My first Manhattan night out, each new disco Robert squired me to asked for my ID. I appeared to be just what I was: new here, doggedly healthy, loaded with energy, nearly as talented as driven, a rube, if a well-brought-up one, terrified, oversexed, and reasonably fearless. Meaning: innocent innocent innocent, and not unpretty. New York, watch out! Jump a goodly distance back.

—Only in retrospect do we ever really understand how we actually looked. The young ones who learn that at the time can be rendered whores by overknowing. Whores, or actors.

For me, New York meant the chance of having fun while creating something true and beautiful, a chance at lowering my address book’s bucket into the deepest, coolest waters I could find.

New York offers the twin necessities for founding your artistic reputation: one very public stage, adjoining (via long service-corridors) many anonymous Santa-workshop refuge caves, places to perfect the work you’ll soon make public.

Listen to the name of entry-level Manhattan real estate: “Studio apartment.”

Your art’s foundry. Plus, where you go to hide from its results. “Ghetto” is an idiomatic Venetian word for “foundry”—a landmark in the only neighborhood where Venice allowed its Jews to live.

My ninth address book (I still own every one, and will show you later if you’re not careful) reflects all this: a first huge forward swelling. There is red wine splashed across the A’s and most B’s—the thin, rich, membranous color that itself has now become something of a sensuous address in time.

Looking back, rereading my young Manhattan life’s fine print, I now wonder who this Astrid Terboldt is. All Astrid’s possible extension phones are listed, and my scribbled note to myself: “Give her father’s driver at least 15 min. notice, named Griffin.” How did I (and memory) lose her? Jotted here are back-room phones for off-brand midtown galleries long since shut. There are the numbers of good restaurants’ pay phones. Here’s a friend of a friend in the Met Museum’s Department of Education who might help sneak us into black-tie previews meant for actual adult donors. Plus a lotto ticket number that, apparently (I hope), did not win. Addresses exist in time as well as space.

You get a larger urban life; you go buy yourself a bigger, sturdier binder, industrial-strength. As soon as you’ve established your address book’s critical bulk, Natural Selection starts to cull the ones you really love from those you just find entertaining despite their bad characters.

Then—too soon—Natural Subtraction kicks in. You adore some folks more than others, but you choose the ones who can best and truthfully adore you back. And—even there—little tiffs occur.