Talk Stories Read online

  The magazine called Ingenue was owned by the same man who owned the National Lampoon, and the two magazines were in the same building. I must have gone up and down in the elevator many times without paying attention to anything or anyone, for I cannot remember anything particularly, except this: one day a man, perfectly handsome and wonderful (that was how he appeared to me on a first look), and kind (that was how he appeared to me after many looks), exchanged some words with me, and at the end of it he said to me that he would like me to meet his friend George Trow. That man who spoke to me in the elevator, his name was Michael O’Donahue and he is dead now, but at the time that I met him, he was at the center of a group of men who earned their living by telling jokes and making people laugh. I perhaps should have thought that was strange, since less than ten years had passed since I left the island on which I was born and on which I had spent the first sixteen years of my life; I was then twenty-three. On the island where I grew up, jokes were told as a form of entertainment, but everyone had a joke, and jokes were so common and everyday that when something serious and important had to be done, someone would have to announce, in a serious and harsh way, that what was about to take place was not a joke.

  Michael O’Donahue introduced me to George Trow and George befriended me. George then was a writer for a magazine called The New Yorker, a magazine that has since gone out of business, though there exists now a magazine by that name. George was the first person to listen to me, George was the first person I made laugh with an offhand observation, George was the first person to make me understand that what I said mattered, George was the first person to make me hear my unconscious voice before other people heard it so. George took me to events that featured the important people involved in the world of disco or humor or other things which were of interest to him and which he felt should be of interest to me.

  I did not know anything then, I do not know anything now, but I knew even less then. I read everything, I read without discrimination. One day I said the word “utilize” while describing something to George and he told me that I must never say “utilize” because the word “use” would do very well, and he went out and bought for me a copy of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and I never said the word “utilize” again, and I always want to correct people when they say “utilize” but I never do, because they are not me and I am not George Trow.

  I lived then in rooms in other people’s apartments, or I lived in their apartments while they were away in Paris, or while they went off to live for a short time with people they had only just fallen in love with; I had no place of my own because I had no money. I was always avoiding the telephone calls of the people who were away in Paris, or the presence of the people who had let me live in one of the rooms in their apartment, or the presence and the telephone calls of the people who had allowed me to live in their apartments because they had gone off to live with the new person with whom they had fallen in love. Is it possible to live like that in New York now? I do not know. I had no money, I had no place to live, and I almost never could afford to buy myself my own food.

  At the time I met Michael O’Donahue in the elevator, I had already come to make an object of myself. I had cut off my hair to a short boy-like length and I had bleached it from its natural black color to blond; I had shaved off my eyebrows completely and painted in lines with gold-color eye makeup where my eyebrows used to be. I could not afford to buy new clothes and so I bought old used-up ones and I wore them as if they were the only clothes an interesting person would wear. I had never liked nylon stockings and I could not comfortably wear high-heeled shoes, and so I wore white anklets and old saddle shoes and I wore them as if they were the only kinds of things to wear on your feet if you were an interesting person. I thought of myself as an interesting person, though I had no idea what that meant and I did not care if anyone else agreed with me. In fact, many people did not agree with me. People of every kind would stare at me, and mostly with hostility. That did not bother me at all. Young black men and women would stare at me and laugh at me and then say something insulting. That in particular did not bother me at all; in fact, I rather liked that, it was most familiar. I had grown up in a place where many people were young and black and men and women, and I had been stared at and laughed at, and insulting things had been said to me: I was too tall, I was too thin, I was very smart; my clothes had never fit properly there, I was flat-chested; my hair would not stay in place. And so when the young black men and women would stare at me and make fun of me, I was used to it, I did not feel threatened by it at all, it was familiar. And even now, especially now, I think they, young black men and black women, are the only people whose opinion I want to seek out, whose attention I want to provoke.

