Love-Love-Love

Lucia scolds me for leaving the lid of the potty up, this is taboo in our house, I say, 

yes dear, and she says, 

just make sure you close the lid next time burro and don’t try to butter me up. 

It’s awful, my words are nearly always an offence.

A man must partly give up being a man
with womenfolk.  

If a thin man is with a fat woman, she has to give everything it she’s got because she’s lucky to have him.

How bout the fat girl who's loved by a thin man she's gotta stay on top of things, especially her man. 

shit happens,

Some guys like a women that treats em mean and doesn't care.

It's bein in the lobby of a Miami Hotel looking for love, love, love, or when your woman spends the night with another man.

Remeber that love comes and goes in life. 

In Bukowski’s book, Women, he writes that he never got laid  until he was a famous writer— the dude was fugly to the bone. 

Women fucked him because they were attracted to his mind.

Joanna Bull, a voluptuous blonde former girlfriend of rock star drummer Levon Helm, sent him samples of her poetry and began visiting him at his bungalow in East LA. 

Miss Bull knew he wanted to sleep with her. 

One night she got loaded and stayed at his house late remembering,   

when we got to the moment of truth, wrestling around and doing stuff, preparing ourselves, he realized I hadn’t taken off my panties and was disgusted. 

Afterward, she goes into the toilet and throws up, saying, 

it was unbearable for me, 

If Joanna Bull had a lick of kindness she would have mercy fucked Bukowski, regardless of his looks.

In his book Ham and Rye, he mentions going to ROTC instead of the gym because he was ashamed to wear shorts and exposing the boils on his legs. 

Around the same time, his old man, Heinrich, sent Charles to a dermatology clinic where a nurse spent hours painfully sucking pus and blood out of his large cysts and boils with a syringe. After a few weeks of the horrid process, Buk’s face and body looked worse. 

By the fifties, Bukowski’s Acne Conglobata was a non-issue. 

Buk claimed the majority of what he wrote was literally what had happened in his life, representing himself and his experiences at the bottom of American society. 

Simply put, his life was as undomesticated as his writing.

Is There Anything to Take Away Here?

                                      

Humbolt begs Lolita who's passed pubescence but is younger than 17,

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul— Lo-lee-ta the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap. Lo. Lee. Ta…

Vladamir Nabokov

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York… 

Sylvia Plath

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…

Hunter S. Thompson

These examples of opening paragraphs written by authors I love.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Earnest Hemingway 

Hemingway’s opening paragraph paints a picture for the reader.

She quietly dresses, slipping into a white thong, then covering her nakedness with an oversized Oxford shirt. Outside, she gets on her Vespa scooter, moments later she's at Dog Beach where she rents an umbrella and folding beach chair from Lazy Carlos’s. 

Figaro Lucowski 

How does this opening paragraph from my story Lazy Carlo’s stand up against the others here?

More on Hemingway—

He was a man’s man who couldn’t get a handle on bohemianism. He didn't fit in with Stein, Elliot, and Pound. 

The sea fish, Marlins, and Swordfish he spent hours trolling from his boat, Pilar, got revenge on him when he fell ill with stage IV skin cancer while living in Idaho in 1961. 

In the end, bohemians have the best time, from TS Elliot to modern rockers, the Beats, jazz musicians, and artists.

James Baldwin said, commenting on life in the 60s, 

Everybody’s journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does homosexuality. 

There are abundant articles on the web about pain, heartache, pleasure, and happiness, stuff you read in Psychology Today— words, words and more words, soapy stuff, experts and more experts writing the same twaddle, none of it out of the box.

Experts make the point that we are living in a world where people take too much psychotropic dope, particularly anti-depressants and mood stabilizers— I’m on anti-depressants, why? Because my body and soul were consumed by a black spirit.

A few years ago I met a German psychiatrist in Pai, Thailand, an unorthodox hippy town in the Kao Tao mountains that looks like a Spaghetti Western set.

We drank Thai beer, Leo, with ice like Thais do. Earl (the shrink) says to me, 

psychotrop drogen sind nutzlos, after a month the body becomes immune so you must continue increasing the dosage, so there's no reason to prescribe them. 

I got the vibe the German shrink was on the run— Pai’s a scene where people can slip away from the de facto world, a no man’s land, or from the law even, for writing bogus scripts.  

You must go to jail to know what it's like.

I'm at home in bed, not in jail. Millions of men and women in the world are doing time as I write this— 

God bless the blind poets and poetesses doing time because they can’t look up at the moon for inspiration.

God bless your computer and typewriter— they are faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a flash.

They Killed, Henry, John Berryman, & Me

 

                                        

Fading away on tramadol and ganja takes my pain away, Lord take me to the upper room.

Keep your nose to the grind Henry, breathe easy God says.

