Back from the Dead and Desperate for Cash, Charles Bukowski Tries to Write a Chick Lit Novel

It was Angie’s first day at the hippest fashion magazine in the city. She stood outside her boss’s door, waiting for the courage to knock. Her U.C.L.A. friends said she was wasting her time working for a mag, but Angie knew better. They were just a bunch of bitchy dykes bent on dragging her down. Filthy whores living in their cotton-pressed hell.

She felt a pinch just below her ankle and cursed her shoes. Horribly cheap knockoffs of the Christian Louboutins that all the sophisticates were wearing. But Angie was on a budget. Her dad cut her off after graduation, and her trust fund was locked until she turned 30. “Try to earn your own way,” her father had said while drinking his scotch by the pool. The old man liked his liquor like his pussy: neat and dark.

But there was no escaping it. In fashion, you were only as good as your shoes. She knew women who skipped meals to buy Jimmy Choos, and her new boss, who consumed souls in place of food, had a pair of Manolo Blahnik faux leopard-print heels she would kill for. And she’d done it before. Back when she used to crash in the supply-room of Charley’s on Sunset. There was a bug-infested mattress where respectable businessmen would go to get sucked when they were slumming it. For Angie, it was a private haven. A respite between her modern-feminism and urban-sociology classes. But the day her nap was interrupted by a two-bit whore looking for a place to do business, she went nuts. Angie stabbed her with a broken beer bottle right in the moneymaker.

She dripped red with the whore’s blood as it ran a bright red line down the front of her von Furstenberg blouse like a Hugo Boss tie. Angie thought about that as she stood outside the door and pondered a new theory: Were faux-leopard-skin heels the new power tie?

She wanted to knock, but couldn’t. It was only 10:30 in the morning but, man, she had the taste. And this was no thirst that could be satisfied by a Jell-O shot off the ass of that way-cute office boy Trevor. No, she needed the hard stuff. Vodka. Gin. Anything that worked. She’d drink it down whole. She’d lap it up in a puddle off the office carpet. She’d take it in her quicker than that whore took the bottle. Angie thought fast and huffed some Wite-Out off the receptionist’s desk. Then she knocked three times. That’s right, girl. Angie Stern had arrived. Now get the fuck out of her way.