On Bukowski and Our Grime
by Lucia Auerbach
Tattooed on my ribs is a miniature version of Mark di Suvero’s statue, “Declaration.” Most of the time, it looks like a compass sitting on my skin. I lean over in front of the mirror in the mornings, standing nude and sopping wet. The vertebrae on my spine no longer protrude; it looks more like a long indentation now with skin flabs ramping down. I try to arch my back so I can see the tattoo in its true di Suvero glory. The ink distorts to the angle I long for it to be, but once I see it, the water drops bead over and I rearrange myself back into my towel.Though I don’t always believe in a god, I think being born in Venice Beach was a true blessing. The environment of conformity I was born into had nothing to do with homogeneity but everything to do with eccentricity. To fit in, you had to be unique—what a wonderful ethos to grow up in, a constant battle to display your individuality. My best friend, Emily, grew up just a few blocks away from me. During the summer, I would bike to her home already lathered in sunscreen with my swimsuit on under a pair of denim Daisy Dukes and a red Brandy Melville tank top with the straps knotted at the shoulders. We would walk down her street to the traffic circle that spilled out in front of the lighted Venice Beach sign installed by Abbot Kinney in the early 1900s. Walking under that sign leads you to the center of the Venice Beach boardwalk. There lay the poet mural, the graffiti wall, the skate park, the playground,the police station,and the Mark di Suvero “Declaration” statue.
As a little girl, I always saw “Declaration” as the sign that the beach was near and that I had truly arrived on the boardwalk. Acting as the uncomfortable identification of a middle point, di Suervo’s statue is a lighthouse for the “freaks” who live in Venice. All of those who wish for a beacon of direction and a safety blanket of artistic opportunity are swaddled under his large steel L beams.
Yet nothing is that simple. I was never to be on the boardwalk alone, my parents would tell me. A trusted adult had to be with us at all times—it wasn’t that they didn’t trust us, but they didn’t trust the people that would be around. My mom said it was best to go in the morning—the dew of the marine layer did paint the rotting boardwalk with some kind of naive ecstasy. It was mostly because the drunks would have gone to bed by the time the sun had been up for a few hours. Everything stunk and I was unaware of any other odor. The grotesqueness that manifested in Venice’s swampy air pervaded every animate or inanimate crevice. I grew up in a world where everything was kind of gagged at—sewage-water and needles-in-the-sand kind of gross. In Charles Bukowski’s poem “Venice, Calif.” he describes the macabreness that was Venice in the 1970s, saying that “the sun sandpapers it all down / red to brown to dark death, / the waves still trying / hopelessly / and the oil and the turds and the sailboats, / it is a most terrible place.” Bukowski's connection to Venice is irrevocable. The same grime, grit, eccentricity, and nauseating quality that make Venice can also be found in Bukowski’s prose. To think of the man is to think of brilliant verbiage, a white tee shirt soaked in cheap beer, the clarity of the shrewdest mind, the dry mouth and dried sweat crusted over you on a Sunday morning on top of a couch you don’t recognize, sitting alone on the beach and finally feeling content with yourself, picking sand and dandruff out of your hair while you wait on a subway bench, walking down the street listening to your favorite song, or looking at yourself in the mirror and then throwing up. Bukowski is a gross and complicated man—but instead of neglecting his oeuvre because of his controversial and perverted existence, I dove right into his collections in my teenage years once I had left Venice and longed for its eccentric polarity.
