I have a picture I took thirty years ago of a white clapboard house partially obscured by brilliant, blazing leaves of autumn. The photo, which I framed and hung in my Upper West Side apartment, represented something beatific, something out of reach. I could only imagine what it would be like to live in a house like that.

I became obsessed with leaf-peeping. Every fall, I’d trek from the city to the Hudson Valley or New England for several extended weekends to drench myself in nature’s color spectacular. I’d snap a thousand pictures, crunch along leaf-strewn trails and hole up in quaint B&Bs.

Unknowingly, it wasn’t leaf-peeping I was indulging in, as much as an exercise in life-peeping.

Who are the lucky souls who get to wake up in old houses lit by flaming maples and golden hickories? How great would it be to live in a place with a rocking-chair porch covered with large pumpkins and baskets of misshapen gourds, where sweet-scented smoke curls through a chimney and swirls of falling leaves eddy at the doorstep?

Every trip deepened my wonder and curiosity about what it would be like to own such a house.

“Slow down,” I’d say from the passenger seat while passing through a postcard-perfect New England town. “I want to have a closer look at that one.”  Then, sighing as the car rolled away:  “Isn’t it the most beautiful house you’ve ever seen?”

Subconsciously, I was cataloging the accoutrements of country life, like a hungry person scanning a patisserie window. I needed to know what the details were so I could slowly, methodically paint myself into the picture, the one that hung in the city apartment. It takes a while before a city girl can really imagine country life for more than a few days at a time.

The man I married in 2001 convinced me, finally, to leave Manhattan and move to the kind of house I once jumped out of a car to photograph. As Burb Appeal readers know, we live in an old farmhouse that satisfies my decades of yearning. Our house might not be as grand or handsome as some I saw on leaf-peeping excursions, but it’s framed by tall trees and dense woodlands that turn stunning shades of sienna red, burnt orange and taxi-cab yellow.

What’s different now that I’m living the dream?  One thing I never, ever do is take meandering, leisurely, leaf-peeping drives to small towns.

I’m too busy.

Autumn, to the unsuspecting leaf-peeper’s eye, looks serene and peaceful and Norman Rockwell-orchestrated. The reality behind that tableau is hard work — a lot of hard work.

In late September, we’re harvesting and drying out sunflower seeds, eating the last of our cucumbers and melons and planting winter vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower.

On October 1st this year, I turned on the heat — just to test it. Turned out the basement furnace needed a $500 repair. While the leaves around us were just starting to pop with reds and yellows, we were planting 200 irises and 150 hyacinth bulbs.

By mid-month, I was begging my husband to clear out the tangle of garden supplies from the shed to make room for my daughter’s bicycle and scooter and for the patio furniture I was hosing down. A parade of potted impatiens was making its way inside. Empty pots with plants that didn’t make it were stored in the basement. Dead vegetation needed cutting back.

Meanwhile, the newspaper’s Friday weekend section taunted me with suggestions for fall leaf-peeping day trips.

Not gonna happen, I told myself.  We’ve got to rake and chop wood and caulk and weather strip and call the chimney sweep and air out the winter bedding and plant the garlic bulbs and stock up on chicken feed and grit and buy gourds and a wreath and, of course, the pumpkin.

Ah yes, the pumpkin. Every year, amidst the frenzy of transitioning to winter, we invite friends to our annual pumpkin carve and harvest meal.  My daughter draws facial features on the pumpkin, and my husband expertly carves along the lines. We gather up the pumpkin guts and seeds and place a candle in the cavity. As the sun fades, we light the Jack-O-Lantern and ooh and ahh. Then, we feast on food we’ve grown.

And I remember why I wanted all this so badly.

 

 

(The Merry-Go-Round is Beginning to Taunt Me[1])

 

1. Author As [not circus] Dog Trainer (Cris)

You can’t lie to a dog. Or you can’t lie badly. While training dogs, you need to be “telling” them, with both body-language and voice, that they are the center of the universe to you, and that what they do for you—and what you’re doing together—makes you happier, and means more to you, than anything else in the world. They can tell if you’re lying. If you’re unconsciously communicating to them that you’re disappointed or upset because you’re thinking about something else, something offstage—whether your life’s true dilemma or your most current disappointment—they take it on as stress. To dogs, it’s all about them. So the trainer has to be able to convince the dog of that, whether it’s true in the trainer’s larger life or not. Problem is, the dog can usually tell. A good trainer doesn’t have “a larger life.” It’s never “just a dog” and therefore easy to lie to.

Is an audience at a reading “just an audience at a reading,” and easier to lie to than a dog? If your true, or larger feelings, infringe on the party atmosphere, on your cheerful gratefulness that you have a book published and an audience to read to, will they also decide your angst is all about them and therefore have no interest in whether the book itself is worthwhile, interesting, important, or even possibly entertaining?

After finishing a series of readings for my 15^th book, I received this advice:

Be fun, vivacious, personable and amusing. Be substantial and invested, but leave them smiling. Everyone wants to be where the party is. If folks are kind enough to make a party atmosphere around your book [by attending a reading], then let people have a good fucking time at the party, and be happy and grateful for that.

I responded: “I wonder if being a fun-chameleon is really the way to give a book a better chance at some modicum of success. I mean, why can’t some of us have a different personality? And if I’ve lost some of my burn and zeal, I think I’ve had some of my corners worn down (to the bone, it feels) in an indie-press career spanning 20 years now. Has it come to this: I really need to act like a cheerleader?”

My advisor:

The reason I’ve given you any advice at all about how to “act,” which is presumptuous of anyone to tell someone else, much less a newer writer to tell a more experienced writer, is that a lot of people we know mutually have remarked to me over the past couple of years on how negative, depressed, anxious or bitter you have seemed. Taken individually, this doesn’t mean anything except that the person saying it may be judgmental or just wants to gossip. But taken collectively when I’ve heard it from 5 or 6 people, especially when I know some of these people really like you and aren’t just trying to be assholes, this is why I’ve given you the advice I have about not coming across as negative.

And when a couple of the occasions after which people remarked stuff like this to me were not “private” occasions, but after seeing you at someone else’s reading or sitting with you at a group table or something like that, this is why I thought I should mention it.

This is not surprising—you’ve had a few really hard years. The thing with [your last publisher] was very hurtful. . . albeit if none of the huge unearthing of issues in your life had taken place, it’s possible you would not have taken career things as hard. But, I mean, for a while you were clinically depressed. I know it’s very hard to give a shit about literary stuff, or to have optimism or “illusions,” when one’s personal life and psyche have been in an uproar.

I don’t mean you should act like a bubbly 25 year old. I don’t even mean to act differently than you have for the bulk of your career. I just mean that, whatever you have been willing to “put out there” over the past few years in terms of your mood or personal disillusionments / insecurities, I would recommend that you don’t put that out there anymore when promoting the book. And in case you were not “willing” to put it out there, but rather unaware that you were doing so, I guess I was trying to just give a subtle hint.

The subject here, then, is author as entertainer, as life-of-the-party (or life of the it’s-all-about-me-but-I-care-about-you party); as friendly, funny pal everyone will want to hang with; as popular girl (or guy) in the high-school halls with a peer group that now includes 3 or 4 different generations. Those pensive, faraway, or serious-thinker author photos had better also disclose someone ready with a hilarious quip for any occasion, the teasing nature of a camp counselor, the gracious vivacity of the party’s host, the beguiling animation of a really good tour guide. The subject here is a popularity contest.

The voices here will have to be anonymous.

All of the people I’ve spoken with are writers I admire, and friends, people I care about to one degree or another. If I disagree with anything they’ve said, I’m not here to embarrass or out them. They’ve caused me to think. I like that. If I have to think about my inability to be personally popular … it’s not their fault that’s my reality. Not their fault that I feel like an actor who joined a serious theatre group (even if only cast in bit parts) and over the years the company morphed into a circus without her realizing.

 

2. #AuthorFail (Davis)

If dogs teach us anything, it’s that our trusty domestic companions have come a long way from their wolf-roots. As my oldest daughter Athena says, “I’m evolving now, and it doesn’t hurt a bit.” Sure, even the toy breeds probably have the pack instinct and yearn to howl at the moon. Perhaps miniature pinschers everywhere wait their chance to turn on their benevolent masters and caretakers—us. This is why I’ve always been a cat person, and even though I had to put my long-time super cat, Cassie, to sleep some months ago, filmmaker John Waters reminded me recently that, “your cat hates you!”

Sure, Cris, we’re up against the wall as authors-of-a-certain-generation who can’t live 24-hours-per day on social networking sites and blogs and within the too-incestuous miasma of small-press book promotion that churns and churns and never stops but for the most part has the collective yelp of the chickapoo of whatever else these cross-bred former-wolves might now be called. Can you hear the French onomatopoeia for the dog bark: “jappe jappe”? Esperanto: “boj, boj.”

Sadly, or perhaps not-so-sadly, much small press/indie authorship serves within a matrix of production-for-producers. We write books that other small-word writers read or pretend to read or never read and never pretend to read and we review and cross-promote each other with a vehemence that makes Gregor Mendel seem like a pea-pod dabbler and we conspiratorially make like nothing untoward may be happening or better yet we call it “community building” and we really mean it—we do—this is more than rhetoric—but most of us also really do mean this in the same double breath that we’d like to break through the indie ceiling and cash a big check from a New York publisher even though we realize that path is almost never sustainable and almost never going to happen without a goodly amount of aesthetic give-and-take or take-and-take. Or just take. Let’s look at two types of writers in this matrix:

1) The Modern Romantic (MR): The type of writer who secretly (or not-so-secretly) craves a “wider” audience, and for whom—and this is essential—it is not enough to wish for demonstrable authorial “success.” Rather, the MR sees his or her exile to the small press world as either

a) A temporary state of affairs, or

b) A great indignity foisted upon her by a entropic universe concerned only with the marketability of books, a universe with little room for a new author to break into the pack, an author whose work is undervalued yet “better” that whatsoever appears on the spring list, will toil for an unspecified period below the surface of Manhattan’s wide Sargasso Sea.

