John Hendrickson Tells the Truth
Two stutterers walk into a bar.
No, really. John Hendrickson and I arrive at The Library in the East Village on a Sunday afternoon. We wave hello to the bartender and claim a shadowy booth in a tucked-away corner, underneath a projection of the 1958 remake of Dracula. This is the last stop on our tour of John’s old haunts from his salad days in New York City. Earlier we walked through Tompkins Square Park, where he used to spend Saturdays on a bench with a stack of magazines, and grabbed a bite at B&H Dairy, where he used to sit at the counter and flip through the Village Voice. (He likes to read.) And now we’re here, at The Library, the dive bar where he celebrated his 25th birthday. All the while, we’ve been talking, and by talking I mean stuttering.
John and I are both stutterers. We stutter differently, of course, as no two stutterers stutter the same, but we both share a tendency to block—that is, we get stuck on sounds, rather than, say, repeating or prolonging them. When we first meet up I tell him that I’d been feeling the same pre-interview jitters I always get—I was anxious that
