Heart Disease

This is an excerpt (but no fear; it can stand alone!) From a work of interrelated sketches on, well, people in general, that I've been working on.

A girl with the purple glasses and houndstooth scarf shyly purchased a pen and pad of paper in a decrepit grocery store in Chelsea. She bid the cashier a word of thanks and left quickly. Down the street, a dilapidated brick building sat behind a lighted sign; the sign boasted a concert by some underground band that nobody had heard of and nobody ever wanted to hear about. The girl could tell by the use of pejorative adjectives in the band's name that it was most likely going to be one of those college drop-out, heavy metal bands. She sighed as she walked towards the building; she was tired of watching music acts that didn't know a C minor from a screeching caterwaul. A journalism major who had graduated with honors, she had landed her first post-college job writing concert reviews for a newspaper reminiscent of heart disease- it was barely in circulation. She preferred poetry to muckraking, anyways: She looked up at the sky and, in an observation any moody writer might make, noticed that it looked like the contents of an ashtray. She looked at the brick building in front of her and, wishing she were at home curled up with her copy of the Divine Comedy, saw Hell. With the sigh of a clinically depressed, middle-aged man, the girl walked into the bar in which the band was performing. The first thing to greet her was a rancid smell her nose found overwhelming. It was sweat, it was smoke from various illegal drugs, it was hairspray- it was a poorly-mixed cocktail of all three, plus other ingredients some opprobrious bar-tender had slipped in. She scrawled a quick note on her notepad, then turned her attention to a couple of girls sitting in the corner. There is no need in describing these girls' appearance, for you've probably seen some form of them on dimly-lit street corners, bending over farther than required to shoot pool, and, incidentally, given Julia Robert's pretty face in Pretty Woman. It was something the girl in the purple glasses could not help but doing each time she went to review these concerts: She wondered where the girls were from, what their childhoods were like, what they had eaten for lunch that day, and, when you washed away all the pink and black goop, what their faces looked like. It made her want to bring a pressure washer to work instead of paper and pen. One of the girls raised a cracked martini glass to her dark red lips- who was her mother? Another slipped her arm seductively over a man's shoulder and walked him into a back room- where did she live? The girl always had a strange urge to invite a group of them to lunch. They reminded her of the pre-artist Stephen Dedalus, when he was just a guilt-ridden young man, and she found she could not talk to them. Lost in her musings, she almost didn't notice when a man, identifying himself as the drummer for the band, came up and asked her if she'd like a drink. That's when the Fitzgerald, the Hemingway, the Faulkner came out in her- she said yes, and went off with a heaviness settling over her spirit to get stinking drunk.

 

 

 

 

Author's Note

Please don't be too harsh! As I am only sixteen, my feelings haven't quite grown callous to harsh critiques yet. But I'm working on that...
I'm just curious what the devil people would think of this piece.

Reviews

[bob, small b. aka invs]

i'll be nice. it's much better than most of what i was writing at 16. a few suggestions and comments:
the story has potential. i like the concept and some of your descriptions and observations are quite nice. i think, for me, what's missing is feelings and emotions. is there resentment in accepting jobs writing reviews for bands she doesn't like? why do the girls in the club annoy or interest her at all? triggers from her own life? you give an excellent description of a series of events, but i don't really think we know anything about the character you're writing about. there's nothing to connect with as a reader. i hope you don't take this as too negative. i don't want to discourage you from writing. you have potential. welcome to the cafe.

[C.F. Boehlke]

Haha! I love the bit about the name choices of college dropout, heavy metal bands! So true!

And thank the devil for those who properly use semicolons!

Instead of "With the sigh of a clinically depressed..." I would consider changing it to "Sighing like a clinically depressed..."

Also , instead of "The first thing to greet her..." I would make it "She was greeted with a rancid odor and was immediately overwhelmed."

I don't know if it's just me, but the bit about Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman was a little unclear.. But just that last part of the sentence! :) Great description of the hussies without going to every little detail, with the added bonus of continuing to bring out the cynical/sarcastic voice of the story!

Girl, I'm impressed! I would definitely continue reading this! This appeals to the sarcastic, people-watching creep in me and I love it! The things I mentioned are minor. You succeeded in capturing the essence of both the MC and those around her in a very short piece and I enjoyed it. I look forward to reading more of your work!