Two years later, I packed up my last dorm room and got on that Chinatown bus one final time. I landed in Brooklyn, subletting a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s roommate’s room for a year, and slept in a plywood cave on a lofted bed, a set of single-file dollhouse steps leading to the cold, dirty floors. I fell in love right away with a guitarist named Ben who lived down the hall. He had the biggest eyes I’d ever seen, and gentle fingers, and he was in love with a girl called Kate who was much prettier than I was. I found a job in a metal bar and spent my first twelve months in New York drinking and chasing Ben while he chased Kate and then eventually this ended in the spring, with me sobbing in the then detritus-park at the end of South 3rd while Ben walked away, shaking his head and apologizing. Five minutes later—tears dripping off my chin as I stared out at the river mournfully—I was approached by two pale, bearded Hasidic guys in their big satin jackets. They asked if I liked to party. We wound up doing coke behind a curtain in the back room of a nearby dive bar, and they told me that God was ashamed of me for being impure, and I was so coked up that I cried again and told them they were probably right. I hadn’t picked up a palette knife since arriving in New York, and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Pine City, or any other real artists, and I’d lost myself. I was miserable and I truly thought that I’d ruined my life, that I had wasted the most precious opportunity I’d ever known, because when you are twenty-two every day feels like a year.

One night I followed one of Ben’s friends to an ad hoc music venue in the city to see a sparsely attended folk concert. Cavernous and sticky with old beer, it was a ninth-floor walk-up somewhere off an alleyway in the Financial District, and I loved it immediately. The venue was full of art debris—blowtorches and canvases and weird, incomplete foam sculptures shoved against the wall to make room for the stage—so when I found out that the people who lived in the back were looking for a new roommate, I ran three blocks to the nearest ATM and took out all my money.

Seven hundred dollars in tens later, out of breath from the stairs, I introduced myself to Cady, Atticus, and Jonny, the sloe-eyed twenty-somethings on the lease, and told them I was a large-scale abstract painter looking for a live-work space. They shrugged their sloping shoulders, ambivalent—until I gave them the cash, at which point they hugged me, showed me my room—really, a lightly partitioned drywall area—and gave me a key to the front door.