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  PRAISE FOR KIM ADDONIZIO

  “Kim Addonizio writes like Lucinda Williams sings, with hard-earned grit and grace about the heart’s longing for love and redemption, the kind that can only come in the darkest dark when survival no longer even seems likely.”

  —Andre Dubus III

  “Like Anne Lamott . . . Addonizio seems to sense how to pull back from sentimentality, be it with humor, honesty, or clarity of vision.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Addonizio tackles tough subjects—unequipped mothers, the loss of love, mental illness—with unflinching clarity, lyricism, and humor.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Kim Addonizio’s imagination is like a runaway train under perfect control. Nuanced, shaded, and unshaded, her poems are bold, brave, respectful of the darkness, perfectly pitched, and virtually every one reverberates with a kind of wild tenderness.”

  —Thomas Lux

  “Kim Addonizio’s poems are stark mirrors of self-examination, and she looks into them without blinking.”

  —Billy Collins

  “Searingly beautiful, evocative, and surprising. Kim Addonizio is a master . . . in the best tradition of Robert Coover and Angela Carter.”

  —Katie Crouch

  “Wonderful . . . A streak of dark humor, colored with a tinge of pathos, infuses her best work.”

  —The Oakland Tribune

  “For all their fleshiness, stiletto stylishness, and rock-and-roll swagger, Addonizio’s finely crafted and irreverent poems are timeless in their inquiries into love and mortality, rife with mystery and ambivalence, and achingly eloquent in their study of the conflictful union of body and soul.”

  —Booklist

  “Addonizio’s honesty and self-knowledge will pierce you to the core.”

  —Carolyn Kizer

  ALSO BY KIM ADDONIZIO

  FICTION

  The Palace of Illusions

  My Dreams out in the Street

  Little Beauties

  In the Box Called Pleasure

  POETRY

  Mortal Trash

  My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits

  Jimmy & Rita

  Lucifer at the Starlite

  What Is This Thing Called Love

  Tell Me

  The Philosopher’s Club

  NONFICTION

  Dorothy Parker’s Elbow (edited with Cheryl Dumesnil)

  Ordinary Genius

  The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Kim Addonizio

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  “How to Succeed in Po Biz” first appeared in New Letters; “Pants on Fire” in New Ohio Review; and “How I Write” in Booth. “Plan D” was published in Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, edited by Ellen Sussman (W.W. Norton, 2007); “A Word of It” (as “How I Found Poetry”) in Red Thread, Gold Thread: The Poet’s Voice, edited by Alan Cohen (Ravensun, 2009); and “Necrophilia” in Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, edited by Ellen Sussman (Bloomsbury USA, 2008). “How to Succeed in Po Biz” later appeared in Pushcart Prize XXXIV, edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize Editors (Pushcart Press, 2009).

  eBook 9780698408913

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Addonizio, Kim, 1954- author.

  Title: Bukowski in a sundress : confessions from a writing life / Kim Addonizio.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015042338 | ISBN 9780143128465 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Addonizio, Kim, 1954- | Women authors, American—20th

  century—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. |

  LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC PS3551.D3997 Z46 2016 | DDC 818/.5403—dc23

  The people and stories portrayed in this book are all true, however the names and identifying details of some of the characters have been altered in order to protect their privacy.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  for my tribe

  Contents

  Praise for Kim Addonizio

  Also by Kim Addonizio

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Plan D

  How to Succeed in Po Biz

  A Word of It

  Necrophilia

  Children of the Corn

  Are You Insane?

  How to Try to Stop Drinking So Much

  Pants on Fire

  Flu Shot

  All Manner of Obscene Things

  Not Dancing

  How I Write

  Simple Christian Charity

  Best Words, Best Order

  Don’t Worry

  Bukowski in a Sundress

  Cocktail Time

  Penis by Penis

  DOA

  How to Fall for a Younger Man

  I New York

  What Writers Do All Day

  Untrammeled

  The Process

  How to Be a Dirty, Dirty Whore

  Space

  Acknowledgments

  Plan D

  IT WAS THE LAST frenetic night of the big conference, and a few hundred people who weren’t too old or too hungover had gathered to party down one last time in the hotel ballroom. Under the requisite mirror ball, most of the attendees stood around while a few wild souls gyrated to oldies from the sixties. The DJ kept exhorting the crowd with comments: “You cats know how to rock ’n’ roll, don’t you?” “All right, everybody, here’s a blast from the past!” It could have been a conference of urologists or ghost hunters or nanoscientists, but it happened to be a conference of writers, many of whom were overmedicated professors released from their small-town colleges for a few days of intensified drinking, schmoozing, and airing of professional resentments.