John Berryman wrote Dream Songs— here's number 1,

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it that made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, we survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be
once again a sycamore. I was

kicked off the stage by the MC.

I wrote the following poem in 2013. 

They Killed, Henry, John Berryman & Me

John Berryman, high on something, scribbling a poem in the English Department,

remembering 

a  hot, mixed-up, cockeyed day in Chinatown at an opium den, dreaming of wooden ships, the god Neptune and flying fish.  

The Bronksville Hotel Henry is pulverized by cockroaches, mosquitos, and lice magnifying 1000 times in the coterie of his dying brain.

He told the screws to mix his ashes with tobacco and Bougainvillea pedals in a tin of Prince Albert Tobacco, and to place it in the trunk of a Cadillac sedan, because in his words,

there won't be a body this time.

The street people follow the cheerleader to Wicker Zoo where she hands the gorilla a hand-rolled Cuban cigar.

King Kong lights a blunt and blows smoke rings at the sun.

All in all, it was a lovely remembrance somewhere south of Elysian Field.

Where are the Valiums?

Where are the valiums? 

It will come to me in a second, darling.

Driving home the other day I saw a truckload of pigs headed to the slaughterhouse. It breaks my heart every time I see it, I haven’t had a thimble full of meat in ten years or more, sure I crave it, ribs, bacon, pork chops, but I can't get around slaughtering pigs.

Barbecued ribs have been an institution for hundreds of years in America for Chinese Americans, Afro-Americans, and whites.

State fairs throughout the US hold rib cook-offs every summer. 

The Holy Quran states that you can eat pig meat if you’re starving and there's no way out— Jews that eat Kosher think the same.

Some would eat human flesh if they had nothing else— in the film Alive, the starved survivors eat flesh from the bodies of their dead comrades to survive.

Any cannibal worth his or her salt wouldn’t think twice about eating people, the Wari of Brazil celebrate victory on the battlefield roasting captured enemy alive and eating them. 

Personally, I can't stomach pig or human meat. Let's move on.

Henry and Lucia have a noon reservation at Conch Republic in Key West for the yearly exotic meat festival and he asks his wife,

what's the fare at Conch Republic,

the usuals dear, alligator, wildfowl, escargot, jellyfish,

pigeon? 

Yes, it’s wildfowl,

they’re flying rats, 

they mate for life sweetie, it's romantic. 

At the Conch Republic, the couple is greeted by the owner Carlos anouncing,

it’s the most beautiful man and woman in Key West, I hope you all didn’t eat cause we got an exotic meat spread that’s gonna knock your socks off, go help yourself it’s cafeteria style.

The couple orders a pitcher of a local brew, Funky Buddha, then go fill their plates with exotic meat. 

Back at the bar, Carlos points at their plates saying, 

you got a croc, pigeon, eel, we did what we could to cook jellyfish, but the creature's acids burned our mouths.

Henry tastes the pigeon saying, 

damn, this is better than chicken, pass the salt and pepper darling.

They drain the pitcher of Funky Buddha and order another, Lucia insists on Cubano beer, Buccaneer, Carlos tells em, 

the salad bar's ready, 

at the salad bar, they fill bowls of mac and cheese, cole slaw, mashed sweet potatoes, and poi, bringing the bowls to the bar on a tray. Henry wonders aloud asking,

Jesus, Carlos, you can't be makin any money here, 

Henry, we make money on the booze and break even on the meat product, my brother Ray owns a butcher shop, I get it at cost,

nice Henry says, 

Carlos speaks in Spanish to Lucia.

I came to Miami in an overcrowded rust bucket during the Mariel Boatlift in 79, Fidel shit all over El Presidente Carter, trust me, Lucia, nobody expected the Cubans to do so well in Miami,

sí Carlos, el pueblo Cubano del Miami fit in well here, cono Latino is always welcome, Henry grins saying, 

yes, everyone loves Latin pussy, it makes the world go round.

Wait, Carlos says,  

as the two get up to go, Carlos slips Henry a brown envelope wrapped in a napkin saying, 

I think you're going to need this wee man, love you guys!

The couple's loaded, holding on to each other for balance as they walk home and go to bed. 

Later at 9PM, Henry wakes Lucia and they walk out to the patio. Lucia goes inside to mix up drinks in the blender, bloody marys garnished with stalks of cellary, bringing them to the patio table.

Henry lays out 8 lean lines of cocaine row by row on the tabletop. 

They roll dollar bills, snorting the protean stuff, Henry asks Lucia, 

where are the valiums, darling?

Blackbird's Warning

Henry and Lucia are in the kitchen drinking coffee and munching on donuts when Henry looks out the window and says, 

let's go to the beach darling.

They dress quickly, down-sizing, wearing extra large tank tops over swimsuits, then packing beer, sushi, and hashish in their iced-down Coleman cooler.

