prompt: edit, title: press rewind, Woody gets her back again in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Once upon a time, a girl with whom I was deeply-infatuated (but had no romantic interest in me) said I should rent Annie Hall from the local pizzeria/bodega/video rental/narcotic courier service Carney’s Corners. We’re efficient in the frozen flyover. At least, we used to be. When folks need a bit of everything, why only pizzas when you can also sell penny-candies and nickel-bags? How does one simply run a bicycle-shop, when someone must be the town pornographer as well? The hearty pragmatism of our post-industrial Adirondack Foothills psychology.

I watched, of course, I needed to impress her. My complex about getting outshined by boys who play guitar isn’t wholly upon her slender shoulders, of course, but she sure gave my neurosis one hell of a head-start. I can’t play guitar, can’t play piano like Dad, can’t even hit a damn curveball. To this day, all I’ve ever had to my name were the words coming out my fool-mouth.

I fell asleep in the middle of it. Even at what must’ve been seventeen, I only saw the cascade of narcissistic navel-gazing from a weird little prick convinced himself better than everyone else, out of the fear he was the worst person to ever breathe. The irony escaped me, of course, as that’s exactly who I was then as well but, in my defense, I was a teen and life hadn’t beaten perspective into my mind over a decades-long-string of failures and epiphany yet. Mr. Allen was a grown-ass multi-millionaire, what the hell was his excuse?

When I finally awoke, the girl was gone, but the tape auto-rewound and had started over. My attempt feign coolness collapsed under the weight of knowing the signs of pathetic self-insert fan-fiction, as I was wrote then myself, but at least I had the self-awareness to burn it all before I went to college, not demand a goddamned Oscar for my molehills of sanctimonious self-pity.

But I should thank her because, decades later, the film made me realize I had to write my book about Frank. Because Allen did the relationship between LA and NY so dirty in his masturbatory declaration of being just a sweet little dude, how can one not love a fellow who quotes freshman philosophy trying to get laid? How does one not immediately edit him into one’s wedding plans?

The real story deserved its telling and, hell, I’d already lived it.

Any large city is a vortex of horrors and wonders, curse or not, unaffordability without trust-fund or not. Both, slightly different surfaces in which to see yourself, as in some mirror dimly. I tried to watch it again as an adult and my only difference in reaction was the realization Paul Simon’s character was the hero of the entire piece, getting Hall away from that passive-aggressive little creep. Maybe, in the end that’s what the boys who play guitar are here for. To save girls from us schmucks who need decades of trauma to become even-somewhat-less awful than Woody Allen.