Deep sighing breath. Get centered.

Namaste.

The MR author has also, unsurprisingly, been found guilty of some Kafka-esque sin, which given only the possible zyzzygy of lucky break, talent, and perseverance, might still upend the cruel fates. (There is a bit of good ‘ol Yankee boostrapism at work in this one.)

Of course, a certain version of the MR had some success at first with a book from a major label or a well-regarded minor literary press (Milkweed, Greywolf). Now, books later, this MR toils in the rear of the wolfpack, where her books are poorly copyedited, under-marketed, and forever relegated to the footnotes of a literary topography that has long since shifted its tectonic plates.

Where to spot the MR: You can find the MR in a writer’s colony or garret or subway car or coffee shop writing her way out of the world in the possession of a dog whose been kicked and left for dead and buried and whose book is pulped after a year in a warehouse and who goes back now, tail between legs, to the minor league small press world where she grows increasingly embittered[2] as the newer generation of MFA-bred cross-promoters “like” each others Facebook links until Facebook wets itself into some collective virtual orgasm where even Mark Zuckerberg gets his share of vicarious click-thrills.

2) The Young Turk (YT, and yes, the archaic term is meant ironically): This latter group, while certainly possessing some traits of the MR—and after all, how could any American writer schooled in an MFA or Ph.D. writing program not to some extent internalize the ideas of genius, authenticity, and old-style creationism internally programmed into the system?—also represent a new genus of the literary scene[3].

Defining characteristics: The YT lives online, perhaps not to the extent of the zapped-into-the-screen absurdity of Jeff Bridges in Tron, but the YT sees writing-as-networking, using new-media as an extension of the page, networking to the point where networking disappears and becomes something else: “living.” The YT has at least 1500 Facebook “friends,” can expect “likes” or comments in the dozens for postings on the order of “I’ve just had lunch” or “It’s on” or “Just finished writing a short story” and “The universe,” ad infinitum. The YT probably writes for a collaborative literary site such as BigOther, HTMLgiant, The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown (yes, I write for two of these), etc; the YT carries a smart phone and is live tweeting while reading this article; the YT’s website is miminalist and sharp, easy to navigate and positively airy (compared to the accomplishment-thick website of the MR, redolent in garish colors); the YT will respond to emails anytime of the day and generally until 2-3 am; the YT, despite being a publishing writer for less than three years, knows more people than the MR: the YT has published 100 or so creative pieces in journals edited by other YTs (whereas the MR has published 12 stories over her long career, and only in the “best” lit mags); the YT enjoys going to AWP and participates in bar readings that last 7 hours with a cast of thousands (each reader has 38 seconds to perform); the YT would love to teach or get a tenure-track academic job, and some do), while the others look to break into this work, which many MR’s have long-ago conquered only to be then defeated by the byzantine minutiae of administrative politics, committee meetings straight out of Dante, and a loathing of student papers that makes 1984’s Winston’s rat-fear seem like a soft phobia on the order of disliking wax beans.

 

3. The Ante is What? OK, I’m In (Cris)

Troubled by events where I felt overshadowed by not just humor, but something bigger than humor, I had various email exchanges with other writers. Some noteworthy comments and responses:

#1 But if you’re reading with 4 other people, it helps to stand out.

#2 … if we want to stand out, we have to stand out. Plain and simple. The work itself matters first, of course, but the quality or distinction of the work won’t “sell” the work, necessarily. So maybe just maybe, the …  public perception of a certain image or persona or personality or crazy multipronged marketing party-plan that’s somehow both honest and original could do the job. And that means something about it has to be radically different from the pack. That’s partly why I’m all into the transmedia/freakshow angle for [TITLE OF BOOK].

#3 This is offensive. It means that a group reading isn’t about experiencing different voices, different aesthetics. It means that it’s about competition, of one-upping, of being the “best of the bunch.” Which translates into book sales.

 Me: Like in high school, whether we knew it or not, whether we were aware of it or not, or whether we actually received the advice directly or not, there was an underlying understanding that boys wouldn’t like girls who were pensive and smart or who looked serious and intellectual, or worse yet, somber, gloomy, reclusive, or a snob (i.e. shy). Back then, I got labeled “the sad girl.” Is this like that? The bubbly, effervescent girls will succeed as writers too?

#4 Vivacious for girls, yes; however, for guys one option is the smarty-pantsiosity that becomes the know-betterism—a kind of unequal equal of muscle. I try to be clever and fun and instructive and usually end up also being fairly emotional (two of the poems I’ll read are about suicided friends of mine, and another is for my dead sister—though none is angsty). I have seen you be amused if not amusing at events here, but I want to know your thoughts on giving oneself permission to not be so amusing or clever and smarty-pants-ish.

How could I hope to express anything about this better than #4? (So … would I want to read with him? Well, I did once. Almost 3 decades ago. I’ll get to that. )

 

4. Are we even playing cards? Doesn’t matter. (Davis)

Some of my (recent) shameless reading gimmicks: A 100-foot rope threaded through the audience and clipped to my belt and then you-the-audience pull me pull me pull me and I pull back while I read; forgetting the rope and so asking audience members—six eager writing students—to push me or try to steal my text as I read and they chase me and I run and jump around the room; strobe lights set to the alpha-wave frequency and you listen with eyes closed while I read and, hopefully. you see stuff; shouting; dressing as a mime to read from my novel BLANK, a largely blank novel; pouring water all over Lidia Yuknavitch with you, Cris, as you and Lidia did the same to me; using Google Earth to geo-locate texts during a “Neighborhoods” Chicago Reading at the Chicago Cultural Center.

The last two, Cris, were more or less your ideas.[4] This proves that you are willing to jump into this strange pool of standing-out self promotion even if you want to be the quiet Svengali in the background and let others figure out how to do it, but that’s not exactly true because you even brought the pool to our reading with Lidia and a tarp to protect the floor of the gallery and this was damn thoughtful and then you laughed with everyone and you were in on the joke and you so thoughtfully left the pool at a bus stop in Chicago.

We went out for drinks and dessert afterward with the organizers of the Red Rover series and some of audience members—including the couple who drove over 100 miles to see us dump water on each other—and we basked in the afterglow of the deed itself and sounded pleased when we heard about the photos and the videos and the way this would not be merely an afterglow but have an afterlife beyond this table, this story, these people—and so live on forever and ever amen.

How would the pure MR respond to such tasteless gimmickry? With disdain (perhaps tinged with jealousy.)

How would the YT respond? By exploiting the event online in a much-more-effective manner than either of us are capable of doing.

Let’s take the example of the videos and photos of the Red Rover water-experiment.

Before the event: Jen Karmin and Laura Goldstein, the Red Rover organizers, insert us into the schedule and prepare their email announcement. I don’t know about you or Lidia, but I invite a few Chicago folks.

The event itself: You and Lidia meet at a coffee shop in Bucktown and I’m not sure I can even make the thing because my father, in his firth-year of advanced brain cancer, sits thick with a bacterial infection in the hospital. The day before, he shakes for a four-hour period in an advanced fever state. He tells my mother in a fit of delirium, “It’s because of Kennedy and Castro. That’s why I’m sick…” He takes a turn for the non-feverish and I truck down to Chicago from a northern suburb.

The three of us meet, laugh, and plan out the general water pattern of the event. We are three deeply wounded people. Maybe. Or not. We go out to dinner and talk more about mutual acquaintances in the avant-writing world. We leave for the event, and I arrive five minutes later, since we are only three blocks away. You drive with Lidia and somehow get lost and I panic and call and text both of you over and over while assuring the kind organizers that you are both on your way. I stand outside the venue, a nondescript third-floor walk up gallery space in Wicker Park, and discover you, standing in a trance state, lost, holding the kiddie pool. We move into the space and lose our breath walking up the stairs. We do the water thing.

We submerge ourselves.

After the event: Aside from the aforementioned dinner, there is documentation. A series of photos and a few videos appear on Facebook. People comment and then it all fades away.

What else have we done with this? Nothing. We are failed YTs.

Except in this essay.

We live forever now.

 

 5. Will You Do It For 10-Cents?

Whadda-ya Think I Am?

We’ve Already Established That, Now We’re Haggling Over a Price[5] (Cris)

Either it started to rub off on me, literary Darwinism took hold, or I’m turning into a conceptual reader (or book-promotion werewolf) and just don’t know it. I had some unfortunate (or advantageous, depending on who you’re asking) big ideas. Honest, I was joking. I was trying to survive.

In one, four writers from the Chicago area were going to stand on various places on a city map, drawn or projected onto the floor, and read pieces depicting some aura of their corner of the city. Whew, good thing no one could figure out how to draw the map. I’m from California and didn’t have anything to read from the exurbs of Chicagoland where I now live, and yet the bright idea was mine.

In another recent event, three of us are supposed to read from books that by some means involve water, while sitting in a filled plastic child’s wading pool. This possibly brings body image into the competitive mix, as in: if you’re not funny, maybe you look good in a speedo. Or maybe we’ll reduce this idea to squirt guns (supplied to the audience). I have to remind myself, stop having these reckless ideas. The water imagery in Waterbaby was never meant to be funny, irreverent or snarky. It was supposed to be Alice Munro’s “gray, deep, baleful, magnificent sea.” (Is this like disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich comparing himself to Gandhi?[6] Dan Quayle comparing himself to JFK?[7] I’ll say it first, Mazza, you’re no Alice Munro.) But is this idea akin to having Rosanne Barr read (perform) Alice Munro?

