Two graduations in Pennsylvania, one in New York City, and a weekend at International Mr Leather in Chicago, all in one trip. Naturally the bag got searched at every single stop.

So the Manly Fireplug brought his iPod dock to Hawaii, and there we got laid to the sounds of Amy Winehouse, whom I liked much more than I thought I would. I mean, the song “Back to Black” kind of burrowed its way into my head, reminding me romantically of some of my past misdeeds. None of my current misdeeds, of course. I’m nothing but an honorable man now.

In the mornings we ate in the restaurant of our hotel, the Queen Kapiolani, affectionately nicknamed by our posse as “The Queen Krap.” The restaurant, like the rest of the hotel, had seen better days, but I appreciated its down-at-the-heels aesthetic. Kind of like Amy Winehouse, now that I think about it. A hotel forever caught in the tropics of 1973.

The Fireplug tore open a packet of C&H sugar for his coffee, then read its label. “Guess where this came from,” he said.

“The Big Island?” I asked.

“No. Yonkers.”

It was a repeat of our last year’s trip, though this year it was more of a working vacation for me, as I spent the two five-hour plane rides, and several hours a day in the Queen Krap, working on my thesis, which I Fed-Exed back to Columbia yesterday, in time for Monday’s deadline. Yep, that part of my life is now over. In May, if all goes well, I should get my MFA, which the Fireplug in Hawaii decided meant, “Mighty Fine Ass.” He’s sweet like that.

In January, upon first print, the thesis totaled 369 pages. I spent the next month cutting, fleshing out, and polishing it into a 270-page, leaner, meaner manuscript. And though it’s far from perfect, I’m proud of it.

I surpassed the 120-page minimum for thesis requirements, but at 270 pages it’s still only two-thirds of my intended book. I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I send it off to agents. So today I went back to my new office and back to work on the rest of the book. I read some interview recently with Michael Chabon, who writes 1000 words a day, five days a week. I figured I could do that, too.

Not too long ago the Fireplug was running into Spike’s coffee, across the street from his barbershop, and a boy at one of the outside tables yelled to him, “Hey! Tell Dogpoet to put some excerpts of his book on his blog!”

The Fireplug yelled back, “Fuck no! He’s done with giving it away for free!”

I really do love the guy.

Unfinished Manuscript                        Puppy
370 pages                                        18 weeks

So instead of taking yet another year to finish my thesis, I’ve decided to graduate in May. Which means turning in my thesis by the end of February. I’m way past the minimum page requirements, so I’ve gone back to the beginning to revise, edit, and polish up the first big chunk. Turn that in, graduate, get my degree, then go back and finish the rest of the manuscript, and start looking for an agent.

The little monkey is good for distraction and comic relief. Right now he is hiccuping, again.

I flew home over winter break, and found Bearbait at the baggage claim, where he’d been when my mother had been dying and I’d flown back from Minneapolis. During my time away I had missed him terribly. He had been, and still remained, my AA sponsor, and it wasn’t until I was thousands of miles away that I came to understand how much he had saved my life. And it wasn’t until I was in New York that I had what felt like a stunning revelation; Bearbait had come into my life six months before my mother died, and he’d taken on her role gently, unobtrusively, and faithfully. It was such an obvious connection, yet I’d missed it for over four years.

Now he waited for me at the bottom of the escalator, dressed in an absurdly tight black t-shirt. Since I’d been away he’d hired a personal trainer, something he’d been considering forever until one day, just before I’d moved away, I interrupted him in the middle of a conversation.

“Can I say something? As your friend?”

His eyes widened. “Uh oh.”

“You’ve been talking about getting a gym membership for four years.”

“Ouch.”

“God knows you’ve helped enough people. Go be selfish for a while.”

And he had. And I knew that he was wearing the t-shirt to show off his progress, because he wanted to impress me, and I was deeply, immeasurably touched.

“What the hell are you benching?”

He giggled, turned bright red, and hugged me.

A minute later I tried to extricate myself from his embrace. “Bearbait…”

“I’m not letting go, so shut up.”

He dropped me off on my little dead-end street on the hill. And when I stepped out of his truck and stood on the sidewalk outside my old apartment, all I could hear was the wind through the trees, and I breathed in the smell of damp eucalyptus leaves, and for the first time since I’d been away, I relaxed.

Bearbait rolled down his window. “Sweetie?”

“I’m having a moment.”

“I can see that. Pick you up in the morning?”

I nodded, and watched as he turned the truck around. All of that revelation business, about him being my mother, could wait.

