Stories from the Bar

About three years ago my friend Courtney and I spent entirely too much time at Park Bar on 15th Street between Park and 5th Avenue. This one time some chick I didn't know ruined my night with her bad adolescent poetry. She had a pink and white marbled notebook, the kind you beg your mom to get you when you're doing your school shopping in third grade but she refuses because it's $.49 more than the regular black and white marble notebook. Anyway, this chick wasn't eight years old, she was closer to twenty-four or twenty-five, so the fact that she was dragging this juvenile fake-ass moleskine around was distressing to say the least.

As Marble Notebook Girl approached me Courtney sort of giggled and slipped away. Bitch knew what was coming! Courtney was a heroin waif sort of model, it wasn't hard for her to slip away. I remember I was drinking a martini with olives and while I tried to be nice, this girl started reading me her poems, which went something like this:

A lone girl
ALONE
in the corner
so alone
she draws the blade
the RAZOR blade.
across.
skin.
RELEASE. she cries.
but she cannot feel.

Marble Notebook Girl's poem may have been a little better than that. I don't remember. I was saying stuff like "wow" while throwing back martinis and waiting for my horrible friend Courtney to somehow rescue me. What else was I supposed to do? You can't say to a cutter that their poetry sucks. You don't want to be responsible for their next battle with a bic razor.