They let you read there in the Owl. We considered it a badge of honor to hang out and absorb without sullying our love of literature through actual cash transactions. You sat on books as you initiated other books. Some wise earlier shopper had stacked a makeshift all-book reading chair. It was made of Lamb, Amis, Lovejoy, and two complete Barchester Towers; wedged where your elbows fell, find opposing copies of A Farewell to Arms. Into the chair’s rearmost spine-support, A Pillow Book, and Henry Green’s great novel, Back. (New York is nothing if not allusive.)

About to leave, I always stuck whatever three novels I was reading into some spots hard to reach, an advantage of being tallish. You could smell the great books disintegrating; their musty glue, their bitter ink and bandage spines, all acted on me like pipe tobacco or some form of dusty opium. I’d soon sneeze myself outdoors but I never lost the scent. Since the Owl’s half-blind owner was always pasting something, using clamps on leather bindings, the place retained the varnish odor of a workshop. Though decaying paper gave the air its stink, your final impression was, oddly, one of permanence. The paginated richness of others’ passions, yellowing yet legible. It sometimes sent me running up four flights, to type. I’d hold a blank white page and rub it till the urban oil of my thumb and forefinger ruined its perfection. How could I explain this to my parents? New York was not a sewer, it was an archive, a new bed, a wanted poster, a grape press, a new futon smelling of straw and possibility.

Angie and Gustafson and I found we had skads else in common. The less we could control these ground-glass streets, the more we cared how our tiny “spaces” looked. We shopped alike. With serious skimming methodical glee. We boy-boys and straight girls had a nose for bargains and a penchant for extravagance and we guessed that these need not be mutually exclusive.

Poverty-stricken spendthrifts. As good a description of Humanity as any!

Once as we wandered Columbus Avenue, the stalky brilliant Marxist English actress from a great theatre family pounded Robert on one shoulder, handed him a twenty, smiled. “Never figured you’d get it back so fast this time, now did you, luv?” We walked on. I said nothing, practically rupturing my spleen, pretending that his heightened life was normal. One block later, Robbie greeted a Heineken delivery man, “Hot enough for you, Verne?”

“How do you know all these damn people?”

R. said he’d had five years on me here. “And it’s basically a friendly town, Hartley. Give them a chance, people’ll talk.”

“People’ll talk to you.”