Rain fell the entire week I was home, but I didn’t care. I sat on the couch in the living room looking out at that view. Across the way was a lush green hill, sparsely scattered with pale Victorians. Against the green hill the rain fell in curtains, twisting and curling in the wind. I watched for hours in the warm and quiet house, and I felt things settling within me, as if I’d been a jar of dirt and water shaken continually for months on end, and finally I’d been set down and left alone, and the layers of sediment could slowly drift down and fall into place.

And with the sediment other things drifted into place. With time I could build another family in New York. But I was tired, finally, of starting over every five years, tired of losing touch with people. What would it feel like, I wondered, to know friends for ten years? Fifteen? Louie yawned and stretched out across my feet, and I leaned forward and rubbed his ears. He was nearly eleven years old already, an old man. Where would I be when he died?

One night the Manly Fireplug and I squeezed into Bearbait’s pick-up and the three of us drove over to Cathedral Hill for an AA meeting. When we climbed out of the truck I glanced at my watch. “We have an entire hour to kill.”

“Let’s go save seats,” Bearbait said.

“Oh my God, an hour early?” I said. “You’re kidding right? They don’t save seats in New York meetings.”

Bearbait and the Fireplug glanced at each other. “Listen to him,” said Bearbait. “Like he’s a New Yorker now or something. I suppose we could grab some coffee.”

“You have to move back to San Francisco,” the Fireplug said as we set off towards Polk Street. “And keep Bearbait and I from turning into a couple of old women.”

Polk Street, a commercial strip on the edge of the Tenderloin, had been the city’s original gay ghetto back in the sixties and seventies. After the emergence of the Castro, Polk Street had grown tarnished, though gray-haired men still bought drinks for the hustlers at Rendezvous and the Giraffe until recent years, when the bars closed to make way for straight nightclubs and tapas bars. Here and there the last decayed storefronts remained. Trannies, meth dealers, young professionals, and immigrants shared the sidewalks. As we turned the corner we saw fire engines blocking off an intersection. Thick clouds of black smoke spilled from an old fish and chips restaurant and rose up against the night sky. I’d never seen a fire in person, and I lingered among a crowd of onlookers. The Fireplug disappeared around the corner and came back with a greasy slice of pizza, and the three of us leaned up against the outer wall of a laundromat and watched the building burn. The firemen aimed a hose at the roof, and sheets of water ran down the plate glass windows. One fireman swung his axe, the wooden storefront cracked open, and smoke pushed through the fracture. The Fish-n-Chips sign blackened before our eyes. Windows shattered, the firemen called to each other, and red lights spun in patterns over the street and across the faces of the crowd. Two cops waved cars through the intersection, bellowing at the drivers who twisted in their seats and gaped at the spectacle. The firemen leaned a ladder against the one-story structure, and a half dozen in full gear climbed up and lumbered across the tarpapered roof. They moved steadily, without hurry, their movements obscured by black smoke. Slender flames curled up along the doorframe.

The Fireplug turned and silently offered me a bite of his pizza. I shook my head and turned back to the fire. “That looks dangerous,” I said. Bearbait was quiet beside me, his shoulder pressed against mine. Standing beside my friends, I knew that I had already made my decision.

Back in New York, I found work as a research assistant to an author who’d written a biography that had sat on my bookshelf for several years. He’d recently been named one of New York magazine’s “Fifty Most Beautiful New Yorkers,” and I’d spend a few hours a week with him at his apartment in the Village. Patti Smith was his next-door neighbor. Once I showed up a few minutes early to find a film crew interviewing him for a documentary about gay artists who’d died in the AIDS epidemic, and while I waited I glanced through his bookshelves. Propped against the cracked spines of Isherwood and Cunningham was an engraved invitation to his fiftieth birthday party, hosted by Diane Von Furstenberg and Barry Diller. Another time he showed me a ballot that Vanity Fair sent him, to vote for the city’s “Best Dressed.” Later that afternoon we discussed my post-graduate career options.

“Well, you could go to Milan and be a model,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m kidding,” he said. “That’s what I did.”

“Oh, right.”

“What are you doing this weekend?” he asked, as I pulled on my jacket.

“Reading.”

“You’re always reading.”

“I know. What are you doing?”

“I’m going to Kurt’s birthday party.”

“Kurt?”

“Kurt Vonnegut.”

“Oh, right. Tell him hi for me,” I said.

The next week I asked him about the party, and he pulled up a website on his computer: “New York Social Diary.” And there he was, a glass of red wine in hand, smiling next to Kitty Carlisle, Kurt, and Billy Collins.

What would Rick Bass do?

“You’re name’s in bold print,” I said.

Later that week Columbia sent me an email, asking if I planned on renewing my lease at the end of May. I wrote back, “no.”

