Talk Stories Read Free Page A

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