The Wake

In slouching checkered pants, two lengthy gold chains (one ending in a giant ampersand), and a plain cotton tee, Davy Rothbart looks like he may spout rhymes at any second. Instead, he picks through a stack of crumpled paper and recites a letter to Continental Airlines from passenger 29 E—the tortured soul whose seat is at arms’ length from the plane’s bathroom door, and who continually finds his fellow travelers encroaching on his spot as they wait for the loo.

“Asses fit into my personal space like a pornographic jigsaw puzzle,” 29 E rants. “The next ass that touches my shoulder will be the last… I just heard a man groan in there. This sucks.”

Earlier, Rothbart read from a boy’s small diary. Inside were ramblings on school, teachers and a four-step plan for destroying his brother, Matt.

Step one: Wait until he’s asleep. Step two: Make sure he’s asleep. Step three: Put hand in water. Step four: Total humiliation.

These are just two of the thousands of personal notes, e-mails, pictures and signs left lingering in high school hallways or forgotten in bowling alleys that people collect and mail to Rothbart, who compiles the most compelling—and hilarious—submissions into Found, a series of ingeniously simplistic books and magazines.

Last month, Rothbart stood before a crowd packed onto metal folding chairs and pressed against the walls of the Creative Electric Studios’ small Northeast Minneapolis gallery to read (and sometimes dramatically reenact) his favorite finds, including a typed note titled “Budget List.” After logging typical expenses, like rent and cable, the note continues:

Food: $500. Liquor: $600. Laundry: $30. Crack: $600. Attorney: $250.

Then there’s a handwritten letter found by a high school janitor, which looks torn from a Five Star notebook. The rumpled paper is a correspondence between two girls, distinguished by different colored pen ink, which Rothbart articulates with the emotion of two Hollywood actresses duking it out for an Oscar.

“Fuck you bitch. Give me my pen back.” “Yo mama a bitch.” “Trash-whore-ho. You think you the shit but you ain’t nothing lame ass.” “Don’t play with me, because when you play with me, you play with fire.”

The note, probably slipped slyly across desks during class, leaves one girl seemingly near tears, and the other consoling her. “See you later!” it happily ends.

Found is a family business. Submissions of found items are actually mailed to Rothbart’s mom’s house, and his brother “Popcorn” Pete writes songs inspired by the finds, including “The Booty Don’t Stop Girl,” based on a mix-tape that a kid named Nigel found while walking home from his bus stop. The cassette’s title is “Booty Songs,” and its content, the brothers explain, is “dick-donkulous.”

Pete’s rendition of the mix-tape’s opening track, which begins: “Damn. The booty don’t stop girl,” and says little else for the next few minutes, is crooned in a boy-band worthy harmony, softly-and-slowly, with all the emotion of a Nick Lachey/Jessica Simpson duet—before they split.

But the night’s real treat occurred when Rothbart grabbed a stack of unopened envelopes, all Found submissions, except for one student loan bill, and passed them out with all the zeal of a proud U.S. postal service worker doling out Christmas cards. “I want to give you a sense of what I experience every single week,” Rothbart explained, before the crowd dug into mail sent from as far as Billings, Montana, and as close as Minneapolis.

Gleefully tearing into my prize, I find a 3-by-5 inch photo of five white goats on a farm, discovered in the self-help section of a thrift store, inside a book titled “Building a Marriage.” “Did the goats live happily ever after?” the finder questions.

Someone else unwrapped a poem scrawled on the back of a student loan service center envelope (though not Rothbart’s). “When I get bad grades, I start to turn blue. That’s when I like to eat something—like you… Filipino pastries, filled with some sweet cheese… You’re curious. You make me dream.”

Curious, indeed.

Found can be purchased at area bookstores or online at foundmagazine.com.