No, my fellow readers at these events are not caricatures, not clowns (at least not yet), not avatars. We meet before events to have (usually) sushi or Thai food, laugh over past events where the audience numbered one or two (and one of those had wandered into the wrong room then left after the first reader), then each of us turn our backs halfway to call home and tell someone there we love them. Real people with pathos, needs, fears and hope. Or is it hope and fears. Or is it just plain anxiety?

 

6.  Will You Do It For Nothing? Then you’ve already won! (Davis)

A farm boy follows a rainbow to its end within a ancient forest, and finds, to his delight, a small leprechaun with red-hair stuffed under his garnet-green hat. The leprechaun guards—no surprises—an overflowing pot of gold, fat with bullion.

I’m taking the gold, says the boy, because I found you here, at the end of everything.

Right is right. Take whatever you can carry, me boyo.

The boy stuffs his pockets with bullion, tucks in his shirt and proceeds to dump coins down his collar. He’s lousy with the stuff. And the gold weighs him down with an absurd flourish. Jupiter gravity. Pancake flat.

Too greedy, me boyo. Leave some gold here. Yer’ sure to be rich still with just a few pieces of me coin.

Your whole pot-o-gold is mine by rights, and I’ll get a wheelbarrow to take all the gold.

Listen to me, boyo, take what you can now, and you’ll be happy fat rich.

The boy wants it all, though, and convinces the magic leprechaun to tie a green ribbon around the tree so he can find the gold and the leprechaun again.

There, around an ancient oak, the leprechaun stands, misty eyed, as the boy tromps out the gate of the forest toward his small farm, away from the faded rainbow.

The stakes are so low in the world of the small press that they are at the same time absurdly high. In the same way that one can be so far to the left that she can come out on the right. In the way that the singer can be so avant, so non-authoritative, so Duchamp-like in her contortions and arabesques and willful un-marketability, that she comes out with the scarlet A: Author.

Author.

Author.

 

7. Not funny or all that clever, but maybe the original smarty-pantsiosity: a brief history of my readings (Cris)

So, that reading I referred to, almost 30 years ago. It was my first reading, paired with two poets, two of us graduate students, one a talented undergrad (now a published avant-garde poet). I chose a story where a forestry worker, sexually abused by a dirt-biker who’s ripping up the wilderness serenity, responds with frenzied superhuman anger, dams up the river and watches as the stranded fish “waited for someone to put them back into the water.” I chose to supplement my reading with a simultaneous slide show of tranquil home photographs of my siblings, as children, fishing in our beloved Sierras. My two peers simply read their work. What did they think of my show-offy special effects? Perhaps they were secretly glad that the slide projector jammed and several of the pictures only showed up halfway on the screen.

Six years later I was writer-in-residence at a public university in Tennessee, and began my reading there with a story about a dog-trainer’s obsessive interest in a Marine taking dog-obedience classes from her, and I read dressed in a student’s cammo Army fatigues. For the story that followed, I shed the uniform right there on stage, down to the black leggings and T-shirt I’d worn underneath. Amusing or clever—that can be debated—but smarty-pants-ish in a very literal way. At least I was reading alone, but still two decades ago, I had the notion that the event should be something beyond the words I had written read aloud.

After that I became more of a “straight reader,” (as well as the straight man for whomever was reading with me) except when I toured for my 1998 novel, Dog People, and perched my obedience-trial champion Shetland sheepdog on a director’s chair beside me. No tricks: all she did was sit there without attempting to leave. This encouraged many questions from the audience: mostly about how to get dogs to behave better at home. If I’d been touring with a dog-training manual, I might have become the dog-whisperer before Cesar Millan got there first. (Make no mistake, he deserves his title, a superior trainer, and never lies to his dogs, although he hides the electric collar and transmitter from the TV camera).

In the late ‘90s a group of writers associated with independent, innovative presses planned to read together to celebrate Banned Books Week. I thought we discussed what we would read: material that might have been banned in previous eras. So the reading happened, and I read a very short story titled “Hesitation,” from my collection Former Virgin. I vaguely noticed that other pieces being read didn’t seem to fit the “would have been banned in previous eras” theme. After the reading, the authors sat in the reading space, in chairs around the perimeter, and the audience circulated, bringing books to be signed, asking questions, expressing their pleasure or appreciation for the piece an author had read. Not one soul talked to me or brought a book to be signed. When anyone came to talk to the writer I was sitting beside, they did not look at me. To this day I don’t understand what happened or what code I broke.

 

8. The Code (or Writing as Data) (Davis)

Winded, the boy returns to his farm and keeps away from the questioning looks of his older brother whipping a scythe through a handful of wheat. The boy makes for the barn. In his eye, the barn may be already on fire; he must be of fleet-foot.

Pulling the wheelbarrow from the corner and dumping its load of fresh, steaming cow dung onto a pile of ragged hey, the boy runs back across the field and past his brother whose eye tears in the wind. The boy streams past the farmhouse and back into the entrance to the woods and through the path he just came pushing the wheelbarrow over knotted roots. He becomes a mouse returning through a lab maze to exactly, precisely, the spot where the leprechaun should be. There, as planned, hangs the green ribbon around the oak.

A fat, emerald bow.

Come out, leprechaun, I’m back with the wheelbarrow and aim to take your entire pot-of-gold.

The boy searches around the tree. No leprechaun.

He falls to knees, crying, traces of shit steaming from the wheelbarrow.

Every tree in the forest, were he to look up from his sorrow, stands marked with a garnet knot.

The pot-of-gold is not so much the book or the book deal, of course, as the sustainable “career” within the industry, also called the book business. Authors who operate in even a vaguely innovative or indie forest become conditioned to desire the pot of gold, but the trouble is their inability to locate or agree upon the nature of the “rainbow” the “ribbon” the “leprechaun” or the “gold.”

For the Modern Romantic, the rainbow spectrum meanders circuitously through thickets and brambles and glens and patches of poison sumac and the tortuous ambiguities of the writing life—the isolation, the static of non-writing life always threatening to interfere with and perhaps inflect or overwhelm the act of artistic creation—this leads toward not so much wealth as the frustration of losing the impossible to pinpoint pot-of-gold.

For the Young Turk, the path is to forget the forest and the leprechaun and the pot-of-gold and simply recreate new versions of these things, each moment, on Facebook and Twitter and in the data-sphere where it’s not so much about the object itself as it is about the discussion surrounding the object. For many YTs, there is no object at all in the sense that the MR supposes.

The pot-of-gold is simply the story’s method of recreating itself.

 

9. The literalized metaphor (Cris)

I once gave an unremarkable reading at a small conference for experimental fiction. I believe it had a fancier name than that. I sat in attendance for some of the “papers” also being presented. One was in the form of critifiction,[8] which at the time I understood to be literary criticism written in the form of narrative using familiar techniques of fiction (dialogue, character, conflict) etc. The same presenter would, in the next year or so, do a critifictional piece on one of my novels, with a literary critic narrator who has just been diagnosed with cancer while teaching this novel, so the critifictional narrative parallels his personal conflicts with class discussions on the novel. (The same critic died from cancer about 6 years later). The other presentation I remember was called “Writing on the Body,” and while I realized the meaning of the word “on” would be tooled, I was amusedly surprised (not aghast) that the mode of presentation included posing an undergraduate female on a dais, undressing her, and writing on her body. Another literalized metaphor in action. As is frequently my experience, I didn’t understand the philosophy or theory being illustrated with the literalized metaphor, but I do, these many years later, still remember the presentation. So perhaps this is the allegory for some of the “readings” I have helped plan and am still am facing pending participation. I remember she had a dog there, but don’t remember which novel she was reading from. I remember she was sitting in a pool of water but don’t remember the title of the novel.

 

10. The de-literalized metaphor/ the end of the book (Davis)

We don’t remember much of the past, really, and even less details from a reading we might attend. Ten years out from the best reading we’ve ever experienced—the most effective literary tour-de-force, gimmick free—will we recall the name of the book, the name of the author, a line that turned us on and for a moment cut into the stream of our wandering mind? On some level, the act of reading functions within the same paradox: reading Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is no different than reading a well-crafted summary of Fear and Trembling once the endless march of time has steamrolled over the old-growth forest.

Certainly, the best books that stay with us—for me, recently, Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland, or Proust’s A La Recherché du Temps Perdu, which I recently finished for the second time—being two of the most memorable—becomes books that become experiences. Books that interface with our lives and our obsessions in some way that moves beyond the books themselves.

Tomasula’s, the more recent, epitomizes a move toward the non-book. VAS gestures to the network rather than the stream. This is a roman-glitch rather than roman-fleuve. To enter into discussion with VAS is to let go of your notions of the book almost completely.

Proust, the elder, by sheer virtue of its length and the time-commitment it takes to finish the damn thing, stands out in the way that we encounter a Modernist idea of mastery. We read such texts from start to finish and invest ourselves in their procession because we have no choice but to on some level internalize their aspects in order to finish. If you’ve just moved through Heidegger’s Being and Time or Joyce’s Ulysses or insert-title-of-massive-tome here…well, if you can’t get with the thing on some level then it’s been a colossal waste of your life. Sucker. It doesn’t matter if you’ve understood Heidegger or Joyce or read very word or skimmed or let your mind wander or whatever. You’ve finished. You mastered in. You’ve found a leprechaun. Congratulations!

Just try to find him again.

 

10. What If I Was Sitting in a Pool of Metaphoric Quicksand? (Cris)

This whole contemplation began when I was given the semi-solicited advice[9] I quoted at the start, including: “I know it’s very hard to give a shit about literary stuff, or to have optimism or ‘illusions,’ when one’s personal life and psyche have been in an uproar.”

