Activity

Walking over to the subway—Morris told me to take a cab but I wanted to ride the subway—I passed through Chelsea. I had never seen so many beautiful people. I was sweating, tired, gruesome, and these people had left their houses looking like movie stars— perhaps they were movie stars? One fell behi…

Most of these places had declined or changed—they were not for me, just then—but Morris Binkel’s articles in the New American were a different story. His mind was ablaze. It was his belief that American culture was corrupt; that it was filled with phonies, charlatans, morons, and rich people. Also …

That summer I relocated lawyers from Mount Vernon to Fells Point; hippies from pretty Charles Village to boring Towson; a professor’s desk from the graduate poli sci department to the undergraduate poli sci department across the street. I abetted gentrification, such as it was; the invisible hand o…

They had dinner at a small, upscale pizzeria down the road. You could tell it had been an ordinary pizza shop once, with the linoleum tabletops, until the rich people started going crazy, or sort of crazy, and arriving at the sanatorium nearby. Therefore Sam was confident, given the pizzeria’s usua…

And as I had to go to these places fairly often, mostly by myself, there were conversations, flirtations, with women. I accepted them, as I accepted all those e-mails, as part of the largesse of the late Clinton years. And one night in New York I stepped out into a hallway—I would have liked to say…