Late again. Hit the ground running after DC and never really stopped. Well, what can I say? Bob and Jimbo, with the help of Rich (who’s even better looking than his pictures in this month’s OUT magazine), put on an excellent show. No real glitches (except for the upstairs bartender who was late. Thank you to those who were kept waiting downstairs). There were a couple of last-minute cancellations from the performers, but in the end I think it was for the best; the show was the perfect length. Leave them wanting more is one of those clichés that works. There was a great turn-out and I got to meet some of the other bloggers for the first time. Joe, a fellow New Yorker, used to patronize the Powerhouse, where I bartended in SF. Andrew Sullivan came in fashionably late wearing a tight t-shirt advertising Detroit. And good old Geekslut aka American Horndog, made good on his promise to kiss me, and pulled me into the back room where I teased him for awhile. Get the hell out of Florida, Steven, it’s a wasteland.

All the boys read well. There was a good mix of material; funny, poignant, and raunchy. And then there was me. I had decided earlier in the week that I would memorize my piece; a five page poem, and spent many, many hours devoted to that task, walking in a tight circle around my studio apartment, down Riverside Drive to 72nd and back, staring out the window of the train as it sped towards DC. And though I did have it memorized, at the last second I decided, after pacing nervously around the back of the bar during Andrew’s reading, to just bring the damn poem up on stage. I was far too anxious and knew I’d forget a line and would be up there, blank expression on my face, sweat trickling down my back. Most of my nervousness was probably self-induced; the pressure to memorize and the pacing around didn’t help matters. And then there was the set-up; a bar, with a large group of gay guys standing in a tight semi-circle around the stage, which was only a foot or so off the ground, so that everyone seemed about three feet away. The poem trembled in my hands and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. You’d think I had never read in public, or acted on stage for that matter. But then it was over and I could relax. Sullivan gave me a hug. Homer bought me a Coke with my drink ticket and we got to chat a bit. He had a great calming influence. Great to see Ultrasparky again, another fellow New Yorker. Bob was spinning some excellent music, I would have stayed much longer but Jimbo, my host, was starving so we hit the Ethiopian restaurant down the block with his roommate and wandered home in the cool dark, where we ate at the kitchen table.

The weather that weekend was dismal, and I was struck with dread and sadness on the train back to New York. I didn’t know where it was coming from, and though the leaves along the tracks were all changing color, they seemed muted by the heavy sky. I was hiking through the mind-fuck of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as we passed through Philly, glancing up now and then at the damp landscape. I worried that my dread was about New York. Did I hate my life there? Or was I just hungry and tired?

The train pulled into Penn Station around three that afternoon, and I took the underground mall to the 1/9 platform, a block away. It’s an amazingly convenient commute to my apartment, and as I waited for the train I felt the dread and sadness stall a bit.

I had a couple of hours before class. I showered, changed clothes, then headed out again for something to eat. And on Broadway the sun had come out of the clouds, and the rush of people around me didn’t exhaust me, but rather energized me. And I sat upstairs at Pinnacle with a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza, watching the customers mill around the deli and soup counters below, and gradually my mood improved.

Over the past week I’ve felt more and more comfortable in New York, and though I keep struggling to find that balance between school, friends, the gym, and sobriety, I’ve realized that my perception of this city depends almost entirely on my state of mind. This isn’t a brilliant realization, I admit. But nevertheless, people here really do make eye contact. And Columbia really does seem smaller and less imposing. And I care less and less about the students with whom I’ve had problems. I’m a pretty agreeable guy, and it’s a rare soul that I can’t charm. Obviously their problems aren’t really about me. And there’s great people in my program, two of whom came to my reading at P.S. 122 and who make me laugh. Life’s too short to dwell in confusion over other people’s strange agendas.

Fall is my favorite season. The leaves are changing color here, and the stretch of Riverside Drive near my apartment is lovely. Yesterday the sun was out, and the temperature hovered around 65 degrees, and I walked over there and sat on the bench where I go to make my phone calls, to friends back in California. And the sidewalk was covered in crisp yellow leaves, and each time a faint wind shook through the trees the leaves fell in slow, delicate paths. I went to the gym and afterwards I stopped at the farmer’s market on Broadway and bought a gallon of fresh cider. And I walked home, the sun on my face, the cider knocking against my leg. I wished this season could last. I don’t want to leave here anytime soon.

Though I’ve only been here seven weeks I did something last week that cemented my New York residency. I helped my friend Norman move. Say what you will, and undoubtedly some pushy New Yorker will write and tell me that “you’re not a true New Yorker till you…” because that’s how New Yorkers are. In fact I may not become a true New Yorker till I become just as pushy and obnoxious as everyone else here, God love them.

Norman moved from a dingy third-floor walk-up in the East Village that he shared with two roommates, to a beautiful bachelor-pad studio in Chelsea. Once again I didn’t leave myself enough time to eat first. So on my twentieth trip down the steps of the building on Second Avenue with a box full of vinyl, my legs began to shake and tremble and I had visions of pitching head-first down the steps to the grimy tile-floored lobby, where I’d be trampled by the three other parties moving out of the building at the same time. I envied Marcel, who had the classic New York moving job of Waiting-on-the-Sidewalk-and-Watching-the-Truck. She perched on Norman’s amp and scribbled in her notebook.

Luckily we stopped en route to the new apartment at Bagels on the Square, where I devoured the most amazing salt bagel with herb cream cheese ever, sitting with Norman and the others on a park bench in the sun, the U-Haul van parked illegally on the street behind us. It was a lovely moment, one of the best I’ve had since my move, once my blood sugar level equalized.

It was a good antidote to the previous week, especially the moment on Monday afternoon when I was sitting on the steps of Low Library under the heavy gray sky, re-reading the notes I had 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.”

In some ways it was a relief to finally admit this to myself, to stop pretending that my “new life” was one exciting thing after another, rather than admitting the truth; that my new life was an exhausting, overwhelming, homesick-inducing series of days and that, 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; if indeed I wasn’t cut out for the life I thought I wanted. Maybe I should have just stayed home and set my sights lower on the horizon.

I thought back to the weekend of my stepsister’s wedding, when a friend of hers, a woman who had been through a graduate program at Harvard, told me that for the first three months she and a fellow student used to walk home everyday together, crying and wondering the same things. I tried to take solace from her words, knowing that if nothing else I could certainly endure three months if better days were on their way. Watching the thousands of students pass me on the steps, my heart detached from the rest of me, I tried not to dwell on the fact that my first submission would be critiqued in Tuesday’s workshop; the moment that I had been anticipating and dreading ever since Columbia called me back in March.

Added to my usual (and by now boring) insecurities about the quality of my intelligence and my writing was the strange altercation that took place last week between me and a woman in my workshop.

That particular day I had arrived to class with ten copies of my 18-page manuscript in hand, nervous and exhausted from having stayed up all week making major revisions to the piece, one of the essays that I had originally submitted as part of my grad school applications. Each week three students would hand in manuscripts; we’d take them home and read them, making notes and a written summary of our opinions, so that the pieces could be discussed in the next class.

For the sake of clarity and anonymity let’s call this young woman Maria. That day her work was up for discussion. She had turned in an introduction to an anthology she had edited, a collection of short stories and essays by men writing about failed relationships. Apparently she had previously edited a similar book from the woman’s perspective, and it had done well enough that the publisher had suggested the second anthology. The introduction she had written was, in my opinion, pretty disjointed and long-winded, containing a section where she quoted her fiancé, a “jazz scholar”, talking for paragraphs about Muddy Waters. I believe the section was used as an attempt to connect jazz and contemporary literature about heartbreak, but I wasn’t able to follow the argument. The professor pointed out that, by and large, people don’t talk in paragraphs.

As the class discussed the piece, Maria’s true feelings about the anthology became clear. She wasn’t enthusiastic about it. In fact she made a point of saying that the whole experience was creepy because, in contrast to the woman’s anthology, the men had all written about sex, often “pornographically”. She told us that she had done a heavy amount of editing for this reason, and that there was one particular word that absolutely, positively was not to be allowed, for any reason, in the anthology. That word was “cum”. She launched into a diatribe against “cum”, accusing it of vulgarity and arguing that people only spelled it that way because they read too much pornography. Maria said the proper, literary spelling was “come”. She was passionate about this perceived misspelling and as she continued her argument I shrunk lower and lower in my chair.

In the first paragraph of my manuscript, the one sitting in a pile waiting for everyone to take a copy, was the word “cum”. I was already self-conscious about both the content and the quality of my manuscript, having taken a few risks submitting a piece about sex and longing. I thought it might be a good idea to admit this up front, in class, with a bit of humor, since everyone was going to be seeing that word in my piece. Maybe if I joked about it everyone would be able to get past the word with less drama and concentrate on the rest of the piece. But it didn’t seem the right time to draw attention to myself. The discussion continued.

After class ended someone suggested that we all go out for a drink together; sort of a bonding ritual since the workshop, unlike a seminar or lecture, is where you truly get to know your fellow students, especially through their writing. We wandered down to the Heights, an upstairs bar with big windows that opened out over Broadway. It was happy hour, and though a pint of dark beer sounded heavenly after the past week, I ordered a pineapple juice instead. Maria joined us late, having stayed behind to talk to the professor. Naturally the only open seat at the table was across from me, which meant she and I had to make conversation. I got the sense she’d rather have different company. We chatted a bit about our lives before grad school, and the fact that she commuted by train from Boston twice a week for classes. She revealed to us, 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…

She exploded. “Dude! You cannot spell it that way! It’s wrong! It’s not spelled that way! You only think it’s spelled that way because you read too much pornography!” She thundered on, turning to another woman at the table who interrupted her with a question and saying, heatedly, that “everyone who spells it that way is ignorant and needs a copyeditor and is lazy with the English language.” She went on and on; I remember hearing the word “ignorant” three or four times.

I fumed. My face flushed red and I fought the urge to leave the table and head outside for fresh air since the bill was on its way. I was upset and embarrassed and pissed. Unfortunately I shut down when someone yells at me, and so all of the emotions boiled away beneath my skin, intensified by my exhaustion. I turned away from her and stared bitterly out the window. Everyone at the table was quiet, except for Maria. Eventually she climbed down from her soapbox, and saw that I was upset. “You hate me now, don’t you?” she said.

I tried to answer, to say something articulate, to explain, as if I needed to, why the word “cum” was appropriate in the context of my piece. But I stuttered, my words came out twisted and without sense. She tried to make some kind of conciliatory gesture but I was beyond reason. 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. Though of course I could not say, or even think, any of this at the time. Instead I busied myself with collecting everyone’s money for the bill. I had to re-count the cash four or five times, and then we left.

The evening ended with no peaceful accord. I left without speaking or even looking at Maria, and walked back to my apartment. I was upset beyond reason, and I hated that everyone had seen me that way. That I had let her get to me. I knew that this had nothing really to do with me. I knew that this was “her crap”. And yet I was shaken for the rest of the night.

As the days passed my rage subsided, but did not disappear. I talked about it with friends till they were most likely sick of hearing about it. And I dreaded, even more, the upcoming workshop, and the discussion of my piece.

It did not go particularly well. It did not go badly, either, but at such times I can only hear the criticisms, and the praise fades to background noise. I had done what I had feared; I had bitten off more than I could chew with the piece, and it had failed. It was a “gutsy” and “courageous” failure, but still a failure. Too many themes squeezed into too small a space. Too many details left out; not enough background information. I had forgotten that, unlike readers of this website, neither the students nor the professor knew anything about me, and they could not clearly see the narrator. Instead of letting the issues rise up out of the life itself, I had tried to compress life into the issues of introversion and sex and loss. I had done remarkably well, unsurprisingly, at revealing my weaknesses, but what about my strengths? Obviously someone like me, a man who grew up with two gay parents, whose mother was an alcoholic, who later lost her to ALS, someone who became an addict himself and then got sober, someone who tested HIV positive, obviously someone like that was strong enough to get through. So where were the narrator’s strengths?

It was good feedback, straight and on point. But I was discouraged that the piece hadn’t done more, hadn’t been a little more successful. I sat and nodded as each person spoke, writing down their comments dutifully, keeping my face expressionless so that they could tell me the truth. The conversation was winding down, the moments of silence between each comment growing longer, when Maria spoke up.

“Can we discuss the rape metaphor on page 17?”

Everyone flipped to the page. This was the section where I had described my first sexual encounter in the bird sanctuary near my house in Minnesota, the winter of my senior year in high school. I had ended up fooling around with an older guy, a guy whose age became clear to me only at the point when he kissed me. He had given me a blowjob, to which I had responded half-heartedly and with a limp dick. He had stopped, climbed to his feet, given me a hug and then suddenly whispered in my ear, “You just want someone to love you, don’t you?” At which point he turned and walked away. This is how it ends:

I watched him until he disappeared among the trees, my jeans around my thighs. The cold metal of the belt buckle against my leg. I pulled my jeans up and buttoned them. I smoothed out my clothes and pulled on my backpack. Then I walked in the other direction, towards home.

I felt both sickened and aroused, and strangely empty. Both stunned and relieved at his abrupt departure. I trudged up the hill, past the neighboring houses. I wondered what people were doing, that moment, inside.

I unlocked the door and stepped into the dark, cool living room. Nobody was home. I walked through the quiet house and into my room. I dumped my backpack on the floor and closed the door behind me. I wondered what I should do. I thought of movies I’d seen, where women sob in the shower after being raped. But I hadn’t been raped. I didn’t take a shower. I took off my shoes and turned on the stereo. I thought of skin and the hot wetness of his tongue. A weight holding me down.

“What did you want to say?” the professor asked Maria.

“I…I don’t feel like the word ‘rape’ is earned here. I think it’s too strong a word and it’s offensive.”

And that’s when the best part of the workshop, for me, took place, the moment when everyone else took Maria to task.

“He’s only seventeen…” one student said.

“He’s a confused kid, ” said another.

“He is? I thought he was older,” Maria said.

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, though my head was bent over the desk. It says I’m seventeen in the first paragraph, you stupid bitch.

“He’s only stating the emotions going through his head. He says, in the next sentence, that he wasn’t raped,” said the professor.

“But I feel like he entered this sexual experience willingly…” she continued, at which point one of the other woman in class gave her a hard look.

“Be very careful, Maria, ” she said. “You’re going into date rape territory, so you better be extremely careful with what you say.” She pointed at Maria, her finger pushing forwards with each word. Maria said nothing.

By this point I was sure that Maria had a thing about men. All men, that is, except her new husband, the “jazz scholar” whose words were worth quoting paragraph by paragraph. I tried to withhold complete judgment, though, knowing that the altercation at the bar had influenced my opinion. But later, when we were discussing another piece written by a woman in our class, Maria suggested cutting out the entire subplot revolving around the boyfriend, or, if nothing else, making him “less likable.”

Looking back over what I’ve written here, at the amount of space I’ve given to Maria, when she so clearly deserves nothing more than a dismissal, I’m a little embarrassed. It’s probably safe to assume that the altercation at the bar had a greater impact on me than I’d like to admit. Why else does she continue to interrupt my thoughts? Why else do I fantasize about taking her apart in workshop?

Obviously I took her “feminist” criticisms personally. My mother was a lesbian. Her partner, obviously, was a lesbian. I was raised by strong women; women who accepted no male chauvinism at home and who taught me, by example, that women were most certainly the stronger of the sexes. I take pride in this education, and maybe I’ve hidden behind it, maybe I’ve pinned it like a badge to my lapel, a medal of honor, a charm against any charges of sexism that may be leveled against me, sexism that everyone carries, to varying degrees.

Maria’s comments hurt because they cut too close; to my insecurities not only about my prejudices, but also about my intelligence, my ignorance of literature, my “laziness” with the English language. If pushed I will admit to not knowing my rules of grammar. Or that I only know them instinctually, from so much reading, but that I still make many mistakes. My point isn’t that Maria is evil, only that her personality clashed with mine and that I let it wound me deeper than necessary. Chances are these words will eventually come back to haunt me, as have so many of my words posted on the Internet.

I was thinking about Maria on Saturday night, and about the words I had written about her. I hadn’t yet posted them on my site, and I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of doing so. Most likely the words would reach her eventually, and I say that not from an overestimation of my site’s impact, but from nearly three years’ experience with blogging, and knowing how eventually everybody finds your site.

On Saturday night I was at the Patti Smith concert at Roseland, pondering both Maria and, unrelated, my libido. The crowd was a lively, cool mix of aging punkers and rock-n-roll fans, and there were some hot men weaving in and out of the crowd, plastic cups of draft beer balanced in their hands, usually trailing behind their girlfriends.

“I want a punk rock boyfriend,” I told Jennie, who stood beside me. We glanced over the crowd.

“It’s kind of an older crowd here,” she said.

“I’ll take a punk rock daddy then.”

“Except that most punk rock daddies are pale, skinny guys, with Adam’s apples sticking out of their throats.”

“Yeah.”

“Except Henry Rollins.”

“There are a couple of cute skinheads setting up the sound equipment.” I watched them, envying their apparent confidence and the speed with which they moved about the stage.

“Patti’s boyfriend is in the band,” Jennie said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. He looks like he’s fourteen. In a hot way.”

“Go, Patti.”

We were in the presence of a legend that night; Patti bouncing around in her torn jeans during “Rock-n-Roll Nigger”. She sipped water and spit it out on stage. That’s when I began to wonder. And it was later, when she sang George Michael’s “Father Figure”, that I decided. I needed more punk rock in my life.

Would Patti mince words? Would she pull herself back from rage and revenge? Or would she lay it all out? Fuck my goddamned insecurities.

And fuck Maria. She’s a cliché, a self-appointed gatekeeper of Literature who sabotages her very cause, embodying the kind of failed political correctness that valued censorship over freedom of expression.

Jammed together with the other fans on the main floor, I rocked in place to Patti Smith, turning now and then to watch all the upturned faces of joy, release, and rage. That night I had been sober for four years. And when she screamed “Hello, New York!” I screamed back, with all my might.

Once, when I was much younger, I brought home an English paper that I had written. Across the top my teacher had scrawled, in red pen, the score of 97. I showed it to my mother.

