Most Beautiful Woman in Town and Other Stories by Charles Bukowski

I just read that this is volume 2 of the reprint in 1983 of the 1972 short story collection printed by City Lights "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness."  I am reading volume 1 as well.  What can I say, Buk is Buk.  He is one my favourite writers because of the raw honesty of his writing.  He doesn't beat around the bush. He calls a cunt a cunt. He calls a cock a cock.  No Latin terms, no euphemisms.  He describes his morbidly fat characters as morbidly fat, not overweight or anything lighter.  He describes the crazies as crazies, not victims of society with unfortunate upbringing.  He describes the whores as whores, the murderers as murderers, the sadists as sadists, the pedophiles as pedophiles, exactly as the garbage that they are, no punches pulled.

However, I have to say that some of the stories in this collection traumatized me.  The Murder of Ramon Vasquez is horrible in its direct description of homosexual rape, extreme torture and murder.  It is even worse knowing that it was based on a real event of a silent movie actor.  The Fiend is absolutely traumatizing description of a rape of a 6 year old girl by a pedophile.  I get the honesty and the direction, but - still traumatizing. I wish I never read it. The White Beard is also disgusting, partly because of the 13 year old hooker and partly because the eating of a watermelon mixed with cum.  A Drinking Partner describes a horrible attach on a pregnant woman, where the fetus dies, and then a murder of her husband. I get that these things happen and there are such monsters out there, looking just like the rest of us, but one of the reasons I stopped watching the news is exactly these kinds of stories.  I just don't want that information in my brain.  I know it exists, but I don't want to have it in my memory banks.

Of course that there are many good stories in this collection that did not traumatize the reader like the ones mentioned above.  Life and Death in the Charity Ward describes the cruelness and banal evil of the 'free' hospitals in the United States and the people (?) who work there.  The title story is touching narrative about a suicide. My Big-Assed mother is hilarious in its honesty and description of rotten cops.  I don't care much about his horse racing stories, as I always found that kind of gambling the most boring of all possible forms of gambling, but there is some very detailed advice given by Buk. Good literature, but not something to read while eating.