I’m embarrassed to admit I don’t have the mental bandwidth to write a new essay this month. So please enjoy the following creative nonfiction piece I wrote when I was an undergraduate. I had recently transferred from Gettysburg College to New York University, and I wrote this for an advanced creative nonfiction class that I weasled my way into. It was the only creative writing course I took at NYU. The professor and I got into a couple of pathetic tiffs, and so I dropped the creative writing minor because I never wanted to see her face again.
I both pity and envy the young lady who wrote this. Pity, because of her unrelenting melodrama and because she genuinely thought she would be a curator at the Met one day. Envy, because as a twenty-seven-year-old with a sedentary office job, I just don’t romanticize life or dream like her anymore.
Little Town Blues
When I first arrived in New York City, I was a bundle of cliches bound in rhapsody. The cement pulsed underneath my sneakers, I squinted at the sizzling skyline, and thousands of eyes darted around me. I walked from East to West Village, Park Slope across Prospect Park, buying a bunch of carnations from a dinky stand, picking up an americano at a corner cafe. If I was lonely, I hit the streets; back home in Podunk, Maine, I went to sleep if I was sad. New York, however, never slept, and I was becoming an insomniac too.
Three months later, I’m not as sprightly. My first semester at New York University is underway. Because I study Latin poetry and Classical art, I’m constantly counting spondees, dating Egyptian stelae, or doodling my name in Greek polytonic during endless hours of lecture. I’ve surrendered my youth to Phidias and Sulpicia, all for the day when I’m a curator at the Met. So that I can demand that the Museo Archeologico Nazionale send me the Pronomos vase for my newest exhibition. Rapidamente!
Yet because I’m at NYU, and NYU kids don’t dilly-dally their free time away, I took on an internship at a literary agency, and I’m the new secretary for the Review and Debates club on campus.
My boss at the literary agency, Mr. O’Dowd, is crotchety, brusque, and addicted to newspaper puzzles. Every Friday, he buzzes me into his ground-level apartment, and together we run the operation. I sit at a table against a brick wall, slide his alpaca wool placemats towards the edge, and slog through hundreds of manuscript submissions. Mr. O’Dowd is either cold-calling editors, smoking on the back patio, or schooling me on the lit biz. Between anecdotes of his time in a limo with Iggy Pop and of his overnight stay in a prison, Mr. O'Dowd and I sit in his garden and discuss the day’s manuscripts. “Have you found me the next great novel yet?” he says. He puffs on a cigarette and lifts a hefty serving of bourbon to his lips. The ice tinkles against the glass, and when he tips his head down to take a sip, his head is spotted with liver spots, like a roan cow.
There are days when he asks me how to hard boil eggs. Or when he calls a publisher regarding missing royalty checks, and he barks into the phone, “You’re runnin’ a tight operation down there, eh?” When the doorbell rings, I’m supposed to answer it. One day, I opened the door to a mailman who asked where Mr. O'Dowd was. As I turned to point back into the apartment, Mr. O'Dowd stood up, hacked up some phlegm and said, “I’m right back here, just putting my clothes back on.” I grimaced as they laughed. Why else would I be in this old man’s apartment on a Friday afternoon?
When I’m not babysitting Mr. O'Dowd or studying, I’m the secretary for the Review and Debates. The club organizes debates between students and professors and publishes a political journal. All I do is take meeting minutes and send newsletters. I signed up for the Review at the club fair because I thought the president, Andrijan, was cute. Dressed in a sweater and button-down combo, brushing his long black hair back from his Ray-Ban glasses: he was irresistible.
As I typed my email into his iPad, he asked what my major was.
“Classics.” I flashed my sweetest smile
“Oh, that must be hard,” Andrijan said. “I’m not a science person at all.”
“What? I said ‘Classics.’”
“Oh! I thought you said physics!”
Apparently this exchange was promising enough for me to apply for the secretary position.
I see Andrijan at every exec meeting and debate, and I think about him often. It’s a side effect of a big, fat, old-fashioned crush. I’ll imagine him bringing me lilies, and me wrapping a box of cologne for his Christmas gift. I’m halfway to psycho, all of this giggling over how we both have curly hair. Seeing him gives me a sugary, melodic euphoria. It’s that pinky streak of dopamine that gets me to the gym and forces me to wash my hair.
A debilitating infatuation, manuscripts, and ancient poetry have killed my zest for New York. At night, however, I don’t seem to mind that I’m exhausted from it all. I cook a plate of chicken, butter, and peas and then eat it while imagining what outfit I’ll wear tomorrow.
*
Ordering ice cream at inappropriate venues is my New York quirk. Once in winter, I ventured into Williamsburg with a girl named Effie—Scottish, cinema nut, bedecked with cascades of orange hair. We saw a modern art exhibition called “The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff.” The room was a set of a 1950’s instructional video. Tables were stacked with towers of computer paper and ink wells, and cameras crowned by flayed film flanked the entryway. A triptych movie of prim secretaries mocking emotion and putting pegs in holes was projected on the wall. A harsh school bell punctuated each film chapter, and then the screen went black. Until there were more bionic people waiting for their less-productive selves to complete menial tasks.
Effie said she wanted to make a triptych movie too. “Write my script?” she asked. We talked about interlocking stories, of drunk bums on Bowery, about the merits of bona fide film. Effie wanted to throw in some Scorsese references or even Wu-Tang songs in her film, and I didn’t know what a Wu-Tang or a Scorsese was. I thought, Just nod and smile, you can Google all this when you get home.
We talked about normal things once our night continued in a bar called Tutu’s. Effie told me the story of when she first discovered her allergy to goat cheese. I interrupted her story with coos of veneration over the peanut butter, Nutella, and hot fudge sundae I had ordered. The ice cream itself was airy and slippery.
