“Guy tried to be a New York artist. Lasted less than six months up there. Came back to his daddy’s big white house, and a job on the loading dock of Dad’s Budweiser Outlet. Regular Rembrandt, right? They say he really drinks bad now. Never talks about New York City. Hasn’t touched a paintbrush in years. Sleeps in his old room. ‘Beave It to Leaver,’ hunh? Eats with the folks. Works here. Dates nobody. Gets plastered every weekend. Period. They say he really basically wanted to go be queer up there, but didn’t even have the nerve to get it on with even one guy. Never choked a one down. Never ‘came out,’ like they call it now. Instead, came back. —They say the poor jerk had some talent, too. Look at him, sulking, playing like his daddy doesn’t own this joint. Acting like he can’t half-hear us. Real rebel, right?”

There are worse things than dying young.

In the Midst of Your Early Blue Period, Something Overtakes You

ou can paint your cheap New York studio apartment white, and it looks great for about three weeks. Then the window sills begins seeping wheat-plasma-color, becoming brown, next black. Finally some other substance arrives—some bubbling, tarlike force, unidentifiable. It is silt, it is toxic chem-plant New Jersey drift, it is others’ envy, it is the spittle of the roach eggs hatching, it is applicant Death.

The neighbors’ leaky pipes, the hall’s Rasta graffiti artist, something starts immediately resenting and reversing mere girlish (virginal) suburban white. And, seeing this, you will either leave NYC, or else repaint, or (likelier) learn to survive it. You’ve already learned to cohabit with hand-sized roaches, occasional break-ins, and a certain quota of phoned-in wrong-number “breathers.” Chaos becomes a constant, like Mrs. Park’s almost-always-open corner green-grocery where you score your eggs and milk and they all know your name. Chaos has a neighborhood nickname for you. Does that make things easier?

I noted that, since Robert’s blinding, we all walked in a new way. Darting, taking short breaks, sitting down on ledges, checking store windows’ reflection to see who followed—no longer just for purposes of stalking seduction-attraction—now, more self-defense. I had just learned what the word “tired” meant. The same ole hits of Cuban caffeine sometimes failed to pay their usual kickass magic.

While Robert was out sailing with the America’s Cup crew and that gym teacher from Lifeboat Thirteen, while he weekended at Aaron Copland’s up-river retreat, Angie and I tried distracting ourselves. We exchanged two bits and a challenge: Go to The Honored Owl, four storefronts down, find a one-page portrait of each other. The book had to cost fifty cents or less. We would meet back here in forty minutes and swap our one-page likenesses. There is, in the young, such a thin line between narcissism and self-knowledge.