Becoming a Writer: Picture One

He was one of those experimental writers who have once been hit on the forehead by Hunter S. Thompson and constantly find themselves in the weirdest situations struggling to press at least the tiniest bit of prose from them ever since.

He needed to take a bath, a nap and a meal for about as long as a week but kept running from conferences to cinemas to zoos to schoolyards – always frantically waving his little notebook and pencil around. From time to time he stopped at the stationer’s to buy new pencils since he kept losing them during the course of his trip.

He could have been thirty but maintained himself on a steady 25-year-old-level, always on the safe side. He had wasted away two girlfriends. That was ten years ago. Today, his best friends were his collection of white shirts in his closet along with dark-blue jeans and brown leather shoes. Someone should have told him that brown shoes don’t make it but apparently hadn’t.

The door was open; the typical, boring, deafening music that was usually played at those cocktail-parties to keep people from exchanging too much information worthy to remember any fact of after waking up the next morning poured into the hallway. A drunk, freshly connected couple, giggling and spitting out obscene bits of language to each other rushed past him, stumbled, fell to the floor, crashed down the stairs to the first floor and then apparently started the giggling and spitting again, moving forward and out of the house.

He decided not to put that down. Too weird. Which was weird, as he was actually out to find the weird.

He moved into the flat, instantly trying out several types of grins and smiles, fumbling out the cigarettes he had bought on the other side of the street to hide his nervousness. He took a cocktail of undeterminable sort from a table still full of them and stepped to a bunch of people, who were chattering gaily and consuming large quantities of alcoholic drinks – none of them had a cocktail; it was all whisky, Tequila, and other stuff.

“How’re doin’?” he shouted at them, exchanging his cigarette between mouth and left hand, right hand and mouth, dropping the cocktail, putting the cigarette back to his left hand and up to his – well, he was actually hitting his nose with it. Unfortunately, everybody had seen both the dropping and hitting. Nobody laughed. All eyes on him. These were definitely the wrong people to have a casual conversation with.

“Great. Who are you?” a 45 year old giant moustache asked.