  On that day I met Michael O‘Donahue in the elevator and he asked me if I would like to meet his friend George Trow I was wearing jodhpurs made out of a beautiful beige, twilled cotton; a plain white cotton blouse; a deep brown fitted-at-the-waist jacket; a brown plastic brooch that looked like a man’s wristwatch, but instead of hands and numbers my brooch had a dog’s head drawn on its face; and around my neck I wore a bright yellow silk scarf that had printed on it some kind of small, not American, dog. I had a number of funny little hats in all sorts of colors and all sorts of materials. On the day I met Michael O’Donahue in the elevator, I wore a beige one that was in the shape of small round cake, and I wore it cocked on one side of my head, so that it looked capricious or just stylish, I did not care which. I walked then the way I walk now, I talked then the way I talk now. I never wear those clothes now, not even the scarf; they do not fit me anymore.

  I had wanted to be a writer before I met George, I had wanted to be a writer before I met Mr. Shawn. I do not know if I would have become the writer that I am now if not for a set of events. George took me many places with him, sometimes just for my companionship, sometimes just to feed me. One night he took me to a restaurant that was on Twenty eighth Street between Lexington and Park Avenue, and that restaurant served Lebanese food. I said something, I do not remember what, but it pleased George and he laughed in the biggest of his big laughs and he said that he would take me to meet Mr. Shawn and I did not know then who Mr. Shawn was but I agreed to it all the same.

  It was a day in April, a cold day, and I wore not clothes for comfort, warmth, but clothes that I liked: I wore a pink-and-white silk dress, a dress that had been fashionable in the 1930s, and my brown jacket, the one I usually wore with jodhpurs. If I can’t remember what Mr. Shawn looked like when I first met him that spring in 1974, it is only because he looked the same to me as when I saw him for the last time in November of 1992, and not long after that he died. At that lunch I was asked to place my order first, out of courtesy, of course, but I did not know that, and I ordered the most expensive meal on the menu, because either I was hungry right then or I did not know when I would have such a good meal again. I was quite ashamed that George ordered something that cost half as much as mine did and Mr. Shawn had only tea and a slice of cake, and when I saw what they had ordered I really thought it was because my own meal had cost so much that there wasn’t enough money left for them to eat properly.

  It was because George loved Mr. Shawn that he wanted me to meet Mr. Shawn and introduce Mr. Shawn to someone who might write for him and in that way give Mr. Shawn some amusement, some joy; I felt then, and still do now, that George loved me and wanted to bring me into that part of his world. I loved George then and know that I still do now. Mr. Shawn did not think that I would make a Talk reporter, but he told George that I should try. It was five months later that I wrote my first piece, but it was only after I wrote that piece, only after Mr. Shawn read it and gave it a form, a life, that I knew it was writing, my writing, and it was through that piece of writing and Mr. Shawn’s acceptance of it that I came to know writing, the thing that I was doing, the thing I would do, that thing that I now do, writing; it was through that first experience with giving Mr. Shawn some thoughts of my own on
paper that I came to be the person writing that I am now.

  I was born in St. John’s, Antigua, and I spent the first sixteen years of my life there. Shortly after I turned sixteen years of age, I was sent to America by my family to work and earn money to support them. I did not like any of it at all. I did not like being sent away, and then I did not like sending them the money I had earned. By the time I met George, I talked about my family all the time and in such an obsessive way that I must have seemed insane. George did not think so, Mr. Shawn did not think so. That first piece I wrote was about the carnival that immigrants from the English-speaking West Indies re-created in Brooklyn, New York. But to say wrote is misleading, for I did not think I was writing; I made some notes, observations of what I saw in the days before the actual carnival, and then I wrote down my impression of the carnival itself. The two things were separate, notes and observations, and I thought that when I gave them to Mr. Shawn he would have George rewrite the notes and make them sensible. Instead, notes and observations were printed, just as I had written them, and it is the just-as-I-had-written-them quality that makes me to this day suspicious of people, editors, giving me suggestions about how I should change one thing or another when I write.

  As far as I knew then, I wanted to be a writer; as far as I knew then, I wanted to be that thing in particular, a writer, I did not want to be myself, I did not know what myself really was, I only did not want to be myself as I knew myself then, I wanted to be a writer. But I did not know how to do that, I did not know how writing was done. When at that moment Mr. Shawn published my words, my thoughts that I had on my mind, I knew I could be a writer, and I became a writer. The words I spoke, the thoughts in my head, that was my writing, and I did not need to have come from the people who had long straddled the world, I did not need to come from the people who had imagined and then made real the world in which I lived. That moment became my own. In the beginning was my word and my word became the world as I ordered it to be. If it now sounds too bold, if it now sounds too made up, if it now sounds too in retrospect, all the same it is true: when I saw my words and my own thoughts, as I had put them down on paper in the pages of a magazine authorized (and that is the real word for it, “authorized”) by Mr. Shawn, I became a writer and that writer became me. That is the person who is writing this.

  Until I wrote about the West Indian Day carnival in Brooklyn, I had appeared in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker as a person who said interesting things. Not long after that, I began to write my own contributions to the Talk of the Town. I wrote in the “We” voice and I did not like it a little bit at first and then I did not like it altogether. And that was the point, and that was the good thing: it was not meant for me to settle in to writing “We” and I only see that now. It was only afterward, long afterward, that I came to see that writing for the Talk of the Town was a kind of apprenticeship, that I was supposed to do it for just so long and then go on to my actual writing.

  The anonymity of Talk then was a gift, and I only see that after Talk stories began to be signed. I feel sorry for those writers who now have to sign their names to Talk pieces. How young I was then and how old I felt then. I had just started to write and almost immediately I felt I wanted to write important things. And so at the beginning of each year I would make my New Year’s wish be: May this be the year I write fiction. And the year would wear on and I did not write fiction; instead, I wrote for Talk and, feeling confined by it I began to write my Talk stories as little stories in themselves, as little experiments. I wrote a Talk story in the style of the Nancy Drew books, I wrote a Talk story in the form of an expense account, I wrote about growing up in Antigua. One day I wrote my first short story; it was about growing up in Antigua and it was one sentence long and it went on for three typewritten pages. One day I wrote an entire novel about growing up in Antigua.

  What did I love most then? I loved my friends and I loved being at The New Yorker. My friends were all at The New Yorker. I loved Mr. Shawn, and he was the editor of The New Yorker and the person for whom I wrote then and who is now dead, but when I write even now, I think of him, perhaps especially even now, perhaps more than ever even now. He did not like everything I wrote, and when he didn’t he never told me, we never discussed it. Sandy Frazier and I had a joke about what happened to our writing that Mr. Shawn did not like and did not ever bring up again. It was this: Lord Mountbatten, an Englishman, had been killed by the IRA, when they blew up his yacht on which he had been a passenger while sailing off the coast of Ireland. Sandy and I for very different reasons hate aristocrats of every kind, but especially English ones, and we were perhaps the only two people in the world then who actually felt sympathetic to the IRA when they blew up Lord Mountbatten’s yacht. When Mr. Shawn never mentioned our Talk stories that had been submitted, which meant that they would never be printed, we began to refer to our stories as taking trips with Lord Mountbatten on his last fateful sail off the coast of Northern Ireland. A Talk story I wrote about a mouse running over me in the middle of the night met such a fate. The mouse ran over me because I was sleeping on the floor. I had no money to buy a proper bed and so I slept on the floor, first on newspapers and then later on an old mattress I found on the street. I am so afraid of rodents that I am sure I was one in a former life. I wrote of my fear and I wrote of my poverty. That story was never printed. I do not regret it, I do not miss it.

  I miss Mr. Shawn, I miss the friends I had then, I do not miss my youth. I miss Mr. Shawn because for a writer, no matter your age, to know such a voracious reader, a reader who liked to read what you had written, just what I had written, was a gift so rare, and I have never been given it again, I do not know why. And when I say that I do not miss my youth and yet that I miss my friends, what do I mean, for Sandy Frazier is my best friend and I talk to him almost every day that there is a day. What do I mean, what do I mean? Only that George Trow will not go to Mr. Shawn and insist that the wall separating his office from Tony Hiss’s be removed, so that they can write Talk stories with their typewriters facing each other, and then one day go to Mr. Shawn and insist that the wall be put in its place again because Tony wore a tie that annoyed him. Or this: Sandy Frazier standing on his desk before a window that looked into Kennedy Fraser’s office, and while she was sitting at her desk, which was in front of a window that looked into Sandy’s office, he started to take off his clothes, and all along she pretended not to notice, but then when he got to his underpants, she suddenly got out of her chair and pulled down her window shade. I miss all those people I knew then; I see them now, but it is not the same, and it cannot be the same: Mr. Shawn is dead, I am now over fifty years of age, I live far away from New York City.

  And yet and yet: Mr. Shawn will never be dead for me, and my youth, and all the friends and events that came with them, can never be dead. For when I sit down to write anything, anything, I cannot help but think about George Trow with the thick bunch of yellow hair growing out of his head, and he introduced me to Sandy (Ian) Frazier, and the world after that was muddled, and the world after that was so clear, is so clear; all things, everything not seen through this lens, is a mistake, a very big mistake!

  West Indian Weekend

  Speeding by Taxi Across the Manhattan Bridge with Sassy Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid—Toward Dimanche Gras, on the Grounds of the Brooklyn Museum, on the Third Day of the Seventh Annual West Indian—American Day Carnival:

  “There are several things you ought to know,” said Jamaica. “First of all, you are going to see The Mighty Sparrow, who is the No. 7 calypso singer. Secondly, you are going to see ‘Ole Mas.’ The ‘Ole Mas’ is a spoof. This year, there is going to be an important ‘Ole Mas’ about New York Transit Authority buses. There will be men dressed as women—my friend Mr. Errol Payne told me all about it. One man will have a big over-stuffed bust. He’ll have a sign saying ‘I Own de Bus.’ Another man will have a big overstuffed bust trailing behind him. He’ll have a sign saying ‘I Lose de Bus.’ But wh
at I really have to do is to tell you about ‘jumping up.’ ‘Jumping up’ is a very important West Indian concept. You ‘jump up’ when things get to be so exciting you just can’t sit still, and that happens all the time during Carnival. I love to go to Carnival now, because when I was growing up my mother would not let me ‘jump up.’ My mother was so strict. All I wanted was to ‘jump up’ at Carnival and get little patent-leather shoes from America. My mother would never let me ‘jump up,’ and she would never let me have shoes from America, because she said they would fall apart in the first rain. Anyway, when I was fourteen we had a real row because I wanted to march with a band at Carnival. I was going to be in a band dressed up as bees and I would have been a worker bee. It wasn’t much, but my mother just wouldn’t let me do it. So we compromised, and she got me a pair of plaid sneakers from America. She was right, of course. As soon as they hit water, they fell apart.”

  At Dimanche Gras (Threatened by Rain), on the Grounds of the Brooklyn Museum:

  There were a lot of seats set up around a big stage in the open air. On the back of each seat was a plastic bag that read “Fred Richmond for Congress,” which would become useful if it rained. Jamaica introduced us to several dignified men who wore ribboned badges reading “Carnival Improvement Committee.” Then she introduced us to La Belle Christine, the limbo dancer. “I’m the famous limbo-dance artist,” said Miss Christine. “I performed on Friday night. I’m adjunct-professor of Ethnic Dance at City University. I’m America’s No. 1 limbo-dance artist. I design my own costumes and I do my own choreography. I’ve got my B.A. I’m working on my M.A. I’m in Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges: 1972-73.”