Overheard in New York

This NPR interview by Renee Montagne with Michael Malice, the author of Overheard in New York, got me thinking about one of the most bizarre conversations I overheard in L.A. I was sitting at a cafe on Pacific Coast Highway in Manhattan Beach when a couple of women in business suits passed by me, and one of them said to the other: “Look, if she’s bludgeoned to death, I want to make sure we see some blood.”

Oh, my God, I thought, what are these two plotting?

They sat down with their coffees and they started to mumble, and I couldn’t hear the rest. I pushed my chair away from my table, as if I needed the extra space for my book.

“Right,” one of the women said, “so one of the problems we’re having is that when the blood comes out, it gets pixellated. Do you have experience dealing with that?”

“I do, indeed,” the other woman replied, and she pointed to her resume.

They were having a job interview for a video game designer position.