People Tell Me Things by David Finkle

Author:David Finkle [David Finkle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780954626846
Publisher: nthposition
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Blue Beard

Oh, to be young and foolish again!

Not.

When I was young and foolish, I knew for sure I was young (and reveled in it), but I didn’t have the vaguest inkling how foolish I was. Less so the unfortunate forms foolishness can and will assume.

Nor did I have any insight – wouldn’t have wanted it – into the problems, not to say the damage, a young man’s unexamined and unchecked foolishness can cause.

On the contrary, like so many other young men with whom I was acquainted then, I believed I knew it all and if I didn’t know it all, I certainly believed I knew enough of it to be pretty sure of myself and my effectiveness in almost any situation.

As the saying goes, I thought I was hot stuff. As the vulgar spin on the saying goes, I thought I was hot shit.

And why wouldn’t I be? I’d had a relatively privileged upbringing, I’d been born with a snappy intellect (and the absence of any understanding that intellect isn’t all), I’d gone to the best schools and sailed through them with an oddball combination of conscientiousness and insouciance, I’d come to the world’s best city where in green-apple-quick-time I’d located an affordable apartment to rent and landed, hot off the swanky streets, a hotsy-totsy little position at a well-read magazine where they liked adding new old-school-tie boys at the low end of the masthead.

The world was my erster, so to speak.

I also found a use for a small unexpected and unlooked for talent I’d discovered I had.

This goes back to bright college years where I roomed in the same entryway with a funny (both funny ha-ha and funny peculiar) guy who fancied himself a composer. Terry Woodside was his believable enough name. He stood about yea high with pudgy arms and legs, a round face that resembled the crescent moon and talked six to the dozen whenever you ran into him.

He could be something of a nuisance, he was that gregarious, that garrulous, but you couldn’t really dislike him. Okay, some of the fellows did, but most didn’t and said things about him along the lines of “Terry’s all right – I get a kick out of him.”

That was pretty much my take, and whenever we bumped into each other or ended up sitting together in the Commons, we more or less talked easily.

It was during one of these early senior-year conversations when Terry gave out with there being a school tradition of senior class songs that over the decades had been more honored in the breach, but he was damned if in his – in our – senior year he was going to breach it. Cole Porter hadn’t, and Terry figured he, at twenty-one, was just as good and as promising as Cole Porter was at twenty-one.

That’s the kind of confidence he had, which I racked up to his having a mother who repeatedly told him, he said proudly and often, how “gifted” he was.

While we all scarfed

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