NICE TO MEET YOU!

The man with thinning hair and thickening glasses went to see a similar man, similar in that respect, different in others, the first man was a journalist who had attained fame with his first book, an essayistic meditation on the role of fear in business, it had topped bestseller lists, was often in the hands of CEOs on jets public and private, prosperous men, emphatically so, though their exact relationship with it, beyond ownership of course, was unclear (one contemporaneous review called it “a thick rectangular badge of belonging that is destined, for better or worse but probably better, to be mostly unread”), the masterstroke with this book, he liked to tell people at conferences, was its cover design, which was purely white aside from a centered little pinpoint photograph of a screaming man, so that was the first man, and the second man was a pop songwriter, famous in the sixties, famous in the seventies, famous in the eighties, still famous, though slightly less, and he had read the book, truly read it, and found it both trenchant and odious, as he said in the letter of invitation he wrote to the journalist, using precisely that language, “I found your book both trenchant and odious,” and though he also indicated in the letter that he was, at this late date, expanding his horizons and receptive to the notion of a collaboration that would produce something that was both pop and prose, the truth was that he had only told a half-truth, that he found the book odious but not trenchant, that he was enraged with its success, that he was tired of flying on planes or sitting in private airports and seeing it in the hands of other men (only men, but that was a whole other story), and that, as a result of a recent series of doctor’s appointments, increasingly hopeless, which located within him a terminal illness that would most certainly send him before the year’s end to, in the words of one of his most famous songs, “a place to read alone,” meaning the great beyond, meaning the grave, he felt even more urgency in writing the journalist, asking him to visit, setting the place up with food and drink and steeling his courage to, when the man arrived, kill him.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas