A STORY by KT BAUGHMAN
A Character Study
He tells his lower Manhattan adult poetry workshop that he sees his own life as a character study. He watches A24 for fun. He does his buddy’s coke on the weekends, each time with the same rolled hundred dollar bill. A blonde girl from class once called that lame. He doesn’t like her anymore.
He maintains that there exists no one more suited to be a writer than himself. He had taken a class on Hemingway last year. He’s so committed that he sometimes falls asleep at the desk in his writing room, converted from a bedroom after his roommate broke the lease to move out early. He considers this sacrificing his body for his art, indistinguishable from Vincent Van Gogh’s sliced ear.
This week’s shared story about his raw and unfiltered visit to the Yellowstone National Park is proof of such brutal commitment. His metaphors, the same reused recycled metaphors from last class and the class before, were this time improved. He was the sun and the stars. He was the mountains and the dying Earth. Every sentence was the truest sentence that he knew.
The critical consensus from the rest of the class is to delete the fourth stanza’s out-of-place line about his participation in the secret underground chloroform health craze. They saw it as unrealistic, but what did they know? He was here only to take inspiration from the ability to say he was in a writing workshop. In his back pocket, he has a half-used four-ounce bottle of chloroform for his salad.
Last week, he brought to class a dead bird he claimed to have found next to a large glass window as an example of what he referred to in his poem as the “glass window epidemic”. It was more of a prop than anything (if his neighbor’s pet bird went missing, he had no idea). During a dreadfully dull poem recitation by a pregnant lady on his left, all he thought about was how everyone must still be thinking about the bird.
His buddy rang and he made a show of pulling his phone out, screen intentionally angled towards the rest of the group, to decline the call. He was cool and popular. The people from the workshop didn’t know he owed his buddy ten grand.
The next girl’s poem is a metaphor for the trials of love. In his critique, he says that it sounded too much like lyrics of a Taylor Swift song, mostly because the girl looks a little bit like Taylor Swift. Hating Taylor Swift was a very big part of his personality. He has never cared more about anything in his life than personally monitoring her private plane use. Except maybe politics. He considers himself a very political person. His third cousin is Nancy Pelosi’s niece’s friend.
He sneaks away from the workshop to pick up the Caesar salad he got delivered by his mother, who lives on the Upper East Side. She was parked in the no parking reserved space for fire trucks, which he chastised her for (around here, they really respected the firemen, he says). He wishes her well. He didn’t want to stay too long, or the girls in the class would think he was pooping, which he never did. A side effect of the chloroform diet.
On his way back, stirring his salad, he’s confronted by a lady from the workshop outside the bathroom. She tells him that it was Jane’s birthday (the girl who’s a lot like Taylor Swift). He doesn’t want to chip in the ten dollars to buy her an Apple Watch. He was on a one-man boycott of the Apple Watch.
Well, maybe I can write your name on the birthday card anyway, the lady says. He doesn’t like that idea either, because he has very strong morals. He holds out his chloroform salad to be added to her gift pile.