When I moved to Utah at age 15, it left me feeling a lot like the “other” in ideological ways that Venice would’ve embraced. Confronted with the reality of being the weird girl, I retreated into a protective literary hermit shell. Living in that shell brought me into the wonderful world of bookstores, specifically Ken Sanders Rare Book Store in Salt Lake City. When you walked into the place, you were immediately hit with the smell of must and mold. The books were placed on towering shelves, well over six feet, and were not big enough to contain Sanders’ entire collection. In the leftmost corner of the store was a section devoted to Bukowski’s poetry on the bottom shelf. I would cower over to the section, hanging my head down with shame, acting as though I had stumbled upon it and not beelined to it. Bukowski represents an exploration of discovering the everlasting youth of a self in a way that other poets rarely dare to attempt: he lingered in his degeneracy and refused to age out of it. In the community I found in Salt Lake’s rare book store aisles was a collective of young readers relishing in the notions of his ghastly: taboo sex and drug usage, overt egoism, the abandoned son. We found that our underdod traits were finally seen in their true disgusting flory in Bukowski’s poems. The dirt under our fingernails was plainly presented with no bells or whistles; there was no concealment or boorish traits we had picked up on.
I could have lived on that shelf and never left it and I would have been eternally satiated. The rest of us could have sat there until we blended into the dust bunnies alongside us. The grime removes us from any need to conform. We tried not to rid ourselves of the skin we wear. You can’t scrub it clean—there is no cleanliness, you know. If you care to be clean, you can swim in the ocean. The salt will lick your wounds and turn them into stitches. The waves will refresh your curls and get rid of any smell. It replaces the grime picked up on the sidewalk with the grit of sand. It is normal, and even natural, for us to be encrusted. Dirt is supposed to live in our pores, our hair is supposed to become unruly, and our nails are to be bitten to a nub. However, the desire to shove sand into bodily crevices and wait until your hands turn black to wash them is more than what you are born with. But that impulse lays right under the skin you are trying so hard to scrub clean. Keep scrubbing! Maybe you’ll find something under there—right? You can find some semblance of stability if your skin is stripped raw and all that is left is the smell of bleach.
To know grime is to have been intimate with isolation. The isolation in which even the mirror feels too extroverted—the plausible existence of another conscious—feels ridiculous. It is just me, my eyes, and the little bits of dust that live in the cracks of the wooden floor I've claimed as home. You can stare so intensely at those bits of dust. You are allowed to ponder where they came from. Because they cannot just be bits of skin and dirt that have been grinded so small that they hug each other so tightly that their atoms become one. That skin cell actually came from my mother. Everything that is mine was once hers—the rings I wear on each finger and the chains on my neck and wrist—they were once hers. The old punk tee shirts I wear and the large Doc Marten combat boots were hers too. So is my profane vocabulary, slender nose, freckled cheeks,and against-the-status-quo disposition. So that speck of grime laying next to the tip of my nose as I become one with the floor is not just something I can toss away so easily. It is made up of everything I am, have been, and will ever become. The grime is hereditary. As much as Bukowski was a nihilist, his prose created a twisted sense of optimism, an optimism that draws in misfits. If he really was as drunk and suicidal as he claimed to be, he would have been dead before the pen hit the paper. Bukowski knows the world sucks, but sometimes there’s a bit of joy in the sinful and indulgent that gives us just enough motivation to see the morning light. And when you wake, maybe that motivation lingers for long enough to dedicate yourself to something purposeful—for Bukowski and me, it’s the craft of writing. “It is possible to be truly mad and to still exist upon scraps of life.” The grime and the grit are sustainable, even vital, to those who know them well.
I perpetually sit in Bukowksi’s pond of dissonance, which pools at the edges of his pages. I kick my feet around in the muddy pond he has created. Looking down into the reflection in the water, I see the younger version of myself, clad in tied tank tops and holding tattered beach towels, looking up at an old Bukowski. We’re standing in front of Di Suervo’s statue. The only sensitivity that can be rendered from his face comes from his eyes; the crow's feet indicate some life lived that was happy. I tilt my head and try to register more about his face, but nothing comes to mind. We don’t speak to one another. I look down at his hands; there are decades worth of dirt caked into his cuticles. I look at mine; there is a day’s worth of blood and picking staining the sides of my thumbs. I look back at him now, and there stands Charles, looking down at me, and all I want to ask him is if he has looked in the mirror yet today, wondering if I should do the same.