“What happened to the other three points?” she asked me.

The student life is ridiculous, and I was born for it. I was born to read four hundred pages a week, to read authors whose work I missed by majoring in – of all things – sociology in college. I was born to haunt libraries with my laptop, wringing meaning from past experience, gazing for hours, one could argue, at my own navel. To stay after class and listen, with hunger, to the professor tell me anecdotes about working at the kind of New Yorker that no longer exists. To sit at the edge of a party with a plastic plate of cold chicken in my lap while I argue with a fellow student about what makes good writing. To hit the campus gym at night and to wander back, past the hot dog vendor dozing in his booth, to my apartment where more books await.

Heavenly, but also hellish. Learning is not some pink-hued abstraction. Maybe small children learn without pain. But at thirty-three learning is the process of destruction, tearing down earlier assumptions, welding together with white-hot flame ideas which once stood separate, excavating a hole in the self you’ve built up, painstakingly and sometimes haphazardly, over the years. A self you’ve leaned on, though you knew its precarious structure. And if I’m self-indulgent tonight it’s because that self is under fire, it’s disintegrating, and I’m confused.

Confused in New York, which contains everything save comfort. I have no routine, everything and everyone is fresh, and I greet them with humming, crackling nerves. The only comfort I’ve found is the solitude waiting in the room with the closed door, the hum of the air conditioner in the window drowning out the harsh sounds. A pile of books on the table.

Three cups of coffee and my eye hasn’t stopped twitching all week. Twelve essays by Edmund Wilson to read, or rather to study since reading sounds more passive than the work expected of me, the work that Wilson himself put into his writing; the ideas and the structure built around them, a piece of art that both inspires and depresses, for the cold light it casts across my own writing.

I don’t understand the confident man. At moments I respect, then deplore him. Above all I envy him, and I study him for the hairline crack, and when I find none I try to imagine, without much success, what it feels like to be such a man. I’m always three points shy.

I’m my own arch villian. For too many years I let the insecurities keep me from passion. Even now, in the dream come true, they wrestle me from confidence. And I let them. By now they’re old friends; I curse them while silently praising them for “keeping me humble”. I hold on to them to ward off arrogance. I hold on to them to clothe the emperor.

And speaking of confidence: here they come, pouring from the depths of the 116th St. station, pushing through the doors of Butler Library, clambering down the steps of Avery Hall. They’re pulling bags over their shoulders, brushing hair from their eyes, clutching cell phones to their ears. They’re bending over omelets at the Deluxe, clustering on the steps of Low Library, sweating on the treadmills at Dodge. They’re swinging bags of toothpaste and toilet paper from Duane Reade, avoiding the clipboards of Democrats for Kerry on Broadway, tossing footballs on the South Lawn. They chatter, they mill, they rest, sunbathing on the squares of grass lining College Walk. They’re everywhere; the fresh-faced undergraduates of Columbia, their youthful confidence a personal affront to me, who cannot imagine the balls it takes moving to New York at the age of eighteen.

I’ve always surrounded myself with older people. I’ve told myself I did so because of the shared maturity and wisdom. Nitwits my age, I reasoned, could never understand my struggles, my elaborate battle scars. But I’ve come to realize in the past few weeks that there was a more defensive reason. With older companions I could perpetuate my self-image as a young man. And as this young man I could pretend that I still had all the time in the world; time left to accomplish the ambitious goals that I set out for myself, that I fantasized over, that lingered always on the fringe of the future. In the company of undergraduates the fantasies fade.

I know that I’m still young. Enough. These fears, of falling behind, of never catching up. They’re old friends, too. They’re comfort, they’re familiar.

And the casual cruelty of the young, who refuse to flatter my ego by acknowledging my presence. Pipsqueaks. My vanity, bruised, finds refuge in the required reading of the fall semester. Back to Edmund Wilson, that arrogant son of a bitch. Wish I had read every single book ever published. Maybe then the three points…no matter.

So it’s only in the periods of transit, from home to campus, from class to class, from lunch to library, that I engage with the throbbing mass of undergraduates. As my anchors to Columbia increase and strengthen I’m bothered less often by the invisibility I had felt settle over me after my move. The lack of eye contact, the absence of – say it – boys cruising me fed my self-pity. When you’re new to New York, I reasoned, you do not yet exist. I had not realized the importance of people acknowledging my presence, had underestimated its effects; my life, my body, my face noted, acknowledged, seen.

I’ve been thinking about this absence of eye contact. It’s not about rudeness; it’s self-preservation. There are millions of people in New York. I don’t think I ever really grasped how much larger New York was than San Francisco until I walked its streets, felt the relentless march of crowds passing, the ubiquitous couple wandering in front of me, blocking the sidewalk, the angry young man stepping on my heels.

It’s self-preservation not in the sense of safety, but of sanity. One must learn to filter out some of these people. It’s a denial of reality. With blinders on we carve out our niche; our lives gain more meaning and significance, we matter more.

I had promised myself that, on some profound levels, I wouldn’t change. I swore to keep the sweetness, the Midwestern integrity, the relaxed air of the West Coast. I had resolved to keep my eyes open, to see everything, to take it all in. It seemed vital to being a so-called writer.

Why then do I walk down Broadway, realizing several blocks later that I’ve ignored nearly everyone I’ve passed? Why, for the first time in years, have I started wearing headphones? Didn’t I swear I wouldn’t? Didn’t I resolve to listen to my surroundings, to observe, through all five senses, my new city?

But with my headphones, with my music, I can retain some sense, if only a fraction, of my inner life. I can narrow my focus. I can ignore the clipboards of the Democrats for Kerry, the pleas of the homeless on the train. I can keep myself sane. I can return to my room intact.

But then an email with a photo, or a phone call. And homesickness descends, a heaviness settling behind my eyes. And it’s not some rigid sense of masculinity that prevents me from crying; it’s not the tough guy within. I just haven’t found the private switch. And so, every couple of days, I feel myself pulled down, into the small comfort of my bed. And I fight against it. I do the one thing that seems to work. I leave my room, I put on the headphones, and I walk.