  I was wandering the ballroom, stoned out of my mind, bothered by a left eye that was watering profusely from an accidental squirt of champagne earlier—the yeast in champagne, apparently, is the irritant—and I’d had too much scotch besides. The pot and alcohol were courtesy of my friend Jeff, whom I was now looking for. I was at that pleasant, slightly hysterical stage of being moderately fucked up, where the most appealing course of action is to get quickly to the next stage, that of near obliteration.

  Once an aspiring professor, Jeff was now the personal assistant to a famous writer; mostly, he interacted with the assistants of other famous writers. When Oprah called, her people talked to Jeff. It was a lucrative gig, so when it came to intoxicants, Jeff could afford the best. I thought of him as my supplier. Every time I walked out of a panel (Strategies for Reaching Underserved Communities in the Creative Writi
ng Classroom) or reading (Tribute to a Newly Dead Writer We Didn’t Pay Much Attention to Until Now) or hospitality suite party (Free Booze for Important People and Attractive Female Grad Students), he would be there to catch my eye and say, grinning, “Wanna go to my room and get high?” No doubt he hoped to get lucky, but all that would happen was we’d smoke his hallucinatory pot from his blue metal pipe and drink copiously from the several bottles lined up on his hotel dresser-cum-wet bar and gossip about other writers’ love lives and who was publishing where, and then we would fall awkwardly silent until I staggered up from one of the matching orange chairs and reeled back out to the next scheduled event.

  But now I’d lost Jeff, so it was time for Plan B: finding someone in the ballroom I recognized who could buy me a watered-down drink at the cash bar near the dancers. I caught sight of an associate professor named Lori, resplendent in a one-piece skintight tiger suit, but she was busy grinding her pelvis to “Louie Louie” in the direction of a much younger man. Good for Lori. I took another survey of the dance floor, dropped Plan B, and headed for the hotel bar upstairs. Plan C: find Jeff and get more pot and alcohol. Plan D, if it came to that, was to hit up a stranger at the bar.

  I find it’s important to have a plan, to keep some sense of control, some belief that even if there’s no order to the universe, even if it’s all chaos and darkness, you can navigate your way through it with some existential dignity. At this time of night I figured there would be plenty of drunk men to choose from, and I had on my tight black jeans and high-heeled combat boots and tight Betty Boop T-shirt. In other words, fish in a barrel. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need Plan E: go back to my room, throw myself on my orange bedspread, and cry uncontrollably.

  The hotel bar turned out to be jammed; there were so many conversations filling up the room I couldn’t even hear the light rock station that was usually playing. This was where all the hungover writers had sensibly repaired to after the evening’s readings and receptions. I spotted the back of Jeff’s head. Oddly, he had on a different shirt, and he seemed to have let his hair grow out a bit in the hour or so since I’d seen him last. Still, I strode right up and punched him on the shoulder.

  Okay, so it wasn’t Jeff. The man who turned around had bright green eyes—or maybe they were blue? The main thing, the important thing, was that he was dreamily attractive, and clearly as happily surprised to see me as I was to see him. Neither of us could believe our luck. I explained about Jeff as I glanced around the room, making sure he really wasn’t there to bother me, while my new friend ordered me a vodka and cranberry. In about ten minutes we had progressed from flirtatious conversation to kissing while the men to our right muttered drunkenly to each other about the luck of other guys.

  “How come this never happens to Cookie?” one of them said.

  His friend had been calling him John, so maybe Cookie was what he had named his dick. I could have told him why it never happened to Cookie—he was holding forth on safe sex, for one thing, dropping witticisms like “rubbers are for tires”—but I was busy exploring the inside of my new friend’s mouth with my tongue. His name was Ken; it was stitched in red on his jumpsuit. He’d just gotten off work, which involved installing refrigeration units or something equally, blessedly foreign to literary life, and he had come to visit his sister, who tended bar here. Seeing how wasted I was, she began serving me straight cranberry juice—not that I noticed. Ken mentioned it after I came back from a fourth trip to the bathroom off the lobby.

  When the bar closed, I led Ken up to the eleventh floor, where I was sharing a room with another writer, who’d known me long enough to have forgiven me already for more than one similar transgression. I hoped she was in a forgiving mood again. I cracked open the door; the room was dark.

  “Hi,” I whispered. “I brought a man home. Do you hate me for it?”

  From out of the darkness came her benediction: “No, Kim,” she said. “I love you for it.”

  It didn’t occur to me until later that this comment might have been ironic.

  We tried to be quiet. But gradually, as things got under way, Ken and I got louder. We laughed while he tried to get my boots unlaced in the dark and unpeel my jeans. We laughed when I knocked over a glass on the night table—the drink I’d brought with me from the bar. When his roving hands discovered my pierced navel, he said, “I’ve never met anybody with an earring in her belly button.” More laughter.

