I carry a little notebook in my back pocket now. Every time a vivid childhood memory or interesting quote comes to me, I fish out the notebook, flip it open (with one hand: my journalist imitation, works well on subways, a legend in my own mind) and jot it down. For someone writing a memoir I have a particularly bad memory and need all the help I can get. I’m on my second notebook now, neither of which would make any sense to anyone else. But they do their trick for me:

Diane’s farm (almost moved there)
kerosene lamps
salamanders
Nilla wafers
Chekhov: “the voice of wisdom is boring”
Mark (?) Duran Duran – check 7th grade yearbook; wrist, lunchroom

I’m also taking a research seminar this semester and am learning new methods and resources, including what my professor calls “the deep internet”, which includes galaxies beyond Google. I love research, could spend my whole life on it. The best part of research is that you’re never done. You can put off the actual writing until you’re done, which is never.

I keep uncovering intriguing details, such as a supposed sexual assault that occurred against a member of my family on this date, February 10th, thirty-one years ago. Through my investigative-reporter antics I tracked down a newspaper article about the supposed crime, and today exchanged information with both the hospital and police department where the crime took place in hopes that they can dig up records of the event. As I’m doing this, though, I always think of the intro to Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, where she describes her own feelings about research:

“What else is there to tell? I am bad at interviewing people. I avoid situations in which I have to talk to anyone’s press agent. (This precludes doing pieces on most actors, a bonus in itself.) I do not like to make telephone calls, and would not like to count the mornings I have sat on some Best Western motel bed somewhere and tried to force myself to put through the call to the assistant district attorney. My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. This is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

I’m researching Catholicism. My mother was raised Catholic but fled the Church, much to her parents’ chagrin, when she married my father. So I was never raised Catholic and know practically nothing about the Church that you can’t pick up from movies, books, and television. I’m particularly interested in what it was like to grow up as a Catholic girl in post-war Midwest America, since I’m pretty sure she ran away for a reason, and not just the obvious one. So I’ve been spending a few hours lately combing through the stacks of Butler Library on campus.

Butler Library is an imposing structure of stone pillars and gleaming marble. But the stacks themselves are like another world. They sit within the center of Butler, enclosed by hallways and reading rooms that run the perimeter of the building. There are, according to a rather confusing model in a display case, fifteen floors of stacks in a nine-story building. Each stack floor is barely eight feet tall, so they’re squeezed in between the nine stories, and crammed tight with shelves that run floor-to-ceiling, each aisle of books on the windowless floor lit by a single button at the end of the row that flicks on a harsh fluorescent light for exactly fifteen minutes. During slow hours you can be the only person on a floor, squeezing down silent aisles, your trail growing dark as the lights flick off behind you. Holding a few books on Catholic girls, I suddenly remembered a book, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” by Edmund White, which I once read at college while in the process of coming out, the memory of which gave me a sudden ache of nostalgia. Figuring it might help trigger more memories, I hunted it down. Columbia, like many libraries, binds its paperbacks in its own nondescript hardcovers, the title and call number printed by some machine. So looking for a familiar spine on the shelves wouldn’t help. I flicked on the light at the end of the very last row of books on the tenth floor, scanning through the W’s, Wendall, Wexner, Whitaker, White, and there it was, my old favorite, the title swimming out from the gloom, striking me in a second as somehow off, and what it said was Nocturnes for the Kong of Naples.

What I meant to say, when I took a cheap shot at young creatives, is only this; that I have dreamed of this city for so long – sixteen years – that I may never grow immune to its charms, nor feel quite worthy of my place here, despite moments, many, where I am lugging groceries up Broadway, or emerging from the subway on West 23rd, or throwing my bag over my shoulder outside the barber shop on East 9th, when I realize that for several minutes, or an hour, I have forgotten the lovely, anxious thought – I live here. And it’s that thought that I’m inclined to conceal from others, as if it’s the very thing that will dispel the dream. As if to admit to this thought is to admit to an unflattering earnestness. As if earnestness were a liability, which, on the Internet, is sometimes true.

I feel, in my university-owned studio, like I’ve been granted a reprieve, one that will come to an end, at which point I either will or won’t land on my feet, here, and that it will depend on a combination of resilience and luck that today remains incalculable. I’m trying to describe this strange dream to you, seeing or studying with people who wrote books that have stood on my shelves for years. Or meeting someone who appeared in a movie that I saw when I was sixteen, or twenty-three. Or sitting in a restaurant, at a long table cluttered with dessert plates, silverware, and cocktail glasses, with people who are seated at places I’ve long coveted, and I want them to talk forever, in hopes that their combination of resilience and luck could be learned, which it can’t. All of us have been granted a reprieve, a temporary pass.

