TOWNIES
Townies, a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities, written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays.
I was sitting under a tree in Precita Park, in my San Francisco neighborhood, when I finished E.M. Forster’s “Howards End.” My mind normally wanders when I read outside; a book tends to be a pretext for me to sit and watch people, who often give me ideas for stories. Yet this novel captured my ever-shifting attention. While I’d long been familiar with the book’s famous exhortation, “Only connect,” I was taken by surprise by another salient idea, this one more radical and less adaptable to literary sound-bite.
I’m talking about Forster’s ideas about the nature of property. Read more…
I was out of money, and no money, I knew, meant exile. I’d moved to 5 states in 10 years — California twice. In my 30s now, I had absorbed the gypsy lessons of starting fresh. I wanted to learn the art of having a home. Besides, I had finally fallen hard for San Francisco.
But what to do? How to be sustainable? (A good S.F. word!) Here in the city there was always bike repair and artisanal lattes, but I had eked out a master’s degree — I aspired to the professional class. So I looked north and south, where two valleys flowered with employment — Napa and Silicon. Read more…
Townies takes a summer vacation from New York, with a month of essays from the cooler coast of San Francisco.
I got a bike — a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can’t let that stop you. When I went to receive my bike from its maker in a cramped workshop down on Cesar Chavez Street, I didn’t know what I know now: a single San Franciscan in possession of a good bike must be in want of a Wiggle. Read more…
I moved to New York in the summer of 1979, when I was 7 years old. For a girl raised on Eloise and Sesame Street, the city was a storybook made real — busy, busting with energy, oozing music and dance and art. I loved movies, tap-dancing and singing songs from “Annie” at the top of my lungs, and I had an inkling, a suspicion, that I was destined for fame and fortune. To others my name was weird; to me, roller-skating in a Wonder Woman swimsuit and terry cloth running shorts to the sound of Donna Summer blaring from car radios, it was unique and soon to be in lights. Read more…
My girlfriend pressed her balled up sweatshirt against her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut, tears striping her temples. She lay on her back on the floor of our living room, feet tucked under the coffee table, head on a sheet-covered pillow, left arm outstretched. I knelt over her, the heat of my breath filling the yellow surgical mask, hands slick under sterile gloves. I delicately peeled up the corner of her bandage, the skin beneath it smooth and pale as onionskin. With every tug, I saw her chest heave. Gritting my teeth, I pried the plastic dressing from the tiny tube that led into her upper arm. It was mid-June, and the dressing had melted onto it. She kept her arm still, but I heard her moan through the sweatshirt. Heart thudding, and tears pricking my own eyes, I kept going, despite the refrain in my mind: I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I can’t do this. Read more…
A few years ago, when I had just moved to New York, my father mentioned in a letter that my mother, who is a nurse, had spent the week arranging hospice care for a dying patient. “I spent this week hanging a door,” he said. “Kind of seems insignificant in comparison. On the other hand, the door will almost certainly last longer.”
At that point I was struggling to manage the financial records of a recruiting company in Chelsea — a nightmarish task for which I had no aptitude or training whatsoever — and picking up other odd jobs as they arose. I spent a while temping at a real estate development firm that was short-handed because the regular receptionist had gone on a monthlong Scientology cruise. Of course, none of this was as profound as comforting the dying, or as tangible as hanging a door. Read more…
One afternoon several months ago, I was sitting on the curb watching my 4-year-old son ride his bicycle when I noticed he put up his hand every time he passed a particular telephone pole. He slowed as he approached the pole, extended his arm straight out, his palm out like he was signaling someone to stop, and then sped up once he was safely past.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Going through the toll,” he said. Read more…
Back in 1989, the publishing company then known as E.P. Dutton was an old-fashioned kind of place. Wide-sashed windows opened to the weather; an orange carpet was duct-taped together where it had frayed; the telex machine buzzed and spit out missives from abroad. I was a young editor, newly enough promoted to still be dazzled by lunches with agents who drank me under the table and left me with the check.
And, it was the era of the slush pile — a mountain of hard-copy manuscripts sent in over the transom, with postage stamps enclosed for the return journey. Once someone (not me, unfortunately, as I was surviving on lentils and credit cards and could have used it) ripped open an envelope to discover a $20 bill instead of return postage. Magic like that happened, sometimes. So did other kinds of magic — my first fiction acquisition came from that pile. Read more…
A native of Chicago’s South Side, I was raised in poverty. Several times my mother and I had to take refuge in other people’s homes, and sometimes in shelters. I thought that by joining the Navy at 18, I would get the training and education I needed to improve my life and help my family.
Yet once I was honorably discharged in 2008, with good conduct medals and, from a service-related injury, seven screws in my foot and ankle, I found the recession had left few available jobs. I worked as a server at a pizza joint and as a salesman at a retail store. Finally I did maintenance at the veterans hospital in the Bronx. I should have taken a full-time job there when it was available, but felt sure I could find something that paid higher. I was proud, and I was wrong. For a long time, I got by on the G.I. bill benefits and scholarship grants I received from going to community college and, more recently, the New School. But eventually I couldn’t get by anymore; I couldn’t even pay rent. Read more…
Perhaps because I’m still in my early 30s, I tend not to fully believe that the people closest to me are vulnerable to sickness and death. But in 2008, shortly after my parents moved from Russia to Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach — a Russian neighborhood on the edge of the Atlantic — I began to have doubts that I would be celebrating Father’s Day ever again. Read more…
