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goon_sm2

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The-Keep

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978-0-385-72135-6

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Emerald-City

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Jennifer Egan

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Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem / Vistalux Contact Vistalux for more information (t) 323-933-7800 (e) info@vistalux.com (w) www.vistalux.com

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Emerald City and Other Stories

teameight — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:48:39 +0000

Sisters of the Moon Silas has a broken head. It happened sometime last night, outside The Limited on Geary and Powell. None of us saw. Silas says the fight was over a woman, and that he won it. "But you look like all bloody shit, my friend," Irish says, laughing, rolling the words off his accent. Silas says we should've seen the other guy. He adjusts the bandage on his head and looks up at the palm trees, which make a sound over Union Square like it's raining. Silas has that strong kind of shape, like high school guys who you know could pick you up and carry you like a bag. But his face is old. He wears a worn-out army jacket, the pockets always fat with something. Once, he pulled out a silver thimble and pushed it into my hand, not saying one word. It can't be real silver, but I've kept it. I think Silas fought in Vietnam. Once he said, "It's 1974, and I'm still alive," like he couldn't believe it. "So where is he?" Irish asks, full of humor. "Where is this bloke with half his face gone?" Angel and Liz start laughing, I don't know why. "Where's this woman you fought for?" is what I want to ask. Silas shrugs, grinning. "Scared him away." ******** San Francisco is ours, we've signed our name on it a hundred times: SISTERS OF THE MOON. On the shiny tiles inside the Stockton Tunnel, across those building like blocks of salt on the empty piers near the Embarcadero. Silver plus another color, usually blue or red. Angel and Liz do the actual painting. I'm the lookout. While they're spraying the paint cans, I get scared to death. To calm down, I'll say to myself, If the cops come, or if someone stops his car to yell at us, I'll just walk away from Angel and Liz, like I never saw them before in my life. Afterward, when the paint is wet and we bounce away on the balls of our feet, I get so ashamed, thinking, What if they knew? They'd probably ditch me, which would be worse than getting caught--even going to jail. I'd be all alone in the universe. Most people walk through Union Square on their way someplace else. Secretaries, businessmen. The Park, we call it. But Silas and Irish and the rest are always here. They drift out, then come back. Union Square is their own private estate. Watching over the square like God is the St. Francis Hotel, with five glass elevators sliding up and down its polished face. Stoned, Angel and Liz and I spend hours sitting on benches with our heads back, waiting for the elevators to all line up on top. Down, up, down--even at 5 A.M. they're moving. The St. Francis never sleeps. Angel and Liz expect to be famous, and I believe it. Angel just turned fifteen. I'm only five months younger, and Liz is younger than me. But I'm the baby of us. Smoking pot in Union Square, I still worry who will see. ******** We've been talking for a week about dropping acid. I keep stalling. Today we go ahead and buy it, from a boy with a runny nose and dark, anxious eyes. Across the street is I. Magnin, and I get a sick feeling that my stepmother is going to come out the revolving doors with packages under her arms. She's a buyer for the shoe department at Saks, and in the afternoon she likes to walk around and view the competition. Angel leans against a palm tree, asking in her Southern voice if the acid is pure and how much we should take to get off and how long the high will last us. She's got her shirt tied up so her lean stomach shows. Angel came from Louisiana a year ago with her mother's jazz band. I adore her. She goes wherever she wants, and the world just forms itself around her. "What are you looking at?" Liz asks me. She's got short, curly black hair and narrow blue eyes. "Nothing." "Yes, you are," she says. "All the time. Just watching everything." "So?" "So, when are you going to do something?" She says it like she's joking. I get a twisting in my stomach. "I don't know," I say. I glance at Angel, but she's talking to the dealer. At least she didn't hear us. Liz and I look at I. Magnin. Her mother could walk out of there as easily as mine, but Liz doesn't care. I get the feeling she's waiting for something like that to happen, a chance to show Angel how far she can go. ******** We find Irish begging on Powell Street. "Can you spare any part of a million dollars?" he asks the world, spreading his arms wide. Irish has a big blond face and wavy hair and eyes that are almost purple--I mean it. One time, he says, he got a thousand-dollar bill--an Arab guy just handed it over. That was before we knew Irish. "My lassies," he calls out, and we get the hug of those big arms, all three of us. He inhales from Angel's hair, which is dark brown and flips into wings on both sides of her face. She's still a virgin. In Angel this seems beautiful, like a precious glass bowl you can't believe didn't break yet. One time, in Union Square, this Australian guy took hold of her hair and pulled it back, back, so the tendons of her throat showed through the skin, and Angel was laughing at first and so was the guy, but then he leaned down and kissed her mouth and Irish knocked him away, shouting, "Hey, motherfucker, can't you see she's still a child?" "What nice presents have you brought?" Irish asks now. Angel opens the bag to show the acid. I check around for cops and catch Liz watching me, a look on her face like she wants to laugh. "When shall we partake?" Irish asks, reaching out with his cap to a lady in a green raincoat, who shakes her head like he should know better, then drops in a quarter. Irish could have any kind of life, I think--he just picked this one. "Not yet," Angel says. "Too light." "Tonight," Liz says, knowing I won't be there. Angel frowns. "What about Tally? I look down, startled and pleased to be remembered. "Tomorrow?" Angel asks me. I can't help pausing for a second, holding this feeling of everyone waiting for my answer. Then someone singing "Gimme shelter" distracts them. I wish I'd just said it. "Tomorrow's fine." ******** The singer turns out to be a guy named Fleece, who I don't know. I mean, I've seen him, he's part of the gang of Irish and Silas and them who hang out in the Park. Angel says these guys are in their thirties, but they look older than that and act younger, at least around us. There are women, too, with red eyes and heavy makeup, and mostly they act loud and happy, but when they get dressed up, there are usually holes in their stockings, or at least a run. They don't like us--Angel especially. Angel hands me the acid bag to hold while she lights up a joint. Across the Park I see three cops walking--I can almost hear the squeak of their boots. I cover the bag with my hand. I see Silas on another bench. His bandage is already dirty. "Tally's scared," Liz says. She's watching me, that expression in her eyes like the laughter behind them is about to come pushing out. The others look at me, and my heart races. "I'm not." In Angel's eyes I see a flash of cold. Scared people make her moody, like they remind her of something she wants to forget. "Scared of what?" she says. "I'm not." Across the square, Silas adjusts the bandage over his eyes. Where is this woman he fought for? I wonder. Why isn't she with him now? "I don't know," Liz says. "What're you scared of, Tally?" I look right at Liz. There's a glittery challenge in her eyes but also something else, like she's scared, too. She hates me, I think. We're friends, but she hates me. Irish tokes from the joint in the loudest way, like it's a tube connecting him to the last bit of oxygen on earth. When he exhales, his face gets white. "What's she scared of?" he says, and laughs faintly. "The world's a bloody terrifying place." ******** At home that night I can't eat. I'm too thin, like a little girl, even thought I'm fourteen. Angel loves to eat, and I know that's how you get a figure, but my body feels too small. It can't hold anything extra. "How was school?" my stepmother asks. "Fine." "Where have you been since then?" "With Angel and those guys. Hanging around." No one seems to notice my Southern accent. My father looks up. "Hanging around doing what?" "Homework." "They're in biology together," my stepmother explains. Across the table the twins begin to whimper. As he leans over their baby heads my father's face goes soft--I see it even through his beard. The twins are three years old, with bright red hair. Tomorrow I'll tie up my shirt, I think, like Angel did. So what if my stomach is white? "I'm spending the night tomorrow," I say. "At Angel's." He wipes applesauce from the babies' mouths. I can't tell if he means to refuse or is just distracted. "Tomorrow's Saturday," I tell him, just in case. ******** We spend all day at Angel's, preparing. Her mom went to Mexico with the band she plays violin for, and won't be back for a month. Candles, powdered incense from the Mystic Eye, on Broadway, a paint set, sheets of creamy paper, Pink Floyd records stacked by the stereo, and David Bowie, and Todd Rundgren, and "Help Me," of course--Joni Mitchell's new hit, which we worship. Angel lives six blocks from Union Square in a big apartment south of Market Street, with barely any walls. A foil pyramid hangs from the ceiling over her bed. All day we keep checking the square for Irish, but he's disappeared. At sundown we go ahead without him. Candles on the windowsills, the white rug vacuumed. We cut the pills with a knife, and each of us takes one-third of all three so we're sure to get the same dose. I'm terrified. It seems wrong that such a tiny thing could do so much. But I feel Liz watching me, waiting for one wrong move, and I swallow in silence. Then we wait. Angel does yoga, arching her back, pressing her palms to the floor with her arms bent. I've never seen anyone so limber. The hair rushes from her head in a flood of black, like it could stain the rug. Liz's eyes don't move from her. When the acid starts to work, we all lie together on her mother's huge four-poster bed, Angel in the middle. She holds one of our hands in each of hers. Angel has the kind of skin that tans in a minute, and beautiful, snaking veins. I feel the blood moving in her. We wave our hands above our faces and watch them leave trails. I feel Angel warm beside me and think how I'll never love anyone this much, how without her I would disappear. ******** The city at night is full of lights and water and hills like piles of sand. We struggle to climb them. Empty cable cars totter past. The sky is a sheet of black paper with tiny holes poked in it. The Chinatown sidewalks smell like salt and flesh. It's 3 A.M. Planes drift overhead like strange fish. Market Street, a steamy puddle at every curb. We find our way down alleys, our crazy eyes making diamonds of the shattered glass that covers the streets and sidewalks. Nothing touches us. We float under the orange streetlamps. My father, the twins--everything but Angel and Liz and me just fades into nothing, the way the night used to disappear when my real mother tucked me into bed, years ago. In the Broadway Tunnel I grab for the spray cans. "Let me," I cry, breathless. Angel and Liz are too stoned to care. We have green and silver. I hold one can in each fist, shake them up, and spray huge round letters, like jaws ready to swallow me. I breathe in the paint fumes and they taste like honey. Tiny dots of cool paint fall on my face and eyelashes and stay there. Traffic ricochets past, but I don't care tonight--I don't care. In the middle of painting I turn to Angel and Liz and cry, "This is it, this is it!" and they nod excitedly, like they already knew, and then I start to cry. We hug in the Broadway Tunnel. "This is it," I sob, clinging to Angel and Liz, their warm shoulders. I hear them crying, too, and think, It will be like this always. From now on, nothing can divide us. It seems like hours before I notice the paint cans still in my hands and finish the job. SISTERS OF THE MOON. It blazes. ******** We make our way to Union Square. Lo and behold, there is Irish, holding court with a couple of winos and a girl named Pamela, who I've heard is a prostitute. Irish looks different tonight--he's got big, swashbuckling sleeves that flap like sails in the wind. He's grand. As we walk toward him, blinking in the liquidy light, an amazement at his greatness overwhelms us. He is a great man, Irish. We're lucky to know him. ******** Irish scoops Angel into his arms. "My beloved," he says. "I've been waiting all night for you." And he kisses her full on the lips--a deep, long kiss that Angel seems at first to resist. Then she relaxes, like always. I feel a small, sharp pain, like a splinter of glass in my heart. But I'm not surprised. It was always going to happen, I think. We were always waiting. Angel and Irish draw apart and look at each other. Liz hovers near them. Pamela gets up and walks away, into the shadows. I sit on the bench with the winos and stare up at the St. Francis Hotel. "You're high," Irish says to Angel. "So very high." "What about you? Your pupils are gone," she says. Irish laughs. He laughs and laughs, opening up his mouth like the world could fit in it. Irish might live on the streets, but his teeth are white. "I'll see you in Heaven," he says. On the St. Francis Hotel the glass elevators float. Two reach the top, and two more rise slowly to join them. They hang there, all four, and I hold my breath as the fifth approaches and will the others not to move until it gets there. I keep perfectly still, pushing the last one up with my eyes until it reaches the top, and they are, in a perfect line, all five. I turn to show Angel and Liz, but they're gone. I see them walking away with Irish, Angel in the middle, Liz clutching at her arm like the night could pull them apart. It's Liz who looks back at me. Our eyes meet, and I feel like she's talking out loud, I understand so perfectly. If I move fast, now, I can keep her from winning. But the thought makes me tired. I don't move. Liz turns away. I think I see a bouncing in her steps, but I stay where I am. They turn to ghosts in the darkness and vanish. My teeth start to chatter. It's over. Angel is gone, I think, and I start to cry. She just walked away. Then I hear a rushing noise. It's a sound like time passing, years racing past, so all of a sudden I'm much older, a grown-up woman looking back to when she was a girl in Union Square. And I realize that even if Angel never thinks of me again, at some point I'll get up and take the bus home. The winos have drifted off. By my Mickey Mouse watch it's 5 A.M. I notice someone crossing the square--it's Silas, the dirty bandage still around his head. I yell out to him. He comes over slowly, like it hurts to walk. He sits down next to me. For a long time we just sit, not talking. Finally I ask, "Was it really over a woman?" Silas shakes his head. "Just a fight," he says. "Just another stupid fight." I straighten my legs so that my sneakers meet in front of me. They're smudged but still white. "I'm hungry," I say. "Me, too," Silas says. "But everything's closed." Then he says, "I'm leaving town." "To where?" "South Carolina. My brother's store. Called him up today." "How come?" "Had enough," he says. "Just finally had enough." I know there's something I should say, but I don't know what. "Is he nice," I ask, "your brother?" Silas grins. I see the young part of him then, the kind of mischief boys have. "He's the meanest bastard I know." "What about Irish?" I ask. "Won't you miss Irish and those guys?" "Irish is a dead man." I stare at Silas. "Believe it," he says. "In twenty years no one will remember him." Twenty years. In twenty years I'd be thirty-four years old, my stepmother's age. It would be 1994. And suddenly I think, Silas is right--Irish is dead. And Angel, too, and maybe even Liz. Right now is their perfect, only time. It will sweep them away. But Silas was always outside it. I put my hand in my pocket and find the thimble. I pull it out. "You gave me this," I tell him. Silas looks at the thimble like he's never seen it. The he says, "That's real silver." Maybe he wants it back to sell, for his trip to South Carolina. I leave the thimble in my hand so that if Silas wants it he can just take it. But he doesn't. We both look at the thimble. "Thanks," I say. We lean back on the bench. My high is wearing off. I have a feeling in my chest like feathers, like a bird waking up and brushing against my ribs. The elevators rise and fall, like signals. "Always watching," Silas says, looking at me. "Those big eyes, always moving." I nod, ashamed. "But I never do anything," I say. And all of a sudden I know, I know why Angel left me. Silas frowns. "Sure you do. You watch," he says, "which is what'll save you." I shrug. But the longer we sit, the more I realize he's right--what I do is watch. I'm like Silas, I think. In twenty years I'll still be alive. On one side the sky is getting light, like a lid is being lifted up. I watch it, trying to see the day coming, but I can't. All of a sudden the sky is just bright. "I wonder what people will look like in 1994," I say. Silas considers. "Twenty years? Probably look like us again." "Like you and me?" I'm disappointed. "Oh yeah," Silas says with a wry grin. "Wishing they'd been here the first time." I look at the blue bandanna tied around his wrist, his torn-up jeans and army jacket with a Grateful Dead skull on one pocket. When I'm thirty-four, tonight will be a million years ago, I think--the St. Francis Hotel and the rainy palm tree sounds, Silas with the bandage on his head--and this makes me see how everything now is precious, how someday I'll know I was lucky to be here. "I'll remember Irish," I say loudly. "I'll remember everyone. In twenty years." Silas looks at me curiously. Then he touches my face, tracing my left cheekbone almost to my ear. His finger is warm and rough, and I have the thought that to Silas my skin must feel soft. He studies the paint on the tip of his finger, and smiles. He shows me. "Silver," he says.

The Invisible Circus

teameight — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:12:29 +0000

She'd missed it, Phoebe knew by the silence. Crossing the lush, foggy park, she heard nothing but the drip of condensation running from ferns and palm leaves. By the time she reached the field, its vast emptiness came as no surprise. The grass was a brilliant, jarring green. Debris covered it, straws, crushed cigarettes, a few sodden blankets abandoned to the mud. Phoebe shoved her hands in her pockets and crossed the grass, stepping over patches of bare mud. A ring of trees encircled the field, coastal trees, wind-bent and gnarled yet still symmetrical, like figures straining to balance heavy trays. At the far end of the field several people in army jackets were dismantling a bandstand. They carried its parts through the trees to a road, where Phoebe saw the dark shape of a truck. She approached a man and woman with long coils of orange electrical cord dangling from their arms. Phoebe waited politely for the two to finish talking, but they seemed not to notice her. Timidly she turned to another man, who carried a plank across his arms. "Excuse me," she said. "Did I miss it?" "You did," he said. "It was yesterday. Noon to midnight." He squinted at her as if the sun were out. He looked vaguely familiar, and Phoebe wondered if he might have known her sister. She was always wondering that. "I thought it was today," she said uselessly. "Yeah, about half the posters were printed wrong." He grinned, his eyes a bright, chemical blue, like sno-cones. It was June 18, a Saturday. Ten years before, in 1968, a "Festival of Moons" had allegedly happened on this same field. "Revival of Moons," the posters promised, and Phoebe had juggled her shifts at work and come eagerly, anxious to relive what she'd failed to live even once. "So, how was it?" she asked. "Underattended." He laughed sardonically. "I'm glad it wasn't just me," she said. The guy set down his plank and ran a hand across his eyes. Blunt, straight blond hair fell to his shoulders. "Man," he said, "you look a lot like this girl I used to know." Startled, Phoebe glanced at him. He was squinting again. "Like, exactly like her." She stared at his face. "Catnip," she said, surprising herself. He took a small step away. "You were friends with Faith O'Connor, right?" Phoebe said, excited now. "Well, I'm her sister." Catnip looked away, then back at Phoebe. He shook his head. She remembered him now, though he'd seemed much bigger before. And beautiful--that intense, fragile beauty you saw sometimes in high school guys, but never in men. Girls couldn't resist him, hence his name. He was staring at Phoebe. "I can't believe this," he said. While Catnip went to extricate himself from the work crew, Phoebe struggled to catch her breath. For years she'd imagined this, a friend of Faith's recognizing her now, grown up--how much like her sister she looked. Together she and Catnip crossed the field. Phoebe felt nervous. There were blond glints of beard on his face. "So you're what, in high school now?" he asked. "I graduated," Phoebe said. "Last week, actually." She hadn't attended the ceremony. "Well, I'm Kyle. No one's called me Catnip in years," he said wistfully. "How old are you?" "Twenty-six. Yourself?" "Eighteen." "Eighteen," he said, and laughed. "Shit, when I was eighteen, twenty-six sounded geriatric." Kyle had just finished his second year of law school. "Monday I start my summer job," he said, and with two fingers mimed a pair of scissors snipping off his hair. "Really? They make you cut it?" It sounded like the Army. "They don't have to," he said. "You've already done it." Traffic sounds grew louder as they neared the edge of Golden Gate Park. Phoebe felt like a child left alone with one of Faith's friends, the uneasy job of holding their interest. "Do you ever think about those times?" she asked. "You know, with my sister?" There was a pause. "Sure," Kyle said. "Sure I do." "Me too." "She's incredibly real to me. Faith," he said. "I think about her constantly," said Phoebe. Kyle nodded. "She was your sister." By the time they reached Haight Street, the fog was beginning to shred, exposing blue wisps of sky. Phoebe thought of mentioning that she worked only two blocks away--would be there right now if not for the Revival of Moons--but this seemed of no consequence. "I live around here," Kyle said. "How about some coffee?" His apartment, on Cole Street, was a disappointment. Phoebe had hoped to enter a time warp, but a sleek charcoal couch and long glass coffee table dominated the living room. On the walls, abstract lithographs appeared to levitate inside Plexiglas frames. Still, a prism dangled from one window, and tie-dyed cushions scattered the floor. Phoebe noticed a smell of cloves or pepper, some odor familiar from years before. She sat on the floor, away from the charcoal couch. When Kyle shed his army jacket, Phoebe noticed through his T-shirt how muscular he was. He took a joint from a Lucite cigarette holder on the coffee table and fired it up, then lowered himself to the floor. "You know," he croaked, holding in smoke as he passed the joint to Phoebe, "a bunch of times I thought about dropping by you and your mom's. Just see how you were doing." "You should've done it," Phoebe said. She was eyeing the joint, worrying whether or not to smoke. Getting high made her deeply anxious, had paralyzed her more than once in a viselike fear that she was about to drop dead. But she thought of her sister, how eagerly Faith had reached for everything--how Kyle would expect this of Phoebe. She took a modest hit. Kyle was bent at his stereo, stacking records on a turntable. Surrealistic Pillow came on, the rich, eerie voice of Grace Slick. "She remarried or anything, your mom?" he asked, resuming his seat. "Oh no," Phoebe said, half laughing. "No." As Kyle watched her through the smoke, she grew self-conscious. "I guess that phase in her life is kind of over," she explained. He shook his head. "Too bad." "No, she doesn't mind," Phoebe said, wondering as she spoke if she knew this for sure. "She's sort of past the age of romance." Kyle frowned, toking on the joint. "How old could she be?" "Her birthday's next weekend, actually. Forty-seven." He burst out laughing, spewing smoke and then coughing with abandon. "Forty-seven," he said, recovering himself. "That's not old, Phoebe." She stared at him, stunned by his laughter. "I didn't say she was old," she said. The pot was confusing her. Kyle's eyes lingered on Phoebe. Smoke hung on the air in folds, dissolving slowly like cream into coffee. "What about you?" he said. "How've you been?" "Fine, thanks," she said guardedly. By the time they finished the joint, the room seemed to pulsate directly against Phoebe's eyeballs. Her heartbeat echoed. The pillows exhaled a cinnamon smell when she leaned back. Kyle stretched out flat, hands cradling his head, legs crossed at the ankles. "I want to talk about it," he said, his eyes closed, "but I don't know how to." "Me too," Phoebe said. "I never do." Kyle opened one eye. "Not even with your mom? Your brother?" "I don't know why," Phoebe said. "We used to." "Plastic Fantastic Lover" came on, meandering and druggy, invading Phoebe's mind with fluorescent splashes of color. They listened in silence. "So...did you ever find out what happened?" Kyle said at last. "You mean, how she died?" "Yeah. How it happened exactly." As always when the subject turned to Faith, some pressure inside Phoebe relaxed. She took long, peaceful breaths. "Well, everyone says she jumped." Kyle sighed. "In Italy, right?" Phoebe nodded. After a pause she asked, "Do you believe it?" "I don't know," Kyle said. "I mean, the way I heard it--you'd know better than me--it would've been pretty hard to fall there by accident." "Except no one saw." Kyle raised himself on his elbows and looked at Phoebe. She gazed back at him, very stoned, trying to pinpoint what exactly had changed about Kyle since the old days. "But I mean, why?" he said. "You know--why?" He looked so earnest, as if he were the first person ever to pose the question in quite this way. It made Phoebe laugh, softly at first, then convulsively, tears running from her eyes. "I'm sorry," she said, wiping them on her sleeve. Her nose was running. "Sorry." Kyle touched her arm. "I just wondered what the story was," he said. "Yeah," Phoebe said, sniffling. "Me too." Laughing had relieved her, the way crying did. "You think it was an accident," Kyle said. "I'm not sure." He nodded. The subject was closed, somehow. Phoebe felt as if she'd lost a chance. It was her own fault, she thought, for laughing. They drifted into silence. Phoebe's thumb and middle finger were sticky with resin. Kyle relit the roach, and when he handed it over, she smoked without hesitation. Finally Kyle let the nub of roach drop to the floor and sat cross-legged, the fingers of one hand pressed to the other. "You look like her," he said. "I guess you hear that a lot." "I don't hear it," Phoebe said, confused as to why. "Because"--she laughed, realizing--"well, I mean, no one sees us together." Kyle smacked his forehead, clearly mortified. "But I wish they did," Phoebe said. "Say that." He left her, crossing the room to the window. Phoebe stretched, reaching toward the ceiling in her painter's pants and desert boots so the muscles pulled at her ribs. She was very stoned, but today it seemed all right. She even felt a loopy sort of confidence as she lay on her side, watching Kyle squint through his prism. A nylon thread attached it to the window. He twisted it, scattering smudges of rainbow light. King Crimson's song "Moonchild" came on. "I just had a weird feeling," Kyle said. "What?" "I thought, if you told me right now you were Faith, I bet I'd believe you." Phoebe turned her face away to hide her pleasure. She still wore Faith's clothing sometimes, frayed jeans and lacy flea-market blouses, a crushed velvet jacket with star-shaped buttons. Nothing quite fit. Her sister had been thinner, or taller, her black hair longer--something. Try as Phoebe might to bridge the gap between herself and Faith, some difference always remained. But one day that difference would vanish, she believed, part of a larger transformation Phoebe was constantly awaiting. She had thought it would come by graduation. "I'm leaving for Europe pretty soon," she lied, seized by a desire to impress and dazzle Kyle. "A long trip." "Oh yeah?" he said from the window. "Where to?" "I'm not sure. I thought I'd just go, you know? Kind of be spontaneous." There was some truth in this; Phoebe did intend to go one day to Europe, retrace her sister's steps. She had always known it. But she'd enrolled at Berkeley for the fall semester, chosen five courses and even dorm space. "I'm all for spontaneity," Kyle said, sounding envious. So had their father been. In his will he'd tried to ensure it, providing Faith and Phoebe and Barry five thousand dollars each after high school, to explore the world. "Do it first," he'd said, "before you get tied down. Do things you'll tell stories about the rest of your lives." "Just go, you know?" Phoebe said, losing herself in the lie. "Just take off." Kyle moved to where she lay, his bare feet sticking on the polished floor. A knee cracked as he eased himself on the cushions beside her. Phoebe shut her eyes. "You're beautiful," he said, touching her face. Phoebe opened her eyes and quickly shut them. She felt giddy, as if the room, like Kyle's prism, were twisting on a nylon string. He leaned down, kissing her mouth. Phoebe kissed him back, some blind part of herself rushing forward. She was still a virgin. Kyle's mouth had a sweet, applesauce taste. He adjusted the cushions and stretched out beside her. As he touched Phoebe's breasts through her T-shirt, she sensed his confidence, and it helped her relax. Kyle took her head in his hands, his palms cool at her temples, and Phoebe heard behind her covered ears a rushing, seashell noise. Kyle eased himself on top of her. She clung to the muscles along his spine, the heat from his body seeping through Phoebe's clothes to her skin. The coiled strength of his stomach moved gently as he breathed; his erection pressed her thigh. She opened her eyes to look at him. But Kyle's own eyes were clenched shut, as if he were making a wish. "Wait--wait," Phoebe said, squirming out from beneath him. Kyle resisted her at first, then sprang to his feet as if a stranger had entered the room. Phoebe heard his shallow breathing. She sat curled like an egg, chin on her knees. Kyle moved to the couch and hunched at one end. "Shit," he said. But Phoebe had lost track of him. There was something she needed to remember. She shut her eyes, forehead pressed to her knees, and saw Faith and her friends swallow tiny squares of paper and sometime later start laughing, crazy weeping laughter that in Faith soon turned to helpless sobbing in her boyfriend's arms--"Wolf" he was called for his brown skin and white teeth, brown hands on her sister's head, "Shhh," stroking her hair as if Faith were a cat, "Shhh." Shirtless under a soft leather vest, his brown stomach muscles reminding Phoebe of the shapes on a turtle's shell. And then Faith was kissing him, Phoebe watching, uneasy. "Come on," Faith said, and tried to stand, but she couldn't; she was sick, her eyes feverish. "Come on." Kissing, kissing, but Wolf saw Phoebe crouched beside him, and their eyes locked. "Faith, wait," he said. "Babe, hold on." But finally he helped her up, Phoebe creeping behind them into the hall, where they tottered to the far end, her mother's white bedroom door swinging shut behind them. Then silence. Phoebe waited in the hall for the door to open up again, growing frightened as the minutes passed--her sister was sick, could hardly walk! After their father got sick that door was always shut, sweet medicine smells in the hallway. Phoebe threw herself down on the rug and lay there in a kind of trance, the white door burning a hole through her head until finally after what seemed like hours she ran at the door sobbing, cool smooth paint against her cheek, but still she didn't turn the knob. She was too afraid. Then footsteps. Phoebe jumped back as Faith opened the door, her sister's eyes wide and black, drops of water sticking to her lashes. Hugging Phoebe close, "Baby," rocking her gently, "Baby, baby, what's happened to you?" Smelling of soap--had she only been taking a shower? And Wolf, the hero, watching Phoebe with such pain in his face, as if he'd hurt her. No, Phoebe wanted to say, no, no, but how could she speak when she understood nothing, when everyone was mysterious? Now Phoebe looked at Kyle, miles away on the couch. It was always this way--something she needed to remember pulling her back, like an undertow. A white door sealing her off, reminding Phoebe that her present life was unreal and without significance. What mattered was hidden from sight. At times she hated remembering, wanted nothing in the world but to rush forward into something of her own, lose herself in it. But this wasn't possible. The only way forward was through that door. "Do you miss her?" Phoebe said into the silence. Kyle groaned up from the couch and sprayed water on the leaves of several spindly marijuana plants leaning toward an ultraviolet bulb. Delicate threads tied them to stakes. "Sometimes I feel like she's still back there," he said. "In that time. I miss it like hell." "Me too," Phoebe said, an ache in her chest. "Even if I wasn't really there." "Sure you were there." "No. I was a kid." There was a long pause. "I wasn't there, either," Kyle said. "Not totally." "What do you mean?" "I kept circling, circling, but I never quite hit it." This admission made Phoebe uneasy. "You were there, Kyle," she assured him. "You were definitely there." He grinned, seeming heartened. He sprayed his mister into the air, granules of vapor catching the light as they fell. Phoebe heard the cannon, fired each day at five o'clock from the Presidio military base. "I better go," she said, wobbling to her feet. One of her legs was asleep. It was 1978. Faith's boyfriend Wolf lived in Europe now. Phoebe's mother hadn't heard from him in years. Kyle waited, hands in his pockets. "I'll give you a call." "Okay," Phoebe said, knowing he wouldn't. She walked carefully down the macadam steps to the street, gripping the rail. Sunlight glittered in the trees. There was a distant cable car prattle, silence around it. "Hey," she heard overhead. Kyle was leaning out his window. "I forgot, I wanted to five you something in case you get to Munich. I've got a cousin over there." Phoebe shielded here eyes. She'd forgotten her Europe story, and was startled now to hear it repeated as fact. "C'mon back," Kyle said. Phoebe retraced her steps. Kyle handed her a joint wrapped in fluorescent pink rolling paper. It felt dry and light in her hand. "Tell him it's the same stuff we smoked at Christmas," he said, copying from an address book onto the back of a receipt. "Steven + Ingrid Lake," Phoebe read, with an address. The telephone number seemed short on digits. She rolled the joint carefully inside the address and slipped it in her wallet. "Tell Steve to stay clear of the anthills," Kyle said, laughing in the doorway. "He'll understand." Descending the stairs a second time, Phoebe felt a curious excitement. As far as Kyle knew, she was going to Europe--next week, tomorrow--and this thought amazed Phoebe, thrilled her with a sense that anything might happen. On the street she looked up. Kyle was watching her from his window again, absently touching the prism. "When are you leaving?" he said. "Soon," she said, almost laughing. "Next week, maybe." She turned to go. "Send me a postcard," he called. Phoebe found herself smiling at the bony Victorian houses. Europe, she thought. Birds, white stone, long dark bridges. Going all the places Faith had ----exactly, one by one. Her sister's postcards still lay stacked in a shoebox underneath the bed. Phoebe recalled awaiting them feverishly, right from the day her sister and Wolf had first left, a summer day not unlike this one. They'd driven to the airport in Wolf's truck, with a girl who'd already paid him for it. Phoebe had stood on the sidewalk a long time after they'd gone, wondering what would happen to them. She'd been wondering ever since. Her sister died on November 21, 1970, on the rocks below Corniglia, a tiny village on the west coast of northern Italy. She was seventeen; Phoebe was ten. Traces of drugs were found in Faith's body, speed, LSD, but not enough that she would have been high at the time. If her neck hadn't been broken, they said, she might have lived. If Phoebe could string together the hours she'd spent circling this event, they would surely total years. She lost herself in these contemplations, her own life falling away like a husk as she sank into the rich, bottomless well of her sister's absence. And the longer Phoebe circled, the more certain she became that a great misunderstanding was at work; that if Faith had taken her life, she'd done it without a hint of the failure or hopelessness the word "suicide" implied. When Phoebe thought of her sister's death, it was always with a curious lilt to her heart, as if Faith had been lifted into some more spectacular realm, a place so remote she could reach it only by forfeiting her life. Like kicking away a ladder. Where was the failure in that? Phoebe's mother, Gail, had flown to Italy and returned with Faith's ashes in a box. She and Phoebe and Barry scattered them from the clifftops near the Golden Gate Bridge, a place where their family used to picnic. Phoebe remembered staring in disbelief at the silty, uneven chunks, like debris left in a fireplace. Her hands had been sweating, and as she tossed fistfuls into the wind, the finest powder stuck in the creases of her palms. No matter how hard Phoebe shook, the powder remained. Afterward she'd locked the door to her room and gazed for a long time at her open hands. The house was quiet. Phoebe stuck out her tongue and lightly ran its tip along her palm. The taste was sour, salty. Horrified, Phoebe fled to the bathroom and scoured her hands and mouth in the sink, staring into the toilet and willing herself to be sick. Lately she'd wondered if what she tasted that day was her own sweat. A white door at the end of a hallway. "Come on," Faith had said, reaching for Wolf. They closed it behind them. Phoebe pacing outside, driving her toes deep into the soft rug. Terrified--of what? That her sister was gone. That the door would never open. That when it finally did, she would find herself alone in a bright, empty room.

Look At Me

teameight — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:05:19 +0000

After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see. In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through space like being on the Tilt'o'Whirl (always a favorite of mine), feeling my body move faster than, and counter to, the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the windshield into the open air, bloody and frightened and uncomprehending. The truth is that I don't remember anything. The accident happened at night during an August downpour on a deserted stretch of highway through corn and soybean fields, about twenty miles outside Rockford, Illinois, my home town. I hit the brakes and my face collided with the windshield, knocking me out instantly. Thus I was spared the adventure of my car veering off the tollway into a cornfield, rolling several times, bursting into flames and ultimately exploding. The air bags didn't inflate; I could sue, of course, but since I wasn't wearing my seatbelt, it's probably a good thing they didn't inflate, or I might have been decapitated, adding injury to insult, you might say. The shatter-proof windshield did indeed hold fast upon its impact with my head, so although I broke virtually every bone in my face, I have almost no visible scars. I owe my life to what is known as a "Good Samaritan," someone who pulled me out of the flaming wreck so promptly that only my hair was burned, someone who laid me gently on the perimeter of the cornfield, called an ambulance, described my location with some precision and then, with a self-effacement that strikes me as perverse, not to mention un-American, chose to slink away anonymously rather than take credit for these sterling deeds. A passing motorist in a hurry, that sort of thing. The ambulance took me to Rockford Memorial Hospital, where I fell into the hands of one Dr. Hans Fabermann, reconstructive surgeon extraordinaire. When I emerged from unconsciousness fourteen hours later, it was Dr. Fabermann who sat beside me, an elderly man with a broad, muscular jaw and tufts of white hair in both ears, though most of this I didn't see that night--I could hardly see at all. Calmly Dr. Fabermann explained that I was lucky; I'd broken ribs, arm, and leg, but had no internal injuries to speak of. My face was in the midst of what he called a "golden time," before the "grotesque swelling" would set in. If he operated immediately, he could get a jump on my "gross asymmetry--" namely, the disconnection of my cheekbones from my upper skull and of my lower jaw from my "midface." I had no idea where I was, or what had happened to me. My face was numb, I saw with slurry double vision and had an odd sensation around my mouth as if my upper and lower teeth were out of whack. I felt a hand on mine, and realized then that my sister, Grace, was at my bedside. I sensed the vibration of her terror, and it induced in me a familiar desire to calm her, Grace curled against me in bed during a thunderstorm, the smell of cedar, wet leaves...It's fine, I wanted to say. It's a golden time. "If we don't operate now, we'll have to wait five or six days for the swelling to go down," Dr. Fabermann said. I tried to speak, to acquiesce, but no moving parts of my head would move. I produced one of those aerated gurgles made by movie characters expiring from war wounds. Then I closed my eyes. But apparently Dr. Fabermann understood, because he operated that night. * * * * * After twelve hours of surgery, during which eighty titanium screws were implanted in the crushed bones of my face to connect and hold them together; after I'd been sliced from ear to ear over the crown of my head so Dr. Fabermann could peel down the skin from my forehead and re-attach my cheekbones to my upper skull; after incisions were made inside my mouth so that he could connect my lower and upper jaws; after eleven days during which my sister fluttered by my hospital bed like a squeamish angel while her husband, Frank Jones, whom I loathed and who loathed me, stayed home with my two nieces and nephew--I was discharged from the hospital. I found myself at a strange crossroads. I had spent my youth awaiting the chance to bolt from Rockford, Illinois, and had done so the moment I was able. I'd visited rarely, to the chagrin of my parents and sister, and what visits I made were impetuous, cranky and short. In my real life, as I thought of it, I had actively concealed my connection to Rockford, telling people I was from Chicago, if I told even that. But much as I longed to return to New York after the accident, to pad barefoot on the fluffy white carpeting of my 25th floor apartment overlooking the East River, the fact that I lived alone made this impossible. My right leg and left arm were sheathed in plaster. My face was just entering the "angry healing phase": black bruises extending down to my chest, the whites of my eyes a monstrous red; a swollen, basketball-sized head with stitches across the crown (an improvement over the staples they'd used initially). My head was partly shaved, and what hair remained was singed, rank smelling and falling out in bunches. Pain, mercifully, wasn't a problem; nerve damage had left me mostly numb, particularly from my eyes down, though I did have excruciating headaches. I wanted to stay near Dr. Fabermann, though he insisted, with classic Midwestern self deprecation, that I would find his surgical equal, or superior, in New York. But New York was for the strong, and I was weak--so weak! I slept nearly all of the time. It seemed fitting that I nurse my weakness in a place I had always associated with the lame and the useless. And so, to the bewilderment of my friends and colleagues at home, to the pain of my sister, whose husband refused to have me under his roof (not that I could have borne it), she arranged for me to move into the home of an old friend of our parents', Mary Cunningham, who lived just east of the Rock River on Ridgewood Road, near the house where we grew up. My parents had long since moved to Arizona, where my father's lungs were slowly dissolving from emphysema, and where my mother had come to believe in the power of certain oddly shaped stones, which she arranged on his gasping chest at night while he slept. "Please let me come," my mother pleaded with me over the phone, having assembled healing pouches full of herbs and feathers and teeth. But no, I said, please. Stay with Dad. "I'll be fine," I told her, "Grace will take care of me," and even through my croaking stranger's voice I heard a resolve that was familiar to me--and no doubt to my mother. I would take care of myself. I always had. Mrs. Cunningham had become an old woman since I knew her as the lady who used a broom to chase away neighborhood kids trying to scoop the billowing goldfish from her murky backyard pond. The fish, or their descendants, were still there, visible in flashes of white speckled gold among a snarl of moss and lily pads. The house smelled of dust and dead flowers, the closets were full of old hats. The lives of Mrs. Cunningham's dead husband and her children who lived far away were still in that house, asleep in the cedar filled attic, which is doubtless why she, an old ��jX��jX�jX�+�jX��jX��jX@��jXed, bridge-playing friends had decamped long ago to spiffy apartments. She tucked me into bed in one of her daughter's rooms and seemed to enjoy a renaissance of second motherhood, bringing me tea and juice which I drank from a baby cup, slipping knitted booties on my feet and feeding me Gerber Apricot Puree, which I lapped down lustily. She had the lawn boy carry the TV up to my room, and in the evenings would recline on the twin bed beside mine, her waxen, veiny calves exposed beneath the hem of her padded bathrobe. Together we watched the local news, where I learned that even in Rockford, drug gangs had come to rule the streets, and drive-by shootings were the norm. "When I think what this town used to be," Mrs. Cunningham would mutter as she watched, alluding to the postwar years when she and her husband, Ralph, had chosen Rockford above all American cities as the ideal place to make their home. "The most prosperous community in the nation," some erstwhile pundit named Roger Babson had apparently anointed it; Mary Cunningham went so far as to heft a musty tome onto my bed and jab her bent, trembling finger at the very quotation. I sensed her bitterness, her disgust at the grave miscalculation that left her now, in her solitude, obliged by memory and experience to love a place she had come to despise. * * * * * It was four weeks before I left the house to do anything more than herd my various limbs into Grace's car for visits to Dr. Fabermann and his associate, Dr. Pine, who was tending to my broken bones. When he implanted a walking plug in my leg cast, I ventured outside for the very first time in zebra striped sunglasses Mary Cunningham had worn in the sixties, Mary herself at my side, to walk gingerly through my old neighborhood. I hadn't returned to this part of town since Grace had left for college, at which point my parents had bought a smaller place on a bit of land east of town, near the Interstate, and a horse, Daffodil, whom my father rode until he was too short of breath. By now it was late September; I had tracked the passing days in the obsessive belief that if I measured the time, it wouldn't really be lost. We stepped through a warm breeze toward the house on Brownwood Drive where I had lain in bed for several thousand nights, staring into a cat's cradle of Elm trees that were slowly expiring from Dutch Elm disease, where I'd listened to record albums in a basement with orange indoor-outdoor carpeting laid over the concrete, where I'd stood before a mirror in a prom dress, my mother plucking at its petals of rayon--and yet, for all that, a house I'd thought of hardly ever since I'd left. And there it was: flat, ranch style, covered with yellow bricks that must have been pasted on from outside, a square of crisp green lawn tucked like a napkin under its chin. So indistinguishable was this house from tens of thousands of others in Rockford that I turned to Mary Cunningham and asked, "Are you sure this is it?" She looked puzzled, then laughed, no doubt reminding herself that my vision was worse than hers at the moment, that I was doped up on painkillers. And yet, as we were turning to go, I had what I guess was a memory: this house against a dawn sky as I jogged toward it from my best friend Ellen Metcalf's house, where I'd spent the night. The feeling of seeing it there--my house, with everything I knew inside it. The experience of that memory was like being hit, or kissed, unexpectedly. I blinked to recover from it. The next week, I made my way on crutches to the Rock River, where a park and jogging path meandered along the water's eastern edge. I gazed hungrily at the path, longing to visit the rose garden and duck pond further north along it, but knowing I didn't have the strength. Instead, I used a pay phone in the parking lot beside the YMCA to call my answering machine; Mrs. Cunningham's phones were all rotaries. It had now been seven weeks since the accident, and the outgoing message I'd instructed my sister to leave on my machine explaining my plight while not revealing that I'd left my apartment--lest it get robbed, which would really have finished me--had provoked a rash of messages from worried friends that Grace had been dutifully collecting. But there were a couple she hadn't retrieved yet. One from Oscar, my booker, who yelled through a polyphony of ringing phones that seemed otherworldly to me now, "Just checking in, Sweet. Call when you've regained the gift of speech." He'd been calling every day, my sister said. Oscar adored me, though it had been years since I'd earned my agency, Femme, any serious money. The second call was from someone named Anthony Halliday, who identified himself as a private detective. Grace had taken two messages from him already. Having never spoken with a private detective before, I dialed his number out of curiosity. "Anthony Halliday's office." A wobbly, almost childish female voice. Not a professional, I thought; someone filling in. "He's not here right now," she told me. "Can I take a message?" I wasn't giving out Mary Cunningham's phone number, in part because she was a kind old woman, not my secretary, and because there was something perverse and incompatible in the notion of New York and its inhabitants storming the mausoleum of her house. "I'd rather call him," I said. "What's a good time?" She hesitated. "There's no way he can call you?" "Look," I said. "If he wants to reach--" "He's ah...in the hospital," she said quickly. I laughed--my first real laugh since the accident. It made my throat ache. "Tell him that makes two of us," I cackled. "Too bad we're not in the same hospital, we could just meet in the hallway." She laughed uneasily. "I think I wasn't supposed to say that, about the hospital." "There's no shame in hospitalization," I assured her heartily, "as long as it's not a mental hospital..." Dead silence. Anthony Halliday, a private detective with whom I'd never spoken, was in a mental hospital. "Maybe next week?" she said timidly. "I'll call next week." But even as I began my halting journey back toward Mary Cunningham's, I felt the notion slip from my mind like those lists you make as you're falling asleep. * * * * * Grace visited that night, pulling a chair between the twin beds where Mary Cunningham and I were ensconced as usual, watching "NYPD Blue." When a man was pummeled in a restroom, his face beaten bloody, Grace covered her eyes and begged me to change the channel. "You change it," I retorted. "I'm the invalid." "Sorry," she said, going sheepishly to the TV--apparently one of the last in the world to be controlled manually. "I shouldn't be the one crying." "You're crying for both of us," I said. "It just seems bizarre that you would come to Rockford without telling me," she fretted, flipping channels. She'd said this a dozen times, apparently in the belief that, had she but known I was on my way, I would have arrived without incident. And much as I disliked this line of questioning (or any line of questioning, for that matter), I vastly preferred it to the topic Grace didn't dare broach: What would I look like when all this was done? And what would become of me? "I wanted to surprise you," I said. "My, and you still don't remember what happened!" Mary Cunningham marveled. "Was it an animal in the road, dear, or were you feeling sleepy? Could you have dropped off at the wheel for a minute?" "I don't remember. I don't remember," I said. For some reason, I covered my ears. "Her memory's always been lousy," Grace said. It was true--my memory was lousy, and Rockford was the place I remembered least. And yet the boredom and stasis of my present circumstances were driving me to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped up in an old house will eventually make her way to the attic and upend a few boxes. In moments, I found myself drenched in early childhood impressions of Rockford: a lush, sensuous world of sticky green lawns and violent thunderstorms, mountains of glittering snow in winter. In early adolescence, I'd done a school report on Rockford's industrial achievements, reading at the public library about a self-tying attachment for grain binders, a knitting machine that made seamless socks, the oil lubricated "universal joint," whose purpose I've forgotten; the "side by side," a bookcase and desk combination; about lathes, reapers and their component parts. I remembered reading in a state of keen anticipation, awaiting the moment when Rockford would burst forth in triumph, the envy of the industrial world. I sensed this glory approaching with the invention of cars, for eleven Rockford companies had designed them, and one, the Tarkington Motor Company, built a prototype that was warmly received at an auto show in Chicago in the twenties. But no--the investors backed out, the car was never produced, and with this failure, my excitement began to congeal into something heavier. There was to be no limelight; Rockford remained a city known for its drills, transmissions, joints, saws, watertight seals, adjustable door bumpers, spark plugs, gaskets--"automobile sundries," as such products are known--for its agricultural tools; in short, for dull, invisible things that no one in the world would ever know or care about. After two days of reading, I had tottered from the library into the empty husk of "downtown," across the river from our house, nearly all of whose commerce had been leached away by malls far to the east of the river, out by the Interstate. My mother beeped her horn from the parking lot across the street. But I held still for a minute, clutching my bookbag, letting the smallness and meagerness of this forgotten place pour in around me. Rockford, I now saw, was a city of losers, a place that had never come close to being famous for anything, despite the fact that again and again, it had tried. A place revered among mechanics for its universal joint was not a place where I could remain. This was clear to me at age twelve: my first clear notion of myself. I was not Rockford--I was its opposite, whatever that might be. I decided this while standing in front of the public library. Then I crossed the street and got in my mother's car. Our father was an electrician, a man who pushed through walls to the hidden circuitry behind, who braided wires between his fingers and made the lights turn on. As a child, I had ascribed magical powers to his work, and arrayed myself in necklaces he made me from bolts and washers and colored wire. But after the library, I began to imagine a perspective from which my father's life--and my mother's, too--were small, earnest, and futile, too deeply touched by this place where they both had spent their lives. I grew up waiting to leave. And Grace grew up cleaving to me, knowing that I would go and she would stay. Now here I was, back in Rockford, fighting with my sister over who should change the TV channel, my head full of titanium bolts and screws invented here, for all I knew. I found this funny in a dark way, one of life's little ironies. "The girls are dying to see you," Grace said, reviving our ongoing debate over my nieces. "Please let me bring them." "They think they want to see me," I said. "Charlotte, will you get over it?" she said, and pressed my hand. "They love you so much!" "Not yet." It wasn't that I didn't want to see Allison and Pammy. In fact I hungered to snuff their mussed up hair and feel them bump against me the way kids do without thinking. But to them, I was Glamorous Aunt Charlotte, the fashion model whom they sometimes found grinning, hand on hip, inside catalogs that arrived on their doorsteps unwonted (for that was the level I'd sunk to) or wandering through the background of a Tampax commercial. That was me hawking deodorant on the Coney Island Cyclone ("Now this. Is stress."); that was me in waders, wielding a fishing rod and declaiming the merits of antifungal foot powder. That pixie-faced brunette sprawled atop a Buick as if she'd fallen from a tree? The one in glasses, blushingly recounting the trauma of passing gas during a board meeting? Urging fortified granola upon her freckled son? Those were me, too. It was far short of the transcendent existence I once had envisioned for myself. But to my young nieces, I embodied a mythical ascension. I would let them believe in me in peace, I told myself, unencumbered by my present grotesqueness. I was ashamed to be seen. * * * * * One afternoon, I walked to the Cedar Bluffs Cemetery and parked my rear on a gravestone that was as near as I could recall to the spot where I used to sit with Ellen Metcalf. I lit up a Merit, my first since the accident, thus flouting Dr. Fabermann's warning that smoking impeded the healing of bone. Before dinner and after, too, sometimes, Ellen and I would lean against these stones among the legions of dead Swedes, Olsens, Lofgrens, Larsens, Swensons like myself, and smoke Kools, which we believed were a cure for the summer heat. We talked about losing our virginity--not losing it, though, with all the haplessness that word implied, but yielding it up in a blaze of ecstasy that would leave us permanently altered. I tried to recall the sound of Ellen's voice. I couldn't, as if she'd been an imaginary friend, a projected figment of myself. Once, we had walked from East High School all the way to the pharmacy beside the Piggly Wiggly, then stopped before the section of plastic children's toys. Only to find, as we looked at each other inquiringly, that neither one of us knew what we were doing there; we had each been following the other. After my next doctor's visit, I asked Grace to drive past East High School. A rather grand building, it seemed to me now, large and mustard tinted, hundreds of canted windows juggling the sunlight. As I stood before its broad, empty steps, I had another jab of memory: seeing Ellen Metcalf for the first time outside that school, an olive skinned girl with long black hair. Watching her there, exotic, alone, and wanting to become her--the feeling sprang from my fingers to my throat. Later, Ellen said, of spotting me that day, "I could tell you didn't belong here." The highest compliment. Her father owned a company that made fertilizer, and her mother was a quasi-invalid, cloistered in a darkened master bedroom, consumed by some malady whose exact nature no one seemed sure of. They lived in a sprawling house just a few blocks from my own much smaller one. Ellen existed in a state of lonely hauteur, like the last surviving member of a royal family; her brother, Moose, had left the previous year for the University of Michigan. I knew about Moose. He was one of those high school boys whose athletic and romantic feats inspire the teenage equivalent of epic poetry, recited longingly in their absence. I had encountered him once, briefly, thrillingly, on a summer afternoon when I was practicing my golf swing on our front lawn and hit a sprinkler head, sending a geyser of water into a red Mustang convertible that happened to be driving past. The driver got out, shaking water from his longish hair: an older boy, tanned in a spotless white T-shirt, ambling over the grass like a person who had never hurried in his life. As I stammered my apologies, struggling to tamp the foaming crescendo of water with my foot, he scanned our yard and said, "Handle's where, behind that hedge? Turn it off and let me take a look." By the time I'd returned from that errand, he had removed the sprinkler head and was rattling its rusted parts in his hand like dice. His absorption allowed me to study him; a charmed, confident boy whose appeal was compounded, somehow, by the Neanderthal cast of his head. Twenty minutes later he had repaired the sprinkler, sauntered back to his car and driven away with a wave, and it was only then that an older girl from across the street stampeded over to tell me, breathlessly, in whose rarefied presence I found myself. But Moose was gone. Ellen was alone, marooned in a place that felt as desolate to her as it did to me. Everything good was gone from this crummy city, this home of reapers and ball bearings, and there was nothing for it but to plunder what few excitements remained. We talked about our lust--where e��jX��jX�jX�+�jX��jX��jX@��jXf her mouth. * * * * * By October, Dr. Pine had removed the last vestiges of plaster from my body. As Mary Cunningham raked her yard, I trailed behind her with a tube of green poison whose proboscis I shoved into the eye of each weed I spied, and pumped. Rockford was in the grip of a mania for Jack o'lantern leaf bags; at least one grinning orange sack squatted on every lawn, fat with leaves. Stalking weeds, I tried to recall each one of my sexual quarries that sophomore year with Ellen. Jeff Heinz: a shy and statuesque football playing senior, the sheer grace of whose movements set him apart from the sludge of players on the field. Jeff and I were in chemistry together, and I managed to insinuate my way into the role of lab partner, standing close, brushing his wrist as we puzzled over beakers full of colored liquid. Nothing. Meanwhile, Ellen had a boyfriend, Michael Ippen, with whom she expected to do it shortly. So I relinquished Jeff Heinz, who proceeded to Brown University (an unusual step for a Rockford boy), whence filtered back the electrifying news, a year or two later, that he was a fairy. I would have loved to snicker over that one with Ellen, but by then we were no longer speaking. Benji Gustafsen: blond, sweet, rippled muscles on his belly, the whole of whose intelligence, it seemed, was compressed into a knack for restoring small antique appliances: can openers, toaster ovens, vacuum cleaners. This was a boon for Benji's friends and neighbors; less so for anyone trying to hold a conversation with him. But conversation wasn't my goal, either, and I lost my virginity to Benji in his squalid basement workroom only two days after Ellen lost hers to Michael Ippen on his older brother's squishy bed. We brushed snow from our respective gravestones and perched in the early dark, down parkas pulled tight around us, looking west toward the lights of the expressway that snaked alongside the Rock River. "The bed had a scratchy blanket on it," Ellen remarked. "There were tons of McDonalds wrappers on the floor," I said. "It smelled like catsup." "Did it hurt?" "Killed. Plus I bled." "With all the catsup around," she said, "he probably didn't notice." We passed our last Kool back and forth. Ellen slipped off the gravestone and lay on her back in the snow. "Doesn't that freeze your head?" I asked. "Yeah," she said, "but the stars." I lay down beside her. She was right, the stars. After I'd done it with Benji, an awful sensation had come open in me--who was this guy, stretching like a dog so his spine cracked? But then I'd thought of Ellen, telling it to her, strategizing, and the feeling had melted into a kind of sweetness. Marcus Sealander: a tattooed motorcyclist whose menacing black leather vest concealed, of all things, a potbelly. We did it standing up. Marcus had a nasty habit of shoving my shoulders against the wall as if it excited him to think of snapping my spine, so he got no second chance. Meanwhile, Ellen did it twice with Luis Guasto, a strange boy who'd pasted hundreds of beer cans to the walls of his parents rec. room with a glue gun. They did it downstairs, among the cans, and the first time Ellen thought she might almost, just barely feel something, but then Louis rolled off her and moments later was in the bathroom pissing loudly, so that was that. The second time was even worse--over in four minutes flat. Tom Ashlock. Lenny Bergstrom. Arthur Blixt. Stephen Finn. By spring we were sluts, sirens, alarming to girls and boys alike as we scoured in vain for someone to satisfy us. When Moose came home at Christmas, Ellen abandoned me for his sacred compass: a brutal disappointment, since I'd hoped to be included. For three lonely weeks I hardly saw her. Moose's departure left her listless, but soon the alchemy of our union was back at work, plotting our rescue from the crushing banality that surrounded us like those shrinking rooms full of water from which TV heroes must escape. The streets, the sky, the lousy moon. What was wrong with these boys? Boys. We rolled onto our sides, staring at each other amidst the gravestones. The snow had melted, exposing a paper mache of last year's soggy leaves. A revelation was upon us: the problem was boys--too young, too inexperienced to make us feel what we longed and deserved to feel, whereas men, with their years of practice--men would know exactly what to do! And finding men wouldn't be so hard; Mr. Polhill, Ellen's Driver's Ed. teacher, was constantly leaning over her desk and sniffing her hair, and as for me...how old did he have to be? "Old," Ellen said. "Thirties." There was a man I'd caught watching me by the country club pool the summer before. A foreign guy--French, I thought, who'd worn a tight little bathing suit like boys on our swim team wore. I'd found him creepy at the time, but now I revised my opinion: he was French, he was a man, he was perfect. Mr. Polhill gallantly proffered the use of his personal car when Ellen asked him for extra driving practice after school, then suggested a small detour. That was all she would tell me. There was a blankness about her that I'd never seen before; I waited in the cemetery but she didn't come, and when I chased her down at school she refused to elaborate. Meanwhile, through a friend of my mother's who knew Mrs. Lafant, the Rockford girl who was married to the Frenchman, I managed to procure a Friday night babysitting job at his house, where two brats drizzled ice cream down the front of the tight, low-cut dress I'd worn for Mr. Lafant's entertainment. Afterward, as he drove me home, I moved close to him in the front seat. He went still, as if in disbelief. "You are a very lovely girl," he breathed carefully, in his marvelous accent. When I moved closer, he stroked my hair and I shut my eyes, opening them only when I noticed that Mr. Lafant had begun driving rather wildly. He screeched to a stop somewhere off Spring Creek Road, killed the engine and turned off the headlights. It took my eyes a few moments to adjust, and when finally they did, I discerned Mr. Lafant's erect penis groping from his pants like a mole emerging from a tunnel. His hands, which moments before had been delicately stroking my hair, now were guiding my head most assertively toward it. I was frightened. His obvious hurry made it worse; when I squirmed my resistance, he seized the back of my head and shoved me toward his groin while also (I noticed) glancing at his watch, no doubt calculating how much longer he had before his wife began to wonder. A wave of revulsion roiled through me. "No!" I shrieked, "No, no!" at which point my employer began to panic. "Shut up," he implored, shoving the inquiring penis out of sight. He drove me home in urgent silence, an angry muscle jumping in his face. I leapt from the car and he roared away without a word, his tires barking on our quiet street. I would have sprinted straight to Ellen's house, but my mother had heard the car and padded onto the dewy lawn in her slippers and robe. "Well, that wasn't very nice," she remarked. "He should have waited until you went inside." The next morning, Ellen met me at the back door of her big, empty house and led me upstairs with the same indifferent look she'd worn all week. "I Love Lucy" was on in the TV room. "So, did you do it?" she asked, her eyes not leaving the set. "He didn't want to," I said. "He wanted me to suck it." Ellen turned to me with interest. "I couldn't," I confessed. "It was just too disgusting." Then I asked, instinctively, "Did Mr. Polhill...want that?" Ellen began to cry. I had never seen her cry before, and I hovered near her, on the verge of hugging her as I would hug Grace when she cried, but hesitant. Ellen wasn't like Grace. "Did you do it?" I whispered. "I tried," she said, "but after about three seconds, he--you know, he--" "No! No!" "In my mouth," she sobbed. "Oh my God!" "And then I threw up. All over him and on the bed." I was quiet, stilled by my horror at the scene she'd conjured, and at the same time, tickled by some creeping mirth that seemed lodged within it. My mouth, of its own accord, twitched into a smile, at which point Ellen's crying swerved into laughter, outright hysterics, tears still running from her eyes. By now I was laughing, falling with Ellen into aching hilarity until I, too, burst into tears. "He must've died," I sobbed. "He ran in the bathroom and locked the door," she said, and then we doubled over, both (as it turned out) helplessly wetting our pants. Later, having showered and changed, stuffed our jeans and underwear in Ellen's washing machine, we put three Old Styles in a bag and carried them to the cemetery, along with a pack of Kools. "Forget the men," Ellen said. "They're perverted." "The good ones wouldn't do it with us," I agreed. "They just want to do it with their wives." We sipped the dry, cold beers. It was so warm, we no longer needed our jackets. We were fresh and clean, yet from somewhere within us--below us, it almost seemed, down among the dead Swedes--came a weight that was palpable. The weight of our boredom, our impatience. "I have the answer," Ellen said, but without any of the jollity that had accompanied our prior inspirations. "What?" "Moose." Moose. Who within the month, she informed me, would return from the University of Michigan for summer vacation, three friends in tow. Who would party and waterski with these friends for a couple of weeks, relubricating the vast machine of his social life before he commenced a summer job at his father's factory. Whose friends would doubtless be the finest specimens the University of Michigan, or any university, had to offer. Not men, not boys. Experienced, but not perverted. And yet, for all the epic allure of Ellen's brother and those within his hallowed ken, the very thought of another sexual undertaking exhausted me. I feared losing Ellen again after Moose's return, as I had at Christmas. On his first Saturday home, we peeked down through the country club's chain link fence at the river directly below, where Moose and his friends--Marco, Amos, Todd--stuttered over the brownish water at intervals presaged by the roar of Moose's boat. Even at this distance, the sight of Ellen's brother was arresting: a taut, athletic-looking guy in neon green swim trunks, the best waterskier of the four, by far. But he skied the least, preferring to cheer on the others from the wheel of the boat. "Which do you want?" Ellen asked. "Including Moose?" She looked at me oddly, then shook her head in adamant refusal. "Marco," I said, crestfallen. "I'll take Todd," Ellen said, which mystified me; he was the palest of the three, angular and trim in a way that reminded me of my father. Moose's destination that night was a party in one of the vast houses on National Avenue, just north of Downtown; our plan was to show up there, do it somewhere in the house with our respective choices, and afterwards, meet back at the country club beside the swimming pool. The party was disappointingly routine; Tom Petty straining some dad's stereo, a throng of drunk, roaring guys older than our classmates, but otherwise identical. At last I observed Moose again at close range--in the kitchen, where he and another guy were scrimmaging with sponge mops for a can of Tender Vittles on the sticky linoleum. A towering presence, was Moose, big shoulders flicking under his white T-shirt like keys on a player piano as he wrested the cat food from his opponent with some fancy mop work, forearms buttery with tan, his appearance a winning amalgam of beauty, thuggishness, and faint embarrassment. And something else: an awareness on the part of Moose and everyone else, a crowd of admirers thronging the room for a glimpse of his folly, that he was special. Famous. At the sight of us--of Ellen--Moose abandoned the game. "Sis," he said, discarding his mop and slinging an arm around her shoulders. Thus encompassed, Ellen looked childlike, serene--bland in a way I couldn't have pictured. The crowd curled around her like a smile. I watched it all with jealous fascination. Later, across a patio drenched in buggy light, Ellen and I tossed ourselves at Moose's friends with an abandon verging on carelessness. Moose cast acid looks in my direction, but as the party ground on, he lost track of us. Eventually Marco and I crept up a narrow flight of stairs to a third floor guest room that reeked of mothballs. He peeled the clothes from my body and was just lowering himself on top of me like a crane setting an old car onto a pile of old cars, when I recoiled. "No," I said. "Stop, wait!" stricken with the memory of Mr. Lafant. It was too soon, I didn't know this guy; I'd forgotten what I was supposed to do with him, and why. Marco, bewildered by this seizure of modesty after my slatternly behavior downstairs, went to take a piss. I fled the room and bolted from the house, sprinting north along the river toward the country club, already revived by the thought of seeing Ellen and swapping our tales of woe, like always. Except, I thought, still running, what if hers was not a tale of woe? What if finally, after so long, she and Todd had found what we were looking for? The thought sickened me. The club's iron gate was locked, a variable we hadn't foreseen. I stood outside, wondering whether to scale it. Finally I shimmied over the fence and dropped to the ground inside the club, intensely quiet under the bright moon and torn clouds. The warm golf course grass bounced under my feet. I ran down the concrete steps to the pool, whose turquoise bottom caught the light of the moon, and I saw something move in the water and it was Ellen. I felt such a shock of happiness that I called out her name and she hushed me, laughing, and I saw her clothes by the pool and flung off my own and dove into the wet, heavy silence. I felt the water move as Ellen swam past, her long hair fluttering over my skin. We burst into the air, giggling. "So, what happened?" I asked softly. "With what?" I stared at her. "Todd!" "Oh, he couldn't," Ellen said, with an indifference that overjoyed me. "Too drunk." But we were grinning. There was no sense of failure; only this giddiness, as if we'd broken free--finally, somehow--from an onerous fate. We swam to the shallow end and looked at the sky. The air and water felt identical in temperature, two different versions of the same substance. It was strange and good to be naked in the pool where normally you had to wear a bathing cap. Clouds floated past the moon, milky, mysterious, and I heard a boat on the river below and thought, I'm happy. This is happiness--why was I looking for anything else? Ellen floated on her back, water pooling around her breasts, and no one had ever looked more beautiful to me. I reached for her. It was as if she had known I would, as if she'd reached for me, too. We stood in the water and kissed. Every sensation of desire I had ever known now amassed within me and fought, demanding release. I touched her underwater. She felt both familiar and strange--someone else, but like me. Ellen flinched and shut her eyes. For once, I had some idea of what to do. She clung to me tightly, then collapsed, trembling, her arms around my neck. When she laughed, I heard chattering teeth. We moved to the pool steps and sat, our bodies underwater, just our heads and necks above, and I took her hand and put it on me. She was tentative, afraid, but I kept my hand on hers until my heart snapped and my head hit the concrete behind me. We lay there, my head pounding, a lump forming on my scalp that would hurt for a week, and when the water made us shiver we got out of the pool and dried ourselves off with our clothes and spread them on the grass and lay on top of them and began again, more slowly now. Still, the intensity was punishing--we're killing each other, I thought. We're killing something. Afterward, we lay half asleep, and finally Ellen said, "We could teach these assholes a thing or two," and we laughed and got dressed and walked back to Ellen's house, talking thoughtlessly, as if nothing had changed. We were best friends. We slept naked in Ellen's single bed, pressed together with her hair everywhere, and again I had that sense, as when I'd firs��jX��jX�jX�+�jX��jX��jX@��jXthing. I woke at dawn and had an impulse to leave, with it all still so nice. This was odd because it was Saturday, and normally we would have made Swedish pancakes and watched cartoons, probably spent the whole day together. But I left Ellen sleeping there and walked home in the May sunlight, and only as I approached my own house, the flat, unassuming yellow house bleached almost white by the bare morning sun, did what had happened with Ellen begin to seem pretty strange. I almost couldn't believe it. But when I remembered the feeling of it, the physical feeling, I felt that warmth in my stomach and all I wanted was to see her again, to have that again. Am I a lesbian? I wondered, incredulous. No other girl had ever attracted me. I waited until that night to call her. Moose answered the phone (coldly, having surely been informed of my antics with Marco) and handed it to Ellen. I heard a guardedness in her voice that instantly provoked an equal guardedness in me, and our conversation had a weird, stilted feeling that was completely unlike us. It never went away. After that, seeing Ellen was like seeing one of the guys I'd done it with; she made me self conscious, aware of the passing moments and the need to fill them with something. In the pauses I would wonder, Is she thinking about it? Does she want to do it again? But I didn't, anymore, because now Ellen seemed no different from a boy. It was a horrible summer; I had no other friends. I saw Ellen only once, at the movies. "Wait," I gasped, yanking Grace into the shadows as Moose and his entourage spiraled from the theater into the carpeted lobby. The guys were sparring, tousling, and Moose leaned down and hoisted Ellen over his shoulder--so easily, as if she were a coat, and her clogs fell off but Moose wouldn't let her down, he ran with her through the glass doors and into the parking lot, where I heard the shriek of her laughter. Someone collected the clogs and brought them to her. I watched, incredulous. To be coddled, protected that way--what must it feel like? To be at the absolute center, adored by the boy whom everyone loved, without trying. What could compete with it? That fall, I saw Ellen walking home from school ahead of me. She was alone, sadness closing back around her now that Moose was gone. I forced myself into a trot and caught up. "I feel so weird around you now," I said. "Me, too," she said. "We have to forget about that. We have to go back to how it was before." "We have to!" she agreed. Then silence. I couldn't think of anything else to say, and we pushed terse, empty comments back and forth as I counted the minutes to my house. When finally it came into sight, I pretended my mother was waiting for me and ran ahead, leaving Ellen by herself. I had thought it would be hard to make new friends, but it turned out that Ellen and I were neutralized by our disunion to the same degree that we'd been empowered by our accord. Eventually we settled down with boyfriends and went to proms and even signed each other's yearbooks--Good luck with everything!--and except in the most abstract sense, I forgot about that night. I did pay one last visit to Ellen's house. This time with Moose, who graduated from Michigan and returned to Rockford to work for his father. I picked him up my senior year at a state championship hockey game, where he was watching teenage boys scramble over the ice. By then Moose's aura of fame had shrunk; even the youngest siblings of the kids who had revered him were gone, and East High, where once he'd reigned, no longer knew of his existence. He was still living at home, and I followed him up the dark familiar stairs, past the master bedroom where his invalid mother spent her days, past Ellen's empty room (she was a year older than I, and had already left for college), to his own attic lair: faded sports posters loosening from the walls, dusty trophies lining shelves. There was a seriousness about Moose that I hadn't seen before. As we sank onto his bed, I pointed to a series of ropes and pulleys connected to a box attached to the ceiling and asked what they were. "Nothing," he told me. "Some old stuff I outgrew." When it was over Moose faded into a doze. I stared at him, the bulky shoulders and slightly purplish cast of his eyelids; this locus of so many years of cumulative envy and mystery, idolatry and myth, now prone, snoring lightly into a pillow. His eyes opened. "What?" he said, groggy. "You," I said. He looked puzzled, and raised himself onto an elbow. "Just...Moose," I said, and shook my head. "Moose. Moose Metcalf. I can't believe it." Now he smiled, uneasy. He knew what I meant. Wind filled the bedroom from his tiny window. "Actually, my name is Edmund," he said. * * * * * I was not a nostalgic person. I didn't save Christmas cards, rarely took pictures, felt mostly indifferent to the snapshots people sent me. Until the accident, I had always thought my memory was bad, but in fact I'd thrown the past away, a ream of discarded events--so that I could move, unencumbered, into the future. Now, as I made my limping way among the tall bare trees toward Ellen Metcalf's house, it was not with the intention of losing myself in misty-eyed recollections of my old friend, but to see the house now. To learn what it, and if possible she, had become. The Metcalf manse was a rambling Tudor style that has always been popular among the Midwestern rich. The lawn still impressed me, wide and lush despite the scorching summer that had just passed. On the grass were sundry child-oriented items: a bat, a large plastic gun, a smallish fluorescent orange bike. What age child they denoted I had no idea. I touched my face, stuccoed with Mary Cunningham's thick, flower-scented pancake. I was still badly bruised; rather than fading, it seemed, my bruises simply changed color, like fireworks whose finale won't arrive. I felt darkly conspicuous; a dour visitor, a drug-ravaged starlet incognito. The area behind the house had been re-landscaped; flower beds shaped like Lima beans blossomed with wine colored begonias. I stood on the flagstone patio and listened to the silence. I went to the screen door that led to the kitchen--the door Ellen and I had always used--and gently tapped. I rang the bell. When it was clear that no one was home, I opened the door and went in. The difference shocked me; I remembered the kitchen as a dark room with greenish walls and high windows that made you feel you were straining to see the sky from the bottom of a well. Now the windows were wide and lower down, and the room had been opened up, cracked wide so you saw light and sky and green lawn spotted with piles of raked leaves. Very California, I thought, tapping my heels against the pizza colored floor tiles, and an impressive array of beaten copper pots dangling above the stove. And if someone comes home? I asked myself, ascending the front stairs after a glance at the living room, where modern art had commandeered the walls. But I wasn't afraid. I felt shielded--protected, somehow, by my dark glasses and mask of makeup, the silk headscarf tucked into the top of my trenchcoat to hide the bruises on my neck. This isn't me, I thought, rounding the stairs and emerging into the upstairs hallway, whose crisp walls and luminous floors effaced all traces of its former dreariness. How could I be caught, when I didn't look like anyone? As a model, of course, I'd carried my face like a sign, holding it out a foot or so in front of me--not out of pride or vanity, God knew; those had been stamped out long ago, or at any rate, disjoined from my physical appearance. No, out of sheer practicality: here's what I am. Calling card, handshake, prÃ©cis, call it what you like; it was what I had to offer to the world where I had spent my life. I was heading for the master bedroom, a room I'd glimpsed only when Ellen would go in or out, a shadowy peek, a gust of scented air, her mother's hushed, plaintive voice. Now the door was open. I went in. The room was immense and spare, bars of sunset angling through wood blinds that looked custom-made. There were big ficus trees and a modern looking bed with long delicate posts. The walls were yellow-white. In a plush adjacent dressing room I smelled one of the Chanels, but my damaged nose could not distinguish which. Long mirrors, walls covered with framed photographs. I went closer to look--I wasn't yet allowed to wear my contacts--curious about the family who lived here now. Instantly I recognized Ellen, aged by many years but still beautiful, the bones even stronger in her face. She was standing on a beach with a man at her side, her husband, presumably, who looked ten years older and had the tanned skin and white teeth of a German. Ellen Metcalf. I was in Ellen Metcalf's dressing room. Straining to focus my bleary eyes, I studied other pictures: Ellen lounging with her husband in some foreign clime; the squashed face of a newborn; some youthful photos of Ellen's parents done in the manner of Hollywood stills; a montage of two children, the oldest a girl who--poor thing--looked nothing like her mother. I wondered if she'd been adopted. Ellen and this daughter in matching bathing suits, lying beside the country club pool. As I surveyed the whirling narrative of Ellen's life, I began, for the first time, to feel anxiety at the thought of her coming home and finding me there. It wasn't my trespassing that concerned me; more a basic sense that I couldn't be seen this way. I decided to leave. But no sooner had I left Ellen's dressing room than I heard footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom door. Appalled, I yanked my sunglasses over my monster-red eyes, shot back into the dressing room and hunched in a closet, gently coaxing the door shut behind me. I hid there, panting in a darkness full of filmy dresses scented with more of that mysterious Chanel, until it occurred to me that the humiliation of being caught inside a closet would surely exceed that of simply standing in a dressing room, and I flung open the closet door just as a girl of about thirteen, with earphones on her head, wandered in from the bedroom. She jumped, then gaped at me, startled and guilty, as if she were the one who'd been caught. It was the girl from the pictures, a sadly average looking girl with thin, drab hair and insect-like glasses on her face. She pulled off her earphones. "Who are you?" she said. "I'm an old friend of your mother's," I replied as casually as I could manage. "I was passing through town and thought I'd stop by. But I guess she's not home." This flimsy pretext seemed, bizarrely, to satisfy her. I saw how unlike her mother she was; Ellen would have been all narrow-eyed suspicion. But this was an open, curious girl. Thank God. "She won't be back for a while," she said. "Darn," I said, and then, because it seemed only natural, "Where is she?" "Chicago, at the hospital." "Nothing wrong I hope." My ignorance clearly surprised her. "Ricky had leukemia? But now he's in remission." "Oh, that's good," I said. "That's terrific. The house is beautiful. I haven't seen it since your grandparents lived here." "I'll show you my room, if you want." I followed her down the hall. She had a light, skipping step. Her room was Ellen's old room, painted blue now and a little dark; she was one of those girls who pulls the shades and burrows in bed with a book (not the sort I ever knew well). Indeed, there was a pile of books heaped by the bed and even on top of it. The covers were mussed, as if she'd been underneath, reading. But the place where she led me out of pride or habit was a large rectangular fishtank. The water bubbled merrily. A chair was poised beside the tank, as if the girl spent time there, watching her fish. And they were beautiful fish, I had to admit, though I wasn't fish-inclined. The two smallest were a phosphorescent blue, like peacock feathers. "Those are Damsels," she said, seeing me notice. "Blue Damselfish." "What's that?" I asked dutifully, pointing at a fish with sharp prongs curved around its tail like a comma. "An Angel Flame," she said, then added proudly, "This is a salt water tank." Having no idea what difference that made, I kept quiet. The girl stood across the tank from me, eying my face through the percolating water. "Why do you wear sunglasses inside?" she asked. "I had an accident," I said. "A car accident." "I thought something happened," she said. "Your face looks kind of strange. Does the light hurt your eyes, is that why you you wear the glasses?" "No," I said. "They just look bad." "Can I see?" "You don't want to," I said. "Really." "Yes I do." She did. She wanted to see my eyes, this girl, and came back around the tank for that purpose, slim, wiry, her head about the height of my chest. I'd been wrong about her age: she was older than thirteen. She seemed almost like an adult. "Believe me," she said, "I can handle it." I took off the glasses. The room wasn't nearly as dark as I'd thought. The girl looked evenly into my eyes: the gaze of someone who has already seen her share of pain, and knows what it looks like. "How will you look after it heals?" she asked. "Like I looked before, more or less. These doctors, you know, they're fantastic." She nodded. I had the feeling she didn't believe me. "What's your name?" I asked. "Charlotte," she said. I thought at first that I'd misheard her. I didn't ask again--just let the surprise ricochet through me once, then dissipate. "No kidding," I said. "Mine, too." Right away I saw my mistake; she would tell Ellen, and Ellen would know what had happened to me. "That's incredible!" she said. "I don't know any other Charlottes. Only one Charlene." "Charlotte is a better name." "I think so, too," she said. "It's fancy." There was a pause. To distract her, I asked, "And your uncle? Is he still called Moose?" The girl smiled, blood rising to her cheeks. Same old Moose, I thought. "You knew my uncle?" she asked, with excitement. "Before?" "A little," I said noncommittally. "Before what?" "Everything that happened," she said, and some memory grazed me, then, some disturbing thing I'd heard about Moose. I couldn't call it back. "He's still called Moose," was all she said. I had been trying, in as relaxed a manner as possible, to steer us from her room in the direction of the front stairs. But just as I began my gimping descent, just as I was beginning to rejoice at having slithered from this potential debacle without having so much as roused the suspicions of my young hostess--just then, a shadow of prudence fell over her. "Don't you...want to leave a message? Or a note?" she asked, pattering down the stairs behind me. "No, that's okay." I was struggling with the front door. "But I--I thought you--" Even as she helped me open it, I felt the beat of worry in her, which provoked in me a corresponding guilt, as if I'd nabbed the family silver and were about to make a run for it. "Tell your mom I'm sorry I missed--" "What's your--" But I was out the door, loping across the lawn--a freakish sight that must have been--away from her. As I hurried back to Mary Cunningham's, I was gripped by jealousy so sharp and unexpected that it felt like sickness. I wanted that girl. She was mine, she should have been mine; even her name was mine. I wanted that house, that life; even the kid with cancer--I wanted it. I wanted children, people around me. I wanted to send a young Charlotte into the world to live a different life from mine. Such feelings of envy and remorse were so alien to me that I hardly knew how to respond. There was a voice that spoke to me at times of internal duress in exactly the way I spoke to Grace: briskly reassuring at first, and if that didn't work, brusque to the point of bullying. All my life I had heard that voice, and when its scolding was not enough to still the fear in me, I took action--walked, danced, made phone calls--whatever was required to stop the whining. I despised whining, my own more than anyone's. But now I was too tired to move. I collapsed onto the day bed Mary Cunningham kept in her front room, unable yet to attempt the stairs, and decided I would inquire that very evening about the precise contents of that swank liquor cabinet I'd noticed in her living room. In the Midwest you could usually count on a decent stock, even at an old lady's house. My face ached and throbbed; I'd stayed out too long. Upstairs, when I wiped off my pancake makeup with the special creams Dr. Fabermann had given me, my monstrous reflection looked more angry and swollen than it had in days. Like a newborn, I thought, exchanging looks with my frantic, scalded eyes--a newborn howling in pain and outrage. I soaked a cotton pad in vitamin E oil and gently swabbed my face. I spoke to it in tones that were uncharacteristically soothing. "There, there, come on now," I said, "It's not so bad," dabbing the oil on my hot skin. Everything will be fine. This is the angry healing phase, that's all. It will end and then you'll have a new face--your old face but new again, like Ellen's house. This is your Charlotte, I thought, looking at myself in the mirror. This is your Charlotte, and you must take good care of her so she'll grow up to be a beautiful girl, and live an extraordinary life. * * * * * * * * * *

