9586. MAN WATCHING PULP FICTION. DIES. GOES HOME

MAN WATCHING PULP 

FICTION. DIES. GOES HOME

One of the jerks who taught me 'writing' always wanted

specific localized details put in. As if it was his idea

to begin with. He didn't know anything. I introduced

the concept to him. The jerk. All that writing workshop

crap, where the fine little girl from St. Lawrence Place

starts to critique your work aloud because she takes 

offense at your portrayal of female freebooters on the

old Nebraska plains. I'll give her some dust in her

teeth. Boy do I detest workshops and the people who

deal them. Like a sunny-boy Summer camp for wiselings 

to learn from others aloud about what they really want.

So bogus, the whole game is a scheme. Anyway, this

instructor guy  -  who for all I know was better at

basketball or badminton than ever at writing, steals

my very basic, plain and simple idea, and starts

glomming it off onto everyone else like it was his.

Cheats and bastards, for pigeon's sake, can do better.

He constantly kept a salt-shaker on his desk, which

was another thing that bugged me, and he would eat

cold, boiled potatoes like they were apples, which was

okay, I guess, but he should have shared  -  or at least

brought in ten or twenty  -  with others. But, anyway,

he'd sprinkle salt on them as he ate them. So that each

new mouthful had a new coating of salt. Well, I guess 

I understood, but why bother. Enough with the salt

already. Then one day I spoke up and told him, aloud,

for everyone, as an example of 'putting curious, local

things into what you write,' about how heroin addicts

I knew, back when I did know them, would use those

same sorts of cold, boiled potatoes to practice with a

needle, how to shoot up. I guess they were like veins

or the body and all. I don't know. I always wanted to

eat them, but they'd always begin shooting up in them

instead. I guess it was water; I don't know. These were

serious addicts and all, you know, emaciated as it was,

and they sure could have used some potato ingestion

themselves. Anyway, the rest of the silly workshop

thought it was a great idea, the way I'd presented

something like that which they could gasp. The

teacher-workshop guy, he didn't seem impressed one

way or the other  -  just kept sprinkling his damn salt.

Probably just to bug me. Boy did I dislike him.