Part of my “failure” to properly pursue promotion for my 2009 collection of fictions was a personal crisis and the darkness that lingered. I had a new book, yet I spent an inordinate amount of time lying on the floor of my study, not caring about anything.[10] I knew I had to do better in 2011. But among other personal dilemmas the literary world doesn’t care about, it seems my own life also caused me to not properly pay sufficient attention to others’ private lives. If this seems paradoxical, it’s because it is.

Author book-promotion includes (but is not limited to), readings—of course—but also class visits, interviews, blog appearances, book blurbs, writing reviews, etc., which we (most of us) earnestly try to keep from seeming to be quid-pro-quo[11].

We all know we’re supposed to contribute, heavily, to the publicity of our books. But the word self-promotion is still nasty. Some group blog sites have rules for posts: no self-promotion. We filter the most egregious self-promoters off our Facebook feeds. We don’t admit this. We’re caught in the middle, pretending not to be talking about our books while we’re talking about them. We don’t admit this. Whereas it used to be a book itself might create an “industry buzz” (often with the help of an agent or publisher), now instead the key is to “build a platform,” and spend time networking. We don’t admit this. And we’re all networking among other people networking for the same purpose—and, if lucky (no, it’s not luck, but we don’t admit what it really is), will become an internet or blogosphere darling, or will say or do something that goes viral. The marriage of these euphemisms would be: book publicity now requires that one become an internet virus. [12]

… or a trained bear.

San Diego Zoo, circa 1970: Chester is an Alaskan brown bear. He lives in a formerly progressive enclosure (without bars), with a pool for cooling off, a tree trunk (chained to the ground) for scratching or rolling around, and a cave if he absolutely positively had to go hide somewhere. But Chester didn’t hide because the tour buses came around every 20 minutes or so. The bus stops alongside Chester’s enclosure, and Chester is already ambling toward center stage, while the straight-man bus-driver begins the shtick.

Driver: Here we have our Alaskan brown bear, also known as a Kodiak brown bear or grizzly bear. Hello there Chester, can you show your guests how big an Alaskan brown bear is?

Chester stands on his hind feet, just on the other side of his moat.

Driver: The largest subspecies of the brown bear, Alaskan brown bears grow up to 1700 pounds, due to their rich diet of salmon. Give a San Diego Zoo greeting to these fine guests.

Chester raises his paw.

Driver: Brown bears also live inland, mostly in the Rocky Mountains, where their habitat has shrunk due to pressure from vacationeers and huntering. Chester, show us where you put the hunter.

Chester pats his stomach.

Now, the driver, at the same time he revs the engine to move on, frisbees a slice of wonderbread into the enclosure. Chester returns to all four feet, ambles to the bread and eats it. If the spectators are lucky, the bread may have landed in the middle of the pool, so Chester would slide in, suck the soggy dough into his mouth, then leave the water.

I remember Chester, that he was a Kodiak brown bear, a different, larger species than black bears. I remember that the San Diego Zoo pioneered cageless enclosures and Chester’s was one of the originals. I live in a society and culture where I remember these things because Chester put the hunter in his tummy then went to eat a slice of wonder bread.

 

11. Sounds Bytes that Speak to and Around the Key Questions of This Reading Experience. (Davis)

1. William S. Burroughs: Language is a virus.
2. Davis Schneiderman: Language is a virus.
3. The author-as-quipper must speak in the form of gregariousness that takes content to be a secondary function.
4. Content only works in so much as it serves the larger form of the communicative function.
5. Here. At a reading. Online…The message remains the same: look at the clever way in which I am participating in this game of authorship.
6. It’s not so much notice me, notice me, notice me, as look how competently I speak within the rules of the available speech act.
7. The source of the agon is that the rules are changing: time was, pre-internet, when the sole publicity duties of the author consisted of personal appearances at readings—and, thus, the events became one-of-a-kind moments, with little cyber-baggage to inflect the performance space.
8. Now, the event itself is secondary to its continued contextualization in the cyber-realm, and so, since everyone and anyone can comment and participate in these streams, each author who participates, even at the entry level in the game, begins to bark and bark and bark.
9. Put another way, it’s not the bark-as-message but bark-as-bark.
10. Bow wow.

 12. Of Course Eventually, Davis, You Quote Burroughs and I Don’t Understand (Cris)

 Instead I’ll quote Laura Miller of Salon.com:

People become writers because they’re introverted or awkward in personal encounters and have poured everything they want to say to the world into their work. What usually gets lost in the perpetual refrain about authors becoming their own marketers is that there’s no particular connection between writing talent and a gift for self-promotion.

I majored in journalism and never spent a day as a journalist because I didn’t want to go out and talk to people. I have spent more than a few days in a row, on more than a few occasions, without getting dressed and leaving the house—because I didn’t “have to,” so why would I want to? I decided to live almost 50 miles away from the campus in downtown Chicago where I teach. I have started four sentences in a row with “I” because I am sitting alone in my study and have not talked to another soul in-person today. I want to hug Laura Miller for understanding.

And yet, it won’t bail a teacup of the tide of change that occurred (and continues) my first book appeared in 1989 and People magazine called me to ask for a photo for a review (which never ran).

Despite my apparently hypocritical history in this matrix of production-for-producers, where the emphasis is “on being a writer, not the writing itself,”[13] I am sad … and tired.

 

Chester RIP

May your species live in natural dignity.  It’s too late for mine.

 

 

Credits:

Photo of Davis bound and gagged courtesy of Andi Olsen.

Photo of the “water reading” by Melanie Page

Photo of Cris Mazza reading with her dog by James Comunale

Photo of Chester by Cris Mazza

 

Cris Mazza has authored sixteen books, most recently Various Men Who Knew Us as Girls, a novel.  Her other fiction titles include Waterbaby, Trickle-Down Timeline, and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet?  In 1995 & 1996, Mazza was co-editor for the original Chick-Lit anthologies: Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, and Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics.  In 2006, her essay “Who’s Laughing Now: Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” explaining the co-opting and corrosion of the title, appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine.  In addition to fiction, Mazza also has published a memoir, Indigenous: Growing Up Californian, and has another hybrid memoir, Something Wrong With Her, forthcoming from Jadid Ibis Press.  A native of Southern California, Mazza grew up in San Diego County.  She currently lives 50 miles west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She can be found online at www.cris-mazza.com.

 

Davis Schneiderman‘s bio is below.

 

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I. Where Past, Present and Future Collide

The first “psychic” reading I got some 12 years ago was involuntary. A shoddily clad heroin addict in Hamburg screamed my future at me: “YOU WILL DIE WITHIN THE NEXT THREE YEARS!” Pressing my face against the subway window I quietly started sobbing.

The next day I went to the doctor. He couldn’t find anything wrong, but suggested I go see a therapist.

The first therapist had a card on his desk that read: “If you refuse to remember your past, you will be punished in the future.” The second one found my dark thoughts “romantic.” At the end of the session he led me through an unlit hallway where he suddenly hugged me goodbye. In the following weeks he bombarded me with phone calls, pleading with me to come back.

When the reaper hadn’t knocked on my door within my allotted three years, I moved to New York. There I saw a therapist from Japan. My German accent so violently clashed with her Japanese accent that we spent two thirds of the session trying to clear up misunderstandings. It would have been equally effective had she attempted to read my mind from a bowl of rice.

Then I found Jenna. A young social worker from New Jersey, Jenna was determined to help me create a future more satisfactory than the past. I don’t know where I would be today without Jenna. I once even gave her a cast-iron frying pan as a thank-you-gift. The frying pan came in a set of three, and after schlepping the heavy pans from Macy’s to her office on the Upper West Side, I decided to palm the largest one off on her. Jenna pretended to be flattered and I convinced her to accept my gift by emphasizing that no housewife is complete without a cast-iron pan. Maybe I put a spell on Jenna with my pan because shortly after she decided to have babies and move to the country. I tried to talk her out of it, but she seemed bewitched. At that point I stopped believing—in therapy, babies, large cast-iron frying pans and pretty much anything else.

My loss of belief conveniently coincided with a switch to a new health insurance, which did not cover therapy. I took this as a sign: It was time to accept the inevitable and leave the past behind. I wanted to embrace the present and start facing my future. But what would that future be like, I wondered. Where and when would it begin?

II. Where I Rediscover my Belief in Beauty

One fiercely cold afternoon I am walking around aimlessly in Jackson Heights, Queens, when two stocky Hispanic women approach me. Wrapped like mummies with only their eyes showing in between hoodies and scarves, they are handing out flyers for “Espiritista Victoria.” Effortlessly, the mummies whisk me upstairs.

Victoria’s workplace is right next to a lawyer’s office. In the hallway two boys are playing tag.  I briefly disappear in the restroom to turn on the little digital tape recorder I always carry in my pocket. If I am going to be charged to be told what no one can ever know for sure, I might as well record it. Now I wish I also had a lipstick camera, but since it would be odd to put on make-up in the middle of a conversation, I didn’t bother. Besides, I don’t wear lipstick.

Victoria leads me behind a black curtain into a space that in size and atmosphere resembles a fitting room at Daffy’s. She explains: Tarot is $25 and palm $5 less. I decide for Tarot because Tarot, she says, is “more accurate.” One question at the end of the reading is included and every additional question costs $5. When I ask about the length of “a session,” Victoria acts surprised. “It really depends,” she says.

“Do you want to hear only the good stuff or are you okay with bad news?” She begins.

“I want to hear everything,” I say boldly. I am excited to finally hear someone else talk about me and do all the work.

“Good luck!” She says, as if foreboding unavoidable danger. Then her iPhone rings. It is Cesar, wanting to know whether he could come by at four.

Victoria puts down some cards, and I wonder how she can read their symbols in the dim light.

“The first thing it shows—thank God—you have a very long life.”

Bingo.

“You are a good, a kind-hearted person. You help out a lot.” Now imagine the discordant cry of a train whistle. Victoria must have heard this shout of failure, too.

“I’m sorry. I do feel a little bit of bad energy around you,” she shifts her course. “Have you been down lately? Sad?”

Right now I am absorbed by Victoria’s beauty and all my sadness has vanished. No older than 30, Victoria wears her long, shiny brown hair neatly tucked back in a ponytail. Her lips are gorgeous and her teeth as white as her eyes are black. Her shirt’s low-cut neckline accentuates the smooth skin of her chest.

“I see two children. Do you have any kids?” She asks. The image of Jenna, swinging my large, cast-iron frying pan at her children, appears in my mind.

“What? You don’t want any?” Victoria screeches. “I see two!”

I wish Victoria wouldn’t screech like that because it makes her appear a bit vulgar.

Embarrassed by Victoria’s wrong intuition (and annoyed by her screeching), I say, “Maybe it’s my sister’s two kids.” (Whenever Victoria is at a loss I feel a sudden urge to help out. I don’t want her to feel humiliated or discouraged. I want her to continue, so I can get the most for my $25.) But Victoria has pride and doesn’t allow herself—or me, for that matter—an easy way out.

“No, with you,” she screeches. “I see two.”

As if his provenance might reveal the secret behind our childless marriage, Victoria wants to know where my husband comes from.

“Mexico,” I offer.

Suddenly Victoria sees a lot of people who don’t want us to be together. One short, heavy woman keeps reappearing. “This woman is jealous,” Victoria says, “and her skin is darker than yours.” This is a game with a rather predictable outcome, I think, and happily play along.

“My mother-in-law?” I say.

“Possibly,” she answers.

But except for my mother-in-law, the future promises to be hunky-dory: good health, a life-long marriage and professional success. Someone might die soon, but since it is neither my husband nor I, I really don’t care.

Now it is time for my question. “When will success arrive and what is it going to be like?” I ask, hoping that Victoria takes this as the single two-part question it is meant to be.

Two small t-shaped furrows surface in between Victoria’s eyes. In this critical, pensive mode her face looks even more beautiful.

“Success will come around August,” she promises. “I give you another question.”

“For free?” I asked insecurely. “How do you know all these things?”

Her Rumanian grandmother was a psychic, and Victoria started “picking up on it” when she was 12.

The head of a small boy with fuzzy dark hair appears between the curtains. “Mom! What day is it today?” (The psychic gene clearly hasn’t been carried down to Victoria’s son.) Victoria looks at me, quizzically. “Monday?” She says. I shrug. “Tuesday!” She corrects herself, laughing.

I leave Victoria with the feeling that the future will be a-okay.

III. Where I Learn That the Future Is Still Under Construction

I am hooked. My visit with Victoria has triggered my investigative reporter compulsion. In a trash alley off Roosevelt Avenue I come upon an abandoned table with cards, candles and a painting of parrots. A mural of stars and woven lines leads me up the building’s stairs. Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blasts from behind closed doors. I knock, but no one answers. I knock again, this time a bit harder. Finally Anna appears. She looks pale, skinny and disheveled and wants $60 for a reading. Her voice raspy and abrupt, she calls me “sweetheart” after each sentence. “Excuse our appearance, sweetheart,” she says, twitching. “We are still under construction.”

Having had bad experiences with the psychic skills of dope fiends before, I am spooked and excuse myself. “Sorry,” I say, “I don’t have much money.”

“That’s okay, sweetheart,” Anna says. “How much you got?” “Ten dollars,” I say, knowing that $10 wouldn’t buy her a fix. She shakes her head and walks me back to the door.

On my way home I pass a chalkboard, on which, in rainbow colors, Psychic Theresa advertises her skills.

When Theresa opens the door, it is clear that she didn’t foresee me coming. She looks utterly surprised and makes me wait in the hallway for another ten minutes. I count the dead flies on top of splatters of blood on the hallway walls.

Like Victoria, Theresa has a little altar where she mixes Christian artifacts with New Age objects. Toys and drawing books are scattered on the floor. Theresa turns off the big flat-screen TV and makes herself comfortable on the white couch. For me she has pulled up a plastic folding chair. Theresa’s shoulder-length hair is brown and wavy with an inch of grey emerging from the scalp. Her teeth are a nicotine-stained mess; the tidiest things in the room are her neatly plucked eyebrows. Theresa’s face provides a window into a life that hasn’t been easy. She coughs up some heavy phlegm and we begin to hold hands.

“You’ve been a little bit confused lately,” she begins. Lately? Confusion has been a part of my life, like breakfast, lunch and dinner. Right now, for example, being so close to a stranger confuses me.

“Your lifeline is long,” She adds in her husky voice. “Negative substances is not good for you. You do that in moderation.” Trying to figure out what constitutes moderation, I glimpse at Theresa’s brown teeth and take another whiff of her smoky breath.

“Things have not come easy to you,” she murmurs mystifyingly. “You take things in life very serious.” Theresa talks slowly, like in a trance: “Doubt… problems… negativity… disappointments… bumps… struggles… lack of trust.” In New York you can never go wrong assuming bumps, problems and struggles. And there is really no reason to trust anyone in this world. Suddenly Theresa surprises me. “You like to write,” she says. My surprise, though, bursts like a bubble, when she adds, “Or do you like to make music, paint?” (In New York, one or the other always works.)

I try to detect the derivation of Theresa’s accent, but fail. Although from different parts of the world, we both share a struggle with prepositions. “You’ve been very stressed out through this,” Theresa says, and, “I believe you are going to ride this over. I don’t believe there’s going to be problems through children. I see two.”

Here we go again. When I don’t respond, Theresa looks at me perplexed. She shifts course, adding, “Maybe it was difficult to be pregnant or holding a child?”

Thankfully, the elevated train rattling by right next to her living room window drowns out all the nonsense talk about children. I scoot around on my chair trying to straighten my back, but to hold hands with Theresa I have to slightly bend down and forward, which hurts my neck.

“You’re having problems with your back,” Theresa now murmurs, her psychic mind having stumbled across yet another inarguable truth. I say that I do right now because of the way I’m sitting on her folding chair. She offers me a seat next to her on the couch. We are now inches away from each other, still holding hands.

Theresa, too, warns me of jealous women and tells me that later on I will regret my decision of not having children. When I don’t respond she loses interest. She coughs one last time. “That’s my advice. You come back,” she orders and sees me off into the blood splattered hallway. The future, it seems, will be just as ramshackle and haywire as the past.

IV. Where the Future Amalgamates With the Past

I miss Jenna. I like revisiting the past. How can the future ever materialize without the past? Maybe I could find another therapist? Despite my efforts my insurance won’t budge. This is when I remember JC, a faint figure from long ago.

A storefront psychic in my old neighborhood in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, JC always astonished me. Soaked in sweat and gasping for air, she would schlep her grossly obese body to the corner store several times a day to buy soda, candy and lottery tickets. She would stand at the counter rubbing off her tickets, then mumble and curse at her lack of luck. For obvious reasons I never went to have my fortune read by JC. Yet I suddenly miss her presence.

Rumor has it that JC closed her storefront and started hanging out at the local pharmacy. When I ask the pharmacist about JC’s whereabouts, he grins. JC, he says, moved on and up to Manhattan. But where in Manhattan she opened up shop, he doesn’t know.

Assuming that Greenpoint psychics keep in touch, I decide to see Sophia a few blocks up on Manhattan Avenue. “Psychic Sophia Wróżka,” the neon sign on the second floor window reads; but the entrance gate is down and the clerk at Radio Shack on the ground level shoos me off when I hassle him about Sophia. From the liquor store clerk across the street I learn that Wróżka is not a last name, but means psychic in Polish. Sophia put up the translation to attract customers in this primarily Polish neighborhood. The clerk calls Sophia an imposter who is really a Jew from the Middle East. Each winter Sophia disappears to the sunny South.

This is when I notice that all psychics, except of JC, carry names ending with the letter “a”: Victoria, Anna, Theresa, Sophia—and finally it occurs to me: Jenna. Now I am convinced that JC is short for Joanna Cassandra and that Jenna is really a witch. While to some the letter “a” may suggests wonder, awe and lust, to me it brings memories of the pains of the past: “Aaaaah!” I would say, my mouth agape so the doctor could check my pus-coated tonsils. “Aaaaah!” I would cry, when my tongue was covered with flaming red spots.

V. Where I Cease to Believe in Foreseeing the Future and Decide to Carry On

Manhattan is the place to be. For fortunetellers, that is. Maybe I will find Joanna Cassandra. Maybe I will finally find my way to the future. Hopefully, I will find my way back to Queens.

People scurry about 8th Avenue like vermin. Suddenly I am one of them. On 23rd Street a storefront psychic named Patricia offers “psychic solutions.” I knock. After several minutes Patricia opens, wearing pink pajamas. “Can I help you?” she asks, rubbing her eyes. It is eleven and for Patricia the future has not yet begun. She tells me to come back after one.

I wander south, my gaze affixed to the windows of basement apartments. On MacDougal Street I finally see a large window advertising readings. I knock on the door. A toothless, pant-less man eagerly waves me in. The small storefront is separated from the living quarters with a curtain and decorated with artifacts from different religions. (Think Buddha sculpture next to crucifix.) A myriad of stains have dyed the once golden carpet the color of gray-green mucus. I hear the TV blaring and the rhythmic huffing and puffing of an oxygen machine. The sound stops and Gina appears. Her thin gray hair is greasy and her four brown teeth jut out randomly like charcoaled tree trunks after a forest fire. Gina wears a stained nightgown that may have been white long ago. Tarot and palm readings are $25 each, she informs me. I ask what she suggests we do. “Palm,” she says, sounding utterly indifferent. Gina’s breath smells like a dead rodent, and I wish she would have taken the time to brush her four teeth.

