Page 40 of Bad Words
From: Robert (Chicago, IL)
Happy that City Magazine has introduced this “feature” to express appreciation for pieces of “especially fine journalism.” I can only hope that “number of tips” will result in higher end-of-year bonuses! Keep up the good work, Mike!
“Quotation marks,” said Joyce, with sympathy. “Always a killer.”
Curious, I clicked on the Tip Jar tab at the top of my own inbox. A dozen emails appeared, and halfway down the list, a familiar name caught my eye.
Tip alert: $5
From: Parker (New York City, NY)
To tide you over when City folds.
I snapped my laptop shut and looked back up at Erica’s presentation, trying to recapture the thread.
After the meeting, alone in my office, I reopened my laptop to study the message. What was Parker trying to accomplish, exactly? All those years of pirating my writing, and he’d caved just to make this petty jab?
I narrowed my eyes at the screen. Maybe he expected me to screenshot the comment, post it online with an insulting response, and generate more free publicity for his book. If I told Hayden, she’d probably encourage me to do exactly that. But unfortunately for both Hayden and Parker, I’d been enjoying the relative calm of the last week and a half.
Yes, I told myself, exiting my email. There was no need to respond at all.
No need, except that now I was imagining the self-satisfied expression he’d probably been wearing as he’d submitted the comment. I was remembering his belligerent look at our panel, when he’d recommended Aiden Linville’s Desperations to that poor crowd of people. This was the person currently mocking me by email.
Lips pursed, I opened my phone, tapped into Venmo, and searched Parker Navarro. Just like that, he appeared at the top of the list. That same brooding headshot.
I hit Pay, then entered $5. I drummed into the message field: Your next advance.
Are you sure you know this user? Venmo asked me.
I tapped Confirm and set my phone face down on the desk, hard. I needed to focus. Scott was expecting a review of that Ariana Okoro book. I needed a draft by the end of the day.
But as I opened my laptop, I found myself clicking back to Parker Navarro’s social media. This is unproductive, I told myself, even as my fingers flicked to scroll, flicked to scroll, flicked to scroll.
@ParkerNavarroWrites: Had a wonderful time at @WisemanFoundation @WFLF. Thanks to all who came!
@ParkerNavarroWrites: Appreciated this review of High and Dry in the @AustinDispatch! Written by @CBHenderson, a generous reader and electrifying writer.
I switched to Replies.
@ParkerNavarroWrites: @RobotCatsUnite Hahahaha yes! Made me laugh on the train!
@ParkerNavarroWrites: @JennDiagram I’ve never read it, although clearly I should!
The page went on and on like that. Laughter, permissiveness, acceptance, absorption. Exhausting. And on his main feed: the voice of some wide-eyed ingenue, a person whose sole purpose in life was to react rather than to generate a thought of his own.
This annoyed me in a way I wasn’t used to being annoyed. Parker Navarro was already an egotist and a bad writer. He didn’t need to make himself seem even worse than he actually was. This version of him was nowhere near the real thing, the person who, at our panel, had at least displayed the ability to put an idea into words, the person who had approached me in the bar to confront me about Asylum Piece.
I was still wrestling with that overlap in our tastes. It shouldn’t have meant anything that he’d read Asylum Piece half a dozen times, but somehow it did. Sometimes a book forms such a foundational part of you that to meet somebody else who loves it, who really cares about it, feels like stumbling into a stranger in another country who comes from your hometown. At some point in the past decade, Parker Navarro and I might have been rereading at the same time, tugging out our paperbacks and letting them accordion open, grateful that, though other books might let us down, this one never would.
It was strange to know that Parker had come to the book from Marcy D’Artagnan’s City review, too. Unwillingly, I pictured him then, adolescent, a copy of City stuffed into an overfull backpack and Asylum Piece open before him on a high school desk. I’d been sixteen and desperately lonely the first time I’d read it. Like me, had he been blasted back in his seat by the sheer possibilities of language that slender book revealed, like a pilot experiencing the kickback of a jet engine?
I realized I’d been staring, unseeing, at an @ symbol on his profile for upward of a minute. Sixty seconds of my life I’d never get back, thinking about a teenage Parker Navarro.
I closed the tab and got back to work.
Chapter ElevenParker
My phone buzzed with an alert from Venmo:
