19th
Lunch at the Professor’s
The professor’s walls are books. How many, I don’t know. It could be a massive apartment underneath all those books. Some of the books are on shelves, but not in rows, or even in stacks—in whorls. Maelstroms of books, Bosching up against each other, burls of books trying desperately to return to their original tree-state: Books in stacks, books in screes, landslides of books and berms of books, alluvial deposits of books in the corners of the room.
And, in the bathroom, a very nice handwritten note from Anjelica Huston, above the cracked gray marble tile, with the same little bottle of Chanel No. 19 standing guard, as it has for years.
This is what the inside of the Professor’s brain looks like. It’s what the inside of my brain will look like someday, only with fewer books and more pornography. Healthy, functional brains make math and money. Broken brains make art or, more often, crime.
The Professor has a six foot poster of herself framed and lying on the floor. It was for a festival in the early nineties. Two were made, and the theater was throwing one away.
“So I took it,” says the Professor. “But it’s not the sort of thing I can have in my house.” The poster is larger than the refrigerator. “I think I know a hair salon on 96th that wants it.”
I crouch on one side of the poster to watch a video she’s showing me: (Her television is nine inches and sits on the floor.) It’s a home movie of her trip across the ocean in 1960, to see Nkrumah’s Ghana. The color bleeds in and out—it’s a VHS rip of old super-8 footage. In it, the Professor is very young, younger than I am now; she looks like a child dressed as Ingrid Bergman for Halloween.
“You’re too young to be comfortable,” the Professor tells me
“I’m not comfortable.
“You need to some new role models,” the Professor tells me.