Reaching St. Vicent's Beach, they park their scooter and walk mid-way down the beach where they string a cheap Mexican hammock between two arching palms, realizing they're alone and stripping down. 

Settled, Lucia lies in the hammock, Henry grabs a couple beers from the pint-sized cooler, handing one to her, they're thirsty and Lucia says, 

the first sip always tasted the best.

They pull on a hash pipe, passing it back and forth, Lucia chuckles and says,

I can see Cuba, bebe.

Oh Yeah, what does it look like? 

Like pain and suffering, quierdo.

Sweating, they run into the waves, then body surf, losing themselves in it, riding the surf until exhausted, then walking ashore and falling asleep under the palms. 

They nap awhile, then walk as the sun sets in the West, tired, hungry, loaded, and wanting to go to bed. 

Finally reaching the parking area where they load up the Vespa, revving it as they take off.

At their bungalow, they hustle to the patio and shower, rinsing off in cold water and then getting into their hot sauna. Henry lifts Lucia’s thick and fleshy ass on the top of the sauna, resting it flat, spreading her legs to tongue her clit.

Gyrating as she cums she spritzes pee in his face, he laps it up, grinning. 

After a nap they get up at eight, walking along the ravine to Ricco's Bar and Grill,  a friend locals call Blackbeard.

They order Rum Cocas, a one-of-a-kind blend of coca oil, coconut water, and rum.

Henry kisses Lucia shamelessly tonguing her then coming up for air saying,  

life is a dream for us and I'll love you forever, 

you swear, bebe?

Yes, I do— say Blackbeard we're going to toast loving forever how bout a few more drinks?

OK, but I'm gonna warn ya, they sneak up on ya dog, Lucia says, 

oh, you're a perro now bebe?

all three laugh. 

After eating the lovers begin to come down, staggering out of Blackbeards and making a B line for home.

In a short time they reach the bungalow and are so loaded they lose control of their motorbike, crashing into the Bougainvillea bushes, getting scratched up, and going to the kitchen where they lovingly tend to each other's wounds, Lucia says, 

quierdo, we were warned by Blackbird about the Rum Cocos, and we didn't listen! 

Yes, Lucia. 

We Three Kings

Some Christmas memories are atypical and have nothing to do with—garlands, cozy fireplaces, ornate cookies, eggnog, the giving of stuff, and mistletoe. 

This is a story about a seasonal memory that has everything to do with the magic of youthful adventure and little to do with Christmas.

Henry and his parents traveled to Acapulco from Mexico City on Christmas eve,1966, staying at The Las Hamacas Hotel, across the street from Acapulco Bay in the central city.

The Lucowski family show at the small-time hotel in a pink Cadillac limousine at 10 AM, checking in and going to the canopied dining area by the pool for a late breakfast. 

The hotel serves a homespun and memorable breakfast— freshly baked hard rolls, Churros or Mexican donuts, sliced avocados, tomatoes and cucumbers, bananas, fresh strawberry papaya, eggs, bacon, and brewed coffee. All of it served in a fun, relaxed manner on tables covered with white linen. 

The Mexican waiters wearing white chaquetas and black pantalones are known for their dark sense of humor— directed at each other and the gringo guest. 

Like, telling a woman with a wig on, 

señora your hair is bonita! 

Or, saying to a kid who isn't eating,

Niño, finish your breakfast or Papá Noel is going to bring you coal for Christmas. 

And, telling an elderly woman who's dining with her husband, 

señora, take it easy on the Red Snapper you're eating, he looks like your husband.

After breakfast, Henry goes across the street to a taco bar on the bay, his parents will go for souvenirs, crap really— bogus machetes that couldn’t cut butter, silver from Taxco that turns green, cheap sombreros wrapped with Shrink Wrap, stuff!

Anyway, Henry's sitting at a taco bar on Acapulco Bay drinking a beer at a small table. He puts a hand full of pesos in a jukebox filled with 45 RPM records, the hippy music of the day— Sopwith Camel, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Hendrix, The Doors, and Jefferson Airplane. 

At 16 he’s an easily tempted, astute lover of everything native— psychedelic music, incense, exotic and erotic literature, who’s constantly reading— Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anis Nin, William Faulkner, William Butler Yeats, Kerouac, and even the Kama Sutra, but still a virgin.    

He notices a young couple approaching, crossing the street, coming from his hotel, they are walking arm in arm. As they pass he leans towards them, asking them to sit down, they oblige.  

Their siblings, Juan and Moon, 16 and 15 respectively, also staying at The Las Hamacas Hotel.

Moon’s fetching, willowy with long chestnut hair, wearing glasses, looking nymph-like, a child who's becoming a woman. Her older brother Juan is cool, lean, tanned, with long sideburns, his hair parted in the middle, a member of the Carte Blanca surf club of Southern California.

