Do kids still send handwritten mash notes to one another, slipped into school lockers or textbooks, passed hand-to-hand in class, delivered by giggling messengers as in an Elizabethan comedy? Or, in a time when young people are besotted and savaged by instant messaging, texting, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, are written declarations a hopelessly passé technology dating back to their grandparents in the 1970s, if not older?
I don't know, but I can speak of the spine-tingling impact of anonymous written communications. Consider these two stories separated by 40 years.
On a visit to the Brooklyn Museum in 2015, I checked my backpack in the lobby. When I retrieved it several hours later, I noticed a piece of paper tucked into its outside webbing. The page had been torn from a museum map and said this:
I caught you staring at me from across the room but you didn’t come right over. Were you being coy, well it worked. Maybe you felt the need to see the others, knowing that I would seize your full attention. You held your hands behind your back, resisting your desire to touch me. I longed for you to come close but we had to keep our distance under the watchful eye of another. You slowed, staying long enough to see all sides of me. You quietly traced my contours with your looking. I am wondering how I appeared in your eyes. I don’t know if I am projecting but you seemed to be trying to uncover something, as if I held a secret for you. So did you get what you wanted from me? Course I am left with the lingering feeling of our encounter.
That’s all. No address, no
name, no next step, no closure. After my pulse returned to normal, I wet a finger and ran it
across a word to see if this was, in fact, an actual written note and not a
pre-printed piece of performance art that a transgressive artist had
photocopied and stuck into my backpack.
The black letter smeared slightly. The writing was real, even if what was written had no relation to the reality of that evening at the museum, where I strolled with my girlfriend the whole time. The note could only have been slipped into my backpack in the check room. I wouldn't be surprised if the artist observed me finding and reading the note.
I’m left with a mystery of
identity and intent that cannot be solved. It made such an impression on me that I wrote about it then, and now, following an open mic appearance about it last Friday, I'm writing about it again, with an update you can see in the comments of the original piece.
Mind games—these had happened before with the same confounding sense of something beckoning from just beyond my reach. The Brooklyn episode happened 40 years after other notes popped up in my locker at Mission High School in Texas. The similarity in anonymous, teasing targeting is remarkable. Somebody knows how to get inside my head, first in 1975 when I was a teen, then 40 years later. The mysteries of hidden and malicious human contact linger on. I knew back then I was getting played but, to paraphrase Shakespeare's opening of Twelfth Night, if anonymous notes be the food of (imagined) love, play on.
Adolescent note writing directed at me started in junior high, when a messenger handed me a passionate declaration of love from a classmate, with her real name. That was obviously a goof because that girl and I never interacted and I had no inkling of any interest from her to, as she wrote, "go around with me, I really love you Van."
Anyway, this note business heated up in the steamy locker area of Mission High School with notes bearing the initials “M.R.” After the first one I somehow expressed my curiosity to M.R. with a response in my locker. She (or he?) responded with loopy adolescent female notes that eventually make references to her buck teeth and big ass. The piece de resistance was a hand-colored piece of cardboard, painted on one side with a stylized "W" and written on the other. Even if a fraud, the sign showed a high attention to detail and makes me wonder about which of my artistically inclined friends might have conceived this teenage masterpiece.
The back of the card said,
"Someone lost something, all yours, FINDERS KEEPERS. This is a suviner
from an admirer 'M.R.'"
I never heard more. I doubt M.R. used her (or his) actual initials. It could be one person, it could have been a group project from mean girls who wanted to see how I'd react. I imagine I responded exactly the way they wanted me to, like a hungry catfish swallowing a lure in the Rio Grande. Catfishing, today's kids might want to know, existed with nondigital forms of social media. I’ll post this on Facebook—maybe M.R. is on my friends list. I never heard a bashful confession at high school reunions in Mission in the decades that followed, where liquor and loud music should have loosened up tongues and memories enough to reveal the real M.R. Am I being obsessive? You might say I'm Captain Ahab and M.R. is my now-postmenopausal Moby-Dick. Thar she blows! A hump like a snow hill!
Who was M.R., really? Maria, Mandy, Melissa, Marisol, Rosie, Renee, Rodriguez, Rivera, Ruiz, Reyna? Almost certainly none of them. Who was that sultry and oh-so-evocative Brooklyn note siren? I don’t know. However, the Brooklyn story has a coda that surprised me as much as the original letter. In 2020, five years after my original blog post about the note, I received an anonymous blog comment that led to this exchange:
Hi - I was just going through old papers and found this exact piece of paper amongst my things. I had forgotten about it until now. Like you, it was placed in my backpack when I visited the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. I thought it was real as well but now I’m thinking it was performance art. I haven’t been able to find anything else online about it. I wonder who the artist is!?
I'm curious: how did you happen to find my post on this mysterious episode, after five years?
I typed the text into Google search and your post popped up. I’m thinking about contacting the Brooklyn Museum to see if they know anything about it.
I copied part of the note’s text into a search engine. Only my blog post mentioned it. How many other such notes slid into Brooklyn backpacks that night? Could the anonymous commenter be none other than the mystery writer herself continuing the game from a safe distance? Or did M.R. teleport herself 40 years into the future from Texas to Brooklyn for one more round of teasing? While I doubt I'll ever know (or M.R. even remembers), the curious quest continues.
Maybe M.R. will read this and IM me on Facebook—the preferred channel for us old people these days.
