"Hot Water Music" by Charles Bukowski, summary

The collection "Hot Water Music" was published in 1983. The book consists of thirty-six short stories about the seedy underbelly of American cities. The characters move from cheap rented rooms to furnished apartments, squander their last cents at the racetrack, guzzle whiskey in dimly lit bars, and get caught up in debilitating scandals.

Backyard Bohemians

Elderly painters Jörg Svensson and Serge Marot are languishing in poverty. Due to his back pain, Serge pins his canvases to the ceiling and paints while lying down. At an expensive restaurant, the friends get into a drunken brawl, beat the maitre d’ with a cane, and flee without paying the bill.

Outside the window of his Hollywood apartment, Henry Chinaski sips scotch, scolds a well-fed Camus, and entertains random guests. The homeless writer Stobbs sleeps in a glass shower stall. Poverty is suffocating the neighborhood. Hollywood Hills hangers-on profiteer off other people’s entertainment expenses, while the insane wife of one of them runs from room to room with a butcher’s cleaver, threatening reprisals for imaginary slights. A year later, the lame Roger collects thousands in insurance money for an accidental fall from a balcony.

In a cheap room in a Christian dorm, the paralyzed poet Bernard Stachman is fading away. His wife ran him over with her car. The filthy old man urinates past a bottle, keeps a pair of bronze women’s stiletto heels under his pillow, and collapses into a gutter in the pouring rain.

Deadly Bonds and Nightclubs

That night, Margaret recalls her husband’s long-ago kiss with his rival. She takes a loaded revolver from a dresser and coldly pumps two bullets into the sleeping Theodore’s chest. Bleeding profusely, Ted snatches the gun, shoots his wife in both legs, and smashes the glass with his shoe. Enraged, Margaret reloads the revolver and blasts her husband’s lower jaw just before the police arrive.

In a dimly lit bar, a skeleton behind the counter mixes drinks in front of a stunned patron. Elderly lady Maud reflects on the burning of Joan of Arc and sets her own lavender dress on fire as a testament to her fortitude. The fire is extinguished on the floor. The bartender declares the skeleton a fiction.

Regulars of cheap dive bars flit along Alvarado Street. A rough-faced, painted-haired woman gets into the narrator’s car. At an intersection, a young traffic cop gets into a violent fistfight with a passerby, while prisoners in the county jail groan under the brutal blows of their guards.

In a motel room, three hungover authors guzzle warm beer amidst the sounds of vomit. Enormous fat men weighing nearly four hundred kilograms leap into the pool with a crash. A drunken magazine editor shouts filthy taunts from the window. The enraged giants nearly break down the hotel room door.

At the bar, Mel shares a horrific story of cannibalism with the bartender. A couple he knew lured a teenage hitchhiker, chopped his body into pieces, and filled the freezer with the meat. The frightened bartender points a gun at the guest. Mel smashes a bottle in the man’s face and cold-bloodedly shoots him with a trophy Luger.

Distortions of the flesh and other people’s fantasies

Looking for cheap housing, Chinaski answers newspaper ads. An eccentric yoga teacher interrogates the writer about his sexual preferences and takes him away in a white car to Hidden Hills.

In the bedroom, Tony is preparing to seduce his wife’s friend. Suddenly, her mystic brother, Damion from Detroit, materializes right on the bed. Flashing his fists, the guest instantly disappears along with his sister.

School memories bring back images of a friend’s mother with horse teeth. Teenagers would launch balsa wood airplanes and peer up a drunk woman’s skirt until one of the panicked boys defiled her thigh.

At a poetry recital, Viktor Valoff shrieks meaningless lines at the audience. Chinaski sarcastically mocks the poems from the audience and hurries off to watch basketball with a friend.

Chinaski is brought to the doctor with a severe wound to his reproductive organ. The injury was caused by a broken glass vase after he kissed the unstable blonde Bernadette.

Everyday survival and hangover reckoning

In the morning, bank manager Kevin learns of a bizarre accusation. Relatives claim that at the previous night’s party, a drunk man dragged two little girls into a closet. Kevin himself remembers nothing. At a family meeting, the culprit meekly agrees to pay for the services of a child psychologist, attributing his rampant drinking to all-consuming boredom.