I head downtown, along Broadway, my pace at a steady clip, passing nearly every other pedestrian not because I’m in a hurry but because speed pushes me forth from the crowd, out front, where I’m a little more alone. And the music, an old mix by Deep Dish, pumps lightning through my sluggish blood, adrenaline fueling emotion, neurons firing, serotonin flooding over the sadness, and I’m twenty, thirty, forty blocks from home. I pass Lincoln Center and veer right, where Columbus Avenue becomes Ninth, and I push along the edge of the Theater District, heading for an AA meeting on West 45th, if only to give myself a destination. And I pass a bar, glancing through the picture window, noting in an instant the all-male clientele, the rainbow flag tacked up over the bar, the man near the window who locks eyes with me. And he nudges the man next to him, never looking away from me, nudging once, then twice, then pulling hard on the man’s shoulder, to spin him around, to make him look out on the street just as I pass from view.

This cheered me up in a way no book could. I will admit that this is the thing that brings me out of the college town of my neighborhood, down to Chelsea or the West Village or Union Square, feeling less ghostly once I’ve been seen.

There are two or three times I have felt at home in New York. They were moments when I stood with a friend on the sidewalk, on Broadway or downtown on 14th St, moments from descending into the subway, still talking, still things to say, the night quickening, warm fading twilight. And the crowds push past us but we hold our ground, and in that second, words rushing between us, I felt I belonged. I felt that in some ways I had always been here, standing on the corner with a friend, a home waiting for me uptown.

One of those nights my friend and I were on Christopher Street, the night before Labor Day, an electricity coursing through the air, the sidewalks choked with people, awake, expectant. And as we neared Seventh Avenue I saw a man emerge from the crowd, walking towards us with deliberation, his feet unsteady, his gaze unfocused. As we passed he leaned in to my friend, whispered something in his ear, then continued on, weaving back into the crowd.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“No.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, I care about you.”

On the uptown train I couldn’t stop thinking about the man, his story, where he had been drinking, the person he’d been thinking of as he stumbled past us. Feeling something so strongly that he had to whisper into a stranger’s ear, to make contact. And I was jealous of my friend. I wanted, unreasonably, to hear such an intimacy whispered in my ear. A drunken man, a city, murmuring something pathetic and sweet to me, something to puzzle over as I made my way home.

I was going to write about how the shine faded a bit on my twelve-day love affair with New York today, and how even though I paid off all my debts two-and-a-half years ago the mistakes I made before I got sober are still haunting my credit report, and therefore Citibank is now treating me like an irresponsible twelve-year old, and how Verizon made me pay a ridiculously high deposit just so that I could have the privilege of signing a two-year contract for one of their dumb cell phones, and that the cell phone reception in my apartment still sucks so I had to get a landline which I didn’t want because I’m going to be a poor grad student and how the grocery stores in my neighborhood are overpriced and how for some reason all my friends are operating under the impression that Columbia is paying for everything, including my apartment, which is funny except when I have to correct them with the truth, and how the neighborhood is full of fresh-faced undergraduates and their parents milling about, getting in the way and how the West End pub was packed with business school students (I’m guessing business school from the clothes and haircuts, though that’s small of me) and how it’s hot and sticky and the Republicans are in town and everyone’s mildly freaked out and how my stepsister is getting married in a month and I’ve never owned a suit in my life and I don’t know where to grow up and get one and join society but I decided not to because it was boring to say all that. Much less for you to read it.

And honestly everything will be better once I can find a good barber to compulsively harass visit every two weeks and once I get my student ID at orientation next Wednesday which will let me use the gym. And the library. But at the moment the gym is my priority. A good haircut and a good workout are the cheapest, most reliable forms of therapy I know. And then I can go to the library and read or something. Maybe even write, since that is what I’m supposed to be doing here.

So in the meantime I made some sugar-free chocolate fudge pudding with a dollop of Cool Whip and I turned on the Blue Room and tried to chill out.

But I’m still taking recommendations for barbers.

I spent last weekend in Los Angeles visiting my buddy Brian in his new digs, a condo building on Laurel near Sunset Blvd. It had a beautiful tiled inner courtyard with a pool, like Melrose Place, though I preferred to think of Mulholland Drive instead. Friday night we sat out by the pool talking, enjoying the warm night (which we never get in San Francisco). I sat on the edge of the pool, my feet submerged. The pool was lit from within, and my feet looked pale and thick below the surface of the water. I told him about the last time I had sex. Liquid patterns of light and shadow played against the underside of the palm trees within the courtyard.

The next day we swam and lay in the sun. A few of his neighbors were there as well, lying on the deck chairs reading. I swear to God that half of them had scripts in their hands. The other half were reading either People or Us. I kept dropping the word “industry” while talking to Brian to show how cool I was, but nobody paid any attention to me.

That night we went to the Arc Light, a state-of-the-art movie theater where you can literally reserve seats ahead of time. The little planner that I am, it was an exciting experience. As we looked for parking in the nearby ramp, I noticed a rather large family walking back to their car. I immediately scoped out the Daddy, and then I gasped “Oh My God, is that Corbin Bernsen?”

“Where?” said Brian. “Oh, yep, that’s him.”

“Wow. Corbin Bernsen.”

“He’s totally checking you out.”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe he’s gay.”

“Maybe he wants to see the person who still recognizes Corbin Bernsen.”

Later people applauded the car chase in the Bourne Supremacy. And half the theater stayed for the credits. On my way out I passed two guys, one of whom was saying, “…yeah, I normally don’t do those kinds of films, but Nancy Travis’ husband is a friend of mine…”

…

Thanks to everyone who responded to my adolescent-girl-outburst regarding my new apartment, especially those of you who’ve told me of nearby coffee shops and delis. I still can’t believe I get my own studio. I feel like I could just maybe handle New York now.

It’s official. I bought a one-way ticket for August 15th, smack in the middle of New York’s balmiest month. At least the city won’t be so crowded then. Luckily I can crash with Jennie till the movers arrive with my stuff. I have an appointment to sign my lease on the 16th, after which I’m sure I’ll be running around the city picking up things I’ve forgotten to pack. I realized over the weekend that I haven’t lived alone in about ten years, and there are so many things, like kitchen stuff, that I don’t have, since I’ve always used my roommates’ stuff. I’m spending a lot of money right now; thank God I may have found someone to buy my car.