The Keep

teameight — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:10:05 +0000

Chapter 1 The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn't see this. What he saw looked solid as hell: two round towers with an arch between them and across that arch was an iron gate that looked like it hadn't moved in three hundred years or maybe ever. He'd never been to a castle before or even this part of the world, but something about it all was familiar to Danny. He seemed to remember the place from a long time ago, not like he'd been here exactly but from a dream or a book. The towers had those square indentations around the top that little kids put on castles when they draw them. The air was cold with a smoky bite, like fall had already come even though it was mid-August and people in New York were barely dressed. The trees were losing their leaves-Danny felt them landing in his hair and heard them crunching under his boots when he walked. He was looking for a doorbell, a knocker, a light: some way into this place or at least a way to find the way in. He was getting pessimistic. Danny had waited two hours in a gloomy little valley town for a bus to this castle that never frigging came before he looked up and saw its black shape against the sky. Then he'd started to walk, hauling his Samsonite and satellite dish a couple of miles up this hill, the Samsonite's puny wheels catching on boulders and tree roots and rabbit holes. His limp didn't help. The whole trip had been like that: one hassle after another starting with the red eye from Kennedy that got towed into a field after a bomb threat, surrounded by trucks with blinky red lights and giant nozzles that were comforting up until you realized their job was to make sure the fireball only incinerated those poor suckers who were already on the plane. So Danny had missed his connection to Prague and the train to wherever the hell he was now, some German-sounding town that didn't seem to be in Germany. Or anywhere else-Danny couldn't even find it online, although he hadn't been sure about the spelling. Talking on the phone to his Cousin Howie, who owned this castle and had paid Danny's way to help out with the renovation, he'd tried to nail down some details. Danny: I'm still trying to get this straight-is your hotel in Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic? Howie: Tell you the truth, I'm not even clear on that myself. Those borders are constantly sliding around. Danny (thinking): They are? Howie: But remember, it's not a hotel yet. Right now it's just an old- The line went dead. When Danny tried calling back, he couldn't get through. But his tickets came the next week (blurry postmark)-plane, train, bus-and seeing how he was newly unemployed and had to get out of New York fast because of a misunderstanding at the restaurant where he'd worked, getting paid to go somewhere else-anywhere else, even the fucking moon-was not a thing Danny could say no to. He was fifteen hours late. He left his Samsonite and satellite dish by the gate and circled the left tower (Danny made a point of going left when he had the choice because most people went right). A wall curved away from the tower into the trees, and Danny followed that wall until woods closed in around him. He was moving blind. He heard flapping and scuttling, and as he walked the trees got closer and closer to the wall until finally he was squeezing in between them, afraid if he lost contact with the wall he'd get lost. And then a good thing happened: the trees pushed right through the wall and split it open and gave Danny a way to climb inside. This wasn't easy. The wall was twenty feet high, jagged and crumbly with tree trunks crushed into the middle, and Danny had a tricky knee from an injury connected to the misunderstanding at work. Plus his boots were not exactly made for climbing-they were city boots, hipster boots, somewhere between square-tipped and pointy-his lucky boots, or so Danny thought a long time ago, when he bought them. They needed resoling. The boots were skiddy even on flat city concrete, so the sight of Danny clawing and scrambling his way up twenty feet of broken wall was not a thing he would've wanted broadcast. But finally he made it, panting, sweating, dragging his sore leg, and hoisted himself onto a flat walkway-type thing that ran on top of the wall. He brushed off his pants and stood up. It was one of those views that make you feel like God for a second. The castle walls looked silver under the moon, stretched out over the hill in a wobbly oval the size of a football field. There were round towers every fifty yards or so. Below Danny, inside the walls, it was black-pure, like a lake or outer space. He felt the curve of big sky over his head, full of purplish torn-up clouds. The castle itself was back where Danny had started out: a clump of buildings and towers jumbled together. But the tallest tower stood off on its own, narrow and square with a red light shining in a window near the top. Looking down made something go easier in Danny. When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language came up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom-those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but also you could be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto-the word was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably. Danny wished he'd brought his satellite dish to the top of this wall. He itched to make some calls-the need felt primal, like an urge to laugh or sneeze or eat. It got so distracting that he slithered back down off the wall and backtracked through those same pushy trees, dirt and moss packed under his longish fingernails. But by the time he got back to the gate his alto was gone and all Danny felt was tired. He left the satellite dish in its case and found a flat spot under a tree to lie down. He made a pile out of leaves. Danny had slept outside a few times when things got rough in New York, but this was nothing like that. He took off his velvet coat and turned it inside out and rolled it into a pillow at the foot of the tree. He lay on the leaves faceup and crossed his arms over his chest. More leaves were coming down. Danny watched them spinning, turning against the half-empty branches and purple clouds, and felt his eyes start to roll back into his head. He was trying to come up with some lines to use on Howie -- Like: Hey man, your welcome mat could use a little work. Or else: You're paying me to be here, but I'm figuring you don't want to pay your guests. Or maybe: Trust me, outdoor lighting is gonna rock your world. -- just so he'd have some things to say if there was a silence. Danny was nervous about seeing his cousin after so long. The Howie he knew as a kid you couldn't picture grown up--he'd been wrapped in that pear-shaped girl fat you see on certain boys, big love handles bubbling out of the back of his jeans. Sweaty pale skin and a lot of dark hair around his face. At age seven or eight, Danny and Howie invented a game they'd play whenever they saw each other at holidays and family picnics. Terminal Zeus it was called, and there was a hero (Zeus), and there were monsters and missions and runways and airlifts and bad guys and fireballs and high-speed chases. They could play anywhere from a garage to an old canoe to underneath a dining room table, using whatever they found: straws, feathers, paper plates, candy wrappers, yarn, stamps, candles, staples, you name it. Howie thought most of it up. He'd shut his eyes like he was watching a movie on the backs of his eyelids that he wanted Danny to see: Okay, so Zeus shoots Glow-Bullets at the enemy that make their skin light up so now he can see them through the trees and then-blam!-he lassos them with Electric Stunner-Ropes! Sometimes he made Danny do the talking-Okay, you tell it: what does the underwater torture dungeon look like?-and Danny would start making stuff up: rocks, seaweed, baskets of human eyeballs. He got so deep nside the game he forgot who he was, and when his folks said Time to go home the shock of being yanked away made Danny throw himself on the ground in front of them, begging for another half hour, please! another twenty minutes, ten, five, please, just one more minute, pleasepleaseplease? Frantic not to be ripped away from the world he and Howie had made. The other cousins thought Howie was weird, a loser, plus he was adopted, and they kept their distance: Rafe especially, not the oldest cousin but the one they all listened to. You're so sweet to play with Howie, Danny's mom would say. From what I understand, he doesn't have many friends. But Danny wasn't trying to be nice. He cared what his other cousins thought, but nothing could match the fun of Terminal Zeus. When they were teenagers, Howie changed -- overnight was what everyone said. He had a traumatic experience and his sweetness drained away and he turned moody, anxious, always wiggling a foot and muttering King Crimson lyrics under his breath. He carried a notebook, even at Thanksgiving it was there in his lap with a napkin on it to catch the gravy drips. Howie made marks in that book with a flat sweaty pencil, looking around at different family members like he was trying to decide when and how they would have to die. But no one had ever paid much attention to Howie. And after the change, the traumatic incident, Danny pretended not to. Of course they talked about Howie when he wasn't there, oh yeah. Howie's troubles were a favorite family topic, and behind the shaking heads and oh it's so sads you could hear the joy pushing right up through because doesn't every family like having one person who's fucked up so fantastically that everyone else feels like a model citizen next to him? If Danny closed his eyes and listened hard he could still pick up some of that long-ago muttering like a radio station you just barely hear: Howie trouble drugs did you hear he was arrested such an unattractive boy I'm sorry but can't May put him on a diet he's a teenager no it's more than that I have teenagers you have teenagers I blame Norm for pushing adoption you never know what you're getting it all comes down to genes is what they're learning some people are just bad or not bad but you know exactly not bad but just exactly that's it: trouble. Danny used to get a weird feeling, overhearing this stuff when he came in the house and his mom was talking on the phone to one of his aunts about Howie. Dirt on his cleats after winning a game, his girlfriend Shannon Shank, who had the best tits on the pom squad and maybe the whole school all set to give him a blow job in his bedroom because she always did that when he won, and thank God he won a lot. Hiya, Mom. That square of purple blue almost night outside the kitchen window. Shit, it hurt Danny to remember this stuff, the smell of his mom's tuna casserole. He'd liked hearing those things about Howie because it reminded him of who he was, Danny King, suchagoodboy, that's what everyone said and what they'd always said but still Danny liked hearing it again, knowing it again. He couldn't hear it enough. That was memory number one. Danny sort of drifted into it lying there under the tree, but pretty soon his whole body was tensed to the point where he couldn't lie still. He got up, swiping twigs off his pants and feeling pissed off because he didn't like remembering things. Walking backward was how Danny thought of that and it was a waste of valuable resources anywhere, anytime, but in a place he'd spent twenty-four hours trying to escape to it was fucking ridiculous. Danny shook out his coat and pulled it back over his arms and started walking again, fast. This time he went right. At first there was just forest around him, but the trees started thinning out and the slant under his feet got steeper until Danny had to walk with his uphill leg bent, which sent splinters of pain from his knee to his groin. And then the hill dropped away like someone had lopped it off with a knife and he was standing on the edge of a cliff with the castle wall pushed right up against it, so the wall and the cliff made one vertical line pointing up at the sky. Danny stopped short and looked over the cliff's edge. Below, a long way down: trees, bushy black with a few lights packed deep inside that must be the town where he'd waited for the bus. Alto: he was in the middle of frigging nowhere. It was extreme, and Danny liked extremes. They were distracting. If I were you, I'd get a cash deposit before I started asking people to spelunk. Danny tilted his head back. Clouds had squeezed out the stars. The wall seemed higher on this side of the castle. It curved in and then back out again toward the top, and every few yards there was a narrow gap a few feet above Danny's head. He stood back and studied one of these openings-vertical and horizontal slits meeting in the shape of a cross-and in the hundreds of years since those slits had been cut, the rain and snow and what-have-you must have opened up this one a little bit more. Speaking of rain, a light sprinkling was starting that wasn't much more than a mist, but Danny's hair did a weird thing when it got wet that he couldn't fix without his blow dryer and a certain kind of mousse that was packed away in the Samsonite, and he didn't want Howie to see that weird thing. He wanted to get the fuck out of the rain. So Danny took hold of some broken bits of wall and used his big feet and bony fingers to claw his way up to the slot. He jammed his head inside to see if it would fit and it did, with just a little room to spare that was barely enough for his shoulders, the widest part of him, which he turned and slid through like he was sticking a key in a lock. The rest of him was easy. Your average adult male would've needed a shrinking pill to get through this hole, but Danny had a certain kind of body-he was tall but also bendable, adjustable, you could roll him up like a stick of gum and then unroll him. Which is what happened now: he unraveled himself in a sweaty heap on a damp stone floor. He was in an ancient basementy place that had no light at all and a smell Danny didn't like: the smell of a cave. A low ceiling smacked his forehead a couple of times and he tried walking with his knees bent, but that hurt his bad knee too much. He held still and straightened up slowly, listening to sounds of little creatures scuttling, and felt a twist of fear in his gut like someone wringing out a rag. Then he remembered: there was a mini-flashlight on his key chain left over from his club days-shining it into somebody's eyes you could tell if they were on E or smack or Special K. Danny flicked it on and poked the little beam at the dark: stone walls, slippery stone under his feet. Movement along the walls. Danny's breath came quick and shallow, so he tried slowing it down. Fear was dangerous. It let in the worm: another word Danny and his friends had invented all those years ago, smoking pot or doing lines of coke and wondering what to call that thing that happened to people when they lost confidence and got phony, anxious, weird. Was it paranoia? Low self-esteem? Insecurity? Panic? Those words were all too flat. But the worm, which is the word they finally picked, the worm was three-dimensional: it crawled inside a person and started to eat until everything collapsed, their whole lives, and they ended up getting strung out or going back home to their folks or being admitted to Bellevue or, in the case of one girl they all knew, jumping off the Manhattan Bridge. More walking backward. And it wasn't helping, it was making things worse. Danny took out his cell phone and flipped it open. He didn't have international service, but the phone lit up, searching, and just seeing it do that calmed Danny down, like the phone had powers-like it was a Forcefield Stabilizer left over from Terminal Zeus. True, he wasn't connected to anyone right at that second, but in a general way he was so connected that his connectedness carried him through the dry spells in subways or certain deep buildings when he couldn't actually reach anyone. He had 304 Instant Messaging usernames and a buddy list of 180. Which is why he'd rented a satellite dish for this trip-a drag to carry, an airport security nightmare, but guaranteed to provide not just cell phone service but wireless Internet access anywhere on planet earth. Danny needed this. His brain refused to stay locked up inside the echo chamber of his head-it spilled out, it overflowed and poured across the world until it was touching a thousand people who had nothing to do with him. If his brain wasn't allowed to do this, if Danny kept it locked up inside his skull, a pressure began to build. He started walking again, holding the phone in one hand, the other hand up in the air so he'd know when to duck. The place felt like a dungeon, except somehow Danny remembered that dungeons in old castles were usually in the tower-maybe that was the tall square thing he'd seen from the wall with the red light on top: the dungeon. More likely this place had been a sewer. If you ask me, mother earth could use a little mouthwash. But that wasn't Danny's line, that was Howie's. He was heading into memory number two, I might as well tell you that straight up, because how I'm supposed to get him in and out of all these memories in a smooth way so nobody notices all the coming and going I don't know. Rafe went first with the flashlight, then Howie. Danny came last. They were all pretty punchy, Howie because his cousins had singled him out to sneak away from the picnic, Danny because there was no bigger thrill in the world than being Rafe's partner in crime, and Rafe-well, the beautiful thing about Rafe was you never knew why he did anything. Let's show Howie the cave. Rafe had said this softly, looking sideways at Danny through those long lashes he had. And Danny went along, knowing there would be more. Howie stumbled in the dark. He had a notebook under one elbow. They hadn't played Terminal Zeus in more than a year. The game ended without talking-one Christmas Eve, Danny just avoided Howie and went off with his other cousins instead. Howie tried a couple of times to come near, catch Danny's eye, but he gave up easily. Danny: That notebook's messing up your balance, Howie. Howie: Yeah, but I need it. Need it why? For when I get an idea. Rafe turned around and shined the flashlight straight at Howie's face. He shut his eyes. Rafe: What're you talking about, get an idea? Howie: For D and D. I'm the dungeon master. Rafe turned the beam away. Who do you play with? My friends. Danny felt a little stunned, hearing that. Dungeons and Dragons. He had a kind of body memory of Terminal Zeus, the feel of dissolving into that game. And it turned out the game hadn't stopped. It had gone on without him. Rafe: You sure you've got any friends, Howie? Aren't you my friend, Rafe? And then Howie laughed and they all did. He was making a joke. Rafe: This kid is actually pretty funny. Which made Danny wonder if this could be enough-them being in the boarded-up cave where no one was allowed to go. If maybe nothing else would have to happen. Danny wished very hard for this. Here's how the cave was laid out: first a big round room with a little bit of daylight in it, then an opening where you had to stoop to get through into another room that was dark, and then a hole you crawled through into room three, where the pool was. Danny had no idea what was beyond that. They all got quiet when they saw the pool: creamy whitish green, catching Rafe's flashlight beam and squiggling its light over the walls. It was maybe six feet wide and clear, deep. Howie: Shit, you guys. Shit. He opened up his notebook and wrote something down. Danny: You brought a pencil? Howie held it up. It was one of those little green pencils they gave you at the country club to sign your check. He said: I used to bring a pen, but it kept leaking on my pants. Rafe gave a big laugh and Howie laughed too, but then he stopped, like maybe he wasn't supposed to laugh as much as Rafe. Danny: What did you write? Howie looked at him: Why? I don't know. Curious. I wrote green pool. Rafe: You call that an idea? They were quiet. Danny felt a pressure building in the cave like someone had asked him a question and was getting sick of waiting for an answer. Rafe. Now wondering why Danny's older cousin had so much power over him is like wondering why the sun shines or why the grass grows. There are people out there who can make other people do things, that's all. Sometimes without asking. Sometimes without even knowing what they want done. Danny went to the edge of the pool. Howie, he said, there's a shiny thing down there at the bottom. You see it? Howie came over and looked. Nope. There, down there. Danny squatted next to the pool and Howie did, too, wobbling on the balls of his big feet. Danny put his hand on his cousin's back. He felt the softness of Howie, how warm he was through his shirt. Maybe Danny had never touched his cousin before, or maybe it was just knowing right then that Howie was a person with a brain and a heart, all the stuff Danny had. Howie clutched his notebook against his side. Danny saw the pages shaking and realized his cousin was scared-Howie felt the danger pulling in around him. Maybe he'd known all along. But he turned his face to Danny with a look of total trust, like he knew Danny would protect him. Like they understood each other. It happened faster than I'm making it sound: Howie looked at Danny and Danny shut his eyes and shoved him into the pool. But even that's too slow: Look. Shut. Shove. Or just shove. There was t he weight of Howie tipping, clawing arms and legs, but no sound Danny could remember, not even a splash. Howie must've yelled, but Danny didn't hear a yell, just the sounds of him and Rafe wriggling out of there and running like crazy, Rafe's flashlight beam strobing the walls, bursting out of the cave into a gush of warm wind, down the two big hills and back to the picnic (where no one missed them), Danny feeling that ring around him and Rafe, a glowing ring that held them together. They didn't say a word about what they'd done until a couple hours later when the picnic was winding down. Danny: Shit. Where the hell is he? Rafe: Could be right underneath us. Danny looked down at the grass. What do you mean, underneath us? Rafe was grinning. I mean we don't know which way he went. By the time everyone started fanning out, looking for Howie, something had crawled inside Danny's brain and was chewing out a pattern like those tunnels, all the ways Howie could've gone deeper inside the caves, under the hills. The mood was calm. Howie had wandered off somewhere was what everyone seemed to be thinking-he was fat, he was weird, there was no blood tie, and no one was blaming Danny for anything. But his Aunt May looked more scare than Danny had ever seen a grown-up look, a hand on her throat like she knew she'd lost her boy, her one child, and seeing how far things had gone made Danny even more petrified to say what he knew he had to say-We tricked him, Rafe and me; we left him in the caves-because that handful of words would change everything: they would all know what he'd done, and Rafe would know he'd told, and beyond that Danny's mind went blank. So he waited one more second before opening his mouth, and then one more, another and another, and every second he waited seemed to drive some sharp thing deeper into Danny. Then it was dark. His pop put a hand on Danny's head (suchagoodboy) and said, They've got plenty of people looking, son. You've got a game tomorrow. Riding back in the car, Danny couldn't get warm. He pulled old blankets over himself and kept the dog in his lap, but his teeth knocked together so hard that his sister complained about the noise and his mom said, You must be coming down with something, honey. I'll run a hot bath when we get home. Danny went back to the caves by himself a few times after that. He'd walk alone up the hills to the boarded-up mouth, and mixed in with the sounds of dry grass was his cousin's voice howling up from underground: no and please and help. And Danny would think: Okay, now-now! and feel a rising up in himself at the idea of finally saying those words he'd been holding inside all this time: Howie's in the caves; we left him in the caves, Rafe and I, and just imagining this gave Danny a rush of relief so intense it seemed he would almost pass out, and at the same time he'd feel a shift around him like the sky and earth were changing places, and a different kind of life would open up, light and clear, some future he didn't realize he'd lost until that minute. But it was too late. Way, way too late for any of that. They'd found Howie in the caves three days later, semiconscious. Every night Danny would expect his pop's sharp knock on his bedroom door and frantically rehearse his excuses-It was Rafe and I'm just a kid-until they ran together in a loop-It was Rafe I'm just a kid itwasRafeI'mjustakid-the loop played even when Danny was doing his homework or watching TV or sitting on the john, itwasRafeI'mjustakid, until it seemed like everything in Danny's life was the witness he needed to prove he was still himself, still Danny King exactly like before: See, I scored a goal! See, I'm hanging with my friends! But he wasn't one hundred percent there, he was watching, too, hoping everyone would be convinced. And they were. And after months and months of this faking, Danny started to believe in it again. All the normal things that had happened to him since the cave made a crust over that day, and the crust got thicker and thicker until Danny almost forgot about what was underneath. And when Howie got better, when he could finally be alone in a room without his mother, when he could sleep with the lights off again, he was different. After the traumatic incident his sweetness was gone and he got into drugs and eventually bought a gun and tried to rob a 7-Eleven, and they sent him away to reform school. After Rafe died three years later (killing two girls from his class at Michigan in his pickup truck), the family picnics stopped. And by the time they started up again, Danny wasn't going home anymore. That was memory number two. So now back to Danny, walking with his arms up and his cell phone on through the basement or dungeon or whatever it was in a castle that belonged to Howie. He'd come a long way to meet his cousin here, and his reasons were practical: making money, getting the hell out of New York. But also Danny was curious. Because over the years, news about Howie kept reaching him through that high-speed broadcasting device known as a family:

Bond trader
Chicago
Insane wealth
Marriage, kids
Retirement at thirty-four

And each time one of those chunks of news got to Danny, he'd think, See, he's okay. He's fine. He's better than fine! and feel a bump of relief and then another bump that made him sit down wherever he was and stare into space. Because something hadn't happened that should've happened to Danny. Or maybe the wrong things had happened, or maybe too many little things had happened instead of one big thing, or maybe not enough little things had happened to combine into one big thing. Bottom line: Danny didn't know why he'd come all this way to Howie's castle. Why did I take a writing class? I thought it was to get away from my roommate, Davis, but I'm starting to think there was another reason under that. You? Who the hell are you? That's what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I'm the guy talking. Someone's always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don't know who it is or what their reasons are. My teacher, Holly, told me that. I started the class with a bad attitude. For the second meeting I wrote a story about a guy who fucks his writing teacher in a broom closet until the door flies open and all the brooms and mops and buckets come crashing out and their bare asses are shining in the light and they both get busted. It got a lot of laughs while I was reading it, but when I stopped reading the room went quiet. Okay, Holly says. Reactions? No one has a reaction. Come on, folks. Our job is to help Ray do the very best work he can do. Something tells me this may not be it. More quiet. Finally I say: It was just a joke. No one's laughing, she says. They were, I say. They laughed. Is that what you are, Ray? A joke? I think: What the fuck? She's looking at me but I can't make myself look back. She says: I bet there are people out there who'd tell me Yes, Ray's a joke. Who'd tell me you're trash. Am I right? Now there's muttering: Ow, and Shit, and What about that, Ray-man? and I know they expect me to be pissed, and I know I'm supposed to be pissed and I am pissed, but not just that. Something else. There's the door, she tells me, and points. Why don't you just walk out? I don't move. I can walk out the door, but then I'd have to stand in the hall and wait. What about that gate? She's pointing out the window now. The gate is lit up at night: razor wire coiled along the top, the tower with a sharpshooter in it. Or what about your cell doors? she asks. Or block gates? Or shower doors? Or the mess hall doors, or the doors to the visitor entrance? How often do you gentlemen touch a doorknob? That's what I'm asking. I knew the minute I saw Holly that she'd never taught in a prison before. It wasn't her looks-she's not a kid, and you can see she hasn't had it easy. But people who teach in prisons have a hard layer around them that's missing on Holly. I can hear how nervous she is, like she planned every word of that speech about the doors. But the crazy thing is, she's right. The last time I got out, I'd stand in front of doors and wait for them to open up. You forget what it's like to do it yourself. She says, My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head. It leads wherever you want it to go, she says. That's what I'm here to do, and if that doesn't interest you then please spare us all, because this grant only funds ten students, and we only meet once a week, and I'm not going to waste everyone's time on bullshit power struggles. She comes right to my desk and looks down. I look back up. I want to say, I've heard some cheesy motivational speeches in my time, but that one's a doozy. A door in our heads, come on. But while she was talking I felt something pop in my chest. You can wait outside, she says. It's only ten more minutes. I think I'll stay. We look at each other. Good, she says. . . . So when Danny finally spotted a light in that castle basement and realized it was a door with light coming in around it, when his heart went pop in his chest and he went over there and gave it a shove and it opened right up into a curved stairwell with a light on, I know what that was like. Not because I'm Danny or he's me or any of that shit-this is all just stuff a guy told me. I know because after Holly mentioned that door in our heads, something happened to me. The door wasn't real, there was no actual door, it was just figurative language. Meaning it was a word. A sound. Door. But I opened it up and walked out.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

teameight — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:15:10 +0000

[slideshow id="2445"]

The Miami Herald

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:36:27 +0000

The Miami Herald, November 14, 2006 Literary voices inspire Egan's plots; For her latest book, The Keep, she found herself in a Gothic frame of mind

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:53:43 +0000

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 5, 2006 Read the Q & A A Castle Inspired Egan's 'The Keep'

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"slide11" from ALR Main's Album by ALR Main. Released: 2010.

The Boston Phoenix

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:54:14 +0000

The Boston Phoenix, September 26, 2006 Read the Profile Cave Dwelling; Jennifer Egan's goth/po-mo gamble

New York Newsday

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:54:50 +0000

New York Newsday, July 30 2006 A REPORTER'S GOTHIC STYLE; She's the queen of her castle

San Francisco Chronicle

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:55:23 +0000

San Francisco Chronicle, July 23 2006 Read the article "Hearing Voices" In 'The Keep,' Jennifer Egan stakes out new territory, combining the ordinary with the supernatural in Eastern Europe

Time Out

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:55:53 +0000

Time Out, August 3-9, 2006 Castle In Doubt: Jennifer Egan's new novel turns a gothic story line on its head by David Bahr

New York Times On the Web

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:56:34 +0000

New York Times On the Web Saturday, July 22, 2006 Listen to the Inverview Audio: An interview with Jennifer Egan, the author of "The Keep."

The Believer

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:57:17 +0000

The Believer, August 2006 Read the Interview Breathing new life into the gothic genre--but not in a creepy way. Jennifer Egan interviewed by Vendela Vida

New York Magazine

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:57:47 +0000

New York Magazine, August 28, 2006 Read the Article Off The Shelf: Jennifer Egan/ The author of the new novel "The Keep" on five books in her library that have influenced her--and why Henry James is so hard to read in New York

Poets and Writers

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:58:17 +0000

Poets and Writers (Cover Story) Sept/Oct 2006 Read an Excerpt of the Article Powers of Perception: A Profile of Jennifer Egan/ After the success of Look at Me, her eerily prescient social satire of American life, what did Jennifer Egan turn to next? The gothic novel, of course. By Jessica George Firger

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 23:58:45 +0000

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 9, 2008 Read the Interview Borough of Writers Q&A: Jennifer Egan

Face value - By Laura Miller

teameight — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:46:50 +0000

Salon.com, November 14, 2001 Read the Interview Face value - By Laura Miller Jennifer Egan, author of "Look at Me," talks about her book's prescient depiction of a terrorist sleeper, the perversities of the fashion world and why male novelists get more credit for writing about big ideas.

Cleveland Plain Dealer-Sex Interview

teameight — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:28:40 +0000

Why is Good Writing about Sex so Rare? Discuss The Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 4th, 2010 Read the Article

Bomb Magazine

teameight — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:30:31 +0000

Bomb Magazine, Summer issue Interview with Heidi Julavits "Egan is a super-thinky writer in quasi-disguise, a writer who alchemizes Big Ideas into works of emotional intensity and architectural intricacy, the result being sneaky books you can recommend to those friends and relatives who demand “recognizable” characters and thumping storylines, but whom you hope might find tantalizing, beneath these vibrant entertainments, the buzzing circuitry of Egan’s mighty brain." Read the Introduction

Salon.com

teameight — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:17:52 +0000

Salon.com, 6/13 "Trying to "follow" the "plot" of "Goon Squad" is like trying to count the pores on your arm while tripping: tempting, yes, but a distraction from all the pyrotechnical fun." Read the Review/Q&A

Bookslut/2006

teameight — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:59:08 +0000

Bookslut, interview by Donna Seaman Read the Interview

The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC

teameight — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:25:24 +0000

The Leonard Lopate Show, WNYC, 6/10 Listen to a Podcast

Wall Street Journal, NY Region

teameight — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:20:06 +0000

Wall Street Journal, NY Region, 6/15 "Brooklyn-based novelist Jennifer Egan has accomplished the tricky feat of using metafiction techniques without sacrificing old-fashioned storytelling." Read the Q & A

Philebrity

teameight — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:42:17 +0000

Philebrity, 6/17 "We wish they made more novelists like Jennifer Egan these days." Read the Interview

Drinking Diaries

teameight — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:44:51 +0000

Drinking Diaries, 6/13 Read the Interview

The Rumpus

teameight — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:39:17 +0000

The Rumpus An interview in person, and in PowerPoint View the Interview

The Paris Review

teameight — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:22:58 +0000

The Paris Review, 6/25 Read the Q&A

Bookotron

teameight — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:22:56 +0000

Bookotron, 6/28 "What I am frankly most curious about is how the novel will be received by the science fiction community." Listen to a Podcast of the Interview

Express from the Washington Post

teameight — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:33:07 +0000

Express from the Washington Post, 6/28 "In general, Egan is less interested in telling her own story than she is in describing the world from her own point of view." Read the Interview

St Louis Courier-Journal

teameight — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:13:03 +0000

St. Louis Courier-Journal, 6/28 "Part of the joy of reading "Goon Squad" is the thrill of recognition that comes from being fully introduced to a character who has been alluded to in a preceding chapter." Read the Interview

The Daily Beast

teameight — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:08:21 +0000

The Daily Beast, 6/29 "Egan is an iconoclastic and original fiction writer, hewing to her own genre-bending path and creating fresh starts with each new book. Her finely tuned cultural antennae, her elegant language, and the unpredictability of her imagined universes make reading her work an adventure. Her work is supremely intelligent, psychologically acute, seriously playful, attuned to cutting-edge technology." Read the Interview

Guernica

teameight — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:27:32 +0000

Guernica/a magazine of art & politics Egan talks with Temple University's Joshua Lukin, who knows her work better than she does. Read the Interview

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

teameight — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:34:43 +0000

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 7/4 "I really wasn't thinking of anything but breaking open a cliche I wanted to understand," she says, "and out of this came this guy I was just nuts about." Read the Interview

Guttersnipe

teameight — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:36:42 +0000

Guttersnipe, 7/1 "Guttersnipe reached Jennifer Egan at home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where she was enjoying some time off following a book tour. Music journalism, Jagermeister as an artistic choice, and the future of books were among the topics." Read the Q&A

Dossier

teameight — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:36:52 +0000

Dossier, 7/9 "As Egan’s fans know, her style varies from book to book and this collection is a testament to her wide-ranging mastery of voice and tone." Read the Q&A

The Millions

teameight — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:21:52 +0000

The Millions, 7/12 "This is where Egan’s genius lies. She engages with philosophical questions and is formally daring, and yet, and yet!, her work is emotionally moving, the stories and characters always compelling." Read the Profile/Interview

NPR, Morning Edition

teameight — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:53:05 +0000

NPR's Morning Edition, 7/26 Interviewed by Lynn Neary "According to Egan, the novel is a flexible and sturdy form, capable of withstanding the changes and challenges brought on by new technology. As a writer, she says she aims to hold on to the best of the past while having fun with the best of what's new." Listen to Podcast or Read Story

Off the (C)Huff

teameight — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:36:16 +0000

Huffington Post, 7/27 "Ok. She's not always cozy. Instead she's intuitive. Ironic. Intense. Insightful." Read the Story/Interview

New York Magazine's "Grub Street"

teameight — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 15:21:04 +0000

New York Magazine's Grub Street An interview in which Egan unwittingly reveals that her vocabulary when discussing food on the phone is limited, and that her kitchen is a mess. Read the Interview

The Takeaway

teameight — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:40:25 +0000

NPR's "The Takeaway," with John Hockenberry and Lynn Sherr, 8/3 "If you’ve read any of Jennifer Egan’s previous work, you know that her writing style is rarely predictable. In her new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad," she takes that unpredictability to a whole new level." Read the Text/Listen to the Interview

The Economist

teameight — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:19:54 +0000

More Intelligent Life/The Economist, 8/5 "The miracle of "A Visit from the Goon Squad" is that nothing—not even a section devoted to an extended PowerPoint presentation—feels forced." Read the Interview

Riff City, 13 Online

teameight — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:48:10 +0000

Riff City/Channel Thirteen, 8/11 "Egan might be better than every music critic ever at describing both how music is made and what listening to music feels like." Read the Interview

The Fader

teameight — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:02:24 +0000

The Fader, 8/17 "To those of you who have found much of what you do soundtracked—and if you are on TheFADER.com, we’re guessing that is you—it’s a strongly moving book about time and growth, and what’s exciting about being young and old, and what’s difficult about both." Read the Interview

The Morning News/Robert Birnbaum

teameight — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:09:01 +0000

The Morning News/Robert Birnbaum, 8/18 "Let’s put it this way: I would hesitate to call anything satire in our culture. Or futuristic." Read the Interview

Paper Cuts/Website

teameight — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:10:59 +0000

Paper Cuts, the Times Book Review blog, 8/19 "At dinner with a friend recently, the subject of writers’ Web sites came up, and this friend mentioned Jennifer Egan's website, which she said was “incredible” or “amazing” or some such superlative...I went home and, as soon as I had a spare moment, looked up Egan’s site. That “moment” turned into at least an hour. Read the Interview

HITS "Daily Double"

teameight — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 15:55:03 +0000

HITS Magazine's "Daily Double," 9/7 "The subconscious can be a very powerful force. And thank God for that, because without it, I would have a sub par IQ." Read the Interview

Mary Literary

teameight — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:20:57 +0000

Mary Literary, 9/7 "At first I wanted to be a doctor...I was a kid who wanted to dig up graves and look at bodies." Read the Interview

Cooking the Books

teameight — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:31:54 +0000

Cooking the Books, with Emily Gould, 9/29 Egan assists in making chocolate-dipped macaroons while discussing cabbages and kings. Watch the Video

Opening Lines

teameight — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 13:26:43 +0000

Opening Lines (a website devoted to artists' beginnings), 9/15 "I’m sorry to say that my crowning achievement [in high school] was a play about the group The Who. I don’t think that’s something I’ll be sharing with the world. I’m not even sure about where it is." Read the Interview

The Austinist

teameight — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:15:20 +0000

The Austinist, 10/1 "Hah! I wish I’d known how to use PowerPoint in time to help me with organizing this wacky book." Read the Review

Irish Echo

teameight — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:55:01 +0000

Irish Echo, 9/29 "Everything about the past...is a construction of that present. I wasn’t there. You weren’t there. We’re all imagining it together.” Read the Interview

Satellite Sisters

teameight — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 02:47:38 +0000

Satellite Sisters Show, 11/20 Word-Write Festival. Listen to the Podcast

The Nervous Breakdown

teameight — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:16:51 +0000

The Nervous Breakdown, Nov. 13 Of Time and Tornadoes: an interview with Dika Lam Read the Interview

Kirkus Reviews

teameight — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:18:11 +0000

Kirkus Reviews, 12/15 "In a way, maybe [GOON SQUAD] is a response to the bewildered renegotiation of my relationship to the world." Read the Q & A

EMusic Interview

teameight — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:13:59 +0000

EMusic, 12/20 "One area I find weirdly unpleasant is actually telling my kids stories, like my father used to do." Read the Q&A

The Wall Street Journal Speakeasy

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:25:36 +0000

Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, 3/24 "My cats are a big part of my work life. They’re in and out of here all day long." Read the Interview

Aspen Public Radio

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:27:24 +0000

Aspen Public Radio (part 1), 3/23 Listen to the Podcast

Psychology Today

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:39:24 +0000

Psychology Today, 3/25 "Hang in there. If things don't go your way in this round, they may very well the next." Read the Interview

NEA Podcast

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:45:06 +0000

National Endowment for the Arts Podcast: Interview with Josephine Reed, 3/24 Listen to the Podcast

Granta

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:59:09 +0000

Granta: Online Interview, 3/18 "I'm someone who doesn’t necessarily lunge to read ‘experimental’ work, because for me that word tends to connote abstraction, even a kind of severity, rather than a reading experience that might be fun." Read the Q & A

BBC News Online

teameight — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:06:28 +0000

BBC News: Entertainment & Arts, 4/1 "I myself have been robbed many times in many ways - the most egregious being the time someone stole my wallet and then phoned me posing as a bank employee and got me to give her my pin number." Read the Interview

NPR: Word of Mouth

teameight — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:10:47 +0000

NPR: Word of Mouth, 3/28 "Jennifer Egan, MS Powerpoint, and the Rock n 'Roll Pause" Listen to the Podcast

BBC The Strand

teameight — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:54:44 +0000

BBC Radio, The Strand, 3/25 Listen to the Podcast

Paperback Events Coverage

teameight — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:58:00 +0000

Coverage of some recent Brooklyn events: Book Court, 3/28 BAM, 3/31

EW Online

teameight — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 16:07:48 +0000

Entertainment Weekly: Shelf Life, 4/3 "I just didn’t expect such an idiosyncratic, decentralized book to prompt such strong enthusiasm." Read the Q & A

BBC 6 Music News

teameight — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:00:54 +0000

BBC 6 Music News, 4/5 "Great Rock Pauses" Listen to the Podcast

BBC Radio 4 Open Book

teameight — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 17:27:17 +0000

BBC Radio 4 "Open Book", 4/10 An interview with Mariella Frostrup Listen to the Interview

Sky Arts Book Show

teameight — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:14:02 +0000

Sky Arts Book Show (UK), with Mariella Frostrup, 4/14

Aspen Public Radio-Part 2

teameight — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:32:42 +0000

Aspen Public Radio (Part 2), 3/30 Listen to the Podcast

Bookmunch (UK)

teameight — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:46:50 +0000

Bookmunch (UK) 4/11 "Quick views of someone you never get to know are so evocative." Read the Interview

The Days of Yore

teameight — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 23:31:52 +0000

The Days of Yore, 4/18 "I was interested in corporeal strangeness. I wish I could tell you it was about making people well, but I think it was more about wanting to cut them open!" Read the Interview

The Atlantic Wire

teameight — Wed, 04 May 2011 16:20:59 +0000

The Atlantic Wire: Media Diet, 5/3 "Nonfiction expands my knowledge, but fiction broadens my experience." Read the Interview

The Los Angeles Times

teameight — Fri, 06 May 2011 00:18:13 +0000

The Los Angeles Times, 4/29 "I think the real surprise to me is that young people seem to respond to it." Read the Profile

The Guardian

teameight — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:36:34 +0000

The Guardian, 5/7 "I think there was a kind of clarity to being reduced to myself in this extreme way." Read the Profile

The LAist

teameight — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:43:26 +0000

The LAist, 5/10 "I think the industry, how books will be created and sold; there are legitimate worries there, but I’m not sure that the death of the book is on the list." Read the Interview

Shelf Awareness/Bethanne Patrick

teameight — Tue, 17 May 2011 20:43:14 +0000

Shelf Awareness/Bethanne Patrick 5/16 "I'm obviously a disaster of a tweeter." Read the Interview

7x7 SF

teameight — Wed, 18 May 2011 01:43:58 +0000

7x7SF, May 2011 "I think the city was in a sleepy hangover, and the echo of the ’60s was everywhere." Read the Profile

The Big App Show

teameight — Thu, 19 May 2011 14:03:23 +0000

The Big App Show, with Adam Curry 5/19 Watch the Interview

NY Magazine Vulture

teameight — Thu, 19 May 2011 14:37:25 +0000

New York Magazine: Vulture, 5/11 "I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves, that’s the most dangerous kind of censorship — that’s how hegemony works." Read the Q & A

NPR's To the Best of Our Knowledge

teameight — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 18:22:53 +0000

NPR: To the Best of Our Knowledge, 6/11 "Novel Novels" Listen to the Program Podcast

The National

teameight — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:34:01 +0000

The National, 6/6 "Ideally you would like it to seem true but not actually be true - because then it's not satire, it's just realism." Read the Interview

SF Chronicle

teameight — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:50:40 +0000

San Francisco Chronicle, 6/14 "It feels just the right amount of different, so there's no overlap at all with anything I've done before." Read the Interview

San Jose Mercury News

teameight — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:54:48 +0000

San Jose Mercury News, 6/15 "I was a witness -- not a hanger-on, just kind of a looker-on." Read the Interview

The Gothamist

teameight — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:36:20 +0000

The Gothamist, 7/8 "I don't know what I'm doing. That's the price you pay for doing something different every time." Read the Interview

Leonard Lopate Book Club

teameight — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:50:45 +0000

The Leonard Lopate Show Book Club, WNYC, 7/14/11 Jennifer Egan discusses LOOK AT ME Listen to a Podcast

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

teameight — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:45:06 +0000

Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/6 "At first, the characters were 'little islands far apart -- I didn't see the land mass that connected them till later.'" Read the Interview

The Guardian

teameight — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:47:02 +0000

The Guardian (UK), 8/21 "I would have accepted a marriage proposal from Roger Daltrey on the spot." Read the Interview

photos/bio

teameight — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:46:01 +0000

Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories and the bestselling The Keep. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and "The Bipolar Kid" received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Short Version (***Introducers, please use this one to prevent audience slumber!!): Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling The Keep. Her new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine.