  In the next bed, my roommate turned over and sighed. Another turn, another sigh. Each was a long exhalation that might have meant she was turned on, or that she had had enough of my slutty ways and would never speak to me, let alone room with me, again. It was impossible to tell, and it wasn’t the time to do a check-in with our feelings. I was too busy feeling Ken’s tongue move to where his hands had been.

  We stayed up until almost dawn, and then he left without either of us exchanging cards—something I’d been doing with complete strangers for the past three days. Not that Ken would have had a card, but I could have given him mine, and maybe asked for his phone number. I could have called him up and asked whether he thought the universe was essentially random, or possibly invisibly organized according to some divine plan, and he could have responded with an appropriately hopeful metaphor from the world of refrigeration; I was casting him in the role that Robert De Niro played in the movie Brazil. But it was more like Last Tango in Paris, or the beginning of it, anyway, before the Marlon Brando character falls in love with the young French girl and becomes needy and pathetic and wants to know all about her. Ken and I had an understanding. We came, we stripped, we conquered loneliness for a few hours. That was it. He put his tongue down my throat one last time, and then we parted.

  The alarm woke me a couple of hours later. My head hurt so much I could barely move. But I had to catch the hotel shuttle to the airport. My friend—possibly now my former friend—had already left for her flight. She probably hated me for keeping her up all night, and for whatever horrible crime I had committed and forgotten; there seemed to be a few gaps in my memory. I couldn’t remember, for example, whether Ken and I had actually consummated our encounter, or just fooled around. I looked for a telltale shriveled condom or torn-open foil square: nothing.

  I had to pack and get on a plane, and I was going to puke at any minute. I stuffed everything into my suitcase and duffel and made it downstairs in time for the airport shuttle. I kept my sunglasses on and hoped I wouldn’t throw up on my fellow writers, who appeared not to notice that I could barely sit up as they discussed their programs, their students, their teaching loads, their hoped-for sabbaticals, their publications, their grant and fellowship applications, their literary journals, their lives that apparently, at least at this moment, did not involve lustful nights with refrigeration installers.

  On the plane at last, I kept my sunglasses on and found a free row of seats where I could lie down. I vowed never to drink again, if only I could make it home without throwing up. I vowed never to pick up another man in a bar, ever, even if I didn’t keep my first vow and found myself in a bar, stoned and drunk with one eye watering from champagne. And if I did end up with somebody, I was going to carry a concealed recorder and play everything back later so I would know for sure whether I had compromised myself.

  I did remember a few things. Ken told me he’d been left by a woman a couple of weeks before. He had come to the bar depressed, thinking about her; the idea of ever being with another woman, at that moment, was inconceivable. He was suffused with her, her, her. Her name was Kristi, with an i—he spelled it twice, to make sure I got it, while fumbling in the dark with the hooks on my leopard print bra. Sitting on the plane, traveling away from him, Ken Somebody, at hundreds of miles an hour, I could still feel his hands sliding down my back and smell the sweat I’d licked from his armpits. I was sick and sour-breathed, and in the white of my left eye a red blotch had appeared and was spreading like some miniature crimson star violent
ly being born. I was a writer who would never be a tenured professor, a throwback writer, the kind who came to conferences and drank too much and committed inappropriate acts with inappropriate people instead of chatting up somebody who might help my career. What career? I couldn’t really connect that word to anything I’d ever wanted as a writer.

  Curling up under a couple of thin airline blankets, taking deep, shuddering breaths, I thought about how stupid writers conferences were and how I never wanted to go to another one. I thought about poems I wanted to write, and about Ken and his girlfriend, Kristi, and about how long it had been since I’d been with a certain man who had drained the shot glass of my heart, slammed it on the bar, and walked away. Hurtling over towns and cities and bedrooms far below, I remembered that just before Ken left me, he called me an angel, and I realized then that, for him, at least, I was.

  How to Succeed in Po Biz

  MANY ARE THEY who harbor the burning desire to become successful poets and rise to the top of their profession. To see one’s name on the cover of a slender paperback, to have tens and perhaps even dozens of readers, to ascend to a lecture podium in a modest-size auditorium after being introduced by the less successful poet, who is unsure of the pronunciation of your name—these are heady rewards. And beyond these lie the true grail: generous grants, an endowed chair at a university, the big money that will allow you to write and remodel your kitchen while freeing you from reading the incoherent ramblings of inferior wannabes. How can you realize your dreams? Follow this step-by-step advice.

  First, receive some measure of recognition as a writer. Publish in a few literary journals of small circulation, and then publish a book or two with a struggling nonprofit press and receive a pittance of an advance on modest royalties. This is step one. Step one is not as simple as it sounds. Think of a little baby, of how long it takes it to raise its head without a hand cradling it, then how long to flail its arms about, until the happy day it manages to roll over of its own accord. Think of the months of crawling; multiply them a hundred times or so, and you will have some idea of the difficulty of step one.