“An Innocent in the Boroughs”
A writer goes to Brooklyn.
This past weekend, I sacrificed art at the altar of money. It may not have looked exactly that way to those standing nearby, or to the cashiers standing sweaty and annoyed at the back of Strand Books. There was no blood or anything. No ritually mutilated animals. Not even candles or incense. Just another twenty-something trying to trade a stack of tired titles for some cash.
But for those who preordered their iMetaphor goggles — Apple’s decisive literary response to Google Glass and the idea that quite literally killed Steve Jobs (or so the story goes) — there may have appeared something a bit weightier at play. They might have (or should have, rather) recognized the tragedy in the transaction.
These were books, after all, and I was (read: am) a struggling writer demeaning their inherent goodness, haggling over their value with the weasel-eyed fellow standing behind the cash register. My very act of negotiation was diminishing well-polished, professional-grade sentences to nothing more than a fraction of a lifeless financial formula — something organic and human laid prostrate to the whims of the autonomous, unfeeling market. An ethical dilemma of the highest order it wasn’t. But as a writer and a reader of books, it felt dirty, like a betrayal of sorts. To the credit of the weasel, he seemed to be taking the whole affair rather seriously. Though that may have just been him. He was wearing glasses, but they were the regular reality-baring type, and it was clear he too failed to recognize the gravity of our exchange.
After he and his computer deemed most of my offerings unfit for resale, he asked me if I’d like to let Strand take the stragglers off my hands, free of charge. How nice of them. When I said yes, he asked if I was certain and if I’d like to keep any of the titles. I pulled back Roth’s overwrought paranoia, “Plot Against America.” The cashier nodded in approval and said, “Good choice, I’m a big, big fan.” I did one of those masturbating hand gesture things inside my head (as in not literally) and walked out six dollars in the black and a few pounds off my back.
Symbolism specs or not, the whole affair maybe wasn’t as dramatic as I’ve rendered in my head or the sentences above. The line at Strand to offload a box of books for a few odd cents is always a half-dozen patrons deep, and sometimes even protrudes out the backdoor, as it had on this day, straight out into the wall of summer humidity beyond the frame. Which is to say, lots of people sell books — most not pondering their place in the universe or the ethical ramifications of their entrance into the recycling economy, most thinking only: Fuck, this box of books is heavy.
As a struggling writer inherited by the Internet Age, I’ve grown accustomed to trafficking words for negligible returns. And like every good millennial scribe, I’ve given paragraph after paragraph away for free. Every once in a while, the opposite will happen. I’ll find myself undeservedly well compensated, passing off pitiable sentences for hefty sums. A half-assed ten-page report on how car companies have begun tricking teenagers into brand loyalty by placing their newest models in games for PS3 and Xbox fetched $800. A lazy afternoon spent editing a grant proposal warranted a rate of $30 an hour. But that’s just once in a while and it’d been quite a while since one of those once-a-while’s came along. So I was savoring, if somewhat shamefully, the six dollars.
Per usual, my meager profit was short lived. I needed to line my stomach with food and grease in preparation for a night of drinking. And in New York, food and grease don’t come cheap. A cheeseburger, fries, and several beers later, and my six bucks was gone, several times over — relinquished to Bonnie and her diner in Park Slope. The night of drinking I’d trekked to Brooklyn for was a celebration of a book that I’d agreed to put my name on, a small volume I’d composed what seemed like ages ago but which had only recently been sent out into the world. This appeared to be a twist of irony — a book sale followed by a book sale, each anchored by distinct emotional milieu. But mostly, it was pathetic. The fact was that I’d began concocting the afternoon’s earlier dramatics for several days prior, pondering the allegorical weight of each text as I fingered their spines and pulled the victims off the shelf. Christmas gifts unread: a family betrayal. Authors I admired: intellectual abandonment. Dickens, first edition: just kidding.
