I had this encounter in October of 2022, almost two years ago. Immediately after Bob left my apartment, I snatched a pen and notebook to take down as much as I could remember verbatim before it slipped out of my mind. I had no particular vision for what I would write, but I was sure Bob’s personality was worth capturing.

At the time I’d already spent over a year reading pieces of New Journalism and I imagined I could take inspiration from pieces like Lillian Ross’s portrait of Hemingway, an infamous magazine article that was later printed on its own as a book. Tom Wolfe, delighted, called it an evisceration. But Ross had no such intention. And Hemingway, apparently, loved it.

As I sit down on my couch in this blazing August sun, I still don’t know how I’m going to write this. As I begin, I realize I am already sticking to a certain tense and point of view. Let me instead write down the sequence of events with bits of detail I remember, and later I’ll fit it into a form.

Wow. That worked. The whole thing just spilled out as soon as I stopped trying to construct the first few sentences so self-consciously.

I’m tweaking the first few sentences, but they already work quite well. I intended them to be placeholders, but they may hold their place after all.

I think I can leave it as it is, at least for now. It communicates Bob’s buoyant spirit and his delightful way of speaking, which is the main reason I wanted to write this piece. It’s good enough to post.

Now it’s the following morning and I’m making small edits. Tweaking phrasing, rewriting one sentence, and capitalizing the first letter of phrases when Bob was quoting others.