Fragments

The Wild Horse Unloosed in my Mind

Photo by Oleksandr Baiev on Unsplash

I remember Manhattan, quiet Central Park in the dark gray of winter, fine white snow blanketed over everything. I liked the contrast of the green benches against the puffy white snow. Kids riding little sleds down snowy hills. Me, walking into the park from 70^th Street, my street.

And before that it was East Harlem: Rough, especially during the pandemic. My whole family 3,000 miles away, in safe, warm, sunny California. Me, in my spacious two-bedroom third-floor walkup, the basketball court across the street, 5^th Avenue along my apartment. How did I survive those early months of Covid lockdowns?

And then Dad: Cancer. Leaving NYC. After only 2.3 years. At least I had 2019. And me, with Mom, our bond always complex and tinged with both deep love and corrosive acid, caring for my father, a man I’d always loved but never understood. We spoke different spiritual languages.

Writing: 13 unpublished novels; dozens of full manuscript agent reads; close calls but no cigar. Dozens of published short stories in little no-name literary magazines. Political ideology infested everything. My generation: Millennials. The Occupy Wall Street Generation. The iPhone Gen. Less reading, more streaming, Facebook and YouTube.

Then the glorious discovery of Substack. First heard of while circling The Great Lawn in Manhattan, Central Park, summer 2020—into the lockdowns now—listening to some favored potent podcast discussing how The New York Times has become illiberally ideological and how censorship in myriad forms is on the rise and how the major news corps are trying desperately to pitch Substack as a right-wing hate site. It wouldn’t be until over a year later, walking around my neighborhood in Santa Barbara—a town I never imagined I’d live in—that I decided to start a Stack. The rest, as they say, is history.

Love. Real love. Finally, the end of dating. The end of online dating, which was so horrendous, so spiritually exhausting, so depleting emotionally that it felt like sawing off insanity from my life when I stopped. Moving in. Lompoc. Getting engaged. Marriage. Marriage. All my adult life I’d spouted off about how I’d one day get married, but I wasn’t sure now if I’d ever meant it. And yet I’d met her, the one. The one. Irony: Finding love during my father’s inevitable decline. One door opens while another door slams shut.

Writing, again: Finished with the past; finished with trying the traditional publishing route. Substack allowed me to write directly to readers and to offer low paid subscriptions. Why not? Why not slice off the middlemen, the gatekeepers, the egocentric literary agents and fickle book publishers who took most of your money (which was not going to be very much) and gave you a pittance, and for what?

Adulthood, that foggy mysterious phenomenon, had finally arrived. At age 36, fresh in Manhattan, I’d felt more like a sober 28. I’d been boyish and excited, naïve and romantic, ready to “be a writer in NYC.” I wrote feverishly and wildly. I read voraciously. I started running, 7, 10 miles every other day, exploring the metropolitan city. Live music, jazz at Smalls in the Village. Comedy at the Comedy Cellar. Writing in noisy coffee shops, the espresso machine whirring. Walking for miles and miles and miles all over the island. (And into Brooklyn.) Washington Heights, Greenwich Village, East Village, Upper West Side, Battery Park. Bookstores, so many incredible bookstores. Mostly used, like Sidewinder on West 81^st and Broadway. Mc-Nally Jackson Books in SoHo. The Shakespeare & Company on 69^th and Lex. I spent hours in there.

Endless walks through Central Park. Writing groups, including one I did for six months, into the pandemic (via Zoom). AA meetings galore: 12^th Street Workshop; 42^nd Street Workshop; Writing Sober; Midnite.

The loud crunching and crashing and hard-turning of the subway trains, the 2/3 train, the C train to Washington Heights, the 1 train slowly along Broadway. Getting off at 72^nd Street, 79^th Street. The anarchic chaos of Times Square. The explosion of people. The ornate, gorgeous architecture of the 42^nd Street station. Spending time in the New York Public Library. The glory of the silence.

Walking along 5^th Avenue. Walking along Lexington. Walking along York. Walking along Broadway. Along Amsterdam. Along Prince Street. Along MacDougal Street. Seeing that homeless Black man with no legs shuffling along the train, hands out begging for change. The sweaty stink of a packed train.

Going out to dinner with friends, after a meeting at that dive bar in the Upper West Side on Broadway and 101^st. Laughter. Politics. Jokes. Writing talk. Women talk. Emptiness, loneliness, sagacity, freedom. The sense of being alone and mid-thirties and in New York. The excitement; the energy.