©

My sophomore year of high school, I was put in charge of the literary magazine by an English teacher whose classroom was some hybrid of an AA meeting and the outdoor stage of a summer Shakespeare festival. The magazine was called — without much creativity or pretension — The Final Draft, and about nine people knew of its existence. This is where I met Cooper Bell.

Cooper Bell was not on the staff of the The Final Draft. I never spoke to him; I had no clue what he looked like. Cooper Bell was what we were up against, but also who we were fighting for. He was all the best and all the worst parts of running a high school literary magazine.

Here’s what it means to run a high school literary magazine: three kids submit, anonymously, and all of them are on the magazine staff. During editorial review, they call their own work cliché (optional to affix a d; mandatory to affix a ?, hoping it isn’t true). When the rest of the group agrees, they quit.

We decide that the problem is marketing. We email all the teachers we know, who, meaning well, make submission to The Final Draft a class assignment. We get hundreds of Greek myths retold from the perspective of the manservant, or the Minotaur, or the pomegranate that Persephone ate. We get earnest college essays with the ‘Why Stanford?’ paragraph left in. We get comfortable being in school when school is over — with the empty Escher hallways and the perforated ceiling tiles dripping paper clips and the janitors’ boom boxes.

Everything Cooper Bell gave us was written in class, but none of it was written for class. Nothing was word-processed. Every week, the English teacher handed me a fistful of notebook paper: ‘Here’s ten more from Cooper Bell.’ Each of his poems had been turned in the same hour that he wrote them — when the English teacher wasn’t in, he would slip them under the classroom door, like adding dollars to a swear-jar.

His pieces were torn out of spiral notebooks or scrawled on the backs of yearbook order-forms. Sometimes the pages were wavy-stiff, the unnerving topography of paper that has been wet and then sun-dried. They were covered in scratch-outs and ink blots. (What kind of pens leaked, anymore?)

Cooper Bell thought he was hot shit. His poems had titles like ‘Untitled #74’ and ‘Febrile Night,’ and when you could discern people in them, the people were smoking cigarettes or having sex with prostitutes. Declared at the bottom of every page was an inky ‘© Cooper Bell.’

‘My man Cooper’s a dingbat,’ said the English teacher, with respect to the copyrights. And yes, Cooper Bell may not have known a lot about intellectual property, but he was on to something. He hadn’t made a Xerox of anything he gave to us — he had no fear of losing it. It was imperfect, and ample. Inspiration would strike again, probably the next day in 2nd period chemistry.

I like to think that Cooper Bell knew that he was our meme, and that he kept submitting anyway — owning it all, but not precious about any of it.

We have something to learn from Cooper Bell, which is why we’ve staked out this corner of the internet. Soon, we’ll slip something else under the door.

© Helen & Erson