I ask which hand she wants to see, but she doesn’t care. She grabs the one closest to her and begins. “Your lifeline is long. There is a lot of doors that you want to open, but you can’t open them so quickly. Positive changes are coming.” Suddenly she looks up. “Where are you from?” I don’t know what my provenance has to do with anything, but answer politely. “Germany.”

“Because you are a very strong and stubborn person,” she continues. I wonder what Gina’s response would have been had I said France? (“Because you are arrogant and love Jerry Lewis”?) Or Switzerland? (“Because you are punctual and drab”?) One of Gina’s nails buries into the lines of my palm as if trying to unearth a secret. Her nail slightly taps with each sentence.

Gina, too, mentions a “negative woman” who drains my energy. “Who’s that woman?” she demands. This time I shrug, short of saying, “You tell me!”

Gina persists. “Who is that woman?”

“My cat’s been very sick,” I say, adding, “It’s a female. Does that count?”

Gina just shakes her head. “What kinda work do you do?”

Oh come on, I think, I’m the one who’s supposed to ask the questions. But I can’t come up with any.

“What’re you writing about?”

“Murderers,” I say, alluding to one of my most recent subject matters. Gina giggles the raspy giggle of an old witch. She then goes over the usual, her insights matching my previous psychic experiences: success will come; I’m confused; I am strong physically; I found love; and I am made for two children. Vasectomyvasectomyvasectomy! I want to scream, but bite my tongue. Why do fortunetellers have such a hard time imagining that there are women—and men—in the year 2010 that don’t feel like they are made to have children? But this is clearly not the right time to talk about procreation.

“Legal matters,” Gina continues, as if marking off keywords on a list. “Could it be paper scamming for you?” she asks like a restaurant waiter offering Lamb terrine as a special. She then mumbles that something positive is about to happen involving the initial R and the initial D. At this point I’m just relieved that it doesn’t end with the letter “a.”

“You interfere in other people’s privacy—why is that?” Gina asks.

“I am a writer,” I say, annoyed.

“Oh, you are a writer?” Gina says, as if she’s heard this for the first time. “What do you write about?”

“Murderers,” I repeat. And again Gina giggles.

Gina is done with my hands but urges me to also do a Tarot card reading. When I ask her about the difference between the palm and the tarot card reading, she says, “I’m gonna see the future.” At this point, I’m having so much fun that I agree.

Gina slaps one card after the other on the table, repeating what I just told her. “You are married. And this is you,” she says, pointing at a medieval maid on a horse. “You go to other people’s face.” She aggressively taps on a card on the table. The next card shows a medieval knight with swords in his back. “This is what you write about,” she says. “You work with the devil.” She now points at a card showing the image of a man with hooves, horns and tail. Gina is on a roll. She switches cards so rapidly that I hardly get a glimpse of their images. “The world. Changes. You see?” Slap. “A man will show up. A very stubborn man.” Slap. “You are going to be very successful. But not tomorrow.” Slap. I feel as if forced to run into oncoming traffic.

”When will that be?” I interject.

“In six years,” Gina says. Slap.

“Where do you see that?”

She looks at about ten different cards before picking one that supports her assertion—kind of. The card has five star-shaped symbols on it.

“But wait, those are only five stars.”

“This year and then five more,” she quickly responds. Slap. “You have to get it together. Alrighty? That’s it,” she concludes, shuffling me to the door.

Gina and I both know very well that no one can see the future but you alone—not even if your name ends with the letter “a.” Having found love, a dependable home and more or less meaningful work, I now sometimes catch bright glimpses of my future. And the more I can feel those glimpses, the more the dark past retreats.

I was moving down Broadway in a state of diminished intelligence, looking one way and another. I could have been a homeless. I imagine the ghosts of Indians wandering, lost in Manhattan, in loincloths, paint on their cheeks, stunned the way I am, crippled in their hearts by the height of what towers remain. Asking where the forests have gone to and concerned about game and survival, awed by these vehicles rumbling, awed by the light from the sky…

“Game” is a word I should note.

Notepad I should have.

I have to live life differently.

Heh.

Don’t we all?

I need two phalluses next time around.

A person should have a Ferrari.

Scratch: a person should have the wisdom you get from Ferrari ownership.

I was still carrying the glove. It was a heavy workman’s glove found under a mailbox some number of blocks uptown. I must have spent three minutes on my knees wondering if I should take it—looked like a pretty swell glove.

At the corner of Twenty-fifth, I saw a hotel to the right. I was clutching the glove, backpack weighing on my shoulder, standing on the sidewalk outside of a Comfort Inn. It had been a residential building sometime in the past. Pale stone, redbrick. You could tell from the outside it would have to have one of those impoverished elevators inside, small as a phone booth and no sturdier.

I dropped the glove on the steps going in. I’d almost brought it with me to the front desk—my brain wasn’t well. The priority was not to go home.

The guy responded quickly to the bell. “Yes?”

“You have rooms?”

He said, “Yes.”

“What’s the rate?”

It was $229. I stood thinking, touching the counter with one hand and looking down. Then I said, “Thank you. Good night.”

“Good luck, sir.”

I stepped on the glove going out. I walked back to Broadway, continued downtown. A Comfort Inn is a Comfort Inn is a dump whether they charge $230 or $60. A cab home would cost $18, net of tip; people go home at the end of their days. I know all the basic procedures. Brush your teeth and floss. Mumble to your spouse and grab hold of that flab at her side; it gives you comfort through the night.

It was the quiet stretch below Twenty-third and above Union Square, where no business was open, no person was seen. I stopped at the display window of a particular high-end store and was staring at stemware. It was all crystal, with facets cut in. I like things like that. I happen to own a pillow with silk case that I paid $90 for, in ’02. The exact word for its color is “nacarat,” red tinged with orange; it’s a cognate of “nacre,” meaning mother-of-pearl: the pillow has a nacreous sheen. I was a big fan of it when I bought it—I was a big fan of myself while I was doing the buying, aware of the decadence of (a) having a throw pillow at all and (b) having a throw pillow that fucking expensive, as well as of the deeper decadence of not truly thinking, in my heart, the purchase was all that extravagant. The most decadent decadence is unreflexive, unaware, opaque to itself.

In the middle of the next street, I challenged a cab, and he slowed and was nailing the horn. I did not flip him the bird. I proceeded to cross the street at a pace so reduced you almost couldn’t tell I was moving. His engine roared as soon as he could pass me.

Muscles all over my body were sore. My feet hurt—I’d been walking for miles. I was hungry, and I wanted alcohol. I liked not knowing quite where I would sleep. It reminded me of being on the road in the old days, a long time ago, in a galaxy way the fuck out there.

 

***

 

Union Square was less dead, but still dead. The Barnes & Noble looked gloomy. The new books displayed in the window were like an affront. Screw them.

Approaching the corner of Park Avenue, I was staring at the W across the street. This is a decent hotel. The building is old and brick and passionately renovated, massive neon glowing from the roof in a color not far off from nacarat, gorgeous giant windows by the sidewalk, so the geeks can peer in and the meatheads inside can show off their three-figure blue jeans, three-figure T-shirts, or four-figure jackets, and how much they spend on their drinks. I always found that kind of vanity highly provocative and enraging.

As I entered the lobby, I practically slipped. They take good care of their floors. The handsome wooden banister at the left side of the curved stair shone as if it were metal. The woman at the desk smiled graciously.

I asked if they had a vacancy.

“Yes…”

“What’s the best rate at this hour?”

“Best I can do is three-eighty,” she said.

“What time is checkout?”

“Eleven.”

“I would have the room for—what, seven hours… ? I’m a member of the Auto Club.”

“The triple-A rate is the same. Hold on a moment.” She was keying something in, looking pained. “I can give you three-forty.”

I was holding my silver MasterCard, pausing, with no other idea than the thought that I mustn’t go home. Paul would be there, and I couldn’t look at Paul.

I couldn’t have Paul look at me. I’d spent the day playing poker at Columbia, losing three Gs… Had to try to put it all behind me. “Could I get a late checkout?”

“Of course.”

 

***

 

Next morning, in the $340 room, I wasn’t hungover alcoholically with thorough physical sickness, nausea, and head pain. This hangover was different. It was all in the brain and the chest.

I tried showering. But that couldn’t help. My face’s reflection looked sickly. My skin couldn’t become clean. My skull throbbed, and my thoughts were all scrambled. I was feeling the restlessness still.

On the train home, all I could think as I sucked bad coffee heavily sugared was that I needed to shower my mind, rinse or scrub or exfoliate in there somehow. Hose it down, if I could.

There’s no way.

In any case. In any case.

I’m a strong bitch.

My might has been proved by now.

You could ask the Aladdin about it.

In the building I climbed the three flights. Someone had been smoking on the stairwell again. I got to the green metal door of the dump Paul and I called a home.

As soon as I stepped inside, the throb and the anxiety quickened. It was like a bass drum getting frantic. Fruit flies bobbed in the kitchen. I bade them good day.

I got out my laptop from the backpack and went stumbling into my room. I collapsed at my desk. I had paid $600 for the desk. I’d gotten a number of furnishings in ’02 when I moved into Manhattan for a year. The days of wine and poses, long ago.

What is this—2005?

It’s ’06, kemo sabe. Get a grip. Bush is the president. War in Iraq. The terror alert is at orange. Things hunky-dory in general.

