San Francisco
Ronnie, Rakoff, and I spent the afternoon wandering around before his reading at Books Inc. on Market Street. We went for coffee and then walked over to the Castro Theater to use the bathroom. The doors weren’t open yet, but the guy at the box office was nice and said we could go inside. Ronnie had worked at the Castro in the late seventies and was showing us around when we were approached by an usher who asked if we needed any help. The man was maybe in his fifties and wore a suit and tie. Around his neck was a strand of fat fake pearls. His ear was pierced and his gentleness suggested a slight learning disability. We used the bathrooms and he caught up with us in the lobby on our way out.
“It’s so bootiful, isn’t it?” he said. “I just love this place. It’s like a big ol’ home to me.” Ronnie asked about his accent and we learned that he was from Asheboro, North Carolina. “But I went to NC State and I love Broughton High School. Sanderson too. I got both their yearbooks.” He held up two fingers. “There was this Broughton girl, Barbara Mooney—I’ll never forget it—and when she didn’t make head cheerleader she said, ‘Then I’ll just transfer to another school,’ and so she went to Sanderson and they made her the head. I’ll never forget it. She worked at a dress shop.”
The Asheboro accent is lazier than that of Raleigh. “I’ll just transfer to another schoo-ul.” This man seemed familiar with every movie theater in the state of North Carolina and reported their closings and renovations as if he were filling us in on old friends. “The Piedmont in Hendersonville is gone, but they did a bootiful job fixing up the Carolina in Waynesboro. And do you remember the State Theater in Charlotte? I hate that town but used to work there when old Jeanette Tucker was in charge. Then she got married and, I’ll never forget, she told me, ‘My husband got transferred and there’s no way I’m moving to old hicky Hickory.’ I’ll never forget it. But she did move there, yes, she did, Jeanette Tucker.”
We talked about this man for the rest of the day. Rakoff had turned on his mental tape recorder and every few minutes he’d stop and say, “She worked at a dress shop,” or “I moved here in 1988 and I was scared to death.” We wondered where the usher lived and if his parents were still alive. It must have been horrible living as a homosexual in Asheboro and we tried to imagine his wonder at moving to a city that allowed him to wear pearls.
May 3, 2002
New York
The dumbest words ever spoken in New York are “I think I’ll wear my new shoes.” I left the hotel yesterday at ten, and when I returned seven hours later, it looked as if I’d jumped into a wood chipper. My socks were stained with blood and I had just enough time to change and iron a shirt before I went to the BEA party, where I spent three and a half hours on my feet. Now they’re red and swollen, resembling strip steaks.
May 22, 2002
Barcelona, Spain
We went for dinner at a tapas restaurant halfway between here and the city center. The food kept coming and went from the sublime to the ridiculous: octopus and beets followed by goose-liver ice cream and wild strawberries topped with rosemary foam. I sat across from Heidi and next to a young woman named Amanda, a New Yorker traveling with the Cirque du Soleil. At the age of seventeen she had a play produced off-Broadway. She’s sold a few stories to the New York Times Magazine and seems like the kind of person who could do anything well and effortlessly. On top of that, she looks all of fourteen years old. Amanda’s brother runs a private yoga studio in SoHo. “Oh, my God,” Heidi said. “Your brother is Eddie? The Eddie?”
It was a real New York conversation. The subject turned to celebrities, and then restaurants. Heidi used to work at the MercBar, where the rule was “No suits after ten p.m.” When the time came, the staff had to push out all the Wall Street guys who weren’t considered cool enough. One night there was an altercation, and the bouncer had his nose bitten off. “They found it in the gutter and were able to sew it back on, thank God,” Heidi said.
June 2, 2002
Dublin, Ireland
While on the bus, waiting to board our flight, we saw our plane defecate onto the tarmac. They were emptying the sewage hold and accidentally opened the valve before the hose was in place. “Look,” someone said. The man was Irish and sounded like the leprechaun from the Lucky Charms commercial. “Look, over there.”
We turned to watch human feces and used toilet paper drop from the plane and onto the runway. Moments later we watched as the luggage handlers set our bags into the flowing river of waste. “Mother of God,” the Irishman said. A maintenance worker shouted something to our bus driver, who moved us to the other side of the plane, effectively blocking our view.
If this was the worst that had happened I might have laughed it off. “So there’s some shit on my suitcase, who cares.” Sadly, however, there was more. After boarding, we waited on the runway for an hour, arriving in Dublin at just after ten. It took another hour to get our luggage, which finally arrived soaking wet with Irish rain. On a positive note, the rain helped rinse away some of the shit so, again, I shouldn’t complain.
June 5, 2002
Ballycotton, Ireland
It was my idea to go to Cork, which, according to our guidebook, is the second-largest city in Ireland. I’m not sure what part of town we wound up in, but it was full of teenage mothers leaving fast-food restaurants. At Hillbilly’s Fried Chicken a lot of the moms had nose rings. They looked to be around sixteen, all of them chubby and most of them accompanied by their mothers. It was the same story at Wimpy’s and Supermac’s, where three generations stood on the sidewalks sharing sacks of fried food. In this particular part of town, all the shops were practical, offering outfits for 22 euros, handbags for 6, electric woks for 9.99. We had lunch at a sandwich shop, walked around for a little while, and then drove on to Midleton, home of the Jameson Distillery. I’d just wanted to visit the gift shop and was disappointed when Hugh bought tickets for a tour, which began with a fifteen-minute filmstrip titled “Water of Life, River of Time.” The narrator described Ireland as being “bejeweled by beauty” and then outlined the distilling process, first learned by perfume manufacturers in the Orient.