Not That I Care

Upon perusal, the papers proved to be a miscellany of things, snipped from a magazine and torn rudely from newspapers, a few pages from savaged books and a napkin carefully embossed with a logo from a bar called the “Ugly Hitch,” upon which someone had jotted a seemingly complex pattern of nearly-illegible runes and a phone number appended with the name “Henrietta Muskovits.”

The magazine articles, I have since pieced together, all came from the June, 2011 issue of People magazine, although the text of several of them proved different from copies of them which I later compared, having obtained a copy of the issue in a doctor’s office on 14th street, a week later. They spanned a range, from the boring to the mundane, write-ups of lesser films and a particular breed of celebrity gossip that tends to turn my stomach. The bulk of this slick, magazine material, though, was a single review, split over seven pages, of the DJ Skribble album, “MDMA: Reloaded.” I’m not sure what horrors, real or imagined, Scott Ialacci perpetrated on the hapless author of the piece, but the piece was perhaps the single least informative review of an album, of a career, I have ever read. A sample follows:

...the third track is a mess. Skribble throws samples and beats together like a crocodile in the backseat of a used Volvo. I put my back out, I whip my hair back and forth, and for what? Some lousy pimp sticks and a pair of jawtooth bangers? I don’t think so. Loose grooved channel shifters don’t make up for the frankly racist synth work on a floppy little spit of a boulle. This is the kind of thing you’d expect from Skribble, though. He puts his money where his mouth is, only when he can’t get his foot out of the fire, and he’s just proving it with the newest MDMA collection. His smug scratching just proves the point, when a Bro with commie piping gets a little frisky, you can look forward to disappointment...

I am, myself, unfamiliar with the actual fruit of DJ Skribble’s efforts, but I understand he was a fixture of mid-90s MTV. The album in question was released, according to Wikipedia, in 2004, making it a fossil in musical terms, even in 2011 when the review was first published, although here, a tricky piece of reality seems to intrude. Although the pages of the review of DJ Skribble’s album are the only magazine pages with numbers and dates, the review was conspicuously absent from the Doctor’s copy. In its place were a tepid writeup of a Coldplay album, two advertisements for vodka and various halves of things, places where no story or ad was in the layout.

The tearings from newspapers were mostly single lines, and have proven so far to be untraceable, at least with my meager skills. Below is a complete list, in as much the order presented originally as I have been able to preserve.

The last time such an event occurred, two noble fighters left the ring forever.

she said she never saw

unless the GOP can swing the vote in Idowa [sic]

rampant internet culture, left unchecked, proved to be the last thing

CANCER: don’t believe the hype! You are twice as good anyway. A friend long lost will come back to your bodega, if left unbidden long enough.

Also, half of a Heathcliff daily comic strip in which the cat in question rises beatifically from what seems to be a freshly dug grave. Presumably, the missing half includes one of the regular “human” characters, as the half of the quote below runs as follows:

...always knows where to find them!”

The back of the paper is, peculiarly, completely blank.

The pages from books were torn, sometimes whole, sometimes in shreds, from what I have come to understand are called “Altered Books.” Six of the pages seem to have come from an early edition of George Orwell’s 1984, painted with clumsy figures and thick, tacky swathes of acrylic paint. Four pages, those most egregiously torn, came from a mass-market paperback copy of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. These were colored with chalk, in fluorescent pink and green, with pale blue swirls which seemed to be repeated on each page, the same pattern, until I began to think they may have some meaning. The swirls have resisted my attempts to decode them, though. I think it is this obtuse quality which commands my attention so. A story seems to float just below the next page, until the mystery finally gives way to only the disappointing tabletop.

The napkin presented a small consolation, in that I was able to glean some satisfaction from that blind alley dead-end. I called the number, to find that it no longer belonged to Mrs Henrietta Muskovits, but was answered by her granddaughter, tasked with disposing of Mrs Muskovits’ Earthly remains. Upon my query as to a bar called the “Ugly Hitch,” the younger Miss Muskovits demanded I meet her at the dwelling in question, a fourth-floor walk-up on the far on the East side. Miss Muskovits, Paulette, I learned, was turning over the apartment and its dearth of physical possessions. At the end of her life, a scant three months before, Henrietta had sold or given away most of the things of value in her life, including, I was informed, her small dog and cat. The only things left, she said, of her grandmother were the couch upon which we then sat and the tea set we then sipped from.

“Well,” said Paulette, “Those and the writing.”

“The writing” turned out to cover the walls, floor and ceiling of two of the rooms of the house. It was painted in oil paints, some of it still wet and somewhat smeared. Paulette pointed out the wettest patches to me. Upon comparison, many of the letters on the walls seemed to match those on the napkin, although I was unable to compare it closely. As soon as I removed the instrument from my bag and held it up to the wall, Paulette pounced on it.

“Where did you get this?” She held it close to her chest, eyeing me like a suspicious cat.

“It was given to me,” I lied, although only technically.

“This is fifty years old. She didn't give it to you. Who did?”

“It was left to me,” the lie seemed to work, and I did not have the mental wherewithal to invent a better one.

“Why did you keep it?”

“It seemed interesting.”

She shooed me out of the apartment then, pushing me forcibly in the small of my back. Though I demanded the return of the napkin, she did not even dignify this with a response. She slammed the door and I heard several locks shot to. I turned, dejected, and walked down the stairs.

It seemed interesting.

It was the way he presented the papers to me, though, that required my compulsive sifting at first. He dropped them in front of me as I sat at the library branch on Avenue M (the new branch). I was reading a book about city planning, a recent addition to the collection, in preparation for the city council meeting the following Thursday night. He walked over to my table, made glaring eye contact, and dropped the stack in front of me.

“Not that I care,” he said, and stalked out the front door.