The notebook he found said “Azealia Banks” on the front, hand-lettered, but it wasn’t by her, which is what he first thought, but rather about her, which was in a way more surprising. It had page after page of doodle-clouds drawn around “212” or “Fantasea,” with short paragraphs scribbled in the space where the doodles weren’t. These paragraphs tended to be simple stories whose last lines incorporated, with obvious inelegance, the title of songs: the tale of a woman who took a new job and left at lunchtime on her first day to shop for shoes (it ended with “She was ‘broke with expensive tastes’”) or of a man who displayed only relief at his own divorce hearing (“He was ‘used to being alone’”). Every once in a while came a spread of pages that contained neither doodles nor stories. Those were blank but for tiny words written vertically along the gutter. Upon closer inspection, he saw that they were lyrics as well, but with words changed in a manner that scuttled rhymes or rhythms (“Chinchillas, feathers, and leathers / AB, AB, the two initials”; “Zooted and sipped, I’m suited and ready for whatever the night ahead might bring”). The notebook fascinated him, and he kept it as long as he could, knowing that it would soon vanish, which it then, one day, three weeks later, as he sat at breakfast at a diner, folding a corner of a piece of toast, waiting for a refill on his coffee, did.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment