A Look Worthy of Baudelaire

Posted on July 31, 2002 in North Carolina

I’ve been told that I look mean when I write. That could well explain why the poor barristes at Tully’s whispered among themselves. The sight of me stooped over a notebook or battering the keyboard has unnerved a few roommates, classmates, relatives, and others who see in my face what appears to them to be smoldering rage. When I am in the creative state, my external communication skills become more primitive as the words on the screen become more eloquent. Lynn knows to keep her head when my conversation with her consists of signals with the hand and a vocabulary limited to “Go away.” If there’s something she needs me to answer, she states a list. I grunt when something she suggests sounds good to me.

I had one roommate back in North Carolina who, when she’d find me hacking out words on the old door I used as a desk would ask “Are you mad? Are you mad?” I couldn’t understand why she thought that. On another occasion, another denizen of that same house brought a prospective resident through while I sweated at stamping out my diary. “Joel,” she said in a dry drawl that always sounded both bored and annoyed. “This is Trent.” I remember looking up and seeing this skinny little fellow with generous facial hair. I didn’t say anything. Just stared. Later she took me to task. Pat prided herself as the genuine Southerner of the house and to her my California writers’ ways had seemed downright inhospitable. She thought I’d scared him away.

I later moved in with the guy at another house. He remembered me. I asked him what he thought. “Well,” he said (he was a poet), “that look you gave me was worthy of Baudelaire but I had no problem with it.” My roommate Pat struck him as neurotic, which was true. The first night I moved in, she went into a rage and spent the night breaking every last dish her ex-boyfriend had given her. She screamed at me because he‘d made her have an abortion. I wish I’d had Trent’s prescience of mind about that woman. Trent and I got on well those six months we lived together. I miss the guy and am sorry that I lost track of him. We both wrote and as we did, we’d sometimes check on the other. There was the look. Never bothered me to see it on his face nor did he lose sleep when he saw it on mine. It’s how we two writers were when slashing the wood pulp with our pens. We saw nothing wrong with it.