Pine City was not an actual city, but rather a derelict upstate summer resort turned private retreat by the charismatic young achievers who graduated from the Academy two years before my arrival as a freshman. Pine City (the group) founded Pine City (the place) when they were twenty-eight and I was twenty-two, moving upstate shortly after I arrived in the city, naming it after themselves and defining it as the last real artist-owned retreat. Pine City was meant as their personal antidote to the corporatization of patronage that had resulted in otherwise anti-capitalist mid-career artists competing without blinking to be the Swarovski or Louis Vuitton Fellow of the year, the Costco Resident, et cetera. They kept it small, inviting only one or two other artists each season, people who were already their friends, and the myth of the place grew alongside their own.

Though I’d never been there, I had seen dozens of photos of Pine City over the past decade—mostly of their dazzling annual parties, martini-soaked bacchanals set against a backdrop that was half Dirty Dancing, half Twin Peaks. The black lake with its armada of canoes; feather-haired young people sleeping on the beach, dried mud cracking on their skin; Tyler shooting fireworks into the sky with a grenade launcher; Jack reading Josef Albers in the lush grass of the lawns; Carey smashing a pyramid of empty Krug champagne bottles with a golf club. But those images were old. They all but dried up after Carey committed suicide. Over the last few years, the pictures of parties were replaced with portraits posed against gray curtains as the rest of Pine City marched past forty without her, their work becoming more serious, their attitudes more bourgeois, and their positions more establishment.

My interest in them was more than prurient. (It was fueled by prurience, but with selfishness, too.) I was genuinely hopeful that moving into Pine City would inflate my sails with the creative wind I needed in order to remake seven huge paintings. I told myself it was a strategic decision: I could live free of charge for four whole months with a handful of geniuses, walk the same paths that Carey Logan did, be animated by the same winds and leaves and sunlight. I would discover the secrets to her early success, and do exactly that, and I would find out, too, what pushed her to move into performance work—and then never do that. I would finish my paintings, and this time, this time, I would turn my show profits into something responsible, maybe a farm up here, Ooh, look at that great farmhouse, maybe like that. Sure—I was living on credit cards. But I felt certain that it would all work out. And each eighteenth-century manor that I drove past, with peeling columns and chestnut-laden gravel driveways, reminded me of how gracefully my professors at the Academy lived, and tempted me to consider myself their equal.