Writer Joe Meyer suffers from a hangover as phones ring. Requests to speak at a militant rally give way to a trip to the Santa Anita Racetrack, where his modest winnings melt away before his eyes. At home, the writer is besieged by a toothless janitor and annoying students.

In the entrance hall of an apartment building, Harry regularly rapes his neighbors between floors by pressing the elevator’s emergency button, then returns to a quiet family life with his submissive wife in the kitchen. In the bed of a casual lover, the maniac suddenly loses his erection and immediately attacks a new passenger in the elevator.

Lonely Margie sips brandy while listening to Chopin nocturnes. During a street quarrel, a neighbor tosses a clay head of the controversial poet Marx Renoffsky right under a rose bush. The woman carries the sculpture to the piano, showering it with kisses, until the real, drunk poet barges in with a rude advance.

Barney’s morning begins with brutal violence against his wife. In the kitchen, the tyrant yells about lost laundry and spilled coffee. Shirley calmly declares her icy hatred for her husband. The enraged husband slaps his wife across the face, pins her to the bed, threatens to kill her, and leaves for work.

Literary tours and strange alliances

Chinaski’s university lectures are met with cold fuss, an approaching tornado, and drunken flights. The author signs his usual autographs, argues about the war at Chicago airport, and returns to his faithful Anne.

A girl named Myra introduces her drinking buddy to her lover, Albert. The four-armed circus freak lives on welfare, presses phone buttons, and caresses his friend with all his limbs.

Visiting the well-bred Louise, the narrator listens to confessions about a visit from a young lover. A former rock star stumbles into his room with lines of cocaine.

The phone rings at night with drunken calls from Joanna, describing her perverted Texas lover. Chinaski’s memory returns to editor Malloch, who kept two dogs and a screaming parrot in his hotel room.

Elderly writer Max Miklovic loses a young admirer because he doesn’t want to commit to marriage.

An empty house and street clashes

At his father’s funeral, the deceased’s forty-three-year-old mistress, Maria, collapses onto the coffin, sobbing. Henry takes the woman back to his parents’ house, dons his father’s dressing gown, drinks old wine, and spends a wild night with her, skipping the actual burial at the cemetery.

A week later, a greedy crowd of neighbors gathers outside the empty house in Arcadia, pilfering paintings, dishes, furniture, and a toaster, while simultaneously buying gardening tools for a paltry fifteen dollars. Left within the bare walls, Henry goes out to water the rose bushes.

The phone rings with the complaints of a depressed writer named Paul, who has been dumped by his girlfriend. Cynical Harry advises his friend to get his act together, while simultaneously finding out details about the woman’s new lover and squeezing a pustular pimple in the mirror.

At a local bar, regulars lash out at an unsociable guest. The rage stems from his refusal to mourn the orphans who perished in a fire. The narrator calmly finishes his glass and disappears into the night.

An interview with the respectable poet Janice Altris turns into a parade of academic complacency among the groomed mountain slopes.

On a chilly street in East Hollywood, a drifter named Leslie knocks down a random passerby, slits his throat for a box of matches, and returns to his closet to listen to the radio.

Reckoning on the Dark Side

Lucy’s rejected friend meets a young artist, Don, drinks herself to the point of vomiting, and unsuccessfully tries to seduce the owner of the studio.

Marty waits for his lover in his hotel room. Former stripper Lilly discusses the habits of female praying mantises, caresses him, and suddenly bites off a piece of his flesh.

Delivery man Frank takes out his pent-up rage on two young men on the highway. He beats up the attackers on the flatbed truck, steals a folding knife, and goes off to drink with a stranger at a roadside bar.

A young regular at Benny’s tracks down a brazen bartender in the parking lot who cheated him out of forty dollars. With a few blows from a baseball bat, the avenger breaks his assailant’s knee, takes his wallet full of cash, and disappears into a flophouse.

Elderly gambler Ted rents a motel with a seductive blonde after his triumph at the races. Waking up in his room, the bewildered old man discovers his clothes, money, and keys missing, and finds a mocking farewell written in lipstick on the dusty window.