The Man Who Muses: a short story
When you should tire of blank screens and vacant words, there’s a small city in a tiny county that bears its name in upstate New York where the #writingcommunity goes to seek inspiration for their next book – Schenectady. Twenty bucks and a cigarette’s the cost.
Within the crosshairs of Hamilton Hill, on the outer sights of the gentrified plots, lies a shady spot colloquially known as the Murder Lot. They say he comes there from the West side of Broadway, donning a dusty fedora and a moth-bitten tweed, crinkling in his fist ideas on yellowed slips guaranteed to win awards. Make it fifty with a full pack of smokes, you might even get yourself the next best-seller.
Someone claimed to have asked him once where he got those ideas from. From between the piles, it’s supposed, of the overpass. He draws them out like water from a well, stashed amidst the soggy cardboard signs the panhandlers stuff into the crack, when the black-and-whites of the local police roll by, so they can make themselves scarce. They just come to him, he said.
I thought to follow one day. Hurried into my pick-up to circle the block, tracking where he’d go once he reached the bottom of the pedestrian path. West along Broadway, just as I had been told, I got caught at the light and watched him begin the ascent up the tree-covered steps toward St. Anthony’s. But when the light turned green and I charged up the wooded street by the cathedral, I never saw him reach the top. He simply wasn’t there.
The price is thirty now, or so they say. I never saw him from that day to this. He won’t take my call. But he’s still out there, just the same, waiting with a story that needs to be told.
A little backstory -
Author James Scott Bell tells a story in his lecture on “How to Write Best-Selling Fiction” about how writers go to Schenectady, NY for their inspiration. As he tells it, that idea originates with famous sci-fi author, Harlan Ellison, who allegedly grew tired of people asking him where he got his great story ideas from. Ellison finally started answering that there was a clearing house in Schenectady that would send him a six-pack weekly for twenty-five bucks.
That quip seems alive and well today in the literary world because the city of Schenectady turns up even as recently as this year as in a TV series with a sort of wink-and-a-nod by the writer to his peers. Having grown up in a nearby county, I was rather tickled by the joke. This story was the result and is dedicated to James Scott Bell, who was nice enough to email me about it when asked.