contact

teameight — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 20:46:17 +0000

Egan's Facebook Author Page Jennifer Egan at Random House

Literary Rights, U.S. and Foreign

Amanda Urban at International Creative Management: aurban@icmtalent.com

Film and TV Rights

Ron Bernstein at International Creative Management: rbernstein@icmtalent.com

Reading and Speaking Events

Kim Thornton at Random House Speakers Bureau: kthornton@randomhouse.com

For publicity inquiries contact Kate Runde

krunde@randomhouse.com

James is a Girl

teameight — Sun, 04 Feb 1996 17:49:38 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) An October morning in Paris. James King, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, bounds from an elevator into the lobby of the Hotel de la Tremoille, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, where she has been staying for the past week. "How do I look -- what do you think?" she asks the 20-year-old Julia Samersova, who used to work at Company Management, the modeling agency that began representing James nearly two years ago, when she was still known as Jaime. (Company Management already represented Jaime Rishar, a top model. "James" was already Jaime King's nickname.) Samersova is now James's best friend and occasional chaperone. Seated at a breakfast table squeezing lemons into a bottle of Evian, she looks up at James, who gestures nervously at her black pants and long-sleeved black shirt. "Do you think this is proper? Do you think it's fierce yet subtle?" ("Fierce" is the superlative du jour this fall among the fashion crowd.) She has enormous dark eyes and braces on her teeth, and will tell anyone who asks that her father is a Russian mobster. Motherly beyond her years, she has taken a break from her studies in fashion-business merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York to accompany James to this fall's ready-to-wear shows in Europe, which began the first week in October in Milan. "Banana Republic rocks, I'm sorry," James says. It is the morning of the John Galliano show, one of the most anticipated of the collections being shown in Paris, and James has been cast in it -- a triumph for any model, not to speak of one having her first season in Paris. James has just finished her third season in Milan (fall, spring, fall), but because of French law, any model under 16 is prohibited from appearing in the Paris collections. James turned 16 in April. When James has finished her breakfast -- tea, a small pain au chocolat and a chain of Marlboros -- I walk with her and Samersova to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where the Galliano show is to take place. Despite the balmy weather, Paris has been a mess -- a general strike and the resulting gridlock have filled the air with a throat-scorching smog; the proliferation of terrorist bombs in subways and garbage cans has led to a heavy police presence on the streets. Yet the fashion world feels eerily removed from all this. At the backstage entrance to the Galliano show, the most pressing question is who will get in and who won't. Fashion shows used to be sedate affairs catering mostly to magazine editors and department-store buyers. Now that models have become icons, the shows have about them an air of exquisite urgency: they're cultural high-low events, like a Stones concert in the 1970's. Though the show isn't scheduled to start until 6:30 P.M., models like James who aren't yet stars are summoned hours ahead to have their hair and makeup done, so that the top models can arrive last and enjoy the full attention of the staff members. In a windowless backstage area, time drifts by on a languorous haze of smoke and hair spray and blow-dryer heat. A dance beat throbs unnoticed, like a pulse. James sips a can of Heineken and smokes. She picked up a horrible cough in Milan and developed shingles on her back from stress -- a wide brush stroke of tiny purple blisters that she takes obvious glee in showing people. Samersova nags at her to take her medicine. James likes to tell people that she and Samersova are Tauruses. "I mean she is the second me," James says. "That's why I bring her here, because I know that when I'm too frazzled to make a rational decision I can trust her because we think exactly the same. I mean she's like a boyfriend but not." James seems quite childlike at times -- she's easily distracted, prone to slouching and staring into space, then snapping to attention in a fit of enthusiasm. She's physically affectionate in a sweet, unself-conscious way, always hugging people and leaning against them. She can be insecure, like the time she accused a Company Management driver of preferring to drive another model rather than herself, then stalked away, looking as if she might cry. Yet other moments she seems much older than 16, so jaded as to be unshockable. She has a pierced nipple, a large tattoo of a winged fairy on her lower back, refers to people in their 20's as "kids" and frequently invokes her "whole life," as if this were an endless expanse of time. These contradictions are all present, somehow, in her face, which looks freshly minted in its innocence yet, somehow, knowing. Galliano is famous for his lush romantic details, and by 3 in the afternoon, James's hair has been wrapped around coils of wire to resemble branches of a tree. Makeup is next; then she huddles with the other younger models, wiling away the remaining time before the show. At one point they talk among themselves about how distant they feel from their old lives. "The hardest thing is when you go home and you realize you've grown up 10 years in 2 days," James says. "My sister is in college, earning $5.50 an hour working part time, and she's like, 'You make so much more money than I do, and I'm 20 years old.' " After a moment, James adds: "She has a 3.9 grade-point average. That's almost 4.0." Having been pegged early on as a potential star, James opted to leave high school more than a year ago and pursue modeling full time, a route the industry publicly frowns upon but is not all that uncommon. The supermodel Bridget Hall, who even now is only 18, is said to have left school at 15. Like Hall and a number of other teen-age models, James is enrolled in a home-study program, but she admits that she has little time or inclination for schoolwork. Still, there is an intellectual hunger about her: she asks lots of questions (not always the case with teen-age models), keeps voluminous journals and usually has a book buried in her bag; today it's a contemporary Japanese novel, "The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," by Haruki Murakami. Shortly after 4, the supermodels begin to show up: Kate Moss and Amber Valetta, Naomi Campbell, Shalom. Some rhythm backstage instantly quickens. One well-known model arrives in a long navy blue skirt and turtleneck. ("Fake boobs," a younger girl whispers.) In the imaginations of younger models and would-be models, each supermodel seems to stand for something: Linda Evangelista for hard work; Campbell for bad behavior; Moss for imperfect beauty that triumphed. Within minutes of the supermodels' arrival, the room is saturated with camera flashes and television crews, everyone tripping over wires and elbowing one another aside to get at those famously beautiful faces. The media runoff falls to the newer, lesser-known models, who are already inured to the giant cameras clocking their every move, often only inches from their faces. By now, outside the theater, an impatient, well-heeled crowd surges against the waist-high metal barriers cordoning off the doors. Everyone is brandishing crumpled invitations and wailing the name of Galliano's gatekeeper, a young bespectacled Englishman named Mesh. "Mesh! Mesh!" He paces frantically before them, occasionally waving his arms and consulting with the security guards. Now and then, a shaken-looking fashion editor makes herself heard and is pried from the crush. "I'm so sorry!" Mesh murmurs in soothing tones while delivering her into the theater. "I had no idea you were there." Inside, seating is assigned in direct accordance with status, and Galliano has sharpened the hierarchy at this show by seating his most important guests right on the stage. Eventually the show opens to sound bites from the "Pulp Fiction" soundtrack. It's a convoluted spectacle, no simple runway viewing. Campbell saunters about the stage like a high priestess, several choirboys trotting in her wake; Shalom, barelegged in a tutu, pirouettes around the perimeter of the balcony. James appears in a white dress, her hair full of leaves. As she darts to and fro, following Galliano's wordless, pretentious script with complete sincerity, she brings to mind nothing so much as a girl starring in the school play. In the fashion world, models are always "girls." Successful models are "big girls." Stars like Moss and Campbell and Evangelista are "huge girls." Diminutive though the term may sound for a 30-year-old like Evangelista, who has made millions during her career, "girl" captures the peculiar role played by a model of any age. Backstage at a show or at a shooting in a loft, "girl" suggests, as it is meant to, someone more beautiful and less complicated than a woman. In recent years, America has become obsessed with "girls," and the fashion world has a theory about why: actresses have lost their glamour by turning into real people, and models have replaced them as the stars of our time. Certainly models are this decade's contribution to our already crowded celebrity pantheon. They are what rock stars were to the 70's and visual artists were to the 80's. The rise of models has less to do with the fashion industry, whose business has slumped since the 80's, than with the potent blend of cultural preoccupations they embody: youth, beauty and, perhaps most of all, media exposure. Models are perfectly suited to a culture obsessed with fame for its own sake. Appearing in the media is their job -- their images are their stock in trade. They are famous for being famous. In the fashion world, there is a feeling that models have changed. "Today, you're not looking for perfection anymore," says Michael Flutie, the owner of Company Management, one of several new modeling agencies that have been founded in New York in the last decade. What matters more than any particular look is a model's attitude, her ability to project an inner life for the camera: the inner life of someone whose surface fascinates us. To "find a girl" is to discover a teen-ager with potential. The career arc of a model requires that she start young, and the preternatural beauty of very young girls (along with their quite genuine girlishness) makes them ur-models of a sort. Even a face 21 years old doesn't look quite as fresh, and I've had models in their 20's admit that they're a few years older than they say, and tell me how hard it was to adjust to metabolic changes. For years now, and in summertime especially, Manhattan has teemed with schoolgirls, some as young as 12 or 13, who are building up their modeling portfolios during vacation. The ones with real potential almost always get magazine work before they graduate high school. The paradox of the outcry over Calvin Klein's recent advertisements for his jeans is that most of his young models were shown to look their real ages. But if models have always been young, they have not always been media celebrities, and nowadays, teen-agers like James must contend with a level of attention -- and the pressures that come with it -- that wasn't there in the early 80's, when I modeled briefly. The media presence is greater now, and the world has shrunk: a 16-year-old model might be offered jobs in Paris one week and Prague the next. She is part of a globalized industry. To "make a girl" is to put her on the map. Flutie began making James two years ago. James is big today, and there are people in the fashion world who believe that she could be huge. She has long, straight blond hair and a heartbreaking face -- sexy and sorrowful. She has an endearingly snaggletoothed smile and the luminous skin of a child. She is a slender girl and a voluptuous woman. She is growing up before our eyes, and she is growing up very, very fast. On the day Flutie arrives in Paris from Milan, company management holds a dinner for its models at Natacha, a restaurant popular this fall with the fashion crowd. (Fashion people tend to surround themselves with one another, wherever they are.) In a downstairs room bathed in gold light, the models and their guests sprawl around several tables and wait for Flutie. There's Jicky Schnee, a bleached blonde whose modeling career took off when she had the good fortune to share an elevator one day with the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, whom she didn't recognize but whose dog she patted. There is Suzy Richards, from London, who recently cut off her long brown hair and bleached it white, and Lesli Holecek, who recently cut off her long blond hair and dyed it blue-black (and, more recently, back to blond). The models share gossip from Milan -- Evangelista looked fat, the runways were full of blondes, some models aren't coming to Paris because of the nuclear testing in Tahiti. Joi Tyler, a black model, is having a miserable time in Paris. The designers are using few black models this season, and she has heard it's because Romeo Gigli used mostly black models in his spring '95 show and the line wasn't a commercial hit. Tyler turns to Andreea Radutoiu, a cinnamon-haired model with strong Eastern European features. "I never want to come back here," she says, almost close to tears. Finally, Flutie arrives with James and Samersova. James looks exhausted. Flutie, who has bleached-blond hair and eyebrows and is wearing black leather pants (as he almost always does), sits down near Radutoiu, looking pained. He has bad news: a mix-up has occurred between the organizers of the Comme des Garcons show and the French bureaucrats who issue work permits, and Radutoiu, a new model who is having her first season, has been canceled from her biggest show. "But I was just there for the rehearsal," Radutoiu says in a near whisper, "and they didn't say anything." She has a sweet, unpretentious air -- once, having run out of moisturizer, she rubbed Mazola oil on her face for a couple of days. She has just turned 19, and spent her adolescence struggling with the rest of her Romanian family as they all settled in Chicago. She looks stunned. James, who was canceled from the Comme des Garcons show for the same reason as Radutoiu, bellows from her end of the table: "They can [expletive]. I have more important shows to do!" (Later, I heard she was in tears when she first found out.) After venting his frustration with Comme des Garcons, Flutie sips red wine. Among his models, he tends to assume a half-listening stance, like a distracted father whose mind is still at the office. Radutoiu broods. Her book is full of tear sheets from magazines, but in her first year she'll probably earn less than $30,000, more than half of which will go to repay the agency (on top of a 20 percent commission) for money advanced to her for the many expenses she incurred in the development process: haircuts, air fare, messenger fees, laser prints for her book, multiple copies of each magazine she appears in and even food. The model pays for everything, and it adds up. James, whose Corn Belt blond hair and blue eyes are more naturally the stuff of catalogues -- a good source of income for models -- will make an estimated $150,000 in this, her second year. But she, too, will have a commission and expenses to pay. The rest will go to her parents, who invest it and provide her with a weekly allowance. Striking a balance among editorial, advertising and catalogue work is crucial to the success of any model who, like Radutoiu or James, is shooting for the top. Editorial work -- that is, posing for the photographs that appear in the fashion pages of magazines -- is low paying ($150 per day on average), but highly prestigious and a valuable source of tear sheets and exposure. Catalogues pay much better (day rates start at $750 and can go as high as $10,000 or more, for a star), but are useless in forwarding a career. To be perceived as a mere catalogue girl is to lose the hope of editorial work, without which a model has little chance at grasping for the real prizes of her business: campaigns, or seasonal advertising for designers, which can pay as much as $20,000 per day; and most desired of all, contracts, in which a model becomes a representative for a company's products or apparel lines (Moss for Calvin Klein, Claudia Schiffer for Revlon). A contract model may earn sums in the millions. There is an upright piano at Natacha, and James begins fooling around on it. She has a charisma that draws others to her, and soon a group is gathered at the piano. Watching her, I find myself thinking of her description of her first meeting with Flutie, when she was 14: "Michael asked me a question. He's like, 'Why do you want to do this?' And I said, 'Because I want to be a star.' It didn't mean that I want to be famous. It didn't mean that I wanted everyone to know me, it just meant that I want to be a star to myself. That I wanted to be successful to myself, that I wanted to go somewhere with my life and I wanted it then, I wanted it now." James is from Omaha. "I grew up in the suburbs," she tells me, "very normal family, like Mom, Dad, that kind of thing." She has an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents separated more than a year ago (something James never mentions), but the split is amicable and they still work together in Omaha, renting out mostly low-income apartments. "When I was 12 or 13," James says, "that's when I started looking at magazines, and I became literally obsessed with designers and models. Like, I would stay up till 3 o'clock in the morning slicing the best pictures out of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and, making collages and posting them up on my door, like the fiercest pictures that I saw, like of Gaultier and Galliano and whatever. I knew every model, I knew who Steven Meisel was." In the minds of a great many young American girls, modeling has replaced Hollywood as the locus for fantasies of stardom. Kelly Stewart, a 14-year-old high-school freshman who has been with the Click agency for two years, says she became obsessed at age 8. A room plastered with pages from Vogue has become as emblematic of American girlhood as Barbie has, and the assiduous merchandising of models in books, magazines and cable-television shows is no doubt fueling this surge of interest. "When I was in junior high, I had a lot of problems with people," James says. "I started getting my breasts earlier than everyone, I had my period earlier, and people really made fun of me." Radutoiu, who spoke no English when she arrived from Romania with her family at 13, says that she, too, found solace in fashion magazines. Like fantasies of Hollywood stardom, modeling contains the archetypal elements of discovery, transformation and escape from an imperfect life into a world of riches and fame. But here's the twist: while few 14-year-olds find their way to Hollywood, a 14-year-old with even the slimmest prospects for a modeling career is more than likely to come to the attention of someone in the fashion world. A vast apparatus exists solely to ferret her out: traveling conventions like Pro Scout and Model Search America, where thousands of girls (and boys) pay to be seen by agents from New York and elsewhere; and countless modeling schools, ranging from the well known, like John Casablancas and Barbizon, to regional schools like Nancy Bounds's Studios in Omaha. That was where James asked her parents to let her go, and where Flutie, who routinely travels to small markets in search of new talent, spotted her in November 1993 at her graduation fashion show and invited her to New York. James visited the city with her mother for several days in March 1994, when she was a high-school freshman. She saw photographers, did some test pictures (meaning that both model and photographer work for free, or that the model pays a small amount) and received enthusiastic responses. She returned to New York in July 1994, shortly after her 15th birthday, and did work for Vogue, Mademoiselle, Allure and Seventeen. She also shot an ad for Abercrombie & Fitch, with photographs by Bruce Weber. She made a splash. "I went home after that first summer and I tried to go back to school," she says. "I went four days, and that's when the work started kicking in. I had to choose whether I wanted to do my career or go to school. And you know what? I'm sorry, but you will learn so much more traveling around the world than you ever will sitting in a classroom with 25 people reading a history book. What they teach you in French class about France is bull. You will not know anything about French culture until you come and experience it, just like everything else they teach you." James's mother, Nancy King, describes her daughter as the sort of child who scored high on aptitude tests but was apathetic in school and hard to control at home. "She was different from the beginning," says King, who is 43 and clearly the source of her daughter's beauty and blondness. "She would sit around the house and do nothing. We tried to screw her window shut so she wouldn't sneak out at night -- didn't work. My husband and I were separating, and I thought, How am I going to handle her alone? And then the modeling thing came up . . . everything happens for a reason." King sees modeling as providing direction for James now and financial security for her future, which she hopes will include college. Flutie says he doesn't encourage early departures from school, like James's. "The modeling had nothing to do with her not being in school," he says. He mentions that another of his models, Ramsay Jones, 16, just signed an exclusive contract with Galliano for the House of Givenchy, but that the deal will allow her to remain in high school full time. (James is enrolled in a home-study program run by the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.) James spent the fall of 1994 and much of the following spring commuting between Omaha and New York, where she lived either with Samersova and her mother in their home near Brighton Beach in Brooklyn; in an apartment Company rents in lower Manhattan to temporarily house its models, or at Flutie's apartment in Greenwich Village. When she traveled for work (especially common in winter, when shoots often take place in warmer cities like Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco), a family member, usually her mother, went with her. Her career continued to flourish: she worked with top photographers like Ellen von Unwerth, Francesco Scavullo and Arthur Elgort, did a Benetton advertisement with Mario Sorrenti and appeared on the cover of Italian Glamour and in the fashion pages of Italian Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Spanish Vogue, British Elle and other magazines. But while the transformation from Omaha school girl to New York fashion model was, at first, fairly smooth, the return trip was not. James recalls: "I'd come back and visit people. I would sit and watch them at the cafeteria table gossiping . . . and realize: It's so hard for me to relate to these kids because I have different priorities. All they know is who's going out with who, what test they have to take and how they're gonna steal the test to get the answers, and on my mind is, O.K., what job I have to do, when I have to be there -- how I'm gonna balance it out." Being in New York and working, however, created other anxieties. "I was like: I'm gonna miss the prom. I'm not gonna be able to look back and say that I went to the high-school football games. I was sitting around listening to my friends talk about all the cool things they did last summer, and I didn't have anything to say. I started to feel really isolated." She began turning down jobs -- including a 10-day booking in Thailand for French Elle, where she would have shot 30 pages and had 10 cover tries -- simply because she was in Omaha and didn't want to get on a plane. James took a break from modeling and spent part of this past summer at home. "I finally felt close to my friends again," she says. "Driving around, going to movies, hanging out, gossiping, sleeping until 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I took my mom on a vacation to St. Lucia with the money I'd made from a job. We stayed at a spa for two weeks, totally chilled out. And then I realized after two months I was so bored of sleeping until 4 o'clock in the afternoon. I was so bored of sitting at people's houses watching them get plastered, drinking kegs of beer like everybody does in high school. My friends had already gone back to school at that point, and I had nothing to do during the day . . . and I decided, you know what? This is my time, and if I don't do it now, then I'm never gonna get the chance." In a sense, the decision was already made; her childhood ended the moment it became hers to choose or to leave behind. Teen-age models new to New York face an array of temptations. Trendy nightclubs need models, and if they happen to be 15 or 16 -- well, they don't look it. Consequently, the downtown restaurant and nightclub scene, which for most mortals signifies difficult-to-get reservations and humiliating waits in line outside club doors, presents to models nothing but the best tables and free admission. Mark Baker, one of the best-known club and restaurant promoters in town, admits that an enormous amount of his time is spent keeping track of models, whose presence en masse is crucial to the success of the events he orchestrates. "Three-hundred phone calls a day -- around the world," he says. A model with the slightest interest in night life will soon find herself dining lavishly among large groups of models at restaurants that everyone admits pay all or part of the bill in exchange for a beautiful crowd, though no restaurateur will admit to doing this himself. Afterward, the models are ushered to nightclubs and whisked past the velvet ropes into V.I.P. sections, which are usually visible but inaccessible to the rest of the clubgoers. Needless to say, the collective desire to enter these roped-off areas is generally quite keen, which is exactly the point -- "girls" draw paying customers, namely men. "In the 80's, 18-year-old models were going out to chase the celebrities," says Howard Stein, the former owner of Xenon and now the owner of System, a popular new nightclub. "Now it's all reversed. You find celebrities wanting to know where the model party is that night. And that draws playboys and would-be playboys, every little schlepper from Brooklyn thinking he's going to take home next year's Claudia Schiffer." While most promoters, like Baker, have a protective attitude toward the models they entertain (and a desire to stay in their agents' good graces), a teen-ager with a taste for night life, and all that it might entail, will have no difficulty finding it. That first summer in New York, when she was 15, James got into drugs. "When you first go to New York after living in Omaha your whole life, you realize how sheltered you are," she says. "And so I went out and I partied, and I got myself into a little trouble. I came to a point where they were getting ready to send me home. I was missing planes, I was screwing up jobs. "But I think every girl who comes to New York needs to go through that stage. You know why? Because you get to the lowest point when you're so exhausted and so done from partying . . . and you're so depressed, and that's when you make a choice whether you're gonna let yourself sink or you're gonna swim, and I decided I was gonna swim. And you see girls who just give up hope, and then they deteriorate. But the successful girls do not do that." Suddenly she is passionate. "I guarantee you . . . if you walk into a shoot drugged up, they will not put up with it," she says. She insists she no longer uses drugs. "I know when I was doing drugs, that people knew, and people told my agency, and they were like, I'm not gonna work with this girl . . . and so I cleaned myself up." Recalling that first summer, James seems acutely aware that modeling in New York has exposed her to an awful lot for someone her age. "I remember the times where I was so alone," she says, "bawling and bawling, thinking: God, I'm never gonna be able to be a kid. God, I don't know what to do. To the point where I was so low and had no faith in anything. I could look back and say, 'Oh my God, I went through too much at such a young age,' like I saw too much, I shouldn't have to go through this pain at such a young age. I could feel sorry for myself." She pauses and then adds: "But looking back on that, you know what? It made me nothing but stronger." "I was so scared," James is saying the day after the Galliano show in Paris. "It was, like, acting. My heart was pounding." She is at a fitting for Jean Colonna, whose show will be held the following day near the Place Pigalle. In Colonna's vast warehouse-like loft, James puts on the red vinyl skirt and top she'll be wearing on the runway and holds still while an assistant pins it. "Look at her," Samersova says, "her body rocks in a big way." Like all models, James is used to changing clothes in front of people who are dressed. Though critical of her own body, she moves and stands in a way that is both unself-conscious and picturesque. If there is an art to modeling, this is it. Samersova turns up her nose at the vinyl outfit. "What I think is sexy," she says, "is James when she first wakes up in the morning and has no makeup on, and she's coughing her guts out, but she still looks so beautiful." James is coughing a lot today, and running a fever. When she's sick, her jaded side emerges. "I'm so sick of this business," she mutters as we leave the fitting. Outside, she cannot find the car and wanders into a sleepy Parisian neighborhood. A man walking toward us can't take his eyes off her, and I'm struck, as I often am, by how remarkable she looks -- with her heart-shaped face and pale satin top with spaghetti straps, sunlight flashing off her hair; how otherworldly, compared with the rest of us. James glances up, sees the man watching her and yells, "I'm a gangsta!" startling him. "I love [expletive]off the French," she adds with delight. Having found the car, she is overwhelmed by gratitude toward her driver. "You're dope, can I just tell you that?" she says with feeling. "You're awesome." "Pardon?" the driver asks. As we ride to her next fitting, at Karl Lagerfeld, she talks eagerly about getting back to New York and seeing her mother and her boyfriend, Kyle, whom she met back in Omaha last winter. Both of them will arrive in New York shortly after she does and stay for Fashion Week, during which ready-to-wear collections are shown, for the most part, in two large tents in Bryant Park. Later, her father and brother will visit. "My brother is so amazing," she says. "He's only 13, but he acts, like, my age. He says 'I love you' every time we say goodbye." Lagerfeld's studio is saturated with the dance beat that seems to reach every cranny of the fashion world, as if pumped from a single underground source. Lagerfeld himself is behind a desk in the fitting room. An amiable, ponytailed presence in a dark suit, he seems unperturbed by the fact that he will be showing three collections within four days. While James's outfits are being prepared -- Jackie-esque suits in gold and pale blue -- she leans against Samersova on a couch and reflects on her chaotic living arrangements. "I'm starting all over every time I go home," she says, "and I'm starting all over every time I come to New York. I think that's the hardest part for me of this job -- I'm so unsettled. I need to be surrounded by people I love and care about, and who love and care about me." She stops, overcome by a coughing fit so wrenching it makes her gag. Finally it ends, leaving her red-faced. She closes her eyes. "If I could have my Omaha house in New York, I'd be so happy," she says. "If there's one thing I could ask for, I'd ask for that." It's Indian summer in New York, and thick, slanted light pours in columns down the avenues. The garment district is full of models -- running to castings, congregating on street corners. With their colorful clothing and long spiky legs, they look like a species altogether different from the men on the sidewalks pushing reams of fabric on trolleys or pulling racks of clothes in plastic. In New York, you feel the odd collision of worlds that combine to create the fashion business. In lofts of every description, models hand over their portfolios and walk for strangers. Sewing machines, usually operated by Asians, are often humming unobtrusively in a corner. For a new model to get even three shows during Fashion Week is considered an achievement; a particularly "hot" model might end up with 30. A couple of days into Fashion Week, Michael Flutie and his boyfriend, Patrick Abbey, a painter, hold a party at Jerry's restaurant in SoHo. James's mother arrives before James does. She looks fashionably Middle Western in a bright red jacket that stands out amid the charcoal tones of SoHo. Like James, Nancy King has a ready smile and is forthcoming in conversation, though she seems less worldly than her daughter. "It took us all by surprise," she says of James's success. "We thought she'd live in Omaha, go back once or twice a month for jobs. Last year, we were just floundering. Now I've learned how to travel with her and also have my life at home." King's friend Jean Schroeder has come with her to New York from Omaha, and the two plan to go to Broadway shows and restaurants as well as to James's fashion shows. "People ask me, 'What about her education?' " King says. "But this is an education." James arrives in a fuzzy long-sleeved turquoise sweater. Kyle is with her: an affable, unprepossessing youth in jeans and a T-shirt. He works as a cook in Omaha. James perches on a tall stool beside Jean and asks what she and her mom have been up to. Kyle stays close to James. "She needs one person wherever she is," her mother explains. "She's so much calmer when Kyle is around." Both James and Kyle are staying with Flutie in his Greenwich Village apartment. James's mother laughs about permitting this arrangement. "Her older sister is 20," she says, "and I still don't let her sleep with her boyfriend in the house. Now her younger brother's saying, 'What about Jaime?' and I say, 'You have the same rules as your older sister. I can't explain it!' " "Jaime," she suddenly says, turning to her daughter. "I don't like that new picture in your book." "Which picture?" "In the bath. We don't do that." "My nipples are covered," James points out. "It's pornographic," her mother says, half-teasing. "I'm going to talk to the agency." "Mom! That picture is by Ellen von Unwerth!" But both of them are smiling. "Guess what!" James says, changing the subject. "Someone saw my card at Calvin Klein on the 'confirmed' board." (In the end, she was not cast in Klein's show.) James wanders away to talk to Jacques and Pascal, surname-less partners of Haitian descent who have just begun publishing Creme and Sugar, a racy magazine that caters to the fashion crowd. Pascal, who has bleached-blond hair and a black eye patch and wears brightly hued 70's-style polyester clothes, tells James that he knows of a cooking job Kyle might be able to get. James calls Kyle over excitedly; she's dying for him to move here. But back at the table, Kyle says he's not interested in cooking in New York. "Why not?" James asks, stung. He shrugs. "I don't know. I'm just not." Later, he mentions missing the friendliness of their hometown, the way everyone knows everyone else. "Sometimes I wonder, What am I doing here?" he says, glancing around him. Still, he's excited about the fact that a respected photographer, Dah Len, approached him at one of James's fashion shows and wants to photograph him. The shoot is set for later in November, and Kyle mentions it several times, as if hoping it will lead to something else. One of Company Management's bookers breaks the news to James that she must go to a fitting for one of tomorrow's shows either late tonight or first thing in the morning. "I was there an hour and a half, and they didn't have it together -- they were too busy getting drunk," James rails good-naturedly, but soon relents. "I'll do it in the morning. Tell them they can [expletive]." "She has a mouth," her mother says. THE NEXT DAY IS HALLOWEEN, and James has five shows in Bryant Park -- the first at noon; the last at 8 P.M. Generally, Nancy King says, she goes backstage with her daughter and then slips into the tent about a half-hour before the show to vie for a seat. At Richard Tyler, one of James's biggest shows, she snags one near the front. James wears three outfits that are all transparent from the waist up, so that her breasts are fully visible. Like the other models, she saunters to the end of the runway and pauses, gazing with an empty expression into a wall of photographers and video cameras. The photographers, by contrast, are a rowdy, familiar bunch, cajoling and heckling -- "Come on, Kirsty, turn around!" -- as if the models were their exasperating younger sisters. James's walk has a sweet bounce to it, but her expression is wary and unsmiling. Her mother leans forward in her seat, snapping pictures with an Instamatic. Later that day, backstage at the Magaschoni show in the Celeste Bartos Forum at the New York Public Library, models pick at Kisses and Snickers from a Halloween assortment. Champagne is flowing. James has developed pinkeye from the constant application and removal of makeup, and it makes her look like she has been crying. Her skin is raw, and too little sleep has left shadows under her eyes. Kyle, who comes to all of her shows, is with her. On the runway she appears in a gold bikini. ("Eat your heart out," mutters the woman next to me.) The minute the show is over, James is back in street clothes and being rushed through the rain, past flashing cameras and autograph seekers in Bryant Park to the Josephine Pavilion, where the Ghost fashion show is about to start. The minute she arrives, hair and makeup people set upon her like emergency-room personnel. There are sandwiches and more Champagne. The room is dense with photographers, many of whom are in pursuit of Carolyn Murphy, a pixie-faced 22-year-old with short caramel-colored hair who is reportedly negotiating an exclusive Prada contract. Interviewers approach her ceaselessly, asking how it feels to be the next supermodel. A woman from a cable-television show wants to shoot her "real life" next week. "We'll do shopping or something," she suggests. "We'll do you wandering through the city. We'll do. . . . " Murphy, clearly exhausted, just keeps nodding. "Looks like she'd rather do sleeping," someone says. Later, Murphy rejects the idea of becoming, as she puts it, an "old-school supermodel." "The prima donna attitude is out," she says. "It's been out for a while. You have to be thankful. I want to do my job, do it well and also have my own life." Having come from a working-class Florida family, she is not one to take riches for granted. "It could end tomorrow," she says. (The Prada deal eventually fell through.) James has removed her long-sleeved shirt and tied it over her black bra, so she won't have to disturb the gigantic cloud of teased hair that now hovers above her face. She cuddles with Kyle. "Did I look bad in the bikini?" she frets. "Did I look like I had cellulite?" She catches herself slouching and forces herself to sit up straight. "My [expletive]posture," she says. "I've gotta fix it. . . . Mommy!" Her mother has just come from a matinee. "Oh, I love your hair," she says, touching her daughter's cotton-candy tease. Ghost will be the host of a Halloween party later tonight, and King seems more eager to go than James. "We had a great time at the Versace party," she says. "We danced until 3 in the morning!" Someone suggests setting her up on a date, and James whirls around, adamant. "No!" she cries. "Set her up on a date with Dad!" "First outfits," someone calls. James kisses Kyle on the lips. "I gotta go get dressed," she says. It is easy to see how, after two years as a fashion model, James finds it hard to envision resuming her old life as a high-school student. At home she's a celebrity; even if she chose to go back, it would never be the same. And given a choice, what teen-ager could resist this fantasy -- complete with glamour, money and the prospect of fame? So teen-age girls simulate an adulthood they have yet to experience, for the consumption of adult women who then feel dogged by standards of youth and beauty they will never meet. Welcome to image culture's hall of mirrors. "I have James living in my house," Flutie says, "and often I have to come home and say: 'You know what? Mike is not gonna pick up after you and neither is the maid, and go clean your room and clean it now.' Now, I know that sounds like -- what? An agent doing that? But you have to see the bigger picture. At a modeling agency, you're dealing with 15-, 16-, 17-year-old girls who are setting up their own shop. And they're asked to take care of their home, cook, travel, clean, manage a bank account and pay for their expenses on their own. I think that's a pretty big responsibility. "You really pour your whole life into not only teaching a girl what is a good picture or a bad picture but, like, how to sit at a dinner table and really behave. I think education and having a modeling agency are very, very parallel in a lot of ways, because you have to have a sense of commitment and integrity to young people. In a way, a doctor or a nurse has similar psychological needs. Why does someone become a priest or a rabbi? The modeling world, the fashion industry and the entertainment industry have become a great place to really sort of give yourself." Flutie is serious. And for those who find the notion of the entertainment industry being filled with would-be nurses and priests looking for ways to give of themselves, or of modeling agencies as educational institutions, a bit hard to swallow, we can only hope that he and others will live by this loopy idealism. For one thing we can be certain of: in a culture where "being someone" means "being someone people can see," where fame and fortune are held up as the highest possible achievements in any life, modeling will remain irresistible to children and even some parents. James King's precocious career is the fulfillment of a set of cultural desires she herself was in the grip of -- before she was propelled into the very kinds of pictures that once mesmerized her. And that's what it's all about: getting to the other side of that equation. "I want little girls to want to be me," says Kelly Stewart, the 14-year-old model, in a moment of endearing tautology, as if becoming the object of her own desire will finally satisfy it. AT THE END OF FASHION Week, James and seemingly every other model in New York are at Bowery Bar. Crammed under its twirling ceiling fans, a gorgeous fashion crowd kisses hello on both cheeks and then hollers spearmint-gum-scented prattle over the dance beat. James sits next to Kyle, smoking and barely touching a Caesar salad. "I got 18 shows," she says. "That's more than any other girl at the agency." Yet her excitement seems fleeting, and she's quick to say that successes like these don't really matter. Farther down the same table, Radutoiu is still basking in satisfaction over her last show, Marithe and Francois Girbaud, which took place this afternoon. "I want to go back to today," she sighs, draining her Coke. "I want to do Girbaud again." She ended up with four shows each in New York and in Paris -- a respectable first season. James has brought her journal along to the restaurant. As the night goes on, she begins writing furiously in a fancy, looping script. When asked, she reads a few sentences aloud that describe, in rhyme, how uncomfortable she feels in this place where everyone watches everyone else. She will go back to Omaha for the holidays. She and Kyle will break up -- though there's no hint of that now. Come early March, she will be settled again in New York where, before long, the spring shows will begin. This time she hopes she'll have the pick of the lot. By the time she is 20, she will very likely have made it to superstardom or have moved on. When James is finished modeling she wants to be a writer, she says, or maybe a photographer. Amid the chaos of Bowery Bar, James is using her straw to chase a cherry through her Shirley Temple and talking not of her future but her past. "Should I have stayed a kid?" she asks, not looking up. "I think that's a question I'll always wonder about." Copyright (2001) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

The Thin Red Line

teameight — Sun, 27 Jul 1997 17:52:12 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) One Saturday night in January, Jill McArdle went to a party some distance from her home in West Beverly, a fiercely Irish enclave on Chicago's South Side. She was anxious before setting out; she'd been having a hard time in social situations -- parties, especially. At 5 feet 10 inches with long blond hair, green eyes and an underbite that often makes her look as if she's half-smiling, Jill cuts an imposing figure for 16; she is the sort of girl boys notice instantly and are sometimes afraid of. And the fear is mutual, despite her air of confidence. Jill's troubles begin with her own desire to make everyone happy, a guiding principle that yields mixed results in the flirtatious, beer-swilling atmosphere of teen-age parties. ''I feel I have to be all cute and sexy for these boys,'' she says. ''And the next morning when I realize what a fool I looked like, it's the worst feeling ever....'Oh God, what did I do? Was I flirting with that boy? Is his girlfriend in school tomorrow going to give me a hard time? Are they all going to hate me?''' Watching Jill in action, you would never guess she was prone to this sort of self-scrutiny. Winner of her cheerleading squad's coveted Spirit Award last year, she is part of a Catholic-school crowd consisting mostly of fellow cheerleaders and the male athletes they cheer for, clean-cut kids who congregate in basement rec rooms of spare, working-class houses where hockey sticks hang on the walls and a fish tank sometimes bubbles in one corner. Jill is a popular, even dominating presence at these parties; once she introduced a series of guys to me with the phrase, ''This is my boy,'' her arm slung across the shoulders of some shy youth in a baseball cap, usually shorter than she, whose name invariably seemed to be Kevin or Patrick. But in truth, the pressures of adolescence have wreaked extraordinary havoc in Jill's life. ''Around my house there's this park, and there used to be like a hundred kids hanging out up there,'' she says, recalling her first year in high school, two years ago. ''And the boys would say stuff to me that was so disgusting ... perverted stuff, and I'd just be so embarrassed. But the older girls assumed that I was a slut.... They'd give me dirty looks in school.'' Blaming herself for having somehow provoked these reactions, Jill began to feel ashamed and isolated. Her unease spiraled into panic in the spring of that year, when a boy she'd trusted began spreading lies about her. ''He goes and tells all of his friends that I did all this sexual stuff with him, and I was just blown away. It made me feel dirty, like I was absolutely nothing.'' Jill, then 14, found herself moved to do something she had never done before. ''I was in the bathroom going completely crazy, just bawling my eyes out, and I think my mom was wallpapering -- there was a wallpaper cutter there. I had so much anxiety, I couldn't concentrate on anything until I somehow let that out, and not being able to let it out in words, I took the razor and started cutting my leg and I got excited about seeing my blood. It felt good to see the blood coming out, like that was my other pain leaving, too. It felt right and it felt good for me to let it out that way.'' Jill had made a galvanizing discovery: cutting herself could temporarily ease her emotional distress. It became a habit. Once, she left school early, sat in an alley and carved ''Life Sucks'' into her leg with the point of a compass. Eventually, her friends got wind of her behavior and told her parents, who were frightened and mystified. They took Jill to Children's Memorial Hospital, where she was treated for depression and put on Prozac, which she took for a few months until she felt better. By last summer she was cutting again in secret and also burning -- mostly her upper thighs, where her mother, who by now was anxiously monitoring Jill's behavior, wouldn't see the cuts if she emerged from the family bathroom in a towel. Last summer, Jill wore boxers over her bathing suit even to swim. By January, her state was so precarious that one bad night would have the power to devastate her. No one recognized jill's behavior as self-mutilation, as it is clinically known (other names include self-injury, self-harm, self-abuse and the misnomer delicate self-cutting), a disorder that is not new but, because it is finally being properly identified and better understood, is suddenly getting attention. Princess Diana shocked people by admitting that she cut herself during her unhappy marriage. Johnny Depp has publicly revealed that his arms bear scars from self-inflicted wounds. The plot of ''Female Perversions,'' a recent movie that fictionalized the book of the same name by Louise Kaplan, a psychiatrist, hinges on the discovery of a young girl cutting herself. And Steven Levenkron, a psychotherapist who wrote a bestselling novel in the 1970's about an anorexic, recently published ''The Luckiest Girl in the World,'' about a teen-age self-injurer. ''I'm afraid, here we go again,'' Levenkron says, likening the prevalence of self-injury to that of anorexia. ''Self-injury is probably a bit epidemic.'' Dr. Armando Favazza, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia medical school, estimates the number of sufferers at 750 per 100,000 Americans, or close to two million, but suggests that the actual figure may be higher. Long dismissed by the psychiatric community as merely a symptom of other disorders -- notably borderline personality disorder -- self-mutilation is generating new interest as a subject of study. Dr. Barbara Stanley of the New York State Psychiatric Institute explains: ''Some of us said, maybe we shouldn't be focusing so much on diagnostic studies. ... Maybe this behavior means something unto itself.'' Indeed it does. Favazza, whose book ''Bodies Under Siege'' was the first to comprehensively explore self-mutilation, defines it as ''the direct, deliberate destruction or alteration of one's own body tissue without conscious suicidal intent.'' His numbers apply to what he calls ''moderate/superficial self-mutilation'' like Jill's, rather than involuntary acts like the head banging of autistic or retarded people, or ''coarse'' self-mutilations like the eye enucleations and self-castrations that are occasionally performed by psychotics. Moderate self-mutilation can include cutting, burning, plucking hairs from the head and body (known as trichitillomania), bone breaking, head banging, needle poking, skin scratching or rubbing glass into the skin. The fact that awareness of self-mutilation is growing at a time when tattooing, piercing, scarification and branding are on the rise has not been lost on researchers. While experts disagree on the relationship between the behaviors, the increasing popularity of body modification among teen-agers, coupled with the two million people injuring in secret, begins to make us look like a nation obsessed with cutting. Marilee Strong, who interviewed nearly 100 injurers for her book, ''A Bright Red Scream,'' to be published in 1998, calls it ''the addiction of the 90's.'' On that Saturday night in January, despite Jill's anxious resolutions, things at the party ultimately went awry. ''It was really late,'' she says, ''and I was supposed to stay at my best friend's house, but she left and I didn't go with her. I was drunk, and it was me down there in the basement with all these boys. ... I'd walk by and they'd grab my butt or something, so I sat on a chair in the corner. And they tipped the chair over and made me fall off of it.'' Realizing she was in a situation she would punish herself for later, Jill went upstairs and tried in vain to get a friend to leave the party with her. She had nowhere to stay -- no way to get home without calling her parents -- so she ended up at the home of her friend's brother, who was in his 20's and lived near the party. This proved to be another mistake. ''I wake up there the next morning, and these guys were basically dirty 20-year-olds,'' she says, ''and they tell me: 'You want a job living here with us? We'll pay you a hundred bucks if you strip for us once a week.' ... I was just like: 'I have to go home! I have to go home!''' But by now, a cycle of shame and self-blame was already in motion. On finally arriving at the two-story brick house where she lives with her parents and brothers (one older, one younger), Jill learned that she was being grounded for not having called home the night before. Her bedroom, right off the kitchen, is a small, makeshift room with accordion doors that do not seal off the noise from the rest of the house. ''All Sunday I just slept and slept, and I was just so depressed, so disgusted with myself. ... I felt like the dirtiest thing ever because of everything that had happened the night before.'' For all her popularity, Jill felt too fragile that morning to ask her friends for reassurance. ''I feel really inferior to them, like they're so much better at everything than me,'' she says of the other cheerleaders. ''I feel like I have to be the pleaser, and I can never do anything wrong. When I fail to make other people happy, I get so angry with myself.'' That Sunday, no one was happy with Jill: her parents, the friend whose house she hadn't slept at and, in her fearful imagination, countless older girls who by now had heard of her sloppy conduct at the party and were waiting to pounce. ''Monday morning came and I was scared to death to have to go to school and see people,'' she says. ''I started cutting myself. First I used a knife -- I was in the bathroom doing it and then I told my mom because I was scared. She was like, 'Why the hell are you doing this? You're going to give me and your father a heart attack.' ... She took the knife away. So then I took a candle holder and went outside and cracked it against the ground and took a piece of glass and started cutting myself with that, and then I took fingernail clippers and was trying to dig at my skin and like pull it off, but it didn't help anymore, it wasn't working. ... That night, I was like, 'My mom is so mad at me, she doesn't even care that I was doing this,' so that's when I took all the aspirin.'' Jill isn't sure how many aspirin she took, but estimates it was around 30. ''That night was like the scariest night in my life,'' she says. ''I was puking and sweating and had ringing in my ears and I couldn't focus on anything.'' Still, she slept through a second day before telling her parents what was really ailing her. They rushed her to a hospital, where she wound up in intensive care for three days with arrhythmia while IV's flushed out her system, and she was lucky not to have permanently damaged her liver. ''That was very shocking, to think that she was going through so much pain without us being aware of it,'' says her father, Jim McArdle, a ruddy-faced police lieutenant with a soft voice, who chooses his words carefully. ''There's a ton of denial,'' he admits. ''It's like: 'It happened once, it's never going to happen again. It happened twice, it's not going to happen three times.' The third time you're like. ...'' He trails off helplessly. Self-injury rarely stops after two or three incidents. According to the only large-scale survey ever taken of self-injurers (240 American females), in 1989, the average practitioner begins at 14 -- as Jill did -- and continues injuring, often with increasing severity into her late 20's. Generally white, she is also likely to suffer from other compulsive disorders like bulimia or alcoholism. Dr. Jan Hart, who surveyed 87 high-functioning self-injurers for her 1996 doctoral dissertation at U.C.L.A., found their most common professions to be teacher and nurse, followed by manager. The notion of teachers, nurses and high-school students like Jill seeking out ways to hurt themselves in a culture where the avoidance of pain and discomfort is a virtual obsession may seem paradoxical. But it isn't. People harm themselves because it makes them feel better; they use physical pain to obfuscate a deeper, more intolerable psychic pain associated with feelings of anger, sadness or abandonment. Often, the injury is used to relieve the pressure or hysteria these emotions can cause, as it did for Jill; it can also jolt people out of states of numbness and emptiness -- it can make them feel alive. These mood-regulating effects, along with a certain addictive quality (over time, the injurer usually must hurt herself more frequently and more violently to achieve the same degree of relief), have prompted many clinicians to speculate that cutting, for example, releases the body's own opiates, known as beta-endorphins. According to Lisa Cross, a New Haven psychotherapist who has treated self-injurers, patients have for centuries described the sensation of being bled in the same terms of relief and release as she hears from self-injurers. And people who have been professionally scarred or pierced sometimes describe feeling high from the experience. Women seeking treatment for self-injury far outnumber men. There are many speculations as to why this might be, the most common of which is that women are more likely to turn their anger inward. Dusty Miller, author of ''Women Who Hurt Themselves,'' believes that self-injury reflects a culturally sanctioned antagonism between women and their bodies: ''Our bodies are always too fat, our breasts are too small. ... The body becomes the object of our own violence.'' But the fact that few men are treated for self-injury doesn't mean they aren't hurting themselves, too. Among adolescent injurers, the ratio of boys to girls is near equal, and cutting is rampant among both male and female prisoners. Self-Mutilators Anonymous, a New York support group, was initiated 11 years ago by two men, one of whom, Sheldon Goldberg, 59, gouged his face with cuticle scissors, ''deep digging'' to remove ingrown hairs. ''I would have so many bandages on my face from cutting that I would sit on the subway all dressed up to go to work,'' says Goldberg, a former advertising art director, ''and people would look at me and I would realize a wound had opened up and I was bleeding all over my shirt.'' Now, five reconstructive operations later, the lower half of Goldberg's face is solid scar tissue. ''But men can get away with it,'' he says. ''When people ask me what happened, I say: 'I was in the war. I was in a fire.' Men can use all the macho stuff.'' It's February, and a frigid midwestern wind thumps at the windows of Keepataw Lodge at the Rock Creek Center, a general psychiatric institution in Lemont, Ill. It is the home of the SAFE (Self-Abuse Finally Ends) Alternatives Program, the nation's only in-patient treatment center for self-injurers, started in 1985. Jill, in jeans, hiking boots and a Pucci-style shirt, lounges on an upholstered banquette in the lodge's skylighted atrium. She has been here 10 days, spending her mornings in the hospital's adolescent program completing assignments her school has faxed in, dividing her afternoons between individual and group therapy. She's ebullient -- partly from sheer relief at being surrounded by people with her same problem. ''It's really weird how many people in the group have my same kind of thinking,'' she says, repeatedly removing and replacing a pen cap with hands scarred by cigarette-lighter burns. ''How they grew up feeling like they didn't deserve to feel their feelings, like they had to keep people happy. ... I don't even know who I am anymore, because everything I do depends on what other people want.'' Her cheerleading friends have visited, bearing get-well cards and magazines, but Jill finds playing hostess on the grounds of a mental hospital a tall order. ''I'd make up things like, 'Oh, I have a group in 10 minutes, so you guys better leave,' because I couldn't take it to have them sitting there and me not knowing how to make them happy in such a weird environment,'' she says. Her parents arrive to meet with her doctor and then take Jill home after her group therapy; for insurance reasons, she must continue the 30-day SAFE program from home as an outpatient. (Blue Cross refused to cover her hospitalization costs before SAFE because her problem was ''self-inflicted''; the family is appealing.) Jim and Nancy McArdle are warm, open people who seem a little shellshocked by their sudden immersion in the mental-health system. Jim, who in happier times likes to kid and joke, sits tentatively at a table with his hands folded. Jill is the most animated of the three. ''I'll just turn it off, like I never even knew what that was,'' she says of the behavior that landed her in the hospital only three weeks ago. An anxious glance from her mother, an attractive woman with reddish brown hair who works as a respiratory therapist, gives Jill pause. ''Last time we thought it was going to be fine too,'' she reflects. ''But then eventually it just all fell back even worse than it was before. It's scary to think about. I don't want to spend my life in hospitals.'' This is a reasonable fear. Most of Jill's fellow patients at SAFE are women in their late 20's and early 30's, many of whom have been hospitalized repeatedly since their teen-age years, some of whom have children. (SAFE accepts men, but its clientele is 99 percent female.) In free moments during the program's highly structured day, many of these patients can be found on the outdoor smoking deck, perched on white lawn chairs under an overhead heating lamp beside a thicket of spiky trees. (Unlike many psychiatric wards, SAFE does not lock its doors.) The deck's cynosure is a white plastic bucket clogged with what look to be thousands of cigarette butts; even when the deck is empty of smokers, the air reeks. ''Hi! What's your diagnosis?'' Jane C., a Southerner in her early 30's, cheerfully queries a patient who has just arrived. ''Bipolar? Me, too! Although that can mean a lot of different things. What're your symptoms?'' Jane, who insisted her last name not be used, is one of those people who can't bear to see anyone left out. She has olive skin, an animated, birdlike face and wide, dark eyes like those in Byzantine paintings. She smiles even while she's talking. The patient bums a cigarette from her, and Jane lights it. ''Cheers,'' she says, and the two women touch cigarettes as if they were wine glasses. Jane once made a list called Reasons for Cutting, and the reasons numbered more than 30. But the word she uses most often is power. Like many self-injurers (65 percent according to the 1989 survey; some believe it is much higher), Jane reports a history of sexual abuse that began when she was 7. Shortly thereafter, she raked a hairbrush across her face. By age 10, she was in her parents' bathroom making her own discovery of the razor blade. ''I cut right in the fold of a finger,'' she says. ''It was so sharp and so smooth and so well hidden, and yet there was some sense of empowerment. If somebody else is hurting me or making me bleed, then I take that instrument away and I make me bleed. It says: 'You can't hurt me anymore. I'm in charge of that.' '' Sometimes Jane pounds her head repeatedly against a wall. ''When my head's spinning, when I'm near hysteria, it's like a slap in the face,'' she says. ''I've had multitudes of concussions -- it's amazing I have any sense at all.'' It is virtually impossible to imagine this polished, friendly young woman doing any of these things. Much like Jill, Jane, herself a former cheerleader, masks her vulnerabilities with an assertive and jovial persona. ''She's created this face to the world that's totally in control when there's really chaos going on underneath,'' says Dr. Wendy Friedman Lader, SAFE's clinical director. ''There's something very adaptive about that, but it's a surreal kind of existence.'' Even Jane's many scars are well hidden, thanks to what she calls her ''scar-erasing technique,'' which sounds something like dermabrasion. Like many victims of early trauma, Jane is plagued by episodes of dissociation, when she feels numb or dead or separate from her body. Cross, the New Haven psychotherapist, explains the genesis of dissociation this way: ''When you are abused, the natural thing to do is to take yourself out of your body. Your body becomes the bad part of you that's being punished, and you, the intact, positive part, are far away.'' But what begins as a crucial self-protective device can become an inadvertent response to any kind of stress or fear. ''There have been times when I don't even feel like I'm alive,'' Jane says. ''I'll do something to feel -- anything. And that's usually cutting. Just seeing blood. . . . I don't know why.'' At SAFE, Jane C. is often in the company of Jamie Matthews, 20, a quiet, watchful young woman with pale skin and long brown hair who seems to bask in her friend's overabundant energy. Cutting herself, Jamie says, is a way of coping with her rage. ''I would get so angry and upset and so tense, so all I could think about was the physical pain, doing it harder and doing it more. And then afterwards it was a relief ... sometimes I would sleep.'' As a student at a small college in upstate New York, Jamie lived in a dormitory, so privacy was a major preoccupation. ''I would lie in bed at school -- that was the best place for me to do it because if my roommate walked in, she would think I was sleeping -- and I would lay on my back with the knife underneath me, and then pull it out the side, across my back.'' Jamie already completed the SAFE program once, last summer, but relapsed back at school. The last time she injured herself, she says, was when it felt best. ''It was actually pleasureful. It gave me chills; it was that kind of feeling. I sat there smiling, watching myself bleed.'' Descriptions like these, along with the intimate rituals that accompany some people's injuring -- candles, incense, special instruments -- have led some clinicians to compare self-injury to masturbation. Jamie's self-injury has caused her a multitude of problems, yet there is almost a tenderness in her voice when she speaks of her self-harming acts. ''It's all mine,'' she says. ''It's nothing that anybody can experience with me or take from me. I guess it's like my little secret. I've got physical scars. ... It shows that my life isn't easy. I can look at different scars and think, yeah, I know when that happened, so it tells a story. I'm afraid of them fading.'' Self-injury can appear, at first, to be a viable coping mechanism; the wounds are superficial, no one else is getting hurt and the injurer feels in control of her life. But what begins as an occasional shallow cut can progress to sliced veins and repeated visits to the emergency room. As with any compulsion, the struggle to resist one's urges can eclipse all other thoughts and interests, and despair over the inability to control the behavior can even lead to suicide attempts. ''It's like a cancer,'' says Cross. ''It just seems to start eating into more and more of your life.'' Jane C. managed to hide her problems for many years. She was married and had a successful career as a sales executive at a medical-supply company, whose wares she frequently used to suture and bandage her self-inflicted wounds. Eventually, despite her vigilant secrecy, Jane got caught -- her mother appeared at her house unexpectedly and found her in the bathroom, drenched in blood. Weakened by her emotional turmoil and a severe eating disorder, Jane ultimately almost passed out on the highway while driving home from a sales call, and finally left her job three and a half years ago. ''I went on disability, which was really hard on my pride,'' she says. ''I've never not worked in my whole life.'' Jane C.'s discovery by her mother is a fairly routine step in the life cycle of self-injury -- for all the secrecy surrounding it, it is finally a graphic nonverbal message. ''I think that there's a wish implicit in the injury that someone else will notice and ask about it,'' says Christine Sterkel, a psychologist with SAFE. This was clearly true in Jill's case; after burning her hands, she covered the wounds with band-aids until Christmas morning, then appeared before her family without them. ''In the park, she cracked a bottle and cut both her wrists,'' a friend of Jill's told me. ''Everyone gathered around her, and I think that's what she wanted. She was crying and I'd be hugging her and stuff and then she'd raise her head and be laughing.'' Later in the afternoon, Jill, Jane C., Jamie and the other SAFE patients settle on couches and chairs for one of the many focused group therapy sessions they participate in throughout the week. Patients must sign a ''no-harm contract'' before entering the program; group therapy is a forum for grappling with the flood of feelings they would normally be numbing through self-injury. It is not, as I had envisioned, an occasion for trading gruesome tales of the injuring itself. Karen Conterio, SAFE's founder, has treated thousands of patients and rejects the public confessional that is a staple of 12-step programs. ''Self-mutilation is a behavior, it's not an identity,'' she says, and encourages patients to save their war stories for individual therapy. Beyond that caveat, Conterio, 39, a lithe, athletic woman with short blond hair, lets her patients set the agenda. Today, Jill and the others discuss their feelings of shame -- shame they repressed by injuring, shame over the injuring itself. At emergency rooms, their wounds were often mistaken for suicide attempts, which in most states requires that a patient be locked up in a psychiatric ward, often in physical restraints. Later, in a small office adorned with mementos given to her by former patients -- a knit blanket, a papier-mache mask -- Conterio tells me that she's less concerned with guiding patients toward a specific cause for their self-injury than with helping them learn to tolerate their feelings and express them verbally -- in other words, begin functioning as adults. Still, revisiting one's past is a key step in this process. As Maureen Ford, a psychologist at SAFE, puts it: ''Self-injury is a kind of violence. So how is it that violence has entered their life in some way previously?'' In jill mcardle's case, the answer isn't obvious. She is part of an intact, supportive family; as far as she knows, she has never been sexually abused. But there were problems. Jill's brother, a year older than she, was born with health troubles that cost him one kidney and left him only partial use of the other. Today he is well, but, Nancy McArdle says: ''It was three, four years of just not knowing from one day to the next how he was going to do, in the hospital all the time. ... Jill picked up on it right away and tried to make everything easy on us where she was concerned.'' (Jamie Matthews also grew up with a chronically ill sibling.) Beyond worrying constantly about her ill son, Nancy McArdle, whose own childhood was marked by alcoholism in her family, admits to feeling a general sense of impending catastrophe while her children were young. ''I wouldn't drive on expressways -- I'd take a different route,'' she says. ''If I saw a storm coming, I'd think it was a tornado.'' Giggling at the memory, Jill says: ''She'd make us all go into the basement with pillows and blankets. I've been petrified of storms ever since then.'' Nancy McArdle has since been given a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder and is on Prozac, and she and Jill can now laugh about those old fears. But it's easy to see how Jill, as a child with a terrified mother, a chronically ill sibling and a father who kept a certain distance from the emotional upheavals in the household, might have felt isolated and imperiled. She quickly developed an unusual tolerance for pain. ''I'd fall and I'd never cry. ... I never felt any pain, really. It was there, but I pushed it back.'' Triumphing over physical pain was something she could excel at -- distinguishing herself from her physically weak older brother, while at the same time reassuring her mother that she, anyway, would always be strong. This mix of toughness and a hypervigilant desire to please is still the engine of Jill's social persona, which mingles easy affection with an opacity that seals off her real thoughts. ''She never tells anybody how she feels -- ever,'' Nancy McArdle says. Jill agrees: ''I turn it all inside. I just think I have to help myself, it all has to be up to me.'' But paradoxically, the child who feels that she must be completely self-sufficient, that no one can help her or that she doesn't deserve help is uniquely ill equipped for the independence she seeks. Terrified to express emotions like sadness or rage for fear of driving everyone away from her, such a person becomes more easily overwhelmed by those feelings and turns them on herself. ''I and my razors and my pieces of glass and the pins and the needles are the only things I can trust to bring relief,'' paraphrases Dr. Kaplan, author of ''Female Perversions.'' ''These are their care givers. These have the power to soothe and bring relief of the tension building up inside. ... They don't expect the environment to hold them.'' Tending to their own wounds, which many injurers do solicitously, is the final part of the experience. In a sense, self-injury becomes a perverse ritual of self-caretaking in which the injurer assumes all roles of an abusive relationship: the abuser, the victim and the comforting presence who soothes her afterward. In someone like Jane C., whose childhood was severely traumatic, physiology may be partly to blame; trauma can cause lasting neurological changes, especially if it occurs while the central nervous system is still developing. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University who specializes in trauma, explains: ''The shock absorbers of the brain are shot. If everything is running smoothly, if it crawls along just fine -- as it does in nobody's life -- you're fine. But the moment you get hurt, jealous, upset, fall in love, fall out of love, your reaction becomes much stronger.'' It is for this reason, many people believe, that self-injury begins during adolescence. ''They go through early childhood developing very poor capacities to deal with states of internal disruption,'' says Dr. Karen Latza, a Chicago psychologist who does diagnostic work for SAFE. ''I can't think of a single thing that involves more internal upheaval than the adolescent years. The changes that come with their menstrual cycles or with sexual arousal engender panic in the young self-injurer.'' Jill fits such a model: for all her popularity, she steers clear of romance out of an apprehension she attributes to the friend who lied about her. ''I just think that every boy would be like that, just make up stuff,'' she says. But there is a second danger for Jill: her irrepressible impulse to please, which could make her vulnerable to unwanted sexual attention. As if sensing this, Jill tends to develop a distaste for boys who take an interest in her. The next time I see Jill at SAFE, the weather is warmer, the ice on the ponds at Rock Creek is melting, and she seems antsy to resume her old life. ''I'm just sick of having to wake up every morning and go to therapy, therapy, therapy,'' she says. Cheerleading tryouts are that night; the following week, she will begin easing back into school. The thought of facing her peers en masse fills her with anxiety. ''Last Thursday I went to a hockey game and I saw all these boys, and seriously, my skin was crawling. ... They'd give me looks, and I couldn't even look at them.'' After the SAFE group, Jill and I drive to Mt. Carmel High School, in a run-down neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, for her tryouts. Her fellow cheerleaders greet her enthusiastically; Jill brings one of them a birthday present. Another girl fawns over Jill in a fanged display of unctuous sweetness. ''That's the bitch I hate,'' Jill says matter-of-factly. The girl, still within earshot, shoots her a look. ''She thinks I'm kidding, but I'm not,'' Jill says. With glitter over their eyes and tiny mirrored hearts pasted to their cheeks, these incumbent cheerleaders huddle in a stairwell outside the gymnasium, awaiting the chance to defend their positions on the squad. Their coach, Suzy Davy, assures me privately that Jill will be chosen. ''She was just so cute and energetic,'' Davy says of Jill's performance last year, which earned her the Spirit Award during the same period when she was cutting and burning herself in secret. ''She wasn't fake. She was just out there and she said, 'This is me!''' Finally the girls file into the gym, shoes squeaking on the varnished wood, and spread out on the floor to stretch. Some of them seem to be vying for Jill's attention; others keep a respectful distance. And it strikes me that by cutting herself -- by getting caught and hospitalized -- Jill has freed herself from her own tough persona, at least for a time. Everyone knows that something is wrong, that no matter how happy and confident she may seem, there is unhappiness, too, and a need to be cared for. She has revealed herself in the only way she was able. There is nothing new about self-injury. As Favazza documents in ''Bodies Under Siege,'' from the Christian flagellant cults of the 13th and 14th centuries to male Australian Aborigines who undergo subcision, or the slicing open of the penis along the urethra, as a rite of passage, the equation of bodily mortification with transcendence and healing is repeated across cultures. Many such rituals occur in the context of adolescent initiation rites -- ceremonies involving youths about the same age as most boys and girls who begin cutting themselves. ''We've done away with rites of passage, but the pattern can still exist,'' says Favazza. ''And the younger teen-agers who are seeking to become adults, the ones who can't make it the ordinary way, somehow tap into that.'' One group that consciously seeks to tap into primitive rituals and vanished rites of passage are practitioners of what is called new tribalism or extreme body arts, who embrace such forms of body modification as tattooing, piercing and, more recently, scarification and branding. Some of these practices are performed as public rituals of a sort, particularly in gay S & M culture, where they are known as bloodsports. Ron Athey, an H.I.V.-positive performance artist, cuts and pierces himself before audiences while reading aloud from autobiographical texts. An entirely different sort of performance is practiced by Orlan, a French woman who has undergone repeated facial plastic surgeries on video. More often, body modification takes place in private studios like Modern American Bodyarts in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a small, scrupulously clean storefront bedecked with African masks. Here, a multiply pierced and heavily tattooed artist, Keith Alexander, pierces clients, cuts designs into them using scalpels and brands them with sheet metal bent into designs, heated up to 1,800 degrees and ''pressed firmly and quickly into the flesh.'' Partly, the purpose of these practices is to create a decorative scar. Raelyn Gallina, a body artist in San Francisco, takes impressions of her blood designs with Bounty paper towels and has a portfolio of hundreds. But the experience and the scar itself are also symbolic. Gallina says: ''You know that you're going to endure some pain, you're going to shed your blood. ... That act, once it happens and you come out victorious, makes you go through a transformation. We have so little control over what goes on around us. ... It comes down to you and your body.'' Of course ''control,'' or the illusion of control, is perhaps the primary motivation behind self-injury too. And the parallels don't end there. Gallina, like many body modifiers, says that a high proportion of her female clients report having been sexually abused. Rebecca Blackmon, 35, a slim, fair-haired woman with a gentle voice, was such a person. ''I wanted to heal all the sexual parts of my body,'' she says. She began in 1989 by having her clitoral hood pierced; now, her pubic bone and stomach are branded, her nipples, tongue and belly button are pierced and a crescent moon of thick scar tissue from repeated cuttings encircles the lower half of both her breasts. ''It's made me a lot more aware of my body; it's made me a lot more sexual,'' Blackmon says. Her feelings about her abuse have changed, too. ''It's not so present in my mind all the time.'' Clearly, body modifiers like Blackmon share the urge of many self-injurers to return to the site of their abuse -- the body -- and alter it in a manner that feels symbolically curative. And as with self-injury, ''aftercare,'' or tending to one's wounds, is an important part of the process. ''The ritual part to me is the daily taking care of it,'' says Blackmon. ''The daily cleansing it, pampering it, putting heat packs on it.'' Among body modifiers who cut, there is great concern over scar enhancement, or thwarting the body's healing process. Common scarring techniques include dousing the freshly cut skin in rubbing alcohol and setting it afire; rubbing cigar ash or ink into the open wounds and advising clients to pick off their newly formed scabs each day. But the many resonances of motive and procedure between self-injurers and body modifiers can obscure a crucial difference: control. Getting an occasional brand or cut design in the course of a functional life is not the same as slashing at one's flesh -- or fighting the urge to do so -- on a daily basis. One is a shared act of pride; the other a secretive act steeped in shame. And many body modifiers -- perhaps the majority, now that piercing and tattooing have become so commonplace -- are motivated not by the process at all but by the simple desire to belong to a group that is visibly outside the mainstream. One of the most famous body modifiers is Fakir Musafar, 66, who spent much of his early life secretly indulging his own urges to do such things as bind his waist to 19 inches and sew together parts of himself with needle and thread. As a teen-ager in South Dakota, he assembled a photography dark room in his mother's fruit cellar so that ''if she knocked and I was in there putting needles in myself or ripping flesh, I'd say, 'Sorry, I'm developing film and I can't open the door now.' '' Now a certified director of a state-licensed school for branding and body piercing in San Francisco, Fakir, as he is known, has seen his secret practices embraced by a growing population of young people. He performs rituals around the world, including the O-Kee-Pa, in which he hangs suspended from two giant hooks that penetrate permanent holes near his pectorals. Favazza asked Fakir to contribute an epilogue to the second edition of ''Bodies Under Siege,'' published recently. In it, Fakir suggests that self-mutilation and body modification share a common root in a collec-tive human unconscious. ''There's an undercurrent in everybody that's quite universal,'' Fakir says, ''to experience in the body self-initiation or healing. If there is some way socially that these urges can be faced, they don't overpower people and get them into mental hospitals.'' The argument makes a kind of sense, but there is a lot it doesn't explain: if these longings are so universal, why are those cutting themselves, and being cut, so often the victims of trauma and neglect? And using Fakir's logic, couldn't one argue that anorexics and bulimics are merely performing their own symbolic body manipulations? Surely the coexistence of urges, symbolism and a sense of meaning or empowerment is not enough to make a practice healthy. But Fakir has led a long, rich life, and Blackmon feels she has reclaimed her body, so perhaps there may be a context in which ''self-injury,'' controlled and guided along safe paths, could serve as part of a healing process. Favazza seems to think so. ''If it can be controlled and relabeled and not get out of hand, everybody would be better off,'' he says. ''There's less shame associated with it, there's less possibility for bad accidents to occur. ... But we're dealing with a lot of ifs, ands and buts here.'' It's a sunny, springlike St. Patrick's Day, and the McArdle household is teeming with relatives and small children eating corned beef and green-frosted cupcakes from a generous spread on the dining-room table. Jill's bedroom smells of styling gel and electric curlers, and her cheerleading outfit is heaped in one corner. Her hair, which spirals in curls down her back, is crowned with a ring of metallic green and silver shamrocks. With a friend at her side, she works the family phone, trying to figure out where the best parties will take place during the South Side Irish parade. Soon we're wandering through a neighborhood awash in Irish pride. Jill and her friend sneak cans of beer from the pockets of their windbreakers and guzzle them as we walk. ''I love this day,'' Jill says. She finished the SAFE program two weeks ago but returns twice each week to see her therapist. ''I'm feeling so much better,'' she says, smoking a cigarette as we pass Monroe Park, where the boys used to tease her. ''Usually I'd be afraid to go somewhere because maybe somebody wouldn't want me. Now I don't care. Now it's like I'm O.K. with myself. It's their own problem.'' We begin a desultory journey from party to party that leads from a cramped back porch beside a half-frozen portable swimming pool to a basement rec room with a hanging wicker chair and a bubble-hockey set. Jill cheerfully explains my presence to anyone with an interest: ''She's writing an article on self-mutilation. That's what I was in the hospital for,'' seeming mildly amused by the double takes this bombshell induces. An old friend of hers, a boy, informs me that Jill is ''a nice, friendly person who likes to talk.'' She waits for him to say more. ''Remember in eighth grade when you used to say to me, 'You have a thousand faces'?'' she prompts. ''Remember that?'' The boy looks puzzled. ''Eighth grade was a long time ago,'' he says. Finally we head to Western Avenue for a glimpse of the parade. As we walk in the bright sunlight, I notice that Jill's friend has fresh scars covering her forearms. She tells me rather proudly that she went on a recent binge of cutting herself, but insists she did not get the idea from Jill. Jill tells me privately that she thinks her friend did it to get attention, because the day after, she wore a short-sleeved shirt in the dead of winter, and everyone saw. Jill has been urging her friend to seek help. The riotous spectators seem almost to drown out the tail end of the parade. Jill plunges into the drunken crowd, tripping over her untied shoelace, her friend straining to keep up with her. Men gape at her under her crown of shamrocks; she cheerily bellows hello at them and then swirls out of sight. We turn onto an alley, and in the sudden quiet, Jill stops a group of strangers and lights her cigarette off one of theirs. Her friend seizes this moment to kneel down and carefully tie Jill's shoelace. Outside Jill's house, the girls hide their beers and cigarette butts in the bushes, then go inside to exchange a few pleasantries with Jill's family. The openness Jill showed toward her parents at SAFE has vanished behind a sheen of wary cheerfulness. Watching her, I find myself wondering whether self-injury will wind up as a mere footnote to her adolescence or become a problem that will consume her adulthood, as it has Jane C.'s. Often, particularly in someone with an intact family and friends, the behavior will simply fade away. ''This disorder does tend to burn out, for some reason,'' says Cross. ''Life takes over.'' And Jill knows where to get treatment, should she need it again. Jamie Matthews felt like a failure when she relapsed, until she talked to a friend who has repeatedly sought help with her eating disorder. ''She said it's like a spiral staircase,'' Jamie says. ''You keep going around in circles, but each time you're at a different level.'' As for Jane C., she returned home shortly after Jill left SAFE and reports that the azaleas are blooming. It's hard, she says, returning to a place where she has always felt she was wearing a mask. ''One night I was incredibly close,'' she says. ''I mean, I had the blade to the skin. I sat there and I thought, It doesn't matter to anybody else. And I was just about hysterical, but I stopped myself. I thought, This isn't the only way that works.'' Jill, too, seems to be making a kind of staggered progress. ''I know I have to take care of myself more instead of other people,'' she says. ''I'm at peace with myself.'' Since leaving the program, she says, she has had no impulses to hurt herself. ''Part of me always used to want to do it, but that part of me dissolved.'' Her mother, admittedly a worrier by nature, is less sure, and says she has resorted to sneaking into Jill's room in the wee hours with a penlight, lifting the covers while her daughter sleeps to check for new cuts or burns. So far, she's pleased to say, there has been nothing to report. As Jill and her friend finally burst from the house and clamber arm in arm down the block into the late afternoon, Nancy McArdle watches them from the living-room window and says, ''You can't ever relax.'' Correction: August 17, 1997, Sunday An article on July 27 about self-mutilation misstated the specialties of two doctors. Christine Sterkel works as a psychiatric consultant and psychotherapist, not as a psychologist. Louise J. Kaplan is a psychoanalyst, not a psychiatrist. Copyright (1997) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

A Thin Line Between Mother and Daughter

teameight — Fri, 14 Nov 1997 17:54:50 +0000

online at Salon.com

Uniforms in the Closet

teameight — Sun, 28 Jun 1998 17:58:30 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) Before R., a Marine Corps officer, leaves Camp Pendelton, he changes out of the starched camouflage suit that is the everyday uniform of marines into ''civvies'' -- in R.'s case, jeans and a T-shirt. It is normal for a marine to change clothes before leaving the base; by shedding his ''cammies,'' R. leaves behind the obligation to salute other marines in uniform. But for R., the change is also symbolic: as a marine who is gay, he looks forward to the end of each workday as a reprieve from hiding part of himself from everyone around him. Most days, the marines in R.'s battalion are not in the field but at their desks in a modest office building, set amid scrubby Southern California coastland, where images of wives and crinkly faced infants smile from picture frames and computer screens. In R.'s office, the decor is strictly military: photographs of his various units over the 12 years he has been a marine, a picture of the general whom he served as an aide -- a demanding and highly prestigious job. (R. has also been a commanding officer, bearing ultimate responsibility for a unit.) R. wishes he could place on his desk a photograph of David, a civilian mechanical engineer and his partner of three years, but a man's picture would almost certainly kindle suspicions. Even a personal telephone call from a man might be considered unusual, so David almost never calls R. at his office, where a single phone line serves dozens of marines. Yet despite these and a multitude of other precautions, he worries that some men in his unit suspect that he is gay -- in part because he is over 30 and unmarried; in part because years of hiding have made him deeply paranoid. ''Sometimes I feel like they can look at me and just tell,'' says R., who would speak with me, and allow me into his life, on condition that I refer to him only by one of his initials. (Other gay military personnel I interviewed for this article similarly requested anonymity.) Driving from Camp Pendelton into San Diego, 40 miles south, R. grows visibly more relaxed. He has a California tan, deep-set eyes and the sturdy build characteristic of marines, along with a large Marine Corps tattoo -- eagle, globe and anchor. A vigorous, sociable man, he is full of plans. After work tomorrow, he will make the two-hour drive north to David's house in Los Angeles, as he does each weekend. On Sunday, they will go to brunch at the home of a gay Marine officer. In a couple of weeks, R. will accompany his battalion to ''the desert,'' Twentynine Palms, a Marine base outside Palm Springs where field training exercises are performed. From there he will head into Palm Springs for the annual White Party, a large all-night gay dance. This constant switching between mutually exclusive worlds can have some odd, hallucinatory effects, R. says: ''Several times I've met someone on base and wondered, Haven't I seen him at a bar? And then I've seen people at bars and thought I recognized them from the base. When I see someone at the mall, I can't remember where I know them from.'' R. joined the Marines as a teen-ager and is fiercely loyal to the Corps, particularly to the enlisted men who answer to him -- ''my marines,'' he calls them, and adds, ''I'm a marine first and gay second.'' His career has been stellar; he is what is known in the Corps as a ''mustang,'' an enlisted marine who crossed over to become a commissioned officer. ''Now that I've been a commanding officer and a general's aide, sky's the limit,'' he says. Military retirement, which can begin after 20 years, would allow him to draw half his base pay for the rest of his life. But R. plans to leave the Marines at the end of his current commission. The reason is simple. ''I'm fed up,'' he says, ''with having to hide.'' It has been more than four years since the policy known as ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue'' went into effect. This policy was a compromise eked out among the White House, Congress and the Pentagon after President Clinton's announcement of his intention to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military -- a ban that prohibited homosexuals from serving under any circumstances -- set off a firestorm of opposition. Under ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'' homosexuals (and bisexuals) may serve as long as they tell no one about their sexual orientation, refrain from ''homosexual acts'' and forgo homosexual marriage. The policy bars the military from questioning service members about their sexual orientation or investigating them without credible information that they have engaged in homosexual conduct. The stated goal of the policy is to allow homosexuals to serve while preserving morale and unit cohesion, which the military believes would be impaired by the presence of openly gay soldiers. But ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' forces a difficult choice upon homosexuals: in order to serve, they must either do without sex, romance and companionship or live uncelibate lives and lie about it -- breaking the law and forfeiting their careers if they are caught. Two months ago, the Pentagon issued figures indicating that the number of homosexuals discharged -- 997 in 1997 -- has risen 67 percent since ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' went into effect. Michelle Benecke, co-founder and co-director of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, a watchdog group that assists military personnel accused under ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'' says she believes the rise in discharges indicates that commanders are continuing to seek out homosexuals despite the fact that they are no longer supposed to. ''No one has informed commanders of what the new rules are,'' says Benecke, whose organization has documented 1,379 command violations of the policy in the four years of its existence. ''No one has ever told them the intent: to back off.'' The Pentagon disagrees, attributing the rise in discharges to an increase in ''statement'' cases, in which homosexuals -- many of them in their first year of service -- openly declare that they are gay. But what the military regards as a statement is not always so clear-cut: last November, the Navy tried to discharge a senior chief petty officer named Timothy McVeigh, a nuclear submarine expert who had been in the service for 18 years, on the basis of what it called his homosexual admittance. McVeigh's so-called admittance was an Internet posting with America Online in which he stated, anonymously, that his marital status was ''gay''; a Federal judge ruled in January that the military's investigation of McVeigh was in violation of policy and ordered that McVeigh, who has declined to discuss his sexual orientation, be retained. Earlier this month, McVeigh and the Navy reached a settlement under which he will retire this summer with full benefits and receive a payment of $90,000 to cover his legal fees. During a recent interview, Kenneth H. Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, told me: ''Obviously, there are many people serving in the armed forces who have gay relationships, but they're discreet. They aren't pursued, and they may not even be known about.'' This suggests a split between the letter and the spirit of ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'': the letter says, Don't do it; the spirit says, It's O.K. to do it as long as you are discreet. But this double message leaves homosexuals on queasy middle ground: theoretically, they are allowed to serve, but their private lives are illegal and will cost them their careers -- if they get caught. But then, no one is supposed to be trying to catch them. When I raised this notion of the policy's murkiness with Rudy de Leon, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, he said, ''I think we're at the heart of some of the conflicts that are built into the policy, which tries to balance many competing interests.'' If, as the Pentagon says, some homosexuals are outing themselves with the knowledge that they will be discharged, it may be that for them, the pressures and risks of serving under ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' are too intense to bear. R is part of a sprawling social network of gay marines and sailors, men and women, based in and around San Diego, where the shoreline bristles with dull gray ships and the sky is full of lumbering choppers and S-3's, anti-submarine-warfare planes that honk like gigantic geese as they fly. On this unseasonably cool spring evening, I accompany R. to a 6:30 dinner at the home of a Navy doctor near Hillcrest, a gay neighborhood north of downtown San Diego. The group tonight includes a tank officer who was one of the first to enter Kuwait during the gulf war, where he earned a bronze star; a Navy helicopter pilot, and several noncommissioned officers, or N.C.O.'s -- enlisted men who have worked their way up through the ranks. The off-duty mingling of officers and enlisted people of different ranks is prohibited because of its potential to break down the chain of command, but the fact that gay personnel are forced underground creates a bond among them that transcends military hierarchy. None of these friends work together; they met socially and communicate mostly by E-mail, using a code that eliminates gender-specific pronouns, since the military can monitor any E-mail exchanges that take place on a base. (Most of R.'s friends say they have never met a gay person on duty; even when they suspect that a fellow sailor or marine might be gay, they rarely approach -- the risk of being wrong is too great.) Like a number of his friends, R. joined the military believing he was heterosexual. Reared and educated in a strict Southern Christian community, he was profoundly homophobic. ''I would say, 'AIDS is God's judgment on homosexuals' -- I really felt that,'' he says. He was drawn to the Marines by the camaraderie, by the promise of adventure -- and also by the largely single-sex environment. ''I would think, I'm going to be with all these men -- that's kind of exciting,'' he says. ''But I didn't know why I was excited.'' Some of R.'s friends, aware of their homosexual inclinations, joined in hopes that the military -- the Marines in particular -- would ''cure'' them. ''Everybody knows that there are no fags in the Marines,'' says a former infantryman. Over pizza, R.'s friends talk of other motivations for joining the military, including the desire to get away from home and the hope of proving themselves to a disapproving world. ''I'm supposed to be that one guy that can't survive in this environment,'' says one powerfully built man, an operations officer in the Marine air wing. ''I'm the guy that's supposed to be filtered out, the weak one who can't carry the pack.'' This officer goes on to tell me that his homosexuality is an open secret. ''I know that in my command there are marines who work for me that assume I'm gay,'' he says. But he is clearly the exception. A logistics officer I'm introduced to at dinner has a dedicated ''stunt babe'' -- a woman who poses as his girlfriend at military events and whose picture he keeps on his desk. The annual Marine Corps Ball, I learn, is the biggest command performance of this sort; R. usually brings a date with whom he has collaborated on a complex romantic history while David stays home, watching TV. It isn't enough to say nothing about your private life; unless you give the appearance of being heterosexual, people will start to wonder -- especially now that ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' has alerted them to the fact that there may be homosexuals in their midst. As a result, R. and his friends monitor themselves obsessively, aware that a single blunder can lead to exposure, humiliation and a discharge they regard as a disgrace -- particularly those, like R., whose families don't know they are gay. A strange car in front of your house, clicks on the telephone line, a summons from the commanding officer -- in the life of a gay soldier, any one of these can prompt a flicker of anxiety, even all-out panic. ''Say you're out with four or five of your friends at a restaurant, and there goes somebody in your department with his wife,'' says the Navy doctor who is the host of the pizza party. ''You know you're nailed.'' Even gay nightclubs can be a hazard, although ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' has discouraged the trolling of clubs by investigators, a formerly common practice. One officer says of a popular San Diego club: ''Last time I was there on a gay night, I ran into two of my marines, who were there by mistake. They were like, 'Hey, Sir, what're you doing here?''' Another of R.'s friends, P., was an F-18 fighter pilot who dropped bombs on Iraq during the gulf war before leaving active duty three years ago. (He is still with the Marine reserves.) P. was in a long-term relationship with his civilian ''roommate'' while in the military, but feigned a romance with a lesbian friend for three years to avoid having to go on any more blind dates set up by the Officers' Wives Club. A fair, soft-spoken man who has retained his marine build and haircut, P. says his hardest times were the six-month deployments on aircraft carriers, when he and his partner were rarely able to speak, and when P. rationed the letters he sent home out of fear that too many to the same man would draw attention. The letters his partner sent him were unsigned or signed with a female name, sent without a return address and chary on endearments. (During R.'s ship deployment, he asked his partner to have a woman address his letters.) Each month, P. recalls, a videotape would arrive on his ship, fashioned by the Officers' Wives Club, filled with greetings from loved ones. ''Everybody else in the squadron's wife or girlfriend would be in the video saying, 'Hey, honey, how're you doing?''' he says. ''And you'd be the only one without anything on that tape.'' At the end of the deployment, when the ship was within six or seven days of land, senior pilots with wives or fiancees would get to fly the planes ashore early to be with their loved ones. Though P. was always among the most senior, he, being single, had to wait until the ship docked. ''You get off, you have this huge welcome-home party and everyone else is there, except yours,'' he says. ''He could be, except you'd have to stand there and shake his hand: Thanks for coming, buddy.'' And, of course, being met by a man after six months at sea might well arouse suspicions. Still, in this crowd it is generally felt that gay enlisted people, not officers, have it the worst. The enlisted are a tighter pack, which makes keeping secrets much harder, and the homophobic atmosphere tends to be far more virulent. Twelve of the homosexuals discharged in 1997 were officers; the remaining 985, enlisted people. J., an N.C.O. who says he has witnessed beatings and harassment of those suspected of being gay, told me he would fear for his life if his subordinates were to discover his secret. He socializes in Hillcrest, but tells subordinates that he goes to bars they can't afford: ''I'll say: 'Dude, I met this babe last night. We hit it off!' You have to lie. They're like a pack of dogs -- if they smell blood, they're going to go after it. You're dealing with kids, 18 or 19, who are trying to prove their manhood.'' Homosexual jokes and slurs, he adds, are a constant. So saturated is the Marine Corps with homophobia that some of R.'s friends agree with the Pentagon that they should not be allowed to serve openly, that it would hinder their ability to lead. R. used to feel this way, but like the majority of gay personnel I spoke with, he has come to believe that although President Clinton had good intentions in seeking to change a draconian policy, ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' amounts to a step backward. For one thing, it has turned discrimination against homosexuals -- formerly just a military policy -- into Federal law. And by forcing homosexuals to remain invisible, R. says, the policy deprives gay military people of the chance to prove themselves and begin to dispel the prejudices against them. ''The best way to change people's attitudes is the personal one-on-one relationship,'' he says, and tells of how a close friend, a heterosexual Marine fighter pilot with whom R. used to trade jokes about homosexuals, has completely revised his views since learning that R. is gay. But under ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'' R. could be discharged simply for having told his friend that he is homosexual. ''Clinton thought he was doing us this big favor,'' R. says, ''and all he did was build a brick wall around the closet.'' Each time J., the N.C.O., recalls one of his fabrications, he begins, ''I told a lie,'' as if to keep straight in his mind what is a lie and what is the truth. Clearly, so much lying troubles him. He shows me the red plastic Core Values card that every marine must carry. ''Honor,'' begins the text, which also includes the words ''Integrity,'' ''Responsibility'' and ''Accountability.'' ''Look at those and tell me if a marine who lives by that code can be gay in the military and live with himself,'' J. says. ''They encourage integrity, but they expect us to lie.'' Yet none of this seems to have blunted J.'s passion for the military. ''If I could do it all over again, I would have gone Air Force,'' he says. (The Air Force and the air wings of the Navy and the Marines are seen as being less intensely homophobic environments.) ''But now that I'm a marine, I'm a marine through and through. It's in my blood.'' Still, for gay service members, devotion to the military is fraught with the knowledge that it will turn on them instantly if it learns one of the most basic facts about them. Many are haunted by the story of Lieut. Col. Loren S. Loomis of the Army, winner of two bronze stars and a purple heart in Vietnam, whose homosexuality was exposed in a way few could have imagined. After his house near Fort Hood, Tex., caught fire in 1996, the Fire Department, suspecting arson, took a video camera and a videotape from Loomis's home as part of its investigation. The video showed Loomis engaging in gay sex. Although the Fire Department had removed the video without a search warrant or a subpoena, the district attorney's office nevertheless turned it over to the Army. Loomis offered to retire early, but was discharged instead, and thus deprived of his active-duty pension and retirement benefits. Most chillingly to gay service members, his ouster came just five days before his 20-year retirement eligibility would have begun. ''In flight school, in every school I was in,'' says P., the former F-18 pilot, ''I finished first. In every squadron I was in, I was always the No. 1 guy. But no matter how many times you're No. 1, if they find out you're a homo, you're out.'' After dinner, I head with R. and some of his friends to Flicks, a gay bar popular with military men and their civilian admirers, known as ''chasers,'' some of whom emulate the distinctive Marine ''high and tight'' haircut -- shaved almost to the scalp around the sides of the head with a flat wedge of hair along the top. Part of the allure of military men is that they're tested regularly for H.I.V. and thus are perceived as ''clean.'' Andrew Cunanan, who is believed to have murdered Gianni Versace and others, was a chaser, and Flicks was his bar of choice. His bloody rampage across America has fueled the wariness R.'s crowd already says it feels toward civilian homosexuals; at Flicks, he and his friends are a somewhat insular presence, clean-cut and light drinking -- most rise at 5:30 A.M. and are in their offices by 6:30 or 7. They talk among themselves or with the other military men they encounter. The night's entertainment is a performance by a former marine, now a stripper and porn star, but that's not why they're there. Military socialization, with its emphasis on patriotism and war, structure and rank, is conservative and unique; it creates a gap between soldiers and civilians that doesn't disappear simply because both are gay. R. and his friends tend to be leery of ''nellie,'' or effeminate, men, though it is a prejudice of which they are somewhat ashamed. ''I know very little about gay culture,'' R. says. On a gay cruise he and David took recently with some military friends, R. was mystified by a drag spoof of ''Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.'' ''The whole place is going wild, and none of us had seen 'Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,''' he says, and admits to finding the hedonism in some pockets of gay culture -- the all-night dance parties, for example, which David enjoys -- wearying and empty. As for gay advocates in San Francisco and Washington, many of whom are left-leaning and anti-military, R. says: ''I don't think they speak for us. I don't think they understand us.'' Part of what they don't understand, of course, is what it's like to function in a world where even saying that you are gay is illegal. After the gay cruise, R. says: ''When I was going back to work, I actually felt sick, nauseous with dread. I go to bars and these people are able to live without fear. It makes me jealous. It puts a barrier between us.'' Yet this barrier leaves R. and his friends in something of a no man's land: socialized by the military but divided from it by sexual orientation; bound to gay culture by definition, yet culturally estranged from it. In a sense, they belong to a group consisting only of one another. Most of them leave Flicks at 10:30, before the stripper begins performing, and head home to bed. What R. and his friends hope to ward off through the use of stunt babes, phony photos and other false trappings of heterosexual life are any formal inquiries into their sexuality. Under ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'' an inquiry cannot begin without credible information that a person has made a statement of homosexual orientation or engaged in homosexual conduct, but what exactly constitutes ''credible information'' is up to the commanding officer. (C.O.'s are advised to check with legal counsel before beginning such inquiries.) Sonya Harden, a heterosexual black enlisted woman with the Air Force, was investigated for homosexuality after a former civilian roommate who claimed that Harden owed her money forged letters in Harden's name stating that she was gay and gave them to her commanding officer. Harden's C.O. initiated an inquiry. Such inquiries are often as simple as questioning the service member -- or, in the practice, discouraged but still extant, known as witch hunting, pressing the service member for the names of other homosexuals in exchange for leniency. Some inquiries are more complex: in the case of D., a black female marine who was in training for the Military Police, the inquiry included interviews with her parents, her childhood friends and even her prom dates -- 300 pages of testimony. After investigating, a commanding officer must decide whether a service member has, in fact, made a statement of homosexuality or engaged in homosexual acts, which current policy defines as any bodily contact that ''a reasonable person'' would understand to be for purposes of sexual gratification or an expression of homosexuality -- in some cases, as little as a kiss, a hug or handholding. If the C.O. determines that a basis for discharge exists, he or she will initiate ''separation'' proceedings -- the administrative process whereby a service member may be prematurely discharged. In the case of D., who had been caught lying on a bed fully clothed with another female trainee, the C.O. read through hundreds of pages of testimony and decided not to seek a discharge. But in Harden's case, the C.O. went ahead with her discharge despite the fact that, by then, her accuser had recanted and had admitted to having forged the incriminating letters. Service members like Harden who choose to fight their separations must appear before a separation board. Once things have come this far, though, a number of factors weigh heavily against the accused. For one, because a separation hearing is an administrative rather than a criminal proceeding, there are no strict rules of evidence; the Government can present or exclude virtually anything it wants, no matter how it was obtained. (That was why, in Colonel Loomis's case, the videotape could be used against him.) In Harden's case, the Government presented the forged letters -- even though the forger herself testified before the board on Harden's behalf -- and also chose to exclude a polygraph, which Harden had passed. Another factor weighing against a service member in a separation hearing is that the members of the typically three-person panel who will determine his or her fate are chosen by -- and sometimes answer to -- the very commanding officer who is presenting the allegations. Moreover, although the accused is entitled to a military defense lawyer, and by all accounts these lawyers defend their clients assiduously, they are notoriously overworked. Sometimes service members are not provided a lawyer -- or even told what they are being charged with -- until discharge paperwork is already pending, at which point little can be done to stop it. And most enlisted people cannot afford civilian lawyers. But perhaps the biggest hurdle facing a service member in a homosexual case is the near impossibility of proving that he or she is unlikely to engage in homosexual acts. ''You have to prove that you not only don't have sex, but you have no propensity to,'' says Beatrice Dohrn, legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. ''How do you prove that?'' With great difficulty, it would seem -- even if, like Harden, you are heterosexual. Three former boyfriends testified on her behalf, and Harden gave a sworn statement, but the separation board still ruled against her, and she was discharged in August 1996. ''Once somebody says you're gay, you can sleep with a hundred guys, but they're still going to say, 'She's gay,''' Harden says. Harden filed a complaint with the Inspector General of the Air Force, whose job is to investigate alleged command abuses. He ultimately concluded that Harden had been treated fairly without ever interviewing her. On Harden's discharge form, beside her honorable discharge (in the absence of aggravating circumstances, policy stipulates that the character of a homosexual discharge be commensurate with the character of the person's service) are the words, ''Homosexual Acts.'' She will carry that form with her for the rest of her life, and some employers will want to see it. Even on the so-called short form, there is a code barring re-enlistment that many employers recognize. ''The humiliation goes on,'' says Harden, a sad-eyed woman who now works as a police officer in Louisiana. She still wears her Air Force ring. On a bright, windy spring Friday, R. and I attend the weekly graduation ceremony at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. R. wears his dress-blue trousers, which have a thick red stripe down each side to show that he is an officer; his white ''cover,'' as hats are known in the military; a long-sleeved khaki shirt, and khaki tie. He has misplaced his officer's tie clip; appearing at the graduation without one is out of the question, so we stop to buy another. The marines we pass on our way to the graduation salute R. crisply and say, ''Good morning, Sir,'' as R. returns the salute. He admits to falling naturally into the designated marine walk, swinging his arms so that each hand extends six inches beyond his body and then three inches behind it. The six graduating platoons, all male (female marines are trained on Parris Island, S.C.), stand perfectly still, occupying a tiny fraction of a runway-size courtyard surrounded by golden California Mission-style buildings. They have just completed three months of famously punishing training -- longer than boot camp in the other military services. As the Marine band begins to play, R. looks at the hundreds of identical-looking soldiers and says: ''There's 500 of them. You figure, probably 50 are gay.'' During his early years in the Corps, R. had two homosexual experiences, which he viewed as the temptations of Satan. His transformation from rabid homophobe to gay man occurred haltingly over seven confusing years. At times he felt an urge to bond with his enlisted men that led him once to share a hotel room with some of them during a trip in Asia -- an act of fraternization and favoritism that he now deplores. ''I was in denial,'' he says. ''I told myself I was an officer looking out for my men in a foreign country. Now I see that I was attracted to my men.'' It was in 1992 that R.'s perception of himself began to shift. In an officer's meeting, he says: ''Somebody told a gay joke, and everyone laughed. Then he said, 'You know, faggots are the last group of people that a marine can joke about without having to worry about offending anyone.' And I said, 'Yeah!' But somewhere in the back of my mind I thought: Good. He can't tell I've had sex with two men.'' Several months later, R. admitted to himself that he was homosexual and experienced a tremendous relief, even euphoria, along with a heightened awareness of his actions. ''Right after I admitted it, we went to some training in the desert, and they had field showers,'' he recalls. ''It's a room full of 50 naked men. I purposely waited until the very end, when I was the only one there, because I thought, Someday everyone's going to know I was gay, and I don't want anyone saying: 'Oh, I remember. He used to leer at me in the shower.''' To this day, he showers alone whenever possible. R.'s problems as a gay marine were just beginning. A rumor reached him that after a group sexual experience he was involved in with female prostitutes in the Philippines a year earlier, someone had described him as a guy who was looking a little too closely at other men's anatomy. Desperate to quash the rumor, R. invited a female friend to San Diego to pose as his girlfriend. While at a bar with R., she became interested in one of the straight marines she was supposed to be deceiving. R. made it clear that if she wanted to flirt with the man, she and R. would first have to stage a fight, which they proceeded to do. ''We were screaming,'' he says, ''and I went like I was going to hit her. 'You bitch, you're a slut.''' R. charged out of the bar, passed a couple of hours at a gay bar nearby, then returned to pick up his ''girlfriend.'' By this time, however, the heterosexual marine was bruising for a fight over the way R. had treated the woman, and R. narrowly escaped a punch-out. His life of paranoid dissembling had begun. When the graduation ends, we drive to Camp Pendelton for lunch. Passing through one of the many military checkpoints in and around San Diego has the quality of falling into a parallel universe; today, near the Staff Noncommissioned Officers' Club, teams of military prisoners in bright orange coveralls are manicuring hedges. As we head inside the dining room, R. is greeted by a leathery man with vivid blue eyes wearing cammies. ''How's life on the other side?'' the man barks. I feel R. go tense beside me. ''What other side, Sir?'' he asks. ''The other side you're on,'' the man says, and laughs. While eating his Reuben sandwich, R. mulls over the encounter, trying to recall where he had previously met the man, what he could have meant by ''the other side.'' There are many ''sides'' in the Marine Corps: officer versus enlisted, ground versus air wing, active duty versus reserves. Most likely, R. muses, the man was alluding to his stint as a general's aide. But the question lingers: Does he know? We have arranged to meet M., a gay female friend of R.'s, at lunch. Because she is not in uniform, having just come from a farewell party, M. is able to join us despite the fact that R. is an officer and she is a staff N.C.O. Still, M. grows anxious at our table; like most military women, she functions in an overwhelmingly male environment where she says that she feels intensely scrutinized. An attractive woman with a small gold cross around her neck, M. has told only one of her heterosexual colleagues, a civilian, that she is gay. ''It is relaxing, or easing, to feel like she knows me,'' M. says. If male homosexuals feel pressure to invent heterosexual lives, the pressure on women is exponentially greater -- they represent 14 percent of the armed forces, yet have accounted for roughly a quarter of the homosexuals discharged over the past four years. Several years ago, M. took a step that is quite common among gay military personnel of both sexes: she got married. In addition to the obvious boon of creating the appearance of heterosexuality, marriage in the military brings myriad financial benefits; the most important is a higher Basic Allowance for Quarters when you live off-base -- essential for any homosexual who wants a private life, but on an enlisted salary, which begins at $11,113 per year, virtually unaffordable. Marriages of convenience, either between gay men and women or with foreigners seeking American citizenship, are one solution. M. married a civilian homosexual so that she could live off-base with her partner while securing medical benefits for her ''husband,'' who was her partner's best friend. But guilt over deceiving the Government soon began to gnaw at her. Her relationship foundered; when M. told her partner that she was divorcing the friend, the woman threatened to tell M.'s C.O. that she was gay. Panic-stricken, M. nevertheless held her ground. ''I said, 'Go ahead, there are going to be three of us in jail,''' she says. M. proceeded with the divorce, and her partner kept quiet. ''I felt haunted by that nightmare for years,'' she says. Yet perhaps the biggest problem for gay military women is a problem they share with straight women: they are often deeply resented by their male colleagues and subordinates, many of whom still feel that women shouldn't be serving at all. Being gay is a vulnerability for women that some male colleagues are only too happy to exploit. The C.O. of one of M.'s friends has threatened to sit outside her house all night to prove that she has female lovers. Often, gay women are reluctant to report sexual harassment for fear of retaliatory investigations into their sexuality. A., an Army officer who has been deployed to both the Persian Gulf and Bosnia, filed a sexual-harassment complaint against a superior who demanded sexual favors from her. Some months later, an anonymous assertion that she was homosexual appeared in A.'s personnel file, and her security clearance was suspended. M. has spent more than 10 years in the Corps, but like R., she plans to end her career when her present enlistment is up. ''I'm sick of living the lie,'' she says. ''What scares me is that it gets to the point where you don't even notice it. You start to withhold information that you don't have to. How was your night? Oh, good. I'm practicing saying, We did this and we did that. Kind of remembering that this is human interaction, and this is O.K.'' The military is adamant that it cannot allow homosexuals to serve openly without greatly compromising the readiness and effectiveness of its troops. Military personnel live and work under intimate conditions that would shock most civilians. (On the U.S.S. Constellation, an aircraft carrier I toured, the enlisted men's berthing quarters were crammed with three-tiered bunk beds the size of large dresser drawers.) Unit cohesion is at the heart of a successful fighting force, and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and Gen. Colin Powell argued passionately before Congress that openly homosexual men and women would polarize units and destroy that cohesion. At least some of R.'s gay friends in the military don't dispute this view. ''Homophobic people don't want to work with a fag,'' one officer said. ''The group falls apart, we do not fight effectively.'' And while it is true that many NATO countries allow homosexuals to serve openly in their militaries (as does Israel), anecdotal evidence suggests that most homosexuals in these forces still remain closeted -- and must, if they wish to advance in rank. There is a hesitation to dispute the military's arguments. I, like most Americans, have no idea how wars are fought, and it is easy to underestimate the deep animus toward homosexuals that exists in the armed forces. (General Schwarzkopf, for one, says he believes that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would sharply discourage enlistments.) Still, several factors complicate this picture. For one, homosexuals have served in the armed forces since the country was founded (even earlier, actually; one of George Washington's generals is said to have been gay), and many have served openly -- their units knew of their sexual orientation -- without apparent problems. Brig. Gen. Pat Foote, who retired in 1989 after 29 years in the Army, says, ''I don't know many serving officers or N.C.O.'s who have not, in units with which they were affiliated, known that there were men and women other than heterosexuals doing magnificent jobs.'' Maj. Gen. Vance Coleman, who was wounded in the Korean War and is now retired from the Army, says that he served with homosexuals without incident. General Coleman, who is black, says that the present-day arguments against allowing homosexuals to serve openly echo prior ones against integrating blacks in the armed forces -- including the claims that white soldiers would not follow orders given by black officers and that whites and blacks could not peaceably share a foxhole. When President Truman overrode those arguments in 1948 with an executive order to integrate, military personnel, among others, reacted with horror. Referring to homosexuals in the military, General Coleman says: ''This is a civil rights issue and a human rights issue. You're not the same as I am, therefore you're inferior.'' Perhaps another factor complicating the military's argument against homosexuals serving openly is that discharges of homosexuals, some suspect, fall during wartime; indeed, revelations of homosexuality during wartime are often received skeptically by the military, as possible ruses to avoid combat, and a person must sometimes furnish sworn statements from sexual partners to be discharged. Though the Pentagon disputes this, General Coleman, among others, says he believes that concern about the presence of homosexuals is a peacetime obsession. ''When there's a war, nobody has time to deal with that,'' he says. ''It's about fighting and winning.'' Tom Carpenter, a former Marine fighter pilot who met his partner of 20 years, a former naval flight officer, while on active duty in the 70's, says he believes that the military's revulsion from homosexuality is linked to the intense male bonding that has traditionally been a part of military life. Like many historically all-male environments, the military has had its share of homoerotic rituals -- most famously the Navy's ''Crossing the Line'' ceremony (''modified'' and ''supervised'' nowadays, according to the Navy, but said to still occur unmodified on at least some ships). ''Crossing the Line'' is an initiation for new sailors, or ''polliwogs,'' making their first Equator crossing. Elements of this ritual include the crowning of ''King Neptune's queen,'' played by a young sailor in drag; the whipping and paddling of polliwogs by a gantlet of seasoned sailors, known as ''shellbacks,'' and sometimes simulated fellatio and anal intercourse between shellbacks and polliwogs. At the conclusion, the young initiates strip off their soiled uniforms and pitch them into the sea, then mill about in the nude as proof that they, too, are now shellbacks. Indeed, by many accounts, what is known as ''conditional homosexuality,'' or homosexual behavior by men who are normally heterosexual, is not uncommon among soldiers during long periods when women are unavailable. Navy phrases like ''It ain't queer unless it's tied to the pier'' allude to such behaviors. Some married men, it is said, believe that sex with another man does not constitute adultery. There is even a provision in ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' that excuses homosexual conduct if it is aberrant behavior for an individual. Bridget Wilson, a San Diego lawyer who has defended gay military personnel, calls this the queen-for-a-day exception. Lois Shawver, a clinical psychologist whose book ''And the Flag Was Still There'' studies attitudes toward homosexuality in the military, says, ''The sense of the troops' being demoralized is built on the anxiety that gays are going to stare at them and turn on them sexually.'' But Shawver's research suggests that this fear is unfounded -- that, in fact, homosexuals regulate their behavior even more carefully when they are known to be gay. As for exceptions, military policy and, in some cases, the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibit displays of physical affection while in uniform, sex in military barracks, sex between people of different ranks and sodomy, which includes oral sex. ''We have within the U.C.M.J. all that we need to deal with people that bring any type of sexual misbehavior to the workplace or the barracks,'' says General Foote, who recently served as the vice chairman of the Army's Senior Review Panel on Sexual Harassment. ''We don't need any more laws.'' The next time I see R., a few weeks later, the weather is warmer and El Nino has roused rashes of fluorescent purple flowers along Interstate 5. At the end of his workday, we drive from Camp Pendelton to Hillcrest and meet the tank officer I'd first met at the pizza dinner and his male partner, a naval nurse, in the home they share with a burly chow and a small striped cat. Over beers, R. recounts a quintessential gay-military snafu that occurred at the Marine officer's brunch he attended a few Sundays back. The officer had invited his straight military friends for brunch on Saturday, his gay friends on Sunday, but one straight Navy pilot got the days confused and arrived with his wife in the midst of the all-male brunch. The host panicked, feigned an emergency and bolted from his own party. But the heterosexual couple, apparently unfazed, were still there when the shaken host finally returned. According to R., the Marine officer then took his straight friend into a quiet room and said, ''There's something I have to tell you'' -- at which point the guest seized his arm and answered: ''Don't worry. I'm on board with the program.'' There are people who feel that as a younger generation rises to power within the military, attitudes like that of the Navy pilot will gradually prevail, and that the laws barring open homosexuality will fall away, just as those barring women and blacks eventually did. But ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' is now Federal law, and laws are not changed easily. So far, the Supreme Court has refused to hear a case challenging it, and three Circuit Courts have upheld the policy. However, the Second Circuit Court, in New York City, recently heard an appeal of a case in which a lower-court judge ruled that ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' violates the constitutional rights of equal protection and free speech. That case, Able v. the United States, may yet reach the Supreme Court, but even then, precedent suggests that the Court may defer to the military. ''If you look at the case in terms of the law and reason, it looks like an overwhelming winner,'' says Matt Coles, director of the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the case jointly with Lambda. ''But if you look at it in terms of the courts and the military, it looks like it doesn't have a chance.'' The more likely venue for change is Congress, but that, too, seems a long way off. Republicans are virtually unanimous in their opposition to gay rights; so far, even the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a basic gay rights bill, has failed to pass. Representative Barney Frank (Democrat of Massachusetts), who is openly gay and opposes ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'' says that should the Democrats win even a small majority in the House and the Senate in November (no small task), the gay rights bill could eventually pass. However, he holds out little hope for lifting ''Don't Ask, Don't Tell'' anytime soon. ''The military issue is unfortunately seen as a tougher one,'' he says. ''So you'd need a bigger Democratic majority for that.'' Whatever happens, R. will be reading about it in the newspapers, like everyone else; in a few months, he will become a civilian for the first time in his adult life. It won't be an easy transition for him. ''It's a way of life,'' he says of being a marine. ''David and I will be walking down the Oceanside Pier, and somebody will see me, and they'll be like, 'Sir, how are you doing?' David's like: 'You're not at work! You're not in uniform! Why are they calling you Sir?' I'm like: 'That's just the way it is. I can't explain it.''' But R. joined the Marines for the brotherhood, the esprit de corps, and ultimately, his sense of brotherhood has been eroded by the years of hiding. ''For the longest time, I felt close to the people,'' he says. ''But more and more, when you hear somebody make an anti-gay comment, that becomes a bookmark in your mind. I can't become close friends with the people I work with. It's definitely made me grow apart from the Marine Corps.'' His experience raises the question of whether openly gay soldiers are as great a threat to unit cohesion as closeted homosexuals, whose enforced secrecy gradually distances them from their fellow soldiers. A., the woman who served in the Persian Gulf and in Bosnia, says that as a homosexual ''you have this barrier to intimacy with the people you're serving with -- and that intimacy is what keeps people alive in hostile situations.'' Among the many paradoxes surrounding the issue of homosexuals in the military is this: the fact that R. has thrived in the military -- and has the record to prove it -- is partly what impels him to move on. ''I want to leave in a pristine state,'' he says. ''I'm tired of the looming prospect that tomorrow the whole world could come crashing down.'' Copyright (2001) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

Los Angeles, CA

teameight — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Los Angeles, CA

Saturday, June 19, 2010 3:00 pm Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood Brentwood Country Mart, 225 26th St., Santa Monica, CA 90402 (310) 576-9960 http://www.dieselbookstore.com/

teameight — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

San Francisco, CA

Monday, June 21, 2010 7:30 pm Books Inc. in the Marina 2251 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94123 415-931-3633 http://www.booksinc.net/event/2010/06/01/month/all/all/1

The Austinist

teameight — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Austinist, 10/1

Wall Street Journal

teameight — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:49:37 +0000

Wall Street Journal, 9/6 A Changed City: Reflections on 9/11 A Decade After Terrorist Attacks, New Yorkers Remember a 'Surreal' Moment, and a Renewed Commitment to Home Read the Interviews

At Google

teameight — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 17:58:31 +0000

Jennifer Egan talks with Greg Sanders at Google, 8/29 Watch the Interview

Huffington Post San Francisco

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:42:45 +0000

Huffington Post San Francisco, 10/10 "I made a study of what the counterculture consisted of, and it led me into other queries, like the impact of mass media on people's inner lives, the longing for transcendence as a basic human yearning, the human tendency to wish ourselves in other times and places." Read the Interview

Slate Magazine

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:52:04 +0000

Conversations with Slate Magazine's Jacob Weisberg, 10/22 A video conversation in 3 parts Watch the Interviews

CBC Podcast

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:01:41 +0000

Canadian Broadcoasting Corporation, 11/5 Jennifer Egan on the Best Pauses in Rock Music Read the Interview/Listen to the Podcast

On Point with Tom Ashbrook

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:04:48 +0000

NPR: On Point with Tom Ashbrook, 10/21 Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan on time, memory, and her latest, “A Visit from the Goon Squad.” Listen to the Podcast

Financial Times, UK

teameight — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:14:29 +0000

The Financial Times Magazine (UK), 12/9 “That was when things began to enter the realm of the hallucinatory. My sense of my reality, as I had known it, began to alter.” Read the Interview

BookTalk (Scottland)

teameight — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 15:40:32 +0000

BookTalk (UK) 1/10/12 "It feels like I am seizing upon details that suggest to me a life I don’t necessarily know, but is out there and has integrity. I could pursue it if I wanted to, but my goal is to keep my eye on this larger vision." Read the Interview Podcast of Discussion by Scottish Book Trust

Seattle Met

teameight — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:42:34 +0000

Seattle Met, 1/26/12 "I just love not being attached to a machine...Maybe I lose something in terms of velocity, but I think I gain it in terms of freedom." Read the Interview

Pop Matters 2/21/12

teameight — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 02:30:13 +0000

Pop Matters, 2/21/12 "I don’t like this so called high brow versus commercial dichotomy because I feel it isolates both camps in an area that I’m guessing no one particularly wants to be in." Read the Interview

Arlington Public Library, VA

teameight — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Reading, Q&A, and Book Signing 7:00 pm Arlington Public Library: 1015 North Quincy St., Arlington, VA 22201

The Bipolar Puzzle

teameight — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:10:23 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) When Claire, a pixie-faced 6-year-old in a school uniform, heard her older brother, James, enter the family's Manhattan apartment, she shut her bedroom door and began barricading it so swiftly and methodically that at first I didn't understand what she was doing. She slid a basket of toys in front of the closed door, then added a wagon and a stroller laden with dolls. She hugged a small stuffed Pegasus to her chest. "Pega always protects me," she said softly. "Pega, guard the door." James, then 10, had been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder two years earlier. He was attending a therapeutic day school in another borough and riding more than an hour each way on a school bus, so he came home after Claire. Until James's arrival that April afternoon, Claire was showing me sketches she had drawn of her Uglydolls and chatting about the Web site JibJab, where she likes to watch goofy videos. At the sound of James's footsteps outside her bedroom door, she flattened herself behind the barricade. There was a sharp knock. After a few seconds, James's angry, wounded voice barked, "Forget it," and the steps retreated. "If it's my brother, I don't open it," Claire said. "I don't care if I'm being mean. . . . I never trust him. James always jumps out and scares me. He surprises me in a bad way." I left Claire's bedroom and found James with his mother, Mary, in their spacious living room, which has a sidelong view of the Hudson River. James is a fair, athletic-looking boy with a commanding voice and a restless, edgy gait. He began reading aloud a story he wrote at school called "The Mystery of My Little Sister." It involved James discovering Claire almost dead, rescuing her and forming a detective agency to track down her assailant. He read haltingly, often interrupting himself. When his mother asked a question, the roil of frustration that nearly always seethes just under James's surface, even when he is happy, sloshed over. "If you listened on the first page, it says it!" he scolded her, then collapsed hopelessly beside the coffee table. "You don't get anything. Now I lost my place. Forget it. I give up." He crossed his arms on the table and rested his head in them. Mary waited quietly in her chair. Sure enough, a minute or two later James began reading us a list he had concocted of 50 ways to get rich. The next time his mother spoke, he bellowed: "I ''t talking to you! I'm not reading it now!" He threw the paper down and stalked out of the room. The baby-sitter arrived, a 27-year-old preschool teacher whom Mary hired to come in a few hours each week and help maintain harmony when both her children were home. It wasn't easy. There was a basic rhythmic pattern to the afternoon: James reached out, craving attention and engagement, then stormed away in roaring frustration only to return, penitent and eager to connect, cuddling and hanging on to his mother in a way unusual for a boy his age. At one point Claire appeared in the next room, and James hurled a ball at her, missing. Claire shrieked as if she'd been hit, screaming, "What did you do that for?" "Wow, I'm scared," James said. "I'm scared, right, Claire?" He threw the ball at her again, then asked, "Want to have family time?" "No," Claire hollered. "I want James to get away from me. Get away!" James made a series of loud, taunting sounds, which induced more hysterical cries from Claire. "James, you're provoking," Mary said evenly. "Claire, you're overreacting." Claire rode out of the room in her wagon. James sat with his stockinged feet in his mother's lap and played his Nintendo DS, though it rarely held his attention for more than a few minutes. "The therapist says that Claire is in crisis," Mary told me, referring to a social worker the family sees twice each week. "James is feeling better, James is feeling happier, so Claire, who has always been easy, is letting it all out now." James has never been easy. Like many children whose emotional problems are being diagnosed as bipolar disorder, his main symptoms are aggression and explosive rage (known in clinical parlance as "irritability"), and those traits have been visible in James from the time he was a toddler. Fifteen years ago his condition would probably not have been called bipolar disorder, and some doctors might hesitate to diagnose it in him even now, preferring other labels that more directly address James's rage and aggression: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (O.D.D.) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.) -- both of which have been applied to James as well. But since the mid-1990s, a revolution has occurred in the field of child psychiatry, and a mental illness characterized by episodes of mania and depression (bipolar disorder used to be called "manic depression"), which once was believed not to exist before late adolescence, is now being ascribed rather freely to children with mood problems, sometimes at very young ages. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the current edition is referred to as D.S.M.-IV) describes bipolar disorder as a condition whose average age of onset is 20, but virtually all the leaders in the field now say they believe it exists in children too. What they don't agree on is what, exactly, characterizes the disease in kids, or how prevalent it is; some call it rare, while others say it is common. Many clinicians say the illness looks significantly different in children than in adults, but the question of how it differs, or what diagnostic terms like "grandiosity," "elevated mood" or "flight of ideas" (all potential symptoms of adult bipolar disorder) even mean when you're talking about kids, leaves room for interpretation. For example, it's normal for children to pretend that they are superheroes, or believe that they can run faster than cars, whereas in an adult, these convictions would be signs of grandiosity. Equally unclear is whether a child who is identified as having a bipolar disorder will grow up to be a bipolar adult. Work on the D.S.M.-V is under way, and discussions have begun on how to address the issue of bipolar children. As Ellen Leibenluft, who runs the pediatric bipolar-research program at the National Institute of Mental Health, told me, "There definitely will be -- and needs to be -- more description of what bipolar disorder looks like in children, how one diagnoses it and some of the challenges." According to Mary, James was excessively cranky and active from babyhood (except where otherwise noted, the names of patients and their families used in this story are middle names). "By 7:30 every morning, I'd be in the playground with him," she said. "If it was over 20 degrees I was out the door, because if he was inside, he would rage." Still, James seemed at first to thrive in preschool. "I said: 'O.K., this is my problem, not his problem. This is my parenting skills, my lack of discipline, my lack of structure.' However, when I would pick him up from school he would scream and cry and rant and rage, sometimes remove his clothes, it would take me half an hour to get him out of the vestibule. I'd have to literally tie him in the stroller. He was 3. People were absolutely horrified." When James was 4 and Claire was a newborn, his pre-school contacted Mary in the fall and told her that her son seemed hyperactive and aggressive. After three days of testing, a developmental pediatrician diagnosed his condition as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and prescribed Zoloft, an antidepressant. "We refused to give a 4 1/2-year-old Zoloft," Mary said. They limped through the rest of the year, but in order for James to remain at the school for another year, they had to promise to hire a "shadow" -- someone to be with James full time in the classroom -- at a cost of $20,000 a year. Mary and her husband are affluent enough to afford this (her husband, Frank, has his own business; Mary hasn't worked since James was born); otherwise, James would have had to leave the school. Meanwhile, life at home was devolving into a nightmare. "James used to wake up every morning violently angry," Mary said. "I used to wake up at 4:30 and heat his milk in his sippy cup so that when he woke up at 5:00 it would be exactly the right temperature. If it was too hot or too cold, he would take one sip from the cup, hurl it across the room and rage so loudly that it would wake Claire up, so that at three minutes after 5:00, I would be crying, Claire would be crying and my husband would be crying." She and her husband took James to a pediatric psychopharmacologist, who prescribed Risperdal, one of a new generation of antipsychotic drugs that have become popular for treating children with rage and aggression because it can blunt their anger and calm them down. These so-called atypical antipsychotics are less likely to cause abnormal movements and muscle stiffness than the earlier antipsychotics, but they can still prompt enormous weight gain and put children at risk for diabetes. Since James was underweight and oblivious to food, Mary and her husband were willing to take the risk. "So we give him the Risperdal drops before bed, and he wakes up the next morning and he says: 'Good morning, Mommy. I'm hungry. Could I have something to eat?' I wake my husband and I say: 'James is different. The medication is working.' That day at noon, the Risperdal wore off, and he became angry, miserable, mean, frightening -- everything he was before." But even with Risperdal and a shadow, James struggled in his second year of pre-K; with his anger under control, his attention problems became more visible. "He could not stay on tasks," Mary said. "He couldn't stick with anything. He'd go to the drawing table and make one scribble. . . . He was hopping around." James's condition was diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a problem that is said to afflict between 3 and 7 percent of American schoolchildren. Normally A.D.H.D. is treated with stimulants like Ritalin, which can temporarily improve focus, but the two stimulants his doctor tried made James nasty and angrier, and he couldn't stay on them. In first grade he moved to a school for children with special learning needs, but by second grade he was having trouble even there. "He would cry every morning, and cry and cry and cry," Mary said. " I now realize that that was depression." Home life was almost unbearable. " I couldn't bring them to a playground together, because if he got behind Claire on the slide, he would push her down. If she walked by, he put out his leg to trip her. If they were watching TV and he became overstimulated, he would kick and punch her. . . . There's never been a dinner hour; he'd push her plate. He didn't like the way she was chewing. He'd rage. We never had any family meals. No family trips. Ever." As often happens with children on psychotropic drugs, James's behavior began to " break through" the medication, requiring more and eventually different combinations of drugs to contain it. Along with the Risperdal, he eventually went on Depakote, one of several antiseizure drugs that are also used as mood stabilizers. Depakote was ultimately replaced with Lamictal, another antiseizure drug, and the Risperdal gave way to Abilify, another antipsychotic. In spring of third grade, Mary was walking James and Claire home from James's school when he demanded a lottery ticket. She refused to buy him one. " He started to scream and yell and rant and rave on a busy corner. We were crossing the street and the light was changing. Coming down 75th Street I saw this big white Hummer. James said to me as we were crossing the street, 'If you won't buy me a lottery ticket, I don't want to live.' He stood in the middle of the street and he faced the Hummer down. And the Hummer pulls over and the guy gets out and starts screaming." At the psychiatrist's office the next day, " James is speaking really fast and he's mounting my leg like he's in sexual overdrive," Mary recalled. Pressured speech and hypersexuality are symptoms of mania. Shortly thereafter, when James was 8, his condition was diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Later on the April afternoon I spent in their apartment, Claire was on the family computer visiting her favorite Web site, JibJab, when James came over and stood beside her. " Can I start it over, please?" he said. " That's nice asking, James," Mary said. Claire replayed the video, and the children laughed, watching it together. A few minutes later, Claire came to her mother on the couch and put her arms around Mary's neck. James followed, draping himself across his mother's legs. Mary mentioned that she was concerned about some of the language she'd just heard on the video and mused aloud over whether to adjust the Internet filter to block JibJab out. " Mommy, please keep that one," Claire implored. " That's the only one James and I watch." When Mary relented, the children cheered, seizing each other's hands in a rare show of unity. A moment later, Claire, still giggling, said, "Ow." James had pushed or hurt her somehow. "Ow, ow!" she cried, in real pain now. "That hurts her, James," Mary said. "Get away," Claire screamed. "Now!" The children began to roar at each other. Mary took charge: "Don't hit. Let's separate our bodies." Then, almost with surprise, she said, "We were having a nice moment." Last fall, James started fifth grade at a school designed to accommodate emotional as well as learning issues. It has a contract with the New York City Department of Education, which means that city children attend free as long as the D.O.E. deems them in need of its services. The first parent conference, last fall, was sobering for Mary and her husband; the combination of A.D.H.D. and anger was making it hard for James to function even in this new school. "He can't start, he can't stop," she paraphrased. "He can't sit in his seat. He can't stop interrupting. He's constantly provoking his classmates. He's basically barely teachable. . . . It was like someone punched me in the side of the jaw." Mary went to James's psychiatrist for help. "I thought I was finally going to walk away with Ritalin," she said. "Instead, we walked out of that office with lithium." Lithium is one of the oldest and most reliable mood stabilizers, but it's a serious and potentially toxic drug, requiring regular blood draws to make sure that it isn't becoming too concentrated. It can have unpleasant side effects: tremors, weight gain, acne and thyroid problems in the short term; kidney damage in the long run. But Mary and her husband felt they had little choice. And the lithium, which James took along with his other medication, helped. James settled down in his new school and began to learn, and even to make friends. He was happier. At which point Claire, perhaps in a delayed reaction to trauma dating back to when she was small, became hysterically intolerant of her brother. "The latest edict from the therapist is that Claire's allowed to take her food and go in the TV room and eat by " Mary said. "And now she's eating three meals a day in there." James's psychiatrist was planning to raise his lithium dose until he was fully stable, and then to try adding a stimulant to help with his A.D.H.D., so he could concentrate better in school. Mary's hopes were riding heavily on this plan; lately, James's psychiatrist had been floating the idea of a residential school for James as a possible solution to his learning issues and conflicts with Claire. Mary and her husband badly wanted to keep him at home. "I used to cry five times a day, and now maybe I only cry once or twice," she told me, her usual upbeat practicality briefly giving way to emotion. "So it's better, you know? It's better now that I don't pick him up at school, and he doesn't rage at me in front of all the other parents. He can rage when he bursts in the door, so no one sees how awful it is. It's like a dirty little secret. It's like having a husband who beats you, only it's a kid. It's your own." A study last fall measured a fortyfold increase in the number of doctor visits between 1994 and 2003 by children and adolescents said to have bipolar disorder, and the number has likely risen further. Most doctors I spoke with found the "fortyfold increase" misleading, since the number of bipolar kids at the beginning of the study was virtually zero and by the end of the study amounted to fewer than 7 percent of all mental-health disorders identified in children. Many also said that because bipolar children are often severely ill, they can proportionately account for more doctors' visits than children with other psychiatric complaints, like A.D.H.D. or Anxiety Disorder. Still, nearly every clinician I spoke to said that bipolar illness is being overdiagnosed in kids. In Leibenluft's studies at the National Institute of Mental Health, only 20 percent of children identified with bipolar disorder are found to meet the strict criteria for the disease. Breck Borcherding, a pediatric psychiatrist in private practice in the Washington area, said: "Every time one of my kids goes into the hospital, they come out with a bipolar diagnosis. It's very frustrating." There are many possible reasons for the sudden frenzy of pediatric bipolar diagnoses. First, a critical shortage of child psychiatrists, especially in rural areas, means that many children are being seen by adult psychiatrists or -- more often -- by family doctors, who may lack expertise in child psychiatry. Managed care usually pays for a single, brief psychiatric evaluation (and it strictly limits the number of therapy appointments a year) -- not nearly enough time, many say, to accurately diagnose a condition in a mentally ill child. Then there is "The Bipolar Child," a successful book published by the psychiatrist Demitri Papolos and his wife, Janice, in 1999, and referred to by more than one parent I spoke to as a "bible." The Papoloses' description of pediatric bipolar disorder was amassed partly by using responses to an online questionnaire filled out by hundreds of parents on an electronic mailing list, who said they believed their children were bipolar (and who often had strong family histories of the disease). The Papoloses' diagnostic criteria include some idiosyncratic items -- a severe craving for carbohydrates, for example -- that are found nowhere in D.S.M.-IV. Nevertheless, many parents walk into doctors' offices having already read "The Bipolar Child" and concluded that their children are bipolar. Because doctors rely heavily on parental reports when diagnosing disorders in children, these "prediagnoses" may have an impact on the outcome. And of course, there are pressures and blandishments from the pharmaceutical industry, which stands to profit mightily from the expensive drugs -- often used in combination -- that are prescribed for bipolar illness, despite the fact that very few of these drugs have been approved for use in children. For all the possible overdiagnosing of pediatric bipolar disorder, however, many in the field also say that a lot of truly bipolar children who could benefit from therapy are falling through the cracks. This is a critical issue; studies clearly show that the longer bipolar disorder goes untreated, the worse a person's long-term prognosis. Between 10 and 15 percent of those suffering from bipolar disorder end up committing suicide. Some studies suggest that bipolar disorder may actually be on the rise among young people. One intriguing hypothesis involves a genetic phenomenon known as "anticipation," in which genes become more concentrated over generations, bringing a stronger form and earlier onset of an illness with each successive generation. Another theory is "assortative mating," in which a more mobile and fluid society, like ours, enables the coupling of people whose mutual attraction might be partly due to a shared genetic disposition to something like bipolar disorder, thus concentrating the genetic load in their offspring. Given these uncertainties, how does a doctor go about diagnosing bipolar disorder in a child? To understand that process, I spent several days at the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Services Clinic at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the largest clinic in America devoted specifically to treating and studying children with bipolar disorder. It has about 260 active patients, most of them from Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and West Virginia, and it evaluates between one and five new cases each week. It accepts managed care, meaning it operates at a loss, which is absorbed by the medical center. (Many child psychiatrists in private practice, who charge as much as $400 an hour in New York, accept no insurance; families who can afford to lay out these sums must collect what they can from their insurers after the fact.) The three evaluations I watched consisted of what are called semistructured interviews of parents and children, separately and together, by an experienced nurse or social worker, to collect the child's psychiatric history and determine which symptoms of mania or depression are present (parents are prescreened by phone to rule out cases that are clearly not bipolar, a process that eliminates roughly 50 percent of callers). Parents and child then have a lengthy meeting with either Boris Birmaher, who founded the clinic 10 years ago, David Axelson, its current director, or one of two other psychiatrists. The first two evaluations I saw were of teenagers, a boy and a girl; the doctors felt they seemed depressed, not bipolar, and directed them to a clinic in the same building that caters to depressed teenagers. The third evaluation was of a 7-year-old boy named Joe (his first name): a burly, sweet-faced kid with long eyelashes and dark curls. He appeared quite depressed, leaning his head on the armrest of his chair and answering yes or no in a mournful monotone. His mother and grandmother described a child who sounded a lot like James -- restless and overactive from birth, impulsive, requiring constant attention, but above all, wildly, explosively angry. His mother recalled tantrums lasting hours; a recent one, which took place in Wal-Mart when she refused to buy him a video game, resulted in her having to sit on Joe in an aisle until store employees could help her wrestle him into the car. Like James's, Joe's condition was diagnosed as O.D.D. and A.D.H.D. and he had taken various medications since age 4, including stimulants and antipsychotics, none of which really helped. A recent rampage at school concluded with a 20-minute physical fight with a police officer; Joe was suspended, and if his mother hadn't been able to get there and calm him down, he probably would have landed in a psychiatric hospital. His mother, who had Joe at 19 and is single, working the overnight shift at a group home for the mentally disabled, spoke through a frequent rattling cough. "He tells me he hates me every day," she said. "He says he hates himself, and he wants to die. I don't enjoy being around him. When I'm restraining him, he kicks me, punches me and spits in my face, bites me. Sometimes I don't ride in the car with him, because I just don't know what he's going to do: if he's gonna open the door, if he's gonna reach around and punch me, grab the wheel." After several hours of interviews, Axelson told Joe's "What is clear is that Joe is having mood difficulties. Whether that's related to a depressive disorder or a bipolar disorder is hard to tell. I know that's frustrating." What Axelson wasn't seeing in Joe was clear evidence of mania, defined in D.S.M.-IV as a distinct period of an abnormally elevated (meaning euphoric) or irritable mood, accompanied by at least three out of seven other symptoms (four symptoms, if the mood is irritable rather than elevated). Those seven symptoms are captured with the mnemonic Digfast: distractibility, indiscretion ("excessive involvement in pleasurable activities" in D.S.M.), grandiosity, flight of ideas, activity increase, sleep deficit ("decreased need for sleep") and talkativeness ("pressured speech"). "I'm not seeing clear patterns of distinct periods of being accelerated and talking and moving and thinking with an intensity of mood that just overflows and then goes back to his usual state," Axelson said. "The intense anger outbursts can happen in kids with bipolar disorder, but they can happen with other mood disorders, or with A.D.H.D. and severe oppositional behavior. He's only 7 years old. This could be the very early signs of bipolar, and it may not be until two, three, four, five years from now that we'd have a clear idea. That doesn't mean that he doesn't need intensive treatment -- he really does." (Joe is currently in treatment at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, but the right medication has proved elusive.) It's possible that a different doctor might have identified Joe as bipolar. In an influential 1995 paper that began the paradigm shift toward bipolar disorder within child psychiatry, Janet Wozniak -- the director of the pediatric bipolar-disorder program at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of "Is Your Child Bipolar?" -- working with the chief of pediatric psychopharmacology, Joseph Biederman, revealed that 16 percent of the children who came to the clinic met the D.S.M. criteria for mania. This was shocking news; it was widely believed until then that mania in children was extremely rare. Wozniak reported that the children's mania most often took the form of an irritable mood rather than an elevated one, and that the mood was often chronic: the norm, rather than the exception. All but one of the manic children in the study also suffered from A.D.H.D. Wozniak told me that the discovery of mania in so many of the kids she was treating came as a shock to her too. "It was like I opened up my eyes: Oh, my goodness, these children have bipolar disorder," she said. "And I realized that what I'd been treating them for hadn't been working well. I was often treating them for bad A.D.H.D., using different stimulant medicines or higher doses. I was often treating them for their depression and not getting anywhere. In those days, the teaching was that we had a group of medicines that could be used for 'aggression' in children. What's interesting is that these were the anti-manic agents; they were lithium and antiseizure medicines." In other words, many of the children in Wozniak's clinic went unrecognized as bipolar, but they were inadvertently being treated for bipolar. The tricky part, diagnostically, is that out of those seven symptoms, three -- distractibility, activity increase and talkativeness -- are also symptoms of A.D.H.D. Which means that a severely irritable child who has A.D.H.D. could be, theoretically, only one symptom away from a bipolar diagnosis. Does it even matter whether or not we call Joe or James bipolar, since the drugs used to treat irritable, aggressive children are often the same as those used for bipolar disorder? Critics of the more widespread use of a pediatric bipolar diagnosis say it does. For one thing, being bipolar makes certain medications extremely risky to use; stimulants can intensify a manic episode, and antidepressants like Zoloft or Prozac can make bipolar patients not just manic but psychotic, even suicidal. In fact, some clinicians say that a number of young patients who become suicidal while on antidepressants -- occasioning the "black box" warning currently mandated for drugs like Prozac -- in fact suffer from undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Gabrielle Carlson, the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, has studied childhood mania for many years and says bipolar disorder is uncommon in children under 10, revealing itself in the same discrete episodes of mania and depression that we see in bipolar adults -- not in chronic irritability. According to Carlson, a large group of aggressive and explosive children, who in fact are "diagnostically homeless," are being relabeled as bipolar, which is a development she says is unhelpful both to the children and the field. "Diagnostically it ends up being a very important consideration of what the kid really has," she told me. "If he really has A.D.H.D. and it's not mania, then you give him medication for his A.D.H.D. You also give him behavior modification." One patient she saw that day, who was thought to have bipolar disorder, actually had autism, she said. "If you say, 'Hey, his problem is bipolar disorder,' then you're not going to treat his language disorder, you're not going to give the social-skills treatment he needs," she said. Problematic conditions in a child's home life are also less likely to be addressed if the child's behavioral issues are attributed to bipolar disorder, Carlson said. "Many people, when they hear bipolar disorder, their brain slams shut." Afternoons at the Pittsburgh bipolar clinic are the time when ongoing patients come in for shorter appointments to assess the impact of their medication regimes on their mood and check for side effects. On my visit in March, Axelson's last appointment of the day was with a pair of bipolar siblings: Phia, 9, and Lucas, 6, both of whom he had been treating for the last year and a half. They were a dynamic and appealing pair, if slightly overcharged; there was constant climbing and prowling in the small office. Phia, who wore a pink sweater, black cords and red wool-lined Crocs, had begun taking lithium just a few weeks before, after two different antipsychotic drugs produced an uncomfortable muscular sensation in her legs called akathesia. Now that she was on lithium and a lower dose of one of the antipsychotics, the akathesia had stopped, and both Phia (a family nickname) and her mother, Marie, agreed she was doing well. On the other hand, Lucas, a vigorous, bullet-headed boy who that day wore camouflage pants, was behaving oddly, Marie said. "Throughout the course of a day, there's a shift from a whole lot of bravado to limp," she told Axelson. "Tell me what Lucas is like at the bravado times," he said. "We went to church, and what he had strong feelings about wearing was a glittery lamé vest on top of a striped shirt and a top hat." Axelson leaned toward Lucas in amazement. "A top hat!" he said. "Do you normally wear a top hat to church?" The nurse found a pretext to take the children out of the room so that Axelson could question Marie further. "Is he talking differently when he's in the top-hat kind of mood?" "There's no inhibition," she said. " He'll just run up to people on the street or in stores, go right up and start talking to them. He'll say, 'Hi,' and tell them something that went on in his life in the morning; it could be his breakfast, it could be his Webkin. They may not even be paying attention to him, but he'll persist." " Is he physically moving around more when he's in that kind of mood?" Axelson asked. " Yes, like touching the stove top, touching everything. But in a reckless way, where things are getting pushed off the counter and dropping and breaking. He thinks that he doesn't need to wear a shirt outside. You obviously tell him, 'You have to wear a coat, it's 32 degrees,' and he'll have a fit. I end up carrying him upstairs to try to get him in a timeout to calm him, and I'll hold him. And after that, it's like the bottom drops. He gets limp. He'll say: 'I'm sad. It's the kind of sad that isn't for a reason.' Or he'll say, 'Things aren't right.'" Axelson decided to increase Lucas's Abilify dose but warned Marie that he wouldn't be able to go much higher. If the manic symptoms persisted, they might need to consider lithium -- not ideal for a child so young and something both Axelson and Marie said they hoped to avoid. Later I asked Axelson what struck him as manic about the behavior Marie described in Lucas. "What would mania look like in a 6-year-old?" he asked. "They can't have sex with strangers, max out their credit card or start new business ventures. But he can dress outlandishly, talk to strangers." Lucas's behavior also harked back to some of his premedication symptoms, which included grabbing strangers' cellphones out of their pockets and trying to touch the guns of police officers. He'd slathered shaving cream on the furniture and drawn all over the walls. Then there were days when Marie couldn't get him off the couch. He had difficulty connecting to other children; after two years of preschool he had never been invited on a play date. Axelson's diagnoses of Lucas's and Phia's disorders were abetted by the fact that Marie and her husband are both bipolar, too. There is clear evidence that the disorder runs in families; a recent study shows that children with even one bipolar parent are 13 times as likely to develop the disease. Marie, an artist, learned she was bipolar only recently, having been treated for many years for depression. Once her children were successfully in treatment, she told me, she was able to perceive how mentally uncomfortable she herself was. A psychiatrist, looking carefully at her history, determined that in her 20s, which Marie had thought were simply "awash in bad judgment," she actually suffered from bouts of mania. The new diagnosis had prompted different medications, which she said had helped her enormously. Marie's history illustrates a trend toward a more inclusive definition of adult bipolar illness; little noted in the study that reported on the fortyfold increase in child and adolescent bipolar doctor visits was the fact that the number of adult visits had roughly doubled during the same period. This increase jibes with a recent population survey estimating the prevalence of bipolar disorder among American adults, long thought to be around 1 percent, at slightly more than 2 percent. The survey also projected that another 2.4 percent of Americans have a "subthreshold" form of bipolar disorder -- less severe but still impairing. The author of the study, Kathleen Merikangas, a senior investigator at the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health, says that she does not feel that the number of bipolar adults is rising but that greater public awareness and diagnostic inclusiveness account for the jump. Still, that comes to nearly 10 million American adults with some form of bipolar disorder, only a small percentage of whom, the study found, were receiving appropriate treatment. It was Phia whom Axelson first identified with bipolar disorder, and he described her case as "pretty clear cut." Like James, Phia was overstimulated almost from birth. Marie couldn't take her for a walk without Phia becoming hysterical in response to the sights and sounds they encountered. Marie couldn't wear colored shirts; Phia couldn't attend a play group. At times Phia seemed bizarrely overconfident for a toddler, pursuing men and flirting with them, showing no sign of fear or remorse when her grandfather, an imposing man, yelled at her. Marie began taking her daughter to a psychologist when she was 4. "I felt like I was doing something wrong," she told me. Despite troubles with reading and an anxious habit of rubbing the soles of her feet against the bottoms of her shoes until blisters formed, Phia was able to function in public school. But from the moment she stepped off the school bus at the end of the day, it was bedlam. "Everything set her off," Marie recalled. "That wasn't the snack that she wanted. She doesn't want a snack. She'd want to be pushed on the swing, and it would be too high, or not enough, so I would push her a little bit more. There would be this screaming fit, kicking her legs, flailing on the swing. 'I hate this, that's not what I wanted!' I'd be like, That's it. We're done on the swings. Then that would precipitate a fit." It was impossible to keep Phia in a timeout; she would burst from her room laughing. Marie attached a lock to the outside of her door and cleared the room of things that might hurt her daughter as she raged. Phia also had "silly" moods that quickly spiraled out of control, resulting in injuries: she broke her collarbone while diving over her bed in a silly fit; flailing, she would smack her arms inadvertently against the wall; she fell down the stairs repeatedly; she cracked her teeth on the edge of a swimming pool. Play dates were impossible; once, upset that a friend was about to leave, Phia told the girl that her father was beating her. She tormented Lucas; screaming at him, pushing and kicking him, once whipping him with a wand so hard that she raised welts through his shirt. And Phia herself was in agony. "She was asking for medicine for at least a year or so," Marie said. "'Isn't there anything they can give me to help me calm down?'" Much of Phia's extreme behavior has eased with medication. When I visited the family at their two-story suburban home on the last day of March, a couple of weeks after their appointment with Axelson, there was an atmosphere of renewal: Marie was painting the kitchen cupboards; her husband (an engineer who works long hours; we never met) had replastered some damaged walls. Nowadays Phia has a best friend and goes to birthday parties. With her mind calmer, she told me, she loves to read and is fond of the American Girl mystery series. She and Lucas are lucky in that they seem not to have any other disorders, or "comorbidities," like A.D.H.D., on top of their bipolar disorder. Both are doing well in public school. I sat with Marie and Phia at a round outdoor table facing the backyard. Lucas was using a remote control to send an electric car roaring over the grass. Marie, a calm, gentle woman who chooses her words with care, told me that Lucas had improved on his higher Abilify dose. But Phia -- surprisingly -- had struggled since the appointment I was present for. After a blood draw, Axelson increased her lithium dose. "My feelings weren't really going that well," Phia told me when I asked her about the previous weekend. "It was like all of a sudden, horribleish. Unexplainable mad, sad horrible feelings inside." She blamed the several days of standardized tests she recently took at school, saying they made her anxious. When Phia went inside, Marie told me she offered, the previous week, to take her daughter to the hospital. "She becomes fitful," she said. "You have to physically hold her down, and that's getting harder and harder to do. She'll bang her head against the wall, she'll bite herself. I brought up the hospital because she said: 'I can't take it anymore. I don't want to be me. I don't want to feel anymore. Why aren't you doing anything about this?'" As he played with his car, Lucas kept looking up, waiting for a little boy who lives around the block to appear on the other side of the wire fence that separates his yard from Lucas's. Marie had repeatedly invited this boy over to play, but his parents always declined -- she wondered if the mayhem they'd heard coming from her house before her children were medicated might be the reason. Toy cars and trucks were positioned along the fence from the boys' prior meetings there. Sure enough, the neighbor soon appeared, calling Lucas's name, and Lucas greeted him joyfully. Lucas hauled a supply of pirate weapons over to the fence and the boys divvied them up and began to play through the wire. Phia joined them, but when Lucas came over to ask his mother for another sword, his sister chased him down, upset; apparently, the neighbor boy asked who I was, and Lucas made some mention of meeting me at his doctor's office. "Don't!" Phia implored her brother. "That's ''t want them to know that we're bipolar, that's not their beeswax. That's our secret thing, O.K.? That's our family secret." Only her good friends know that Phia takes medicine. "They don't know what it's about," she told me. "They have no clue I'm bipolar." She worries that if they knew, they would feel differently about her. Lucas was reluctant to leave his friend for dinner; he waved and bellowed to him through the open window as he wolfed down his ravioli and salad. For dessert, Marie had placed small portions of leftover Easter candy inside Ziploc snack bags: one for each child. She was concerned about their weight, which had increased since they began taking medications -- Phia's especially. She wasn't overweight, but her body had changed from slender to average, and her clothing size had increased from a 6X to a 12/14. "With all the emphasis on childhood obesity, it's a daily worry," Marie said. She dreaded comments about her children's sizes from family members at a coming reunion; Marie says her parents and siblings don't believe that her children are bipolar and disapprove of the medication. The school also has doubts. All these things make Marie question the diagnosis and medication. "Their diagnoses are largely based on the history as I see it," she told me. "And that feels like an incredible responsibility -- how accurate am I?" Eventually the children prepared to go upstairs for baths and bed. On the kitchen counter were four sectional pill containers, one for each member of the family. Marie put each child's pills into a spoon and squirted a dollop of whipped cream on top to help them go down. Like any kid, Phia grabbed the whipped-cream canister before Marie could catch her and sprayed some into her mouth. The next time I visited James and his family, a rainy day in May, things had taken a turn for the worse. The stimulant, which James's psychiatrist had been planning to add for months when his lithium level was high enough, had made James manic -- sleepless, talking incessantly, banging on radiators -- and the school had immediately called and asked Mary to take him off it. This was a huge blow; both school and parents were counting on the stimulant to help James concentrate. Each year he has trouble in May (" Manic May," Mary had dubbed it), and his hostility had reached new extremes; he wouldn't shower or brush his teeth or do his homework without a fight. One morning, when Mary's husband was out of town, James stood on his bed and threatened her with a huge stick. "He said, 'You'd better back down or I'm going to smash your face in,' " she said. "He was really beside himself. I looked at the base of the stick, and I thought, These are things you read about: he's going to break my nose. And I knew I couldn't show how petrified I was. So I stared him down, and he put the stick down, eventually." Another morning, James told Mary, in front of Claire: "I'm going to kill you. I'm going to slice you open with a knife." Later, he apologized, distraught. But, for his mother, something shifted when she heard those words. "I always wondered what my breaking point would be," she told me. "I thought maybe it would be if he accidentally hurt Claire, but the look on his face when he told me he was going to kill me, that was it." James's dose of Abilify had been increased, which was helping somewhat. But Mary had also put in applications to three therapeutic boarding schools, where James might start sixth grade in the fall. The classes would be even smaller, and she said she hoped living at the school would help James with his behavioral issues. All three schools were out of state, and the family would initially have to pay room, board and tuition out of pocket -- the prices ranged from $93,000 to $125,000 a year -- and sue for reimbursement from New York City. Such costs would of course be prohibitive for most families, creating a terrible bind for those who can't receive approval for in-state residential schooling yet are unable to handle their children at home. In some cases, these children end up becoming wards of the state. James hadn't yet returned from school when I arrived, but Frank, his father, was at home; he is a courtly man with reddish curly hair whose posture sagged visibly as we discussed the possibility of his son going away. Two of the schools had already expressed interest, and the third called while I was there; it, too, had a possible spot for James. This last was Mary's favorite, based on its Web site: rural, all-boy; James could ride horses. She made an appointment to visit the school with Frank the following Thursday. "Next Thursday!" he said, taken aback. "Oh, it's moving fast." His biggest fear was that James would perceive boarding school as a punishment for behavior he can't control. "He's 10 years old, almost 11, and he still holds my hand when we walk on the sidewalk together," Frank said. "So when he comes out with guns blazing and eyes popping out of his head, I know that this poor kid has a demon that's just blasting its way out of him. I think what it's like when I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and I feel angry for no particular reason, and I realize that this is James's life moment to moment, every day." Shortly after James arrived home, cheerful and wearing a silky black track suit, Frank lay down for a nap. Mary asked her son to take his 4 p.m. Abilify pill; he refused. He politely asked to borrow my microphone and used his iPod to record himself singing. Then the sound of Claire laughing in the next room set him off. "Be quiet," he suddenly shouted. "Don't talk to your sister that way," Mary said. "Be quiet!" he yelled at her. "Hey," she said, "you need to walk away. Now, it's after 4 o'clock ?" "I'm not taking it now." "Then you can go into your room." James covered his ears and began to chant: "Sorry, sorry, nope can't hear you, can't hear you, sorry, can't hear you." "It's time for you to take your pill." "I'll smack your face," he said, brandishing his iPod earphones. "Don't threaten me with that or you'll never see it again. Take your pill." James took the pill. Then he closed the door to block out the sound of his sister. "You open this door, Claire, I'll pull out something really sharp on you," he said. "Calm down," his mother said. "And no more talk about sharp things." "Sharp things!" James retorted. He tried to play his iPod recording for us, but the speakers wouldn't work. He became enraged and crashed out of the room, emitting animal yells that Mary had to translate for me: "I hate it! Never again! Never again!" A moment later he was back, whimpering, "I want Daddy." "Sweetheart, Daddy's sleeping. Do you want him to help you with the machinery?" "No! I want him! How stupid are you?" "James, you're being so rude. Are you hungry?" "No, I'm not!" he howled, apoplectic. "I just ate raspberries. Why am I [expletive] hungry -- frigging hungry?" He threw himself onto a chair and began to play his Nintendo DS. A few minutes later, he curled, all 105 pounds of him, in his mother's lap, his arms around her neck, head on her shoulder. Later, when James was out of the room, Frank, now awake, spoke wistfully of a sense that he was growing apart from his son. They used to go to a diner together on Sunday mornings, just the two of them, but James rarely wanted to anymore. "He's restless, but he doesn't know what to do," Frank said. "And anything you suggest is of no real interest to him." James came into the room and draped himself across his mother's knees. "Sweetie pie, are you hungry?" Mary asked James. "Would you like Daddy to take you out for something to eat?" James raised his arm, his head still buried in his mother's lap. "Is that the thumbs up?" Mary asked. "Mm-hmm." Frank looked startled, pleased. "O.K., I'm going to ''s hot," he said, rising from his chair. "Come, my little man." I felt an agonizing quiver of dread as father and son gathered jackets and wallet and shoes. Would James become angry? Would he change his mind? Would they actually get out the door without an explosion? When they did, it seemed miraculous. In the abruptly quiet apartment, Mary and I talked about her son's future. "It's not that we even dream that James goes to college," she told me. "We just want him to graduate from high school and be a functioning, contributing-to-society individual. Maybe he'll meet a nice girl from Cape Cod and become a carpenter there. My biggest fear is that he's going to become a loose cannon when he's 18." James's psychiatrist reassured Mary that he would settle down after adolescence. "But she's also the person who told me these were early-childhood issues and he'd be off Risperdal by the time he was 7 or 8," Mary said. There was a long pause. "It just keeps opening up like an inverted triangle," she said finally. "The scope of his difficulties just gets broader and broader the older he gets." The most basic question about bipolar kids remains a mystery: Will they grow up to be bipolar adults? Because diagnosing the condition in children is still relatively new, no studies have yet followed a large number of them fully into adulthood. One fact is suggestive: bipolar kids are predominantly male, while the adult bipolar population skews slightly toward the female. The likelihood is that many of these kids will grow up to have mental-health issues of some kind, but which issues, and how chronic or severe they will be, no one really knows. A long-term study in Pittsburgh overseen by Axelson and Birmaher suggests that as children grow, the severity of their disorders can change; bipolar II, the less severe form of the disease, can convert to bipolar I, the more severe form. Nearly a third of subthreshold bipolar cases (BP-N.O.S., or Not Otherwise Specified, in D.S.M.) convert to the more serious forms. Intriguingly, though, some of the bipolar children in the study appear to have gotten well. Roy Boorady, the director of psychopharmacology services at the New York University Child Study Center, told me: "Now that I've worked with kids long enough, you see some that had this mood instability or irregularity and were diagnosed as bipolar. But then you see them as they're older, and they're off in college and not having these labile mood swings anymore. You really wonder, What was it?" Most clinicians say they believe that there will eventually be clear "biological markers" of bipolar disorder: ways to see and measure the disease as we can seizures, cancer or hypertension. Scientists are working to identify the genes (there appear to be many) involved in creating a predisposition for bipolar disorder. Brain imaging, still in its infancy, can already detect broad differences of size, shape and function among different brains. The hope is to know early on who is at risk so their condition can be diagnosed and treated as early as possible. Mental illness wreaks brutal damage on a life, crippling decision-making, competence and self-esteem to the point where digging out from under years of it can be next to impossible. And there is also a biological theory for why going untreated might worsen a bipolar person's long-term prognosis. Epilepsy researchers have found that by electrically triggering seizures in the brains of animals, they can prompt spontaneous seizures, a phenomenon known as "kindling." Simply having -- even artificially generated ones -- seems to alter the brain in such a way that it develops an organic seizure disorder. Some scientists say that a kindling process may happen with mania, too -- that simply experiencing a manic episode could make it more likely that a particular brain will continue to do so. They say this explains why, once a person has had a manic episode, there is a 90 percent chance that he will have another. Kiki Chang, director of the pediatric bipolar-disorders program at Stanford, has embraced the kindling theory. "We are interested in looking at medication not just to treat and prevent future episodes, but also to get in early and -- this is the controversial part -- to prevent the manic episode," he told me. "Once you've had a manic episode, you've already crossed the threshold, you've jumped off the bridge: it's done. The chances that you're going to have another episode are extremely high." Along with medication, Chang is exploring family therapy and other forms of stress reduction that might help fortify a child against a genetic proclivity for bipolar disorder. "If we wait too long, they will probably need chronic medication treatment," he told me. "But if we can get in early enough, they may not need to stay on medication. So we're hoping to get in and get out, and not subject them to the long-term side effects." (As for short-term side effects, Chang says medications like lithium may actually be "neuroprotective" -- i.e., might actually help a developing brain.) And while it is wildly unclear whether this picture of prevention will ever become a reality, Chang says he is a believer, and his hope is infectious. Whatever the case, a synthesis is likely to emerge in the coming years. "There's contention about lots of major scientific issues," Leibenluft of the National Institute of Mental Health said. "People do the research and gradually, the data speak." Shortly after my last visit with James (who has begun boarding school and is doing well), I went back to Pittsburgh to meet Phia and Lucas at an appointment with Axelson. It was a beautiful day at the end of May, and the children were noticeably calmer than during my last visit to their doctor; Lucas sat quietly, making sketches of scenes from "Speed Racer" and "Star Wars" with a marker. Phia also made a sketch: two wavy lines, a pink one labeled "Am Now" and a purple line entitled "Should Be." It was a mood chart. The lines were nearly superimposed. Lucas, Phia and Marie all agreed that the two children were doing wonderfully. Phia had kept her cool even when she forgot to bring the music for a violin concert she was performing in. Lucas described a school project involving spring trees and talked fondly about his friend across the fence. Marie looked different; in the two months since I'd seen her, she had braces put on her teeth, updated her eyeglass prescription and had her first haircut in three years. "We haven't been to this spot before," Marie said. "I have a hopefulness that there will be more to come." She and her husband bought a small grill, she told me, something they had never been able to do because the kids were too impulsive. And they hired an evening baby-sitter -- another first -- to go out on their anniversary. "This is the goal, where we'd like to be," Axelson said, shaking everyone's hands as they left the office. "Hopefully we'll be able to stay with this." Three months later, in mid-August, I heard from Marie that after more symptoms of mania in Lucas (which included opening the car door while it was moving), and increases in his Abilify, Axelson had finally recommended a move to lithium. Lucas had begun with a small dose -- less than half what Phia was taking -- but Marie had a feeling it would be gradually raised, as Phia's had been since that first appointment I was present for in March. She wrote to me in an e-mail message: "I re-experience some mourning or grieving for the kids with each medicine change. The unknowns are so daunting and somehow I feel so guilty for taking such risks. Putting them to bed at night seems to be the worst time for these feelings. I suppose because at that time they seem to be their youngest and most trusting and vulnerable. I pray for them under my breath."