The dream – of a new life in New York – burned quickly. Its death was surprisingly painless. I only felt relief, as if I’d just shed an enormous burden. I’d carried that dream with me for thirteen years, everywhere I went, and everywhere I went I’d held a tiny part of myself back, saving it for the dream. “What if I lived in New York?” I’d always wondered, looking at my surroundings with disdain. What a relief to know that I no longer had to “live up” to a city. I’d already found the one I wanted. Looking back, I wonder if I moved to New York not so much to pursue the dream, as to put it to rest.

The Manly Fireplug, of course, had cut my hair while I was visiting San Francisco. The barber in the second chair, Jeff, grew up in Brooklyn, and had a rugged, Harley-driving exterior, though I’d always suspected that there was something tender underneath. As the Fireplug buzzed my scalp, I asked Jeff how he was doing, and if he was dating anybody. “Nope,” he said.

“If I moved back to San Francisco, would you let me take you out on a date?” I asked.

He paused for a second or two. “Well, you know, there’s so many kinds of ‘dates’ in the gay world.”

“Like what?”

“Well there’s the coffee date, which could be just between friends. Us sober guys go on a lot of coffee dates. And then there’s the sex date. Self-explanatory.”

“Jeff…”

“And then there’s the date-date, which would be dinner and a movie with the possibility, but not the guarantee, of sex. And then there’s – ”

“Jeff…”

“What?”

“Just tell me what the fuck I should ask you when I move back.”

I’d never seen him speechless before. He may have actually blushed. “A date-date,” he said, quietly.

“Alright,” I said. “But just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date-date.”

He nodded. “That’s fine.”

Looking back, I realize now that my request contained a hidden motive: to make the Fireplug – who had sworn off boyfriends after his last relationshiop – jealous. I glanced in the mirror, to gauge his reaction. But if it did the trick, he hid it well, looking down at the back of my neck, clippers in hand. A moment later he caught my eye in the mirror and patted my shoulder. “New York’s been good for you,” he said.

Soon the fantasies of my “new life” smacked against reality. “I love books!” I’d told my friend Brian before I left for New York. “I love libraries!” But eleven years had passed since college, and I was out of practice. Two weeks into the semester I sat on the steps of Low Library under a heavy gray sky, re-reading the notes I’d scrawled in the margins of Gogol’s Taras Bulba, glancing up glumly at the hordes of students streaming over the quad just long enough to think, “I hate it here.”

It was a relief to finally admit this to myself, to stop pretending that my “new life” was one exciting thing after another, and instead admit the truth; my new life was an exhausting, overwhelming, homesick-inducing series of days and, for as seldom as I left campus, I might as well be in Houston. It was frightening to wonder if I had made a mistake. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for the life I thought I wanted. Maybe I should have just stayed home and set my sights again on the lower horizon.

Once, the year before in San Francisco, I’d sat with Brian in the back row of an AA meeting, listening to a man ramble his way through a convoluted story. At one point he paused, looking bewildered. “And then I was standing in my kitchen yesterday,” he said, “and I was making myself a ham sandwich and I just thought to myself, you know, what’s it all about, Alfalfa?”

I pondered his question, as if he’d just offered a prose poem for our enlightenment. For weeks afterward, every time Brian and I had dinner together, I’d pause meaningfully and ask the same question. Soon Brian took to calling me Spanky.

That was the early spring of 2004, a few months before I moved to New York. As luck would have it, Brian himself had just been accepted into graduate school in L.A., where he’d pursue his Marriage and Family therapy license. The evening after I’d sat on the steps of Low Library, I was back in my apartment, reading in bed when the phone rang.

“Spanky, I’m calling you from the Starbucks on Sunset Boulevard.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I am absolutely surrounded by rabid extroverts.”

I could not picture pale, skinny, cerebral Brian, with his funny scalp, in L.A., even after I’d visited him at his West Hollywood apartment complex, where everyone lay around in the afternoon by the courtyard pool, reading scripts. “You’re living in an episode of Melrose Place,” I’d said.

“You’re just jealous.”

I turned onto my side, cupping the phone between my shoulder and ear, and peeked through the curtain. My neighbor was watching a rerun of Friends. “If it makes you feel any better,” I said, “I’m laying in bed in my dark cave, reading Proust.”

“Dear God.”

“I know,” I said. “I read three books a week. I haven’t seen the gym in days, and I’m a horrible example of sobriety.”

“When was your last meeting?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Spanky!”

“I know, I know, I’m headed for disaster.”

“Well,” he said. “I suppose these are unusual circumstances. You and me, we’re on the Hero’s Journey.”

“Fuck Joseph Campbell!” I yelled. “He never said following your bliss would be such a pain in the ass.”

“Spanky…”

“School is all I do. The last time my life was this unbalanced was when I was smoking crystal meth.”

“Now you’re just being dramatic.”

“I know,” I said, suddenly on the verge of tears.

“Look, I’m miserable, too. But it’s too late,” he said. “We can’t turn back.”

“I know,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to hang up. I didn’t want to have to face everything on my own.

The next week I had a strange altercation with a young woman in my workshop. That evening, after class ended, someone suggested that we all go out for a drink together, and we wandered down to the Heights, an upstairs bar with windows that opened out over Broadway. It was happy hour, and though a pint of Guinness sounded heavenly, I ordered a pineapple juice instead. The young woman, Maria, joined us late, having stayed behind to talk to the professor. The only open seat at the table was across from me, and as she sat down I sensed that we were both a little disappointed by this twist of fate. I’d noticed over the past couple of weeks that Maria held certain opinions of men. One of her favorite prescriptions for other women in the workshop was to get rid of the boyfriend subplot. Or at least make him less likeable. She spoke this way about all men. All men, that is, except her fiancé, who was a “jazz scholar” and who was frequently quoted in her submissions, speaking in full paragraphs. The professor had mentioned that, by and large, people don’t speak in full paragraphs, and Maria had given her a blank look. Later, in discussing a book she’d once edited, Maria launched into a diatribe against the word “cum,” accusing it, and any author who used it, of reprehensible vulgarity. She informed us that there was a literary “tradition” behind the word “come,” which was spelled properly. As she ranted I’d sunk down in my chair. There, on the table, sitting in a neat pile of ten copies, was my first submission, and in the first sentence was the word, “cum.” She’d taken the manuscript without glancing at it, and it sat now in her bag, which was slung over the back of her chair.

Nevertheless, sitting across from each other at the Heights, we managed to chat at a bit about our lives before grad school, and the fact that she commuted by train from Boston twice a week for classes. Then she revealed to all of us at the table, rather shyly, that she and her fiancé had gotten married just the previous night, as if on a whim. The table toasted her and everyone seemed to be in a pretty good mood, and so I chose that moment to half-jokingly warn her that my piece contained the one word that she…

“Dude!” she exploded. “You cannot spell it that way! It’s wrong! It’s not spelled that way!” She sputtered for a moment. “You…you only think it’s spelled that way because you read too much pornography!”

Someone at the table interrupted her, but she thundered on. “Everyone who spells it that way is ignorant. They’re lazy with the English language and they need a fucking copyeditor.”

She went on and on; I heard the word “ignorant” three or four times, as if from a distance. My face flushed hot, and I fought the urge to leave the table for fresh air. “The bill’s on its way,” I told myself. “Just wait.” I stared bitterly out the window. Everyone at the table was quiet, except for Maria. Eventually she climbed down from her soapbox and said, “You hate me now, don’t you?” Her tone was more triumphant than contrite. I tried to answer, to say something articulate, but I stuttered, and my words came out twisted and without sense.

“I may be many things, but I am neither ignorant, nor lazy with the English language. You do not get into Columbia by being lazy with the English language.” I thought all of this much later, of course, when I was alone in my apartment. I grabbed the check and busied myself with collecting everyone’s money. I had to count the cash five times, until my head was clear enough to add everything together. I left without even looking at her, and walked back to my apartment. I hated that everyone had seen me that way.

She’d cut too close to the bone, down to all of my insecurities about my intelligence, my ignorance of the Western Canon, my “laziness” with the English language. It was true; my grasp of grammar was shaky at best, and it was halfway through the semester before I realized that I’d let Maria, who couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag, become the Gatekeeper of Literary New York, revoking my ticket into the Manhattan intelligentsia.

“Cut. The Bitch. Down,” said the Manly Fireplug when I called.

“I know.”

“Seriously. She sounds like a total pill.”

“I know,” I said. “But I can’t talk when I’m angry.”

“You’re going to have to learn.”

“I know,” I said. “Fuck, Joe.”

“Honey, you’re a New Yorker now. You’ll have to learn.”

“I don’t feel like one.”

“And put ‘cum’ in every single one of your submissions.”

I could hear noises on his end. “Where are you?” I asked.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“Just tell me.”

He sighed. “I’m walking up Castro now.”

Over the phone I heard passing laughter, and the 24 Divisadero pulling away from the curb. I could see each storefront he passed: the Chinese take-out counter, Worn Out West, Tully’s Coffee. I rubbed the back of my head. “I need a haircut,” I said.

