but I would have bought Faye as many drinks as she wanted with one of the bills Roth had given me. But when we reached the 116th Street subway station, Faye said that since I was going uptown and she was headed downtown, she guessed she’d see me around, “Sailor.” Didn’t she want to join me for a drink? I asked.
“Nah, I’m not gonna be your Betty,” she said. When I said I didn’t understand, Faye asked if I’d ever read the Archie comic books; Betty was the nice girl who Archie called whenever foxy Veronica was unavailable. I said it was over between me and “Veronica,” then felt myself flush. Faye raised an eyebrow and said she had work to do tonight, but maybe she’d see me again at her opening at the Van Meegeren. She handed me a postcard for her show. At the top of the subway steps, she advised me to stay away from hunky strangers in coffee shops, then raced downstairs before I could kiss her goodbye.
“Carry on, my wayward son,” she said with a laugh.
As I watched her clomp out of sight I felt more alone than I ever had in this city.
IN SEARCH OF MYSELF
I had no job, no money, no girlfriend. I was considering tracking down Jed Roth when something unanticipated happened: I started to write. One morning, after waking up well past noon, I showered, dressed, and, feeling newly refreshed, I sat down at my computer and began typing as if I’d been doing it every day of my life.
I didn’t write about myself particularly, didn’t write about growing up in my little Midwestern town, the son of an Indiana State librarian and an Indiana University law student who died before her son had even learned to write his name. I didn’t write about escaping inside a father’s world of books and stories. I didn’t write about a boy who had been looking forward practically his entire life to moving out of Indiana, then getting the call from his father asking him to come back home. I didn’t write about a father dying too young or a young man saddled with too much responsibility, about selling a house and everything inside it, then moving to New York to fulfill a dream. In the stories I wrote, there were no sweet, ambitious Romanian writers with tragic life stories; there were no frustrated, overweight actors working as café managers; no wiseass baristas with paint-spattered jeans, concert jerseys, and work boots; no suave authors of unpublished adventure novels with nefarious schemes to scam the publishing world.
But, though none of the stories I wrote was autobiographical, they all contained elements with which I was familiar: a kid and a dying parent; dreams of leaving a small town behind; a man and woman fighting to remain in love while their careers seemed headed in opposite directions. And there was a story about a man struggling with whether to give up what little artistic integrity he had left because he had met someone with a plan that sounded too good and evil to be true.
In the past, writing had always seemed difficult, required pots of black coffee and extensive channel-surfing breaks, long walks to clear my head. Now I wrote for hours at a time, played music as loud as it would go—Bobby Womack, Beth Orton, Astor Piazzolla. My favorite was Charles Mingus, and I decided to name my collection of stories after one of his songs—“Myself When I Am Real.” My laptop began to feel like a musical instrument; Mingus tapped keys and so did I. I felt confident, not only in my ability to write stories and see them through to the end, but in my ability to do the same thing with my life. I could find another job, that wouldn’t be hard; I could make my rent, millions of other people did; I would fall in love with someone else, and someday I’d look back at this period as the one that had prepared me for the rest of my life.
Whenever I finished a story, I would slide it into an envelope, send it to agents, publishers, and magazines, even to Miri Lippman’s The Stimulator. When I walked in or out of my apartment, I felt no trepidation when I saw my mailbox. If someone didn’t want my story, eventually someone else would. And when the phone rang and I heard Miri Lippman’s voice on the other end, I knew I was right.