toward the subway station in Union Square—ten minutes late, as usual.
My housemates had beaten me out the door despite having taken showers, which, in my semiconscious state—what with the bathroom plumbing running through the wall right next to my head—I’d considered a needling passive-aggressive display of moral superiority.
I’d just kept hitting the snooze bar and having those short-story dreams between rounds of cruel clock-radio beeps.
Most mornings I played “Rhapsody in Blue” on my beat-to-shit Walkman, gentling the commute uptown with those opening bars of solo-Deco clarinet. Today required a mix-tape of slick/vapid eighties cocaine-frenzy anthems: Chaka Khan, Bronski Beat, and “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight.” Aural Jay McInerney.
A light mist tumbled between the buildings as I walked, white on white, warmed at the edges by bowfront Edith-Wharton brownstones between Sixth and Fifth. The air was still cool this early, but I could feel the day’s impending sweaty oppression tapping its foot in the wings.
It certainly wasn’t chilly enough to mask the street-stench of vomit and garbage and festering piss. I’d been back here long enough to have once again made mouth breathing my default style of respiration.
I smiled at the sight of my all-time favorite bumper sticker, posted in the Trotskyite bookstore’s window:U.S. OUT OF NORTH AMERICA!
I walked faster, slipping through schools of people that grew thicker and thicker as we neared the subway—commuter fish trying to reach the turnstiles so we could spawn and die.
I kept my knees loose on the ride uptown, riding the car’s totally fucked suspension like a surfer chick, until we squealed to a halt at Fifty-ninth Street. I bolted out the doors before they were halfway open, first to snake through the exit gate’s gnashing teeth—a cotton gin for people.
The Catalog was on the thirteenth floor, straight across from the Granta Bitches, with the even-nastier Review behind door number three at the end of the hall. We were a triad of money pits loosely conjoined, no doubt the aftermath of some literary-cocktail-napkin Venn diagram. It always felt like that old joke about academia, the one about how the infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so low.
Pagan was already back in editorial by the time I walked into the front office. She was the assistant photo editor and had gotten me a gig taking phone orders, part-time.
I’d been staff writer at a weekly paper in Syracuse for three years, but that counted for exactly dick in Manhattan, a revelation that gave me more compassion for Upstate New York than I’d ever had while living there with Dean.
I parked my take-out coffee next to a vacant computer terminal and sat down, back to the window. We had a cinder-brick air shaft view: the quality of light made it seem like the asshole of February, year-round.
Yong Sun was running the credit-card batch while Yumiko and Karen typed away with phones to their ears.
I booted up my PC and took a sip of coffee, waiting for the third line to ring. The cool part of the job was talking to customers. We had a direct hookup with Baker & Taylor’s warehouses in New Jersey and Illinois—wholesalers with instant access to virtually any book in print.
People called from Tucson, Fargo, Bakersfield, Anchorage. They faxed orders from Buenos Aires and Paris and Guam. They sought lost favorite volumes to share with their children. They yearned for obscure absurdist novels, slender poetry collections, meaty anthologies. They thirsted for noir and space opera and Zane Grey, Aeschylus and
Kipling and Hollywood Babylon. They wanted to tie knots and grow roses and build wooden dinghies, to mend fences and marriages and classic muscle cars.
The phone rang at last. I punched the blinking button for line
three and picked up. “Good morning, this is the Catalog, how may I help you?”
At the end of my shift a few hours later, I found Pagan lying sideways on the front-office carpet. She was surrounded by leaning towers of paper trays, her head and arms shoved into the guts of our Xerox machine.
“Fucking jammed again,” she said, pushing herself back out. “Not like it matters, since we’re out of fucking toner.”
The only indication that it was probably ninety degrees and muggy out on West Fifty-seventh by now was the dark tan of Pague’s legs, unbroken from her flip-flops to the hem of her raggedy shorts.
You want people to wear stockings and shit, you’ve gotta pay way more than six bucks an hour.
Pagan slotted all the trays back into the machine and tried to push its door closed, but