I like moving about as much as I like getting a root canal. This may have something to do with my childhood, when my parents had joint custody of me and my little brother. For some reason, instead of choosing a more normal schedule like, say, a month at Mom’s followed by a month at Dad’s, our schedule was more like Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays at Mom’s, Thursdays at Dad’s, with weekends alternating at each house. I was scarred for life. I have an overpowering need for a quiet, stable home. And I need to have everything in one place or else I get anxious.

I have a little less than two weeks to pack, which is plenty of time since I’m already halfway done (see “little planner” above). I have four shopping bags full of books to sell or give away, and my room smells like cardboard. I got a little emotional yesterday, sitting on the floor surrounded by piles and piles of boxes I had pulled from storage. My need to streamline runs smack against my sentimentality. I have stories and poems I wrote in grade school, report cards from the eighth grade, notes I passed in junior high, press clippings from every article that ever mentioned my name back when I was a poetry slam champ. I have copies of the literary magazines that published one or two of my poems and rejection slips from all the rest. I have every journal I’ve ever kept, except for the one that I left on a bus in Minneapolis. I have old xeroxed photos that I hung on the wall of my college dorm room, the year I came out of the closet. My favorite is of two skinheads, one is drinking a Bud while the other gives him head. I have scores of old photos and stacks of old letters, nearly all from people I’ve forgotten. I picked up one, a letter that I never sent, and was depressed to see that my problems with men haven’t changed much in ten years.

Maybe it was just the physical condition of my room; everywhere I looked was another pile demanding attention and categorization, and I knew how little space I’d have in New York. Maybe it was old memories. But I sat back and sipped from my bottle of water, looking around my room, and I didn’t move for nearly an hour.

My poor, neglected website. Like a withered houseplant waiting for my return from vacation. I’m blaming it on the move. My personal narrative, the ongoing story I tell myself, has unraveled. My head can’t thread anything together; everything is reduced to a series of to-do lists.

1. Moving estimate. Done
2. One-way ticket to New York. Not done.
3. Change of address form. Not done.
4. Etc. Not done. (Anybody want to buy a great car? 2003 Subaru Forester X. Less than 10,000 miles. Email me.)

The school’s housing office is taking its damn sweet time assigning me an apartment. I have no address, no move-in date. I’m practicing patience and consoling myself with small markers of the passing time. I now have a Columbia e-mail address, and I’ve been receiving announcements of literary events and readings in New York (which, of course, I cannot yet attend. But I feel better, just knowing they are there.) I pre-registered for the fall semester’s classes: a workshop, a “Writer as Teacher” seminar, and a lecture in 20th Century Literary Nonfiction. I’ll pick an elective when I get there. This weekend I’ll get a couple of passport photos taken for my student ID.

This is the longest goddamned good-bye of my life. I was accepted to the program on March 12th. Four months later, and I still have a month to go. If one more person asks me when I am leaving, I’ll just…I’ll just…have to deal with it.

…

Last weekend I flew to D.C. My father was retiring after thirty years with the government, and since he and his partner are moving to the Tahoe area about the same time that I head to New York, it seemed a good time to visit before we once again switch coasts. I tried to hold my own, making small talk with his co-workers at the retirement party, balancing a cup of fruit punch and a paper plate with a slice of sheet cake in my hands. It was kind of sweet, actually; people got up and made speeches about my dad; giving me a glimpse into a side of his life that I’ve never really known. Later I helped him carry a few boxes of personal belongings out to the car. I think he was a little sad; that weekend he kept referring to his job in the present tense, and his partner would correct him, using the past tense.

That night I took the Metro to Dupont Circle and met up with a few good men; Jimbo and Chris and Bob. We went to a restaurant that had a waterfall for a urinal. It intimidated me, so I used the toilet. Bob had the Atkins burger. It came wrapped in lettuce. I’ve been trying the low-carb thing, but it mostly makes me sad. So I had curry chicken. With rice.

Later we squeezed into the Green Lantern just in time for the shirtless drink specials. At ten the bartenders pulled off their t-shirts and tank tops, followed quickly by the entire bar. Except me, of course. I was self-conscious about the last five pounds I can never seem to shed, probably because I keep ordering rice dishes. Plus it had been five whole days since I last hit the gym. I told myself that I kept my shirt on because I wanted to save my nakedness for someone special. But that was a lie. Mostly.

I can get stubborn. One night, back when I was bartending, a drunken customer kept insisting that I take off my shirt. When I refused he started offering me cash. Five dollars, ten. I think he got up to thirty before he quit. I kept my shirt on. By that point it was the principle of the matter, something that won’t get you very far as a bartender.

Next day I grabbed coffee with Bob and we talked for about four hours. Later he walked me to Mimi’s, where I met up with my dad and his partner for dinner. Someone started playing the piano and each of the wait staff took a turn serenading the entire restaurant with old Cole Porter songs. Some of them had better voices than others. I picked up the tab, which I think kind of embarrassed my dad and his partner. But I insisted. Again with the principles. “Happy Thirty Years,” I said.

During my visit I learned of some bad news. The kind of news I could write an entire book about, if it didn’t hurt so much. It hit me like a truck. I did my best to be a good son, but unlike my dad I don’t hide my sadness very well. They tried to distract me, dragging me to the new WW II memorial and later, to Spiderman 2. But I don’t distract easily. I sat with the sadness, twisting it around like a puzzle, as if there would be a solution, some intricate combination of moves that would separate each color from the others; everything in its place. After the movie I went up to the guest bedroom, closed the door, and climbed in bed, where I lay in the dark for three or four hours. I don’t distract. I dwell.

Later I emerged, a bit of my energy restored, just in time for Wheel of Fortune. “Pat’s hair has gotten bigger”, I said, which broke the tension a bit. My father solved every single puzzle with only one or two letters revealed. I thought I was good, but he blew me out of the water. He was an editor for thirty years, as was my mother’s father, so I must have inherited something from both sides of the family, though my father tells everyone that I am the “creative” one, a word almost as suspicious as “interesting”.