After a beer, Juan sees a shadowy figure walking the beach who locals call El Mago, The Magician. 

Juan stands, running to catch up with El Mago, then walking down the shore with him.

Henry and Moon talk over beers at the cafe, for them, love is in the air.

When Juan returns, he sits down at the small table, the lover’s trance fades as he says, 

look under the table.  

Juan flashes a plastic bag full of golden buds, Acapulco Gold. Henry was familiar with ganja, having read about it in Kerouac’s On the Road, and Henry Miller’s book Big Sur.

At sundown, the trio walks across the street to The Las Hamacas Hotel, going to Juan and Moon’s room. Their mother is staying next door and she respects their privacy. Something, Henry’s parents didn’t see as an innate right of youth.  

They sit on the single beds at the center, facing each other as Juan rolls a joint. Eventually, he lights it, instructing the nascent lovers on the art of taking a pull.

Draw steady, hold the smoke in long enough for it to flow through your veins, heart, and brain. Whatever you do, don’t fish lip the joint. Moon laughs at her brother saying,

fish lip? Where'd you dig that up? 

After smoking awhile, they laugh at nothing, and anything— exaggerated, fun, laughter. 

Finishing the doobie, the trio walks through the patio door to the pool, sitting poolside with their legs dangling in it, tossing fallen flower peddles into the blue water, watching ripplets expand outwards as their chakras open magnifying their senses. 

Henry stands on the poolside, bolting to his hotel room, returning with a paperback copy of Yeat's The Land of the Heart’s Desire, going to the diving board and standing at the end, reciting poetry,

Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!  

Juan and Moon stand and applaud.

On Christmas Day they wake at sunrise, giving their parents the run-around, taking a taxi to a beach on the Pie de la Cuesta coast. There's a rundown film location behind the beach where scenes of Johnny Weissmuller's last Tarzan film were shot by RKO in 1948.

The beach is packed with Mexicans who went to Mass on Christmas Eve to honor the Baby Jesus.

Going to the beach on Christmas Day helps the Mexicans to shake off the stifling circumstance of praying for hours in church pews the night before.

You can hear Ranchero music blaring from beachside cantinas, shacks made of bamboo and thatched straw roofs serving, fresh grilled chicken and fish, tortillas, refried beans, rice, beer, tequila, and soft drinks.

Juan, Henry, and Moon walk away from the crowd to an isolated area of the beach with a single cantina. They place a large Las Hamacas bedspread on the sand, strip down to their swimsuits, and drink Pacifico beer.

Juan body surfs while the precocious teens, Henry and Moon, talk about esoterica— 

What is life? 

Is there a God? 

Did Martians create the human race?

The young lovers bond intellectually, physically though, their both virgins.

At sunset, the trio catches a taxi back to The Los Hamacas Hotel and go to their room. The virgin lovers lay in one single bed and Juan passes out on the other. 

At this point, Henry's parents were missing him and suspected something was going on.

Henry and Moon make out on the bed, breathing hard, deep kissing, fumbling, confused, finally getting naked under the sheets— getting closer to first-time coitus.   

Hit and miss, he locates Moon’s pink taco and gently puts the meat to it, getting off in record-breaking time, 30 seconds. She's surprised, shaken some, and she can't recollect feeling anything.

As for Henry, he couldn't have pulled it off if he hadn't read the Kama Sutra.

In that it was their first time, the lovers clean up more than they need to, Moon spends 40 minutes in the shower. 

They walk out the patio door to the pool. Henry’s mother, Linda, is waiting and she corners him. He realizes he missed Christmas dinner with his parents and she reads him the riot act,  

Henry, what were you doing in THAT hotel room with THAT girl? Where have you been for the last two days? Your father and I have been worried sick. You could have left a note at least.

She smacks him around, cross-slapping him European style on both cheeks in front of Moon. 

He's more embarrassed than hurt.

His mother goes on with the sermonizing, she’s juiced on Martinis.

Henry, you missed Mass. It's Christmas Day, a time for families to be together and to pay respect to the Lord. I can smell beer on your breath, and God knows what you've been doing with THAT girl? Go to confession tonight.

Linda opens her purse and pulls out a Rosary, handing it to him, knowing her son is beyond hope and backsliding. He says to her, 

Ma, you drink too much, so forget about sainthood!

Speechless, his mother does an about-face and goes to meet his father somewhere.

In spite of missing Mass, Christmas Dinner, and getting chewed out by his mother, the happenings over the last few days are an awakening for Henry.

Maybe, the magic of new love discovered was paramount to— garlands, cozy fireplaces, ornate cookies, eggnog, the giving of stuff, and mistletoe.  

Juan, Henry, and Moon— We Three Kings, or Two Kings and Queen, win the crapshoot of life, this time around anyway.