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Yes we were stupid for disrespecting the limits placed before us1 for trying to go everywhere and know everything. Stupid, spoiled, and arrogant. But we were right, too. /was right. How could I do otherwise when the violence of the unsaid things became so great that it kept me awake at night? When …

Before she had been a proofreader, Veronica had been a secretary at a screenwriters’ agency. She’d been an assistant script doctor for a television show that I’d never heard of. She’d written flap copy for a publishing house that had gone out of business. In college, she had been a social-work inte…

[...] Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and turned up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world des…

I said I had not gone to New York to be a model, and I hadn’t. I’d gone there for life and sex and cruelty. Not something you learn in community college. Not something you write in a notebook. The city was so big and bright that for a moment my terrible heaven paled, then went invisible. I thought …

I went to community college two more semesters. Instead of I poetry, I concentrated on word-processing classes. When I M felt I was skilled enough to get a job, I quit. I moved to Manhattan when a friend of a friend told me about a friend (named Gandy) who needed a roommate for a six-month sublet. …