Later that night I had a total Woody Allen moment. I’ll admit it now: I had an hour phone session with my therapist, who was back in San Francisco. It was that kind of night.

The trip home, two flights and a layover, lasted about nine hours. I suppose it’s an indication of my mental state that I only read about ninety pages of Portrait of a Lady. I probably could have used Stephen King, but I’m trying to gear up for the Ivy League. Now whenever someone asks I can say “Ah, yes, Henry James…”

When I got home there was an email from my dad:

I’m forwarding a message from Hank B-, who was the bearish looking man about my age who came to my retirement party late and talked to you near the end. He’s visiting New York in a couple of months and asked for your e-mail address, and I didn’t want to be the one to give it to him. You can decide whether to or not (and I told him that). I don’t know Hank really well, but my sense is, well, that he’s a letch! I don’t think you’d have any reason to want to spend time with him, but if you want to, you can send him your e-mail address.

Sometimes having a gay dad is cool.

…

Recently my student dentist gave me a book when he graduated. “For being such a good patient,” he said, meaning I was a damn good guinea pig. He gave me Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a title that reminds me of a boyfriend I had in college.

And thus the long good-bye continues. One more week of work (rock!) then I’m headed down to LA for a weekend to see my buddy Brian in his new digs. My jet-set life glimmers like cubic zirconia.

This weekend nearly 2500 gay couples were married down at City Hall here in San Francisco. They came from all over the Bay Area, and many from out-of-state. They camped out overnight in the rain as if the Rolling Stones were set to play. Today two conservative groups, the Alliance Defense Fund and the Campaign for California Families, will bring the mayor to court in an effort to protect the sanctity of marriage, which is hilarious considering the bang-up job that heterosexuals have done with the “sacred” institution.

Meanwhile Valentine’s Day came and went and I spent the weekend nursing my stupid broken heart. Stupid because it cares about nothing but its own pain. It’s a black hole in my chest; sucking up everything around me, wind howling at its edges. It doesn’t care about all of the giddy love catching hold in the City. It won’t let me read because nobody else’s story is good enough. It allows certain songs to play if only for accompaniment, a soundtrack for its soap opera. It wallows in its painful stew, sighing dramatically so that everyone around can, you know, hear it.

Seriously though. There’s no getting around it, the only way through is through, or whatever it is they say. Too close to write about it, and too distracted to write about anything else. There’s a thickness behind my ribs and a heaviness behind my eyes, though I’ve been listening to The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” as if it contained instructions for becoming a less sensitive man; somebody who could move through his days more blithely, immune to the arrows slung from Cupid’s misguided bow. Someone who could lie to himself and still sleep at night.

I piece together jigsaw puzzles on my Mac, as if by completing a digital puzzle I could answer all the questions my stupid broken heart keeps asking, its needle stuck in the groove. Stop asking unanswerable questions. Finish your sentences with a period instead of a question mark. Dream smaller. Aim a little lower. Stop circling dates on the calendar. Finish off the groceries you bought. Come down and brush your feet along the ground. Give up and look around at what’s left. You still have Art. Art will never let you down. Art is more important than love, you tell yourself. Though you thought you had room for both. Let the self-pity flow, for awhile, then make it stop.

The sadness following a thwarted daydream like the sadness after you come; your underwear looped around one ankle like a ridiculous talisman.

“I have decided that photography is a sort of private sin of mine. As a virtue I find it really hard to sustain.”

The Arbus catalogue is full of quotes that I dutifully scribble in my own notebook after waking to rain on Monday morning. The laundry is spinning upstairs and I have a scant three hours to myself before hitting the dentist’s chair for one of my weekly three-hour sessions. Of course I am bitter and resentful about losing my Mondays to the student dentist, but the only target worthy of my bitterness is myself. One of the least sexy parts of being sober is the whole cleaning-up-the-wreckage-of-my-past project. And there’s no sense in complaining about my student dentist Adrian, who looks an awful lot like the guy in the commercial who has barbeque sauce smeared all over his face. There’s no point in complaining, because although Adrian is slow and has no dental hygienists to assist him, the dental school has a program that pays for all the work done on its clients with HIV. It’s a trade-off made almost bearable by my iPod.

I’m beginning to ask my father lots of questions, about their marriage and my early childhood. I’m not interested anymore in assigning blame for all the pain of those years. I just want to understand them. I want to understand the pressures of that time. I’m beginning to see each of them within myself; my father’s quiet, his need of order, his confusion when confronted with other people’s anger. My mother’s need for affection, her addictions, her desire to please.

My mother was raised Catholic, and hated it so much that she left the Church when she married my father, who was raised a Methodist. But she felt (of course) guilty for having done so, and lied to her parents. Each time they visited from Kansas we’d take them to the local Catholic church, pretending to be members.

I was the one who broke open the whole scam, when I was about nine. I made the mistake of mentioning Sunday school to my grandparents. How was I supposed to know that Catholics don’t do Sunday school? That was a fun day in the McAllister household.

I’m grateful to my mother for many things, including leaving the Church, as it saved me the likely prospect of more guilt than I’d know what to do with. I still inherited a fair amount of residual guilt from her. She was guilty for having abandoned the Church, for being a lesbian, for trying to be someone happier than the culture would allow at that point.

It wasn’t until 11:00 pm last Sunday that I remembered that it was February 1st, and that it had been two years since my mother died. I guess that’s progress, of a sort, though I didn’t feel particularly good about forgetting the anniversary. My subconscious brought her in for a guest appearance in my dreams that night. In the dream my stepsister and I were driving someplace and we stopped off at a 7-11 for a slushee, or Red Vines. And there was my mother, working the counter of the 7-11. I saw her as we were walking up to the front door and I broke down sobbing, wracked with guilt over the fact that my mother had to work at a convenience store. It was a little melodramatic, but my dreams aren’t exactly exercises in subtlety. In my dream she was still alive, but she was sick, which only made it worse. I was probably unemployed as well, making the contrast between her martyrdom and my failings as a dutiful son that much starker. When my mother saw us walk in, she retreated from the counter and asked a co-worker to help us, because she was ashamed we had seen her. She glanced at me quickly as she walked away, her smile an apology. In all of my dreams about her, I can never talk to her. She is always across the room. We can see each other, and she’ll smile at me, but I can never hear her voice.

