I was sentimental . . .

. . . about the green plastic bag I found under my bookshelf this morning as I swept the floor of my apartment. I'm not sure how it got there, but is has probably been there 6 months, when I carried that small shelf up on the subway last September, the only piece of furniture I took when I cleared everything out of my old place and had it cleaned so the real estate broker could show it.

As my divorce progressed things at home deteriorated at an accelerating pace. So, in April of 2006 I moved out. By that point things were so bad I thought I'd end up getting stabbed in my sleep and tabloid newspaper reporters would be asking my neighbors and friends "Why didn't he get out when he could?"

My wife traveled a lot for her job, and on the advice of my lawyer I moved out while she was on a trip. My lawyer was right; it was best not to have some sort of confrontation while I was trying to pack or with moving men trying to do their work. I didn't take any furniture with me to my new apartment in The Bronx. Most of what I own is books and clothes (mostly books). I bought an inflatable mattress (by summer I found my circumstances to be just a bit too zen and bought a deckchair). I had one plate, one bowl, one knife, one fork--you get the idea. Heather, a writer friend of mine, gave me a few more plates and few pieces of cutlery.

I really will get to the green plastic bag in a paragraph or two . . .

The moving men cleared me out of my old place, but I had needed an extra day to pack. The moving men took the important stuff, but I still had books mixed in with her books, clothes tucked here and there in drawers I hadn't opened in years, food in the kitchen that I know she would never eat (I like to cook, she never did). Now, I should mention that at this low point in the unraveling of our marriage, my wife never told me where she as going on her trips or for how long. She could be in Europe, South America, or Asia, and it could be a three-day trip or a three-week trip.

So, after the move I had an unknown number of days to carry out the rest of my stuff. Whatever I didn't take, she might destroy (or let me take; I really didn't know at that point). For two weeks I swung by my old apartment on the way home and filled another box or two and a large strong nylon bag I had. I would then carry that on the subway up to my new place. (There is no way a taxi could have done this faster, and between my legal bills and my psychotherapy bills, there wasn't much money for long taxi rides up to The Bronx.) I would drop off my stuff in The Bronx and come back into Manhattan and do it again. On weekends I took many round trips. There was no time to cook or even wait for takeout food. I would stop by my local Korean deli on my way to the W. 79th & Broadway IRT station and buy an apple and whatever overpriced organic smoothie seemed to go with an apple--which the cash register girls put into a green plastic bag for me. If the train was slow in coming, I could eat everything in the subway station, but if the train came quickly, I might not get a chance to eat till I got back to The Bronx. (By the way--if I may be sarcastic for a moment--there's nothing quite as enjoyable as hauling a piece of nylon luggage with 40 pounds of books in it on a crowded D train up to The Bronx after a long day at work except, perhaps, a divorce.)

By the time she got back from her trip I was willing to lose whatever was left in my old place if it came to that. As it happened, she did not toss out my stuff. She let me take the rest of what was mine and in the end gave me the small bookshelf (which folds flat, making it possible to carry on a subway train).

One of those green bags made its way under that shelf. That Korean deli lost their lease about 6 months ago and its old premises are now two upscale stores that no doubt are paying much higher rents than a place that sells apples and fresh carrot juice.

Anyway, this morning I found one of those green bags that one of those cheerful Korean cash register girls put my apple and drink in. The store is gone. The apartment I lived in longer than anyplace else in my life is gone. That exhausting episode is gone--except for this empty bag that recalled it all for me. I'm gone too; well, not really, I'm here in my new apartment, which needs sweeping now and then. Do I need a green plastic bag? I thought. I keep too many things. I threw it away.

What Tony is reading

I'm up to chapter 7 of The Namesake. The more I enjoy a book, the slower I read it, because I don't want it to end. I am reading The Namesake at home. On the subway in the morning I am revising my novel. I can get through 5 to 20 pp, depending on how much marking up I have to do. I don't continue editing my novel on the ride home. It's better to let the thoughts marinate anyway--sometimes better choices come to me. If I'm not too tired on the way home or I don't have too many groceries, I'm carrying around a collection of short stories with me these days. I don't remember the last time I read Thomas Wolfe, but the collection includes a story of his called "The Far and The Near." I own two or three of his novels, which I have picked up over the years, but I haven't read them, and now I think I should. Wolfe's is a voice I want to know more. Here is a sentence from "The Far and The Near," which is about a locomotive engineer who notices a house on the edge of a small town as he drives a train over the same route for decades:

But no matter what peril or tragedy he had known, the vision of the little house and the women waving to him with a brave free motion of the arm had become fixed in the mind of the engineer as something beautiful and enduring, something beyond all change and ruin, and something that would always be the same, no matter what mishap, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his days.

