Charles Bukowski’s "The Hottest Woman in Town" Summary

The stories center on marginalized individuals, laborers, racetrack regulars, and residents of Los Angeles’s cheap flophouses. The plots revolve around physical frankness, drunkenness, and street incidents. This book is a collection of short fiction by Charles Bukowski, published in 1983 after the larger 1972 edition was split into two separate volumes.

In 1981, Italian director Marco Ferreri made the feature film "The Story of Ordinary Madness," based on the book’s title story and several other stories. Ornella Muti played Cass in the film.

This collection forms a duology with the book "Stories of Ordinary Madness." All of these texts were originally published as a single volume in 1972.

Love on the Sidelines and the Tragedy of Cass

The title story recounts the narrator’s encounter with a young Indian woman, Cass, in a bar on the West Side. A rare beauty, she regularly disfigured her own face with pins and broken glass to test the sincerity of men. The narrator spends days with her on the beach and proposes a life together. Cass declines. Soon, the bartender reports her suicide at the age of twenty.

In New Orleans, penniless drifter Charlie Serkin finds temporary shelter with hat shop owner Marie Glaviano. She weighs about 130 kilograms and sews elegant hats. Charlie kills a spider in the restroom, drinks beer, and shares an antique bed with Marie. In the morning, the drifter leaves the house.

In another story, the hero goes up to a Mexican woman’s room while her sick brother lies behind a partition. The woman dons a celluloid dildo and starts bizarre conversations about bullfighters. After collecting the charged battery, the narrator returns home and reads a children’s book about chickens to his young daughter. In a noisy train station bar, a drunken regular argues at length with a street burglar about trigonometry and the high-profile political assassinations of the 1960s, after which he hastily downs a strong cocktail with a young waitress in a gray wig.

Exhausting work and fights

At the meatpacking plant, Bukowski poses as a former boxer nicknamed Stardust Boy in order to get a hard job. The foreman forces the newbie to catch bloody carcasses and shove beef ribs onto blunt ceiling hooks in the back of a long van. After two hours of hard labor, the hero abandons his government-issued boots at the gate.

A five-hundred-dollar loss at the racetrack forces the hero to take a job as a Sunday newspaper delivery boy, along with a crowd of vagrants. The company assigns him to serve its own neighborhood. Embarrassed by his acquaintances, the delivery boy dumps his stacks of newspapers on the floor of an abandoned car and hurries to his friend Katie’s. On Tuesday, he wins one hundred and forty dollars at the races.

At an auto parts warehouse, the narrator meets a young strongman named Jeff. The two friends get drunk in dive bars and watch as their criminal acquaintance, Gramercy Edwards, dismembers a guard dog with a knife. Later, at a Chinese restaurant, Jeff throws a pregnant customer and her companion down a steep flight of stairs, fights fiercely with a dozen cooks, and then suddenly stops, bursts into bitter tears, and loudly calls for his mother.

In a labor camp near the border, fruit pickers live under the constant thunder of shells. A burly man named Herb desecrates a watermelon and forces former schoolteacher Talbot to eat the pulp and seeds. In a dark basement, the men encounter a busty woman, after which Talbot decides to stab the offender to death in the middle of the night.

Grotesque mechanisms and phantasmagorias

Family life with his secretary, Sarah, results in Henry’s physical decline due to beatings and a strict diet. His wife reduces her husband’s height to fifteen centimeters, places him on a silver chain, and makes him dance on a hot radio for fun. During yet another sadistic encounter, the midget finds a long hatpin and plunges the point straight into Sarah’s heart. The fugitive hides in a grocery store warehouse, cracks the combination to the safe containing the proceeds, and gradually regains his former weight.

In a secret room above the bar, German scientist Von Braschlitz displays a mechanical woman, Tanya, to his clients. The narrator spends passionate hours with the artificial beauty, while his friend, Indian Mike, is maimed to death by the robot. The police tear Tanya apart, revealing hidden wires and tubes.

At the employment agency, employees Bagley and Danforth force the unemployed through the press, draining them of their willpower, dignity, and rebellious spirit. The indoctrinated accountant, Herman, agrees to work seven days a week to buy a color television. Soon, Danforth forces his drunken partner into the machine and leaves to be with his wife.

