The Blondes of Wisconsin

Abstract

When hoping for the most successful book launch, publishers rely on givens including the time of year. Set the publication date for summer's start, when readers are searching for a vacation tome. Or print just as winter nears, so stacks of a new title might be grabbed for holiday gifting. Fortunate is the author whose book is pegged for either of those pages on the calendar. Not so lucky is the one whose work emerges during a time when readers have other things on their minds, like a worldwide pandemic. But that's exactly when The Blondes of Wisconsin landed in my hands, and even without cracking the cover I knew it had arrived at the perfect moment. That's because Anthony Bukoski never fails to deliver the characters and situations we need to be reminded of, or introduced to, or held to our faces like the mirrors that shine in many of his stories.And in this case, Anthony Bukoski and his work arrive to do all that thirteen years after the last of his six short story collections appeared.1 It's no joke to say that I had a teary reunion upon first sight of this cover photo of the brick SUPERIOR WAREHOUSE. Inside awaited sixteen interconnected stories sprung from a writer whose work has impacted me deeply—I instantly was kin to those on the nightly news rushing to their pandemic-sealed doors to embrace those who mattered greatly to them, those whom life had kept apart for far too long.In full disclosure, the author and I share the same Polish American roots, his firmly on the shores of Lake Superior, specifically in the East End of the city, while mine have worked their way around the rocks of New England's Connecticut River Valley. Our writing is largely set in those places, to which our respective grandparents emigrated, and where we've chosen to live still. We've been known to delve into similar themes of a changing ethnic, spiritual, and geographic landscape, and it's the dearth of writers addressing those topics in our community that led me to his work in the first place. But as I've said from the start of my walk in Anthony Bukoski's writing, when the title story in the 1993 collection Children of Strangers grabbed me for its reality of a changing neighborhood and a changing world, you do not have to be Polish to be changed by his work.As the mirror on the oak dresser was the heart at the center of Ralph and Josie Slipkowski's home, past which those “children of strangers” (vs. children of long-time familiar neighbors) rode their bikes in a collection nearly thirty years old, Eddie Bronkowski now serves as that reflecting place in the sixteen-story world that is The Blondes of Wisconsin. The author never has been one to dwell in stasis, is no Springsteen forever a teen racin’ in the street. Each of his books illustrates a perspective bearing the bruises and balms brought by another trip around the sun, and this one does so with a more sharpened edge. Surely, the sure-bet-to-lose boxer Eddie “the Bronko” Bronkowski illustrates that reality, assisted by the puzzle pieces of three generations of family and dozens of locals who assure that, no matter her age, a reader can find footing and perspective and riches here.While the Bronko is the center of this universe, smaller planets revolve neatly. In trademark Bukoski style, we see artful use of minor characters who manage to still shine fully, even though their lifespans on the pages might be far briefer. Throughout the stories, I'm reminded of novelist Aaron Hamburger's advice to his students to remember that every one of a writer's characters thinks he's the main character. They don't have to be, but even the briefest appearance can bear a weight or detail that allows them to earn that space.A perfect example is the character whose story begins the book. Mr. Urbaniak is a change-bemoaning rural mail carrier who visits a Remembrance Service at a Duluth Temple and there wrestles publicly with trying to understand age-old ethnic and religious connections, and their place in a history that not everyone wants to recall. He stands up to question, “Where are the Catholics no one knows about?” and requests that the assembled “Listen to my names.” Like so many from the death camps, the “others” are seldom mentioned, seldom known, a fact the author uses deftly to start the story illustrating this particular everyperson of our world: “Who ever notices Mr. Urbaniak? He picks up the mail, buys his coffee at the convenience store, and drives off to deliver bills, letters, magazines, and advertising circulars to country mailboxes. During his journey, the rural-route carrier might think about Forever stamps, about the changing water levels on Lake Superior, maybe, of all things, about a Slovak church from long ago.”Elsewhere in the book, Mr. Urbaniak comes and goes as quietly as a mail van. His owning chapter 1’s real estate doesn't guarantee him a major recurring role in the rest of the collection—his connection to the Bronkowski family is as a long-ago neighbor—but he moves through the collection's setting, realities, complications, and inner struggles related to the region, to remembering, and to religion. And like every smaller Bukoski character, he is small but mighty, and well wrought.Don't let the title lead you to expect a main thread to be women—particularly those blonde and from the Badger State. Yes, the blondes rule the title, and a troupe of them occupy their own chapter, as they do the requested bug-free rooms in the motels after boxing their matches, sparked by manager Carla inquiring of the crowd, “Who wants to fight a lady?” One night the opponent is the Bronko, a merchant mariner living with his ma due to being “messed up” in the head. The piece ends in the extension of compassion for the has-been, and in a version of the battles large and small waged throughout the collection. The author once was a practitioner of the Sweet Science, so the realities of life on and around the mat are precise. As are preparations for shipping out (also in his CV—as a Marine in the early 1960s, Bukoski served three years in Vietnam). The Great Lakes are in his veins, as is the world around them, so prepare to step deep into that, as you will in “Port of Milwaukee,” when “big city insurance agent” Leon picks up his cousin the Bronko at his freighter. “I bob and weave to show him how classy I was. ‘Zimno,’ I say when he reaches over to open the door for me. I know the word for ‘cold,’ but I don't know many others, which is why my cousin Leon's come for me. We'll go to a restaurant for him to teach me about myself before my brain goes dead and I can't learn any more” (p. 49).