I
READ STEVE MARTIN'S BORN STANDING UP, which lead me to
The Autobiography of Lenny Bruce, and eventually Richard Pryor’s
Pryor Convictions, the purest and rawest of all comedy books I had read, thus far.
Actually, fuck that, it was one of the rawest books I had ever read, period.
Like the gold star stuck on the cover of my otherwise flawless, though used, copy of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, or the phone number inscribed in red ink in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
But what stood out most about the book, more than anything else, wasn’t even a part of the text.
It was an arrow, a simple black arrow that some previous reader had scribbled in the margins that pointed to the one and only underlined sentence in the entire book.
“Then I stabbed the white motherfucker in the back six or seven times.”
Clearly, this one sentence had impacted someone enough to cause him to underline it, to mark its significance for all future readers to see.
Why, exactly, he had done so I would never know, but it seemed to serve its purpose.
Did it prevent me from reading on?
No.
Did it change the way I perceived the book?
Absolutely not.
But it was maybe the first thing I would remember about the book when I thought back upon it.
Those were the kind of details I tended to remember.
Like the gold star stuck on the cover of my otherwise flawless, though used, copy of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, or the phone number inscribed in red ink in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Of course, when I first discovered the phone number, my instinct was to call it, and I managed to not do so for a couple weeks, but I eventually gave in.
I simply could not resist.
I had no real, let alone logical, reason to do so, other than simple curiosity, but that was reason enough.
I took into consideration that maybe, just maybe, the phone number belonged to the family whose garage sale I had purchased the book from, but the area code was not local, and after I took the time to look it up I found out that it belonged to a phone number in Davenport, Iowa.
And so I decided to call.
And when the man on the other end answered with a standard, nondescript, “Hello?” I asked, “May I speak to Malcolm?” and the man informed me that I had the wrong number, and I politely apologized for wasting his time and hung up.
The moment was unextraordinary, to say the least, and it left me feeling unfulfilled, and I questioned why I had even called.
I didn’t know what I had expected to happen, but whatever it was it didn’t occur, which left a rather sour taste in my mouth.
And so when I called back the very next day I was prepared, I had rehearsed my line, and when who I assumed was the same man answered his phone I said with deliberate authority, “Then I stabbed the white motherfucker in the back six or seven times,” then I hung up the phone and waited for him to call me back.
Which he never did.
