wine in a friends garage and was taken to the hospital... or somthing like that...but she said while in the hospital she heard Bukowski had tried to kill himself too.”
Dad paused along time. I could tell he wasn’t sure if he was making sense or not.
He kept going, “So I guess she made love with him that night... touched and felt him. Made love to him. I don’t mean to be dirty. But you here with me now in this ugly parking lot is the most love I have ever felt. The most in the moment. I love you. But don’t take this love any further. When I die... let this ugliness die with it...”
Dad got up and I followed him back to his room. He died the next week.
Now I live in Portland. The buildings are glassy and new. People drink away boredom. My friends sleep with eachother at random. There are fewer and fewer old drunks on the streets. I am lonely. Maybe, dad... love is loneliness shared between two folks... ugliness is everything else. Raise your hand if you are here alone. Now wave. Mysery loves company. See you in the suicide watch ward. Happy Valentines Day.
