Sent from Moynihan Starbucks to the Group Chat
Nate Waggoner
This morning on the train I got emotional reading a post where Michael Imperioli was saying how he wished to do one more scene with Gandolfini, or have one more drink. An overwhelming sentiment came over me of how sad I am that this trip is over and how I love and miss my talented friends always. A woman looked at me like, “Get a grip, buddy.”
I remember last night you said, “People kept dropping things and spilling wine at the service. And I don’t even really believe in this type of stuff, but I know that was her.” When I got to the station and went to get coffee, the employees were preparing and putting out the drinks while fully dancing and singing along to Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls.” You remember how that goes. If this, too, was her - animating, a la Beetlejuice, an entire staff to perform a fun song about suicidal ideation - it would be a characteristically good joke from one whose short life included a relatively successful career in standup.
I went searching through the pictures on my phone to see if I had this passage I love by Denis Johnson where he talks about how New York was never “his” town but one time he came back to visit and described this moment where he had a wonderful hot dog in the park while the autumn breeze was blowing and everything seemed right. It didn’t show up, but this passage from Joy Williams did, even though I have no memory of taking a picture of it in the first place and I don’t know why I would have at the time:
“You were suicidal. You were always asking me suicide riddles like, ‘What would happen if a girl was tied up in a rug and thrown off the roof?’ ‘What would happen if you put a girl in a refrigerator alongside the eggs and the cheese?’”
“None of those things are true,” Liberty said uncertainly.
“I believe that one can outwit Time if one pretends to be what one is not. I think I read that.”
The thing is that I hadn’t typed in “suicidal,” the word that was stuck in my head. The phrase I had begun typing was, “I almost ate the napkin.”
I think this is thematically unrelated, but I wanted to know anyway: just then the conventionally handsome man in a gingham shirt sitting across from me looked me right in the eye, took out a jar of pickles, opened the lid, and started drinking the juice.
Nate Waggoner's work has appeared in Electric Lit, Peach Mag, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. He lives in Richmond, VA.