"I'm a writer," said Candy.
"Of course you are," I returned. "Everyone's a writer," I grimaced. "Writing their memoirs, scribbling in their diary, 'Dear diary, yesterday I battled this treacherous hangnail for hours. Nearly lost my teeth, the thing was so grotesque and horrifying', I know all about writers," I continued. "Hell, people publish shopping lists these days. A whole book full of their shopping lists, jotted down on scraps of paper, scanned in and sold as trite, authentically quaint coffee table books to be perused by hipsters and yuppies with time to burn." I made a face.
We sat at a table, drinking coffee. I had been perusing this book she had, a coffee table book entitled, Dead Men Tell No Tales. It was one of those numbers that's full of interesting photographs of dead people, people who have just died. Murdered, accidentally killed, etcetera. Mostly black and white. No captions so you're left wondering.
"Is this supposed to be shocking?" I said turning a page.
Candy shrugged.
"So, what do you write?" I asked. As in, what are your books about, or maybe, what do they most resemble?
"What do I write?" she repeated.
I nodded, thinking about Manny's patent answer to this ridiculous query: "Whatever God in his wisdom tells me to write." That's his answer. Whenever anyone asks him, he comes out with this ridiculous loaded answer. I remember him telling this to a librarian once. A tasty looking kid in a worn out floral print dress and smudged spectacles. Manny had asked her for a phone number and she said, "You're a writer."
"How can you tell?" he'd replied.
"According to our records," I watched the light from the computer screen flicker across her glasses as she perused Manny's no doubt dubious profile. "You've never actually checked a book out."
"Sure I have," he said.
She shook her head. "No, sorry. You haven't. A few movies from the AV department, but no books."
"And how does that translate into me being a writer?" he asked.
I stood nearby eyeing this librarian, this uppity girl talking down to Manny in a practiced whisper. I was undressing her with my mind. She didn't look half bad.
"Writers never check out books," she replied. "They come in here to check out books, but they never do. They stand in the aisles perusing them, then they suddenly have a thought and push the book back in the shelf and head for a table where they sit and scribble on little pads of paper."
Manny pulled his eyebrows together and said nothing. I could tell this girl was getting under his skin. "Got it all figured out, don't you," he said at last. "What's your name? At least give me that."
"Mona," she said.
He nodded and rubbed his chin. "Mona," he said. "I am a writer. It's true. Though I don't do my writing here."
"What do you write?" she asked.
"Whatever God in his infinite wisdom tells me to write," he said.
She looked at him with mild disdain, as though he had spaghetti sauce on his chin. "That's a bit much," she said. "Kind of arrogant. So you're God's mouthpiece. The voice of God. How very fortunate for you."
"Not really," replied Manny. "It's not what you think. It's more like the kind of thing where you snap a branch off a tree, whittle it down and make a toothpick out of it. I'm the toothpick and my books are what I clean out of God's teeth."
YOU ARE READING
New Adventures in Writing...
HumorA fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants criminal type is trying his damnedest to write the Great American Novel but his underworld past and violent proclivities are making it difficult.