I didn’t like who I was becoming in New York. Who was this miserable, whiny creature? I ventured down to Chelsea, to gay AA meetings, to replicate what I was missing. And I quickly fell in with a group of guys who seemed to like me. But after a week or two I noticed a disturbing pattern; whenever one of them left the room, the others would start in on all of his faults, and dish him so thoroughly that I expected him to stagger back into the room with a full set of kitchen knives planted in his back. This happened every time, to everyone who left the room, and I soon grew so paranoid that I’d hold my bladder rather than slip away to the bathroom.

Every night, heading home on the uptown train, I’d resolve to cut my ties with them, and yet each day they would call me, and whine until I agreed to join them. At some point each of them pulled me aside and spoke to me as if I was the only one in the group who truly understood him. But I was doing them a disservice, only pretending to be their friend.

I was in selfish mourning; nobody in New York knew my story; the story I’d slowly carved over time, standing at the front of AA meetings; the story of my heroic, triumphant resurrection. I’d arrived in New York with five years of sobriety under my belt, and these Chelsea boys saw me as fully recovered. In New York I was expected to be the big brother, and the change in roles, I’m not proud to admit, irritated me.

But the central premise of AA, that one alcoholic helps another, had been drummed into my head as the solution to my problems. I’d forget myself by helping someone just as I’d been helped. But the boys seemed perfectly content with their group dynamics, despite my efforts to set a noble example. They stopped gossiping about each other only long enough to discuss their half-shares on Fire Island, or dish various art world celebrities with whom they were tight.

“All the boys here are legends in their own minds,” I told Brian over the phone.

But did it take one to know one? And was I really one to judge? Had I never gossiped myself, were my friendships with Bearbait, and Brian, and the Manly Fireplug really so sacred? I had lost my sense of perspective. Everything in New York seemed about six inches away from my face, and of the millions of words I’d consumed in the past year, my favorite was “retreat.”

That summer I received an invitation to a “gay writers” cocktail party in Chelsea. The words “cocktail” and “party”, when used together, usually made me break out in hives. But it was rumored that some of the big shots might show up: Edmund White, Augusten Burroughs, Felice Picano. “Plus some publishing industry hotshots,” I was promised. So I put on a nice shirt and took the train down to 23rd Street.

As it turned out the only celebrity who showed up was Edmund White’s boyfriend. Still, every guy I talked to spent most of the conversation looking over my shoulder, scanning the crowd no doubt for David Sedaris. I sipped my diet Coke and kept my elbows close to my side, to hide the nervous sweat stains under my arms. One small group in the corner was discussing the book fair they’d been working all day, and the celebrities who’d showed up to promote their various memoirs.

“I saw Matthew Broderick today,” I offered. “On the 1 train.”

An editorial assistant at Viking rolled his eyes. “Oh God, you can’t swing a dead cat in the Village without hitting him or Sarah Jessica.”

I decided not to mention that a retarded man on the train had asked Matthew if he was, in fact, Ferris Bueller. For a moment I perked up when I saw one of my professors walk in with a bottle of wine under his arm. But he gave me an absent smile when I said hello, his eyes roaming the crowd behind me, and then excused himself. Taking everything a little too personally, I slipped out of the party without saying good-bye to anyone, taking the stairs two at a time.

That fall I accepted a couple more invitations, with the same result. One of Edmund White’s one-night stands appeared at the last one. The highlight of my evening was when a short story writer asked me about my thesis, and I gave him a general description of its plot.

“Sounds…ambitious,” he said.

“I hope to do it justice.”

“I find your modesty so charming. Tell me where you’re from, again?”

Last spring I’d attended another cocktail party, hosted by my writing program – a mixer for students and literary agents, another one of those events where six shots of tequila might have greased the wheels a bit. I left all of these parties feeling the same way: like I wanted to go home and take a shower.

There was writing, and then there was all the business around writing, which only made me want to curl around my thesis like a twelve-year old girl with her first diary. But I told myself that the business was a necessary evil, and the sooner I learned its customs, the better I’d do. And the truth was that I was the one most responsible for my discomfort at these parties; I radiated awkwardness, and could not have made for the most charming conversationalist. Why couldn’t I just relax?