“I'm glad I'm not you,” Leon says during this particular episode of their annual day out in a changing city (p. 57).“The way he looks at me hurts,” the Bronko narrates. “I wanted him to connect me to something, but it ain't gonna work tonight. Ma accidentally hurts me sometimes. People on the (freighter) hurt me like when the Polish nickel of five pennies in a circle mysteriously appears as though some crew member has it in for me. Nobody does it like Leon, though—Leon and his dumb jokes about me and about Mexicans and Chinese people” (p. 57).There are clashes of love, too. In “The Second Cook on the Henry L. Stimson,” the Bronko enters a relationship with said cook, Verna, whose seven years on the water is a refuge from a silent marriage to which she returns only after her husband stands at the dock with a sign announcing he's dying. Narrated by Verna, this strong piece includes a parting look at her and the Bronko in the mirror of their shared berth. “Reflected is the outline of a life,” she tells us of this miniature home of the heart of this book. “As I pack my things and try not to forget the doll he gave me last year, the doll that says I LUV YOU on it, Ed helps me get ready” (p. 70).Not for the first time does a feeling of innocence cloak the work. Certainly, there is the Bronko's increasing dementia to consider in many of the stories, but we also have younger naivete in a fever dream of his nineteen-year-old dad, Alphonse. In that piece, “This Is Your Life,” TV's Ralph Edwards narrates the young man's current standing at Camp Pendleton—next stop, Okinawa. A Saturday in town finds Alphonse taking in the film Ten Days in a Nudist Camp, during which he is propositioned by a high school teacher, Joey from La Mirada. In their shared bathroom stall, Alphonse's mother takes over his head. “I think of Ma telling me over and over, ‘God's holy body is not to be marred by man.’ I say this out loud to Joey, say it to Fatty Arbuckle, to Jeff Chandler, to all who've been lonely” (p. 105).My only confusion in the collection was borne by the blessing of familiarity with one author's work, and seeing it intertwined with that of a fictitious writer. Two stories in The Blondes of Wisconsin are credited to Bronislaw Slinker, a Bronkowski neighbor who emigrated to the USA in 1948 under the Displaced Persons Act and who wrote when not working on the Superior waterfront. Though he's lauded in Polish journals, in “Who Is Bronislaw Slinker?” (not “by” Slinker), we're told he's “a figure no one but his translator knows. Because he's a white ethnic writer, he's pretty much voiceless in an America literature that praises certain ethnic groups while neglecting others” (pp. 109–10).Wondering if Slinker indeed was “real,” I Googled him and landed on a recent interview of Bukoski in a Duluth weekly called The Reader. Jim Lundstrum cited the quote and wrote: Talking with Bukoski, it's soon apparent the above line is the author speaking directly to the reader.”“That's true,” he [Bukoski] said. “We're not included in the multi-ethnic corpus. I've searched through many, many research books, some of them like 600 pages long. You don't see Polish Americans referenced in the multi-ethnic books. You don't see them in the anthologies of American literature. That's fine. I'm trying to do what I can to celebrate us. But then sometimes, too often, I think what I write is not what people want to hear, you know. I can't just write about how wonderful we are. We're as violent, as mean spirited, ugly, and as beautiful and spiritual and artistic as people anywhere. I can't just focus always on ancestor worship and grandeur, because it's just not true.”’2So there was one question answered. My other moment of confusion descended in the same piece, while reading that Slinker had not only written a story titled “A Chance of Snow,” which is described as pretty much mirroring (yep, a mirror again) the story “Who Is Bronislaw Slinker?” “A Chance of Snow” is one of the reasons I first fell for Bukoski's work. Included in Children of Strangers, the piece has the young narrator Agnieszka describing the morning she and her brother find a young Polish asylum seeker in their home near the docks: “Here me and Stevie go off to school and everything is normal; the Sisters beat us up to start the day and to get our blood flowing, we learn, we sing, we work arithmetic, they beat us some more, we pray the Angelus at 11:30, then come home for lunch and there is a sailor at our table.”3 I can't help but plunge myself into that marvelous story once again, but it's twenty-nine years later and this is a type of metafiction in a collection called The Blondes of Wisconsin by a writer who is not unlike the other writer of “A Chance of Snow.” The end of the chapter on Slinker tells us he gets his ideas from his “close observation of this ‘outpost,’ the East End of Superior. . . . Mr. Slinker knows our lives and this ethnic outpost—perhaps better than we know them. Yet who knows Mr. Słinker?” (p. 111).I'm reminded of the first line on the first page: Who ever notices Mr. Urbaniak?Thanks to Anthony Bukoski, I know Mr. Słinker. I have noticed Mr. Urbaniak. I have seen the face of Eddie “the Bronko” Bronkowski, about whom the Blondes say, “Part of his face should be here, part there. The two halves don't match up. Still, there's something earnest and noble in his face” (p. 126). Verna (whom I also know now) has seen it. You will see it, too. Sink into your own long-awaited reunion with Anthony Bukoski's writing. Or meet it with wonder, for the first time. Either way, look in the mirror. Whoever you are, you are in that reflection, just as you are in these stories.