Fat Cat

Logan and I went to this place called Fat Cat last night and I can’t believe I’ve never been there before. Pool tables, ping-pong, foos ball, Scrabble, and jazz; what an unusual combination. It's located at Christopher and Seventh Avenue, and it takes up the entire cellar of a low-rise building. The place is huge. I want to incorporate it into my book somehow, but I’m not sure quite what will happen. We sat at the bar and watched the room fill up and Logan told me about this improvisatory movie he’d just wrapped and I reminded him that the last movie I’d seen him in he’d had this ridiculous hair-dye job. He didn’t appreciate that. We stumbled out into the heat eventually and all was well. A good night. Fat Cat. Check it out if you’re in the West Village.

Teaching Myself to Write

Over drinks last night at the White Horse Tavern, Katie asked me if writing my blog helped with writing my novel. I didn’t hesistate to say “sure,” thinking that any exercise in writing at least serves to strengthen one’s rhetorical muscles. On reflection, though, the blog and the novel are so independent that the idea of linking them doesn’t make much sense. The blog is basically an outlet for any sort of nonsense I feel like writing, whereas the novel is a narrative, with constraints of time, place, and believability that blogging doesn’t really have.

In any case, I don’t intend to blog extensively about the process of writing a novel, but here are some recent extracts in a kind of before-and-after montage. I do all of my writing in longhand, mostly at Doma, a café in the West Village, or occasionally at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. The typing happens later, once I get home, and I almost always fall asleep at the keyboard.

Remembrance of Things Past

I always pick the Art Bar for some reason, even when it’s warm and I want to sit outside. So on Friday I was walking there to meet someone and I was walking on West Fourth Street where it hits West Twelfth at that narrow, cobble-stone intersection with Cubby Hole on one corner and Café Cluny on the other. I was a little early, so I decided to poke my head into Café Cluny, knowing that an old friend of mine is the manager there. I found this out recently because she was profiled in an online feature for New York Magazine.

The last time we’d spoken was in September, I think, before I went out to LA. The last time before that was years ago. We hadn’t seen each other in person since 2000, when we worked at a theatre in Connecticut. In the meantime, she’d been all over: Florida, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, then back to New York. She’d gotten married and divorced. Her sister had been in a car accident and, I was told, lost one of her fingers.

When she saw me, she let out a little yelp and came out onto the sidewalk and we both embraced. We said how long it’s been and how strange it was that it had been so long. I told her that I had to run, but I said I’d call and that was that. However, once I got to the Art Bar, a messenger from Café Cluny was fast on my heels with a card that said to bring my friend there for a free drink. My friend and I had several free drinks and before I knew it, I was in a cab to Brooklyn thinking how long it had been since I’d taken a cab to Brooklyn, how beautiful the bridge was and the water.

The heat arrived the next morning and I took an hour, maybe less, to wander down Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, back to the old apartment at Union Street. I noted the changes and what had stayed the same. I also noticed, maybe for the first time, how quiet Park Slope seemed compared to Morningside Heights. I’d forgotten what a difference Manhattan density makes, even on the fringes. I was sad to see Mule Café on Fourth Avenue boarded up. I'd spent so much time there. I would go there before work and sit for long stretches of time drinking coffee and reading Anna Karenina.

In the end it was too hot to walk and I retreated to the subway and hastened back to Manhattan and, reflexively, Doma. French toast and eggs fortified me, but I didn’t get much work done and I think I fell asleep in my chair once or twice, dreaming, no doubt of Whitman on the bridge or reading in Prospect Park. Those were the days.

Party People

Friday night revelry at Aubergine. I was surprised at the turnout, but then I’m surprised by everything these days. Yesterday I spent the early evening surviving an overly generous happy hour at Rue B in the East Village and I was surprised to find my iPod skipping directly to Ryan Adams as I wandered the Village, east-to-west, devouring the Adams oeuvre while I passed 166 First Avenue thinking, “what has happened . . . ?” Anyway. The party. Carla, Damen and Pamela played host while I nipped in here and there. Lots of actors and then a smaller cohort of skinny, international Parsons students who were friends of Pam. I sat at the head of the table and tucked into my chicken Indian wrap thing from Roti Roll and chatted with some of the cast members of The Great American All-Star Traveling War Machine, Damen’s play at Irondale . . . which, as it happens, is playing at Theatre for a New Audience, directly across the street from 166 First Avenue, and so we come full-circle.

Two coincidental run-ins at the party, neither of which I really did much with except to marvel. First, there was the ex-girlfriend of a friend of mine from high school. This friend of mine from high school works for an agency in Los Angeles and is also friends with a closer friend of mine from high school named Mike, who gave me the lowdown on this girl through a series of text messages that evening. What would we do without cellphones?

Secondly, there was an actor I’d done a show with two summers ago whose name is Jake. I kind of forget how he ended up at the party, but I think he’s friends with Damen or Carla or both. In any event, he’s an actor and there were lots of actors there, so go figure. He’d just concluded a show at some theatre in California with a bunch of douchy actorly grad students. There was a Juilliard kid who kept making droll references to “the Yard.” I thought this was hilarious.

There followed a desultory interlude with a woman whose name I remember but won’t divulge and this included a tour of the house and me growing increasingly wary. We eventually wandered down to the basement and were relieved by the impromptu jazz combo that had set up by candlelight in the old classroom. Inevitably, everyone made their way out back to the garden and started smoking, because there comes a time at every party where everyone becomes, momentarily, a smoker.