Sometime that fall I began thinking about Rick Bass. Many years ago, when I was still living in Minneapolis, I’d taken a weeklong workshop led by Bass, a writer known mostly for short stories that often featured small town characters with vaguely mythological powers, acting in conflict or harmony with nature. He spent most of the year in the remote Yaak Valley of Montana, where he worked vigorously to protect the land from roads and loggers. At the time of the workshop I was more interested in literature about urban angst, so I was surprised at how often he now came swimming up quietly from my subconscious. I wondered if we might have something in common, aside from a fondness for flannel shirts. Soon, to comfort myself, I would imagine Rick Bass at these cocktail parties, hyperventilating in the corner by the wet bar, and it always made me feel better. Even his name – the casual “Rick,” the woodsy “Bass” – conjured the kind of alternate life that I now daydreamed about – the kind of life where Jonathan Safran Foer might succumb to wood ticks and poison ivy within the space of a few hours. Of course, these fantasies of life in the remote wilderness had no more connection to reality than my New York fantasies. I missed the Castro, not Montana. But as I navigated my way through the second year of grad school, I could bring myself peace of mind by asking, What would Rick Bass do?

At the end of the fall semester I was haunted by the ghosts of San Francisco. As I lay in bed reading Sophocles, images flashed through my head, certain views I knew well: the Marin headlands across the Golden Gate Bridge, the houses on the hills from my bedroom window, the Castro Theater marquee from the end of my street. I’d daydream about my old Subaru, my foot on the accelerator, driving somewhere, anywhere on my own volition, somewhere out of the city, where I’d be surrounded by the colors green and blue, mist, air smelling of sea. I dreamed about space, and light, and the sight of things blooming all year. I pulled on my parka and slipped into the crowds on Broadway, and remembered the sound of fog dripping from the eucalyptus trees on my old block. Until this time I had looked on all of my New York challenges as temporary obstacles. Eventually I’d carve out a life for myself, and perhaps even meet a few more New Yorkers that I liked. But for the first time I thought I could move back. And once I’d thought it, it wouldn’t go away…

When the movers arrived from California, I spent the afternoon in my little studio apartment, unpacking boxes. At dusk I lay back on my bed. The scent of my new seagrass rug – which smelled like someone had dumped a ten-pound bag of catnip on the floor – mingled with fresh paint fumes. It was the middle of August, and I listened to the chorus of air conditioners in the windows of the neighboring apartments, and thought about the Manly Fireplug, who’d lived in New York for over a decade. When Columbia University had called and asked me if I might like to join their program, I stopped by his barbershop, where he was closing up for the day, sweeping a dark pile of clipped hair across the room. When I told him the news he dropped the broom and bear-hugged me, and when we pulled away his eyes were damp, for a moment. Then he blew his nose and pushed me into his chair.

“Now,” he said, “you gotta get yourself a Friedrich air conditioner. They last forever.”

“Friedrich.”

“And you gotta walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“Stay focused,” he said. “You’re in the Ivy League now.”

“I know.”

“Those New York boys spend half their life at the gym, so you stay focused.”

“I know.”

“Don’t let it get to you.”

I sighed. “Yes, Daddy.”

He grunted. “Say that again.”

Our big brother/little brother routine had a slight incestuous edge to it. “Daddy,” I said, teasing. At the end of every haircut, when he’d slap alcohol on my neck, he’d growl in my ear, “I just love the way your skin reddens up so easy.”

“Joe…”

“It’s hot.”

“Joe, I’m not going to let you whip me, so don’t even ask.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said.

I pushed aside the curtain; my new window looked out onto an airshaft and a tiny sliver of West 112th, where a construction crew was setting up scaffolding on the building next door. It was eight p.m. At eleven p.m. I called Jennie.

“When do they stop?” I asked her.

“They never stop,” she said.

At midnight I bought earplugs from Duane Reade. “You’re in New York now,” I told myself. “Deal with it.”

The Fireplug’s final piece of advice was that I absolutely must go to the top of the Empire State Building and look for my apartment. “First thing you do,” he’d said. At the end of the week I took the subway down and stood in line with the tourists, as salesmen shuffled by and hawked audio tours of the city, which were narrated by Tony, an “Authentic New York City Cab Driver.”

“See more with the audio tour!” one guy said, and I puzzled over that one until I finally reached the ticket counter, ninety minutes later, where I forked over twelve dollars. The girl stamped my ticket and handed it back. As I boarded the elevator I glanced down. I hadn’t planned my trip so well; it was an overcast day, and on my ticket was a little smiley face, except it was frowning, and underneath it were the words, “Zero Visibility.”

* * *

After that first trip to New York, when I’d watched the boy in the bottle, I returned to college in Sarasota. It was 1992, and my heroes were the men and women of Act-UP, who staged kiss-ins and die-ins on the streets of Manhattan and San Francisco, and whose outrageous tactics paid off in advancements in treatments for HIV. I shadowed their movements through magazines and newspapers. My thesis was burdened by the title “The Sociological Effects of AIDS on Gay Men.”
When I made it to San Francisco in 1997, new pharmaceuticals had changed the effects of AIDS among the world’s more privileged populations. By the time I arrived, the community I had written about for my thesis no longer existed. The activist groups had splintered or disbanded entirely. I had missed an era. Within a couple of years crystal meth had become an epidemic among gay men, and we retreated into isolation and paranoia, hiding in our separate rooms.

