An Excerpt from 'Conversations over Stolen Food'
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
7:43 p.m. Friday, December 30
Union Square W.F. — a natural grocery store
A: Oh. Oh my god I saw…I’m listening.
J: You see somebody you know?
A: A woman that lived next door to me.
J: On 110th?
A: My first year in New York, on East 16th.
J: Oh that old woman?
A: Yeah in…
J: Oh in the long blue coat. Yes and she has sweatpants rolled…
A: She’d…
J: almost to her knees.
A: offer me Pepsi since I’d carry her laundry cart. I’d put…
J: Still you had to decline the Pepsis I’m sure.
A: I didn’t want a Pepsi.
J: But she kept offering you the Pepsis?
A: Her sister developed dementia and accused my…
J: Does she live with a sister?
A: She did. The sister fell long…once stairs stood (to some extent) smeared with blood.
J: She’s she got up and walked away from it?
A: [Cough] head injury. No, I didn’t see her after that.
J: Well New York may have had another tombstone af…
A: What were we discussing?
J: We’d mentioned your daily rhythm and how, when you do what you want, living according to your own ambition or inclinations, you care very much what you hear — what’s being said and what people say back.
A: And you want to know where these rhythms…
J: Yeah. Yeah. To give others a sense, because it’s a thoughtful set of activities. It influenced my life tremendously. I mean people laugh: Amanda, for example, laughed when I said my breakfast lasts three hours. Then I went into a description of how I’d learned the three-hour breakfast from my best friend Andy.
A: Whose breakfast now takes seventy-five minutes.
J: Incredible.
A: Though I’ll include meditation, so you could say two hours and…
J: Every morning?
A: Yes. I wake from eight hours of sleep. I’ll want…
J: Do you ever set an alarm?
A: Always.
J: If you don’t set an alarm would you sleep close to nine?
A: I’d stress and wake earlier.
J: Because you’ll think you’ve overslept.
A: Sleeping nine hours makes me feel off.
J: So you get hard on yourself?
A: It seems quite gentle.
J: Waking in a panic, thinking you’ve overslept by an hour?
A: Oh. My means of gentleness is to to set the alarm and avoid that situation.
J: I see.
A: Then I stretch while cooking hard-boiled eggs. I’d…
J: You’ll cook hard-boiled eggs each…
A: Every other morning. I was giving the condensed version.
J: No give us the condensed version.
A: Ok. Ok. I’ve timed stretching to last fifteen minutes — for how long it takes to boil my eggs. After, and this lets me poo. Someplace in there I can poo.
J: Before you’ve eaten anything?
A: Yeah, if I stretch. After that I’ll meditate…
J: Your eggs cool as you meditate?
A: an hour and eat breakfast in…for a total of two hours fifteen.
J: You eat nothing before meditating? Yeah I hear John Stuart Mill, before eating breakfast, would work through Greek and and Latin exercises, and this is before he’d turned ten years old.
A: When you lived with me, I don’t know if you’ll remember this time, but when you and Stephen rented my room with me for…
J: Oh yes, that summer we split your room in Williamsburg.
A: Right it…
J: [Cough] a great summer. You’d leave James Schuyler or Joe Brainard on your desk, and I’d sit in boxers reading those books. Your roommates would kindly acknowledge my presence. They looked baffled when our stay exceeded two weeks yet didn’t confront us, which I found noble.
A: I have never felt so insomniatic. I’d try to concentrate before breakfast (before the full day started) think — wait here comes…
J: Morning freshness…
A: here comes my neighbor.
J: Yes maybe we want to…
A: No, we don’t.
J: say hi to her? No? Ok. But I waved…
A: You saw that snarl.
J: She snarled and looked down yeah; she…
A: Those are aliens on her shopping bags?
J: has aliens printed on her shopping bags. Her coat hangs wide open. Her scarf dangles messily almost to the floor. Do you think she grew up on East 16th?
A: I’ve read a passage in I Remember, sorry More I Remember, you know, the version before the edits, the final edits, in which Joe Brainard roomed with Ted Berrigan in an apartment in the East Village, and the woman above used to come squeeze them. Did you…
J: Squeeze them? No I never read this passage.
A: She and her brother, who had mental problems as well could barge…she’d force herself into the apartment.
J: Really?
A: Brainard says she was huge.
J: He was very thin.
A: But he ends the entry saying most cities would lock her up, which seems true of my neighbor also…
J: Yeah such a…
A: and that’s why we’re here.
J: And similarly: in other cities someone would tell us to get the hell out of this café with our recording instrument.
Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are the authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by The Week, The Millions, Time Out Chicago and Bookslut. They recently completed Conversations over Stolen Food, a series of thirty dialogues recorded around New York City.