I’m in a room no larger than the room I was in five years ago or so. I was sitting in a bed just like this one, writing right here. Shit, can I ever get rid of this place? I rarely visit sometimes. I should more often. Not the room necessarily, but the room might give me the means. Nothing ever changes I guess.
The world is going to shit.
As I sit here reading a book on recommendation, I remind myself of a time that formed me, not in my childhood, but adulthood as a matter of fact. It goes like this:
I show up to coffee in the café in the godforsaken, bland, office building, void of all culture of which they so highly covet. We drink and shoot the shit, cheating them out of a half hour of work. It’s strictly because we’ve been so consistent, even the VP’s and such have taken a liking to our friendly greetings upon arriving through the double doors, just outside of reach of where we sit, where the overzealous older man of the group greets them because he simply can’t help himself.
It’s a group of four of us usually, sometimes five. I’ve always maintained that if I’m one of FOUR people, I can hold my own in conversation. If there’s any more than that, I disappear in it, becoming the silent listener, a shy guy.
I show up, probably hung over as I usually am and was in those times. The conversation turns to books, and one they are all reading, or about to read, or passing around or something of the sort. They talk about it with a veracity not known since the time of Shakespeare or Dickens or Bukowski or Hemmingway or Laing or Wilde or whatever the fuck. I try to follow along as they converse over my head about a story that I am not in the loop on, they pay me no mind.
As the conversation continues, I make some offhand comment. I can’t remember now what it was, or if I even made it. What I do recall however, is that someone made the snide remark, “Do you even read, Pat?” Or something slightly more crude. I pinched my lip in disdain, hatred.
I knew then what they thought of me. Just some fucking jester, there for the one-liners, one dimensional. I seemed to them as some self-endowed pariah that was little read, and even less cultured, as far as they were concerned. I might’ve defended myself, but again, I forget entirely how I handled the situation.
What I do remember, is that I thought to myself all the things I did they didn’t know about, of which I’m sure I’ve captured here on this very site in writing over some drink or another. And I vowed I’d get back at them somehow, some way.
Some months later, I found myself coming back from a night away, up the coast from a night of questionable decisions and stopped by a record store. I had little to do and had never been to this particular store since I didn’t live particularly close by. I perused the stacks of new-stock records, of which disgusted me that a regional chain could stoop to such levels as to stop business in all things used LPs. I searched the used CDs, as I had a player in my car, and then stumbled upon the book section.
As if by some divine intervention, I found the book. It had some stupid fucking contemporary name of which I can’t recall in this moment, from an author that garnered accolades of the same type from a previous book which was equally as undeserved. I picked it up. It was the book they were all gawking over that day, and many days after that. They spoke about it as if it were fucking Fitzgerald himself found out and discovered to have written the greatest of great American Novels of our and the next six generations. At least that’s how it felt at the time given the bleak circumstances.
I picked it up and turned to the back. It seemed civil enough. I flipped through it, finding the introductory pages.
Well wouldn’t you know. A signed copy by the adored writer himself, I’ll be dipped.
I smirked and brought it up. It was a used copy of course. I smirked to myself even more as I paid for it. Cents on the dollar.
I dug into it when I returned to my hell and sanctuary at the time, one in the same.
I read it begrudgingly, vengeful, anticipating some fucking miracle, an epiphany, a paradigm shift of epic proportions of how they spoke of it.
It was a masturbatory tale of epic proportions naturally. A writer who had written one good story about god of some sort previously, which had garnered critical acclaim, had written his follow up, (this book) and it was all about a fictitious tale of him going off to some equally fictitious island to write his next book, only to find himself with writers block, and frequenting the bar, and finding himself involved in cartels or murders or some other extraordinary circumstance of which I cannot now recall.
The first half was tolerable, the second half I gave up. It was shit. Total, utter, shit.
I couldn’t see it. i could not for the life of me see why these morons were speaking about him, the story, the writer, or the real writer as some folk hero of our time by writing such shit. I really tried too, I’m not just saying all this because I have some sadistic pleasure in righting wrongs. I genuinely gave it my best try and even I, a low-life, criminally under read moron couldn’t take it any longer when the story got so fantastical, that I knew exactly what he was doing, and it wasn’t even remotely clever. It was vomitous to say the least.
I still have it somewhere on the shelf, or in a box now as a reminder to never, ever, take what others view as gold to heart.
It does bring a smile to face however, every time I think of that day i found it, for next to nothing there on the shelf in that used section, and it was signed. If only they knew I read it.