Now I lived in New York, and I’d take the 1 train downtown, where my heroes once walked. Most of them were dead now. Sometimes, walking around the streets of the East Village with my iPod, I’d play the song Frankie Knuckles had spun the night I’d danced in that dark ballroom, as the boy had rocked on the box in the blue rays of light. I’d listen, trying to conjure that night, and that city. But that New York had disappeared; Second Avenue had lost its edge, I could walk the streets of Alphabet City, and on every corner were stores I’d seen in cities all across the country.

I’d never lived anywhere where it was impossible to be outside, and alone, at the same time. I’d been spoiled over the years. In Minneapolis, when I was still in high school, I’d climb out my window at night, and wander with my headphones down to the rose gardens along Lake Harriet, or duck through the hole in the fence along the dark expanse of Lakewood Cemetery. In Sarasota I’d leave my desk, and my thesis, and walk at midnight through the banyan groves down to the bay, and stir the water with a stick until the phosphorescence spun like a constellation. In San Francisco I’d hike to the top of Buena Vista Park, a few blocks from my apartment, where I’d rest on a scarred wooden bench and gaze down at the hills and the slender piece of the Golden Gate visible through the towering pine trees. At night, far below, the red light at the top of the Transamerica Pyramid would blink slowly, like an underwater beacon. My thoughts had room to breathe. Once I’d read about the ancient practice of bloodletting, which reminded me of my walks; they drained the poisons from my body, and gave me peace.

Of course, what I often thought about during those solitary walks was New York. I thought then that I would gladly give up my walks to pursue this vague dream I’d had for so long: to be a writer in New York City. Not so original. But I was a romantic; easily swayed by images of cantankerous poets gathering over choked ashtrays in Village coffee shops, and by all of the book-lined apartments I’d glimpsed in Woody Allen movies. That nobody really lived in a Woody Allen movie was something I knew, if dimly. Still, I felt that I might prove to be the exception to the rule, and I’d end up with such an apartment, or perhaps marry into one by seducing a rich husband with my talents and charm. I’d visited Manhattan several times, and though the city thrilled and terrified me in equal measure, it seemed a worthy challenge.

But even in New York my dream remained vague; if the city I’d dreamt about in college no longer existed, what did I want now, thirteen years later? To be an artist, I thought. Now my new life would begin…

The other night my new thesis advisor was in town to read from her recently-published book at A Different Light, where we arranged for me to give her my book-thus-far. That evening also marked the end of the first week of the semester, and my first weekly ten pages were also due. This breaks down to two pages a day, five days a week, and I’m happy to report that I met this goal, and am three days into my second week, with equally satisfying results. Two pages a day may not sound like much, but I’m quietly ecstatic about fulfilling my rather narrow, self-defined purpose in life.

After months of not-writing at distracting coffee shops, and not-writing in my bedroom (despite my beautiful new desk from Room and Board that – since it couldn’t fit through the hallway –had to be carried down the side of a hill and pushed gingerly through my bedroom window), I discovered that if I took my laptop upstairs to the dining room table, turned off the internet connection, drank a Red Bull or three, and stared at a blank Word document for an hour, I could crank out two pages of really bad writing. The months of not-writing have left me thick-headed and rather stupid on the page, and every five minutes or so I stand up and pace the fifty feet from the table to the living room window and back, several times, till I grow a bit dizzy and have to sit down again.

By the end of two pages I’m so proud of myself that I have to text the Manly Fireplug and tell him of my progress. He very kindly congratulates me on this stunning achievement, and then I sort of collapse in an exhausted heap. Did I tell you I’m currently writing about the period when I was fourteen, and…well…was ANYONE happy at fourteen?

So I printed out the book-thus-far for the advisor, and tallied it up; as of today, I’ve written 200 pages. This probably isn’t as interesting to you as, say, my sex life with the Manly Fireplug. Maybe neither of these subjects interest you. But I don’t have much else to offer you, becaue I’m not really thinking about anything except these two subjects, more or less continuously. It’s what I got, people. Cut me some slack.

Where I attempted to get the Manly Fireplug into a pair of rhinestone-encrusted mouse ears, to no avail. Some people are simply hung up on their masculinity, present company included.