On a rainy morning, secret service agents capture the US President at the White House. Surgeons perform organ transplants and transplant the body of the aging Adolf Hitler, who has taken over the White House. The real head of state is taken away by orderlies to a closed hospital under the name Mr. Tilson.

Literary circles and underground chronicles

Underground newspaper editor Joe Hyanz persuades Bukowski to write a column for a new city weekly. The publication of explicit material attracts the attention of federal postal inspectors, who summon the author for questioning at a government building. The publication goes bankrupt due to court fines for publishing nude photographs and the editor’s constant domestic disputes.

In the publisher’s office, Henry Mason receives importunate visitors. The unsuccessful author Burkett accuses the editors of bias and throws cigarette butts on the carpet. Another writer, Ainsworth Hockley, smokes cigars, discusses the anatomy of athletes, and begs for an advance for an unwritten story about a space orgy.

While the French poet André is away, Bukowski stays at his house. A young admirer, Wendy, appears on the doorstep with her companion. Mistaking the hungover guest for the famous host, the visitors drink wine, argue about Ezra Pound, and become intimate in the living room.

In a remote shack, the poet Sanchez shows a guest his walls covered with aphorisms and a photograph of himself ejaculating, which required ten attempts with the self-timer. At his typewriter, the tired writer attempts to compose a commissioned science fiction piece about flying macaques, amid the mournful flute sounds of uninvited guests, the loud noise of neighbors, and the endless phone calls of a bankrupt friend. In the morning, casual acquaintances whisk the author away to the open ocean on a rickety motorboat.

Violence, hospital and crime

Severe internal bleeding lands Bukowski in the charity ward of a county hospital for the poor. A deranged fried chicken vendor screams frantically in the ward. A nurse refuses a transfusion due to lack of blood credit. Thirteen pints of blood save the patient’s life thanks to his father’s donation. After being discharged, the now-strong man heads to the nearest bar for a cold beer.

Two drinking buddies, Tony and Bill, steal the body of a dead young woman from a hearse. In a rented room, the drinking buddies rape the deceased. At dawn, the men take the body to the ocean shore. Tony swims behind the breakwater and releases the deceased into the open water.

On a hot afternoon, forty-five-year-old Martin Blanchard watches from his window as a neighbor’s girl lies on the lawn. A man lures the child into a dark garage and assaults the girl in front of the terrified boys. Upon arrest, patrol officers knock out the criminal’s front teeth.

Young brothers Lincoln and Andrew break into the mansion of aging silent film star Ramon Vasquez. The robbers demand five thousand dollars, beat the owner, and subject him to brutal torture. A cane strike ends the aging actor’s life. The brothers stain the bedroom walls with blood and drive off in an old car to pick up hitchhikers.

Gambling, women and street manners

In the stands of Hollywood Park, the author lays out the practical rules of betting. Patrons lose their savings due to the obligatory house edge and blind faith in underdogs. Regular winnings require composure, studying the racehorses’ form, and selecting the front-row horses. A separate story is devoted to harness racing, where the gambler squanders his earnings on overvalued favorites. After being discharged from the hospital, the hero brings his friend Madge to the races and wins big on risky bets.

In a room near MacArthur Park, the narrator shares a bed with Linda, the alarm clock ticking away. Drunken neighbors Ginny and Eva celebrate receiving unemployment benefits. In one night, the tenant has sex with all three women, after which the manager throws him out.

Controversies with his friend Vika culminate in beatings, a cast on a broken arm, and the gluing of dentures with household glue. At a pub, the hero meets a woman in fox furs, buys three raw chickens, and takes her to an apartment. The police, responding to the call, lead her away in handcuffs, under the flashing red neon sign outside the window.

In a flophouse, two unemployed men, Harry and Duke, dream of a gold hoard at an artillery range and bring a random girl, Ginny, from an alley. In a cheap hotel in Texas, Bukowski accidentally finds himself staying among the workers of a noisy brothel, receives a sound beating from a drunken local thug, and endures moralizing reproaches from a patriotic acquaintance about military service. Responding to a reader’s letter, the writer rejects government slogans, recalling the military’s lost hydrogen bombs off the coast of Spain and Greenland.