Love & Theft

A piece of literary memoir

This is a a brief encounter, or maybe a memory, that’s lingered for years. It’s part humor, part literary memoir, and it’ll appear in my forthcoming book, The McEneaney Anthology of Literature. Paid subscribers can read the full story below.

This is a true story from 2005—as true as memory allows, anyway. Some names, details, and moments have been reconstructed for storytelling purposes. Bob Dylan is a real person. Whether or not he is guilty of premeditated pen theft is between me, him, and the ghost of Allen Ginsberg.

I was at my favorite outdoor café one workday afternoon, sitting at “my” writing table, the one that wobbled just enough that most of my Americano slopped out of the cup and into the saucer below it. Cradled in the writing callus on the left side of my middle finger I held an expensive silver pen whose smooth surface winked in the sunlight, its black velvet tip rolling over the rough grains of the pages of an expensive spiral-bound notebook.

I was practicing my art and my craft, which back then mostly involved writing standup comedy jokes about women who wouldn’t date me. The café’s clientele of underemployed young creatives surrounded me, their chatter cocooning me with a white noise fading to static. I needed that noise, that distraction, to escape into the blank page and the world of obvious observations about dating culture that I created within it.