Why a Priest

teameight — Sun, 04 Apr 1999 18:00:45 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) 'Watch people's faces when we come in the door,'' Tom Holloway says. Holloway is a 29-year-old fourth-year Catholic seminarian at Mount Saint Mary's Seminary, and on this stunningly cold winter night, he and six other seminarians have driven to a diner not far from Emmitsburg, Md., where the seminary is situated, to have dessert. Holloway and two others in their fourth and last year, Brian Bashista and Damien Cook, are wearing clerical attire, or ''clerics,'' as they call them: black slacks, black shirts, Roman collars. They have already been ordained as deacons; they've made ''solemn promises'' of celibacy and obedience, and can perform baptisms and preside at marriages, as well as preach. They will be ordained as priests later this spring. As they enter the diner, a collective awareness seizes the room, much the way it might in the presence of someone famous. People either look up, or resolutely avoid looking up. After the seminarians settle in at a round table, Holloway, a slight, fair-haired man from Peoria, Ill., expands upon the reactions I've just seen -- a phenomenon seminarians refer to as ''the head-turn effect.'' ''People do one of three things,'' Holloway says. ''Suddenly they get really nice, and they want you to think they're really good people. Somebody my age, they're calling me Sir. The second one is, people get very stony, like they're mad at you. They just glare. The third one is my favorite: you walk in and they do a double take and they look really scared, like, Why is he dressed like that? He knows my secrets!'' The sight of a Roman collar, the seminarians go on to explain, can have the power to flush profanity from conversations, douse lovers' fights and halt the scolding of children. Airplane rides are notorious for inspiring long queries from seatmates, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, even when the seminarian isn't wearing clerics; the sight of a breviary is often enough to set things off. (Priests regularly hear confessions on airplanes, I'm told, finding two back seats for that purpose whenever possible.) Jerome Magat, a brainy, energetic 26-year-old of Filipino descent, is a second-year seminarian, so he wears clerics off-campus only when attending a formal, ecclesiastical event or when visiting hospitals, homeless shelters, prisons and schools, which is part of the seminary program. ''It's that supernatural element,'' Magat says of the reactions his clerics provoke. ''There's a mystery about the priesthood.'' Some of that mystery inheres in the very nature of the Catholic priesthood. A priest is called to be an alter Christus, to stand in the Person of Christ and perform the sacraments, through which grace is conferred by God. Nowadays, though, the distance between the Catholic priesthood and the surrounding culture has given it a near occult mystique. As America hurtles forward unblinkingly into the consumer-driven, technological and environmental unknown, the Catholic priesthood remains becalmed in a zone of otherworldly preoccupations relatively unbuffeted by present-day vicissitudes. Today, as, say, 500 years ago, a man -- and only a man -- who senses he has a vocation, or a call from God to the priesthood, hands over his life irrevocably to the church, promising celibacy and obedience. Now, as centuries ago, he answers to the bishop of his diocese, celebrates the Mass, performs the sacraments and, if he has been appointed a pastor, oversees and maintains the solvency of his parish. (A religious-order priest like a Franciscan or Jesuit makes an additional promise of poverty, and commits his life to his religious community and its particular mission.) In exchange for these sacrifices, a diocesan priest typically receives from his diocese a room, board, a place to retire when he is too old or sick to serve any longer and around $10,000 a year. It is perhaps not surprising that in contemporary America, with its focus on individualism and personal achievement, not to speak of wealth, the number of men seeking out this sort of existence has plummeted. In 1998, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, there were 47,582 active priests in America -- about 10,000 fewer than in 1975. The average age of a diocesan priest is now 58, and nearly a quarter of all priests are older than 70, the average age of retirement. Perhaps no institution in America faces a more severe personnel crisis than the Catholic Church. And it is likely to get worse. The total number of graduate seminarians in America last year was the lowest on record: 2,622, a drop of almost 70 percent from the 8,159 in 1967-8. This decline comes at a time when the number of Catholics in America, where they represent by far the largest religious denomination, has ballooned from 48.7 million in 1975 to 61.6 million today, largely as a result of Latin American and Asian immigration and population growth. The drop in vocations has been under way since the 1970's, when seminaries emptied precipitously, in part because of a disillusionment with celibacy. Meanwhile, families of Italian, Irish and Central European descent -- the old Catholic ghetto that, earlier in this century, was a major source of American priests -- have shrunk in size and risen to the middle class, broadening opportunities for their sons. More recently, the pedophilia scandals of the late 80's and early 90's have been a public relations catastrophe for the church. But those within the church say that the increasingly secular nature of American life has taken the biggest toll on vocations. ''This is the world of advanced science and physics -- what are priests doing in this world?'' asks the Rev. Lorenzo Albacete, a theology professor at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers. ''Those that come into the seminary today are taking a radical stand. They are countercultural.'' ''Countercultural'' is not a word one would readily pin to the amiable, clean-cut young men who are enjoying a rare night out at the diner for ice cream and cheesecake. And yet in America today, a man whose personal heroes are martyr-saints, who invokes God often in conversation, who worries intensely about the poor and believes that contraception and masturbation are always morally wrong is, to put it mildly, outside the mainstream. He stands apart. ''Sometimes it's hard to talk about Jesus Christ,'' says Damien Cook, 25, a friendly, Falstaffian-looking deacon from Omaha. ''I remember in high school, you feel odd bringing Him up. You're told by the culture that Christianity oppresses people.'' Like all counterculturalists, seminarians and priests can provoke suspicion, even hostility, from a society whose values they seem, by their very presence, to challenge. Seminarians say they're frequently approached by strangers who disagree with the church's position on women's ordination or, more often, celibacy. ''They go: 'Father, you can't get married, right? Well, I don't agree with that,' ''Brian Bashista, who is 34 and from Arlington, Va., recounts. ''You try to explain, but some of them don't want to hear it. Maybe I took offense the first couple of times, but it happens so much that I say, Lord, you must be doing something. Maybe this is an opportunity to try to help teach.'' Seminarians often confront the suggestion that a high proportion of them are homosexual. Magat, who worked as a health-care consultant before entering the seminary, learned that some colleagues were wondering if he was gay after he divulged his intention to be a priest. ''At first I felt emasculated,'' he says. ''I had a nave view of what people thought about priests; in my home environment and my family, priests are upheld as pillars of the community.'' In fact, there is a concern among some within the church that the proportion of gay men entering the priesthood has risen sharply. Magat and Bashista claim that they are not aware of gay men at Mount Saint Mary's, but say that it shouldn't matter if some seminarians have ''homosexual inclinations,'' since anyone seeking to become a Catholic priest, straight or gay, is striving to live a celibate life. The conversation drifts to another, darker presumption about the sexuality of priests. Magat recalls an encounter he had recently in a supermarket. ''I was standing in line in my clerics,'' he says. ''The woman in front of me was checking out her groceries, and her young son in the shopping cart, probably 2 or 3, he was kind of looking at me, interested. I waved and said, 'Hi, how's it going?' and she pulled him out of the cart and away from me. I was just mortified.'' Despite the high profile of the scandals involving the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, there is no evidence that the incidence of sexual misconduct is greater among priests than among clergy of other denominations or the population at large. But this is of little comfort to Catholic clergy or parishioners -- nor is it likely to alter the widely held perception that men who choose to live celibate lives have psychological problems they wish to conceal. This perception is not lost on the seminarians. Magat was dating a woman before he entered the seminary, but he avoided telling her that he was considering a vocation until the last possible moment. ''I was afraid,'' he says. ''If I decided not to go to the seminary and I'd told her in advance, then I'm out of the vocation and I'm out of her. Because I knew she would have dropped me like a hat.'' For a long time, Bashista says, he was critical of the fact that priests cannot marry, and celibacy was a big impediment for many years as he struggled with the idea of becoming a priest. ''I really felt that I was called to be a father and a husband,'' he says. ''I thought that was why I was placed on earth. There was a girl I dated in college -- we'd even had talks about getting married.'' Bashista's initial aversion to celibacy is widespread among men of his generation, according to Dean Hoge, a professor of sociology at Catholic University. In a 1985 study of college men, Hoge concluded that making celibacy optional, as it is for Eastern Orthodox and Protestant clergy (celibacy has been required of Catholic priests only since the Second Lateran Council in 1139), would increase the number of candidates fourfold. So far, though, the church hierarchy has shown no interest in such a reform, and with the exception of Bishop Raymond A. Lucker of New Ulm, Minn., who called in a pastoral letter last fall for a dialogue on celibacy, very few American bishops have spoken publicly on the issue. A former architect who practiced for seven years before entering the seminary, Bashista would have been an anomaly 30 years ago, when nearly three-quarters of entering seminarians were under 25. But today he is the norm; 86 percent of seminarians are older than 25 when they enter, and 16 percent are older than 40, meaning that -- with four years of theology in front of them, often preceded by a year or more of ''pretheology'' and sometimes interrupted by a mandatory year of ministry or reflection -- some will be 50 or older by the time they become priests. The student body at Mount Saint Mary's includes a doctor, a concert pianist and several military officers -- evidence of the rising number of ''second career'' priests who embarked upon secular lives after college, but then experienced spiritual epiphanies that upended those lives and remade them. Tom Fesen, 30, a deacon from Trenton, took a job after college at Chemical Bank in New York, where he commuted each day from his home in New Jersey. ''There were two buses; one came too late and one came too early,'' he recalls. ''So I came early. The bus dropped me off across the street from a church, so I decided, I'll go into this church, get a little peace of mind. Mass would be about 20 minutes. So six months into this, the reader left, and the priest came up to me and said, 'Do you want to read during Mass?' I said: 'No, I don't want to. I'm just here a little early.' Immediately after that, he said, 'Well, do you want to be a priest?' ''I was so irritated,'' Fesen continues. ''Where does he come off? I'm going to be a banker; get married; 2.5 kids, house in the suburbs, dog. But after that I couldn't get the thought out of my mind.'' Fesen's story -- of having his vocation acknowledged by someone else before he knew it himself -- is one you hear repeatedly from seminarians, many of whom fell away from the church at some point in their lives. Michael Dobbins, 32, a husky, mirthful deacon from Arlington and therefore a ''D.B.,'' or diocesan brother, to Bashista, had the sort of childhood that might have resulted in a fairly direct journey to the priesthood in a prior era. ''I played Mass as a kid,'' he says. ''My sisters were the altar boys. My dad had this old copper chalice for his beer on football Sundays, so I used that. And Wonder Bread, something white, you'd press it down flat and use a glass to cut a circle out. I wasn't very clear on the vestments, so I used a big bedspread.'' In college, though, Dobbins stopped going to a Catholic church and began attending a Baptist church instead, where he became involved with a Baptist woman. At one point in college, he was briefly engaged. ''In my last year,'' he recounts, ''I was reading my Bible, and I got to John 6. At the end it says, 'And some of his disciples no longer followed him.' I'd read that a thousand times before, but something in that passage hit me like a big brick. And I was like, holy cow -- that's me. I cried like a baby.'' For some, the conversion experience rescued them from paths that Holloway refers to, in his own case, as ''serious darkness and sin.'' A onetime actor and a singer in an alternative-rock band, Holloway had dropped out of college and was living with fellow musicians when his parents persuaded him to attend a weekend conference devoted to the Virgin Mary. At the end, the keynote speaker invited all of those who believed they might have vocations to approach the stage. Holloway remembers: ''I had an interior experience almost as if Our Lady was standing behind me with her hands on my shoulders, leaning down to say, 'If you will put your vocation in my hands, I will take care of all the things you consider obstacles.' My heart was pounding. And I found myself climbing over this balcony and going down there.'' One afternoon last November, I went with Bashista to Arlington, and we visited the two-story suburban house where he grew up and where his parents still live, from which his father, an electrical engineer, commutes to his job at the Naval Research Lab in Washington. Modest and immaculate, with lots of carpeting and an abundance of pink and mauve in the decor, the Bashistas' home veritably thrummed with the quiet, vehement faith of his mother, Aileen, who looks like Bashista only fairer, with pale blue eyes and gold-rimmed glasses. Hefty painted statuettes of Christ and the Virgin Mary stood before a window in the kitchen, and in the living room, near a graduation photo of Bashista smiling over a giant bow tie, there was a small table covered with lace, where holy water, candles and a relic -- a bone of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint -- were on display. ''I always prayed that the Lord would take my sons to be His holy priests,'' Aileen Bashista told me. ''You know it's nothing you deserve. It's God's gift.'' Bashista's younger brother, Christopher, a drummer until a car injury left him unable to play, now a senior at George Mason University who lives at home, had a different reaction: relief. ''Mom got her priest,'' he said. Aileen Bashista makes weekly visits to Seton High School, where Bashista's younger sister, Mary-Beth, is a senior, to teach rosary making. She is also a lay member of an order of Carmelite nuns. She prays that Mary-Beth will become a nun too, though she admitted that the possibility seemed remote for her lively, sociable daughter, who is chairman of her prom committee. ''He seldom knocks us off a horse like he did Paul,'' Aileen reflected. ''If we're always listening to rock music or doing homework and busy with worldly things, you seldom get to hear our Lord.'' ''Enough,'' said Mary-Beth. Brian Bashista's upbringing was not intensely religious, and he and his older brother, John, now married and a father, attended public schools. ''My mom and dad were not always so strong in their faith,'' Bashista explained. ''John and I were never altar boys.'' When he was in junior high school, his mother plunged more deeply into Catholicism and pressed her son Brian to do the same. ''In her fervor, it wasn't necessarily an invitation,'' he said. ''It was: 'You need to do this. It will help you.' John and I were teen-agers, and we both resisted. 'Say the family rosary, Mom, are you kidding? I'm going out with friends.' ''These memories may partly explain Bashista's scrupulous effort never to sound overbearing or judgmental. ''Propose, not impose,'' is a phrase he often repeats. ''Lead them to the truth, don't slam them with it. That's not the way Jesus did it.'' Bashista is more judgmental when describing his own life before he entered the seminary. ''Our Lord gave me everything I ever wanted,'' he recalled. ''I worked for the firm I wanted to work for, I had a lot of friends. But I was my first priority, and if being nice to people helped me, then I did it. I was engrossed in the office gossip: Oh, we shouldn't be saying this, but loving every minute of it. I'd go buy clothes. You don't want to wear the same pants or shirt in one week. . . . Are you kidding? I'd get extremely frustrated over the stupidest things, getting ink on a new white $70 shirt and going ballistic.'' Underneath, he said, ''there was a real spiritual poverty. I felt a sense of loneliness and emptiness.'' Bashista's disquiet culminated one night five years after he'd graduated from college: ''I was in my apartment, and I was so confused and unhappy. I just felt broken. I was in tears.'' That night, he said, he turned to God: ''I said: Lord, I have no other roads to exhaust. I'm going to make a sincere effort to live as You've called me to live.'' After that night, thoughts of the priesthood began once again to visit Bashista, and finally he made a furtive visit to a chancery office in Charlotte, N.C., where he lived at the time. ''I thought, I'll just get a book on priesthood, find out what it's all about,'' he recalled. ''So the receptionist said, 'Well, let's go up to the library.' Then a priest walked by, and the receptionist goes, 'Wait a minute, that's the vocation director!' I just got a chill. I said, 'Father, I have this friend, . . . ' and I bombarded him with an hour and a half of questions. At the end he goes, 'You have an awfully inquisitive friend.' '' Still, Bashista resisted: ''My response was not yes; it was, I'll consider it. I call it my one-sided argument with Our Lord; it was about four months long. I said, 'I don't have to be a priest to be holy.' Finally the response came: 'You're right, but this is what I call you to.' And then that was it, I knew I'd lost. Not lost, but won. I'd won the life. Immediately I said, 'Yes.' I was just flooded with peace.'' The process known as discernment, by which a seminarian determines whether the call to the priesthood is real and lasting, continues until the day of his diaconate ordination, when he makes the promises of celibacy and obedience. On the wall of Dobbins's room is a photograph of his and Bashista's diaconate class four years ago; Dobbins has pasted smiley-face stickers over the heads of the 10 -- out of 42 -- who have left. Some are not actually gone; they're taking pastoral or spiritual years required by their dioceses, or have joined religious orders; others are now married and fathers, including one of Bashista's former roommates. Bashista's views on celibacy have changed. Now he regards it as a crucial aspect of his priesthood, which will not be a job so much as a way of life -- a marriage to the church. (Some priests actually wear wedding rings after their ordinations.) ''Some days I'll think: What if I was back in the architecture firm? Would I be a partner now? Married? Have kids?'' he said. ''But the match has been made. One reason I had thoughts of marriage with this one girl was that connection, that longing to be with this person. And then that feeling was not sustained. It was strong, it was present, but it wasn't deep. And this is deep. I really feel like I'm in love. I'm engaged, and I'm getting ready to get married.'' On a bright, crisp afternoon last fall, I joined all 159 Mount Saint Mary's seminarians outside McSweeney Hall, the seminary's main building, an eccentric, gabled edifice made of slabs of thickly grouted granite, perched midway up a hill among a patchwork of farms and woods. We boarded buses and rode an hour and a half to the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, where the seminarians had been invited to view an exhibit of religious artwork from the Vatican Museums. Mount Saint Mary's is the second-largest seminary in the country, after Mundelein Seminary in Illinois, and is also among the most conservative -- scrupulously adherent to the magisterium, or teaching authority, of the Pope. A man seeking to become a diocesan priest must first be accepted to a diocese, whose bishop usually underwrites his education and chooses the seminary where it will take place; bishops appointed under Pope John Paul II tend to be morally conservative, upholding the Pope's stringent views on such controversial topics as contraception and the ordination of women. But conservative at Mount St. Mary's does not mean sour or grim. A mood of buoyant optimism surges among the men -- a sense, accurate or not, that the bad times are over for the priesthood, and something new and momentous is in the making. ''There was a period of confusion and uncertainty after the Second Vatican Council, even going into the 80's,'' the Rev. Kevin Rhoades, the cheerful rector of Mount Saint Mary's, told me. ''But now we've had 20 years of a very strong pontificate. I think we're at a new era, and these men represent it.'' Among liberal Catholics, including liberal priests -- many of whom regard John Paul II as authoritarian and reactionary -- there is the perception that new seminarians like those at Mount St. Mary's are rigid and narrow-minded, merely parroting the Pope's views without learning to think for themselves. Certainly there is a passionate devotion to the Pope among the men of Mount St. Mary's. They often quote him -- in particular the phrase, ''Be not afraid.'' Bashista put it this way: ''We're the John Paul II generation. That's a great sign of hope.'' But at the gallery, the seminarians scrutinized Medieval and Renaissance paintings with a feverish -- and sometimes wistful -- attention to the past, a past that still pertains directly to their lives. Raphael Hall, 42, one of five seminarians at Mount St. Mary's from the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word in Birmingham, Ala., moved about the gallery in a brown Franciscan habit, the beads of a long wooden rosary clicking softly from his cord belt as he searched for works by Fra Angelico, a 15th-century Franciscan painter who would have dressed almost identically. There were chalices and vestments on display -- the very items that Bashista and the other deacons were in the process of choosing before their ordinations. (It is customary for family members or friends to pay for a seminarian's gold or silver chalice, the cup in which wine and water are believed to be transformed into Christ's blood, and whose essential role in a priest's life is likened to a doctor's stethoscope.) ''This was the cover of a tax book,'' one seminarian remarked to me, as he looked at a painted ''Annunciation'' by Giovanni di Paolo. Then he added, ''That's how much religion was a part of life.'' In mainstream America it is no longer so; indeed, for a young man pursuing a life of celibate devotion to Christ, the world outside the seminary is a minefield of temptations and distractions. Tom Holloway, the former alt-rocker, said once, ''Every morning when we get out of bed, there's a war going on, and we're right in the middle of it.'' The world threatens in a multitude of ways; even something as simple as grocery shopping can pose hazards. ''Lots of magazine covers don't reach Christian modesty,'' Magat said. ''I have to pretty much stare straight ahead -- there are half-naked women all over the place!'' The world threatened, too, during the White House sex scandal, when seminarians had to grapple with whether to read the sexually explicit Starr report. Many did not; some who did went to confession afterward. All whom I spoke to said they prayed for the President, though politically they deplore his support for abortion rights. (In general, their opposition to abortion drives them to the right politically, but not without misgivings -- the Republicans, in their view, do not show enough concern for the poor.) To protect themselves from visual affronts, seminarians employ what they call ''custody of the eyes.'' Bashista explained this concept: ''You just look down. You don't have to make a big deal of it. It's playing with fire. Sometimes these images will bombard your memory.'' If he begins to feel aroused, Bashista said, ''you have to channel that energy in productive ways. Doing something for someone else. If you're looking at ladies, getting some thoughts or ideas, just refocus.'' And yet, many of these men were reared on popular culture and find it difficult to give up. ''On a lot of TV shows, you know married couples are contracepting,'' Magat said. ''And any time Jerry hooked up with some girl in 'Seinfeld,' we knew they were sleeping together. . . . Should I find these things funny? This is the stuff I'm going to be preaching against!'' Magat stopped watching ''Seinfeld,'' but kept track of what was happening on the show to the very end from nonseminary friends. For a long time, Michael Dobbins was a devoted fan of James Taylor. ''I went to several of his concerts and I had his T-shirts, his CD's -- I was taking guitar lessons so I could learn to play his songs,'' he said. ''Then I began to realize that a lot of his lyrics are like, peace, love and butterflies are free -- whatever goes. But whatever goes really isn't the truth, you know? And finally one day I'm listening to this James Taylor concert on the radio, and he says, 'This is a hymn to the goddess Gaya.' I don't know who the goddess Gaya is, but that's not my God. I was just like, That's it. Click -- stopped the radio. Went over to the closet, pulled out my concert shirts and threw them in the trash can. Pulled out my James Taylor CD's -- dunk. See ya, James.'' Magat summed it up this way: ''You have to detach from these things, or you become numb to them. We're trying to live as a sign of contradiction in the world.'' But living as a sign of contradiction is not the same as retreating from the world altogether, and the seminarians struggle to achieve what they regard as the ideal balance: being in the world but not of it, a phrase they often repeat. They see themselves as witnesses -- testifying through their very presence and clerical attire to the Catholic Church and all that it holds true. Bashista provided an example: in the gym at Mount Saint Mary's, college students sometimes play music whose lyrics he finds objectionable. ''It's an opportunity,'' he said. ''It's a time to evangelize. You don't go up and rip the tape out, but you say: 'Can you share with me some of those words? I'm not sure I'm hearing them right.' A lot of times they don't even know what the words are. It's got to be proposing, not imposing, which is the tougher way. It's our Lord's way.'' Witnessing is crucial, say the seminarians, because the world is starving for the message they represent. And here lies the crux of their sense of mission, and the optimism that fuels it: the so-called freedoms of our secular and relativistic culture have not paid off, they insist; on the contrary, they have created a dangerous and uninhibited world where families are ravaged by divorce, abortion, addiction and violence. ''Someone who chooses something they know is destructive, that's not freedom -- that's slavery,'' said Bashista. ''Freedom is knowing your choices and then choosing the truth.'' There is another reason to resist being of this world -- not just for seminarians but also for all fervid Catholics. ''This world is not the end,'' Bashista reminded me. ''That communion we're seeking will happen in the next life.'' Heaven is the subject of rich fantasy among the seminarians; they imagine it as a place unfettered by limitations of time or space, where they will meet and love the many anonymous strangers they pass each day in restaurants and highways. Jim Crisman, a seminarian from Denver who taught for a time in Slovakia, recalled one day: ''I'd go to a 4:00 Mass every day in Slovakia, and I'd see the old women coming in. I couldn't communicate with them. And I was thinking, I don't know anything about them, but I will someday. This isn't the last time that I'll see them.'' A week after the museum trip, I joined the seminarians for Mass, which is at 7:00 each morning in Immaculate Conception Chapel, whose putty-colored walls are trimmed with gold and turquoise, and which smelled that morning of incense and after-shave. Many seminarians had been praying in the chapel since 6:15; prayer forms the core of the seminary experience, and the men talk about their prayer lives the way most people talk about their love lives. At times their prayer is strong, full and deep (some seminarians call this feeling the ''warm fuzzies''); at others it is dry and without feeling, reverberating an emptiness through their lives. After morning Mass and breakfast, the seminarians attend classes, which include moral theology, philosophy, scripture and church history. During their fourth year, they practice celebrating the Mass and hearing confession, often from recent graduates, who return to campus and play the penitents, inventing sins for seminarians to hear. The Rev. Mark Moretti, one such volunteer who is now an associate pastor in Alexandria, Va., explained the purpose of such role playing: ''Are you able to judge what you're hearing? Are you able to give a suitable penance? If you have a little old lady coming in to confess her sins and you hammer her with a novena'' -- a penance lasting nine days -- you're too extreme.'' Bashista and the other deacons' first class this day was Marriage and Family, where seminarians were learning to prepare betrothed couples for marriage. After the class recited the Our Father, the teacher, Sister Paula Jean Miller, got down to business: the topic of the day was ''the theology of sexuality.'' Drawing on Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, Miller explained that ''total self-donation,'' or ''self-gift,'' is the goal for human relationships -- and also a way of explaining why married people should not use contraception. ''Sexual intercourse is a cause of grace within the sacrament of marriage,'' Miller said. ''Just as the Father gives himself totally to the Son and the Son gives himself back totally to the father, that's the standard of love for us. Contraception is a holding back of some very critical aspect of ourselves, of who I am. It's saying to you, I want you but I don't want your fertility, at least not right now. And the goal is total self-gift.'' (Actually, a majority of Catholic theologians disagree with this position.) Only in the last 30 years has the concept of self-gift come to coexist with procreation in the Catholic Church as the criterion for the moral rightness of a sexual act, according to Richard McCormick, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. Self-gift, the seminarians are taught, can be used to explain what is wrong with masturbation (it involves no giving to another), lust (it involves taking rather than giving, thus reducing one's partner to the status of an object) and homosexuality (the ''other'' is not other, and thus self-gift is not really possible). That an intricate discussion of sex and morality was being conducted by 40 men and one woman who have taken vows of celibacy is a stark reminder of a major difficulty facing the Catholic Church in America: how can a celibate clergy persuade sexually active lay people to allow the church to regulate their sex lives? For while American Catholics tend to believe and accept the church's teaching on most doctrinal issues, according to Gallup polls, more than 80 percent of them, in defiance of doctrine, approve of artificial contraception, two-thirds say that premarital sex is morally acceptable (among Catholics under 35, the figure is as high as 9 out of 10), nearly half say that homosexual activity can be morally acceptable and roughly half say that abortion (excluding late-term ''partial birth'' abortions) should be legal in many or all cases. In addition, most American Catholics would support a married clergy, and most approve of the notion of female priests. Diocesan priests, as liaisons between the church hierarchy and the laity, are caught in a morality gap between the two -- asked to promote unpopular views that in many cases they themselves do not share. According to a 1994 Los Angeles Times survey, nearly half of American priests believe that birth control is seldom or never wrong; even more say the same of masturbation. As a result, few Catholics hear preaching on touchy sexual issues on any given Sunday. This is about to change, say the seminarians at Mount Saint Mary's -- they have every intention of preaching on these topics, and some deacons already have done so in the parishes they were assigned to last summer. ''If people had the great opportunity we have to learn and to pray and to study,'' Bashista said, ''maybe they would come to a consensus with what the church is teaching and think of the beauty of it rather than the Thou Shalt Not. And that is our obligation: to preach and to teach the truth in charity and in love, and to be patient.'' After asking permission from his pastor, Cook preached against contraception in the parish he was assigned in Omaha, Neb., last summer. ''I was nervous,'' he recalled. ''If I hadn't really prayed on it and done it in a way that I think was not overbearing. . . . I said: 'What is the nature of marriage? To give of oneself.' I didn't use the word 'contraception' until the end. People came up to me afterward and said: 'No one ever preaches on that. Thank you.' '' Holloway gave me a tape of a lecture he delivered to teen-age boys, in which he told them: ''Let me be perfectly clear. Sometimes people just won't say this: masturbation is always a seriously disordered act. . . . In itself, it is always wrong.'' He urged the boys to confess their sins, and afterward, I was told, they did, lining up in scores outside the confessionals. And if they hadn't? ''If you preach on these topics, you're going to endure a wrath,'' Bashista said. ''But if you are indeed teaching the truth -- what the church is saying, that has transcended time -- Christ says, you're going to endure ridicule. Because He did.'' On a sunny Saturday, I rode with Bashista from Mount Saint Mary's to Blessed Sacrament, the parish in Arlington where he served last summer and now spends two weekends each month. We drove in the low-slung gold Honda Civic that he purchased during his architecture days, and I asked Bashista what has become of that old egotistical, materialistic version of himself. ''It's there, but it's been transformed,'' he said. ''St. Paul said, I'm a new creation. The old self is dead. And in a sense that's true.'' Now, Bashista said, the energy he once spent serving his own interests is directed toward other people who need his help, both in prayer and in deed; like most seminarians, he keeps lists of people who have asked him to pray for them, or else he prays for them in the moment of promising to do so. According to the Pope's theology of the body, the passionate intensity of sexual love is also the model for celibate love -- the total self-donation of a priest to his people. The needs of the sick and the poor are a particular focus; there is perhaps no setting in America -- neither the halls of government nor the campuses of elite colleges anymore -- where you hear the poor evoked more often, and more sympathetically, than in a Catholic seminary. At Blessed Sacrament, Bashista checked in with the pastor and made some last-minute adjustments to his homily, which he would deliver at Mass that evening. (In contemporary Catholicism, the sabbath begins on Saturday night.) Then he stopped at the chapel to ''pick up our Lord'' -- that is, the consecrated Hosts, which he carries to Inova Alexandria Hospital in a gold-plated cylinder called a pyx. At the hospital reception desk, Bashista was given a printed list of Catholic patients to whom he would offer Communion. First we headed for intensive care; he had been told there was a parishioner from Blessed Sacrament there. As usual, Bashista wore his clerics and Roman collar; when people he passed in the hospital halls met his eye, he smiled and said hello, and when they avoided his gaze, he let it pass. The woman in intensive care, who appeared to be in her 50's, was attached to a respirator. It hiked up her chest every few seconds and injected air into her lungs with a gasping noise. Her skin was deeply jaundiced everywhere but her hands, which were bright purple. Bashista stood close to the woman and leaned over her. When he spoke her name, her eyelids parted and she looked up at him. Bashista introduced himself and asked how she was feeling, but she couldn't speak; the respirator attachment filled her mouth. He leaned close and took one of her plum-colored hands in his. ''You've got a good strong grip,'' he said. A priest had told Bashista that the woman felt close to a guardian angel, whom she had named. ''Father told me about Emily,'' Bashista said now. ''She's a sweet little angel. She's with you, too. You're not suffering alone, O.K.? We're suffering with you.'' The woman watched him desperately over her bucking chest. She could not take Communion because of the respirator, so Bashista offered her a spiritual communion instead. He placed the heel of his palm against her forehead and spread his fingers to encompass the front of her skull. As he prayed aloud, she closed her eyes. Watching this, I remembered something Bashista told me once: ''If the church is your bride, intimacy is what you have caring for the sick. You're giving of yourself, and it's being received. There is nothing more gratifying.'' When the prayer was done, the woman relaxed into her pillow, as if some tension inside her had been set free. After some minutes, Bashista gently extricated his hand from hers. ''I'll be back in two weeks,'' he told her. ''You'll probably be home by then. I'll come find you.'' Afterward, he told me: ''If this life were all there was, I couldn't do that. Suffering and pain are senseless if there's not an afterlife. This woman might see Jesus face to face tonight, and don't get me wrong'' -- he chuckled -- life is wonderful, it's a gift from God. But we're pilgrims here. This is not our home.'' Later, the bright, modern church in Arlington was packed for 5:00 Mass, which features 11 white-gloved parishioners, known as dingers, ringing hand bells, and seven singing children. A sprawling, populous complex that serves 3,600 families and runs an elementary school, Blessed Sacrament has a pastor, three associate priests and Bashista, reflecting a bounty of vocations in and around Arlington that is out of keeping with the general trend. Bashista assumed at first that he would join a diocese in greater need of priests, he said, ''but in that process, some doors open, other doors close. The match seemed to be in Arlington.'' Bashista may spend as many as 15 years as an associate pastor, whereas in priest-starved dioceses like Denver, where Crisman will be ordained, a new priest might be placed in charge of a parish as soon as two years after ordination -- thrown into a vast organizational and fiscal job (parishes are financially independent, though they may borrow money from their dioceses) that can put a great deal of pressure on an inexperienced priest. After the Mass, parishioners gathered around Bashista and the other priests outside the church. Several complimented Bashista on his homily. One woman had a little boy with her who was afraid to make his first confession; would Bashista talk with him? A young drummer with an Army band thought he might have a vocation; Bashista promised to send him some information. A number of people asked him to pray for them, and he always assented -- and asked them to pray for him, too. (Later, he recorded the names of new parishioners he had met in a small book to help him remember them.) When they'd all gone, Bashista unvested, returning the white alb and patterned green dalmatic to their hangers in the vestry. Clearly, the Mass and the meeting with parishioners afterward elated him. ''I'm in the honeymoon phase,'' he said. ''But what you're seeing is the future -- I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe that.'' Others in the church anticipate more conflict. The Rev. Richard McBrien, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, told me that the shortage of American priests would deepen the division between clergy and laity. ''What happens now is that people shop,'' he said. ''They go where they can get the best Mass, the best music, the best sermons. But when the day comes that there aren't enough good priests left, I think the people are absolutely going to demand from the government of the church that they have married priests.'' Progressive Catholic organizations hope that the successor to John Paul II will be less authoritarian and more collegial -- the true spirit of Vatican II, they believe. There is talk of the resentment many bishops are said to feel toward John Paul II, who has centralized authority at their expense. (''He treats bishops like altar boys'' is a phrase I heard more than once from liberal priests and nuns.) Will the man chosen to be the next Pope be willing to give bishops greater autonomy -- thus opening the door for discussion of other changes, like relaxing the moral doctrine and even reconsidering celibacy and the role of women? Whatever happens, the Catholic laity may well continue do as it thinks best in the moral sphere. ''American Catholics have matured,'' says William D'Antonio, a research professor at Catholic University. ''Vatican II has succeeded. The real documents of Vatican II are freedom of conscience and the responsibility of individuals not to blithely follow the leader.'' According to the University of Maryland Survey Research Center, more than two-thirds of Catholics say that when their conscience is at odds with the Pope, they should follow their conscience. For the seminarians at Mount Saint Mary's, there is little question about what will ultimately happen. ''We already know the end of the story,'' Bashista says. ''God will triumph. The church will triumph. That doesn't mean that the present trials aren't there. Think of fourth-century Aryanism, when two-thirds of the church, including bishops, didn't believe that Jesus was God! But the threats will never succeed. The essentials will never change. How do we know that? Because Christ said so.'' Still, they admit, the sheer magnitude of what they're up against in their wish to transform a largely indifferent world can be crushing at times. ''I always think of 'Cliffhanger,' ''says Magat, referring to the Sylvester Stallone thriller. ''They have to climb up the cliff with no ropes, going backward. That is our life. There's a lot of skepticism out there, a lot of cynicism. The easiest thing is to say, Forget it, this is not my responsibility. Let someone else do it. And I think that's what a lot of guys are saying when they don't answer the call to the priesthood.'' Bashista keeps a folder titled ''Thanks Be to God,'' in which he places any cards or letters he receives describing the impact he has had on people's lives. When he mentioned the folder to the others at the diner that winter night, each admitted that he, too, was amassing a similar file. ''There may come a day when I say, Was this all worth it?'' Holloway explained, as dessert was cleared away. ''What am I doing here? Has this made any difference to anybody? And if I ever come to that, I'm going to open the folder on that day. And if I get to the end of my life without ever having opened it, that'd be awesome.'' Correction: April 25, 1999, Sunday The article on April 4 about young Catholic priests and seminarians misidentified the religious order of Fra Angelico, the 15th-century painter and friar. He was a Dominican, not a Franciscan. The article also misspelled the name of the fourth-century doctrine that taught that Jesus was not God but merely a higher being. It is Arianism, not Aryanism. Copyright (2001) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

Power Suffering

teameight — Sun, 16 May 1999 18:02:11 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine At sunset one evening in 1353, the 6-year-old Catherine Benincasa is said to have experienced the first of the mystical visions that would power her brief, extraordinary life. While returning to her home in Siena with her brother Stefano after a visit to their married sister across the valley, she gazed over the church of St. Dominic and saw Jesus drenched in light, flanked by SS. Peter, Paul and John. Jesus smiled at Catherine and blessed her. Stefano, finding his sister standing in the road gaping at the sky, shook her from her trance. The vision evaporated, and Catherine burst into tears. She returned that evening to what must have been a teeming household; Catherine was the second youngest of 25 children, though some of them, like her own twin sister, had died in infancy. While Catherine, later to become St. Catherine of Siena, kept her vision of Christ a secret, her piety sharpened after that encounter; in imitation of the public flagellants who had been roaming Europe since the outbreak of bubonic plague some years before, Catherine and several playmates took to flagellating themselves in secret. An appetite for self-mortification would prove one of the saint's most enduring traits, and would lead to her death, at 33, of starvation. In this respect, Catherine's behavior foreshadowed that of a great many women today for whom power and suffering -- often self-inflicted -- are curiously intertwined. Modern-day anorexics, bulimics and self-injurers experience an illusion of control through disciplining or mutilating their bodies, echoing the pious self-punishments of Catherine's time. The lives of Catherine and other saints like her can help to explain why these impulses persist among women -- from athletes and models to Diana, Princess of Wales -- when both the world and the position of women in it have been radically transformed. Catherine's childhood vision of Jesus and the penitence it inspired were common in the lives of mystic saints: individuals whose piety took the form of frequent, direct and personal visions of Christ and other holy figures. Though mystics have existed since the earliest days of Christianity, they gained prominence during the chaotic later Middle Ages, a time of plague, civil strife and economic transition that historians have compared to our present era. A great many of these visionaries were female -- St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Bridget of Sweden, to name just a few -- and their visions and prophecies afforded them a degree of visibility and influence that was virtually unheard of in women of their time. Fourteenth-century girls were married off as early as 12 or 13, shortly after they reached puberty, in part to insure their virginity. But Catherine Benincasa had other plans -- she had promised her chastity to Christ at the age of 7. The death of her favorite older sister, in childbirth, sealed her resolve not to marry, and she chopped off her long gold hair to repel potential suitors. Her parents, distraught at having to forfeit the wealth a new son-in-law might have brought to the family, retaliated by forcing Catherine to work as the family servant. But when no amount of punishment could break her will, her father relented, allowing her to pursue her spiritual endeavors. At about 17, Catherine became a tertiary, or lay member, of a Dominican order in Siena whose adherents she had watched and admired as a child. These were chaste widows who ministered to the sick and the urban poor (a growing presence as Europe's agricultural economy yielded to commerce and city life); as a young virgin, Catherine made an incongruous addition. She continued to live at home, spending most of her time praying alone in a tiny cell beneath a flight of stairs, where she was plagued by demonic visions and temptations. To combat these, she amplified her acts of penance, not speaking for three years except at confession, eating nothing but bread, water and raw vegetables, sleeping on a wooden board and flagellating herself three times daily until she drew blood. Her mother, aghast, took Catherine with her for a bathing cure; she scalded herself in the sulfuric water. ''At that time, the more you were like Jesus in his sufferings, the holier you were and the better,'' says Sister Suzanne Noffke, who is translating and editing Catherine's letters. ''She very much wanted martyrdom.'' Catherine's desire for martyrdom drew on popular tales of the martyr-saints, some of whom died spectacularly at the hands of the Romans during the first three centuries of Christianity, while others were killed later by invading Huns, Vikings and Saracens. Yet martyrdom was only one route to sainthood for women, who account for fewer than 20 percent of all saints; many early female saints were foundresses and patrons of churches and also converters, both in the first centuries A.D. (St. Helena, Emperor Constantine I's mother, is believed to have converted him) and during the sixth to eighth centuries, when missionaries worked to spread Christianity among the Frankish and Germanic tribes of Northern Europe. Queens and noblewomen, whose job it was to receive these missionaries, often were first to convert, and then converted their husbands -- which, in early societies, meant the simultaneous conversion of that ruler's subjects. Catherine found succor in her solitary torments on Shrove Tuesday 1367, when she was about 20. It was the last night of Carnival in Siena, and revelers filled the streets. As Catherine prayed alone in her cell, the Virgin Mary and Jesus appeared to her along with King David, John the Evangelist and SS. Paul and Dominic. While King David played a harp, Jesus placed a ring of betrothal upon Catherine's finger. It is said that the ring remained visible to her throughout her life, though no one else could see it. After this spiritual union -- a recurrent element in the lives of female mystics -- Catherine's retreat from the world came to an abrupt end: God instructed her to venture forth and help her fellow creatures. She rejoined her family at dinnertime (though she seldom ate) and reluctantly began to talk about her visions. She accompanied the other women in her order, known as mantellate, on their visits to the hospital, where she was said to have effected miracle cures. By the time she was in her early 20's, she had amassed a group of disciples who called her Mamma. Male and female, religious and lay (one of her closest friends was a young nobleman she had extricated from a blood feud), these devotees watched over Catherine during her ecstasies, when she went rigid for hours at a time, and also served as her secretaries and scribes. (Though she had learned to read, like most laypeople she probably could not write.) She began an enormous correspondence, often dictating letters to several scribes at once, imparting her wishes and advice to neighbors, family members, kings, religious leaders and the Pope himself. At the time, Siena was plagued by bloody internecine disputes, and Catherine became known for her ability to mediate these successfully, as well as to touch and convert sinners and prisoners. She rekindled the faith of one man, Niccolo di Toldo, on the eve of his own beheading, then accompanied him to his execution and caught his severed head in her hands. She began visiting other Tuscan cities, often to dissuade them from rebelling against the papacy, something they were increasingly tempted to do as their own populations and commercial power grew. There she would preach in public squares, urging the conversion of sinners, and several priests were required to hear the thousands of confessions her words provoked. For a 14th-century woman, such a public life was extraordinary to the point of being freakish. By then, even aristocratic women had lost much of the power they wielded in the early Middle Ages. The population had grown, land was more scarce and heredity laws were rewritten in favor of primogeniture so that family estates could be kept intact. Women could rarely inherit. ''The good woman was invisible,'' says Elizabeth Petroff, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts. ''She wasn't supposed to leave the house. She wasn't even supposed to be seen standing at the window of the house.'' Outside the convent, women received little or no education, and with the rise of the all-male university in the 13th century, education within the convents began to suffer. Medieval theology portrayed women as the more fleshly of the sexes, corrupt and dangerous to men; accounts of many male saints' lives abound with lewd female temptresses. It was no surprise, then, that pious women of Catherine's era turned to mysticism; contemplation was virtually forced upon them by the lack of other opportunities. But that their visions and prophecies were taken seriously by men points to a paradox in the medieval view of women: their very lowliness, it was thought, made them more likely conduits for celestial intelligence. Barbara Newman, professor of English and religion at Northwestern University, says: ''Women's bodies were seen as being more permeable than men's, more open to diverse influences. Just as women are more easily tempted by the Devil, the same thing is true with the Holy Spirit.'' For this reason, Newman says, it was impossible for male clerics to dismiss out of hand the holy visions of a woman. ''Women embodied that voice from the underground,'' she says, ''of Christ standing in judgment over the power structure.'' In the medieval mind, there was a connection between weakness, self-abnegation and holiness -- a connection that originated in Christ's shame and suffering on earth. Female mystics believed this, too; St. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century visionary and Benedictine nun who penned strenuous works of theology, medicine and natural history as well as hymns and other liturgical music, wrote of herself, ''I am a poor earthen vessel and say these things not of myself, but from the serene Light.'' Catherine's correspondence is sprinkled with professions of her own unworthiness. ''Poor wretched woman that I am, my sins are so much more numerous than ever,'' she wrote in one letter, and in another, to an apostolic nuncio for Pope Gregory XI, ''I received your letter, my dear father, and it was a great consolation and joy to think you would remember someone so poor and lowly.'' Yet these disclaimers hardly offset the emphatic, even imperious tone of the letters themselves, in which Catherine used her status as an empty vessel for God's word to chide, exhort, cajole and even threaten with damnation people she believed were failing to embody their full Christian potential. ''If women had a reputation for genuine holiness, that was a ticket to influence,'' Sister Noffke says, and Catherine did not hesitate to use it. In a letter to a governor of Milan who violently opposed the papacy, she likened him to a gangrenous limb on a body of the church. To King Charles V of France, whose involvement in the Hundred Years War Catherine felt was sapping resources from the more worthy project of initiating another crusade, she wrote: ''Enough of this stupid blindness! I am telling you in the name of Christ crucified to wait no longer to make this peace. Make peace! Make peace!'' At times she even mocked her own zeal. ''I don't want to say any more,'' she wrote to her old friend Frate Bartolomeo Dominici, ''because I wouldn't stop until I died -- or bored you to death!'' Catherine's most ardent wish for the church was that the papacy would return to Rome from Avignon, where it had relocated in 1309 to escape civil unrest. To this end, she wrote hortatory letters to Pope Gregory XI, with whom she felt a great familiarity, addressing him often as Babbo, or ''Dearest Daddy,'' and urging him to act. ''Up, father! No more irresponsibility!'' she wrote in one letter, and in another: ''You ought to be using the power and strength that is yours. If you don't intend to use it, it would be better and more to God's honor and the good of your soul to resign.'' In this and nearly all of her letters, she concludes by apologizing for her forwardness. ''Forgive me! Forgive me! My great love for your salvation, and my great pain when I see it threatened, makes me speak.. . .Don't make it necessary for me to complain about you to Christ crucified. (There is no one else I can complain to, since there is no one greater [than you]on earth).'' Mingled with this odd swirl of diffidence and cheekiness, of grandiosity and self-effacement, was the tendency among female mystics to take physical self-punishment to brutal extremes. Catherine overcame her revulsion at a cancer patient's fetid sore by drinking a cup of the pus it discharged, and she was famous for her drastic fasting -- she often inserted sticks into her throat to make herself vomit after eating. Bridget of Sweden poured hot wax on her flesh. St. Clare of Assisi slept on the floor in wintertime and fasted three days each week during Lent. ''The men had work to do, so they didn't have time for a lot of penance and suffering,'' Noffke says. ''Women were not to be seen, not to be heard, but they could suffer.'' Priests tended to glorify suffering in women, and encouraged it in their confessions. Yet extreme self-mortification could also make a woman the object of suspicion, for around the corner from inspired female holiness always lurked the possibility of heresy or witchcraft -- the danger that Satan, not God, was employing the woman as his vessel. ''I'm not surprised at your fear, father, especially about my eating habits,'' Catherine wrote to a priest in Florence. ''I am always fearful because of my own weakness and the devil's cleverness.'' The historian Caroline Walker Bynum has noted that witch and saint were in a sense mirror images of each other: both were impelled by an outside power, whether good or evil; both could read people's minds and perform supernatural feats; both were lifted off the ground -- witches by flying, saints through levitation. Suspicions about Catherine's orthodoxy prompted the leaders of the Dominican order to summon her to Florence in spring 1374, when her reputation first began to grow. Though she satisfied her examiners, the Dominicans assigned her a new confessor, Raymond of Capua, whom they charged with keeping a sharp eye on her. As it turned out, Raymond became Catherine's most loyal defender, and wrote her vita, or biography, which made a strong case for her sainthood. (She was canonized in 1461 and declared a Doctor of the Church -- one of three women to bear that title -- in 1970.) Indeed, most female mystics who became saints had the allegiance of one or more powerful men who shielded them from the world's suspicion. ''If you didn't have somebody in the church hierarchy who could speak for you, you were really lost,'' Elizabeth Petroff says. One casualty was Marguerite Porete, author of ''A Mirror of Simple Souls,'' who was accused of heresy and burned in 1310. According to Barbara Newman, the problem for Margaret may have been one of style as much as doctrine: ''She did not say, 'I have had a vision' or 'I have had a prophetic call.' She just wrote the book the way a male author would have written it, and she didn't get away with it.'' Female strength, untempered by humility, self-abnegation or the imprimatur of a male authority, was an intolerable threat. In 1376, Catherine intensified her campaign to move the papacy from Avignon to Rome by visiting Avignon herself, where she met repeatedly with Gregory XI and continued to write him as well, urging his departure. In September of that year, he finally set off for Rome by ship, his reluctant court in tow. But the Pope's return to Rome failed to have the salubrious impact Catherine had hoped for; disheartened in a foreign land, Gregory XI died in 1378, and his Neapolitan successor, Urban VI, managed to alienate the French cardinals and royalty almost instantly. The cardinals retaliated by appointing a second pope, or antipope, from Geneva, whom they installed in Avignon as Clement VII. Thus began the Great Western Schism, in which two, and even three, popes sought to preside over Western Christendom until 1417. At Urban VI's request, Catherine journeyed to Rome and worked furiously to rally support behind him, believing that his legitimate election was inviolable, whatever his personal faults. She was brokenhearted over the failure of her mission, and her years of austerities had ravaged her physically, leaving her in constant pain. Unable to eat or even drink water, she deteriorated rapidly. ''Here is my body which I acknowledge as coming from Thee and I now offer it to Thee; may it be an anvil for Thy beatings, to atone for their sins,'' she prayed. She died in 1380. In his book ''Holy Anorexia,'' Rudolph M. Bell argues compellingly that Catherine of Siena, along with many other Italian female mystics, fits the classic profile of an anorexic. In a 14th-century context, anorexia actually makes a kind of sense; self-deprivation was widely agreed to be holy, and holiness was one of the few modes of self-expression available to women -- virtually their only route to power. The surprise, then, is not that anorexics existed in St. Catherine's time, but that in our present secular, affluent culture, where women have access to a degree of education, independence and self-expression that would have staggered a 14th-century woman, self-denial and suffering continue to hold out the same kind of promise. Today, anorexia nervosa afflicts about 1 of every 100 female adolescents in America, a majority of whom may never recover fully, and between 10 and 20 percent of whom will eventually die from the disease. About two million people, mostly women, cut and burn themselves compulsively in pursuit of an illusory sense of control, and many millions suffer from bulimia. In high-pressure athletic disciplines like ballet, gymnastics, figure skating, diving and long-distance running, the incidence of eating disorders among women is much higher; Rudolph Bell cites a study showing that nearly 1 in 6 aspiring ballerinas was anorexic. Clearly, a substantial number of women still derive a sense of power from disciplining their bodies, despite the fact that their deprivations and self-inflicted wounds ultimately weaken them and sometimes cost them their lives. Most remarkably, sufferers of anorexia and self-injury tend to be white, Western and middle to upper class -- precisely the women who, more than any before them in history, would seem able to control a great deal more than their physical selves. Even as our culture decries these disorders, in subtle ways it endorses the equation of suffering with female power; what was heroin chic if not a study of the stark beauty of feminine duress, a beauty that seemed to pulse forth with even greater intensity from the scrawny, bruised-looking models with raccoon eyes and hair tangled to perfection. And how else can we interpret the popular rehabilitation of Hillary Clinton, now that her outright power -- offensive to many Americans -- has been tempered by her dignified and mostly silent endurance of the most public marital humiliation ever. Now, for the first time since her arrival at the White House six years ago, the First Lady is widely hailed not only as a model for women, but -- most dizzyingly -- also as a future senatorial and even Presidential candidate. It is as if, through suffering, a certain unseemliness associated with her authority has been erased. Pain has worked for Hillary Clinton, involuntary though it may have been -- a lesson that doubtless will be absorbed by younger women who look up to her. Perhaps the best example of a woman whose visible pain inspired passionate devotion was Diana, Princess of Wales, who can legitimately be called a popular saint. In the Princess, as in the late-medieval mystics, personal charisma and a desire to help others was tinctured with suffering, including some of the same self-inflicted torments -- anorexia, bulimia, self-mutilation -- that the mystic saints underwent. But Catherine of Siena punished herself in imitation of Christ, and the power she experienced came from feeling a greater proximity to God. Lacking any such divine affiliation, the suffering our culture elicits from its women seems doubly tragic -- pointless in itself and, in most cases, a distraction from the real sources of power they might otherwise be able to tap. Toward the end of her life, Catherine of Siena tried to reverse her extreme fasting, but by then her body could no longer tolerate food. Though she urged other women not to follow her example, her suffering was glorified after her death, and scores of young Italian girls starved themselves in her image. In this, as in all matters, Catherine employed her most trusted weapon: epistolary advice. ''And where is the hope that you used to have in the kingdom of God?'' she wrote to a Dominican nun who had grown ill from too many austerities. ''It is gone with the attachment to penance, by which means it hoped to have life eternal.. . .Don't wish for the lesser good of penance to hinder the greater good.'' Fewer women nowadays may long for a union with Christ, as Catherine did, but her advice still resonates: pain, as an end in itself, may well distract us from our greater good. Copyright (2000) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

