The Jester

The Jester

Our girlfriends thought we should meet because they believed a writer is a writer and we were both drunks. His goal was to get into The New Yorker to obscurify to the delight of the upper classes. I recommended In Our Time. He hadn’t read it and wasn’t going to. He had already written not only the best short story he had ever written, but the best short story he had ever read. He wore leather motorcycle boots without the motorcycle and a leather jacket he referred to as “my leather.” He wore $150 custom made shirts and snorted a lot of coke. “I fear I am becoming a character,” he said after self-publishing his first novel. I slept on his couch ten years after we met while hoboing around and working on a novel. He wouldn’t let me use his Olympia, so I bought a Smith-Corona at the Salvation Army for $4. I watched him inflate himself by collecting friends and brutalizing his petite wife. He had the smallest dick I’d ever seen on a grown man. He says to me, “Do you think writing poetry is just a way for you to accommodate your drinking?” Speeding down Divisadero, he doesn’t know who he is, but he knows what he’s going to show you. You couldn’t walk side by side with him. He had to be in front striving and asserting and if he couldn’t, he fell far behind and pretended he didn’t care. One night he broke down. His eyes searched mine. He was pathetic. “I envy the facility with which you write,” he said. “You can only be yourself,” I said. He did not consider himself “particularly touchy,” but in fact he was a bitch and I spent a lot of time feeding his lies just for the conversation and couch. He was a great talker. He’ll probably get into The New Yorker because he has nepotism in his hip pocket. He says to me, “I read the first twenty pages of your novel and I wouldn’t change a thing, but I’m not going to read any more because I don’t want it to affect my writing style.”
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Published on March 21, 2013 08:41
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