And I misread others, that they don’t feel the same, when maybe they do.

He says, defensively. I admit to defensiveness, I admit to a life-long habit of it. And when one is in grad school, having one’s work dissected on a regular basis, one may feel just the slightest urge to withdraw, which may explain my postings as of late. Or maybe it’s just that my current activities lack a narrative arc: Watch him open his laptop! Watch him reheat a half-pot of coffee! Watch his iPod battery die! I do hope that, eventually, I will redeem myself with this memoir, if I do it justice.

What I meant to say was this: I’m a very lucky man. I still, for instance, love the subway. Which is easy to say when you don’t ride during rush hour. I love the descent down poorly-lit fluorescent steps, my hand reaching for my wallet, opening it, plucking out the MetroCard, running it through the sensor – the digital screen displaying my depleting balance – my hip pushing through the turnstile, hand returning card to wallet, wallet to pocket; one fluid, efficient motion.

I love that after two weeks I knew which side of the train the doors would open on at 72nd and 96th Streets. After two months I figured which end of the train would get me closer to the steps at 42nd and 14th Streets. After six months I realized, by looking at the scuff marks on the yellow line, where to wait on the platform so that, when the train pulled into the station, I’d be standing at a door.

It’s this reclusive existence – watch him read four books a week! – that gives each trip downtown a certain thrill. Standing on the platform, watching a column of snow falling through the street grates onto the tracks below. The restless motions of commuters pacing the edge of the platform, peering down the tunnel for the train’s lights, the train pushing a bank of cold air through the station. And in each train, each car, potential stories. Never knowing what will be inside. A man with dirty fingernails scratching through a stack of lotto cards. A young woman knitting, the latin boy across from her watching the needles flick back and forth. A man with no teeth, empty cup in hand, telling bad Michael Jackson jokes. A straight couple, sitting close, bent over a copy of Scientific American. A family of four, theater programs curled in their fists. Matthew Broderick. And the doors open, at 14th St, and I walk to the end of the platform, up the stairs, arranging myself, anticipation, defense; above me the sidewalks teeming, anxious, and sublime.

I’d managed, for six months, to live in New York without seeing any celebrities. Of course there aren’t that many this far uptown on the west side. And even though I like to look down on the whole celebrity-worship thing (“Brad and Jen: our Tsunami”) it still took me by surprise when Matthew Broderick ran onto the 1 train at Penn Station just before the doors slid closed. He’s much cuter in real life; that pale, sickly aura he often projects on screen was missing. He had on herringbone pants, a newspaper-boy cap, and a black quilted bomber with faded “Sex in the City” patches on the arm. I looked around at all of the New Yorkers studiously pretending not to notice him. The only other person looking at him was the mildly retarded man who sat across the aisle from me, and who said something to Matthew which I didn’t hear because of my iPod. Matthew sort of gave him a strange look and nodded, slightly, and I’ve decided the man asked him, “Are you Ferris Bueller?”

I figured that a celebrity sighting on the subway was worth extra points, and when I got off the train at W 23rd St I rehearsed how I would casually mention to friends at the book signing at the Chelsea Barnes and Noble how I’d seen a celebrity on the subway. Nobody was very interested, however, or if they were, they had long ago perfected that indifference necessary to young creatives in the city. Later there was dinner at the Viceroy for the author, his friends, and various hanger-ons (like myself) where I was seated across the table from the author’s agent. Wanting, naturally, to make a good impression, I dropped my celebrity sighting and the agent said, “Oh, you can’t swing a dead cat in the Village without hitting him and Sarah.”

Having learned my lesson, I was at a gallery party this weekend for the closing of a show curated by Choire and featuring the lovely, sad, funny work of Jennie. When a famous young novelist and retired-hatchet-job-book-reviewer walked in and kissed Jennie on the cheek, I pretended not to even notice him. I also did not stare across the gallery at him every five seconds thinking that, like Matthew, he looked better in real life. Since I wasn’t looking over there every five seconds I know I looked much cooler than I did just last week at the Viceroy. Coolness, however, comes in degrees, and I’m afraid that my humble Midwestern upbringing won’t allow me to reach its upper echelons. There’s always a bit of hayseed stuck in my hair, and I suppose I’ve accepted that as a badge of honor by now.