Walking Toward Mindfulness

teameight — Sun, 07 May 2000 18:08:29 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine Peter Williams sits cross-legged on an upholstered chair near mine, eyes closed, hands resting near his socks. A thick, starchy silence pools around us. Williams takes several slow breaths and then begins, narrating aloud the contents of his mind: ''. . . hearing . . . enjoying . . . buzzing in my feet . . . fear: will my feet be O.K.? . . . hearing . . . breathing . . . wondering: will my parents read this article? . . . enjoying . . . afraid . . . what do you think of me? . . . fear . . . it's O.K. . . . compassion . . . butterflies in belly . . . fear . . . kindness . . . compassion . . . hearing . . . bird, house finch . . . naming . . . thinking . . . joy. . . .'' It's a blustery day in March, and Williams and I are in a meeting room at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, 45 minutes north of San Francisco, in Marin County. He's actually meditating, having offered, quite graciously, to do this in my presence. ''Mindfulness,'' a quality aspired to by practitioners of what is called insight meditation (known as Vipassana in the Buddhist tradition), isn't that easy to explain. This much I get: It's not about emptying the mind, which is what I'd always assumed. In a sense, insight meditation is the opposite; it involves noting the ebb and flow of one's feelings and thoughts and allowing oneself to ''sit with,'' or fully experience, whatever comes up -- even discomfort and pain. Outside the plate-glass windows, a group of people move with glacial, dreamy languor around a courtyard, some holding almost still, others consuming many minutes to traverse a tiny distance, a few creeping up the lower flanks of the fat, iridescent green hills that surround us. They're performing what is known as a walking meditation. Williams would be out there, too, if he hadn't chosen instead to speak with me about the two-month silent retreat he and 69 others were about to complete. The members of the group have coexisted in close proximity -- many as roommates -- without exchanging a word or even a look; direct eye contact is discouraged as an invasion of privacy. As discordant as such a notion may seem at a time when communication is possible between people virtually anywhere, silent-meditation retreats have grown enormously popular in recent years; waiting lists and even raffles are common at centers around the country to handle the demand. Williams looks younger than his 40 years, and slightly rakish. A part-time professor of biology at the University of Vermont and a self-employed biology consultant, he has arranged his life in order to accommodate his first priority: spiritual awakening. This is his third long silent retreat in as many years. After a couple of minutes, he stops meditating and explains what he wanted me to notice: that the contents of the mind shift radically and constantly in the course of just a few minutes. He experienced joy, compassion and fear (something he hadn't been aware of) almost back to back. Mindfulness means allowing these shifts to occur while remaining present -- that is, without latching on to any one feeling (Oh, no, I'm afraid! Why am I afraid? It's bad, I have to find a way to stop being afraid . . .) or using it as fodder for a familiar narrative about oneself (I'm always afraid, it's a weakness in me; even when I was a kid, I was afraid all the time . . .). Being ''in the story'' is a meditation term for getting caught in a repeating narrative about oneself that feels deeply true but in fact is just habit -- the result of psychological conditioning. Of course, avoiding such thinking can be extremely difficult even while meditating -- we're narrative creatures, and the mind's play often leads quite naturally into storytelling, as Williams illustrates: ''There was this twang in the meditation hall, almost like a bass,'' he says, alluding to the majestic octagonal room where he and his fellow yogis, as they're known, spend the better portion of each day. ''And instantaneously I heard the bass in a John Coltrane tune called 'Africa.' And I go into this kind of bliss, and I go, 'Ah, infant bliss.' And then I thought, Infant, oh my God: my friends Jim and Mary Claire have a little infant named Luca. I'm remembering the time that Luca was in a car seat in the house, and I got this craving for a chocolate chip cookie. I put him a little bit hastily on a laundry bin full of clothes and the thing toppled. And he fell on the floor, he's 6 months old, and he hit his head, and he's bawling. I felt so bad. And then I thought, That happened because I was greedy, because I wanted a cookie. And so all of a sudden I'm feeling my childhood pain, my unworthiness. I start reviewing my tape loops: the times I've rushed through a door and didn't hold it for somebody. I'm sitting there in that unworthiness and feeling bad for quite a while.'' In analyzing how he swerved into this state of self-criticism, Williams says: ''It's an example of the way in which we suffer. Where did that unworthiness come from? It came because there was a twang in the meditation hall, one condition in the mind creating another. I was identifying with it, holding on to it. But if you just sit with emotions, they disappear. Nothing lasts. And when they leave, there's just spacious sky. Awareness.'' The power of insight meditation, proponents say, lies in its ability to make people aware of, and ultimately free from, the obsessive and restrictive thought patterns that can compromise their relationships and work and lives. Of course, personal transformation, that quieter variant of the American dream, has been the goal of numerous practices and programs -- from Gestalt therapy to Eastern religious practices, from encounter groups to EST -- that have been grouped together by some as the Human Potential movement, an explosion of interest in consciousness and spirituality dating from the early 1960's. Nowadays, the Human Potential movement is wiser and more subdued: there is a general wariness of gurus and abusive teaching practices, a skepticism toward overnight enlightenment and an emphasis on incorporating personal growth and spiritual practice into an integrated life. Williams spent years in therapy, but found that psychology alone was not transformative enough. ''Therapy helped me,'' he says, ''but it wasn't until I went on a three-month silent retreat that I really got a lot of what my therapist had been telling me for years. I could start to see, My God, I'm just sitting here editing and judging myself day after day after day. You get confronted with it, and it's so painful because there's no escape from it. And the only solution is kindness. Acceptance. Acceptance is not a passive thing. The more you accept, the more you energize your whole being.'' An enormous nexus exists between therapy and insight meditation; all five teachers on the Spirit Rock retreat are therapists, and they have a tendency to discuss meditation using therapeutic language. One teacher, Tara Brach, says: ''More than any other kind of suffering people bring in to me is the suffering of feeling deficient, unworthy in some way. Psychotherapy works on that somewhat -- you're bringing out the nature of the wound and how to address it. But what Buddhism brings to the mix is a way of cultivating compassion for what's going on. You're actually learning to reparent yourself.'' Williams, who became serious about meditation five years ago, credits the practice with enormous changes in his life: ''I now say to myself: 'What's my deepest aspiration? What is my heart's desire?' And then I try to make decisions based in that.'' He veered off the Ph.D. track and now devotes more time to meditation, as well as to working with foster children. ''You go through so much on retreat,'' he says. ''It softens you, it tenderizes you, makes you a lot more vulnerable. It's also made me a lot more forgiving toward my family.'' Williams delights in pointing out the little ways in which a silent retreat can teach him about suffering. ''One thing that has been driving me crazy is people coughing,'' he says. ''When you become concentrated, you really polish the sense store, your awareness is really heightened. This person who sits near me coughs really loudly, and I literally feel it in the marrow of my bones. And there's nothing you can do, except just note the pain of the situation.'' Another time, a woman vomited beside him in the meditation hall, then resumed her meditation. ''But life is chaotic, you can't control it,'' he says, laughing. ''May everything in experience lead to awareness. O.K., I have this disgust, and I have this disbelief, and then it's gone. New experience. That's the absolute crux of the practice, learning to be at ease with pleasure and pain. Think about that: if you don't care if the next moment is comfortable or uncomfortable, you're free.'' Copyright (2000) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

Lonely Gay Teen Seeking Same

teameight — Sun, 10 Dec 2000 18:11:10 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) In the summer of 1999, when he was 15, a youth I will refer to by only his first name, Jeffrey, finally admitted to himself that he was gay. This discovery had been coming on for some time; he had noticed that he felt no attraction to girls and that he became aroused when showering with other boys after physical education class. But Jeffrey is a devout Southern Baptist, attending church several times each week, where, he says, the pastor seems to make a point of condemning homosexuality. Jeffrey knew of no homosexuals in his high school or in his small town in the heart of the South. (He asked that I withhold not only his last name but also any other aspects of his life that might reveal his identity.) He prayed that his errant feelings were a phase. But as the truth gradually settled over him, he told me last summer during a phone conversation punctuated by nervous visits to his bedroom door to make sure no family member was listening in, he became suicidal. "I'm a Christian - I'm like, how could God possibly do this to me?" he said. "My mother's always saying, 'It'll be so wonderful when you meet that beautiful Christian girl and have lots of grandchildren,' and every time she said that, I was like, That's it: my life is going to be hell." He called a crisis line for gay teenagers, where a counselor suggested he attend a gay support group in a city an hour and a half away. But being 15, he was too young to drive and afraid to enlist his parents' help in what would surely seem a bizarre and suspicious errand. It was around this time that Jeffrey first typed the words "gay" and "teen" into a search engine on the computer he'd gotten several months before and was staggered to find himself aswirl in a teeming online gay world, replete with resource centers, articles, advice columns, personals, chat rooms, message boards, porn sites and -- most crucially -- thousands of closeted and anxious kids like himself. That discovery changed his life. "The Internet is the thing that has kept me sane," he told me. "I live constantly in fear. I can't be my true self. My mom complains: 'I can see you becoming more detached from us. You're always spending time on the computer.' But the Internet is my refuge." Jeffrey and I met when he responded to an online message I posted, seeking gay teenagers willing to discuss their online lives. When we were first getting to know each other, he made it clear that he could allow no overlap between his online gay life and the life he led in the "real world." He explained, "In our town, everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody's business." He feared that if word of his sexual orientation were to reach his parents, they might refuse to support him or pay for college. From his peers at school he dreaded violence, and with good reason: according to a 1996 study of the Seattle public schools, one in six gay teenagers is beaten so badly during adolescence that he requires medical attention. Jeffrey's computer is in his bedroom, garrisoned inside a thicket of codes and passwords. While he uses the Internet to communicate with high-school friends -- Jeffrey is now 16 and a junior in high school -- and to pursue his avid fandom of the group 'N Sync, he has separate screen names and "instant messaging" services for these activities. (An instant message, or I.M., allows two or more people to engage in a real-time dialogue onscreen.) This way, no one from his "straight life" can track his forays into the online gay world using the "locate" feature on America Online, for example, which allows subscribers to find online "buddies" in whatever public chat room or other AOL area they happen to be visiting -- a potential disaster for gay teenagers. A brainy, ebullient kid, Jeffrey is an excellent student, active in high-school government, with a number of close friends. He took a girl as his date to homecoming earlier this fall. But his free time belongs largely to the disembodied gay life he pursues online -- from 8:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. during the school year, and for even longer stretches in summertime. Jeffrey was hesitant to explore the online gay world at first, he said, certain he would somehow get caught. "I thought, Somebody's gonna get in my computer and find out," he said. "The paranoia was that bad." So he did the obvious thing -- the thing many Web pundits advise as a matter of safety when communicating with strangers online: he employed an alias, changed the town he came from and then threw in a few other "improvements" on his real identity. He said he came from a rich family, drove a BMW, had killer good looks and was 18 -- old enough to cruise the adult gay chat rooms. But as his online friendships deepened, the phony elements of Jeffrey's story began to oppress him: "I was like,I can't be myself in real life, and I come on the Internet and I still can't be myself. Yeah, I'm gay, but it's a lie." In June of this year, he mustered his nerve and began telling his online friends that he was not quite the person they had believed. "One of my really good gay friends has nothing to do with me now," he told me sadly one month after "coming out" online as his real self. "He has totally changed his e-mail, his screen name, everything. He was very protective of who he let close to him. He let me in, but he let in this false identity. When he found out, he blocked me." (To "block" someone is to preclude their being able to see whether you are online or send you instant messages or e-mail.) By last summer, Jeffrey also had an online boyfriend, whom I will call C., the first initial of his first name. A fellow Southerner a year older than Jeffrey whom Jeffrey called his "true love," though the two had never met, C. forgave him his online fabrications but pointed out that they complicated things. "After I told C.," Jeffrey explained," he said, 'I still love you, but I don't know you.' " For homosexual teenagers with computer access, the Internet has, quite simply, revolutionized the experience of growing up gay. Isolation and shame persist among gay teenagers, of course, but now, along with the inhospitable families and towns in which many find themselves marooned, there exists a parallel online community -- real people like them in cyberspace with whom they can chat, exchange messages and even engage in (online) sex. The popularity of "cybering," as online sex is called -- masturbating in real time to sexually explicit typed messages -- has lately been supplemented (among boys, especially) with a mania for Web cams and microphones, which allow them to see and hear each other masturbate, using programs like Microsoft's NetMeeting. But this is only as important for gay boys as it no doubt is for the countless straight youths who flock to Internet sex sites. What was most critical to the gay kids I spoke with was the simple, revelatory discovery that they were not alone. Indeed, gay teenagers surfing the Net can find Web sites packed with information about homosexuality and about local gay support groups and counseling services, along with coming-out testimonials from young people around the world. Gay pornography, too, can be a valuable resource; a number of youths I spoke with, male and female, said that the availability of online porn had proved critical to their discovery of their sexual orientation. Kyle, a 15-year-old youth from Florida I met online, wrote me in an e-mail message: "What I did was go into gay chat sites on AOL and ask where I could find free gay porno sites, my first gay porn I had ever seen. The pictures turned me on soooo much, and I loved it. It was just so clear to me, I am gay and I like men." I asked him how old he was when this happened. "I was about 11," he replied. Parents' attempts to restrict their children's access to hard-core Web sites are rarely a match for their kids' surpassing computer skills. (Several teenagers I spoke with said they had accessed gay pornography on computers at school.) Which means that a curious teenager not only has ready access to graphic material, but also can engage in sexual experimentation with peers that would be next to impossible in everyday life. As one 13-year-old put it in an e-mail message, "I could say that the Internet made my life a living hell. ... It made me realize I'm different. I hated it ... but then I realized the Net helped me realize I'm gay. ... I'd rather find out now than when I'm 30 and married to my wife with two kids or something." Recent studies suggest that kids are identifying themselves as gay at much younger ages; among males the average age has dropped from 19-21 to 14-16, and in females from their early 20's to 15-16. Caitlin Ryan, a clinical social worker and the author of "Lesbian and Gay Youth: Care and Counseling," says, "Today, youths are coming out right in the middle of high school or earlier, and I think the Internet is playing an important role in that because it's providing information to help them label those feelings and figure out who they really are." One might reasonably ask whether such heightened early awareness of sexual orientation is always a good thing. And for all the educational resources the cyberworld can offer gay youth -- articles and studies and hot-line numbers and so on -- the gay-sex cyberworld, like the much larger straight-sex one, is not an especially wholesome environment in which to tease apart one's sexuality. Type the words "gay" and "teen" into virtually any search engine, and you'll find yourself circling among interlocking porn sites, some featuring "twinks," or boys of allegedly legal age who appear to be younger (and in some cases obviously are), and other sites hawking lesbian scenes that clearly cater to heterosexual men. And of course, there is the simple fact that cyberspace is an incorporeal world, a world without flesh-and-blood people, and thus a peculiar realm in which to become one's "true self," as Jeffrey put it. "The Internet is an inferior substitute for real-live human beings," says Kevin Jennings, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization working to end antigay bias in schools. "But it's frankly better than nothing, which is what gay youth have had before." Late last summer, Jeffrey returned from a family vacation and wrote to me in an e-mail message: "We had such a great time, yet I missed my Internet so much. I had "withdrawal' symptoms, you might even say ... LOL." (The abbreviation "LOL" is cyberspeak for ha-ha-ha, i.e., "laughing out loud.") "I did contact my boyfriend, and using eVoice we were able to set up a time where I could call him or vice versa." (EVoice is an online voice messaging system.) Online boyfriends and girlfriends were common among the gay teenagers I spoke with. In some cases, the relationships had a sexual component, but what startled me was the level of closeness and intimacy teenagers derived from these cyberrelationships. Jeffrey explained how he and C. sustained that intimacy without ever meeting. "We were in search of things we could do and share that were very personal and very intimate," he said. "We'd come up with little nicknames and little jokes between ourselves." They planned to attend the same college, he said, and had even discussed marriage and the adoption of children. Like Jeffrey, many of the boys I talked to described themselves as "addicted" to the Internet. Girls, who responded in smaller numbers to my postings, seemed more aware of the Internet's limitations. They were also more likely to have at least one off-line confidante -- a parent, a friend, even several friends -- who knew about their sexual orientation and accepted it. In the case of Jane, a 13-year-old African-American girl I met online, her mother knows, but with one exception her friends don't, and she's quite lonely in her eighth-grade class. "The only word I can think of to describe it is small," she wrote in an e-mail message last summer. "People seem to be pretty narrow-minded. ... It's hard finding a niche anywhere. Even so I mostly hang around with the popular crowd. ... I'm not trendy. I mean I don't wear sweater sets. LOL." Online, Jane, who says she has known she was gay since the fifth grade, has been able to find a number of lesbian girls her own own age. "I have at least five people on my buddy list that are 13," she said. "The longest going thing I have is with my girlfriend. We've known each other online for 9 or 10 months." Like Jeffrey and C., Jane and her girlfriend, who lives four hours away, had not met. "In ways it's the same as a face-to-face relationship," Jane explained in one e-mail message, adding, "The only difference being that we don't see each other." When I asked Jane whether having an online girlfriend -- whom I will call S. -- would keep her from pursuing a relationship with someone she met in person, she wrote, "I would probably be at a crossroad because S. means so much to me. Ya never know tho." A week later, Jane mentioned in an instant message that she and S. had broken up. Q: You've broken up? Jane: Yes. LOL. ... We fought a lot and I guess we both just lost interest. Q: That's funny. I never had the impression you were fighting. How do you fight by e-mail? Jane: We fight through instant messaging, it's quicker that way. LOL. Q: Can you give an example of something you would fight about? Jane: We would fight about no trust in the relationship, not talking, etc. ... We never had anything to say to each other. Soon after, Jane mentioned in another instant message she sent that she and S. were still talking nearly every day. Q: Then it sounds the same as before. Jane: Before ... meaning? Q: Before you broke up. Jane: No, we really didn't talk then. We never had much to say to each other. Q: Do you think you might get back together? Jane: Oh, heavens no. ... It didn't work the first time. I don't know how it could a second. Q: But it seems as if part of the problem was that you weren't communicating, and now you ARE communicating. Jane: True, but neither I nor she is interested. Two months later, as school began, Jane wrote to me: "S. e-mailed me earlier today saying she didn't think she was gay and that it was probably just a phase. Where does the drama end?" The drama doesn't end, of course; these are teenagers. The remarkable thing is that via the Internet, gay teenagers are now able to partake of the normal Sturm und Drang of adolescent life, which before was largely off limits to them. "Now that we have youth who are coming out during adolescence, that means they can experience the normal developmental milestones in time as opposed to off-time," says Caitlin Ryan. "If you have to delay being an adolescent until later in life, I don't think it's a healthy thing." Jeffrey told me once, speaking of his relationship with C.: "I think it's almost like an accelerated relationship. You can't go out to the movies, so there's nothing to fill the space. You have to talk. It creates this intimacy between you; it draws you closer. Our relationship isn't based on looks or financial status or anything physical. There's no space fillers, because you can't just sit there for 15 minutes and not say anything." And while language itself seems to buckle against the vagaries of online experience -- phrases like "I met. ..." and "I talked to. ..." are too easily confused with RL (real life) -- there is something of the schoolyard and the mall in the hours of hanging out that many teenagers, gay and straight, do on their computers each night. To understand the texture of this online loitering, I got in the habit of asking gay teenagers what they had on their screens at a particular moment -- it was usually some combination of homework, e-mail, games, browser searches, chat rooms and, most of all, instant-messaging sessions -- often several at one time. The resulting dialogues tend to be fragmented and desultory, like a hybrid of a telegram and an overseas phone call. At 10 o'clock one evening in October, I was in an instant-message conversation with P., a 13-year-old Latino boy from the Midwest, and asked him what he had on his screen. "Umm," he typed, "a naked pic, couple I.M.'s and a private chat room." Which was nothing, he hastened to assure me, compared with the feats he'd performed soon after discovering the online gay world a year ago. "The first few weeks I went sex-crazy," he typed. "I cybered every night, with like five guys at once." P. is a palpably lonely kid who admits that in the real world, he speaks in such a soft voice that people often can't hear him and spends the better part of his weekends asleep. "About three-fourths of the people my age don't like me because I act gay and stuff," he wrote me in one instant message. "I have no male friends whatsoever." Two years ago, when he was in the sixth grade of the public school he still attends, P. fell in love with another boy who briefly reciprocated his feelings then moved away, leaving P. feeling suicidal. Soon after, he discovered the online gay world, which he explores clandestinely on his mother's computer, carefully deleting his "history," or the list of sites he has visited, along with the pornographic pictures he trades with other boys. Now an eighth grader, he is online several hours each day. Early on in our correspondence, P. told me by e-mail, "Well, right now this 40 y.o. guy says he loves me so much. ... He keeps pestering me to meet him, he just doesn't get the hint, but I don't like using the ignore button so I just put up with it. ... He said one day in the future he wanted to drive over here and take me to some hotel and spend the night together. I refused his offer. You can tell that I feel sorry for him." P. met this older man in a chat room -- he can't remember if it was a teen room or an adult one. It could have been either; teenage boys often visit adult chat rooms to meet older men (a number mentioned to me a wish to find an older gay man who would serve as a mentor or a role model), and older men notoriously troll the teen chat rooms, sometimes pretending to be teenagers themselves. Among the most popular chat rooms are those at Gay.com, a massive site offering hundreds of virtual "rooms" for gay men and lesbians around the world (there are 122 chat rooms on the "youth floor" alone), with regional rooms for every state in America. The youth rooms are supposed to be restricted to those 17 and under, but in fact anyone can enter a youth room - I've done it numerous times -- and unless older visitors blurt out something overtly abusive (which "bashers" sometimes do) or announce themselves as pedophiles, there is virtually no way to spot and block them. There is plenty of frank sexual talk, which at times -- evenings especially -- makes up the bulk of conversation in the male teenage chat rooms, and to a much lesser extent in the lesbian teenage rooms. Chat-room occupants wishing to cyber together will usually switch to a Pvt., or a private chat session. There, they generally trade basic A.S.L. (age/sex/location) information, and then one or both will masturbate while typing messages to each other. Not all gay teenagers are into cybering; a number of the boys I met online complained that the pervasive sex talk eclipsed more substantive conversation. A 15-year-old named David wrote to me in an e-mail message, "There are thousands of nice, intelligent gay kids who hang back and don't talk much, while the small minority of people who are sex-crazed maniacs are also the loudest." And even boys like P., who seem quite interested in cybering, tend to place it in a separate category from real-world relationships. P.: I just made another online boyfriend yesterday. He asked me if I wanted to have a relationship with him. Q: And what does "have a relationship" mean exactly? P.: Um, cyber with him, support him. Q: And what made you answer yes? Did you like him particularly? P.: I don't care for him, so I won't care if I get dumped. Q: But how can you have a relationship with someone you don't care about? P.: It doesn't matter to me. It's just online anyway. I don't view it as real. When I asked P. what he did view as real, he mentioned the boy he'd loved in sixth grade who moved away. P. has never seen that boy since, but they have communicated sporadically by phone and fax. "He's 99.9 percent of my life, everything else is that 1.1 percent," he typed. "Everything is microscopic compared to him. I think about him every day." The prospect of older men preying on teenagers is a very real issue in the online gay community -- though the problem is by no means limited to gays. Jeff Edelman, president of the Student Center, a Web community for college students and high-school students, straight and gay, says that he worries equally about the danger of older men preying on young girls in the heterosexual chat rooms. And in lesbian teenage chat rooms, there is are current suspicion that fellow "teenagers" might actually be straight men seeking out lesbian fantasies. Among gay teenage boys, the attitude toward older men (known as oldies or sugar daddies) ranges from amusement to weary frustration over the fact that, rather than serving as friends and guides, the men seem to care only for sex. One boy I spoke with told me about an older man who'd tracked him down in his hometown after a conversation on the Internet. The boy eventually filed a restraining order against the man and still worries that he will be stalked again. But most of the run-ins I heard of between teenage boys and older men were less aggressive than that and ranged in tone from consensual to creepy. Kyle, the 15-year-old from Florida, told me about an online relationship of several weeks he had with a fellow 15-year-old who later admitted he was actually 30 and married, with three children of his own. "He even had a picture of himself," Kyle marveled in an e-mail message. "Come to find out, that picture was his godson, really sick! He seemed to know everything about teen life, like he knew what clothes were popular, and how we talked, stupid abbreviations like Phat for cool. ... He seemed so real, I would have never guessed." Ultimately, the man confessed. "He told me he had been lying to me about a FEW things," Kyle wrote. "When I read that, my stomach about dropped to my knees. I flipped. Here I was trusting him with every word I typed, and he LIED about everything. It was a huge shock." Unlike most of the kids I met, Kyle is out to his parents and his peers. Online, he impressed me as a cheerful and well-adjusted kid -- in a picture he e-mailed me, I was struck by his broad grin and sharp, all-American looks. His mother, while accepting his sexuality, has been adamant that he not become involved with another boy, Kyle told me. "She was always fine with me seeing girls, but after I came out, she told me no boyfriends until I was 18," Kyle wrote. "I love my mom more than anyone in the world, but I will go behind her back." After recovering from the shock of the 30-year-old's posing as a teen, Kyle began an online relationship this past summer with a 16-year-old named Brad, whom he described to me as "the sweetest, nicest guy I had ever met online." He went on to write: "It's weird, we were talking the other day about what we thought was really hot. We both agreed that we thought sitting home and hanging out watching TV or playing board games was a really big turn on." Kyle and Brad moved from instant messaging to the telephone, and Brad, who lives 10 miles away, was pushing for a face-to-face meeting. Kyle was reluctant. "I can't figure out why I don't want to meet him," he wrote to me. "Maybe I am so afraid of him not liking me. It would be my first physical relationship." In fact, there are excellent reasons for Kyle's reluctance, and Web sites geared toward gay youth abound with precautions for those who insist on meeting face to face with people they know only through the Net: be sure to meet in a public place; take a friend along or make sure someone knows where you're going; never get in anyone's car. Nonetheless, a majority of gay teenagers I spoke with had met at least one person they had gotten to know over the Internet. (Among lesbian teenagers, real-world meetings seem to be less common.) Some had formed permanent relationships; others had hooked up with older men and had sex -- sometimes safe sex, other times not. A young man I corresponded with who advises gay teenagers through the Gay Student Center Web site recommends viewing multiple pictures of a person before actually meeting, and ideally, speaking to them via Web cam to make sure that picture and person match up. "This I learned the hard way," he wrote in an e-mail message. "I was about 17 and decided I wanted to meet this 'kid' that I met online. I went to the local coffee shop to see my 17-year-old 5-9 blue-eyed stud turn into a 49-year-old, 300-pound dud. ... He definitely passed himself off as a teen online, he was into the teen scene and was up-to-date. I walked out without speaking to him." Of course, there is no way to make sure that the picture you've been sent is of the person you've been talking to; pictures of cute teenagers are floating all over the Net, and even some teenagers themselves admit that they've co-opted pictures of total strangers and pretended to be those people for online sexual encounters. According to the Gay Student Center adviser I exchanged e-mail with, plenty of pictures are simply fake. "If the picture looks too good to be true, then it probably is," he said, "especially if they only have one picture and it's really high quality." He also urges teenagers to pay attention to typing and spelling skills; "oldies" (whom he defines as over 40) are usually better typists and spellers than teens. Adviser: If you don't mind me asking. ... How old are you? LOL.:). [:) and :o) are smiley faces; :( and :o( are sad faces.] Egan: 16 - can't you tell? Adviser: LOL :). Adviser: Nah, I would say about 26 (seriously). Egan: Actually, 38!! Almost an oldie. Adviser: WOW! I was off. See how the Net hides that? Egan: Yep. Adviser: Could have got me out on a date. ... LOL :). Adviser: Except I am gay! LOL :). Adviser: Of course for all I know you're a man! When Kyle finally met Brad at the beginning of October, after months of online conversation, he encountered the person he'd expected to encounter, sort of. He sent me an instant message that same day: Kyle: I met Brad today, it was cool. Q: Were you nervous? Kyle: Oh, yeah, very! I tried to be perfect in every way. I don't think I have ever spent so much time styling my hair, LOL. We arranged it at a restaurant near me. It was walking distance. Q: And did he look the way you expected? Kyle: Ummm, he was definitely a little different from his picture. He had a different haircut, skinnier than I expected, and his face looked a little different all together. Q: Did he seem more attractive or less so, at first? Kyle: At first, he seemed less attractive, but as time went on, he started to look more attractive to me. Q: And what did you talk about? Kyle: Just about everything. Clothes, back-to-school, friends, parents, the food, the restaurant, anything really. Q: What did you think of him, in the end? Kyle: Before I met him, I had a list of the pros and cons of him. Cons: He seems very stuck up, rich, and has an attitude, and can be rude sometimes. Pros: Nice, good-looking, good sense of humor and a good personality. But when meeting him today, I had one more con: he was a somewhat femmy gay. Q: Hmmm. So how does that change your feelings about him, if at all? Kyle: Ummm, I think of him now as more stuck up than I thought originally, and the way he dresses was COMPLETELY different than what I thought. Like he wore a DKNY shirt that was very gay-looking with the buttons starting way down, so you could see some chest. Q: Now what's this about him being rude and stuck up? In what ways? Kyle: Like he feels that if you shop at Old Navy, you are a lower class. And he isn't very nice to strangers. He was somewhat rude to the waiter. I don't recall him ever saying thank you. Q: Are you still interested in a relationship with him? Kyle: Ummm, I don't really know. My immediate reaction when I saw him was a HUGE flamer and somewhat rude, but I still was interested. As these hours go by, I seem to be less and less interested. A week later, Kyle wrote in an e-mail message: "Brad and I haven't called or talked since the meeting. When we are online, we don't chat either. I honestly don't know if we'll ever talk again." They didn't talk again. But shortly thereafter, the indefatigable Kyle placed a personal ad on PlanetOut, a gay and lesbian Web site, seeking male teenagers in his region of Florida for a relationship. "I am really hoping that by the end of sophomore year, I will at least have kissed a guy, LOL," he wrote. "I am just so tired of being lonely." Toward the middle of August, I e-mailed Jeffrey and didn't hear anything back. I wrote again; nothing. This is not especially unusual -- one liability of Web communication is that people sometimes disappear abruptly. A number of my teenage correspondents faded away without warning -- P., for example, the Latino boy in the Midwest, whose e-mail address suddenly ceased to work, leaving me to wonder, futilely, whether he'd changed it to avoid his 40-year-old admirer. Vanishing friends and intimates are frequent laments among gay teenagers; L. B., a 13-year-old from a Middle Atlantic state, had an online relationship with a 15-year-old boy who he says provided him with enormous guidance and support. L.B. had called the boy at home several times, and had even spoken with two of his siblings. Then, suddenly, the older boy's e-mail address stopped working. When L.B. called his house, the number had been disconnected. "I tried to look for him in directories and stuff," L.B. said. "Couldn't find him so I gave up." During an e-mail exchange with Fred, an 18-year-old student at a community college who is still closeted, I felt as if I were hearing the other half of the very same anecdote. "I've had several online relationships over the past few months, and I'm not proud to admit that I broke them off rather shoddily," Fred wrote. "It would go like this: I would set up an obscure e-mail name that I thought would have little connection to anything about me. I meet a guy online, we start to talk, and get to know each other better. Then I become afraid (I don't know what of and I don't know why) and simply stop talking to him. I don't even check the e-mail address I had set up for this guy. I would then stop all gay activity on the Internet for about 3-4 weeks, then I would get a new e-mail address, and I'd do it all over again." In an instant message, he added: "It's kinda depressing to open up an old account and read those e-mails. ...They're all like 'Where are you?' 'Why aren't you talking to me?' I feel really bad about it now, especially one guy who lived close to me, and wanted to meet me. ... I was afraid he was straight and was looking for some fag to beat up." A paradox emerges from these conversations: while the Internet provides a safe haven for countless gay teenagers who don't dare confide their sexual orientations to the people around them, it is also a very easy place to get burned. It's not just that people disappear -- it's that in the end, you're never really sure who they were in the first place. And they don't really know you. Nor should they, many people say - it's just too dangerous. "One of my main suggestions for anyone online is to come up with an alias, and use it at all times," said the adviser I spoke with. "We don't realize how much information we disclose without noticing it. A hypothetical example: 'My name is Danny, and I live in Southern Pa. outside of a large town, and play basketball. I attend PHS. Today after class I have practice, and then we are going to "Markus Theater" to watch a movie.' To show you how easy it is ... if I were a predator ... I would look up Markus Theater, find the location, then with a little thinking find out that PHS equals Pitts High School. Now all I have to do is find out the next basketball game, which player is Danny and that's that. ... ALL TOO SIMPLE." He has a point. By fostering intimate exchanges stripped of all context, Internet dialogue combines too much information with too little. The possibility of deception is implicit; Sherry Terkle, a clinical psychologist and sociology professor at M.I.T. who has written extensively about cyberrelationships, maintains that the very nature of Web interaction involves a kind of fragmentation of what we have traditionally called "identity' -- a breakdown of the unified self. "In the culture of simulation," she writes in "Life on the Screen," a book about identity and the Net, "if it works for you, it has all the reality it needs." And that simulation, according to many, is part of the fun. "I'm not very good-looking in the real world, so why can't I lie a little in the virtual world?" asked Fred. "In real life, I'm very shy and afraid to really say what I'm thinking, but online, I'm bold, and I'm also a bit more ... I guess the word is 'slutty.' " When I asked Fred how many different screen names he had, he wrote back, "two that I use mainly. ... I have some others for special occasions. One is when I want to irritate people with horribly racist comments. I have another name which tends to be reserved more for sex talk and such. I started with my ''secret' name, which nobody I know knows about. My secret name is for meeting people." This widespread juggling of names and identities, while often harmless -- even prudent -- can put an unsuspecting person hungry for companionship in a vulnerable position. Consider the following anecdote told to me by G., now a 19-year-old college student in Boston. When he was 16, having only recently admitted to himself that he was gay, G. struck up an online relationship with Scott, who identified himself as a gay teenager. "We talked more and more, and eventually we developed things into a pretty serious online relationship," G.wrote to me in an e-mail message. "We planned to be together. ... We had every intention of pursuing a sexual relationship later on." Scott introduced G. to his online circle, which included his brother, Mike, and several other friends: Kyle, Kevin, Troy. Then a crisis developed: Scott told his father that he was gay, and his father made him sever ties with G. "I lost all concentration at school," G. wrote. "I actually went so far as to drive to where I believed his hometown was, and I looked around there for several days straight. During that summer, I often skipped meals and felt too sick to eat. ... I was constantly panicked and stressed." Eventually, Scott got back in touch, but soon informed G. that he had to move to England for a year because his father had taken a job there. The relationship ended. After Scott left for England, G. received an e-mail message from someone named Mark, who identified himself as a friend of Scott's and had many things in common with him. "His attitudes and values were the same, the things he talked about were the same," G. explained. "Mark also would occasionally feed me an 'update' about what Scott and his brother were up to over in England.' But with time, the similarities between his new friend, Mark, and his ex, Scott, roused G.'s suspicions. "His typing patterns were the same," G said. "They even often made the same typo of accidentally putting two spaces in the middle of the sentence, as if the keyboard both used had a sticky space bar." Disturbed, G. began to investigate. "I found out that eight screen names were all on the same account, and registered to one man who lived halfway across the state from where Scott had said he lived. The entire theater of characters Scott had introduced me to were all, in fact, the same person. "At the time, this proved to be very traumatic. I thought I'd found what I always wanted -- someone who I related to and who cared about me," said G., who has now been happily involved for two years with someone he originally met on the Internet. "I had no support system in real life, and how could I even tell them this story anyway? It was just too weird and pathetic to ever share." It was the end of September before I finally heard back from Jeffrey. "I am terribly sorry that I have not e-mailed you," he wrote. "My relationship with C. has 'gone down the drain,' so to speak. ... I am suffering from clinical depression." Shortly thereafter, we spoke on the phone, and I asked what had gone wrong. "I'm at a loss," he said. The first signs of trouble emerged when he and C. would send instant messages to each other at night. "When we first talked, he was very quick to respond, and then it became long pauses ... 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes." Then C. stopped leaving Jeffrey regular eVoice messages during the day. "I'd leave my computer on and turn on his I.M. window, so I could see if he ever came on. ... I noticed that he'd come on during lunch and he wouldn't leave me a message, wouldn't leave me a voice mail." The breaking point came during a discussion of monogamy. "From the beginning, C. told me, 'You're the only one. I could wait my whole life to have sex with you,' " Jeffrey recalled. But more recently, C.'s views on that subject seemed to shift. "He said: 'The distance is really getting to me. What's wrong with a little meaningless sex once in a while?' I was completely crushed." Eventually, the two had it out. "He's like: 'You're really running this into the ground. We never met. It's not that hard to get over,' " Jeffrey recalled. "I was like, 'It's obviously a lot harder for me than it is for you.' He's like, 'I'm sorry, things change.' " Jeffrey is haunted by the possibility that what changed was the fact that he finally sent C. a picture of himself. They had held off a long time on exchanging pictures -- in part because Jeffrey was reluctant to set a picture of himself afloat on the Web, for fear of being recognized. But it wasn't just that. "I'd think he had this mental image of this really beautiful guy," he told me, "and that when he saw me he'd be disappointed." Eventually the two did exchange photos -- by mail -- and Jeffrey himself received a shock. "We'd talked for months. ... He always told me, I have black hair and brown eyes. When I got his picture, I was like: Oh, my God. He was black." C., too, seemed taken aback by what he saw. "He said, 'You look very intimidating,' " Jeffrey recalls. "He's like, 'It's gonna take me a long time to put the face with the voice.' " Still, Jeffrey's feelings for C. remained as strong as ever, and things appeared to go on as before, until C.'s communications began to dwindle. Jeffrey found himself casting about frantically to understand the intensity of his despair. "It's like, Oh, my God, I'm crying over someone I've never seen, I've never touched. It's kind of scary." The place where Jeffrey was most reminded of C., of course, was also his refuge: the Internet. "Whenever I get on, I check my buddy list: is he on? Is his brother on? Have my friends seen him?" As the months of e-mail and instant messages wore on, I felt a growing desire to meet face to face with one of the teenagers I'd been speaking with online. Perhaps it's a natural outcome of so much disembodied communication; I was beginning to understand why, despite the dangers, a lot of teenagers take their chances and try to convert the sterility of typing on-screen into the hapless vagaries of human contact. I proposed the idea of a visit to Jeffrey, and he immediately agreed. In early November, I flew to a large Southern city and drove for several hours along an Interstate littered with blown tires and road kill before reaching Jeffrey's hometown, indistinguishable from thousands in rural America: one-story houses lining shady streets; an anemic downtown; a tentacle of roadway crammed with chain motels and fast-food restaurants clutching at the Interstate. It was late afternoon, but as I drove to the restaurant where I'd arranged to meet Jeffrey, the sunlight felt withering. Jeffrey hovered just inside the glass door. I had imagined someone fragile and fair-skinned, but he looked nothing like that. He was nervous, and his anxiety was contagious. As we sat down at a table in the nearly empty restaurant, he explained that he had just run into a girl he knows from school. Had I walked in while he was talking to her, it would have been a catastrophe: in a town this small, no imaginable excuse could account for a high-school boy having a rendezvous with a strange woman from New York. Mercifully, no other acquaintances of Jeffrey's appeared, and eventually we slipped into the easy dialogue we had experienced on the phone and through e-mail. He was feeling somewhat better about C., he said, but admitted this was partly because of the fact that he had guessed C.'s password and had begun checking his e-mail. Shortly after that, Jeffrey noticed a new screen name among C.'s correspondence and opened it. Sure enough, it was from another boy. "It said, 'Hey there, let's hook up sometime and we can go out and do something,' " Jeffrey told me, as we picked at salads served in hollowed-out loaves of bread. "So I went into my computer and put this guy's screen name in there so I could see when he was online. I signed on with another screen name, went into Gay.com and, lo and behold, there was this guy in a chat room. It was just a wild guess. I I.M.'d him and said, 'Interesting screen name.' " Jeffrey had since cultivated a friendship with the unsuspecting boy, who eventually did mention that he had been communicating online with someone named C. In this way, Jeffrey had managed to monitor the relationship, occasionally deleting e-mail from the boy to C. that he didn't want C. to read. He was pleased that the relationship hadn't progressed very far and that C. and the new boy hadn't met in person. Jeffrey knew what he was doing was wrong, but he couldn't seem to help it. "You can't ride by his house and see if he's home," he said. "You can't see him at school and see who he's talking to, so you search. ... You go crazy if you can't find out what's happening. I feel guilty, but I have to do this. I'm gonna go crazy." Jeffrey and I left the restaurant and drove around his town in the thick, dusty light of sunset. It took all of 10 minutes. We passed his high school, where, he said, separate proms and homecomings are held for black and white kids. We joggled over train tracks into the shell of downtown. It was such a quiet place. "I feel like an alien here," Jeffrey said, and it wasn't hard to see why he lunged so heedlessly at something else, or why losing it had left him feeling empty-handed. "At one point I felt that close to C., that I would give up my life," he said. "I would die for him. That scares me, that depth of feeling for someone you've never met." Yet the very fact that Jeffrey has had this heartbreak -- so characteristic of "normal" adolescence -- is a remarkable change. When I spoke with Caitlin Ryan, she cited 1993 and 1996 studies that found the average age of awareness of same-sex attraction to be 10 years old. A subsequent study has found that heterosexual attraction, too, begins at this age. "This is happening in fourth grade, regardless of sexual orientation," Ryan said. "If you repress normative sexual and psychological and psychosocial development for 10 years, that is not a healthy thing. And that's historically what happened for many lesbians and gay men." She points to unsafe sex and substance abuse as frequent consequences of that repression. "Those are some of the downsides of not being able to have a normative adolescence, not being able to go to a prom, not being able to have a boyfriend, to learn all those things that are age-appropriate when you're an adolescent." When I spoke to Jeffrey at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, he had some news: he had managed to connect with a live human gay person, a 24-year-old man whom he drove to meet in a nearby city after first encountering him in an Internet chat room. They had dinner at a mall and shopped at the Gap and at Old Navy and at several music stores. At the end of the evening, they kissed, something Jeffrey had never done before. "I had to do a double take," he said. "Whoa, O.K. You're gay and so am I. I'm actually here, doing this." He expects the relationship to move slowly, and is still busy trying to meet other people. Recently he made plans to rendezvous with a fellow 16-year-old in another town. The boy planned to take Jeffrey to a coffeehouse popular with teenage gays, and Jeffrey was hugely excited. Over time, he hopes to cultivate a network of gay friends in his region. He still thinks of C., he said, but he has stopped hacking into his e-mail and is relieved to feel the obsession losing its hold. "There were times when I felt wonderful in the relationship with C.," he told me. But after the date -- his first -- he lay in bed that night and felt the difference. "It was so incredible, because it was like, I could go back and do it all over again today," he said. "And he's not just a screen name, it's not just typing and it's not just a picture. It's three-dimensional, you know? Reality. It was awesome." Copyright (2000) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

West Village June 2008

teameight — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 15:49:00 +0000

"Safari" = West Village/June 2008

When: In 1987, when I first came to New York in hopes of becoming writer (but in fact working many hours as a temp), I took a workshop with Phillip Schultz, who was then teaching out of his West Village living room. During the course of that class, I wrote a story called "Safari" that for some reason I never brought in -- it might have been too long. But I did end up reading it to Phil over dinner, or coffee, in a West Village restaurant, around 1988. The story was about a teenage girl whose family is part of a larger group on safari in Africa -- something I'd done with my own family in 1980, when I was seventeen. I don't remember much about that early "Safari," except that it was meandering and unfinished, and included a blank-faced actor whom the narrator speculates "assumed expressions only when paid to." Some years later I stumbled on an old draft and was struck by that phrase about the actor -- irked that I hadn't found some use for it since. Then, in 2008, twenty years after the original "Safari," I wrote "Ask Me if I Care," in which Lou tells his "girls" about his trip to Africa. Though I knew Lou was a minor character in the scheme of GOON SQUAD, I couldn't resist following him onto that safari. Music: Nada Surf's LET GO. History: There was an actor on the safari my family went on, too. His name was Tim, and he had a Walkman -- the first I'd ever seen. It was a huge novelty on the trip, everyone wanting a turn to listen through the orange foam headphones. That was our last trip together as a family; my mother and stepfather separated within the year, then divorced. We took lots of pictures of Africa, but were disappointed when we got the film developed back at home: the animals looked the size of ants. Beginning: "Remember, Charlie? In Hawaii? When we went to the beach at night and it started to rain?" Rolph is talking to his older sister, Charlene, who despises her real name. But because they're crouched around a bonfire with the other people on the safari, and because Rolph doesn't speak up all that often, and because their father, Lou, sitting behind them on a camp chair (as they draw in the dust with little sticks), is a record producer whose personal life is of general interest, those near enough to hear are listening closely. "Remember? How Mom and Dad stayed at the table for one more drink -- " "Impossible," their father interjects, with a wink at the bird-watching ladies to his left. Both women wear binoculars even in the dark, as if hoping to spot birds in the firelit tree overhead. "Remember, Charlie? How the beach was still warm, and that crazy wind was blowing?" But Charlie is focused on her father's legs, which have intertwined behind her with those of his girlfriend, Mindy. Soon they will bid the group good night and retreat to their tent, where they'll make love on one of the narrow rickety cots inside it, or possibly on the ground. From the adjacent tent she and Rolph share, Charlie can hear them -- not sounds, exactly, but movement. Rolph is too young to notice. Charlie throws back her head, startling her father. Lou is in his late thirties, square-jawed surfer's face gone a little draggy under the eyes. "You were married to Mom on that trip," she informs him, her voice distorted by the arching of her neck, which is encircled by a puka-shell choker. "Yes, Charlie," Lou says. "I'm aware of that."

Naples July 1997

teameight — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:54:34 +0000

"Goodbye My Love" = Naples/July 1997

When: On a trip I took with my husband to Southern Italy after renting a house outside of Lucca with a bunch of New York writer friends. Where: We stayed in Naples for about a week. It's unusual that I would set a story in a place where I'd spent so little time, but I knew even while we were there that it might happen -- Naples was so grandly moribund, and the paradox of its former sumptuousness juxtaposed with its present-day debasement was keen. I actually did see a red-haired girl buying Marlboros from a basket lowered from a window, and wondered who she might be, and what she was doing there. At another point, my husband and I were walking through a quiet part of the city when an old woman leaned out her window and shooed us away from the street we were just entering. She said something we didn't understand at first, but soon realized was "Ladrones, ladrones." Thieves. Needless to say, we went a different direction. Why: The real occasion for this story was an issue of The New Yorker entitled "The Future of American Fiction," that everyone knew was in the works (it was 1999 by then, and a commemorative, predictive spirit had taken hold). Of course, I wanted to be included; I mean, who wouldn't want to be part of such a lofty project? More to the point, who wouldn't react with misery to the notion of being excluded from it? I finished the story, submitted it...and was rejected. One of those blows that feels insurmountable. Beginning: When Ted Hollander first agreed to travel to Naples in search of his missing niece, he drew up for his brother-in-law, who was footing the bill, a plan for finding her that involved cruising the places where aimless, strung-out youths tended to congregate-the train station, for example -- and asking if they knew her. "Sasha. American. Capelli Rossi" -- red hair -- he'd planned to say, had even practiced his pronunciation until he could roll the r in front of rossi to perfection. But since arriving in Naples a week ago, he hadn't said it once. Today, he ignored his resolve to begin looking for Sasha and visited the ruins of Pompeii, observing early Roman wall paintings and small, prone bodies scattered like Easter eggs among the columned courtyards. He ate a can of tuna under an olive tree and listened to the crazy, empty silence. In the early evening he returned to his hotel room, heaved his aching body onto the king-sized bed, and phoned his sister, Beth, Sasha's mother, to report that another day's efforts had been unsuccessful. "Okay," Beth sighed from Los Angeles, as she did at the end of each day. "I'm sorry," he said. A drop of poison filled his heart. He would look for Sasha tomorrow. Yet even as he made this vow, he was reaffirming a contradictory plan to visit the Museo Nazionale, home of an Orpheus and Eurydice he'd admired for years: a Roman marble relief copied from a Greek original. He had always wanted to see it.

Middle- bury, VT August 1999

teameight — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:03:02 +0000

"You (plural)" = Middlebury, VT/August 1999

Where: At the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, where I was teaching. It was my fourth visit to Bread Loaf; I'd begun as a waiter (a scholarship that allows you to serve meals in exchange for attending the conference) right after returning from England, in 1987, and over the next twelve years I'd moved up through the hierarchy to instructor. But I'd never gotten any work done during the two-week conference. In 1999 I decided to write a short story every day I was there: just sit down in one of Bread Loaf's trademark green wooden chairs, in the middle of a field, with 30 minutes or so, and see what happened. "You (plural)" was the only story that came to anything, and it emerged pretty much as it is. I don't remember much about the others, except that one, called "Night's Candles," was about a boy who falls in love with a lobster. Music: Anything by Carlos Santana History: In the San Francisco neighborhood where I grew up, there was an older boy with the last name of Rolf. When I was a teenager, I heard that he'd died. I never knew how -- in fact, I don't even know if it's true. But I've thought of that boy many times over the years -- and of his mother, whom I remember clearly, for some reason. He had her face. Irony: My stepfather was nothing like Lou, mercifully, but he was a charismatic man whose personal life was often in upheaval. When I first wrote "You (plural)," I found myself reflecting on the fact that he could never be old or infirm -- anything less than the vital, iconic presence he had always been in our lives. Yet when I returned to "You (plural)," nine years later, my stepfather was long dead, after a brief, merciless bout of leukemia. Beginning: It's all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties? But it's nothing like that. Twenty years have passed. He's in the bedroom, in a hospital bed, tubes up his nose. The second stroke really knocked him out -- the first one wasn't so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky. That's what Bennie told me on the phone. Bennie from high school, our old friend. Lou's protégé. He tracked me down at my mother's, event though she left San Francisco years ago and followed me to LA. Bennie the organizer, rounding up people from the old days to say good-bye to Lou. It seems you can find almost anyone on a computer. He found Rhea all the way in Seattle, with a different last name. Of our old gang, only Scotty has disappeared. No computer can find him. Rhea and I stand by Lou's bed, unsure what to do. We know him from a time when there was no such thing as normal people dying. There were clues, hints about some bad alternative to being alive (we remembered them together over coffee, Rhea and I, before coming to see him -- staring at each other's new faces across the plastic table, our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood). There was Scotty's mom, of course, who died from pills when we were still in high school, but she wasn't normal. My father, from AIDS, but I hardly saw him by then. Anyway, those were catastrophes. Not like this: prescriptions by the bed, a leaden smell of medicine and vacuumed carpet. It reminds me of being in the hospital. Not the smell, exactly (the hospital doesn't have carpets), but the dead air, the feeling of being far away from everything.

Court Street July 2009

teameight — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:05:04 +0000

"Great Rock and Roll Pauses" = Court Street/July 2009

[slideshow id="2445"]

East River 1997

teameight — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:07:21 +0000

"X's and 0's" = East River, 1997

Original Title: "XO" Where: From 1990 to 1995, my boyfriend and I lived in a dollhouse-sized apartment on East 7th Street (which I used as Bix and Lizzie's apartment in "Out of Body") between 1st Avenue. and Avenue A. I ran a lot along the East River, taking the 6th Street overpass to get there. Alphabet City was still pretty rough, and aside from eating at the Life Café, which was on Avenue C, I rarely went East of Avenue A except to get to the river. During my runs, I often passed people fishing under the Williamsburg Bridge. One was a sound designer who worked with my boyfriend, and he told me that occasionally you could catch striped bass in the East River. I didn't begin "X's and O's" until a couple of years later, after my boyfriend and I had gotten married and moved to an apartment on West 28th Street. By then, around 1997, New York was having a moment of widespread breathlessness about "information," and "dot.coms," and the transcendent future all this was hurtling us toward. Which led me to wonder: what about the people who have no part in this enthralling colloquy, no access to whatever future it might bring? That question led me to Scotty. Fact: It was only after I'd begun writing about Bennie Salazar for GOON SQUAD, many years later, that I realized that he was the music producer from "X's and O's." That character, originally named Jonah, was much flatter -- as if he were missing some genetic material required to give him life. Oddity: Only after writing "X's and O's" did I learn that mob hits are sometimes presaged by the deposit of a dead fish on the future victim's doorstep. Beginning: Here's how it started: I was sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park reading a copy of Spin I'd swiped from Hudson News, observing East Village females crossing the park on their way home from work and wondering (as I often did) how my ex-wife had managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind, when I made a discovery: my old friend Bennie Salazar was a record producer! It was right in Spin magazine, a whole article about Bennie and how he'd made his name on a group called the Conduits that went multiplatinum three or four years ago. There was a picture of Bennie receiving some kind of award, looking out of breath and a little cross-eyed -- one of those frozen, hectic instants you just know has a whole happy life attached. I looked at the picture for less than a second; then I closed the magazine. I decided not to think about Bennie. There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours -- days, if I have to. After one week of not thinking about Bennie -- thinking so much about not thinking about Bennie that there was barely any room left in my brain for thoughts of any other kind -- I decided to write him a letter. I addressed it to his record label, which turned out to be inside a green glass building on Park Avenue and Fifty-second Street. I took the subway up there and stood outside the building with my head back, looking up, up, wondering how high Bennie's office might possibly be. I kept my eyes on the building as I dropped the letter into the mailbox directly in front of it. Hey Benjo, I'd written (that was what I used to call him). Long time no see. I hear you're the man, now. Congrats. Couldn't have happened to a luckier guy. Best wishes, Scotty Hausmann.

Prospect Park October 2007

teameight — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:11:40 +0000

"Pure Language" = Prospect Park/October 2007

Original Title: "Reach" Where: In Prospect Park, after dropping off my son at Hebrew School, in a shrinking patch of sunlight on the grass, listening to bicyclists whipping past on the road behind me and wishing it were slightly warmer. Music: The Frames, FOR THE BIRDS History: My husband and I moved out of our apartment on West 28th Street in January 2001, three weeks after our first child was born. We made the jump to Brooklyn, a place I hardly knew except from trips to BAM. Before we sold our co-op, we learned that the two squat buildings east of us had been bought by a hotel company, which planned to build a skyscraper there. For years after we moved, nothing happened. And then, maybe three years ago, getting off the 1/9 train at my old stop on West 28th Street, I noticed construction beside our old building. The skyscraper was beginning to go up. Our apartment had four windows, all facing east; through one of them, where I'd placed my desk, I could look almost straight up at the Empire State Building. I remember that building so many different colors -- a beautiful prong of New York, reminding me of why I'd come here in the first place, without family or job -- with nothing more than a desire to be here. By now, that window must be covered up. Last bit of history: It was only as I wrote about Alex not having seen the original World Trade Center that it struck me in a deep way that a whole generation of young New Yorkers has never seen those buildings -- their experience of the city is purely post 9/11. Which of course is a strange idea for those of us who were here before. One of my first jobs in New York involved catering for the Port Authority; taking the 2 train from the West 69th Street apartment with the foam couch, getting off inside the World Trade Center and vaulting by elevator into a vast internal kitchen, thick with foody humidity, where (in my memory, anyway) there were mixing bowls the size of bathtubs. I wore a black skirt, dark tights and a white blouse, and my job was to arrange cookies on white paper doilies for luncheon meetings in the Port Authority offices. Naturally, I hated it. But I do find myself remembering that job, now and then. Beginning: "You don't want to do this," Bennie murmured. "Am I right?" "Absolutely," Alex said. "You think it's selling out. Compromising the ideals that make you, 'you.'" Alex laughed. "I know that's what it is." "See, you're a purist," Bennie said. "That's why you're perfect for this." Alex felt the flattery working on him like the first sweet tokes of a joint you know will destroy you if you smoke it all. The long awaited brunch with Bennie Salazar was winding down, and Alex's hyper-rehearsed pitch to be hired as a mixer had already flopped. But now, as they eyed each other from lean perpendicular couches doused in winter sun that poured from a skylight in Bennie's Tribeca loft, Alex felt the sudden, riveting engagement of the older man's curiosity. Their wives were in the kitchen; their baby daughters were between them on a red Persian carpet, warily sharing a kitchen set. "If I won't do it," Alex said, "then I can't really be perfect." "I think you will." Alex was annoyed, intrigued. "How come?" "A feeling," Bennie said, rousing himself slightly from his deep recline. "That we have some history together that hasn't happened yet."

Back Yard Summer 2007

teameight — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:13:43 +0000

"A to B" = Back Yard, Summer 2007

Where: In a black folding chair in our stamp-sized backyard, interrupted by frequent fussing over the fruit and vegetable plants my kids and I grow from seeds: cucumbers, pumpkins, tomatoes, beans, carrots, watermelons, cantaloupe, and peppers. Music: Pink Floyd, Animals Why: As I was writing "The Gold Cure," I got curious about Bennie's failed life in the suburbs, and about his wife, Stephanie. Before I began "A to B," I'd figured out that Stephanie's brother was the celebrity assailant from "40-Minute Lunch," which I'd written some years earlier. I'd assumed that the drama of "A to B" would surround Jules' return to life outside of prison -- only as I was working on the piece did I realize that it was the story of the end of Bennie and Stephanie's marriage. History: I've never lived in the suburbs, but I do have a sense of country clubs -- first from Rockford, Illinois, my mother's hometown. My grandparents belonged to a golf and tennis club where my grandfather golfed assiduously in bright pants, where my grandmother played bridge, and where my mother declined to marry when she learned that two of her close friends, who were black, would not be welcome on the premises. In Chicago, my father and his family belonged to a tennis club with beautiful clay courts, where I played and swam during my visits to them each summer. I think the deep inspiration for "A to B" was really the sensory atmosphere of country clubs: the sound of tennis balls, the smell of the snack bar, the mothers tanning their pregnancy-stretched bellies, the fathers subtly eyeing the teenage girls around the pool. Beginning: Stephanie and Bennie had lived in Crandale a year before they were invited to a party. It wasn't a place that warmed easily to strangers. They'd known that going in and hadn't cared -- they had their own friends. But it wore on Stephanie more than she'd expected, dropping off Chris for kindergarten, waving or smiling at some blond mother releasing blond progeny from her SUV or Hummer, and getting back a pinched, quizzical smile whose translation seemed to be: Who are you again? How could they not know, after months of daily mutual sightings? They were snobs or idiots or both, Stephanie told herself, yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness. During that first winter in town, the sister of one of Bennie's artists sponsored them for membership to the Crandale Country Club. After a process only slightly more arduous than applying for citizenship, they were admitted in late June. They'd arrived at the club on their first day carrying bathing suits and towels, not realizing that the CCC (as it was known) provided its own monochromatic towels to reduce the cacophony of poolside color. In the ladies' locker room, Stephanie passed one of the blondes whose children went to Chris's school, and for the first time she got an actual "Hello," her own appearance in two separate locations have apparently fulfilled some triangulation Kathy required as proof of personhood. That was her name: Kathy. Stephanie had known it from the beginning.

Carroll Gardens December 2005

teameight — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 16:16:01 +0000

"Selling the General" = Carroll Gardens/Dec 2005

Where: Brooklyn Bread, on Court Street, where I drank strong café lattes and ate egg-and-cheese sandwiches after dropping off my older son at school. There was a wiseguy feeling to that neighborhood that I enjoyed, being a devotee of The Sopranos -- a show I often heard discussed, with discerning enthusiasm, at Brooklyn Bread. Music: David Gray, "Please Forgive Me" Why: This may be the only story I've written in direct response to a newspaper article, but I don't remember the original article; only that it sparked the thought of a publicist getting hired to rehabilitate the reputation of a genocidal dictator. I wanted badly to be included in an anthology called This Is Not Chick Lit, which was coming out the following summer. I'd been laboring for a while (in a health food café in Brooklyn Heights, near my younger son's preschool) over a story called "After the Fact," about an unidentified investigative squad that examines and catalogs artifacts from the daily lives of people who have just died -- this had seemed like a fantastic idea when I first came up with it, but I couldn't make it work. In desperation -- the Chick Lit deadline was approaching -- I hauled out my publicist/dictator idea, switched cafes, and wrote in a focused frenzy. It wasn't until after I'd finished "Selling the General" that I realized that the faded movie star (originally named Pia) was of course Kitty Jackson, from "Forty-Minute Lunch." Beginning: Dolly's first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy, with flaps that came down over the general's large dried-apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, Dolly thought, and best covered up. When she saw the general's picture in the Times a few days later, she almost choked on her poached egg: he looked like a baby, a big sick baby with a giant mustache and a double chin. The headline couldn't have been worse:

GENERAL B.'S ODD HEADGEAR SPURS CANCER RUMORS LOCAL UNREST GROWS

Dolly bolted to her feet in her dingy kitchen and turned in a frantic circle, spilling tea on her bathrobe. She looked wildly at the general's picture. And then she realized: the ties. They hadn't cut off the ties under the hat as she'd instructed, and a big fuzzy bow under the general's double chin was disastrous. Dolly ran barefoot into her office/bedroom and began plowing through fax pages, trying to unearth the most recent sequence of numbers she was supposed to call to reach Arc, the general's human relations captain. The general moved a lot to avoid assassination, but Arc was meticulous about faxing Dolly their updated contact information. These faxes usually came at around 3:00 a.m., waking Dolly and sometimes her daughter, Lulu. Dolly never mentioned the disruption; the general and his team were under the impression that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax machine would be in a corner office with a panoramic view of New York City (as indeed it had been for many years), not ten inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept. Dolly could only attribute their misapprehension to some dated article that had drifted their way from Vanity Fair or InStyle or People, where Dolly had been written about and profiled under her then moniker: La Doll.

RIP

teameight — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:20:32 +0000

RIP

"An American Boy": Bosco as a young man, trying to become a rock star in New York. Haunted by the fact that he walked out on his wife and young daughter. Falls for a journalist writing a profile of him. "Where Are You Going?": Rolph in his twenties, in New York, having joined an experimental theater group to work on a project that involves walking up to total strangers, asking, "Where are you going?" and -- if the strangers are willing -- following them to their workplaces, or homes, or wherever. As I write this, I realize that this was basically the project of my book: to walk up to strangers and follow them home. "Eyes and Ears": My first attempt at a PowerPoint. Susan (Ted Hollander's ex-wife) is a market researcher/spy whose job is to create a log of how people spend their time on airplanes. Her boss is Dolly Peale, who lives in the same upstate town. Susan visits her feckless son, Alfred, in Chicago, and has an accidental meeting with Ted, who is now involved with a Columbia professor writing her new book on pauses in rock and roll songs. "Artifact": Sasha in college at NYU. Thinking a lot about a fragile boy named Leif, whom she met and tried to rescue while traveling in China. Sasha goes to a party at Bosco's loft after a Conduits gig and steals one of his Columbian artifacts. He confronts her and suggests she get help.

Other Songs That Mattered

With Pauses: "Faith" by George Michael "Good Times, Bad Times," by Led Zeppelin "Please Play This Song on the Radio" by NOFX "The Time of the Season," by the Zombies Other Important Ones: "Cemetaries of London" by Coldplay "Unsquare Dance," by Dave Brubeck "The Passenger," by Iggy Pop "Sideways," by Let's Go Sailing "Black and Red," by Negative Trend "Wish you Were Here," by Pink Floyd "Mother Mother," by Tracy Bonham "No More Heroes," by the Stranglers

The Technology

teameight — Sun, 23 Sep 2001 13:30:55 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine I first learned of trouble at the World Trade Center from my husband, who watched the second plane's explosion from inside a Q train on the Manhattan Bridge. He reached me at home on his cell phone. It was only after we had hung up that the thought of him suspended there, above the East River in a subway car, began to unsettle me. Still, I felt curiously calm. He's fine, I thought. After all, I just talked to him. Of course, that was no guarantee of anything. Throughout the disasters of Sept. 11, people harnessed communications technology from the most extreme circumstances imaginable. Barbara Olson, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 757, used her cell phone to report early details of the hijacking. Friends and families of workers in the World Trade Center used e-mail to exhort their loved ones to flee the building. Some of those trapped in the rubble used their pagers or cell phones to call for rescue. The sheer density of such exchanges makes the boundary between those inside and outside Tuesday's disasters seem difficult to establish. Still, there is an eerie poignancy about those high-tech goodbyes from people trapped inside burning buildings and runaway planes. A similar quality clung to the story of Rob Hall, the leader of a doomed 1996 expedition up Mount Everest. Marooned in a snowstorm, Hall reached his pregnant wife in New Zealand by radiophone, and together they chose a name for their unborn child. The imbalance is almost crushing: if they could hear each other's voices, name a child, say goodbye, how could he not have been rescued? We in the developed world have come a long way toward eliminating time and space as determining factors in our lives. We can whisper into the ear of someone across the globe. We can trade intimacies with people whose whereabouts are unknown to us -- beside the point, even. Without a doubt, Tuesday's tragedies showcase the extraordinary rewards of the communications revolution. Yet never have the limits of communication been more stark. One person is inside a burning building and one is outside. Their voices may meet in the digital void, but they can't pull each other to safety across it.

