Ask the Author: Bonnie ZoBell

Bonnie ZoBell has a name you just want to say over and over. Her fine writing appears in the August issue and she talks with us about her favorite borough, the things she has run from and abandonment issues.

Would you get into a cab knowing the driver was high?

That would depend on what he was high on, how high he was, and where we were going. I don’t think I’d like a drunk cabbie to drive me from NYC to Connecticut, or a huffer to pick me up outside Port Authority to find an address in New Jersey. But a garden-variety, mildly-high pot-smoker driving me from the Bowery to Brooklyn would be okay, especially if I needed to get away from someone fast.

What have you run from?

Most of what I have run from is inside of me, not outside. I have run from depression, hurt, and other internal tragedies. Though I have dreams in which I am being pursued and can’t get any sound out, I one time shouted at the top of my lungs at a guy that was following me and hassling me down a dark street on the Upper West Side. I thought this might frighten him and get him to back off. It backfired, though, and he just became angrier and more aggressive, so then I ran out to Broadway Avenue, which was busier.

Does a specific time period matter to the setting of your story or did you deliberately write it so it could take place at any time in New York (as long as cabs existed and they were automotive cabs)?

I don’t think time even crossed my mind when I was writing the story. The story came from a prompt for which I had to use a famous movie line. I lived in New York about twenty-five years ago, so it was set from my memory of the place, though now that you ask, I think of it as occurring in present time.

What is your favorite borough?

I’ve only lived in two of them, Manhattan and Brooklyn, and didn’t experience the others much. Since I was a poor, starving grad student when I lived there, Manhattan was probably my favorite. The subways were much more dangerous back then, before they were cleaned up in the nineties, so I preferred Manhattan because it was quicker and easier to get home safely at night.

If you could have your own gang a la The Warriors, what would the gang’s name and motif be?

We would be an all-girl gang called Bee’s Lead Poisoners. We’d wear black jackets with yellow pencils appliqued on the back and have necrotic fingernails—lead embedded in them so we could lash out if you got too close.

Where would you not like to be abandoned? What would you do if you were abandoned there?

I wouldn’t like to be abandoned in Needles, California, a part of the Mojave Desert where it’s not unusual for the temperature to reach 120 in the summer. Sometimes it sets the world record for highest temperature of the day. It’s so hot that your priorities change. What you thought mattered doesn’t any more. Air conditioning is irrelevant. All you can do is check into the Motel 6 Needles, get into the pool, keep your head under as long as possible, and hope that no one finds a reason for you to get out. The only redeeming thing about the place is that I can’t imagine there’s much crime because it’s just too hot to think about let alone act on.