I did not have a bad life, not at all like that of some of the people I’d see out in the street begging, or smelling like shit in the park, or the homeless guy I once saw, while on an inspection, lying on the subway platform, his head having been split open by an incoming train. I didn’t have much money — think I earned just under eight thousand dollars annually my first few years at TDI (even then, that wasn’t very much), but I had enough to do what I pleased, which came down to doing basically nothing. Still enjoying comic books, I’d make my monthly trips over to an East Side shop, Supersnipe, to look around — one day I had ventured inside just in time to catch Federico Fellini buying a stack of back-issue Marvels. (Sorry, folks, I can’t help it.) More or less out of the music scene except for the occasional jam session with friends, I’d sometimes head downtown to the Lower East Side and to a venue like the Mercer Arts Center or Max’s Kansas City, at the invitation of my former bass player Pete, then working as a roadie for the New York Dolls. (Later, he, knowing their songs inside out, would replace their bassist, who’d left the group.) I’d long since decided that I found the rock scene a bit repugnant (translation: I didn’t have the overtly sexy chops or wild looks to fit into it) and really couldn’t get why people went crazy over certain kinds of music. (The Dolls, for example, did nothing for me, though I could see why the ladies liked David Johansen — a hell of a good-looking guy and a jamoncito and a half onstage.) Though I had published essentially nothing, I can remember feeling superior to just about anyone I’d meet at such places, simply because I had kept that higher aspiration in the back of my mind. I even took some pages I had been fooling around with to Max’s one night, and visiting my friend Pete backstage in the dressing room area — a row of curtained cubicles that didn’t afford much privacy at all — I met the fly Deborah Harry, lead singer of Blondie (sorry again), also on the bill, and did my best to win her favor by offering to give her the pages I had written. She was very polite and kind, surprisingly respectful of me, even though I was slightly inebriated from having killed time after work in a bar with some of my fellow employees.
Slipping out in the evenings, I liked to listen to jazz at this dive on 106th Street (it’s called Smoke now but back then was owned by a shady Colombian who, however, in booking his acts, sometimes displayed a haphazard good taste). I liked sitting by the bar smoking and trying my best to appear as Bohemian as possible, even if by then I had become a hardworking office clone. I’d nod at the most bullshit jazz — what I considered excremental honking, especially on saxophones — even if it drove me crazy. I’d go home late with a headache, usually feeling unimpressed by most of the musicians; but if a guitarist had shown up with some real chops, I’d tiptoe around my living room and pick at some chords on a sweet Brazilian nylonstring guitar I’d bought at an Odd Lot store on Fortieth, trying to figure out what the guy had played. Staying up until some ridiculous hour, I’d manage, as my pop used to, on just a few hours of sleep; then my workdays in the office would begin all over again.
In that time, I really didn’t have much contact with writers — just on a very occasional basis, as when a friend would call me up and say that so-and-so had a reading somewhere. Otherwise, it was a rare thing for me to spend time with anyone talking shop. At work, the only well-read person there was my counterpart, David. As I recall, he had some literary aspirations of his own: A Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe aficionado, he also wanted to write a novel, perhaps about his upbringing in western Pennsylvania, though, working hard in the office and putting in a lot of overtime, as the sort of conscientious sort whom bosses loved, he never got around to the point of having anything to show me. I did spend the occasional evening hanging out with my friend Wesley Brown, who was then writing a great novel called Tragic Magic, and I’d bump into former colleagues on the street — all of them seemed to be getting wherever they were going much more quickly than I. While walking down Fifth Avenue one sunny autumn afternoon, I ran into Philip Graham. On his way to the offices of The New Yorker, where he was about to publish a story, he could not have been in a more ecstatic state, while all I could think about was what I would hopefully eat for dinner.
I had so few friends in my life who seriously read books, let alone writers, that I felt myself very much a loner. (The women in my office read on the subways and during lunch, but mainly Jackie Collins novels, though I noticed the occasional Robin Cook book in the mix, while the men read hardly anything but magazines and newspapers.) Still, I managed to find consolation in the libraries nearby on Fifth Avenue — I spent a lot of my lunchtimes haunting the stacks of the Forty-second Street and the Mid-Manhattan branches, rarely coming back to the office without some interesting tidbit by an author I’d never heard of, to help keep my head together and my hand upon the pulse of literature. (Yes, if you were about twenty or thirty years behind.)
In the nice weather, I’d sit out on the steps (daydreaming, looking off) while the most beautiful and shapely secretaries sunned themselves around me, or came sashaying along in their tight skirts and high heels — of course I noticed them, but I doubt if they noticed me. And what would they have seen anyway but a youngish bookworm wasting his youthful energies and time on something as ephemeral as reading? Occasionally, I’d head out with the office gang on a Friday after work to make the Upper East Side disco scene, partiers jamming the sidewalks at nine in the evening as densely as commuters did Grand Central Station at rush hour. On those nights, hundreds of folks swarmed into those clubs to do the “hustle” and show off their latest moves, while I, dragged along and never going anywhere without at least a paperback stashed in my pocket, stood off to the side, or huddled by one of our tables, sipping a four-dollar watered-down gin and tonic out of a plastic cup, taking everything in, and occasionally, to some of my more lively coworkers’ dismay, actually flipping through some pages of a book. I did so even when it was nearly impossible to read anything but a girl’s fly figure in a room whose main sources of light came from dim candles, cigarette tips, and a galaxy of disco stars, elongating like peacock eyes as they swirled across the walls.
Inevitably, there was always someone around to pull me out onto the dance floor and I’d sort of go along with the fun good-naturedly — in the same way I once did when it came to Latin dance parties — without much expertise or self-confidence. Though I’d occasionally remember some fancy flourishes that I’d picked up from watching my father and guys like Tommy, with his Motown dance steps, I never felt at ease. Still, I took solace in the fact that I knew of very few writers or, for that matter, musicians who danced much at all. Thinking that my guarded ways and introspective manner were understated and cool, I doubt if any of my office friends shared that opinion: No doubt about it, I probably came off to them as a bookish wallflower.