Copyright (2001) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

To be Young and Homeless

teameight — Sun, 24 Mar 2002 13:33:31 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) Like most people who find themselves seeking shelter at the Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx, the sole portal into New York City's shelter system for homeless families, Jackie Fuller and two of her children were at the tail end of a run of extremely bad luck. Fuller, 44, had been living most recently in Brooklyn, but like many people who eventually wind up homeless, she had not resided at her last address very long or securely. She and her husband were New Yorkers who moved to Memphis in 1994, where just two years ago they had good jobs and were rearing the youngest three of Fuller's five children from her first marriage in a rented house. But Fuller missed her two adult daughters and granddaughter, so the family decided to return north. Fuller's husband came back ahead of time to set things up, but by the time Fuller arrived, he had lost a lucrative bridge-painting job and had had an affair with another woman. The marriage collapsed. Fuller and her three youngest moved in with Fuller's two grown daughters and granddaughter in the East New York section of Brooklyn -- seven of them sharing a small two-bedroom apartment -- while Fuller frantically looked for work. She began interviewing on Wall Street, where she'd received and delivered government bonds for 17 years before leaving the city, but no offers came. While she waited, she tried peddling bath towels at a flea market and audited a course in Web design. After Sept. 11, the interviews virtually ceased. Meanwhile, the landlord of the Brooklyn apartment objected to the overcrowding and set a deadline of Jan. 1 for the newcomers to move out. On Jan. 14, Fuller and her two youngest children, Shanna, 16, and Darian, 12, set out for the Bronx, hauling their three suitcases to the Emergency Assistance Unit, or E.A.U., as it is commonly known. (Her middle son, who is 20, moved in with another relative.) ''We thought there wouldn't be any kids,'' Shanna told me later, referring to the E.A.U., ''but there were a whole lot!'' A sturdy, ebullient teenager with a penchant for pink accessories, Shanna had gotten the lowdown on the shelter system from her best friend, whose family was homeless a couple of years ago. But Shanna stopped short of telling her new boyfriend, a college freshman, of her predicament. ''You don't know if you can trust him yet or whether he'll put your business out on the street,'' she explained. ''I told him I might be living with my aunt because she's lonely, but I didn't give him a specific location. I talked to him from the E.A.U. and he said, 'It's loud!' and I said, 'Those are my baby cousins crying and crying.''' Her younger brother, Darian, had been machinating for weeks so that no one in his seventh-grade class, where he's known as a jokester, would ever suspect he'd become homeless. ''I'm slick,'' he explained. ''I told them my mother has a real job, but she sells towels when she's not working to get some extra money because we're moving. You know, to kind of smooth it over.'' Reporters aren't allowed inside the E.A.U. or even near its doors, but I did manage a brief visit inside the one-story brick building early this past winter. A series of windowless rooms, it has the bright, 24-hour feel of a casino. The place is crammed with children, just as Shanna said; every member of each family must be present in order for that family's case to move forward. There is a low din of crying and coughing, but I found the atmosphere weirdly hushed. Families sat or napped on long plastic putty-colored benches. Portable cribs were scattered around, many with older children folded inside them. Occasionally a family whose belongings included a TV or a video game would plug it into a wall socket, and then whole tides of children would surge over to watch. On their first night as a homeless family, Fuller and her children boarded a school bus to East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, one of several locations where the city provides overnight beds to those families still in the application process. The next day she was interviewed by the Eligibility Investigation Unit. New York is unique among American cities in that, by consent decree and subsequent court orders, it must provide shelter to every homeless person or family that requests it. But beginning in the 1990's with the Giuliani administration, proving one's homelessness became a notoriously arduous task. Today, each applicant must provide a two-year housing history so that investigators can visit all prior residences and decide for themselves whether the family has other housing alternatives. If the investigators deem that alternatives exist, the family becomes ineligible for shelter and must leave the system immediately (though families may reapply). If granted eligibility for shelter, the family is ultimately placed in what is known as a transitional, or Tier II, housing facility run by a not-for-profit corporation under contract to provide an array of services -- counseling, job training, housing assistance -- to help the family ''transition'' into permanent housing. While the city conducts its investigations, the family is placed in ''conditional shelter,'' usually for 10 days. This housing may be either a room or rooms in a privately owned hotel or one of about 1,300 apartments the city has begun renting to catch the overflow of families from the hotels. Fuller, Shanna and Darian ended up in a small studio in a run-down building on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where they shared two single beds pushed together, arguing over who had to lie along the crack. (Modest, yes, but consider the fact that in Chicago, a mere 6,000 shelter beds exist to accommodate a nightly homeless population of 15,000 to 20,000, nearly half of whom are families with children. The majority are left to sleep in cars and abandoned buildings, even in winter, according to John Donahue, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.) ''It's small, but it's neat,'' Fuller told me, sitting at a small kitchen table five days into her stay. She's soft-spoken but an easy talker. Her children adore her. As we sat, Darian absently fingered his mother's gold earring and ran his hand through her hair. He's an ungainly youth, sweet-tempered, but he was grumpy about his new circumstances. He ruminated obsessively over his hair, which he likes to keep braided. He missed playing video games on the family TV set with surround-sound, still in storage in Memphis. He missed being able to walk outside and play basketball. Now he can't walk anywhere; a single key existed to the apartment -- Fuller isn't wasting money on copies when the family may be out within the week -- so everyone's entrances and exits had to be coordinated. Darian paced and moped in the tiny space, peering out the window and occasionally repairing to the narrow fifth-floor hallway, where he practiced boxing moves. As for Shanna, she was determined not to let homelessness impinge on her life as an extremely popular high-school junior. She woke up at 5 a.m. and left the apartment at 6, taking three subway trains followed by a bus ride -- a two-hour odyssey to her school. Both her brother and her mother marveled at her resolute good cheer, but the grueling commute was taking a toll. While we were talking that night, Shanna lay back on the bed and was abruptly asleep, fully clothed. ''Disaster kept striking little by little,'' Fuller said, still stunned by the turn in her fortunes. ''This has to be the bottom.'' Fuller and her kids were joining a skyrocketing population of homeless families in New York City. An average of nearly 32,000 people slept in shelters each night last month, up by 23 percent from a year ago -- the largest one-year increase in the city's shelter history, and possibly since the Great Depression. That number far exceeds the previous high of 28,737 in 1987 -- despite the fact that the number of single homeless people has actually dropped in that time by more than 3,000. Today, families make up 75 percent of New York's homeless-shelter population, with more than 13,000 children having slept in city shelters and temporary apartments most nights this winter. The root causes of what is called chronic homelessness -- the adults drifting perpetually among shelters and haunting the nation's downtowns -- are held to be mentall illness and substance abuse, but the chronic homeless constitute only 10 percent of the total shelter population, and children, obviously, don't fall within their ranks. A typical homeless child is under 5 years old, very poor and living with a sibling and a single mother. The mother may well lack the education or job skills to lift her out of poverty; often, she has been the victim of domestic violence. Compounding such children's precarious circumstances are two long-term economic trends: stagnant or falling wages coupled with a rise in housing prices. Ultimately, these children are the youngest members of troubled families too cash-strapped to afford a place to lay their heads. In an era regarded as generally prosperous, the numbers are staggering: between 900,000 and 1.4 million children in America are homeless for a time in a given year. Most of them are homeless only once, and for months, not years. And while the impact of homelessness on these children is difficult to distinguish from the many other hardships of poverty, there is evidence that homeless children have more health problems, more hospitalizations and more developmental problems than poor children who have never been homeless. Homeless children are more likely to wind up separated from their parents for periods, either with other relatives or in foster care. Children who experience homelessness are also more likely to become homeless as adults. Because these children are not sleeping in parks or begging on subways, the fact of their homelessness is largely invisible -- outside the context of a homeless shelter, they just look like children. And while I did meet families in New York who said they'd ridden subways overnight with their very young kids or slept outdoors with teenagers, these parents were taking a big risk -- failing to provide adequate shelter for one's children can result in having them removed from one's care by the Administration for Children's Services, New York City's child welfare agency. Yet because we don't see homeless kids asleep in our streets -- and because the shelters and residences they shuttle in and out of tend to be in the city's poorer neighborhoods -- their plight has not provoked the outcry that the rise in homelessness did in the 1980's. Nevertheless, these children make up 40 percent of the nation's homeless population, and for the time they remain without homes, and for who knows how long after, homelessness is the defining fact of their lives. The Emergency Assistance Unit is situated on what I'm convinced is the coldest street corner in New York City, at 151st Street just off the Grand Concourse. For many nights and days this past winter I stood on that corner in a riptide of winds, watching young, mostly black and Hispanic women (and occasionally men), shepherd their children into and out of a set of gray metal doors. They arrive with suitcases and duffel bags and shopping carts, with blankets and Barbies and television sets. When families are too stir-crazy to sit inside another minute, they get temporary passes to come outside and smoke or drink coffee. Children beg their parents for candy at the R&A Deli-Grocery, across the street, the E.A.U.'s de facto commissary (food is served within, but it is notoriously awful), then eat it in the cold while their parents swap stories. A portion of families at the E.A.U. are first-time applicants, but most of them say they are reapplying after having been deemed ineligible, often several times, and the mood of paranoia is intense. Wild rumors abound: how investigators told an applicant to put her children to bed in a bathtub; how the E.A.U. is paid each time it denies a family eligibility (not true). The kids tend to tune out these harangues -- the youngest play, while the older ones stare resolutely into space. Children in and around the E.A.U. are accustomed to the uncomfortable spectacle of their parents as supplicants, powerless and dependent. They've seen their mothers cry and lose their tempers with city employees, only to be punished for it. The illusion that a parent can protect them -- shelter them, literally, from the world's indifference -- is broken swiftly and severely. You see the result in the teenagers; angry, full of shame, but afraid to vent their anger on their beleaguered parents. Many look on the verge of implosion, especially the boys, who skulk outside the E.A.U., taking big, hard breaths of cold air. One morning, I watched a boy who looked about 16 get led out in handcuffs; he managed to kick out the window of a police van before it took him away. For those who can afford it, there's a McDonald's up the street on the Grand Concourse, which offers the added attraction of a clean bathroom. One afternoon a few days before Christmas, I went there for lunch with Denise Boone, 28, and her kids, Shannay, 9, and Dennis, 11. Both children are in fourth grade. Dennis was quiet, retracted inside his puffy coat. But Shannay was wild with life, as if all the spirit that had been leeched away from her sad-looking mother was churning inside her. ''It's three months since the World Trade Center got knocked down!'' Shannay reported with enthusiasm. She had gold earrings, red, white and blue beads braided into her hair and a knit cap that read ''God Bless America.'' She listened as her mother claimed, in a dejected monotone, that she had been rejected six times since she first applied for shelter the previous April. The city, she maintained, first wanted her to move back in with a female friend who was on crack and took out a restraining order against Boone, then with Boone's mother, whose two-bedroom already houses five adults, including Boone's AIDS-stricken brother. In June, with nowhere to go, Boone put her kids into foster care, she said, but they ran away. The foster parents treated them badly, Boone said. (She herself spent a portion of her youth in foster care and group homes, as did a number of homeless mothers I interviewed.) Boone and her children found themselves back at the E.A.U. on Thanksgiving. A church group arrived with turkey dinners, Boone said, but was not allowed to bring the dinners inside. (No food or drinks, except baby formula, can be brought into the E.A.U.) Instead, the families ate sandwiches in the cafeteria. According to Boone, the place was packed that night, and several families were left overnight on the E.A.U. benches and floors -- an outlawed practice that still goes on periodically. ''They don't want to help you,'' Shannay informed me in the proud, bossy tones of a child playing the expert. ''When you're laying in the street with your kids, they're gonna call B.C.W.'' (She was referring to the Bureau of Child Welfare, the previous name for the A.C.S.) ''What do B.C.W. do, lock you up?'' Dennis asked, interrupting his sing-along with the Christmas carols on the McDonald's soundtrack. ''They take you to jail and they keep your kids until you have enough money to take them out,'' Shannay replied. Like many homeless parents, Boone had been unequal to the task of trying to keep her children in their original Bronx schools as the city moved her among boroughs on 10-day placements. Instead, she registered them at whichever public school district the family happened to be placed in. ''She's too smart to be out of school,'' she said of Shannay. ''She's an A student; she's going to fall behind. Last time they've been to school this month was . . . what was the last day on your homework? ''December 10th!'' Shannay instantly replied. ''And they just got into school four days before that. Then they found us ineligible. We had to come back here.'' ''I miss my teachers,'' Shannay said. Earlier that same day, I'd had breakfast at a different McDonald's with Deborah Williams, 41, and her two children. I met Williams and her kids outside the E.A.U. a few nights before, where Williams, worn out and hoarse, was pushing a shopping cart containing bags of clothing and a small television set. The family had just applied for shelter and was on its way to its first conditional placement. Her daughter, Tynisha, 12, wrapped her head in a long black scarf to avoid me and a photographer. Davonte, 5, a human Superball, promptly informed us that his birthday was Halloween and that he would be playing Jesus the following night in his school play. Then he mugged ecstatically for the camera. Williams, a postal worker, has a much higher income than most E.A.U. clients -- even after being garnisheed for back rent owed to her prior landlord, she was taking home around $350 a week. She was one of many homeless people I met who were holding jobs, a number of them full time. A single parent, Williams pays $425 each month for Davonte to attend God's Kids Academy, a private school near the Bronx post office where she worked at the time. Her life hasn't been easy; she lost two brothers to drug addiction and to AIDS, and she had been in a long, abusive relationship with a man who is now incarcerated. But the bad luck that brought her to this pass was largely of her own making: after a dispute with her landlord led to eviction proceedings, she began withholding rent last May, but instead of saving that money in escrow, she gambled it away in Atlantic City and in neighborhood card games. ''I was totally out of control,'' she told me. ''That was a really messed-up time in my life.'' When the eviction became final last October, she moved her children into the small one-bedroom apartment in New York City housing where her godmother lives with her husband, intending to stay there until her earned-income tax credit came through in late January and gave her enough extra money for the two months' rent and broker's fee required to secure a new apartment. But tensions soared in the crowded quarters, and on Dec. 15, Williams and her kids entered the shelter system. In early January, Williams left me a frantic message from the pay phone at Town and Country, a hotel near Co-Op City, at the northeast edge of the Bronx, where she and her children had settled into their second conditional placement while they sought eligibility for a second time (they'd been denied the first time when the city claimed they could go back to Williams's godmother's). Now they'd been turned down again: ''This is Deborah. They sent me an ineligible letter underneath the door at 12:20, obviously I was at work at that time, telling me to hurry up and make it to a conference in four hours, at 4:20. We walked in the door, all of our belongings were gone. They say they put them in storage. . . . We have no choice but to go back to the E.A.U.'' The next morning, I went to the E.A.U. to meet Williams. Though it was midmorning, school buses were still rolling in, disgorging families from their overnight shelter stays. Women helped each other wrangle strollers and suitcases from the buses; older children carried younger children inside to begin the day's wait. I felt defeated just imagining the logistics of these women's lives -- ferrying all their possessions back and forth, pocketbooks crammed with birth certificates and other original documents they constantly need to produce; matching children to socks and snowsuits and bottles; keeping everyone fed. I was amazed by how well dressed and cared for most of the children looked. Williams emerged from the E.A.U. exhausted; Davonte and Tynisha were sleeping on a bench inside, she told me. The bus hadn't brought them to Powers, a city-run overnight shelter five minutes from the E.A.U., until 1:40 a.m. (These late arrivals are quite common and a particular hardship for working parents and schoolchildren, who must catch the ''early bird'' bus at 5:45 a.m. to log in at the E.A.U. before going to work and school.) Outside Powers, Davonte had vomited on the pavement. Everyone slept in their clothes -- Powers is known for being underheated -- and at one point, between bouts of vomiting, the boy awoke in his own feces. But because their belongings had been locked away at Town and Country, they had only the clothes on their backs. Williams rinsed Davonte's underwear but was worried that if she washed his school uniform pants in the cold room, they wouldn't be dry by morning. As Williams spoke, a slight woman with a pierced tongue burst from the E.A.U. with two small children in tow: Joshuann Russell, 26, whom Williams had just met inside. Russell, who described herself as a longtime victim of domestic violence that had cost her both her job and her apartment, said she'd called the city's domestic violence hotline some weeks ago, after her ex-husband threatened to kill her in front of their children. The city operates a separate shelter system for victims of domestic abuse, but perhaps because it advertises this hotline aggressively on the subways, its beds are often full; the spillover falls to the E.A.U. Russell's youngest child, a 2-year-old boy, was clutching an empty bottle and wailing for milk. We crossed the street to the deli, where Russell filled her son's bottle with a shaking hand while continuing her wild story: against her wishes, the E.A.U. had placed her last night in the Bronx, near where her ex-husband lives. Sure enough, Russell maintained, she woke to find him beating her head with the butt of a gun, having been let inside the hotel by a friend of his who works there. By now her little boy, who seemed to function as a kind of dowsing stick for his mother's anxiety, was becoming agitated as her volume rose. Her attacker had escaped, Russell told me, after she dialed 911 on her cellphone. While I pondered the credibility of this story, the boy began to weep, reaching for his mother in his heavy winter jacket. ''You wanna babo? What? What you want? Drink that bottle,'' Russell implored. ''No, it doesn't hurt,'' she said, as the boy peered up at her. She was holding one cheek where she said she'd been hit with the gun. ''Just my head a little bit.'' Outside, Russell had to run back into the E.A.U., and Williams offered to watch her children. The boy cried for malted-milk balls, which his 4-year-old sister denied him. He had a terrible cold. When he realized that his mother was gone, he went rigid with fear and began to scream, choking, coughing, his face a contortion of terror and despair. Nothing we said could calm him. His sister offered him the candy, but he no longer wanted it. She put her arm around him, a 4-year-old soothing a 2-year-old, diminutive figures in puffy jackets, big hoods bobbing like pompoms. I thought of how alien the world must look to these kids without any of the familiar objects or routines of home -- an unending series of new circumstances and people. No wonder their mother's presence felt so crucial -- she was all that stood between them and chaos. In the late afternoon, Williams reappeared with her children. I was taken aback by the change in Davonte -- groggy, unsmiling, nothing like the goofy giggler who had mugged for the camera two weeks before. We went to a Chinese restaurant nearby, where Davonte picked listlessly at a bowl of chicken soup and sipped from a plastic cup of greenish lemonade. ''Every time I cough,'' he said softly, ''my stomach keeps jumping and jumping.'' ''Whatever you do, don't throw up on the table,'' his sister said. A slender girl, proud and opaque, Tynisha was deeply unhappy to find herself still in yesterday's silver studded jeans. At 12, she's still half a child -- her heart's desire that week was a $40 Tweety Bird doll she'd seen in a window. But she's an adolescent, too, fighting to manage the few things in her life she can still control. She struggled to do schoolwork in various inauspicious settings -- a report on mummification at Powers, math problems on the top bunk of a temporary apartment without a desk. Davonte got up to use the rest room, walking oddly, perhaps out of self-consciousness over his soiled uniform pants. Williams hadn't retrieved their possessions yet from Town and Country; she was worried the errand might prolong their time at the E.A.U. She'd missed work this day -- one of many absences caused by her homelessness -- and her supervisor was running out of patience. ''There's going to be some kind of retaliation,'' she said. ''I'll pray on it tonight.'' Davonte returned from the bathroom and slumped against his mother. ''I'm cold,'' he murmured. ''I want to go home.'' There was a pause. It was unclear where, exactly, he meant: the apartment where they'd lived until October, whose contents, including a large Buzz Lightyear doll he pined for, were in storage? The East River Family Center, their first and favorite placement, where they'd had a Christmas tree and opened presents before they'd been deemed ineligible and had to vacate the premises? Or some primal notion we all carry around in our minds of a comfortable place that is our own, where we can retreat to safety? ''Are you sleepy?'' Williams asked her son. ''Yeah.'' ''Well, we don't have a home,'' she said. ''Isn't that sad?'' It was dark by the time we returned to the E.A.U. and Williams and her children went back inside. That night they would be given a third conditional placement at a temporary apartment in the Bronx, but it would lack heat or hot water, as Williams would report to me the next morning, sobbing over the cellphone I'd lent her to keep in touch with me. No one was able to bathe, and they slept with the oven door open and the gas on. Davonte's pants remained soiled, and Williams missed another day of work and the children another day of school to sort things out and finally retrieve their belongings from Town and Country. (The heat resumed the following morning, and there was hot water from that point on.) After they'd gone inside the E.A.U., I stood beneath the single pink-orange stadium light that hangs above its entrance doors. People were still arriving, some having clearly come from work, accompanied by schoolchildren with bright school backpacks on their shoulders; others who looked dead-tired, dragging garbage bags full of clothing over the pavement. At around 8 o'clock, school buses began pulling in to pick up families for their overnights. The buses would keep arriving into the wee hours, children tottering aboard holding blankets and pacifiers and stuffed animals, looking groggier and more disoriented as the hours passed. Some fell asleep before the buses had even left, their faces mashed against the glass. While there is diversity among homeless families and the chains of events that lead them to seek public shelter, there is also a shared context: in 1970, there were approximately 300,000 more of what are called extremely-low-income housing units in America than families who needed them; now there are 4.5 million more extremely-low-income families in need of housing than there are units in their range of affordability. Many factors have contributed to this reversal: in the decades since 1970, rent prices in urban areas have outstripped inflation while wages in low-end jobs have at best remained flat. A lot of poor urban neighborhoods have been gentrified as city life once again became attractive to the affluent. And a large influx of immigrants beginning in the 1980's has created an enormous demand for inexpensive apartments in the biggest cities. In New York, where income disparity between the rich and poor is nearly twice the national rate, the housing problem is especially acute. Between the late 70's and the late 90's, the incomes of the poorest fifth of New Yorkers fell by 33 percent in real terms, while in the 1990's alone, the city lost more than 500,000 apartments renting for less that $500 a month (in part through the relaxation of rent-control regulations) -- more than half the total low-rent units available. This placed a particular burden on poor families: in 1999, more than 25 percent of New Yorkers who rented an apartment spent more than half their incomes doing so. For a family stretched so thin, a single disaster to a parent -- becoming sick or injured or losing a job; splitting up with a spouse or partner; developing a drug or alcohol or gambling problem -- can result in a child being suddenly without a home. In a middle-class family, such personal blows tend to be cushioned by savings. Poor families without savings look to the government for help. But whereas all poor families able to qualify are entitled to Medicaid, there is no entitlement to housing in America. Indeed, since the late 1970's, the amount of federal money available for providing low-income housing has decreased by around 90 percent, according to Cushing N. Dolbeare, a senior scholar at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard who has been a housing advocate for 50 years. As for rent subsidies: in the late 1970's, the federal government provided 300,000 new units of rental assistance each year, most of them in the form of Section 8 vouchers or certificates, which can be used by poor families toward rent payments in privately owned apartments. By the 1990's, the number of additional new vouchers had fallen to 40,000 a year, and for two years beginning in 1995, the federal government eliminated the creation of new vouchers entirely. The proposed Bush budget allows for 34,000 new vouchers, to be added to the approximately 1.8 million already in use. But this increase will not put even a small dent in the problem. In New York City alone, the waiting list for Section 8 is more than 200,000 long. As for welfare housing allowances, they are pitiful. A family of three in New York can receive a maximum of $286 a month for shelter allowance -- try renting an apartment for that. And during the 1990's, the city's once-robust investments in building and developing low-income housing were slashed by about 50 percent. Poor people struggling to pay the rent will struggle much harder to find new housing, should they lose what they have. And when they can't, they drop with their children into the homeless system. Jackie Fuller and Darian and Shanna waited in their city-provided single room on Ocean Avenue for some word from the city. Another bed was delivered; pots and pans appeared in the kitchenette, lent by Fuller's grown daughters. Ten days passed, then 15. On the 18th day, they found a note requesting more information about the family's residence in Memphis. Certain this meant she was ineligible, Fuller became physically ill, then lay awake praying most of the night. At school, Darian still hadn't disclosed to anyone that he was homeless. I met him at school one afternoon and took the hourlong bus ride back to Ocean Avenue. When I asked how his schoolmates would react if they learned his secret, he said: ''I don't know. I hate this school. There's too many people that think they run me.'' Then he waxed nostalgic about the school he'd left behind in Memphis. ''Everybody knew me as Mace,'' he said wistfully. ''I was the king.'' According to city guidelines, any family not notified of their eligibility status within 10 days should automatically be made eligible, but this rule is regularly broken, and Fuller didn't know about it anyway. She didn't know anything -- no one does, because like most bureaucracies, New York's Department of Homeless Services often functions in a lurching and seemingly arbitrary way. For example, when Fuller first came to the E.A.U., she was offered what is known as a one-shot deal: if she could find an apartment renting for around $600 a month -- a tall order, to be sure, in a city where the rent for a nonsubsidized one-bedroom is seldom that low -- the government would pay her first month's rent, security deposit and broker's fee. The offer was useless to Fuller, who had no income to pay the subsequent months' rent, but for Deborah Williams, who has a steady income from her postal job but lacked the chunk of money required for a new apartment, such an offer would have averted her homelessness altogether. But Williams says that no such offer was made to her. Williams and her children remained in their city-provided temporary apartment in the Bronx for eight days. When a third ineligibility letter arrived, they reapplied for shelter at the E.A.U. and were eventually sent on a fourth conditional placement to the Park Family Residence, a hotel in Queens, near Kennedy Airport. At 5:30 each morning, the three waited in darkness for a bus that would take them to a subway; they took two trains that finally delivered them to work and school in the Bronx: a two-and-a-half-hour trip. At the end of the day, same story: a fast-food meal in the Bronx (rooms at the Park Family Residence have no kitchen facilities), followed by the long ride back to Queens, where they would arrive between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. By the fourth day, Williams was feverish; she nearly passed out at work, she said. The next day she stayed home, as did the children -- she was too sick to take them to school. That evening I went to see them. The Park Family Residence has the look of a large, run-down motel. Set off by a chain-link fence from Rockaway Boulevard and engulfed in a howl of traffic from the nearby Belt Parkway, it makes an unlikely setting for the many children still gamboling near its front doors at 8 o'clock. Outside, under a lunar fluorescent glow, Tynisha and two other girls wielded double jump ropes, each taking their turn at the intricate footwork. It was a testament to the resourcefulness of children, their ability to wrest delight from the most barren circumstances. When Davonte threw his arms around my legs and smiled up at me, I noticed a change in his antic face: a bottom front tooth was gone. He'd lost his first tooth in the Park Family Residence, where it had vanished into the clutter of their small room before the tooth fairy could visit. ''It's cool,'' he said, when I asked how he liked this new place. ''He's happy because over here they can play in the hallway with the other kids,'' Williams said. ''So he's like the man on this floor.'' Hoarse and puffy-eyed, she wore her coat pulled over a pair of shiny blue pajamas, laughing at how ''ghetto'' she looked in this ensemble. Tynisha wore a matching pair; these were part of a slew of purchases -- new coats, hats, boots, earrings for Tynisha and a ring with a ''D'' on it for Davonte -- made with Williams's earned-income tax credit, $3,600, which had finally come through. ''I got new boots,'' Davonte bragged, showing them off. ''I got new sneakers!'' We left the hotel and stopped at the overpriced convenience store in the gas station next door, the only place nearby where groceries could be found. Then we wove among lanes of traffic to Burger King, across Rockaway Boulevard, where we ate dinner in a strobe of passing headlights. The children reminisced about a visit they'd made with Williams the previous summer to the Staten Island Children's Museum and a nearby Disney event. ''We saw Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse,'' Davonte recalled breathlessly. ''And we had fun. And we was on the slide and we was seeing a movie and we was dancing!'' ''It was free,'' Tynisha added. She seemed more withdrawn than the last time I'd seen her; there had been an incident in the previous temporary apartment when a faulty lock was changed without warning, and the family had arrived back that evening to find themselves locked out. According to Williams, Tynisha was devastated; she had a huge test the next morning, and after a super finally let them in, she had lain on the bed and sobbed inconsolably. But when I mentioned the incident, Tynisha went blank. ''My head hurt,'' was all she would say. After dinner, the children went to play video games at the Burger King, and Williams and I sat a while longer. Since receiving her tax-credit check, she'd been combing the papers for an affordable apartment, but to no avail. After buying the children's clothes, paying her godmother for the weeks she'd let them stay with her and putting money aside for moving expenses, she had $2,000 left -- enough for the first month's rent and the security deposit, but not a broker's fee. And that was assuming that she could find a two-bedroom for less than $1,000 a month, which was not proving easy. ''I'm ready,'' she said. ''I have the money. But where is the physical apartment? I am worn out,'' she concluded. ''This particular place is killing me.'' The saga for Williams would continue. She and her children would leave the Park Family Residence a few days later and be placed again at Town and Country in the north Bronx, closer to where she worked, with the help of Steven Banks, a Legal Aid lawyer, whom Williams met at the E.A.U. In early February, she would find an apartment she could afford and put down the rent and security deposit, only to learn two weeks later that she'd failed the credit check. But later that very same day, Feb. 20, Williams would learn that at last, she'd been deemed eligible: after four rejections, the city had finally acknowledged that her family was homeless. This change in their fortunes most likely resulted from Banks's involvement; so wary is the city of his litigation that his mere association with a case is often enough solve the family's problem. It had been more than two months now since Williams first arrived at the E.A.U. The city had spent approximately $6,500, or $100 a night, bouncing her and her children among hotels and apartments -- nearly the cost of a year's rent subsidy through Section 8. Now that she is eligible, Williams can stay at Town and Country for 60 days, after which she will be moved to a Tier II placement and eventually to permanent housing; homeless families get top priority on the long waiting lists for Section 8 vouchers and New York City housing. But the likelihood is that Williams, whose income is too high to qualify for subsidized housing, will find an apartment long before that. She and her children will join the majority of homeless households who pass through the system once and relatively briefly. The question is, at what cost to Williams and her children, and to the taxpayer? The federal government now spends $1.7 billion each year on homeless services, but that's only a fraction of the total spent nationally; some 40,000 programs exist to deal with homelessness in America, many financed at the state and local levels. In other words, a sprawling and expensive system has arisen to confront the problem of homelessness, and many have begun to worry that this system is creating problems of its own. One fear is that families are remaining homeless longer than necessary (their average stay in New York is 11 months, but more than 500 families have been in the system more than two years) and that moving them among shelters and then to transitional housing prolongs their identities as ''homeless families.'' There is concern, too, that other safety-net programs like welfare and foster care may be letting troubled families fall off their rolls into the homeless system. Homelessness among families is such a recent phenomenon -- virtually nonexistent from the end of the Great Depression to the early 1980's -- that no one can say for certain what, if any, its long-term effects may be on the children who suffer it. But Dr. Ellen L. Bassuk, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and co-author of a federally supported study of homeless families, has found that homelessness tends to ratchet up the already grim effects of poverty. According to her research, children in homeless families are sick twice as often as poor children who have never been homeless. Nearly 70 percent of homeless children, she found, suffer from chronic illnesses like asthma and anemia, and almost half of school-age homeless children have emotional problems like anxiety and depression. They also experience four times the rate of development delays and double the learning disabilities and are twice as likely to be suspended from school or repeat a grade than other poor children. Bassuk's research was conducted in Massachusetts in the 1990's, but experts say that her findings are representative of the state of homeless children nationwide, including those who are homeless today in New York. The Bloomberg administration understands that there has been an increase in the number of homeless children in recent years, but it is not clear yet whether the new mayor is planning any significant changes in the system now in place. Linda I. Gibbs was named Bloomberg's commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services in January, having served as Mayor Giuliani's deputy commissioner of the Administration for Children's Services. When I spoke to her earlier this month, she said she did not think her department was overwhelmed or that the problem of homeless children had become particularly acute. ''The crisis would be if there were children living on the streets,'' she said. ''I think the fact that the homeless system is here is a crisis averted.'' She did add, however: ''There's always room for improvement. We really intend on looking at the eligibility process to see if there are ways that we can minimize or reduce the amount of school disruption that happens when families become homeless.'' Supporting a homeless family in New York costs city taxpayers $36,000 a year -- an amount that could subsidize at least four families' yearly rents or finance countless much cheaper preventive measures: emergency grants to pay back rent or help families to secure new apartments; legal aid to help fight evictions. It is hard not to feel that putting these dollars to a different use would be not just more humane, but more fiscally responsible. ''You could spend a dollar on prevention and save four dollars on shelter care,'' says Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless. ''Once somebody becomes homeless, it's that much harder to rehouse them.'' Still, fiscal responsibility alone is not likely to serve as a rallying cry. Make no mistake: ending homelessness for families with children would cost money. The question is how much responsibility we, as a society, feel for the children of people whose poverty, or pathologies, have resulted in those children's having nowhere to live. A shift toward spending money to end children's homelessness rather than simply trying to manage it will come only if enough people decide that the social costs of having a million American children homeless each year are too high to tolerate. It will require a consensus that the suffering and damage inflicted on these children through illness and lapsed education and trauma that could very well compromise their productivity as adults not only reflects badly on all of us, but is actually bad for us -- that we, as a society, are worse off because of it. After hearing nothing from the city for a month, Jackie Fuller went to the nonprofit group Coalition for the Homeless, which contacted the Department of Homeless Services and learned that she'd been eligible for 10 days, but no one had told her. Fuller went limp. She phoned Shanna, who shrieked into her ear. Only Darian's reaction was muted. ''I already knew,'' he insisted. His equanimity crumbled at the news that the family would have to move yet again -- into Tier II housing -- and then again, at some more distant point, when permanent housing became available. ''We have to move?'' he moaned, ''Oh, Ma.'' When I visited the family that evening, Shanna was more subdued than usual. Her boyfriend had stood her up the day before -- Valentine's Day. ''My friends all got flowers and big teddy bears,'' she said, ''and I was empty-handed.'' Since becoming homeless, she'd talked to him less often, she admitted; the reception on her cellphone was terrible in the apartment, and he was tired of leaving voicemails. He'd come to visit once, believing it was her aunt's apartment, but Shanna had made him wait downstairs rather than invite him up. On the day Deborah Williams and her kids found out they were eligible, they went to an all-you-can-eat Chinese seafood restaurant to celebrate. I spoke to Williams en route, Davonte and Tynisha hooting in the background. I asked whether Davonte's missing tooth had ever turned up. Yes, Williams said; she'd spotted it stuck to a bath towel at the Park Family Residence shortly before they left. But the tooth fairy still hadn't visited. ''I let Davonte know I had it,'' Williams said. ''I thought that would be something to save for our new place. You know: 'Now we're here. Now it's good again. Put it under your pillow.''' Copyright (2002) The New York Times Company. Reprinted by Permission. New York Times material may not be used in any manner except for personal reference without the written permission of The New York Times Company.

You Don't Know Madonna

teameight — Sun, 15 Dec 2002 13:48:12 +0000

from GQ Unlike a lot of people in my generation, I was never all that interested in Madonna. I knew about her, of course (how could anyone not?) but I didn't really want to know, and over the years this forcible knowing engendered in me a blustering sort of resentment. Why do I have to keep hearing about this woman? I wondered, sometimes aloud, jabbing a finger at yet another picture of her yet again transmogrified visage. Part of my problem was that except for a few songs ("Into the Groove," "Justify My Love," "Vogue"), I didn't much like her peppy, tuneful music. And the scandals over the videos for "Like a Prayer" and "Justify My Love," along with the infamous Sex book struck me as the cheap stunts of a publicity glutton. The birth of Lourdes, with the attendant honeyed photos and MADONNA AND CHILD headlines made me faintly nauseated. And as for the Kabala studies and the mystical face doodles, please. Will she ever go away? I asked. And asked and asked as the years kept passing. Then something happened. I'm not sure how or why or even when--the past couple of years?--my antipathy toward Madonna began to ease. It wasn't that she disappeared, because of course she hasn't disappeared. But at a certain point I was startled, in response to some new bit of Madonna lore, to feel rustling within me a grudging affection, even admiration, for the woman. Maybe it's nostalgia: Madonna's career as a pop star now spans twenty years, roughly my whole adult life. I was in college when I saw Desperately Seeking Susan; I remember arguing with my boyfriend's sister over whether it was a feminist movie (I thought it was). By the time I got to New York, in the late '80s, with a lousy manuscript under my arm that I hoped was a novel, there was a Madonna section at Macy's and my mother had tickets to see her in Speed- the- Plough. And in all the years since, she's been there. Remaining a pop phenomenon for twenty years without dying or lapsing into self-parody is quite a feat; the Rolling Stone Readers Polls of the past twenty years (most of which include Madonna) look like program notes at a memorial service for pop careers: Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Sinead O'Connor, Milli Vanilli, M.C. Hammer, Prince, Whitney Houston, and on and on. There are other survivors, to be sure: Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Neil Young, Patti Smith, David Bowie, many of whom outlap Madonna musically by many miles. But as global cultural icons, none of these people can touch her. And so this woman who has long irked me has come to embody a mystery: How did she do it? It seemed time for an examination of not just Madonna's oeuvre and the reams of patter she's inspired from the halls of academe to the pages of People magazine but also my own gripes: the things I've always held against her. Is she an idol despite these many failings, or have I been wrong all these years? 1. Madonna has no real talent I'm hardly the first to have thought so; many have remarked on Madonna's less- than- stunning abilities as a singer or a dancer. Luc Sante captured the basic attitude in 1990: "Madonna, then, is a bad actress, a barely adequate singer, a graceless dancer, a boring interview subject, a workmanlike but uninspired (co-) songwriter, and a dynamo of hard work and ferocious ambition." Madonna's only talent, according to this line of reasoning, lies in the realm of self-promotion, that magical zone peopled by the likes of Elizabeth Hurley and Anna Kournikova, where lack of achievement is parlayed into ubiquity. Hence those overused terms one finds everywhere in Madonna discourse: calculating, chameleon and reinvent. The "no talent" argument is an old one. It's also, I think, an argument of the old. I include myself in this category although I'm four years younger than Madonna, for the simple reason that I grew up in the '70s, so I entered early adulthood with a definition of "rock star" that overlapped very little with what Madonna had to offer. Rock stars (my favorites included the Who, Patti Smith, Pink Floyd and Iggy Pop) produced raw, spontaneous music that sounded completely different live than on your turntable. There was something random and dangerous about that sound. Patti Smith ranting the words to "Horses" as if she'd been recorded midseizure or the horrifying scream on Pink Floyd's Ummagumma-- just try to imagine those moments filtered through a sieve of vocal coaches and songwriting teams. As for live performance -- well, anything could happen, or that was the feeling. Pete Townshend's guitar smashing might have been calculated, but compared with Madonna's hyperchoreographed aerobic chorus lines it looked like primal scream therapy. Unlike the music of the '70s performers I loved, Madonna's early sound was bubble-gummy and devoid of mystery, the slick live versions virtually indistinguishable from the studio recordings. Yet there was another facet of Madonna's musical creation that was lost on me, pre-MTV teenager that I was: the music video. I still find these pretty cheesy, having missed the apparently crucial indoctrination phase of lolling around stoned after school on someone's den floor, ogling the latest VJ. So while I can't agree with Norman Mailer, who, in a 1994 interview with Madonna, likened her videos to poetry, I will allow that they can be strange and suggestive -- mysterious, even -- in ways that her music is not. The choir and weeping statue in "Like a Prayer," Madonna's passionate kiss with a black saint -- to me, these images are far more lasting than the song itself. Or the hyperactive urban imagery in the "Ray of Light" video, interspersed with Madonna jittering like a piston; when I hear the song, I see these images and they enhance it. It seems unlikely that a woman with fifteen American top-five hits to her credit -- more than Elvis Presley or the Beatles--has no talent other than self-promotion. Especially when, as opposed to '70s giants like the Stones or Elton John, Madonna has yet to settle into nostalgic wallows through old material. In fact, her two most recent albums have been her most critically acclaimed; Ray of Light won three Grammys, including Best Pop Album. And while the exact nature of Madonna's songwriting contributions has never been clear, no one disputes that she's in complete control of every aspect of her career. Still, Madonna herself said in Truth or Dare, "I know I'm not the best singer, and I know I'm not the best dancer. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in pushing people's buttons, in being provocative. In being political." In other words, music per se has never encompassed the full range of Madonna's aspirations; she's a creator of effects, of extravaganzas, and she does this using imagery, sound, her voice, her body and anything else she can scare up. Her gift for making spectacles is obvious, not just from her videos and performances but also from the pageant of her career itself: a multimedia onslaught of sensation. In 1992, for example, she released a CD, Erotica; a book, Sex; followed by a movie, Body of Evidence, all of which dealt in some way with the power of sexual fantasies. The fact that Sex (which sold 1.5 million copies worldwide) was lampooned by critics and Body of Evidence bombed both critically and commercially hardly matters; the publicity and controversy generated by these multiple efforts pushed buttons -- Madonna's goal -- and jacked up her fame another notch. If, as music critic Gerald Marzorati once suggested to me, the biggest pop stars tend to change in some way the nature of what it is to be a pop star, Madonna's contribution has been to usher in the phenomenon of star as multimedia impresario. These diversified stars are defined less by any single talent or pursuit than by an array of projects and endeavors whose combined impact expands their personae exponentially. Others who have followed successfully in this vein (and whose merchandising efforts dwarf Madonna's) range from Puff Daddy toMartha Stewart. Whether one appreciates this new stripe of celebrity -- I don't, especially -- is a separate question. 2. Madonna is narcissistic Clearly and resoundingly true. And yet the very word sounds old-fashioned in the context of Madonna--a bit like bum-rapping cities for being crowded when compression is precisely what a city has to offer. For Madonna, narcissism is more than a personality trait: it's a m�tier, a creative vocabulary and a bridge to the culture at large. John Fiske once wrote of her, "Madonna knows well the importance of the look. This is a complex concept, for it includes how she looks (what she looks like), how she looks (how she gazes at others, the camera in particular), and how others look at her." In other words, Madonna has a heightened awareness of seeing and being seen. But what exactly is unusual about her self-consciousness? After all, the very nature of performance, not to speak of celebrity, involves being watched by many people who don't know you. Celebrities react to this scrutiny in various ways -- with avoidance (Sean Penn), with rage (Russell Crowe), with concerted "naturalness" (Britney Spears), with weird and possibly criminal behavior (Winona Ryder), with despair and self-immolation (Kurt Cobain). Madonna, on the other hand, appears not merely to enjoy scrutiny but to presume it and control it. She turns being seen from a passive experience into an active one -- the peep-show worker she portrays in her "Open Your Heart" video is a dynamo of glamour and vitality compared with the embalmed-looking men who are her audience. Madonna knows we're watching; hence her winking air of don't pretend you're not looking that can be so aggravating -- in part because if you're there to catch it, then she's right. I'm not denying that there can be vanity, egotism and even real ugliness to Madonna's self-exposure. One thing that makes Sex such a squirmy book to look at, and Truth or Dare such an uncomfortable movie, is Madonna's obvious and unwavering complicity with the camera -- an allegiance that seems to outrank any other bond she might ever form, sexual, professional, even familial. We're watching her watch herself, is the feeling -- there's no one else in the room. In this sense we, the viewers, are complicit in her narcissism--essential to it. In his seminal book, The Image, Daniel Boorstin wrote, "Man fulfills his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera -- and himself. He is impressed, not by what he sees. . .Rather by the extreme and ever-growing cleverness of his ways of seeing it." Madonna is a narcissist -- and so are her fans, including those who hate her the most. This is what Nell Bernstein meant when he wrote, "Madonnaism is ultimately less about the star than about the fan. The idea is not simply to look at Madonna, but also to look at yourself looking at Madonna." So it is with all celebrity worship. It's no accident that Madonna's first and most rabid fan base consisted of teenage girls at an age when total self-involvement is a basic condition of life. They were wild to play their part, mimicking her dance moves and clogging up their arms with rubber bracelets. For the rest of us, it was easier to point the finger and say Madonna started it. The great surprise of Madonna's career is that she's fared so poorly as a movie actress. Yet the reason is hardly a mystery; conventional acting involves erasing all traces of one's self-awareness, while Madonna's performance strength consists of letting us know that she knows what she's doing, even as she does it (New York's Stage Deli offered a sandwich fittingly called the Madonna Tongue n' Chic). She's at her best playing wisecracking dames like Susan in Desperately Seeking or Mae in A League of Their Own, characters for whom jokey self-mockery feels most natural. But in other roles (most egregiously as Rebecca Carlson in Body of Evidence), the effort of keeping a straight face seems to flatten out all of Madonna's usual animation. Her most recent film performance, in Swept Away (directed by her British husband, Guy Ritchie), contains both these extremes: Madonna has a field day vamping as the snarling, cartoonishly vicious Amber in the first half of the movie, but as the tame and devoted Amber of the second half, she's blah. What's missing is the savvy brand of narcissism that fuels Madonna's vast energy. Without that, she's just a person with limited acting skills in someone else's movie. 3. Madonna isn't sexy According to my recent unscientific poll, this is a fairly common view among straight men; for every one of them who found her "hot," there was another who claimed she was "hard" or "fake." When I watched Madonna thrashing and flailing on a large bed in feigned masturbation during her Blonde Ambition tour, I was amazed by how unerotic her performance was. Roland Barthes captured my feeling perfectly. "Striptease," he wrote, "is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked." What I didn't grasp was that Madonna wasn't trying to be sexy in the way I thought. Madonna's point was lost on me for a reason. Despite having grown up in footloose San Francisco during the libidinous era of hot tubs and feathered hair in a perfectly liberal-minded family, I managed to somehow emerge with a 1950s notion of female sexuality: Girls and women were sexy only to the extent that they didn't realize it and weren't trying to be. In other words, women had to be erotic by accident. Prince Andrei's comparison in War and Peace between the beautiful but worldly Hélène and the ingenue Natasha perfectly illustrates my sexual values growing up: ". . .Hélène seemed, as it were, covered with the hard polish left by the thousands of eyes that had scanned her person, while Natasha was a girl appearing décolleté for the first time in her life, and who would certainly have felt very much ashamed had she not been assured by everyone that it was the proper thing." For the first big chunk of her career, Madonna's goal was to rid the world of precisely the mind-set I was saddled with. "It's really important to me that people look at life a different way," she once said, "seeing that women can seduce and women can have sexual fantasies." Having avoided boys in high school and remained a virgin until the age of 20, I was deeply wary of this message, although Madonna would certainly have argued that I was exactly the type who most needed to hear it. Of course, being an object of male desire has historically meant being an object -- powerless and passive -- which is why some feminists chastised Madonna early on for what they felt was a message to young women that they should use their bodies rather than their minds. But Madonna's intent was to turn this equation on its head: to urge women and girls not just to own their sexuality but to revel in it, wield it -- to be empowered by it rather than weakened. Her method was simple. She retooled herself into a creature who was taut and voluptuous, a game sex kitten with the pecs and lats of a dominatrix. With this extraordinary physique, she enacted scenarios in which sexual desire was expressed in the form of power, even domination, over men. Whether or not you thought Madonna was sexy had a lot to do with how you reacted to this sort of power display: for some it was a turn-on; to others it was frightening, even grotesque. My brother, Graham, told me, "Madonna is fascinating to men because she has a set of balls herself," which hits the point precisely. By combining sultry "female" traits with domineering "male" traits, she mixed people up. This helped make her a mascot of gay-male culture, as well as the darling of postmodernists like Camille Paglia, who celebrate fragmentation and contradiction. But to us traditionalists, male and female, she looked like a freak. Several men told me recently that they found Madonna sexier now than in her bad old days. I would agree. Presently in her midforties, married with two kids, Madonna's stats would suggest that the moment had come for a decorous withdrawal inside sweater sets. But she moons the stereotype of the frumpy mom with the same glee as she did the passive sex kitten. She looks fantastic -- her body lithe as ever, her hair and makeup softer than before -- as if she were daring you to try and saddle her with some lame middle-aged stereotype. "There's nothing sexier than a mother," she has said. Interestingly, Madonna's public sexual role-playing seems to have little to do with the way she conducts herself in private. She performed oral sex on a Vichy bottle with memorable brio in Truth or Dare, but in an interview with Carrie Fisher that same year she spoke frankly of her aversion to fellatio. Referring to her former lovers, she said, "They don't tell me I give good head, believe me, because I don't give it. . .Who wants to choke?" One of the few revelations in Andrew Morton's biography is that Madonna was clinging and needy in relationships -- calling lovers compulsively, overwhelmed by jealousy, even sexually passive. Her husband, Ritchie, is known to be a laddish sort; in interviews he has referred to Madonna (no doubt with his own tongue in cheek) as "the missus," "the wife" and "my bird." Madonna appears to savor the role of adoring wife; in an interview last year, she attributed her husband's sexiness in part to his "super-macho ways" and has taken his surname. These facts startled me at first, but they make sense -- when it comes to sex, Madonna is an evangelist; she's trying to puncture stereotypes, and she assumes a range of guises in order to accomplish this. And if one reason she's been so avid to empower women and raise their sexual confidence is that she has felt in herself the pull of the traditional weak role and is fighting against it -- well, that would make the most sense of all. Lately I find myself looking at very young women and wondering: Are they less hung up than I was? They seem like it, with their tanned navels winking in the open air. A generation of young pop stars has clearly gotten the Madonna message; even the famously virginal Britney Spears seems comfortable faking sexual rapture onstage and in her videos. As a girl in puberty, I might have benefited from a role model like Madonna; as a mother who just hit 40, I'm delighted by her example. And if girls today are more comfortable with their sexuality, if they're able to inhabit it more easily and joyfully than I was at their age, then men, presumably, are also the beneficiaries--except the ones who prefer their sex kittens declawed. 4. Madonna is inauthentic The elements of Madonna's creations are all derived from somewhere else -- Catholicism, gay dance clubs, Marlene Dietrich, musical trends already in the making. How, one might ask, could someone become an era-defining star without doing or saying or singing anything truly original? One answer -- popular among her critics -- is that she's done it through sheer business savvy. Forbes magazine reported, "Where Detroit seems to have a difficult time retooling and turning out a new product line every couple of years to stimulate its customers, Madonna does not." From this perspective, her artistic decisions are purely cynical, the machinations of a master manipulator with excellent cultural antennae but no ideas of her own. What this theory doesn't explain are Madonna's rather colossal failures. I mean her movies, some of which are such obvious catastrophes (and would have been even without Madonna) that it's hard to imagine any calculating person reading those scripts and thinking, This will be a shrewd career move. Her worst, Body of Evidence, contains such memorable lines as "That's what I do. I fuck." What self-respecting master manipulator would mess up so badly again and again? It just doesn't make sense. The other problem with calling Madonna inauthentic is that she draws such attention to her own inauthenticity that the "gotcha" factor is practically nil. When she dressed up as Marilyn Monroe in her "Material Girl" video, it was never with a sense of wanting to be Monroe; it was a quote, playful and self-conscious. One feels the same thing about a more recent Madonna incarnation: the Deborah Harry punk guise (ripped skirt, safety pins, feathered hair) she assumed during the first few songs of her 2001 Drowned World tour. "Fuck off, motherfuckers," she hollered at the audience at one point. If this had been meant seriously, it would have been ludicrous, but of course it wasn't; Madonna was practically winking as she said it, referencing a musical period that she and the audience both recognized. And so on, from her frothy Marie Antoinette to her Evita phase to her geisha getup for "Nothing Really Matters" to the cowgirl ensemble and southern twang she adopted later in the Drowned World tour, after doffing her punk threads. These are quotations: a visual form, if you will, of the popular musical trend of sampling. And as with sampling, Madonna's originality lies in the arrangement of these familiar references into new works that astonish and entertain. "I can't remember what the misconceptions are anymore," she said last year. "That I'm cold? That I'm calculating? Well, maybe it just means I'm highly organized, ambitious and focused, and those are traits people feel more comfortable attributing to men." As to the notion that her image shifts are cynical marketing ploys, she said, "I am not reinventing myself; I am going through the layers and revealing myself. I am on a journey, an adventure that's constantly changing shape." In other words, she's just following her gut. Her claim may seem far-fetched -- how could anyone's gut be right so many times? On the other hand, would a machinating cynic have a better chance? In the end, no one makes him-or her-self an era-defining star -- just picture how many we'd have if that were possible! It's the public that collectively picks a handful of celebrities who express the qualities it craves at a particular point in time. And for the twenty years of Madonna's reign, authenticity has been of less interest, culturally speaking, than appropriation. Personally, I'm made nervous by this shift. But the fact remains that Madonna has become an era-defining star not despite her "inauthenticity" but in part because of it. 5. Madonna is the kind of person I hate. She comes off as a very consistent type -- one of my least favorites. Madonna seems like the kind of person who, as a kid, would have laughed hysterically at a joke no one else got and then when you laughed, too, would have stopped suddenly and said, "What's so funny?" Madonna describes herself as having been an outcast in high school. "I was a football player's nightmare," she said last year. "Everyone thought I was a freak. They didn't go out with me. . .I just didn't know how to play the game." Morton's biography tells a different story: her classmates, including a "school sports hero" who apparently was Madonna's first lover, all describe her as popular, vivacious and a bit of a show-off. Madonna may have felt like an outcast in high school, but I trust Morton's description. When she told her overweight hair stylist in Truth or Dare, "Sharon, I beat up on girls like you when I was little," I believed her: I felt as if she were talking to me. Madonna comes off as the classic queen bee, that type who surrounds herself with subordinate and adoring acolytes (in Truth or Dare it's her mostly gay-male dancers and others in her employ on the Blonde Ambition tour) who serve as her audience and entertainment. They vie for Madonna's good graces, sometimes falling out with one another in the process, and she treats them with maternal indulgence so long as they remember their places. As her clandestine audience, we're admitted to Madonna's inner circle so long as we collude in whatever cruelties she concocts to keep things lively. On learning that the luckless Sharon has been raped after going out one night, Madonna's first reaction is a guilty snicker. "I'm sorry I'm laughing," she says (to us?). It's awful and enthralling and familiar from long ago -- that old schoolyard choice between playing along with someone racy and mean or slinking into obscurity with duller, gentler friends. Of course, the Blonde Ambition tour was twelve years ago. Since then Madonna has become a mother, a devotee of the Kabala (an ancient Jewish mystical practice with a Hollywood following) and of yoga, has lived in London for the past several years and has married. "I've changed," she said two years ago. "Having a child has made me a lot more sensitive, more responsible, a lot more aware of my actions and my words. . .I was much more selfish and self-involved before." Her music has changed, too, moving toward a densely textured electronica that I, for one, like better than anything she's done before. It would be a disappointment if Madonna had been etherized into pure sweetness and light. Not to worry. The video for the benign-sounding "What it Feels Like for a Girl," from her Music album, turns out to be a paean to female rage (it was directed by Ritchie, known for his stylishly violent films). Madonna plays a jumpsuited criminal who plucks a doddering old woman from a nursing home and ferries her along as an unwitting passenger in a swath of destruction that includes stealing two cars, blowing up a gas station and finally decimating herself and the elderly passenger by smashing their vehicle into a pole. MTV refused to play the video, a decision that generated none of the controversy that its ban of "Justify my Love" for obscenity did in 1990. Madonna says she wrote the song while pregnant with her second child and hiding it from the world, unsure whether her relationship with Ritchie would last. As a woman, I'll admit to feeling a nervy thrill, watching the rage I've felt at points in my life writ large in such compact, spectacular fashion. But the message is transparent: Indulging such rage is suicide. For Madonna, it's fantasy only; even when her moves have looked self destructive, she's always emerged unscathed. To be loved as a celebrity, she once said, "You need to disappear, run out of steam, run out of ideas...You need to have a drinking or a drug problem. You have to go in and out of rehabs so people can feel sorry for you. Or you need to kill yourself, basically." But Madonna has avoided all of that: no rehabs or suicide attempts, no arrests or collapses or devouring lawsuits or serial divorces or appalling plastic surgery -- scandals, yes, but always of her own making and always, finally, to her own advantage. Sometime very early on, Madonna learned a different way to subvert her rage and quell the fear and pain that are usually handmaidens to an ambition as ravenous as hers: hard work. "I ultimately end up making my own work," she has said. "I don't sit around waiting for other people to give it to me. I've had to do this to ensure myself constant employment." Morton's account of Madonna's early performing years is a litany of wrong turns (including the fact that her first single, "Everybody," was marketed as the work of a black artist) that could have terminally discouraged a less tenacious and resourceful performer. But no matter what went wrong, Madonna always had a next move. She kept producing good material by playing to her own strengths and finding people to compensate for her weaknesses. This ability to create year after year in the face of loud and persistent nay-saying is the single thing that has ensured Madonna's ongoing success. I can only admire it. Now comes the point where the writer is supposed to indulge in a bit of prognostication: what's next? I could do this--ruminate sagely over the staying power of her marriage to a macho guy ten years younger or tsk that those tank tops might not cut it when she's 50. But by defying twenty years' worth of such speculations, Madonna has made a lot of smart people look like dummies. So I'll pass. Better to admit that I have no idea what she'll do, except that I can't imagine her stopping. There's pleasure in not knowing--especially when term limits on fame seem shorter than ever and the surprises we get from celebrities are rarely pleasant. Madonna hasn't exhausted us because we haven't exhausted her, which is another way of saying that she hasn't exhausted herself. I'm tempted to say that Madonna grew up, but maybe it's just that I did.