My desperation was not entirely a sham. A recent return of my recurring symptoms of insolvency had first moved me to hawk a backpack full of my least-loved tomes. But I knew hauling the extra weight on the bus ride north would be a lot of work for little gain. And ultimately, it was some silly, quickly devolving Romantic notion that nudged the ill-hatched plans forward — a notion that this cheesy-cum-contrived act would somehow launch me in the direction of literary epiphany. In the end, I’d sold those stories for a story, not for a measly six dollars.
There’s something about New York that compels a near constant state of trying-too-hard. It’s a state I know well. Those with their wry smiles and their half-filled glasses might say that five boroughs are full of energy or that there’s always something to do, companionship and inspiration just around the block. But I drink a lot, and when my glass isn’t spilled and broken on the floor it’s usually half-empty. A solid buzz insulates me against the optimism of strangers, but it also amplifies that feeling of smallness — a pocket of dormant inferiority that’s always tickled to life by a city that surrounds you with thousands of people that are doing what you do, only better and to wider acclaim.
Walking the streets here, I find myself trying on a rotating series of expressions — bemused, contemplative, frazzled, delighted, angry, plaintive. Every few moments I skip through to a new emotional mask. My new look snaps into place like a stereoscope slide, only I can’t see the projection. I can only trust that my face doesn’t betray my mind, though I know the neural hardwiring that connects my eyes and mouth to the limbic system that governs my facial response has grown desensitized from too many years of deceit and disinterest. I try anyways. I mouth lyrics to songs that don’t exist, and gaze up at the sky as I walk as if I’m about to receive some poetic edict dropped from the cracked windows of the top story apartments along West 10th Street. Anything to fool onlookers into thinking I’ve walked these streets a thousand times. Only a veteran could navigate the back alleys of the Villages while looking so far away. Anything to throw the passersby off the scent of my fraudulence.
There’s a scene in one of the episodes of an HBO series called “Bored to Death” whereby the lead, a struggling writer, explains his three rules of writing to his night school pupils: chiefly, that there will always be rejection — and that one must learn to deal with it. (The others being: it’s difficult and more abstrusely, one should try to give pleasure with every sentence.) Upon hearing these, one of the students remarks that it’s easy for an already established and published author to suggest rejection is part of writing. “You’ve already made it,” the pupil says. The teacher, Jonathan Ames (played by Jason Schwartzman), retorts that success doesn’t inoculate one from the woes of rejection. Being in New York for the first time as an author of a published book, I can’t help but recall this scene. It rings true because I — like all young and struggling writers — have been both pupil and teacher, both question and retort. Reading interviews with my authorial heroes, I find myself often muttering that’s easy for you to say. And yet, I (now published) have passed on this sagely rule to would-be writers younger and even less certain than myself, knowing full well that as they sit there listening to my words of wisdom they’re likely thinking that’s easy for you to say.
As I make my way to celebrate the publication on my one and only book, I try to look like a busy Park Slopean vet with a head full of novel ideas and ideas for novels. I fumble around my pockets as if I’m searching for a smartphone with an inbox full of acceptance emails from eager editors. And I’m reminded of how self-doubt and fear of rejection reclaim their primacy so quickly in the wake of success — quicker than the pedestrians, who whiz by ignorant of my desperation, unaware of my shifting masks. Perspectives change with each new guise. And I raise a glass to the book that feels like a skin I molted years ago, a part of an older self. Once little more than fantastical daydream, it’s now been-there-done-that, and I smile. Our accomplishments so quickly turn from beacon to ball and chain. To escape we frame new scenes and craft new narratives — mix new metaphors.
And yet, on nights like tonight, I don’t wish for new book deals. I wish for a time before the hastening. When life, like the whiskey, had a moment to breathe and to dance on the tongue and to slowly settle in the stomach before it all had to be committed to paper. When laurels could be rested upon and meaning wasn’t constructed in real time — or days ahead — and when a trip to sell used books could, if only for a moment, be that and nothing more.
