First Drafts

Was sitting in my little blue office getting annoyed as hell. I couldn’t get any real work done. Every ten seconds for the last six hours, I’d hear ‘thudthunk’. Curious, I got up from desk and looked out the window. I saw a vehicle drive over something. Heard ‘thudthunk’ but I couldn’t exactly identify the cause of the ‘thudthunk’. Sat back down, typed another sentence. ‘Thudthunk’. ‘Thudthunk’. ‘Thudthunk’. '‘Thudthunk’'. Oh great now it was capitalized. Capital T. 'Thudthunk'. 'Thudthunk'. I had things to do. I was trying to write down my thoughts on first drafts. I was going to write a whole book and post it online called The Craft of Craft. This post on first drafts was to be the second post of The Craft of Craft, a new thing I was trying to do. Or, perhaps, I could call the new writing craft project, The Craft of the Craft of Writing. Wait. The Craft of the Craft of Writing About Writing, that’s what I’d call it. And I’d call the first post, “First Drafts”. Or really, no, this would be the second post, because the first post had already been posted (duh) and was about my new internet and had been called “New Internet”. It was really hard to organize my thoughts because of the 'Thudthunk!' I kept hearing outside, which now had an exclamation point after it. 'Thudthunk!’ I had to do something. Or try to do something. The something might involve roadwork. I didn’t have a permit to do any roadwork. But maybe it was something simple. Finally I went outside to look. There was a can of flattened paint in the road. 'Thudthunk!' I saw a red car run it over. 'Thudthunk!' The can of paint continuously run over by an infinite wave of cars and trucks and busses. I had Rae’s clear plastic jellyfishlooking umbrella in my hand. I stuck the hook of the umbrella out into traffic and pulled in the can of flattened paint. I was successful. I heard someone clapping. Somebody walking down the sidewalk had seen me do it. I smiled but they couldn’t tell, I had on a babyblue surgical mask. I threw the flatted paint can into a trashcan. Quiet. All was quiet in the loudass doomed city I loved. The 'thudthunk' was gone. I thought, ‘I am the world's greatest private detective.’ I turned to walk back inside and saw a man carrying a lamp up the steps. I followed behind. Realized he was my new neighbor in the apartment right next to mine. He sensed me following behind with the umbrella on the sunny day and stopped to let me by. I said, “Oh hi, I’m your neighbor.” He didn’t have a mask on. A woman stepped out from the apartment. She didn't have one on either. I didn’t care. But I felt like a weirdo because I was standing there with an umbrella in my hands and was wearing a surgical mask. He set the lamp down and stuck his hand out for me to shake it. I didn’t shake his hand. I mean, you know, worldwide global pandemic. I said, “Ha, you know, worldwide global pandemic.” They both kind of slapped themselves on the foreheads, “duh.” His name is Gregorio and her name is Aarna, or Aavya, or Amyra, or Navya, or Anaya, I don't remember. His name might not even be Gregorio, I might have heard him wrong. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the mail, names on p.o. box. That’s where and how I’ll figure it out. I’m certainly not going to ask again. I was happy to have new neighbors. The previous ones lived there for maybe two years and I never really had any contact with them but I would hear them slamming their door all the time. They let it slam when they came home and they let it slam when they left too. Got to be I would sit in my office and try and do some work and I could just feel it was going to happen, “Any second now those punks are gonna slam their door.” Sometimes I’d even be right and I’d hear the door slam(!) and I’d jump off my office chair and go to my own door and rip it open prepare to yell at these doorslamming neighbors but it would always be timed just so they had already gone inside their apartment and there was nothing I could do, no one to yell at. Other than I could knock on their door and then when they came to it I could yell at them about it. But that was something a crazy person would do. Which I wasn’t. Yes, I was the world's greatest private detective, but I wasn’t a fullfledged crazy person yet. I set the umbrella in the umbrella basket and walked down the hallway. Rae was at her desk. “How’s it going?” “Going fine, just met our new neighbors.” “Oh nice.” “They seem great. Gregorio I think, and Aarna, or Aavya, or Amyra, or Navya, or Anaya, I don't remember.” “Did you ask them not to slam the door?” “I didn’t, maybe I should have.” “I’m glad you didn’t. I have a work meeting in a minute. What are you doing down there in your office?” “Not much.” I told her about the thudthunking and how it had distracted me from what I was writing. “What are you writing today?” “I’m going to write a kind of one stop guide all about first drafts. How to do a first draft. What to expect. What works. What doesn’t work.” “Sounds cool. For a site paying money?” She knew I was doing an unheard thing now, trying to make money here and there on freelance articles about important things like ‘first drafts’. My days of writing nonsense, for free, were over. “Yeah it’s going be great. Lots of writers seem so down in the dumps, so dejected. Even the ones that go off and get doctorates in creative writing, they don't know how to do a first draft. Can you believe that?” “And you’re going to tell them.” “I’m gonna try.” “I better go now, Zoom meeting about to start, eek.” “Do you want me to make you a tunafish sandwich?” “Not right now.” “I’m not hungry either. Later.” “Later,” she said. I walked into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of grapefruit juice. I was trying to be a little healthier. There was a whiteboard on the fridge now with a mark for every beer or cocktail I’d had for the week. I was going to keep track. I thought it would be funny when the whiteboard had marks on it and a friend was finally over postquarantine and finally asked, “What’s all the marks?” and I could tell them, those were the tenthousand beers I’ve had to drink in the last month. I took the tuna out. I liked to combine a can of ‘white’ tuna with a can of ‘light’ tuna. I chopped celery, onions, and combined it with the tuna in a bowl and then added salt and pepper and a little mayonnaise and a glob of wasabi and a couple squirts of teriyaki and just a little dash of soy sauce. Stirred all that. Sliced the English muffins for later. She’d be done with her meeting in ten minutes, or fifteen, max. Twenty at the most. Just stood there in the kitchen. I could see out the window. The bottom of somebody’s car had just been ripped off. The plastic undercarriage piece that covers the oil canister. Traffic was running it over, of course. ‘THUDTHUNK!’ A harsh ripping sound. Pieces of other cars getting waylaid in the road. ‘‘THUDTHUNK!’ and ‘KERCRACK!’ Had to laugh about it. But I wasn’t going out there to drag the debris out of the road. I just wasn’t. Or maybe I would. The umbrella technique was foolproof. Oh, one last thing—I wanted you to know that I did finally catch the neighbors who used to slam the door. Didn’t want you to think they got away. It was really sad actually. I’d heard the door slam and I’d jumped out of my chair and left my office and yanked open my own front door and finally saw these doorslamming neighbors in the foyer of the building and they had their backs to me and were walking away but I said, “Hey!” But they kept walking. I said, “Hey! Can you stop slamming the door?” And they turned to me, both of them. Two guys with tears in their eyes. They were holding houseplants. One had a big snake plant and the other had a golden pothos and a smaller bamboo plant in a purple container. They stood there looking at me. Tears plopping down. I realized they were leaving. Leaving for good. They were never coming back. They were weeping because they were leaving behind that great apartment next to mine with the wonderful sun and the high ceilings and not even half the traffic noise mine had. “Don’t slam the door,” I muttered. They were crying because they had to leave. “We won’t,” one of them said. “We won’t ever again.”