Katrina—remember? The toilets in Biloxi were destroyed. The Grand lay smashed on the coast. The Isle of Capri disappeared. No one ever saw the thing again. It was like a fulfillment: God’s vengeance upon the casinos. A beautiful sight!

Yeah, I remember that day. I’d been playing poker compulsively on the Internet, feeling rather spavined, and losing. They had all those warnings on the news, predictions of where it would strike. The ominousness was terrific. I was stretched out on the futon and played through the night, hoping for something tremendous.

The laptop had finished booting up. I rose from my chair, and I paced. Dust motes were swarming the air. My bed was disheveled, of course. I sat on the mattress.

I yawned. I had to live life differently. You must, boy, you must. These thoughts just hung in my head: must, must. They were in there, all right. I moved to the desk, reinstalled the poker software, began another day in the life.

The photograph to the left (which has been cropped and can be clicked to view the full image) is one reason. I took it on 31st Street off Fifth Avenue looking north one oh-so-mysterioso night around midnight…an hour in town from Texas…a spring rain having swept through like drum brushes only moments before…still cool enough for some manhole steam, just warm enough to bring out a few optimistic short skirts and frilly dresses. God love those.

I’d like to think it captures some of the majestic monstrosity of Manhattan, which Kurt Vonnegut called Skyscraper National Park, but it’s really just an impulse shot taken in a moment of loneliness, like a lamb in a large country, as my minister father would’ve said.

Of course, everyone adores and worships New York — when we’re not hating it. But I’ve found in my wanderings that what makes a great world city, whether it’s Rome or Rio, Buenos Aires or Berlin, is often not the grandeur or the big picture stuff that gets written about and photographed endlessly; it’s the smaller, quiet things that we personally take away and make our own.

I remember once in Beijing, with literally millions of people all around, I chanced to see an old man leaned up against a wall. He grabbed a tiny frog from off the pavement — and Lord knows how that frog came to be there just then. He put it in his mouth and smiled at me. Then he opened his mouth and let the frog go. Everything else I saw there lives in the shadow of that one scene. The eye contact. The feel of that frog in my mouth. The puzzle of its being there.

Cities are puzzles — and the world’s greatest cities are revealed in the little details and passing moments. The smell of the Union Square subway station — the remnant of a Cuban cigar left smoldering on a curb — they’re part of the puzzle that’s New York for me. But here now are the five essential things that make Manhattan worth coming back to in my mind.

1. High on my list of favorites is the rightfully famous Carnegie Deli on 7th Avenue at 55th Street. This is a Midtown establishment that still delivers far beyond any tourist district standard. It has that old authentic deli atmosphere — lots of shouting and jostling, and no question that your sandwich is being prepared by human hands right on the spot. And what sandwiches! The first pastrami I ordered from there, I literally had to sit on in the bag, just to crush it down to eat without dislocating my jaw. They also do knishes, matzo ball soup, and pickles that make your eyes water. And they do good shouting, which I appreciate. But their pastrami sandwiches are simply in a class all their own.

2. With so much great art to see in the city, whether on the acres of museum walls or the galleries of Chelsea — wherever — it seems sort of criminal to return time again to work I know well, but I can’t help it. Whenever I’m in town for a few days, I always make a pilgrimage to the Guggenheim to experience again Kandinsky’s watercolors. Seeing them close up somehow helps prepare my mind for other art and new visions. I get tuned in again to the synchronicities of the city.

   Once, coming out of a reading, with snow falling, a crazy Jamaican Rasta man cab driver pulled over for me. He had my book on his front seat.

   One late summer day on the steps of the Museum of Natural History, I was for some reason discussing with a female friend who I was trying to bed at the time, Jane Fonda’s curious insistence on portraying non-penetrative sex in the film Coming Home with Jon Voight, and how disappointed she was in researching quadriplegics to find a man whose paralysis triggered four hour erections — when who should I literally collide with but Jon Voight. What are the chances? An obscure, unlikely conversational topic, a metropolis of millions — and there’s Jon — right up in my grill (and he’s a big guy to run into).

   Kandinsky gets me synched with the coincidental magic of the place, so that I’m loose and ready when, for instance, filming rotisserie chickens spinning and spitting fat in a window on First Avenue, I suddenly turn to meet an old neighbor from College Avenue in Oakland. That kind of thing could be upsetting if unprepared psychically — especially since he did jail time and I walked.

3. New York is of course a great city of sound — often so much so that you stop listening — and shut down. But then there are those lovely lulls in the rhythm when you momentarily hear deep into the machinery of the whole carnival, and you wake up. One of my favorite sounds in the entire world is the sensual percussion of Puerto Rican girls in very high heels click-clocking between the traffics of the traffic. I have a special admiration for their ability to outright sprint on knifepoint heels to hail a cab or catch a bus-and to never lose their composure or their balance. They are some of the hardest ass females I’ve ever encountered  — yet they are the most sincerely gracious and thankful if you hold a door open for them or pick up a package that’s been dropped. One thing they for sure don’t teach the nice white private school babes from Connecticut is how to say a simple thank-you to a stranger. Those girls just grow up to be editors for Simon & Schuster. Give me a Puerto Rican shoe store chick a long way from the Sarah Lawrence degree and the family house in the Hamptons. There will be a lot more blood in her heart and a musical smack and crackle in her walk. You can fool people with a cashmere sweater and an Upper Westside apartment. You can’t fool music — and a New York City sidewalk is where some of the most fundamental music in life is made.

4. Growing up in a religious family, I was steadfastly steered into not causing trouble — which is of course why from an early age I’ve often felt obliged to promote whatever commotion I can. Fortunately, I’ve learned a few lessons and have structured my perversity in ever more subtle ways (police beatings will do that to you). One little form of discord I particularly enjoy stimulating concerns the chess players in Central Park.

   I don’t play a good game of chess, but I don’t play a bad game either. And my real game is finding out a bit more about who’s playing at any given time. I like to target those older Jewish guys who take it very seriously, especially the ones who insist on playing without their shirts on come the warmer weather. They may beat me — but by the time they have, I know a lot about their style and what gets their goat. Then, when they’re playing amongst themselves, I start to kibitz and lurk around, occasionally flashing some bills. It’s the “betting” money I’m holding, you see. And I always have some names from the local chess clubs to throw around.

   While they were fixated on whipping my ass, I found out the names of their kids and where they grew up. They wouldn’t remember if I was left or right handed — but I can almost tell their blood pressure. They know I can run an opening gambit. They see the money. They hear names from the city chess scene they’re familiar with. Man, you should see how I can escalate a friendly game between old friends into a pitched battle. These old-timers are so inherently competitive, behind their friendly façades, it doesn’t take much to move them like pieces on a board. Chess? I have my own kind in New York. I can make a jeweler or a tailor at a glance. If you were in retail or sales, I need five minutes to nail the main industry. Food or hospitality? Three. Wholesalers just give it up. It doesn’t take much to make these guys really believe there’s book made on them, and suddenly a quiet game (that actually wasn’t very quiet at all) can become a contest of wills and spirit that makes a sweet counterpoint to the gentle clip-clopping of the carriage horse hooves and the tinkling of the merry-go-round. Check mate.

   Someone really into the grift once told me, “The secret is always making the other party think they’ve won.” He lives in Belize now and isn’t coming back stateside any time soon, but I like applying that good advice in humbler, sillier ways. There’s twisted fun in manipulating people who think they’re smarter than you, when they don’t even know what you’re doing. A little show of cred, a flash of real money, and some research — that’s still the essence of every scam. It’s just a question of scale and intent on return. Me, I like to see proud, puffed up old men have punch ups over chessboards, not knowing how the game got away from them.

5. If I sickly stir up some heated feelings amongst arrogant old farts, I do my atonement by supporting the city’s very fine musicians, at what are still some of the greatest clubs in the world — for jazz, anyway. I like the Lenox Lounge in Harlem and the Zinc Bar in the Village (they moved from their wonderful but very small quarters on Houston Street to great premises at 82 West 3rd Street, between Thompson and Sullivan).

   The Lenox Lounge is at 288 Lenox Avenue, or Malcolm X Boulevard at 124th and 125th. There’s a lot of history in this venue, and a lot of musical life still going down. At the Zinc Bar, you can hear phenomenal talents like Cidinho Teixeria, the Brazilian pianist, who’s a get-the-party-started-no-prisoners player if there ever was one. If you don’t have fun listening to him, better check that pulse.

   Even more commercial, somewhat cynical clubs like the Blue Note at 131 West 3rd Street or the Iridium at 1650 Broadway in Times Square, are still great places to really hear music — and they continue to draw rich talent.

   New venues keep popping up, thankfully. Such is the nature of live music. But you can’t go past B.B. King’s joint on 42nd Street. Some rather important people have a way of appearing there — and James Brown was on the way to that door when he died. We should all have such a good destination in mind when the sand’s running down.

   On my last visit, I realized, while doing book interviews, that Irma Thomas the Queen of New Orleans was playing. Six bourbons down, the latest interview done, I charged the box office. “I have to see her. I must be right down front.”

   I was told, “I’m sorry sir, we’re all sold out.”

   “You don’t understand,” I said. “I have only two weeks to live. I know all her lyrics. This is a chance for you to gain some karma credit.”

   I got my seat. Right down front. And the security dudes were very kind when I attempted to take the stage. Some of my tablemates from Westchester County were a little surprised at my doings — but that’s because they didn’t know the songs.

   The girl on the ticket desk who I’d spun the yarn to get in spotted me on the way out. “Two weeks to live, huh?”

   “Maybe three now,” I said. “Thanks.”

   “Well, you told the truth about knowing all the songs,” she said. “We heard you from here.”

