The chair wobbled uneasily as he tipped it backwards.
“So,” he said as he turned towards me, “what else is new?”
I cleared my throat.
“Well, not a whole lot, to tell you the truth. My editor loved my notes from the conversation we had the other day. Especially when you talked about how much you like Ted Danson.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It was quirky. Three dimensional.”
“I thought I was being a boor. No one wants to hear what an author has to say about a TV star. Especially one that stars in an HBO series written by another author who writes the same kind of fiction as me.”
“Well anyway, she wanted me to come here and ask you what you thought of Salinger’s death. A lot of blogging authors are mentioning how Salinger influenced them, and how that it’s a big deal that one of the most notorious authors of the twentieth century is dead.”
“That was an awful lot of exposition. Maybe you should look into writing drama.”
“Do you have anything to say about Salinger?”
“Well,” he put the chair’s front two legs back on the ground. “Not really. I started writing a post about it, but it never got finished.”
He grabbed the top two pages of typing paper out of a basket placed on his desk.
“I started writing a loose allegory about it involving a mortician and a dead Uncle, but really, Salinger is one of those authors that I enjoyed, but I didn’t feel a certain kinship with them. No disrespect to anyone who loves him. He’s just not my thing.” He picked up his pack of Red Apples from beside his giant beige Selectric typewriter, drew one out and I flinched as I saw him put it in front of that horrible, rotten tooth.
He flicked a black bic lighter at the cigarette and took a long, smooth, satisfying draw as it caught instantaneously.
“And I understand that it’s totally ridiculous that I talked about Billy Mays so much. I can’t defend myself.”
The smoke cloud lifted for a moment as he drew another breath.
“I hope he gets the funeral he would have wanted. That’s the least he deserves.”
“Chuuch,” I said, scribbling that down, just underneath the only Salinger quote I could find about death.
“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