I’ve been thinking about aphorisms. Two in particular. “Be careful what you ask for” seems to be the theme of the last six months. Most writers dream of long stretches of uninterrupted time, which I’ve had in abundance and put to dismal use. My only consolation is that having exhaustively surveyed at least five or six people, I’ve come to the conclusion that NOBODY makes good use of abundant free time. Which brings me to aphorism number two: “The busier you are, the more you get done.” This seems to hold up, at least by past experience. So this semester I’ve opted to sign up with an advisor back at Columbia, who’s given me a series of strict deadlines for my book. Since I’m only on day number two I can’t offer much of an analysis yet, but I’ve reached my daily page count and what the hell, here I am posting again. By next week I could be engineering an improved levee system for New Orleans and running for the Bare Chest Calendar contest. I can dream, and you can’t take that away from me.

I get wary when artists start talking about themselves as “special people.” You know, the kind with sensitive constitutions, consumed with Serious Life Questions, floating a few feet over the earth, their toes grazing the scalps of normal men and women.

There was one adjunct professor at Columbia, from whom I learned nothing, who’d get all starry-eyed and dreamy-voiced when she talked to our class about Being an Artist. One of her hands would touch the scarf knotted at her throat while the other would play with her hair. I swear that every time she spoke to us, she imagined herself being interviewed by Vanity Fair.

On our last day of class this past spring, she asked us about our writerly aspirations. As per usual, I broke the five-minute silence.

“I’d like to make a living doing what I love,” I offered.

She looked offended. “Don’t you want to explore the human condition? Don’t you want to make a statement with your art?”

“Of course I do…” I began.

She slit her eyes. “Is it really all about money?”

“That’s not what I meant-”

“I would think that an artist-”

“Look,” I said, “I’ve worked a string of shitty, dead-end jobs my whole life, while working on my ‘art.’ It would be nice to pay the rent with writing for a change.” I looked around at my classmates for moral support. Unfortunately they had all given up on the class midway through the semester, and were simply occupying their chairs. My voice got a little tight. “As long as we’re dreaming big.”

She rolled her eyes, glanced down at her watch, and with that my final class at Columbia came to an end.

Afterwards, in the hall, a girl from class pulled me aside. “Of course we all agreed with you,” she said. “Besides, that woman comes from money.”

“She does?” I said.

“Totally. God, that patrician accent! Old money, honey. Plenty of free time to weigh the human condition.”

But then, the opposite argument, that artists are just like everyone else, seems a little false as well. Yesterday I read a profile on Doonsebury creator, Garry Trudeau, in which he muses over his former life as a graphic designer:

‘I had more flow as a designer,’ Trudeau explains. ‘I could just drop down into the zone and stay there for hours. With cartooning, I’m constantly coming up for air, procrastinating, looking for reasons not to be doing it. I spend all day granting myself special dispensation, with “creative process” as my cover story. Carpenters and deli countermen can’t do that, so I think they may feel better about themselves at the end of the day.’

Frankly I found some comfort imagining Trudeau procrastinating before every deadline. If someone so successful still goes through that on a weekly basis, then I’m not alone, pacing my bedroom floor, standing in blank silence at the window.

I confess: I’m not writing the book.

That’s hardly new.

What’s new is that I’ve spent the past four months on a diligent mission to find out why. Over time, chasing down false leads, engaged in a meticulous process of elimination, I finally identified the culprit.

I blame you, the American people. And it’s time you took responsibility for the pain you’re causing me. Nothing in your culture feeds my artistic process. Nothing!

Your television shows murder my imagination. Fuck your “Heroes,” your “Grey’s Anatomy,” your “Law and Order” marathons! Outside of a dream sequence or two on “The Soprano’s,” everything on television thwacks the fragile voice of imagination that whispers words to me, that supplies me with a lovely turn of phrase, a stunning metaphor, a book-length theme.

Damn you, for making me justify Project Runway with But it’s really creative!

Playstation 3, Tomb Raider, Warcraft: all just slow death!

Fuck your hybrid Hondas, your knitting circles, your YouTube! Fuck your animated donkeys that talk like Eddie Murphy! Fuck Anderson Cooper’s tears!

And you gay boys, with your trance music, decline bench presses, and bareback porn; leave me in peace!

Big Muscle Bear contributes nothing to Art!

The Da Vince Code is not literature!

Stop making me worry; Jennifer Aniston is going to be fine!

Please, turn off your computers. Kill your televisions. Buy a book. Talk to me about character development, narrative arcs, and postmodern structure. Tiptoe around me as I engage in my “creative process.” Hold my calls. Fix my coffee. Do my laundry. I’ve got a Master’s degree to finish.