This whole neighborhood is littered with writers.
My agent, always trying to inspire me, texts me:
“As though some magic would happen, that some magnificence would spring forth from them, he began to move his fingers… Onto a world of white possibility now spilled ink, digital ink, not yet wet and realized, not yet dry and finalized. Anything could happen.”
“Little would,” I text back. “One thousand words and keep one. One thousand words and keep two. One thousand words and keep three: ‘Fuck. This. Shit.’ Hit print, set the paper on fire.”
“A new day,” he texts. “Three new words: ‘Get. Writing. Again.’”
He knows that lately I’ve been having trouble, a block of sorts but not really a block — just the spewing of garbage. He wants to show me that he identifies with me, understands the writer’s process, the sweat that flavors the page. He even wanted to be a writer once, but it didn’t pay well enough. So here we are. He’s an asshole but he’s a good garbage salesman. He could sell the stink off a corpse, which is what it will take with my writing these days.
Here is the thing: This whole neighborhood is littered with writers. A trip to the grocery store across the street and you’re liable to find poems shoved in between the oranges, short stories among sweet corn. I pulled down a box of cereal once and there was an entire manuscript — a 500-page novel behind the fucking Cheerios. It was about a dog trapped inside the body of a cat. The cat could bark. It wasn’t terrible.
Even the homeless publish a newspaper here. “News on the street,” they call it. Literally. Once a month the mayor sleeps outside and writes a guest column about his experience. “Last night a man urinated on me while I was sleeping,” started one. He ends every column with “I guess that’s just the way it is.” He is not a man of vision.
At the store, shifty-eyed writers and poets loiter around the aisles keeping an eye on their darlings, waiting to see who the lucky taker might be. They see you next time, they ask how it went. “I’m not an editor or a publisher,” I have said, “but I think you’re probably on your way to being famous. But to be honest your style might be better served in aisle 5, tucked up between bags of that rice that takes like 50 minutes to cook… Jasmine or something. Your thought is very eastern.”
At the checkout line, the cashier rings up the hamburger, the buns, the milk, a short story, and a poem. I never look to see what I grab as far as the literature. I never know what I’m going to get. But I’ve learned over time that the raw meat department almost always has the short stories — don’t ask me why. And you can usually find poetry in dairy. Maybe because like milk, that shit goes bad fast.
Here in the store, every registered writer has a little UPC sticker they can attach to a story for scanning at the checkout line, and every story sells for ten dollars or less. Poems are a dime. If you’re not registered, you don’t get paid. It’s all in-store credit. Nobody starves.
When I get home I pull the only key I own from my wallet, turn the lock but find it unlocked. I swear I’d locked it. I go to the fridge, pop the cap off the milk and take a long pull. It’s hot outside today. It’s hot inside today. A million degrees at least and my a/c is out. I put away the hamburger and the buns and as I’m doing this I hear from behind me a voice ask, “What did you think of my story?”
When I hear this I tell you that I quite literally nearly shit myself. Not just in the way that people use that expression, but in the way where I could feel the cold milk I had just chugged begin to curdle its way toward the exit.
I jump and turn around as though I’d touched an electric fence, stepping back hard and bumping into the counter. Before me a small man takes a step forward, says again in a voice unfamiliar but in a way somehow uncharacteristic… his big man voice. “What did you think of my story?”
Pointing at me is a gun — like an old western six-shooter. He has on a ski mask and a big, puffy jacket. I can see just his eyes and the sweat beading on his mustache, soaking through the mask. God damn, that getup must be hot.
I say, “I don’t know… I don’t know what story. What do you want?”
“I want your opinion,” he says. “It’s in the bag there. Take it out and read it.”
My hand shaking, I pull from the bottom of the bag one of the two sheets of paper there.
“Read it out loud,” he says.
It is titled, “Soft time.”
I read:
“Sometime, friends give hard time.
Say, ‘you no good job, you poor, not funny.’
I go way sad to hamster name Larry.”
“It’s very good,” I say, my voice shaking now. And all I can think is, “What kind of a lunatic is this person? Are these the last words I will ever read? My last, dying word: “Larry.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, you idiot,” he says. “Read the other one. I didn’t break into your goddamn house and point a gun at you to have you read me… what the fuck was that anyway, a poem?
“I think so, yes,” I say meekly.
“Well… Jesus. Well, I didn’t break in here to have you read me a shitty poem by some adolescent drug-addled clown.”
And so I pull the other sheet from the bag. We are both sweating terribly now, me from fear, he presumably because it’s 100 degrees and he’s wearing a ski mask and a big puffy jacket. His mustache drips a waterfall of sweat now, his mouth wet and smacking.
“Read it,” he says hungrily. And I begin,
“As though some magic would happen, that some magnificence would spring forth from them, he began to move his fingers… Onto a world of white possibility now spilled ink, digital ink, not yet wet and realized, not yet dry and finalized. Anything could happen.”
~written circa 2007
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