That’s 73 words, not forced, not too heavy--and you can feel the engineer in his train going past the house and on down the track.

You Rock, Tony!

Or at least I wish I did. I fed a tip to a blog that I'm a member of and they used it. The three lines that ended up getting posted because of my information will not change the world and, in fact, by the end of the day the post had been pushed down to the bottom of the screen by other, more pressing, more current posts. When I checked the site today there was a message in the status line: "You Rock, Tony!" Maybe the people who run that blog attached that to my account because of the tip. Or maybe it's a case of "You Rock, [fill in the blank]!" for everyone today--actually, I've never even noticed the little messages in that status line before.

It is not often that I hear the phrase "You Rock, Tony!" directed toward me, and when I saw it in little glowing letters this morning I was startled. O.K., I didn't mean to say "not often" just now. In fact, I don't recall anyone ever saying the phrase to me. So, although I have not done anything as important or impressive as helping a pregnant lady in distress, this is the first time I have ever rocked, however fleetingly. There's a first time for everything.

Perfect

My friend Beth Herzhaft put this diptych on her blog and I told her it was perfect:

What Tony is reading

I haven’t read anything for a month. I think attempting to read After the Plague nearly twice in a row burned me out. I will reread it again soon, I guess. My work deadlines have kept me busy--and I don’t count editing books as “reading.” I have also been revising my novel again. Creating a novel is not the same as reading a novel. I know that sounds obvious, but for me writing is intertwined with understanding the experience of reading what you write, which is not quite the same as reading and being conscious of my experience as reading. The world needs editors.

Instead of reading I burned an eclectic selection of music onto a CD a month ago and listened to it every night as I fell asleep. Normally, listening to music before I fall asleep wakes me up--a lot--but my brain has been in some kind of different mode lately. The CD has Rick James, Prokofiev, John Lennon, Blondie, Miles Davis, Elvis Costello, and a couple of lesser known artists.

Then a few night ago I started reading again. I’m reading The Namesake because the movie is out and I thought it might be nice to read it and then see how it ended up on the screen. I’ve only gotten through the first two chapters, but I am enjoying it immensely. I’m liking it better than The Interpreter of Maladies. Anyway, The Namesake is a wonderful book. It has made me laugh out loud--which I was not expecting. And Jhumpa Lahiri possesses one of the quintessential American voices of our time. Maybe I should read her twice in a row instead of T. C. Boyle.

Do what I do

I don't normally give advice, but my general rule is that you should do everything exactly as I do. O.K., that's not true. I don't even know why I said that. But here's one thing I do that you should do. I carry a list with me and I mark things in my calendar. Dinner with friends, taxes, writers group, improv shows, Stickerbook, lunch, and so on. (I do not have dinner with taxes, by the way; that was a momentary misreading. But I have had dinner with my writers group and I have had dinner with Stickerbook--sort of, I had a bowl of matzo ball soup and a stiff martini during their show at Mo Pitkins once. And having dinner with lunch doesn't even make sense.)

I still forget all kinds of things, possibly because I know that if it was important, I would have written it down. Haircuts for example. Sometimes I forget to look at my list. I have missed business meetings because I only remembered to look at my list after the meeting was over. Sadly, the lack of my presence at the meeting made no difference whatsoever. Cheer up! It wasn't that sad. God, you're sensitive. I look on the bright side: I missed a boring meeting and got to use my time editing a book on governmental auditing and the Compliance Supplement to OMB Circular A-133. O.K. technically that's blasphemous because I used God's name in vain--but in my defense, that's a judgment call: I used it expletively as an intensifier to describe the sensitivity of a human being. You know what I mean. Lighten up.

So, I'll write "vegetable" on my shopping list because I want to buy a vegetable, although I won't make up my mind until I get to the store and see what vegetables they have. Sometimes I write "artichoke" because I'm *dying for artichokes!* except if I don't write it down, I'll forget.

Now here's my advice: Once I've had dinner with a friend on my list or gone to my writers group meeting, I always *circle* it when I'm done. I would never draw a line through a friend's name! Not even on a list. And not anything I care about, such as my writers group--which, come to think of it, is made of people. Always a circle. Taxes, yes, a line through it. Sorry, taxes, we're going dutch, and after dinner I'm crossing a line through you. And you can pay for you own cab. God, you can afford it.

