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I handed it to my agent, Aaron, who read it and loved it and handed it to my editor, Fi
Fi
Every September the city has that nervy crisp air, that new season briskness: new films in the theaters where after a season of explosions serious black and white actors have sex against the odds and subplot of a crumbling apartheid regime, the new concert season led by exciting new conductors with wild floppy hair and big capped teeth premiering new repertoire featuring the debuts of exciting new soloists of obscure nationalities (an Ashkenazi/Bangladeshi pianist accompanying a fiery redheaded Indonesian violinist in Fiddler on the Hurūf), new galleries with new exhibitions of unwieldy mixedmedia installations (Climate Change Up: a cloud seeded with ballot chad), new choreography on new themes (La danse des tranches, ou pas de derivatives), new plays on and off Broadway featuring TV actresses seeking stage cred to relaunch careers playing characters dying of AIDS or dyslexia.
September’s also the time of new books coming out, of publication parties held at new lounges, new venues. Which was why on that freefloating Monday after Labor Day, with the city returned to itself rested and ta
Understand, on my first visits to NY the Village had just been split between East and West. SoHo went, so there had to be NoHo. When I first moved to the city the realestate pricks were scamming the editors into helping reconfigure the outerboroughs too, turning Brooklyn, flipping Queens, for zilch in return, only the displacement of minorities despite their majority. At the time of my party, Silicon Alley had just been projected along Broadway, in glassed steel atop the Flatiron—each new shadow of each new tower being foreshadowed initially in language (sarcastic language).
Call this, then, as I called it, TriPackFast: the four block triangle north of the Meatpacking District but south of the barred lots for Edison ParkFast. Or Teneldea: the grim gray area begi
A pier, jutting midway between where the Lusitania departed and the Titanic never arrived, where steamers and schooners had anchored to unload the old riches of the Old World like gold and silver and copper slaves, before wealth turned from tangible goods and favorable tradewinds to a matter of clicking buttons—where the newest warehouses were filled with “cultural capital”—where “money,” which was still silver in French (argent) and gold in German (Geld), had become a gentrified abstraction.
A purposefully unreconstructed but rebranded wreckage harbored on the Hudson—the interior resembled a ruin, a rusted halfgutted rectilinear spanse. Hangaresque, manufacturingesque. Previously a drydock, formerly a ropery. Had it just been built, it would’ve been a marvel—the type of modern design that architects and engineers torment themselves over, the natural course of things achieved by falling apart: foundation issues, an irresolvable roof, problems with the electric and plumbing.
A table was set, laid with midpriced wine to be poured not into plastic cups but glass glasses, that’s how intensely my publisher was investing in me, offering red and white and, blushing, trays of stinky chèvres and goudas, muensters, gruyères, a dozen varieties of crackers, veggie stix ’n’ dip, sexual clusters of muscats, sultanas, ruby grapes without seed, selections of meze with pita.
A trio performed klezmer, or rehearsed it, a screechy avantklez that didn’t distinguish between rehearsal and performance: a trumpeter, bass, drums, soloing always in that order.
Copies of the book were piled into pyramids? ziggurats? but ziggs are goyish, the pyramids are for the Jews.
The press began arriving, all my future peers, my colleagues. The newspaper people, the dailies, a half hour fashionable. The magazine people, the weeklies, the monthlies, an hour. Aaron’s joke: the longer the leadtime, the later they showed. A cymbal tsked. The bass followed a note and stayed with it, not a note so much as a low throb, as if it were the guest of honor everybody felt they had to notice but nobody much liked to be stuck with, just the excuse for all the busyness swirling—that guest was me, terrified.
I was uncomfortably complimented in my suit, the suit that’d needed shoes, the shoes that’d needed socks, belt, shirt, tie—the only thing I’d already owned was the underwear.
The mic was taken from the trumpeter, tapped. Wine courtesy of Pequot Vintners, beer from Masholu, please join me in thanking our generous sponsors—that was Kimi!
Everyone applauded, drowning her introduction of Fi
My book was called “a migrant story,” “a quintessential American tale”—inheritance of loss, bequest of suffering transmitted genetically, the people of the book, after mille
Fi