Once the Subaru was sold and gone from my life, things began to turn around for me. I got a job waiting tables in a kind of urban country club called the East River Club. The place was located in the financial district and was housed inside several climate controlled warehouses which sprawled across a full city block. Inside the warehouses were multiple swimming pools, various gyms, two spas, four steam rooms, glassed-in squash courts, and not one but two restaurants. One restaurant was a fancy diner for members looking for protein shakes and club sandwiches to go. The second…

The same way that other dads collected exotic beer cans or signed baseballs, my dad collected acts of foolishness. If anyone in the family did anything silly or stupid, no matter how trivial it might have seemed at the time, my father would take note of it. He’d quietly cobble together the particulars into an anecdote, then find a place for said anecdote in his repertoire of “Foolish Anecdotes Starring My Family.” Identifying foolishness and crafting it into stories was one of my father’s greatest talents, second only to his preternatural gifts for building homemade Lazy Susans and somehow always…

One of my early discoveries as a newly minted city slicker was that nothing relaxed me at the end of a long, futile day of job hunting the way that a heaping, steaming plate of spaghetti did. Some might enjoy a day-ending bath or listening to meditation recordings. Me, I ate spaghetti. I’d make a big show of it, too, inserting a napkin into my shirt collar and everything. Then I’d wolf down two, sometimes three plates of the stuff, along with half a loaf of bread. I’d chase it with a glass of cold milk. Afterwards, I’d yank the…

I still very much fancied myself a literary type, and when you fancy yourself a literary type you are obligated by law to seek out all nearby bookstores. My favorite bookstore was Barbara’s on Broadway. Barbara’s stocked all sorts of things that I couldn’t find elsewhere—the two volume set of the collected works of William Carlos Williams; Charles Simic’s Hotel Insomnia; even the obscure chapbooks of the writer Carolyn Forche. I had fallen madly in love with Carolyn Forche based on two things: her poems, which were pretty terrific; and on the postage stamp-sized photo of her on the back cover of Gathering…

I read a story in the paper about a Los Angeles man who painted a 16-word pitch for his screenplay on the front and back of a sandwich board, put it on, and wandered the streets of Hollywood for six weeks before a movie executive, idling at a red light at Sunset and Vine, spotted the man and signed him to a six-figure screenwriting deal. (more…)

Now that I had a place to live, the next logical step was to find gainful employment. I combed the want-ads in the morning paper, hoping to find a position as a bartender. I had some bartending experience under my belt—those two summers that I’d spend frowning behind the bar at the seafood restaurant while reading Russian novels and begrudgingly serving $1.25 drafts to old drunks. And I owned a copy of Mr. Boston’s Official Bartender’s & Party Guide, a small, crimson colored book that was bound in what appeared to be the hide of a defeated hellhound. The book…

My first apartment in Chicago was a sixth floor studio on West Roscoe. When the rental agent informed me that we were going to look at a studio—and this is embarrassing to admit—I immediately pictured a light-flooded loft with vaulted ceilings, cathedral windows and an industrial elevator, the type with doors that rolled up from the bottom and down from the top. I thought, Maybe I’ll put an easel in the corner and try my hand at oil painting. Maybe I’ll put up a basketball hoop and shoot baskets during my oil painting breaks. These were the sorts of activites that I…

The next morning the sky was clear and bright—a high midwestern sky. I cleaned the snow off the Subaru using the broom with the sawed off neck—a very advanced snow-removal tool that my father, a self-proclaimed expert at removing snow from cars, had personally fashioned for me. While checking out of the motel I asked the old woman behind the counter how far it was to the Ohio border. She started to laugh. “The Ohio border? You passed it about a hundred miles back that way,” she said pointing a crooked finger towards the Interstate. She sucked noisily on a…