I made it to bed around 3:00, I think, waking a few hours later to the mechanical wheeze of a garbage truck that was taking its sweet fucking time with things. Earplugs in, I snuck in a few more hours of sleep and then stumbled, empty-stomached, down to Doma where I planted myself at the center table, my usual perch.

Not a bad weekend, but a bit lonely, to be sure. I’m not sure how singledom suits me and there’s only so much introspection one can take. The (re-)discovery of Ryan Adams has been a paradoxical tonic: depressive and inspiring all at once. His output at least inspires, but he shows a remarkable lack of style when it comes to titling songs. To wit: “Tennessee Sucks,” “Oh My God, Whatever, Etc,” “Note to Self: Don’t Die,” “The Drugs Not Working.” The names may not be melodious, but the tunes sing, thank God. I’ll be stuck in repeat all week.

What 15% Gets You

I have to say I absolutely love the new credit card functionality that’s hit all the NYC cabs in the past few months. This is tremendously convenient for a couple of reasons. One, it means not being dependent on the availability of your bank’s ATMs. And two, the taxi card-swiper calculates your tip for you! This is a godsend for people like me who struggle with the basics of math – including, but not limited to: adding, subtracting, and multiplying.

The swiper functionality is such that it gives you, I think, three tip options: 10%, 15%, and 20%. I usually choose 15% - sometimes 10% and never 20%. The other night I was leaving a party with my friend Joe and we walked together to Times Square to hail cabs. He said that he always gives cab drivers two or three dollars, no matter what the fare. Ludicrous on the face of it, this rule actually makes a smidgeon of sense to me once I do the math. In my case, most of my cab rides seem to hover between $15 and $20. Conveniently, a 15% tip for these fares would be around two or three bucks as well. Good rule!

It’s not that I take a lot of cabs, but I seem to have done in the past week. I don’t like doing it because I already pay $81 a month to ride the train. One cab ride on one night can easily set me back a week’s worth of subway rides. Think about that. All the same, there is little I hate more than waiting on a sweaty late-night subway platform for some miserable line like the D or the W or the fucking V.

Last week I went to see Evan at Parkside Lounge and afterwards we headed to the Delancey Street F, a miserable little trench in the best of times, made worse by the late hour. We actually stopped at an apocalyptically noxious McDonalds on Delancey and Essex so I could pee. We then headed down to the station and Evan went for the M train. Now, the M train is a pretty crappy line, and normally I would say that only losers take it. However, in this case, Evan only had to go as far as Fulton Street, which was just four stops away. I, on the other hand, faced a long trek all the way up to Columbus Circle and then a transfer to the 1 to 110th Street. I think I stood on the platform for about two minutes and then I was like “fuck it.” I came back up to street-level and hailed a cab on Delancey and listened to the news on my iPhone all the way up the West Side Highway.

All the Sad Old Literary Men

I recently finished a book called All the Sad Young Literary Men, written by Keith Gessen, who is the editor of the literary magazine n+1. This is not so much a novel as a series of short stories. They all center on overeducated east coast quarterlifers coping with unsatisfying relationships and hindered artistic ambitions. They are literary and they are sad and they are men, but are they young? On this, Gessen is conclusive: they are not. Not anymore. Not after they’ve graduated from their Ivy League universities and attended grad schools and ensconced themselves in overpriced Brooklyn apartments. Gessen’s message here seems to be: by the time you’ve written your thesis and defended it – by the time you’re out of school, in other words - you are officially old, or you will be very, very soon.

The trouble is, most of the guys in Gessen’s novel (they’re all a bit interchangeable) are around my age, or perhaps a little bit older. This made the experience of reading the book rather disturbing, at times. Was I, I wondered, as old as Gessen’s protagonists? By the numbers, it seemed so, but I felt downright sprightly next to most of these bitter veterans. Take the following descriptions as evidence:

In reference to a young writer, contemplating a novel he’s beginning:
“He was getting to be a certain age, he thought. It was the age when his never-to-be-written masterpieces had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was still going to write.”

Referring to a history graduate student at Syracuse University, after being discovered by his students literally passed out at the gym (2 passages):
“No one wanted to see a man this sweaty, and this old, leaving stains all over the equipment.”

“Mark for his part sat up slowly, and then made his old-man’s dignified way to the dressing room.”

More poignantly, referring to the same history student, now finished with school and living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend:
“They both fell asleep then, in the Brooklyn night, two people no longer very young, no longer very happy, though still unsettled, still a mess.”

And, finally, in the book’s epilogue, the narrator contemplating his girlfriend’s pregnancy:
“She was too young to be having babies, and I, I was too old.”

Get the picture? I’m twenty-seven and Keith Gessen is about five years older than me so maybe he has some insight into the process of urban, intellectual aging that I haven’t yet acquired. However, it’s alarming to find that the thread linking these collected stories of intellectual, literary youth in the Thousands is not the dread of living in an age of terrorism and governmental hypocrisy, but rather the burden of mortality! And these are folks in their late twenties! “There were so many things I’d once wanted to do!” declaims one character late in the book. Well, me too, but at least I’m not trudging through life already teathered to my own tombstone. At twenty-seven, I’d like to think I’m just getting started on many things. Besides, I really only feel old when I go out to Columbia bars. Or, of course, when I read books by Keith Gessen.