. . . I had to ask him, “Why didn’t you leave? You could have left. You could be teaching at Columbia—you’re a famous playwright.” He said, “I live here.”

Did that reflect your attitude to New York?

It’s exactly my attitude to New York. That’s why I was asking— I related to it in my own small way.

You’re being buzzed, Lou.

Yeah.

[He seems perfectly happy to keep them waiting. “First thing you learn . . .”]

The thing is, I have my dream too. I’m glad my wife was there when I met President Havel, because otherwise I’d just think I dreamed it.

So where do you see the future going?

I want to take the writing further. I think that an album every three years isn’t enough. I’m at the point now where I think I know what I’m doing.

As a writer?

Right. The Havel piece was hard.

Good writing ought to be hard.

You have to really want it. If you don’t, it’s sloppy. It’s actually offensive—you’d be better off driving a truck.

I got to run . . .

XII

BETWEEN THOUGHT AND Expression isn’t a badly transcribed, pirated flimsy-covered book of the lyrics of Lou Reed. But what the hell. It’ll do until one turns up.

This was originally published in Time Out and reprinted in Reflex #26, July 28, 1992.

Afterword Afterword: Evelyn Evelyn

The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, cry for, people who do not, outside of the story, exist.

There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

AMANDA PALMER IS an outgoing, astonishingly funny, irreverent, sometimes loud, almost unembarrassable, beautiful, chatty singer who plays piano as a percussion instrument. Jason Webley is a foot-stomping, freewheeling, gentle, aggressive houseboat dweller, who plays the guitar and the accordion. He always wears a hat and mostly has a beard.

Oddly enough, it was he who introduced me to Amanda Palmer, in e-mail, almost three years ago.

I heard Evelyn Evelyn before I knew anything about them. The song “Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn?” was on my iPod, a strange ragtime encrustation, as was a song about an elephant, called “Elephant Elephant.” The songs had crept onto my “Stuff I Really Like That I Don’t Really Know What It Is” Playlist.

I’d not been friends long with Amanda Palmer when I asked her about the Evelyn Evelyn songs.

“They are conjoined twins,” she told me. “Jason and I met them through MySpace.”

“I thought it was you and Jason,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Conjoined twins. They have had a hard life. But they make amazing music. They have a whole album coming out. Jason and I are producing it for them.”

“Is that true?” I asked. “Only, on the songs on my iPod, it sounds like you and Jason singing together.”