I was twenty-four, finished with grad school in Boston, new to New York, with no job. A few weeks before, I had found myself sitting in the lobby of a building on East Thirty-second Street, about to meet this man, this therapist who could supposedly help me. My friends were all employed and my afternoons were hard to fill. It was late fall 1983. I was living in Carroll Gardens, a Brooklyn neighborhood that felt like a small Italian town. Sports bars played Connie Francis and Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady.” Our landlord was named Carrado Carbone. There were dozens of bakeries that sold beautifully decorated cookies that all tasted terrible. In the apartment I shared with three Californians, a previous tenant appeared to have done engine work in the bathtub, which was smeared with black.
I wanted to be an editorial assistant at Knopf or Random House. Dressed in my suit and scuffed wingtips, between interviews I set up a sort of office in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, where instead of proofreading my résumé I found myself scoping out the bar to see if any of the women were prostitutes. My first interview was at Random House, where a senior editor named Joe Fox, a gentlemanly sort, asked what subjects I intended to make my specialty. I said, “Fiction and nonfiction.”
He smiled and said, “No, that is too general. You are supposed to say something like sports.”
I was crestfallen and beginning to perspire, fearful of leaving sweat prints on the upholstery. I said, “Not sports.”
He said, “I do sports.”
I said, “I swim like a fish.”
He said, “You remind me of Truman Capote.”
Although I had in the previous weeks spent hours in front of Tiffany with a cinnamon roll or two, I considered this a private matter.
“Does Truman swim?”
. . .
My interviews were all failures. Every time I tried to impress someone, I left myself, abandoned ship— the old problem, and it still happened on dates. At a party, a friend gave me the card of a gay therapist. She said I needed help adjusting.
“To what?” I asked.
“Everything,” she said.
Aside from Pinky, I had never been counseled, though my handwriting had been analyzed by the mother of a friend of mine, an extremely slender woman from Los Angeles who practiced something she referred to as grapho-therapeutics.
“There is fear here,” Mrs. Asher had determined after examining my signature.
I just could not get a job. “Come home,” my father said on the phone. Not Betty. She held firm. She knew how much I wanted to make it in New York. “Don’t be a quitter,” she said. “I’m putting my foot down on this. Do not come back here with your tail between your legs. Something will happen. I have told everyone at bridge you are working there. When was the last time you got your hair cut?
“Don’t give up,” she whispered before hanging up the phone after my father had already gone off to bed.
My counselor in New York, Paul Giorgianni, asked about my family, my life, my feelings, sex life, vices. When he asked if I used drugs, I said only when they were available. He asked if they were a problem. I said not for me. He said I should not use them as an avoidance. Why else I would use them?
“You don’t have to entertain me,” he said.
“Then what are you paying me for?”
“You are hiding from your feelings.”
“Can you teach me how to hide a little better?”
“Why did you come here?”
“Lobby art.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Because I can’t get a job.” I explained that I could not get through an interview and that I kept making a fool of myself on dates. “I lose myself,” I told him. “I go away. I can’t be there when I need to be. I go away.”
It all came out. “You know that cat in the cartoons that gets scared and winds up clinging with his paws to the ceiling? I feel like I am up there, upside down, barely hanging on and there is just the shell of me in the chair, looking desperate. Can you help me not go away?”
He was Freud. I was Dora. He was Dr. Wilbur. I was Sybil. He gave me a discount, and, considering my estimated neurosis-per-dollar ratio, it seemed a deal.
“How long will it take to stop this from happening?” I kept asking him. He didn’t know. “Can’t we please hurry?” I asked.
Just before Christmas, I actually got a job at a place called Yourdon Press where they published books about systems analysis. When I read the ad, I thought that was health-related. Something to do with kidneys.
My job was writing advertising and catalog copy. My computer went down about every fourteen seconds. In the corner of my screen: a tiny picture of a tiny man in a tiny boat. When things were purring along, he smiled. When technical disaster struck, he frowned. It seemed that every time my fingers neared the keyboard, his expression changed to that of a Titanic passenger. Constantly I found myself on the phone, pleading, “Please send the fixer man!” The IT specialist and I became so well acquainted we could certainly have adopted a child.
At night I wrote letters, sent résumés to real publishing houses, got some interviews, and finally secured a new job, not in books, but writing pamphlets for a Wall Street firm. My boss—a young Harvard guy from Cleveland—was good to me. “Why did you hire me?” I asked one day. “I don’t know a bull from a bear.” Looking out of his glass-partitioned office at the collection of middle-aged men on the other side, he said, “Look at them. They are boring. Your job is to talk to me about the movies. You are interesting.”
“Sometimes I think so,” I said, “and sometimes I don’t.”