On Tuesday I woke at 7. The world outside my window was shrouded in white fog, thicker than I had ever seen. I could barely make out the shape of the house next door. The trees were dripping onto the back deck. Drops of condensation fell onto the glass surface of the garden table. I was tired and reluctant, as always, to go into work. I wanted the fog to justify my desire to bury back into my bed. I wanted to call in sick. I wanted the fog to be so thick that the world would shut down. But I poured myself coffee and stumbled into the shower, because like my mother I never call in sick. And that’s why, as I drove down Roosevelt Way, around the curves that twist down the side of the hill, that I saw the fog did not shroud the entire city. As I descended it cleared away, and as I continued the cloud that lay over my house receded behind me.

The rumors of my death are gr…oh shut up, Michael.

How have I spent this unintended vacation?

Filling several pages with writing inspired largely by a chronic case of heartache, writing which is too self-indulgent to show to anyone.

Falling far behind on my e-mails. All apologies.

Watching a numbing array of scary movies on cable during the week of Halloween.

Enjoying the crisp weather that has come to San Francisco, weather that justified a new jacket and a couple of thermal shirts.

Working with a new sponsee/mentee in AA. I don’t know why the good-looking guys ask me to sponsor them, it’s God’s form of punishment. Fortunately, as the weeks pass I come to realize that they’re even more insane than I am, which kind of dulls their sex appeal.

Leaving an AA meeting and wandering through the closed-off streets of the Castro on Halloween evening, in the few minutes before the hordes arrived. It was only seven p.m., and there was a girl sitting on the steps of a house on 18th Street, puking her guts out. At first I thought she was an amateur, then I realized she probably drank like I did. Which means that if the party started at 8pm, I started just a little bit earlier. Like at noon.

Breaking out of my funk by finally working my ass off on the grad school applications. Selecting and polishing the pieces for my writing portfolio, writing why-I-want-to-go-to-your-school essays, tracking down transcripts and letters of recommendation and daydreaming a little about the future.

Planning a couple of short trips to New York to attend information sessions at two of the schools, looking forward to imposing on Jennie and dressing up her dog Malcom in that big furry hat of hers.

Cracking open my window last night so that I could hear the rain pouring down through trees on the side of the hill.

And finally, enduring my second root canal of the last two years, which has required endless hours in the dentist’s chair with my mouth propped open. Hours made more bearable by my new iPod, which I bought from Jonno when he upgraded to a newer model. The celebrity patina that lingers from J-no’s touch is worth the price alone. After today’s dental marathon I treated myself to a white chocolate mocha from Peet’s, which I sip while I write this, savoring the warm flavor on the unanesthetized portion of my tongue.

Obviously I’ve been slipping into a state of creative inertia. See also writer’s block. See also laziness. As someone pointed out to me yesterday; “You’re making lists now. That spells trouble.”

I have nothing to say, certainly nothing illuminating to add to the universe. I’ve even thought, in my lazier moments, of taking a little vacation from writing, but I’m too afraid that I would never return from such a vacation. And if writing is what brings me the most satisfaction and serenity, not writing feels like a living death. And since I equate not writing with the period in which I was snorting a lot of crystal meth and hyperventilating whenever I’d leave the house, I get a tiny bit anxious when the well seems to have run dry. It hasn’t run dry, but I let myself get too tired to haul up the bucket. Or too afraid that a couple of snakes will be swimming around in there. How’s that for a heavy-handed metaphor? That’s just brilliant, Michael.

I need a certain amount of silence to write. If a few days pass without writing, I start becoming afraid of that silence; I fill the void with music, television, movies, anything that will “keep me company” rather than sitting there with all the schizoid voices ricocheting around my head. Honestly, I’m always just a few steps away from winding up in an institution. I don’t mean that as a slight against the mentally ill, for I most certainly belong to that club. I heard someone share at a meeting the other day that when he was in a treatment center, his counselor told him that when he’s spending too much time alone at home, Get out, there’s a KILLER in the house!

Fortunately I’ve suffered through enough of these periods that I am beginning to see them as all part of the process. This morning I again picked up my copy of Art and Fear (which he recommended), which always reminds me that the only way to get art made is to just make it. I hate it when they make it that simple. It takes away all the fun of drowning in my own little sea of neuroses.

Part of the problem is that it’s late September already. Back in the spring and summer it was easy to say “Yeah, I’m going to apply to grad school for next year”. But now, with only three months before application deadlines, the reality is setting in. I have to start organizing a million disparate pieces; essays and transcripts and letters of recommendation, each school with its own set of peculiar instructions. And above all, I must choose 20-30 pages of my very best writing, as 90% of the schools’ decisions are based on the manuscript, no matter how glowing those letters of recommendation may be.

Which reminds me, I’m open to hearing your opinions on what (if any) of my various “pieces” are the strongest. It’s a lot to ask, I know, but I’m not always the best judge of my own writing. I’m also stubborn as hell, so in the end I may just pick a couple of pieces regardless of anyone’s advice. But I’m trying to be a little more open-minded about asking for help. Also, if you or anyone you know has some personal knowledge or experience with the nonfiction departments of various MFA programs, I’d be happy to hear from you. I’m specifically looking at a few schools in/around NYC: The New School, Columbia, and Sarah Lawrence. I got some good advice from Phillip Lopate when I worked with him, but more info is welcome. I feel strangely superstitious about identifying the schools I’m interested in. But there’s so much information that you can’t glean from a school’s catalogue; the kind of information you want when considering investing a chunk of money into your education. As in, does the program suck or not? Is the school a snakepit of insecure, backstabbing bitches? Which professors require bi-weekly blowjobs to get an A? You know, normal questions.

I can’t quite believe that I am setting into motion a chain of events that could result in major changes to my everyday life. Just when things were starting to quiet down. Maybe that’s the reason. Maybe I need a little chaos in my life. I guess there’s one underlying motivation: I don’t want to be an old man, looking back and wondering “what if?” I’m sure that everyone else in the nursing home would get SO tired of me asking that, over and over, driving them all away from my table in the corner of the cafeteria.