Besides eating ice cream at a bar, I ate it at a Persian coffee shop. After one of the Review’s debates, Andrijan invited the editor-in-chief of the journal, Amar, to get a celebratory tea. He invited me because I was just standing there. My heart leapt and danced as the three of us started across Washington Square Park.
Andrijan said, “Look how amazing the moon looks.”
“Yeah.” Amar smirked. “Doesn’t it make you want to hold my hand, Andrijan?”
We had our laugh, and then Andrijan said, “That wouldn’t be appropriate, Shannon is here!”
At the cafe, two balls of vanilla garnished with mint came to me in a cavernous bowl. Andrijan and Amar sipped yellow tea without any sugar. I ladled my dessert into my mouth as they discussed things I didn’t understand. Was capitalism on its deathbed? Why didn’t more existentialists kill themselves? Andrijan knew that all of Plato’s work was extant and that was news to me. What kind of a Classics major was I?
When the conversation turned to Russian lit, I could say at least one thing.
“I read War and Peace when I was twelve.”
But the Tolstoy mention prompted a debate on Anna Karenina, which I have never read. I felt utterly stupid. I had already gotten a C on a midterm that past week, and the ice cream was dribbling down my lips.
While wiping my face, I looked at Andrijan to see if he noticed my juvenile mess. He smiled and cradled his chin in his hand, his fingers resting on the tight lines of his beard.
“I blame Tolstoy for ruining my conception of love.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Anna Karenina is a terrific woman…but she’s also terrible.”
Andrijan stared at me. The milky cafe light caught the hazel freckles in his eyes. He had been staring at me all night. He had been watching my fingers as they wound around my curls and then dropped them on my shoulders, flicking his eyes away whenever I caught him, pivoting his chest towards me as he addressed Amar. He thinks I’m pretty, I thought, but does he think I’m interesting? Still staring. Is this some sort of message? I don’t even know what Tolstoy’s idea of love is! Just keep staring and Google it when you get home.
Except I didn’t Google anything when I got home. I stopped at Walgreen’s and bought a pint of caramel praline ice cream. I ate it on my bed underneath mounds of fleece blankets and pillows, and as each spoonful melted on my tongue, I wondered if I had prepared my Latin text well enough for tomorrow’s 9 o’clock class.
The next day, I was at the agency. I powered through the submissions, really pondering the material, in hopes of redeeming my useless presence at the cafe. I’m fluent in Latin and can trace etymologies through centuries; I should be able to conduct myself in the professional world—in New York. But the authors compared their books to works I had never heard of. I buried my face in my hands. I’m stupid and reading all of the wrong things, and it’s making me inept.
That day, a debut author came to the agency to talk over her new manuscript. I had read it and told Mr. O'Dowd that it needed major adjustments. He mentioned a few of my ideas during the meeting, and suddenly he handed the conversation over to me. I smiled, straightened my back, and elaborated on my ideas for structure and character dynamics. I spoke as if Minerva herself had crowned my temples in myrtle, as if Apollo had winked at me; the words were not mine, they were Calliope’s. I could talk about this.
After the meeting, I returned to my desk, and Mr. O'Dowd stepped onto the patio. He called the author’s editor at HarperCollins, and his voice traveled to where I was.
“And I have this intern here who’s an extremely well-read girl, and she could make this story great…”
I immediately grabbed my phone to text Andrijan. I asked if he wanted to attend a Mario Bellatin reading in Brooklyn with me.
“There’s no way,” he said. He had a class during the reading.
Once he said no, I Googled “tolstoys conception of love.” Through amateur blog posts and university webpages, I learned that Tolstoy believed in love’s inevitable demise and ruinous repercussions.
So I went to Brooklyn by myself, but I wasn’t really alone, because hordes of people were on the streets. I got lost on the subway like the newbie I am and missed the reading, but made it for the Q&A. I slunk into the bookstore and hid between a rolling shelf of Henrik Ibsen paperbacks.
As I peered over the books, I saw that Mario only had one arm. The room erupted into amiable laughter at Mario’s story in Spanish, related by a translator with stiff hair that hung below his chin. I was pretending to find it funny too. Whenever the translator spoke, he made eye contact with me. I tucked myself into the bookshelf wishing my hair wasn’t so big and my jacket wasn’t bright blue.
Mario told stories of his quest for the perfect prosthetic. He wore a dildo for a time. When Marilyn Manson was scaring everybody at a party, Mario shoved his dildo hand into his mouth. The translator said that he traveled the world with Mario, that he saw him write a novel on the plane from London to Dubai. Mario wrote novels on his iPhone because he wanted to straddle the line into oblivion. Mario nodded solemnly, like writing stories was his cross to bear.
There I was, a dumb-dumb in floral Keds and crew socks who couldn’t find the Q train for her life. I had every power in me to write a book and every ounce of fire to get it published. I have an iPhone.
I rubbed my fingers against my jacket zipper and flexed my feet. They already ached from flailing around in the subway tunnels. I was dreading my journey back to Manhattan. My soles felt thin and weak.
I rested my head against the bookshelf, and the corner of A Doll’s House pierced my head. New York is hard, I thought, I want to go home.
I liked this, then I thought I should actually read it; and honestly, it was delightful!
I had a full sense of the protagonist and her angst from the get - first person narration suits you. It also works for a great introduction to the environment. Given my recent trip to New York, I can especially relate to the unnavigable Q train and general fluster of the subway.
The prose is so illustrative! I love when you draw on your classics education to put a grand twist on how you see yourself. This should really be a novella at the least, would love to read more. And if not, at least I know which ice cream to get you next time we meet :)
- Daniel xXx