Wow, has it really been five years since Atlanta already? It seems more like a lifetime. And now I’m moving from Boston to Philly, yet another leap for a tired frog, getting older with each hop.
Every time I move I unearth another faded memory. This time an old scrap of newspaper drifting to the worn, beige carpet, having fallen out of a hardbound copy of William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive. She never did appreciate sci-fi. I wonder why it ended up in there. Rereading the half inch column of her personal ad from the Atlanta street rag brought it all right back.
“Single White Female, 30, enjoys writing.”
That was certainly her claim and she made it even louder and more boldly after a few pints at the Crown and Rabbit. Not that I was a writer in those days. No, that’d come a few years later, almost to spite her. But she’d get going with her friends - always her friends, they never became my friends - going on about Shakespeare, then Hemingway, and Faulkner, always ending with Faulkner. She was a classic southern girl in her love of Faulkner’s meandering prose. I tried and tried to read Finnegan’s Wake and never made it. But from what I did manger to collect in my efforts I’m pretty sure she never did either. She’d go on and on about form versus function and this writing style versus that. All bullshit from what I could hear. I’d add just enough to the conversation every now and then to keep them aware that I was at the table with the occasional backhanded barb, deeply veiled in irony and sarcasm. There were enough of those through our months together to show the inevitable end.
Every time I move I unearth another faded memory. This time an old scrap of newspaper drifting to the worn, beige carpet, having fallen out of a hardbound copy of William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive. She never did appreciate sci-fi. I wonder why it ended up in there. Rereading the half inch column of her personal ad from the Atlanta street rag brought it all right back.
“Single White Female, 30, enjoys writing.”
That was certainly her claim and she made it even louder and more boldly after a few pints at the Crown and Rabbit. Not that I was a writer in those days. No, that’d come a few years later, almost to spite her. But she’d get going with her friends - always her friends, they never became my friends - going on about Shakespeare, then Hemingway, and Faulkner, always ending with Faulkner. She was a classic southern girl in her love of Faulkner’s meandering prose. I tried and tried to read Finnegan’s Wake and never made it. But from what I did manger to collect in my efforts I’m pretty sure she never did either. She’d go on and on about form versus function and this writing style versus that. All bullshit from what I could hear. I’d add just enough to the conversation every now and then to keep them aware that I was at the table with the occasional backhanded barb, deeply veiled in irony and sarcasm. There were enough of those through our months together to show the inevitable end.
No comments:
Post a Comment