As I went to click on my text file of potential blogs topics, I accidentally clicked the wrong icon. When the program opened, I was staring at an old document that was originally created as an exercise in using correct grammar. When I was in Chicago last year, Jet and I spent a booze-filled evening dictating stories from our childhood. The goal was to judge our ability to transcribe conversations. After working on my books for months, I was convinced I was an expert recorder. Jet proved me wrong, as you’ll see, and her transcription of my story is far superior to my transcription of her story. For your consideration:
Jet: ” One day, when I was six, I was playing on the monkey bars, and…it was interesting, because i had just broken my arm–maybe about, say, two months previously. So I was on the monkey bars, and I was hanging upside-down by my knees…and I had no idea at the time–but I started slipping, and I fell. And when I opened my eyes, I was on the ground, sand in my mouth, my arm was broken in two places and I was in horrible pain. And the nurse set my arm with gauze and cardboard. I was rushed to the emergency room. I can’t remember if my mother came to the daycare center or if I met her at the hospital. I don’t remember how I got to the hospital, and I had surgery–I had two pins put in my arm–and I still have four scars from both operations. It was pretty fucking horrible.”
Evan: “I’ll speak slowly, as I am wont to do–are you typing that out, too?–It was 1996. I was at…Loew’s cinema, on Route Ten, in East Hanover, New Jersey. I was with Dan…and Dan–you don’t have to put in my ‘ha-ha-ha’, or what I’m saying right now–we were watching Grumpier old men, starring Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, and Kevin Pollack…and Sophia Loren…and Daryl Hannah…and it was a very uninteresting movie about fishing–I think. …The bell tolls for you, Jet [plucking cello strings with right hand]. …See, now the difference between when I typed it and when you typed it, Jet, is that I…I didn’t have as much time as you. As the movie progressed, we noticed that–somebody was throwing pretzel knots at us, about this big [holds thumb and forefinger into a circle the size of a quarter]. So, naturally, we turned around, and it was a woman–a girl, around our age, probably 13 or 14, I guess…13 or 14…ten…nine…eight and-a-half…Dan went back and spoke to her first. He came back and told us she was ‘weird’. So then I went back and talked to her. I was much more sociable then–I had no inhibitions then, and the sex-drive of a 13 year-old. I don’t remember how the conversation changed–but before I knew it, I was feeling up her breasts. Grumpier Old Men had a gag reel that played through the credits–like outtakes and jokes–I remember, at one point, Dan thought it was over, and he jumped up and said, ‘YEAH!’ and then, it kept going, and he sat back down and said, ‘OH!’ But I wasn’t really paying attention, because I had my finger up the girl’s vagina–I think it was her vagina, I don’t know–I was only 13. The end. Oh, I remember that was the same day my family got our ping-pong table.”
***
…Just another a non-productive day here in LA, going to Psychobabble for a couple hours to people watch and drink chamomile tea, watching Doom Generation…It’s really quite a life I’ve made for myself out here. At one point Steve’s neighbor Meaghan asked bluntly, “Do you have a job?” to which I could only muster a pathetic, “Aww…” in response. “Disappear Here” is what the billboard read in that Bret Easton Ellis book (“Less Than Zero”), and it’s certainly an apt description. By the way, the second viewing of Doom Generation was better than the first. Coincidentally, (nerd alert!) I saw James Duval scouring through used records at Amoeba the other day. Isn’t living vicariously through me somuchfun!? Didn’t think so.