   “This is New York,” I said. “If we don’t remind ourselves we’ll forget.”

   “You’re not from New York,” she said, noticing my accent.

   “Perhaps not,” I replied. “That’s why I know I’m here now.”

I have never met Bill Clegg, but we seem to have a lot in common. I learned in his new memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, that we’re both white people who come from dysfunctional families in rural towns who nursed dreams of getting out. We both moved to NYC after attending uncool colleges, with no plan other than to “become something.” We both became literary agents, falling into a career we seemed thrillingly, finally suited for. We both love photography, and Bill Eggleston in particular. We’re both single and into dudes. We both had problems with painful urination as children and we both have abused illicit substances with abandon. For me, it was Vicodin — or any fun pill I could get my hands on. For Bill, it was alcohol and crack.

Bill Clegg, for the uninitiated, is a talented and best-selling literary agent. The authors he represents, or has, are among the best-reviewed novelists and poets of the last decade (Nicole Krauss, Nick Flynn, Anne Carson) and the advances gleaned for his list are often noteworthy. But after a meteoric rise, at age 34, Bill Clegg took $70,000 and his crack pipe and in 2005 walked away from his stable of writers, his boyfriend, and his pregnant business partner, Sarah Burnes — dissolving their company in a single email to her — and disappeared. Rumors swirled and authors scattered. At the time I knew many people who had been burned by The Addict personally, and in every case they were angry, exhausted and resigned.

A year and a half later he reemerged, having been quickly snatched up by the maniacal Jennifer Rudolph Walsh to agent for William Morris (now William Morris Endeavor). He surprised nearly every agent that had inherited his mess by luring many of the same writers he’d abandoned back to his fold (Flynn, Stephen Elliot, Heather McGowan). Then in 2008, Walsh sold Clegg’s memoir for a widely reported $350,000 to Little, Brown. The proposal was eagerly passed among colleagues –- what would the book reveal about Clegg’s own personal Lost Weekend?

I should say that since his comeback, I have heard glowing reports from various authors he represents. Clegg is known to be a gifted reader, an intuitive editor and a person who understands the needs and temperaments of The Writer. Bill Clegg defenders and fans -– men and women alike — really seem to love him. And people who have been burned by him are really in a kind of angry shock right now.

But the recent publication of POAAAAYM and the barrage of praise heaped upon it (such as in Vogue and the New York Times), all seemingly accompanied by fresh photo spreads of a brooding and contemplative man reformed, have infuriated those scorned by Clegg and baffled early readers like me. These pieces don’t really talk about the writing or the book’s specific contribution to the so-called recovery memoir. What Jay McInerney, in Vanity Fair, calls “literary methadone” I call unbelievably pretentious, almost icky writing. (Sample sentence: “I sit back down on the bed and look out the window to the early evening light as it gentles the buildings across the street.”)

The packaging of this book, the title itself, the flashbacks to childhood written in the third person, and the dead serious tone are meant to introduce Clegg as a writer with significant literary gifts. But considering the content, I find it interesting that the author seems completely unaware of the ironies of his situation (when it’s time to put the pieces of his life back together, Clegg need only sell one or two of his Eggleston’s to buy the time he needs to get back on his feet).

More than that, I think Clegg’s depiction of his drug use is actually kind of glamorous. Despite all the hype about a man who “lost everything,” can someone please tell me what is so “brutal” about going on a drug and sex fueled rampage through Manhattan when you’re staying in its best hotels?  Though he is on the run from family, friends and The Law, Clegg remains steadfast in his aversion to slumming it even a little, never stooping so low as to enter even a Holiday Inn. Because crack is among the cheapest highs in the city, he probably could have gotten more bang for his buck if he hadn’t been so intent on constantly imploding at the Carlysle, the Mercer, 60 Thompson et al.

And I can’t help but think that Clegg’s brave reveals are actually super lame. In a scene meant to detail how desperate things had gotten, Clegg’s long suffering boyfriend Noah somehow finds him at the Gansevoort, just in time for some sex with a Brazilian rent boy. As the two commence, Clegg shares that he became aware that Noah was also there on the bed, holding his hand and weeping. (Where I come from, this is called “a threesome.”)

Then there is the alternate narrative: the chapters written in third person that describe a five year old boy and his shame over an inability to urinate properly and without pain. We learn that he is afflicted with this undiagnosed condition until he is 13, but he doesn’t remember it again until he is 26, and then all at once. I wait for the charges of molestation or some kind of connection to his addictions, but this story simply peters out. (By the way, Clegg, your condition was likely Interstitial Cystitis, and mine was cured once I discovered anti-depressants.)

I get that when one is caught up in the throes of drug abuse, one is not known for being rational or subtle or introspective, but something about this story feels like cheating. The appropriated title (Joyce), appropriated cover art (Flynn) and unrepentant narcissism (vintage Clegg?) feel forced and ultimately hollow. Sometimes writing is “spare” or “streamlined” because it’s not the whole truth.

The closest Clegg comes to apologizing to his former colleagues, friends and associates is not an apology at all, but more of a vague lament. Of those he left behind he writes, “At first I’m consumed with shame and fear and regret, but slowly, with the help of kindred spirits, these feelings evolve, are still evolving, into something less self-concerned.” What’s wrong with shame and regret if it’s genuinely felt and expressed? Could it be that this is a person who apologized to those he thought could help his career, and that this book, which couldn’t be more self-concerned, is for the rest of us?

Here he is now, heroic in his accomplishment. Not only has he conquered New York, he’s more successful than ever. He’s a well-regarded agent at WME. In addition to realizing his publishing dreams, he’s made a lot of money (the sale of the sequel to POAAAAYM, entitled 90 Days has just recently been announced). Celebrated photographer Brigitte Lacombe took the portrait that graces his book jacket. He’s recently appeared in all the publications that matter, including a featured excerpt in New York Magazine, and a photo shoot in Vogue that makes him look exactly like the very healthy, very handsome preppy power bottom that he was, is, but claims he never thought he’d be. In the New York Times, Clegg reveals the source of his issues as “deep-seated insecurities about making it in a city where everyone seemed richer, Ivy-educated and better bred.”

“I never got the handbook,” he said. To which I say to Clegg now:  I think you just wrote it.

Working in Manhattan can be an exciting, thrilling experience, but it doesn’t have to be. For the first year of my legitimate-office-job-having life, I worked in a building entrenched in a cozy block of 7th Avenue, spitting distance from two of the most impressively banal landmarks in this city: Times Square and Macy’s. Now, things can get pretty hectic in busy digital media what with the constant barrage of emails, IMs, phone calls, and that woman from accounting shrilly dictating lists of numbers into her speaker phone. I soon learned, therefore, how valuable it was for the mental health of any office worker to unwinch one’s shoulders from their hunched slump, peer away from the computer screen, and make one’s way out into the city.

I highly recommend an afternoon stroll through the western gutter of Midtown Manhattan to anyone who complains that the city has gotten too gentrified, or fancy, or clean, or pleasant. Nothing quite lifts the spirits like battling one’s way down a narrow sidewalk shrouded in complete darkness at 3 pm on a summer afternoon. I took a walk like this during my lunch break on my last day at my job, and maybe this was why everything seemed already tinged with nostalgia, why the dim streets seemed particularly elegiac. How I would miss spending my days here!

People are friendly in this neighborhood – from the delivery men saying “hello” by tapping gently at your legs with their overloaded dollies or bolts of fabric, nudging you like cordial goats, to the slow-moving herds of tourists who envelop you in their fanny-packed midst, sweeping you inexorably towards the luminescent glow of the Applebee’s in Times Square. Seven-foot-tall teenagers stalk by with modeling portfolios tucked under their arms, directing their doe-eyed gaze at you in what might be welcoming greeting, but also could just be hunger. Every time you exit your building or turn a corner, rest assured you will run smack dab into someone, perhaps even someone (as happened to me on this particular day) who will take hold of your arm and forcibly shove you out of the way (of danger, I assume). Plus, there is a cornucopia of interesting lunchtime options, representative of the breadth of New York’s international cuisine: from salads and sandwiches to sandwiches and salads. The brave of heart may choose to venture down Board-of-Health-defying alleyways marked with handmade signs promising cheap tamales or glatt kosher falafel; the iron of stomach can graze on the urine-yellow halal meat offered up by the street vendors.

Meander a little further west, preferably down 40^th street, flanked by the Port Authority bus terminal on one side and the local parole board office on the other, towards the peep shows, and keep your eyes peeled for the authentically “gritty” characters this city still has to offer. There – a stumbling fellow with a face like gristle leers openly, calls out in a nonsense language something I can only assume means, Hullo, friend! There – a man peeing in a doorway looks up and grins, waggling his flaccid member in cheerful greeting. Hullo!

I came to find that after my lunchtime strolls it was largely a relief to make my way back towards the office building. What a relief to sink back into that office chair, though it seems to be ergonomically designed to make me slouch – how tranquil the office seems after the chaos of the street. The soothing hum of phones ringing, the quiet clatter of web copy being typed into ancient computers, the mellifluous singsong of the woman from accounting dictating numbers into her speaker phone. And yet, there’s something wonderful, I mean really wonderful, about such a dose of chaos.

Now I work in the Conde Nast building, where the hallways seethe with the seamy lights of Times Square. I don’t get back to the old neighborhood much anymore. It sounds nutty, but I actually really do miss it in all its filth and bustle. Maybe one of these days I should make the 5-block trek down to the Garment District and watch someone peeing in an alley just for old time’s sake. After all, I don’t want to become one of those office drones who only leaves the building to go to Starbucks, with that baleful cry, “Anyone want anything from the outside world?” Because you know what? I do want something from the outside world. And it’s not a latte.

Well, not just a latte, anyway.