That is all for now.

Decisions, decisions

I haven't decided what to do about my hair. The way I have not made a decision is as follows. in June I visited my sister in L.A. I was going to get a haircut first, but I figured I'd wait till I got back to New York. That way, my haircut would still look like a haircut by the time I got to my cousin's wedding in mid July. When I got back to New York I was only in the office for four days--maniacally putting all of my books ahead of schedule so that when I got back after the wedding everything would still be on track when I got back from the wedding. On the afternoon before I flew to Nevada I went down to 60 Centre St. with my attorney to work out my divorce settlement before a judge. As it happened, we worked everything out in the hallway and the attorneys presented the deal to the judge's clerk. While my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I sat in the courtroom waiting, we watched a truly miserable case of divorce in which the parents were fighting over custody of their children. Well, we don't have children, and on this particular day that seemed like a good choice we'd made.

I hung out with my parents' in Nevada for a few days, including a 4th of July concert in the park of the little town where they live--which was a lot like traveling back to 1956--before we began our epic car trip. If I'd got a haircut there, it would have looked like 1956, but I figured no one at the wedding would notice. My parents and I then drove to Vancouver, Canada, a leisurely trip with many stops along the way, sometimes with friends of my parents, sometimes with relatives. In fact, in the nearly two weeks we took to drive north we never stayed at a hotel till we got to Vancouver. It was important to take this car trip with my parents. They're getting older and I don't think they will take very many of these sorts of trips in the future. I hadn't done anything like this with them since high school. After about four or five days on the road Mom and Dad were saying things like "This is too much" and "This might be the last one of these that we do." It was also important to me to get away from the New York sense of time pressure. We are densely populated here in the big city, and the hubbub of creativity, stupidity, transportation, grocery shopping, etc. that surrounds us cultivates a desire for efficiency. At least it does in me, although considering how often I have stood in a queue and heard someone sigh "Today already" or some such, I suspect I'm not the only one.

I helped drive, of course, which was interesting for me because I didn't know where I was going. My parents had driven this route a couple of times. Some of that country up there is miles on a two-lane road through thick forests and it's like the same pine trees whizzing by both sides of the road that were there an hour ago. It does alter your sense of time and I suppose it's a little like taking a ship across an ocean or spaceship to the moon. Onward.

I get back to New York and immediately plunge back into my work. I should add that after spending all that time in the vast, timeless west that New York City looked completely different to me. This is my home, of course--I'm not describing an uncomfortable alienness. But New York looked different in the way that it would if, for example, all of it were dismantled and an exact copy were constructed during the two and half weeks I was away. Or if you've ever walked into a location shoot in this city and found yourself among a couple of street corners worth of extras who are acting like regular New Yorkers on a street corner.

But I didn't cut my hair. I just couldn't make up my mind not that I'd breathed the fresh air of the American Northwest and seen relatives for the first time in years and met the children and spouses of my cousins for the first time. I was in what for me was a new New York: How could I possible make a decision such as cutting my hair? I took an Improv 101 class at UCB again, and I found myself in the improverse--what else am I going to call it?--where every encounter in your real life bears an eerie resemblance to the scenes you're doing in class, like the young guy running the Lotto machine at the newsstand with his cigarette smoke clouding around him and he has a thick New York accent and he can't remember whether the Mega is tonight and he *can't believe* you only want to buy one ticket even though the odds of winning are 175,711,536 to 1 and you think "God I wish I could do that character in class." By October it was the longest I'd worn it since I held a serious job (Wall St. messenger and AT&T temp being nonserious jobs).

My hair got longer and crazier--not in an Einstein way, more of a Bozo the Clown way. In November I got a trim, just a bit. Haven't done anything since.

I'm not likely to do like Nick Ross, my former hair inspiration. One Tuesday a while back I went to Harold Night and saw that he had shaved it all off. Quite the opposite of his previous style. I'm not going to do like the fine actress [UCB Theatre, Monday, April 2, at 9:30; $5; this will be a good one!] who recently went super short/platinum/upper ear pierced--but she has an assured sense of style and have made a great choice. I don't have a sense of style, I have chosen not to decide.
My hair is now the longest I've had it since high school, approximately the last time I had gone on a car trip with my parents. When I came out of the deli at lunch today a guy on the corner announced "Afro!" to me, a hairstyle he had probably worn in the 1960s, when he was younger and had more hair. I gave him a thumbs up.