Talk Stories Read Free

I was in America, the next minute I decided I was a writer, and so when anyone asked me who I was, I said, I am a writer. I did not know exactly what that means, I still do not know exactly what that means, but even now, when I am asked what it is that I am, I say, I am a writer.
    It was as a writer that I applied to a magazine called then, and still called even now, Mademoiselle, for a job as a writer,
and they said no, and when I told my friends or anyone else that I had applied for a job at that magazine (called Mademoiselle then and still called that now) and was turned down, they said to me that a magazine like that, Mademoiselle, would not hire black girls. How stupid of them, Mademoiselle, I thought, for I had grown up in a place where quite a few people I knew had been girls and many, many, many more than that had been black, and so I paid no attention to Mademoiselle then and even less than that now. I then asked the editor of a magazine called Ingenue if I could write for her and she said yes, though what I would actually do was only related to writing in that it involved ink and paper and words. I went around asking people who were regarded as accomplished what they were like when they were the age of the Ingenue reader. I could now say that it bored me beyond measure, but that would not be true at all, for I had known real boredom, I had survived being a child. I was not bored by my subjects’ answers because at that time I did not hear anything anyone else said, I only heard my own voice, I was only interested in my own story.
    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