Love Like Bukowski

The smell of the room groped at my clothes, my hair, my bare legs and arms, running invisible fingers along my neck and collarbone.  The smell was everywhere and I was inside it – inside last night’s weed and stale sex and dried sweat.  I sat at the head of the bed, hugging my knees to my chest while he lit up at the foot of the bed.  I made a nervous joke about what a wonderful rock’n’roll cliché it was to wake up, still wearing last night’s clothes, to see him smoking a joint while a Strokes song played.   

“It’s not a joint, it’s a one-hitter,” he told me as he took a drag.  “A joint is rolled with paper.”

I looked at the cigarette-like thing he held between his middle and index fingers.  That was a one-hitter.  I wondered if this was too.

He handed me a book from the table at the end of the bed.  Love is a Dog from Hell by Charles Buckowski.  I was familiar with Bukowski’s work and I knew this particular man liked him but there was something about that moment that was throwing me off.  I could not tell if I felt like I had temporarily stumbled into a life meant for some other woman who was very, very different from a woman like me or if – finally – I had happened upon a real-life moment that mirrored my heart of hearts.   

He watched me as I stared at the page he had opened the Bukowski book to.  I was trying to see what he was trying to show me but all I could see was how I had thought of him while I had been in France and how a moment like this was precisely what I had envisioned but now that I had it, I couldn’t tell if it was the beginning or the end.  I think he thought I didn’t like the book because he took it from my hands and instead showed me a poem he had been writing as potential lyrics for a new song.  He asked what I thought.  I couldn’t think.  The moment was far too close to my heart, too far away from any rational, critical thought.

He put on a song and lay back on the bed, motioning for me to lay beside him.  I moved my body towards his and rested my head on his chest.  The song played.  And then another song played.  And then another.   

Months earlier we had lay in bed together one January afternoon for just an hour or two, just talking and sharing the softest of kisses.  He had asked me if he had still had his mustache when I first met him. I had told him that he did and he had commented that he wouldn’t have thought a girl like me would be attracted to a guy with a mustache.  I had said nothing in the moment but I had thought about this comment on several occasions long after the moment had passed.  As I saw it, I was precisely the kind of girl who would be attracted to a musician with a mustache and I was stunned that he couldn’t see that.  Even if I no longer dressed the part, I was still a rebel with too many causes; I was still a black nail polish, blue ink poet.  I had wondered if this was his way of saying something similar to what a classmate had told me when I was seventeen, “Molly, you’re too smart for a boyfriend.”  I suppose there is always something that people have trouble seeing past.

Nonetheless, the night before – the night of which this was now the morning after – I had liked the look of my shirt falling to the floor and the way my purse was holding a Ziploc bag that had formerly contained weed and now contained a mix CD made just for me.  And I had liked the way, the night before that, I had stood in the cavernous, deserted upstairs of a rock’n’roll bar, alone in the very back room with my back to the door.  I had liked the way he had come up behind me and wrapped his arms around me.  I had liked the way my hands had touched the bare skin of his forearm and the way my lips had laid a kiss halfway between his wrist and elbow.  And I had turned my body around into his full-bodied embrace and pressed my head against his chest while his hands lightly cupped the sides of my head.  And after what seemed like a long moment that could never have been long enough I had looked up into his face.  He had looked back at me.  And I had liked the way our lips met in the middle of the shrinking space between our bodies.


In my life I am often impulsive but always in control.  With him I was neither.  I was unthinking, only feeling and moving and experiencing.  I was outside of my head but closer to myself than I was most days or with most people.  I liked that.  And I thought that maybe that was what truly great kisses were like – taking over your body and melting who you are and who you’ve been into who the other person is and who they’ve been.  And if that is what truly good kisses are like, then I love them.

I had told him in a phone-call minutes before my flight to Paris that I thought I could love him and he had said he thought he could love me too – but that he didn’t know.  And we had never spoken about it again.   

After a couple more songs we got up from the bed.  I put on my big, dark sunglasses to hide last night’s smeared eyeliner and he walked me to the train station.  I remember glancing at him as we walked down the street.  I loved his thick, dark curly hair and the way he looked in the skinny jeans he was wearing even though it was one of the hottest days of the summer.  And I felt a new emotion that I had never before experienced when walking beside a man: pride.   

We said goodbye at the train station.  He said would he see me soon.  I peered at him over the rim of my sunglasses and then we were both gone.  That was June and this is September.  That was it.  But I wouldn’t call it a one-hitter.   

In August I sent him a postcard.  I quoted a Bukowski poem from the book he had once showed me: I loved you in the way a man loves a woman he only writes to, never touches.  Then I added, keep in touch.