Love in the Time of No Time

teameight — Tue, 23 Nov 2004 13:53:43 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) The city is full of people we can't reach. We pass them on sidewalks, sit across from them in the subway and in restaurants; we glimpse their lighted windows from our own lighted windows late at night. That's in New York. In most of America, people float alongside one another on freeways as they drive between the city and the places where they live. To lock eyes with a stranger is to feel the gulf between proximity and familiarity and to wish -- at least sometimes, briefly, most of us -- that we could jump the hedges of our own narrow lives and find those people again when they drift out of sight. In a sense, the explosion of online personals speaks to the fervency of that wish. In the first half of 2003, Americans spent $214.3 million on personals and dating sites -- almost triple what they spent in all of 2001. Online dating is the most lucrative form of legal paid online content. According to comScore Networks, which monitors consumer behavior on the Internet, 40 million Americans visited at least one online dating site in August -- 27 percent of all Internet users for that month. The sites they visited range from behemoths like Yahoo! Personals and Match.com, which boasts 12 million users worldwide, to smaller niche sites catering to ethnic and religious groups and to devotees of such things as pets, horoscopes and fitness. In between are midsize companies like Spring Street Networks, which pools the personals ads for some 200 publications nationwide, including Salon.com, the Onion and Boston Magazine, and sites like Emode and eHarmony, which specialize in personality tests and algorithms for matching people. A recent entrant, Friendster, conceived of as a site for dating and meeting new people through mutual friends, has become a raging fad among the younger set and now claims more than three million members. The societal reasons for this fury of activity are so profound that it's almost surprising that online dating didn't take off sooner: Americans are marrying later and so are less likely to meet their spouses in high school or college. They spend much of their lives at work, but the rise in sexual harassment suits has made workplace relationships tricky at best. Among a more secular and mobile population, social institutions like churches and clubs have faded in importance. That often leaves little more than the ''bar scene'' as a source of potential mates. (Many single people I spoke to saw this as their only option, aside from online dating.) Improved technology -- namely, the proliferation of broadband and the abrupt -- partly explains online dating's surge in popularity. More critical still is the fact that the first generation of kids to come of age on the Internet are now young adults, still mostly single, and for them, using the Web to find what they need is as natural as using a lung to suck in air. They get jobs and apartments and plane tickets online -- why not dates? Still, a fair number of people continue to feel a stigma about dating online, ranging from the waning belief that it's a dangerous refuge for the desperate and unsavory to the milder but still unappealing notion that it's a public bazaar for the sort of people who thrive on selling themselves. The shopping metaphor is apt; online dating involves browsing and choosing among a seemingly infinite array of possible mates. But those who see a transactional approach to coupling as something new and unseemly would do well to pick up a novel by Jane Austen, where characters are introduced alongside their incomes. There is nothing new about the idea of marriage as a business transaction. Serendipitous love is what's new, love borne of chance, love like what engulfed my grandparents after my grandfather, then a resident physician at a Chicago hospital emergency room, happened to remove my grandmother's appendix. Serendipitous love as a romantic ideal is a paean to cities and their dislocations, the unlikely collisions that result from thousands of strangers with discrete histories overlapping briefly in time and space. And online dating is not the opposite of this approach to love, but its radical extension; if cities erase people's histories and cram them together in space, online dating sites erase both cities and space, gathering people instead under the virtual rubric of a brand. The defining fact of online dating is that it begins outside any context -- historical, temporal, physical. To compensate, dating sites offer the old-fashioned comfort of facts: income, life goals, tastes in music, attitudes toward having children -- the sorts of things you might wonder about a stranger you locked eyes with. To ask whether this lack of real-world context is ''good'' or ''bad'' is to oversimplify; online personals are a natural outcropping of our historical and technological landscape -- one more proof of the fact that time and space are ceding their primacy as organizers of our experience. Better questions might be, How do they work and how is the way they work changing the nature of courtship? FIRST IMPRESSIONS Online dating profiles may begin as jokes or time wasters at work or good deeds on behalf of single, lonely friends whose digital picture you happen to have in your hard drive. But for the serious online dater, the personal profile -- the page alloted to each client on dating Web sites -- quickly assumes a pivotal importance. Whether visible or hidden (meaning people can see it only if you contact them first), profiles are as intrinsic to online dating as cards are to poker. The profile does the legwork of materializing before potential love interests and braving with a smile their contemplation, dismissal, exegesis, mockery or the whiplash of being zapped among friends as an e-mail attachment whose subject heading reads, ''Check this one out.'' The profile never sleeps. It keeps vigil day and night, dutifully holding your place in the queue of romantic prospects drummed up by the thousands of searches all over the world whose criteria you happen to meet. What this means is that tens of millions of Americans, a great many of whom have never gone near a virtual-reality game, find themselves employing ''avatars,'' or digital embodiments of themselves, to make a first impression in their absence. Dating profiles are works in progress, continually edited and tweaked, fortified with newer, more flattering pictures. If they were physical documents, they would have the velvety, dogeared texture of beloved children's books or 19th-century family Bibles. Often they're made collaboratively, with friends, or at least vetted by someone of the same sex as their target audience. Many online daters have more than one profile, sometimes on the same dating site. (Before Spring Street Networks limited the number of profiles a single person could post, lone individuals were known to have a few dozen.) Greg, a 23-year-old secretary and aspiring rock singer who lives in Brooklyn, has two profiles on Nerve.com. Recently, his profile answered the question ''Why you should get to know me'' with a short paragraph ending: ''Because I have condoms in my back pocket but don't hit on anyone. I'm quiet, complacent, pretty, and utterly diabolical.'' Greg acknowledged in an e-mail message to me that his approach was ''pretty risky'': ''The ad will attract fewer women, most definitely, but the ones who respond will be very likely candidates for a good date. . . . If I was bored and looking to go on a lot of dates, I'd have a different picture and a funnier, more verbose ad.'' His earlier profile was indeed more expansive and earnest -- the headline reads, ''Make sure she gets home safe.'' And as any online dater will tell you, the picture is the most crucial profile component. (Among the several cottage industries that have sprung up around online dating is that of personal profile photography.) ''I'm no photographer,'' Greg writes (my weeks of conversation with Greg have occurred entirely by e-mail; we have never spoken or met), ''but I've spent a lot of time trying to take sexy pictures of myself for these ads, and the good ones have produced lots of responses.'' Greg estimates that he has gone out with between 30 and 50 women he met online since he first posted a profile nearly three years ago. His second meeting, through amihot.com -- one of several dating sites where members can rate one another's pictures -- led to a relationship that lasted a year and a half. Greg is 6-foot-4 and, judging by his pictures, possessed of a tousled rock 'n' roller handsomeness. Like a lot of online daters I corresponded with, he doesn't have Internet access at home; his online activity occurs almost exclusively at work (he minimizes the screen when his boss walks by) or at Internet cafes on weekends. ''It is impossible to draw the line between my online social life and my real-world social life,'' Greg says. ''Without online personals, there is no telling where I would be living, who I'd be hanging out with, what clothes I'd be wearing or how busy my nightlife and sex life would be (believe me, they are busy).'' Notice that Greg refers to his profile as an ''ad.'' This is common parlance and helps to explain why a lot of people -- especially those older and less Web-inclined than Greg -- are squirmy about posting one. Lorraine, a 39-year-old mortgage officer in Cherry Hill, N.J., and the divorced mother of three teenagers, had no photo posted on her original profile with Match.com, and her descriptions of herself were vague. A tepid response spurred her on. She uploaded a photo and wrote a lengthy profile, whose ''about me'' section includes: ''My ideal man is someone who respects a truly good woman and knows how to make her feel special, important and loved. . . . A man who would give of himself before he gives to himself. (Ouch! I bet that hurt).'' Lorraine was honest, she says, in her choice of picture and report of her physical dimensions, but this isn't always the case; most online daters have at least one cranky tale of meeting a date who was shorter or fatter or balder or generally less comely than advertised. Small lies may even be advisable; by dropping a year or two off her age, a 40-year-old woman will appear in many more men's searches, and the same is true for a man shorter than 5-foot-11 who inflates his height even slightly. But for all the fibbing and fudging that go on, outright lying about who you are is generally regarded as uncool and self-defeating. Think about it: if all goes well, the person will ultimately agree to meet you, at which point they'll discover you're not a race-car driver from Monaco who speaks five languages and owns an island in the Caribbean. Evan Marc Katz, a screenwriter and veteran online dater, has started a business called E-Cyrano.com that will actually write someone's personal profile in his or her own voice after a lengthy interview. Katz, 31, favors another popular metaphor for online dating: job hunting. ''It is really a résumé,'' he says of the profile. ''You're taking the available facts, and you're cleaning them up.'' But for all the metaphorical aptness of shopping and job hunting to describe online personals generally, they neglect the most basic truth of the profile itself: regardless of its tone -- hipster irony in Greg's case, gushy sincerity in Lorraine's -- making and posting a profile is an act of faith. Like throwing coins into a well, there is an earnestness about doing it at all. Which is why even people with a cynical view of personals tend to speak about their own profiles with disconcerting pride. Yasmeen, a 26-year-old recent law-school graduate, went on only one date in three years in Columbus, Ohio, where she says her ethnicity (she is half Indian, half Filipino) made her ''invisible.'' She posted a profile through Jane Magazine, but chose not to meet any of her respondents for a year and a half. Still, she said: ''When I'm lonely, it helps to know there is someone out there who is looking for me. . . . And while my ad may not be 'the real me,' at least there is potential for me to be that best version of myself. Even for just a small part of a day.'' FLIRTING Here is part of the expansive introductory e-mail message Greg wrote to Sam, a 23-year-old graphic designer, in response to her profile: ''Subject: Hi. ''It's weird. I'm in the middle of noting to myself how you misused 'perceptively' (shoulda been perceptibly) when I get to a word I've never seen before: 'ideationally.' Everyone always tells me I shouldn't be so harsh when grading the grammar, spelling, etc. in people's ads and responses, but I can't help it. . . . If you like to go out to dirty rock shows and drink at bars from time to time, or if you think you'd like to let my roommate cook for you while we all act like retards, you and I could get along. Please respond.'' Sam did, in an e-mail that began: ''And here I was congratulating myself on my 170 I.Q. Dammit. . . . I am all about dirty rock shows and bars.'' Referring to Greg's remark in his profile that he carries condoms in his back pocket, Sam concluded: ''P.S. You know, you have to use the condoms, or discard and replace. . . . Just F.Y.I., so you can start hitting on bar skanks before it's too late.'' There is no shortage of ways to flirt online. The most obvious are codified right into the dating sites as nonverbal signals people can click at each other: ''winks,'' ''smiles,'' ''breaking the ice,'' depending on the site. While women are generally more comfortable approaching men online than in bars, men still tend to make the first moves, and since women with attractive pictures (Sam is 5-foot-11 with long blond hair) are usually besieged with responses -- she's had several hundred since posting her first ad last spring -- it behooves a man to think hard about his opening salvo. Greg's style has evolved over time: ''It used to be: 'I like your ad. Check out mine. Hope to hear from you.' . . . But I've found that long-winded and entertaining messages get responses more than half the time, while boring, mass-mailed messages can't beat a 1-to-5 response/message ratio.'' Online daters are constantly innovating ways to shanghai the technology into flirtatious use: a 34-year-old opera singer and actor created a new profile of himself, ''Brooklynboy,'' that was entirely a response to a particular woman's profile, ''Brooklyngirl,'' that had smitten him. But if flirting in the real world consists of no-strings banter between two people who feel a mutual attraction, online flirtation is its inverse -- it happens in the presence of everything but physical attraction. Two people who have read each other's profiles may know each other's hobbies, income, turn-ons, religious affiliations, political views and whether or not they want children, but they have no idea whether the frisson these avatars of themselves manage to whip up in the void will translate into life. When Brooklynboy met Brooklyngirl after a week of strenuous flirtation, there was so little mutual attraction that they never made it to a second date. Online flirting happens, then, in the conditional voice, and there's a general sense that it shouldn't go on for too long. The exact progression from first contact to in-the-flesh-meeting varies among daters and age groups. For younger people, who grew up with instant-messaging programs, e-mail will often lead to an instant-message exchange (or several), followed by a meeting; those over 30 tend to prefer the phone. David Ezell, 39, who is gay and runs a rare-book business online, refuses to exchange more than two or three e-mail messages before moving to the telephone. ''There's a lot of men who are on the fence about their sexuality. . . . this is their sexual outlet: writing personals ads,'' he says. ''They're never going to meet anybody, and they don't want to. . . .That's the first step in intimacy, swapping phone numbers.'' Ezell had a serious long-term relationship with a physician he met online, and when that relationship failed a year and a half ago, he returned to the personals. Making a timely segue from virtual to real-world flirtation is hardest when two people are talking across a physical distance. Angel, a 42-year-old divorced father who lives in Boston, made contact with Carmen, a 39-year-old divorced woman who had just moved from Puerto Rico to Connecticut, on LatinSingles.com, where his profile is posted in Spanish. Angel was skittish about relationships; after separating from his wife of 18 years, he spent several months homeless, sleeping in city shelters and in his car because his job at a printing company didn't pay enough for him to afford an apartment of his own. He and Carmen communicated by e-mail and then moved to the phone. ''I did not go by the looks of her, because she had no photo posted on her profile,'' Angel said. ''I was basically just going with what the heart said.'' After a month of e-mail messages and phone calls, they made a plan for Carmen to drive to Boston so they could meet. ''We met at South Bay shopping center in the parking lot, right in front of Toys 'R' Us,'' Angel said. When he first saw her, he recalled, ''I said: 'Wow. Damn, I'm good.' Because she is a very attractive lady. I was definitely speechless. We were both shy, but slowly we started to loosen up and get to the same type of conversation we were having over the phone. We got a bite to eat, and then we went to get a drink, and she stayed over that night.'' They slept in separate rooms, and Carmen went back to Connecticut the next day. She now visits every weekend and plans to move to Boston in December. CHEMISTRY Angel and Carmen had it; Brooklynboy and Brooklyngirl didn't. ''Chemistry'' is a word you hear a lot among online daters: sine qua non of the enterprise and the object of a fair bit of fetishization. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a dating log kept by Regan, a 37-year-old technical writer in Atlanta, since she posted an ad a year and a half ago on Salon.com. ''M: Sang in the car; zero chemistry; started writing me poems and stories. A: Too young, too tiny, had roommate problems and bored me. C: Zero chemistry; I was sure he was gay. K: Great chemistry, but too straight for me. Lives in my building, of all things. R: Had had a recent bankruptcy and actually skipped out on his bar tab, appalling me. M.P: Came from California to meet me. A waste of a few days -- there was zero attraction.'' The early stages of an online acquaintance happen on spec, with the mutual understanding that chemistry will be required in order for things to proceed. This puts a fair amount of pressure on that first meeting -- both parties tend to arrive with chemistry sensors keyed to a quivering state of alertness. When chemistry is absent, on both sides or (more painfully) just one, a cut-your-losses mentality prevails. ''Sorry but it just wasn't there for me'' e-mail messages are the polite response to a chemically inert date; just as often, the disappointed party will simply fade away, a conventional rudeness that is especially jarring to newcomers. Being on the receiving end of these rejections can be bruising, because the rejection comes not from a total stranger but from a person you've e-mailed and talked to and possibly become fond of. In September, Lorraine, the New Jersey divorcée, had tea on a Sunday afternoon with an attorney she had spoken with at some length on the phone. She said that on first seeing him, ''My initial reaction was: shorter than I like, he's not great looking but he's O.K. looking. I would have given him a chance and gone out again.'' But the attorney sent her an e-mail message that began, ''I think you're a wonderful woman, but. . . .'' A week later, Lorraine was still trying to figure it out. ''You think, what is wrong with me?'' she said. ''I'm 90 percent sure it's physical, that I'm just not the perfect body. I try. I wear a small size, but I'm probably not what he's looking for.'' Or was the problem that, as a way of making conversation, she had mentioned a conflict she was having with a neighbor -- did the lawyer think she was grubbing for free legal advice? Or could it have been her personality? ''On a first date I laugh, I smile, but I don't crack jokes,'' she reflected. ''So I was thinking, Maybe he wanted someone who was fun immediately.'' Lorraine's failed marriage began with love-at-first-sight, so she is wary of instant chemistry. ''A lot of times that spark is just lust anyway,'' she said. She's looking for something that will evolve and endure, but fears that in the chemistry-fixated world of online dating, that sort of bond would never have time to flourish. And there are those who say that the culture of online dating is itself inimical to the chemistry its practitioners crave. Someone actively dating online may have as many as five or six dates in a week (''serial dating'' is the term for this), which can make for some fuzzy-headed folks beholding one another across tables. Just organizing that much dating activity is a challenge; at one point, David Ezell had his dates and prospective dates arranged on an Excel spreadsheet. Leslie Hill, 34, who works in human resources in Silicon Valley, estimates that she went on 100 online dates before meeting her second husband on Match.com. She kept track of the multitude in a dating binder, printing out the profiles of every man who contacted her and filing them under different headings: ''Under Consideration,'' ''Chatting Online,'' ''Chatting and Going to Meet,'' ''Met and Would Like to See Again'' and, for men she didn't want to see again, ''NMF,'' or ''Not Moving Forward,'' a category borrowed from human resources. During phone conversations with prospective dates, Hill would scribble notes about their lives: ''I would write it down: 'has two sisters and a brother,' 'worked there and there,' and if I went out, I would go through my binder and refresh myself: 'O.K., this is Bob. He went to Chico.' I hoped that when I got to meet the person, I was real and genuine.'' For Greg, who isn't looking for a serious relationship, the chemistry issue is less acute. In late July, he had a first date with a woman he met online. ''I just don't spend much time trying to figure out where the date will go,'' he said that afternoon, when I asked about his expectations. ''I think she'll be attractive. I think she'll be just a bit heavier than she looks in her pictures, since she did not list her weight anywhere. I think we will get along very quickly. It would be out of line to assume that we're going to have sex, but I think it's a definite possibility. . . . She's told me that my e-mails make her laugh, which might be good or bad, as it is difficult for me to be funny in person before the conversation has gained momentum, and I've actually had dates comment that I'm much quieter than they expected. . . . The key is fun. Intense mutual attraction is optional. Playful lust will do.'' SEX The next day, Greg sent me this account of his date: ''Well, she was a little on the heavy side, as I expected, but wearing it well. She was well dressed and drank quickly at first. I wouldn't say there was an immediate comfort level; she seemed maybe just a little nervous at first.'' They hit a couple of bars on Manhattan's Lower East Side, played pool and ate grilled-cheese sandwiches. The evening ended like this: ''We took the cab to my place and made out during the entire ride, except when I needed to direct the driver. My place is a wreck. My bed is in the living room. It's a good thing that my roommate was already asleep, because I have absolutely no privacy when he decides to walk through the apartment. . . .We got naked, I left the light on, we had some really good sex for around 40 minutes and passed out by about 1:30.'' He concluded: ''I'd say she'd see me again. It will probably happen at some point.'' I remarked to Greg that by virtually any standard, it sounded like a successful date and asked for his evaluation. ''This was a run-of-the-mill date, or maybe a notch better than that,'' he said. ''I liked her, but not enough to merit fireworks. Given the seemingly endless selection, I get to be a little less forgiving.'' Until the late 1960's, marriage was the best guarantor of regular sex. Thereafter, it was being in a steady relationship. But online dating may be on its way to eliminating that particular incentive for commitment. Sites like men4men4sex.com and adultfriendfinder.com or the ''Casual Encounters'' area of Craig's List exist purely to coordinate sex dates among interested parties with complimentary tastes, often on very short notice. But even at the more mainstream sites, one-night stands are commonplace and easy to arrange. L., a 31-year-old information-technology specialist, had several one-night stands during the three years he lived in New York. (He moved to Paris last August.) He let me log into one of his accounts and scour the old e-mail exchanges, a typical one of which (to ''sexyangelina'') reads: ''Let me know if you're interested. . . . I think we could have fun.'' The woman's response: ''Where yah goin'?'' He: ''Moving to Paris.'' She: ''Whoa! Why is that? You're such a cutie! Good luck to you, though.'' This time, ''sexyangelina'' included a private e-mail address, so the communication could bypass the dating site. ''It starts with a few e-mails,'' L. said, ''and goes to I.M. More pictures are exchanged, then it goes to a phone call, and that's when the deal is usually closed. Typically, it doesn't take very long if both people are interested in the same thing. . . . On two occasions the women have come to my place, had sex with me and we haven't had one paragraph of conversation.'' The ability to prospect anonymously for lovers who have no overlap with your actual life is something of a Valhalla for married people inclined toward extramarital sex, and by all accounts, the dating sites are teeming with them. Many are disguised as singles, while some operate quite openly, usually -- though not always -- without a picture. (Friendster and Spring Street Networks allow ''open marriage'' and ''discreet,'' respectively, in their choices of ''relationship status.'') B., a 45-year-old woman who says her husband is unable to perform sexually, has been using the personals for the past two years to find ''playmates'' to consort with during her husband's frequent business trips. She likes younger men, 25 to 35, and usually corresponds with them for about a month before arranging a 30-minute coffee date -- in effect, a chemistry date -- which is the only time she appears with them in public. ''Men are usually pretty aggressive about talking about their sexual preferences, and I try to match that,'' she said. ''After all, I'm not looking for companionship or romantic love here. I want sex, and I want mutual orgasms, and then I want to go home alone. . . . If he expresses reluctance about giving oral sex or being 'scared' of vibrators, then I know he's not for me.'' If the coffee date goes well, B. arranges a meeting either at a hotel or at her date's home; she never ''entertains.'' Despite all the screening, she has had her share of bad experiences, most often in the form of men expecting to be serviced as if she were a prostitute. But she has also found ''regulars'' -- others, similarly attached, who are game for occasional, discreet sex dates. Greg may not be looking for a serious relationship, but he's not after no-strings sex, either. An ideal date for Greg is a woman he can see casually, sleep with for as long as possible and stay friends with when the sex ends. The lack of context around women he meets online doesn't trouble him. ''We had enough in common, I guess,'' he said of the woman he slept with on the first date the previous night. ''I tend to focus more on the fun at hand -- I'm not preoccupied with matching up with a person's life goals or hobbies or anything.'' By the end of that week, he had gone on four dates with women he'd met online (one indirectly; she was the friend of another online date) and had slept with three of them -- a busy week, Greg said, though not extraordinary. He practices safe sex. ''It's more or less understood with everyone that condoms are mandatory,'' he explained. ''I even have a brand. There is also a brand I hate. Also, it's extremely rare for the girl not to have condoms. The one time I forgot mine because of a last-minute pants change, my date had a whole box in her purse.'' One of Greg's dates that busy week was Sam, the woman whose grammar he'd corrected in his introductory e-mail message, whom he'd already been out with several times. Before that date, Greg said, ''she and I are becoming good buds, so I'm not sure she'll still be wanting to have sex.'' When I asked him to explain, he elaborated: ''It seems to be the way things go: sexual desire either disappears or is repressed (who am I to say which?) if the relationship isn't progressing. The less frequently you meet, the longer it can last without getting serious. If you hang out and have sex for a whole weekend, that might well be the end of it.'' He was wrong about Sam, though. ''Sam and I had wonderful, slow, deep sex last night,'' he told me the next day. ''I guess we are not in the buddy zone. Yet. I still think it lacks any romantic interest.'' Around this time, Sam noticed my picture on Greg's Friendster page (I had joined in hopes of finding interview subjects) and contacted me independently. Wired New Yorkers under 30 seem to be universally mesmerized by Friendster, which functions as much as a social cross-referencing system as a dating site: a way of keeping track of, and learning more about, people they have already met in real-world contexts. Sam told me (by e-mail; we've never met or spoken) that she moved to New York a year ago, having just graduated from college. Last spring, after breaking up with her boyfriend of three years, she began posting personals ads online through Time Out New York. As of this writing, she has met 13 of her respondents and slept with 4, including Greg. She said of Greg in August: ''He is inarguably interesting. I can't quite figure him out. Which is one of the perils of online dating -- no references. I have no one to ask whether Greg is a man-whore but Greg himself.'' By ''man-whore,'' Sam meant a player, or a guy who sleeps around and avoids commitment. Sam's most recent profile is directed toward men and women both and states that she's interested only in friendship. ''My intention was to meet girls -- because I know basically no women in New York at all,'' she said. She received only two responses from women, one of whom, Katherine, she met. ''Katherine proceeded to buy me far more drinks than was sensible and then insisted that I come and hang out at her apartment,'' Sam recalled. ''So the one time I went on an Internet date and was drunkenly taken advantage of, it was by a woman.'' Sam has no regrets, particularly since she and Katherine have no friends in common. They haven't seen each other since. ''It is much easier to sleep with people you meet online,'' Sam said, as opposed to friends of friends. ''You don't have to think about whether so-and-so will get mad because you rejected them. Also if it all goes terribly wrong, you can honestly just disappear.'' For Sam, then, the existence of a liminal zone outside the boundaries of her real life made sexual experimentation possible. Those disillusioned with online dating will tell you that its promise of a no-muss relationship attracts people with intimacy and commitment problems. This is probably true. A 50-year-old American magazine editor who lives in Paris says that he has used online personals over the past 10 years to orchestrate ''adventures'' -- rendezvous in foreign locales with women from various European countries. ''There are periods when a frenzy comes upon you,'' he said. ''You really feel yourself in the grip of something that's kind of like a 'high.' The problem comes when you try to make that happen again and the feeling gets progressively more tepid and less exciting each time around. And before you know it, you're looking for somebody new.'' This man calls his present relationship, of one year, ''a record for me.'' Yet he recently posted profiles on two French dating sites. ''This is kind of made for people like me, who prefer fantasy to reality,'' he said of online dating. For this man, though, the promise of a no-strings attachment has often proved illusory. ''Whatever people say, they tend to get involved,'' he told me. ''People tend to lose their hearts.'' JEALOUSY Around the middle of August, a month or so after their first online contact, Greg invited Sam on a camping trip to the Delaware Water Gap with his father and some family friends. On returning to New York, Sam said: ''It's extremely difficult to conceive of someone as a man-whore when he's roasting marshmallows and passing around rum mixed with Wal-Mart sour watermelon soda and joking with his dad. . . . As far as I can tell, he's sweet, thoughtful, attentive, smart, funny and all that stuff that people say when they're obviously falling for someone.'' When I suggested to Greg that camping together was a rather couple-y thing to do, given that he's not interested in a romantic relationship with Sam, he answered: ''I guess I was knowingly taking the risk of sending confusing signals with the invitation. After all, though, Sam continues to give me tons of breathing room and seems to be enjoying her own.'' But as the week wore on, all that breathing room started getting to Sam. ''I haven't heard from Greg since Monday'' she said. ''Drama, drama. It's driving me crazy, actually.'' For a person even vaguely inclined toward jealousy, online dating serves up a weird mix of provocations, peepholes and blind alleys. The very fact that a love interest has a profile posted is an invitation to wonder what else he or she might be up to, and because that profile is more absence than presence, it becomes a projection screen for whatever narcissism or paranoia the beholder may be feeling. (I've had several people tell me that former dates had revised their profiles to include comments aimed specifically at them.) But for all the ambiguity of profiles, the technology of dating sites also allows for some fairly rigorous surveillance; it's hard to deny you've been checking out profiles and answering mail when your own profile reads ''Active within 24 hours'' or, worse, ''Online!'' Marie, a 43-year-old divorced apparel designer, recently became involved with an attractive man her own age. ''We dated several times, and it seemed to be going well,'' she told me. ''There were definite sparks on both sides. . . . Then he got busy with work, and he'd e-mail me and say, 'Hang in there.''' In the midst of waiting, Marie stumbled on a brand-new profile (along with new pictures) that this same man had just posted on the site where she'd met him. Peeved, she e-mailed him asking why he'd had time to create a new profile and spend a good part of the day online but not time to see her. His reply was vague, and it was the last she heard from him. A few days later, she did a search for men on a different dating site and discovered yet another profile of this same man. In this one, he had written, ''If you're over 40, don't waste my time or yours.'' ''I check Greg's Friendster page compulsively, to tell the truth,'' Sam said. ''It lets me put faces into my vague notion of Greg sleeping with other people.'' No wonder --Greg's 93 ''friends'' on the site include a preponderance of lovely, skimpily dressed women who have left him testimonials like ''This boy is one of the smartest and hottest cats out there ;-).'' Before the camping weekend, Sam said about Greg: ''I feel all the time as though the other shoe is going to drop -- like he's too good, and if he's actually not a man-whore, then I really have no idea what he's doing with me. So I'm continually expecting him to disappear . . . which I suppose all connects back to online personals, because he really could pretty much totally disappear.'' REJECTION Sam isn't paranoid; she's realistic. Relationships begun online have a tendency to end there too. This generally happens one of two ways: by e-mail or by no e-mail -- i.e., someone disappears. Regan, the Atlanta technical writer whose dating log I excerpted above, fell in love last spring with a man she met online: a journalist living in Atlanta. ''We e-mailed and talked on the phone for about a year before we met,'' she told me. ''We set up a meeting two times. He stood me up both times.'' The reason was guilt: he had a live-in girlfriend. In April, Regan happened to pass this man on the street, and they recognized each other from the many digital photos they'd exchanged. ''We circled each other, in slow motion, in disbelief,'' she remembered. ''Everything in me relaxed, calmed, stilled. . . . It was IT. The thunderbolt. And he was going through exactly the same thing.'' They began a relationship that flourished despite the fact that the journalist kept postponing the promised breakup with his girlfriend. On Regan's birthday, he sent a gift and a love letter from Europe and left her three messages. ''His heart is completely open, visible at all times, this one,'' she said. Then silence. Days and then weeks began to pass. Because there was no overlap in their work or social or daily lives, Regan had no idea whether the man was still in Europe or had returned to Atlanta, and they had no friends in common to ask. ''I feel like I'll never smile again, let alone laugh,'' she told me. ''Everything weighs eight million pounds. . . . I guess anyone can do anything to you at any time.'' The journalist resurfaced several weeks later with an unsatisfying explanation and hopes of resuming the relationship. Regan agreed to see him and continues to, but repairing the gouge left by his sudden absence has been difficult. People in fledgling relationships begun online can vanish from one another's lives with the same breathtaking efficiency as a line of text deleted from a word processing document, leaving no hole, no gap in one another's daily lives to mark the fact that they were ever there. For some, an awareness of this exit strategy permeates the enterprise, allowing them to skimp on the niceties they would more or less have to extend toward a person they were likely to meet again. Newcomers to online dating either acclimate themselves to these occasional early evaporations or abandon the practice altogether. ''I'm totally irritated at how disrespectful it is to just disappear,'' a 27-year-old TV producer fumed after the man she had been dating for three weeks failed to call and then stopped answering her e-mail messages. ''I really don't have the energy or the self-esteem to continue to meet guys whose backgrounds I don't know.'' She was one of several people who renounced online dating in the course of my interviewing them for this article, although the paucity of alternatives soon drove her back and she has since become seriously involved with a man she met on Friendster. Because online relationships begin in a state of mutual absence, ''disappearance'' may be the wrong word for a sudden lack of contact between two people who meet this way; more, these are failures to reappear from the digital murk that came first. And because the avatars who reside in that digital realm often hang about long after their makers have ceased to communicate, it is possible for people to keep distant, prolonged track of one another. Lynn Ross, a clothing merchandiser in her 40's, was involved for three months with a married man who deceived her into believing he was single. The relationship ended nine months ago, but she still checks his profile, noting recently that he continues to update it every week. And Marie, the designer, takes comfort from the fact that a man she loved and was rejected by is often logged into the dating site where they met. ''Sometimes when I see him online late at night,'' she said, ''I think: Good. Another night he's home alone.'' Greg didn't disappear. He and Sam continued to see each other, and in late September, they took a road trip to Ohio to do some renovation work at the home of Greg's aunt and uncle. ''Greg is, in a word, amazing,'' Sam told me after they got back. ''I think if I wasn't being so insanely cautious, I would be head over heels. It's possible that I am already, but am in denial.'' And Greg: ''The Sam thing is still strangely casual. We still talk about Nerve and Friendster meetings (only in the most general terms) as if they are ongoing, though I haven't been browsing the ads much myself. . . . In my mind, it's becoming a good friendship, and in a manner that is largely independent of the fact that we sleep together.'' GETTING SERIOUS Online dates that lead to love -- and they are legion -- are a little like Tolstoy's happy families: for all their quirky particularity, they end up sounding strangely alike. There's Kellie Smith, 33, from outside Boston, an occupational therapist who whimsically clicked ''Love on AOL'' during her lunch break and found herself on Match.com, where she dashed off e-mail messages to several men who interested her. Michael DuGally, 35, a partner in a Massachusetts furniture manufacturing company, was her first online date; they met for lunch and never really parted. Last summer, the couple asked Match.com for a logo banner so they could be photographed with it on their wedding day. They aren't the only ones making such requests, according to Trish McDermott, vice president for romance at Match.com; the company has forked over baseball caps and matchbooks to give away at weddings, along with well wishes and toasts to be read aloud. One couple designed their wedding cake in the shape of a computer, with the top section decorated to look like the Match.com welcome page. Michael and Kellie, whom I met for a drink in Manhattan just after their honeymoon in Greece, call themselves lucky, as if a fluke of chance had brought them together. There was no intersection at all between their worlds, yet the connection they feel, they say, is ''spooky.'' Neither wants children. Both practice Bikram yoga. They don't like making plans, but are very neat. They love to shop. They even drink the same cocktail: Grey Goose orange vodka on the rocks, with two wedges of lime. There are scads of stories like this from every walk of life, so that even the most jaundiced view of online personals must contend with the fact that people manage to find one another this way -- again and again and again. So far in 2003, McDermott says, more than 140,000 Match.com members said they were leaving the site ''because they found the person they were seeking there.'' As of December, Angel and Carmen, the couple who met on LatinSingles.com, plan to be living together in Boston. But removing their profiles from the dating site -- the watermark of commitment in a relationship begun online -- is something neither wants to do. A community of sorts has sprung up among the single people posting on the message boards, Angel says. ''My girlfriend and I, we did create a lot of friendships on this board. We have created a ganglike type of thing.'' There are even plans for ''gang'' members, many of whom have never met, to convene in New York this winter. So rather than remove their profiles, Angel and Carmen hope to bend the genre and create a joint profile of some sort -- as Angel puts it, ''something that will reflect both of us.'' The circularity here is intriguing: an absence of real-world community fuels a schematic, inorganic online ritual that spawns a network of online friendships that ultimately pushes back out into the real world. No context becomes, in effect, a context all its own -- an avatar, if you will, of the city itself. This is how the Internet was supposed to work, and it suggests that the deep impulse behind the success of online dating could reach well beyond dating itself. Friendster lets people search for one another using book titles, band names and TV shows, among other things, as keywords, and its ''interested in meeting people for'' category offers not only ''friends'' and ''dating'' but also ''activity partners'' and ''just here to help.'' Greg used Nerve.com to research nightlife before a weekend trip to San Francisco; he arrived with two prearranged dates and a list of 19 bars he was interested in checking out. The chairman of Spring Street Networks, Rufus Griscom, sees the company as not even being in the business of online dating so much as ''purchasing access to like-minded people.'' The long-term vision, here, looks like something out of a Borges story: a virtual clearinghouse where potential lovers, friends, business associates, audience members and devotees of all forms of culture -- invisible to one another in the shadowy cracks of cities around the world -- are registered, profiled and findable. An alternate dimension where the randomness and confusion of urban life are at last sorted out. Sam and Greg continue to see a lot of each other. They've gone on another road trip and have been spending most recent weekends together. Sam told me: ''We've become a lot closer -- which is to be expected seeing as we've spent so much time in the company only of each other. . . . Everyone perceives us as a couple, actually. On the other hand, I don't think anyone would describe us as boyfriend and girlfriend.'' She enclosed part of an e-mail message Greg had sent her that day: ''You possess an equanimity that is quickly leading me in the direction of Sam worship. I always expect you to be supremely cool, but I temper the expectation by acknowledging the unlikelihood that anyone is as cool as I've come to believe you are, and then you come around and meet the expectation anyway.'' For the moment, Greg is sticking to his story. ''Sam and I are becoming famous friends,'' he said. ''My friends adore her. . . . Her mood seems unchangeably good.'' Whatever kind of relationship Sam and Greg end up having, it's unlikely that the online point of origin will ever fall away completely. ''Online personals come up all the time because everyone has one,'' Sam said, ''and they generate interesting stories through responses or new pictures/writings, etc. When I meet anyone, I check whether they're on Friendster. I discuss other people's profiles, if it's common knowledge that they have one.'' And of course, Sam and Greg still have their own ads posted, signaling to others while they sleep.

Wanted: A Few Good Sperm

teameight — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:22:20 +0000

from the New York Times Magazine (Cover Story) One day last October, Karyn, a 39-year-old executive, pulled her online dating profile off JDate and Match.com, two sites she had been using, along with an endless series of leads, tips and blind dates arranged by friends and colleagues, to search for a man she wanted to marry and raise a family with. At long last, after something like 100 dates in the past 10 years and several serious relationships, she had found the man she refers to, tongue only slightly in cheek, as "the one." It all began last summer, when she broke off a relationship with a younger man who wasn't ready for children and got serious about the idea of conceiving on her own. She gathered information about fertility doctors and sperm banks. "Then a childhood friend of mine was over," she told me. "I pulled up the Web site of the only sperm bank that I know of that has adult photos. There happened to be one Jewish person. I pulled up the photo, and I looked at my friend, and I looked at his picture, and I said, 'Oh, my God.' I can't say love at first sight, because, you know. But he was the one." Sperm donors, like online daters, answer myriad questions about heroes, hobbies and favorite things. Karyn read her donor's profile and liked what she saw. "You can tell he comes from a warm family, some very educated," she said. He had worked as a chef. He had "proven fertility," meaning that at least one woman conceived using his sperm. Like all sperm donors, he was free from any sexually transmitted diseases or testable genetic disorders. "People in New York change sex partners quicker than the crosstown bus," Karyn said. "I'd be a lot more concerned about my date next week." But she especially liked the fact that he was an identity-release donor (also called an "open donor" or a "yes donor") -- a growing and extremely popular category of sperm donors who are willing to be contacted by any offspring who reach the age of 18. The next morning, Karyn called the bank and spoke with a woman who worked there. "She said: 'I have to be honest. He's very popular, and I only have eight units in store right now. I'm not sure how much longer he might be in the program,"' Karyn told me. "Most women in New York impulse-buy Manolo Blahniks, and I said, 'I'll take the eight units.' It was $3,100." The price included six months of storage. That hefty purchase, and the strong sense of connection she felt to the donor, galvanized Karyn: she made an appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist and gave up alcohol and caffeine. At work, she took on a position of greater responsibility and longer hours -- with a higher salary -- to save money. She went on a wait list to buy more of the donor's sperm when it became available. (All donor sperm must be quarantined for six months -- the maximum incubation period for H.I.V. -- so that the donor can be retested for the disease before it is released.) She told her parents and married sister what was going on, e-mailing the donor's picture to her father with an invitation that he meet his son-in-law. She also printed the donor's picture and kept it on the coffee table of her Manhattan studio apartment, where she sleeps in a Murphy bed. "I kind of glance at it as I pass," she said of the picture. "It's almost like when you date someone, and you keep looking at them, and you're, like, Are they cute? But every time I pass, I'm, like, Oh, he's really cute. It's a comforting feeling." When I suggested that she must be a type who is prone to love at first sight, she just laughed. "With online dating, friends used to say: 'What about him? What about him?' I'd say: 'Don't like the nose. Ah, the eyes are a little buggy. He really likes to golf, and you know I don't like golfing.' There was always something. If I said this about everyone," she concluded, "I would have married someone about 75 dates ago." Karyn said she hoped to join a population of women that everyone agrees is expanding, although by how much is hard to pin down because single mothers by choice (or choice mothers), as they are sometimes called, aren't separated statistically from, say, babies born to unwed teenagers. Between 1999 and 2003 there was an almost 17 percent jump in the number of babies born to unmarried women between ages 30 and 44 in America, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, while the number born to unmarried women between 15 and 24 actually decreased by nearly 6 percent. Single Mothers by Choice, a 25-year-old support group, took in nearly double the number of new members in 2005 as it did 10 years ago, and its roughly 4,000 current members include women in Israel, Australia and Switzerland. The California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, owed a third of its business to single women in 2005, shipping them 9,600 vials of sperm, each good for one insemination. As recently as the early 60's, a "respectable" woman needed to be married just to have sex, not to speak of children; a child born out of wedlock was a source of deepest shame. Yet this radical social change feels strangely inevitable; nearly a third of American households are headed by women alone, many of whom not only raise their children on their own but also support them. All that remains is conception, and it is small wonder that women have begun chipping away at needing a man for that -- especially after Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," sounded alarms about declining fertility rates in women over 35. The Internet is also a factor; as well as holding meetings through local chapters around the country, Single Mothers by Choice hosts 11 Listservs, each addressing a different aspect of single motherhood. Women around the world pore over these lists, exchanging tips and information, selling one another leftover vials of sperm. (Once sperm has shipped, it can't be returned to the bank.) Karyn found both her sperm bank and reproductive endocrinologist on these Listservs. Three-quarters of the members of Single Mothers by Choice choose to conceive with donor sperm, as lesbian couples have been doing for many years -- adoption is costly, slow-moving and often biased against single people. Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes. In the 25 years since she founded Single Mothers by Choice after becoming pregnant by accident, Jane Mattes, now 62, has seen her group's membership conceiving at younger ages (the median age among members is 36) and more often having second children. But the biggest change, Mattes says, is that the stigma attached to this form of single motherhood has largely faded. "People used to come into our meetings literally afraid to walk in," she told me. "We don't see that as much anymore. Everyone seems to know somebody who did it, which wasn't the case even 10 years ago." Karyn, who asked that I use only her middle name, never imagined her life unfolding in this way, she told me over dinner at Caliente Cab, where we sat outdoors on an unseasonably warm November night. She has big blue-green eyes, shiny brown hair past her shoulders and an ironic appreciation of certain parallels between her life and Carrie Bradshaw's. She has always known she wanted to marry and have kids. "I certainly never thought I would be the last one standing," she said. "You feel a little bit resentful, like, Gosh, how did I get here? Blind date after blind date -- why can't it be easy for me like it was for other people? Right up until I ordered the sperm and made the doctor's appointment, I was filled with anxiety. I felt sad, overwhelmed. Now I'm completely at peace with it." In the month since we had first talked, she had seen the reproductive endocrinologist and received a clean bill of health. Her hormone levels looked excellent. She planned to have her first insemination in December. Her decision had meshed seamlessly with what had been, until now, a conventional life; her parents were driving in from Long Island the next morning to take her for a medical test to check that her fallopian tubes were clear. Of her mother, Karyn said: "She used to call me once a week with a blind date. Now she'll call once a week with a friend of a friend of a friend who has a daughter who became a single mother by choice." Karyn carried a wallet-size copy of the donor's photo between her MetroCard and her work ID: a fair, sharp-featured young man in a crisp white shirt, his arms crossed. In the past month, she had had a couple of residual online dates, but now she seemed relieved to let that go. "People would say, 'Oh, it's just a date -- don't expect anything,"' she said, sipping her ice water. "'Just go out and have a good time.' But then you'd get four calls that night: How was it? What did you think? Did you like him? Why wouldn't you go out with him again? There was so much pressure. It became a job." Online dating has, if anything, made the search for a partner more callous and mystifying than ever; disappearing has become so easy. "I imagine one day when I get to heaven there will be a whole room full of missing socks and men :)," Karyn once wrote to me in an e-mail message. "I hope the men will be wearing the socks." Now, as we sat outside, she said: "There's nothing I'd like more in life than to have the whole picture and to share it all. To have the baby, to have the miniwagon, to have the husband, morning soccer games and P.T.A. -- he's out manning the grill, and I'm mixing the margaritas. But I think if I had to choose today between becoming a mom or finding the perfect man and I could only have one today, I would choose becoming a mom. And hope that I have my lifetime to find the other." Discussion of single motherhood nearly always leads to talk of divorce. More than a third of American marriages end that way; often there are children involved, and often the mothers end up caring for those children mostly on their own, saddled with ex-spouses, custody wrangles and nagging in-laws. Considered this way, single motherhood would seem to have a clean, almost thrilling logic -- more than a third of the time, these women will have circumvented a lot of pain and unpleasantness and cut straight to being mothers on their own. Last October, when I visited the Manhattan apartment of Daniela, a 38-year-old German advertising executive who had recently been inseminated with the sperm of a male friend, her guest room was peppered with toys belonging to the young son of a visiting friend who had broken up with the boy's father by the time he was born. "They got a child out of love, and the parents couldn't deal with one another," Daniela, who asked that I use only her first name, told me. "And now she lives in Germany; he lives here. He doesn't pay any money if he doesn't see the child. So there's a constant battle over it. The child is torn in between. She has to deal with the father. I won't have to deal with the father." Daniela's apartment is neat and spare, with hardwood floors, a basket of colorful slippers by the front door for guests and an entire wall devoted to pictures of her family in Germany. (She also has a married sister with three children who lives in New Jersey.) A 6-foot-1 blonde who speaks with disarming frankness, she came to America 10 years ago with the man she would later marry, only to find that he didn't want children. After their divorce, she was engaged to another man who kept postponing their wedding -- she still has a set of "Save the Date" cards in her closet. Having always wanted passionately to be a mother, she decided to use a "known donor," a close gay friend, also German, to help her conceive. Known donors have some big advantages over anonymous ones: they can contribute fresh sperm, which is more motile and long-lived than frozen. (As much as half of a man's sperm dies during freezing, which is why sperm-bank donors need to have extremely high sperm counts.) With a known donor, there is a theoretically endless supply, and it's free, whereas "washed" sperm, cleared of debris for an intrauterine insemination, or IUI (recommended for women using frozen sperm because the sperm is placed directly into the uterus and doesn't have to swim past the cervix), generally costs between $200 and $400 a vial, plus $100 for shipping, not to mention another $100 if the donor is "open." The big disadvantage to using a known donor, as Daniela learned when she posted a query on a Listserv of Single Mothers by Choice (she had been avoiding the meetings, finding them too full of "personalities"), is that in most states the donor will always have full parental rights, regardless of whatever deal he and the mother might have worked out in advance. This didn't worry Daniela; she wanted her child to have a father, even a partial one. "His parents are ecstatic about it," she said of her donor friend as we sat drinking tea at her dining table. "He's smart; he has a great character; he's a friendly person. I said, You don't have to pay for the child, but if you want to have it with you or you want to participate, you're more than welcome." An unforeseen hitch emerged at the reproductive endocrinologist's office, where Daniela and her friend were posing as an engaged couple to avoid having to quarantine his sperm, as required by federal and New York State regulations before a woman can be inseminated by a man who isn't already her sexual partner: he had an extremely low sperm count. The doctor "spun" the sperm to concentrate it before placing it in Daniela's uterus, and she and her friend had already tried three inseminations, the last one a few days before my visit. She was now in the middle of what is known in fertility parlance as the "two-week wait" to find out if she was pregnant. She wasn't optimistic. In vitro fertilization might be more successful, but she has a stressful job and was leery of the intense hormone treatments. Daniela also found anonymous donors deeply unappealing. "These people don't do that because they want to help the population, let's face it," she said. "They're doing it for the money and because they maybe want to populate the earth. A) you're going to have a lot of siblings out there. B) I question what kind of personality these people can be. You read characteristics like height and ethnicity, what kind of education -- it's the information that you don't get that is much more important. I'm thinking about happiness or moods, these kind of things." Sperm banks do try to address the amorphous question of character; many include psychological studies of donors as well as "staff impressions." Some offer audiotaped interviews in addition to the lengthy written questionnaires, but Daniela said she felt that these materials would only confuse her. She did have a few ideas of what she might look for: she wanted a man of her same blood type, O positive. Because she herself is so tall, she preferred a medium height. (Short donors don't exist; because most women seek out tall ones, most banks don't accept men under 5-foot-9.) She was also attracted by the idea of a donor of another race. "I believe in multiculturalism," she said. "I would probably choose somebody with a darker skin color so I don't have to slather sunblock on my kid all the time. I want it to be a healthy mix. You know how mixed dogs are always the nicest and the friendliest and the healthiest? If you get a clear race, they have all the problems. Mutts are always the friendly ones, the intelligent ones, the ones who don't bark and have a good character. I want a mutt." Her African-American friends questioned this strategy, suggesting that her child's life would be harder if he or she was perceived as nonwhite, but Daniela said: "If that's what I believe, I have to go by that. And it might help the world also if more people are doing it that way." While many single mothers look for donors whose features and coloring resemble their own, Daniela's attraction to a diverse gene pool isn't so unusual. A 40-year-old African-American woman I spoke with wanted a Latino donor so that her child would have lighter skin and nonkinky hair. "I'm the African-American," she told me. "The child will get that from me." Q., a 43-year-old health-care manager who attended a yeshiva from kindergarten through high school (she asked that I use only one of her initials), first sought out a Jewish donor. "Everybody either had glasses, they're balding or their grandmother was diabetic and had heart disease -- typical Jewish population," she told me. Her solution: a 6-foot-2 Catholic, German stock on both sides, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. "He really was the typical Aryan perfect human being," she said, laughing. "He was a bodybuilder. He played the guitar and the drums, and he sang. He was captain of the rugby team in college. When I had the in vitro process done, the embryologist said: 'This is some of the best sperm I've ever seen. It just about jumped out of the test tubes."' Q.'s golden-curled, blue-eyed daughter has just turned 2. For the moment, though, Daniela was still hoping that this recent insemination with her friend's sperm would take. She dreamed of a little girl. And like virtually all of the prospective single mothers I spoke with, she had every intention of finding a mate after the child was born. "Taking this whole 'I have to find the father of my child' out of the equation might make it a lot more relaxed and easier," she said. "The guys are smelling it, and they run." And even if the guy held still, he might not be the one you'd pick -- or even consider -- if you weren't desperate for kids. "I see so many women who are in unhealthy relationships, where they really just try to get married and then have a child and break it off," Daniela said. "If they would consider this as an option, I think they would be happier, and the children would be happier." I went to a special meeting of the New York chapter of Single Mothers by Choice a few weeks later, in mid-November. It had been arranged for members willing to have a reporter present. We met on the Upper West Side, in a long rectangular rented room whose high ceiling magnified the yelps and stomping feet of toddlers who had come with their mothers. Women contemplating single motherhood or trying to get pregnant ("thinkers" and "tryers") arrived an hour later, Karyn among them. It was her third meeting. The mothers' discussion was mostly practical: a pretty blonde in a black T-shirt that read "Sweet and Toxic" had noticed a sign in her health club forbidding children over the age of 3 to change in opposite-sex bathrooms: what would she do in a year when her son was 3? She also wondered about teaching him how to urinate into the toilet bowl; a friend had suggested throwing Cheerios in for him to aim at. (A mother of a 4-year-old boy discouraged this practice; it might tempt him to throw other things into the toilet.) A woman trying to arrange a domestic adoption asked about nannies versus day care. When the general meeting began, each woman in the largely white group introduced herself. Two were pregnant; another had twins; one had adopted a daughter from Haiti. One had not been able to conceive and planned to become a foster parent. Anyone walking into the room would have assumed that the women with kids had husbands or partners at home, but in three hours of discussion, the only men who were mentioned were donors, anonymous and known. These women's independence of male partners in their family-making often brings a corollary reliance on one another -- for sympathy and information, for companionship (Single Mothers by Choice sponsors vacations every year for single mothers and their kids) and the chance to show their children other families like their own. At times, the relationships can become even more enmeshed: one mother I spoke with, whose twin sons were conceived using both donor eggs and donor sperm, gave her leftover frozen embryos to a friend who was having fertility problems. The friend is now pregnant with a child who will be this mother's own sons' full sibling. While nearly every woman I spoke with had her own history of romantic near misses and crushing disappointments, most also saw advantages to proceeding on their own. "This baby will be my baby, only my baby," Karyn told me that night at Caliente Cab. "The thing I'm afraid of is that after doing this, I might not want to get married. It seems like a lot of hard work, a lot of compromise. Someone ends up short, and usually it's the mom, because by the time you get to the child and your husband and the dog, there's not much left." After introductions, the group broke into smaller discussion groups, mothers and pregnant women at one end of the room, thinkers and tryers at the other. Among the thinkers, two women were holding off on making a decision while they looked for work -- something I heard a lot. Such delays put these women in a bind, though; each month is precious in terms of fertility. "I can't stress enough how much money worries me in this process," I was told by a 35-year-old Canadian woman who will soon begin trying to get pregnant. "I'm alone; there's no safety net. If you picture it like the scales, on the one side there's my money and on the other are the years left to have children." Karyn had moved from the thinkers group into the tryers since her last meeting. She had brought a bag of pretzels, which she shared with the others, most of whom were slightly older than she -- slightly in real terms, but through the telescopic lens of a woman's fertility, the difference was vast. "Trying to get pregnant at age 41 is nothing like trying to get pregnant at age 38," a 41-year-old grimly remarked when Karyn asked if she had begun trying. "My gynecologist wouldn't even do any of the tests. She said because of my age, just go to deal with infertility, don't waste any time." Because many single women have waited years, hoping the right man would come along, and because the majority use sperm that has been frozen, they are disproportionately at risk for fertility problems when they finally decide to have children. Many report being stunned that their fertility was so fragile. "I thought I could have kids until my period ended, and menopause is 50, right?" said another woman I met at a Single Mothers by Choice meeting in Washington, who began trying to conceive at 44. The sense of not having been informed, of being too late, is so often expressed by would-be single mothers in their 40's that it has doubtless spurred some younger women in the Single Mothers by Choice network to act more precipitously. (I interviewed two women who conceived while still in their 20's.) Still, the near-miraculous success of some older mothers can give hope -- often unrealistic -- to those still fighting the odds. Most doctors refused to take the 44-year-old Washington woman except as an egg-donor patient, but one did -- and she became pregnant with a girl who is now almost 4. Another woman in the D.C. group went through 16 attempts and a miscarriage, using both IUI and I.V.F., before her son was finally born. At 39, Karyn was still on the right side of this equation, but just barely. "I'm waiting for my next period to start the beginning of December," she told the older woman. "I'm about to start trying, either before or after Christmas Day." But it didn't work out like that. A few days before Christmas, after receiving a string of e-mail messages from Karyn chronicling her march toward insemination, I found one with the subject line, "Do you believe in signs?" She had written: "Sit down, ready for this one? I arrived home from work again at 11:30 last night to be greeted by my doormen telling me how very sorry they were -- a steam pipe explosion blew right through my apartment with a flood.. . .My apartment is destroyed and needs to be gutted.. . .I am taking all of the events as a sign that this is not the right month to get pregnant." She planned to wait three months, at which point she would be weeks away from her 40th birthday. In November, I met Daniela in her Midtown office, which has a modern industrial design and faces east into what that afternoon was a bleak gray day. As she had feared, the last insemination with her donor friend hadn't worked, and she had resigned herself to the idea of using an anonymous donor instead. She had even found two that appealed to her, both from a small Manhattan sperm bank where she would save money on shipping by picking up the samples herself and carrying them to her doctor's office. As I sat across her desk, she pulled up the donors' descriptions on her computer. One was Indian: "He's got black straight hair," she told me, "brown eyes, he's six feet but he only weighs 150. Which is good. If I have a girl, she wants to be skinny, and if she can eat what she wants, that's perfect. You don't have to get in fights about food." The Indian donor's complexion was described as "medium/dark," and he had proven fertility. He had a master's degree in business. He was bilingual, Hindu, single and liked traveling and music. His family-health history looked good. The second donor was a mix of Chinese, Peruvian and Italian. He was olive-skinned, 5-foot-9 and weighed 169. "Thick hair, which is also nice," she said, "because if I happen to get a son, I don't like bald guys. He's Catholic, which I would obviously like, because I am. He has a very interesting book collection: he likes Hesse, Henry James, Lorca. Excellent vision. His parents are pretty boring professionally, so I was a little concerned about that. But when they started their businesses, they probably didn't have all that many chances, the father being Peruvian and the mother being Chinese-Italian." She especially liked the fact that he was a full-time student in theater. "He has creative aspirations," she said. "Those things are hereditary." Mostly from a sense of obligation, she Googled "sperm" and began scanning lists of donors at other banks, using O-positive blood type as her first criterion. "This one is a Hispanic fair," she mused. "But Hispanics can still be very, very fair. Then we have a Dominican-Honduran, black straight hair, olive skin -- he is really too heavy, 220, are you kidding me? Now here we have a Caucasian. Research assistant in psychology -- no. You don't study that if you haven't touched upon it somewhere." At the California Cryobank site, the donors numbered in the hundreds. "All those Germans," Daniela murmured, scrolling down. "How am I proving my healthiness if I do the same race again? Black African, they do have three of them. Look how tall they are. And see how heavy the two O-positives are?" Eventually she happened on a search engine that listed donors from all of the banks without revealing which bank they were from without payment. Visibly weary as she scanned the list, she reflected: "I still like my Chinese-Peruvian-Italian. He seems a little bit more special somehow. From this little bank . . . it's like a little country. There he is. There he is! Chinese-Peruvian-Italian, full-time student!" The sheer familiarity of the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian made him leap from the haze of anonymous data like an old friend. And that feeling counts for a lot. It's no wonder that a number of single mothers I spoke with used the phrase "I felt a connection" in explaining their choice of donors. Despite the obvious parallels between shopping for sperm and dating online, there is finally no comparing them -- a sperm donor is providing half the DNA for your child, and whether or not you choose to think about it, he'll be there forever in the child's tastes and choices and personality. No one wants a decision like that to feel arbitrary. Daniela had other news: she had met a man she was interested in. It happened during a business trip the week before; he was meeting friends in the bar of her hotel. "He was so good with his friend's kid," she said. "I'm, like, 'Oh, you must have three kids.' He said, 'No, just nieces and nephews."' They struck up a conversation, and she ended up joining his group for dinner. She was honest with him about her plans to get pregnant, but the news may not have sunk in; he had been calling ever since, eager to see her again. He was in his 40's, African-American, and had his own business. "It's nice to know that just because you have these plans, you're not unattractive or undesirable," Daniela said. She felt more at ease with this man than she had with other men in recent years and attributed this to her decision to move ahead with motherhood. "It was a completely different feeling," she said. "It empowers one, because you're not relying on somebody else. You don't have to bring up the big life conversations." While many women, like Karyn, relish their emancipation from the grind of dating and pursue motherhood with a single mind, others are intrigued by what romance could mean, absent the imperative of finding a father for their children. One woman, a 40-year-old graduate student in biology in the Midwest, told me shortly after her first insemination: "One of the things that was so powerful about deciding to have a baby on my own was saying, I'm taking charge of this piece of it; I'm not going to wait around for a guy to give it to me. And my feelings about what I want from men right now are really changed. I don't actually want a big relationship. Now I want occasional companionship and sex." On a recent date, between inseminations, this woman noticed the difference. "It was one of these dates where the guy's just telling you his sad story and his complicated relationship with his mother. In my previous dating life, I would have been, like, I'm not going to get seriously involved with a man like this. I'm going to get rid of him. This time I was, like, I think he's hot, so if I just keep listening, maybe eventually we'll have sex. And we had great sex. It was really hot." At one point, she had sex with two different men in the same weekend (both times using condoms) not long after an insemination. Observing her own behavior, she said: "Maybe in six months or a year I'll have more insight about it, but something radical is going on in my brain about my relationships with men. O.K., so I'm not going to keep trying to have this picket-fence-y life. I'm waving the white flag. And now I have permission to directly pursue what I want. It's a very curious and ambivalent liberation, because I would rather not be single. It's not my first choice." Daniela told me that regardless of what happened with the new man, she was certain of one thing: she would go ahead with her plan to inseminate. "I've done the mistake of putting this on hold several times, and I cannot afford it," she said. We looked together at her November calendar on her office computer; sandwiched among coming trips and meetings were her expected days of menstruation and ovulation, noted in German. She planned to inseminate in December, so she would have to pick the donor by the end of the month. Meanwhile, the new man had proposed coming to New York in mid-December, which happened to be the time when she thought she would be ovulating. Daniela said she wouldn't feel comfortable using protection with him while she was going to a doctor's office to be inseminated. "That would be weird," she said. "But leave it up to destiny? That's a possibility, I think." I was astonished. Had she thought through the implications of having this man's child? I asked. What if the relationship didn't last? What if she turned out not to like him at all? Daniela countered that his parents were happily married, and he had good relationships with his siblings, but what I heard in her voice was confusion. Then I recalled something she had told me in a previous conversation: "I have this big fear in my life that I never will be pregnant. You see these pregnant women on the street, and you're, like, How does it feel? What's going on in your mind, in your heart? I want to feel it!" Remembering this helped me to understand: it is hard to want something so badly and to try to prevent it. As it turned out, he didn't visit in December. Daniela didn't inseminate, either. Her Indian donor was out of stock, and the Chinese-Peruvian-Italian's sperm was in quarantine until early January. Meanwhile, she had learned that her health insurance had a $2,000 annual cap on fertility treatments that she had already exhausted on the inseminations with her gay friend. So it was early January when I finally met Daniela at 8 a.m. outside the Empire State Building, where her sperm bank is located, to pick up two vials of sperm from her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian donor. She had hardly slept the night before from excitement, she told me. At the bank, a nondescript lab, Daniela paid $450 and was given an 18-pound white canister with an orange "Biohazard" sticker on it. She had been there once before; her donor friend had had to go out of town and left frozen sperm for her. "You walk out on the street, and you've got the container in your hand," she said, "and then there's all these containers on two legs." One such two-legged container was in the elevator when we got on: a workman surrounded by tools. "You're unbuttoned, you know that," Daniela said, looking at his fly. The guy's fair skin turned crimson, and he buttoned up, grinning but avoiding her eyes. She explained, "I think it's better that I tell you now, so you don't go through the day like that." "If they notice, they shouldn't be looking there," he said in a strong Irish accent, smiling right at her now. Daniela smiled back. "Are you Irish?" she asked. "I'm German. That's why I don't understand a word you're saying." This was flirtation, right? I was still asking myself that question as we left the elevator, but I wasn't sure: what does flirtation even mean in the context of a woman hauling a canister of sperm to a doctor's office so he can inseminate her? Or, to put it another way, what's the point? "He was a sweet kid," Daniela said briskly as we left the building and stepped onto the dusty, bacon-smelling street. At the doctor's office, we repaired to an examining room, where Daniela's doctor, an avuncular man in wire-rimmed glasses, took a sonogram of her ovaries and uterus. "The lining looks very good," he said. "It's the proper time to do this. We'll thaw out the specimen." In a different room, he removed a "straw" of frozen sperm from the canister of nitrogen and placed it into a tub of warm water to thaw. Most sperm banks use plastic vials nowadays, but this particular bank had stuck with an old system. The doctor left the room while the sperm was thawing, and Daniela filled me in on the new man. They hadn't seen each other since that first meeting two months ago; trips had been arranged and fallen through, often because he was short of money. Still, they were in close touch. Three days ago, she told him on the phone about the planned insemination, and his response was wary. "How do you react to dating a person that would be pregnant with somebody else?" Daniela said, paraphrasing his reaction. "Just like I am feeling completely weird carrying that bucket, it must be the same feeling for him when he meets a person like me." Yet she was hopeful that things might still work out. "If we're going to be great together," she said, laughing, "we're going to be great together with that Eurasian child." The doctor came back and placed the straw of clear, yellowish sperm in a slim glass cylinder and removed a drop to look at under a microscope. "We have very good motility," he said. "This is a good specimen." Daniela looked, too. "I see lots of them," she said, excited. "Last time I had to look for four." The doctor left so Daniela could change into a gown and lie down. When he came back, he drew the yellow liquid into an oversize syringe that tapered into a skinny tube. It is hard to say what Daniela's chances of becoming pregnant would be; statistics on the success rates of IUI using frozen sperm suggest that they are between 8 and 15 percent in a given cycle. Daniela would return the next morning for a second insemination; many doctors believe that consecutive inseminations increase the chances. Wearing a small miner's light around his head, the doctor went to work. He was done in three minutes. Daniela lifted her hand, fingers crossed, as he left the room. A week into Daniela's two-week wait, I heard from Karyn again. She had been living in a friend's apartment for weeks while the various insurance companies haggled about how much to pay out for the damage to her apartment. Her computer had been destroyed, along with many of her possessions, including her file of medical records and donor materials. "That's one thing that made me cry," she said. "Just to see all the papers with his information and history and his picture. . .seeing it all soaked." She had resigned from her job -- the brutal hours were wearing her down and said she believed she had other good prospects. Meanwhile, she had decided to go ahead with her insemination plan. The big day came two weeks later, in late January. Her mother went with her, and Karyn called me a few hours after, elated. The next day I received an e-mail message whose subject line read, "I think I already feel a kick :)." Over thanksgiving vacation, I took the train to Darien, Conn., to meet Shelby Siems and her 2-year-old son, Christopher, who had driven down from their home in Marblehead, Mass. Shelby, 44, grew up in Darien and had come to visit cousins and friends over the holiday weekend. She is part of a rising number of single mothers who are having second children; when we met in Connecticut, she was four months pregnant with a second son by the same donor who sired her first. She and Christopher picked me up at the train station, and we drove to a nearby pizza restaurant that was still quiet at that midmorning hour. Shelby is fair, with long blond hair and pale blue eyes that are prone to tears. Christopher is also pale, a watchful, intelligent child with wispy reddish hair. At lunch, he said "please" and "thank you" and rolled a small green train engine over the laminated tabletop while Shelby and I talked. For a 2-year-old he was remarkably patient, but occasionally he cried, "Mama, Mama, I want to hold you." "I'm right here," Shelby said. Once a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, Shelby was finishing up an M.F.A. in nonfiction. Her thesis project is a book about her experience as a single mother, an experience that has been more grueling than Daniela's or Karyn's will most likely be because Shelby has no immediate family; she was an only child of older parents who died by the time she reached her early 30's. She inherited money that has allowed her to go back to school and to support Christopher, but she is alone in the world. In Christopher's first weeks of life, there were periods of many days when they saw no one but each other. Shelby does have a boyfriend: a 52-year-old bachelor who works at a pharmaceutical company, whom she met at a party when Christopher was a month old. "He's been a great person in my life and Christopher's life, but he's not going to marry me," she explained over the phone when we first spoke. "Some people just don't want to do that, and he's one of those people." The fact that Shelby is in a relationship at all is unusual; the majority of mothers I spoke with -- even those with older children -- had remained single. Many expressed a willingness to date if the opportunity were to come along, but they work long hours to support their kids, and when they're not working, they want to see them. For all the comparisons between being divorced with children and having them alone, there are critical differences: an ex-husband who spends any time at all with his kids frees up pockets of time when a woman could potentially see someone new. Even minimal child-support payments would reduce the financial burden on her, and substantial ones could allow her to work less. Perhaps most important, a child with only one parent is immensely dependent on that parent, and the mother of such a child tends to feel her responsibility acutely. It can be painful -- and expensive -- to leave your child with a baby sitter after a whole day away, just to go out on a date. Despite her age -- Shelby was 42 when Christopher was born -- she was determined that her son have a sibling. "He has even less of a family than I do, because he doesn't have his whole father's side of the family," she told me. "The only person he has is me." She wanted to use the same donor again and put the matter to her boyfriend, who made it clear that he wasn't interested in fatherhood. She began stocking up on the donor's sperm (most banks keep a reserve supply of each donor's sperm for women who want second children) when Christopher was still an infant. "I want my son to have a full sibling," she said. "I want to feel like he has one person in the world who is a complete blood relative after I'm gone. I did not want my son to feel deprived, that the other sibling had a father and he didn't." To be sure that there was no chance the child would be his, Shelby and her boyfriend were celibate for the year it took her to conceive, which she finally did at 43, after eight tries, using I.V.F. The fact that a child born of an anonymous donor knows only half his biological family concerns single mothers with more robust families than Shelby's, too. The Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site where families can register children conceived by donor insemination in hopes of being matched with half-siblings or even the donor himself, has proved a boon for many single mothers. The site's founder, Wendy Kramer, estimates that the majority of the 7,400 registered members are single. Recent publicity has prompted a jump in the registry's membership and matches -- more than 1,500 have been made so far, not just among half-siblings but also among sperm (and egg) donors, 320 of whom are registered on the site, and their progeny. Q., the former yeshiva student who ended up choosing the 6-foot-2 German rugby player as her donor, developed severe hypertension during her pregnancy and had to be hospitalized several times. Her symptoms lingered even after her daughter was born, and she became preoccupied with what would happen to the baby girl if she were to die. Her brother and a sister are selfish, she says, and her mother is elderly. Last fall, she went to the Donor Sibling Registry and got a shock: the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting -- he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families -- four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers -- have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007. "I was elated," Q. told me. "To quote the granny on 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' I wanted her to have kin. Now here's kin that look like her; that're in her same age range. I even thought that if I get to know somebody really well from this group, maybe I would pick one of these other mothers, if they would be interested, to be designated as a guardian for my daughter." Q. is one of several people in the group with a keen desire to meet her donor one day. And they aren't sitting idle; one woman had magnified his baby picture, in which the donor is blowing out candles on his birthday cake, to the point at which a first name may be legible. Another mother has a hunch about the donor's provenance based on the way he pronounced certain words on his audiotape. At the Washington Single Mothers by Choice meeting, I met a woman who had easily identified the donor for her 9-month-old son using Google. "The person left specific enough information for me to just type in those words and click," she told the group. "But what to do with that information? I'm bound to keep him anonymous as per the contract, but what about when my son says: 'What do you know? Tell me anything about my dad."' When we'd finished our pizza and salad, Shelby drove to a playground. The brightly colored equipment was empty in the frigid cold, but Christopher bounced in his car seat. "Slides!" he cried. He bounded out of the car, refusing mittens, and commenced to climb, panting plumes of steam. Whenever he was in earshot, Shelby spelled out the word D-A-D; lately Christopher had become fixated on the idea of a daddy. "He goes to a day care, and he's the only child of a single mother in his class. I think they spend a lot of time talking about Daddy," she told me. Christopher had referred to a neighbor as Daddy, as well as Regis Philbin. "Interestingly, he doesn't call my boyfriend Daddy; he's 'mamma's friend.' The other day, I said, 'Someone special's coming to see you today -- do you know who it is?' I expected him to say [her boyfriend's name]. But he said, 'Daddy?"' The single mothers by choice I spoke with generally hold that the story of their children's origins should be told to them from the time of birth, long before the child is old enough to understand it. But Shelby feels that at 2, Christopher is too young to hear that he doesn't have a father. Shelby's son is part of a population of kids that is only now beginning to be studied, though a 1992 survey of teenagers raised by single mothers found that they experienced markedly fewer adolescent problems than children of divorce. A continuing study of a group of children in England, now 2, who were conceived by single women using donor sperm concludes that so far they are healthy and well adjusted. But the long-term questions of how these children will fare or about the different experiences of girls and boys have yet to be answered. As we watched Christopher tear around the playground, Shelby reflected on her occasional frustration at the distance her boyfriend maintains from her family. Over Christmas, he would be leaving town for two weeks to visit his family, and Shelby and Christopher would spend the holiday alone. They had no plans, and Shelby felt pressure to make Christmas festive for her son. "On the other hand," she said of her boyfriend, "he's still attracted to me physically through all my body changes, and he and Christopher are so fond of each other. They have a very sweet relationship." Her boyfriend usually visits on Sunday mornings. "A huge wave of relief comes over me," Shelby said. She can relax or do dishes or take a nap. "I feel, like, Wow, this must be what it's like to have a husband every day of the year. I can do my own thing, but I love to just stand across the room and watch them together." When I next spoke to Daniela, in late January at the end of her two-week wait, she was on a business trip. Her voice sounded weak and tired. She had just gotten her period. And the new man had finally made it to New York, but the visit had been a disaster. "I guess it has to do with the fact that I'm going through this," she said. "You kind of protect yourself. He was saying he was one of these what he calls old-fashioned guys: if his wife is going to have a child, he's going to be in the waiting room until the child is delivered and washed. I'm, like, wait a second. Don't you think you should go through this together? He said, 'No, I'm going to faint, and I'm going to throw up."' His visit to New York was supposedly a business trip, but in the end he didn't have much to do. "He's not cut out to be a provider, to be a protector or to be a patriarch," Daniela said. "He can't be there when the child is born; he can't make the living for the family. Maybe what bothered him is that he couldn't offer what he would like to offer. So he made it, like, taste bad." I had never heard her so low. "Everything is so hard, and it's so degrading," she said. "You always think that you'd go through this with somebody that would support you. You don't think about having all the problems, let alone doing it on your own." I was humbled by the grueling ordeals many women had undergone on their paths to single motherhood: years of trying to conceive, hormone treatments, hospitalizations, miscarriages, untold thousands of dollars spent -- all without a partner to buffer the strains and disappointments. And being a single parent is no easier: whether it's a matter of trying to get a photo taken of you with your child or finding a way to shower without worrying that you won't hear your baby cry or accommodating a difficult work schedule, being a single parent can require compromises and jury-rigging that might awe a person with a partner. A longtime employee of New Jersey Transit spent a year working the 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift, which meant waking her daughter at 4 and walking her across the street in her pajamas to a neighbor's house. Her daughter slept on the sofa until the neighbor woke her and took her to school with her own children. "It's probably harder than you ever think it's going to be," this mother told me. After a moment, she added, "My only regret is that I didn't do it sooner." It is a measure of how deep the pull toward motherhood can be that thousands of women from many different walks of life are making this choice, using reproductive and communications technology in ways that not only break with tradition but also make it seem obsolete. Daniela did another insemination in early February, this time mingling the sperm of her Chinese-Peruvian-Italian with another donor from the same bank who had proven fertility. It didn't work. Neither did Karyn's first try. When I spoke with her early this month, she was preparing to move back into her apartment, whose renovation would soon be complete. There was still one last chance to become pregnant before her 40th birthday in April. "In a perfect world, I'll get pregnant this cycle," she told me. "I'll start working the first week of April before I'm officially really pregnant, and we'll live happily ever after." When I spoke to Daniela a couple of weeks ago, she had recovered from her disappointments and had just been inseminated again with the sperm of a French-English-German-Scandinavian attorney with proven fertility. She had also struck up an e-mail correspondence with another woman on the Single Mothers by Choice Listserv. They had met for a drink and hit it off, and Daniela planned to go with her to a Single Mothers by Choice meeting. She seemed reconciled to the fact that it might take a while to become pregnant, but she was no less determined. Her fellow would-be single mother is 36, Daniela told me, but her situation is complicated by a boyfriend who has children. "Why don't you tell him you've got some kids, too?" Daniela recalled suggesting to her friend. "They're just not born yet."

Great Rock and Roll Pauses

teameight — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:34:31 +0000

[slideshow id="2445"]

Upper East Side December 2005

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:43:17 +0000

"Found Objects" = Upper East Side/Dec 2005

Original Title: Happy Ending Where: The Regency Hotel, on Park Avenue and 61st Street Why: It doesn't usually happen for me this way, but I had an experience and it prompted me to begin a story. As experiences go, this one was brief: on Christmas Eve, my husband, kids and I were having cheeseburgers with my mom and stepfather at the bar of the Regency hotel (a kind of tradition with us). Washing my hands in the bathroom, I noticed a fat green wallet inside a wide-open bag beside the sink. I had a thought along the lines of: She's lucky it's me, seeing this wallet, and not a different kind of person. Which led to the question: What kind of person? Who is the woman who would look down while washing her hands, see a wallet, and take it? That question stayed with me. Although I wasn't intending to work on stories -- in fact, I was trying to begin a novel set in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II -- I sat down with that wallet in my head and a pen in my hand, to see what might happen. Music: Death Cab For Cutie, We have the Facts and We're Voting Yes History: I myself have been repeatedly robbed: by a motorcyclist in Spain when I was 22, backpacking with friends; years later by a guy in Lisbon who tore my purse off its strap and ran away; by a woman sitting next to me in Penn Station as I waited for a train back to college in Philadelphia, who finessed my wallet from my open bag (I caught her and snatched it back, leading to some intensely awkward moments before she left her seat and moved away). Once, in my early years in New York, someone cut my lock at the gym and stole my purse. Later I received a phone call from the thief, posing as a Citibank employee, and she duped me into giving her my PIN number (in the guise of changing it), then went immediately to a cash machine, and overdrew my checking account. Beginning: It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eyes shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you get back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand -- it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously ("I get it," Coz, her therapist said) and take the fucking thing. "You mean steal it." He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she'd lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a child's striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints she'd used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which she'd lifted from her former boss's lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from stores -- their cold, inert goods didn't tempt her. Only from people. "Okay," she said. "Steal it."

DeKalb Ave April 2007

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 21:23:58 +0000

"The Gold Cure" = DeKalb Ave/April 2007

Original Title: "The House of Shame" Where: At Green Apple bakery (now closed, I noticed last week), after dropping my kids at school, annoyed by people who were talking loudly. Music: The sassy, playful sound of Dyme, a pair of identical twin female rappers I was supposed to write about for the New York Times Magazine (but didn't, in the end). While they were nothing like Stop/Go, and I was sorry their album was never released, I did avail myself of the look and feel of their home recording studio. History: Only one of Bennie's shame memories (which I ended up cutting) was based on fact: in a meeting with some hip hop artists at a Greek Restaurant in Queens, Bennie inhales a flake of filo dough and can't cough it back out, leading to much hacking, teary-eyed embarrassment. In my case, this happened in 1992, in Astoria, where I'd gone after work from my temp job at the Tribeca Film Center to sample spanakopita in a few bakeries before ordering some for my boyfriend's thirtieth birthday party. I inhaled a flake of filo dough and it hunkered down in my lung and would not depart. I had to leave the bakery and stand on the sidewalk, under the elevated subway tracks, trains grinding over my head as I coughed in a panic, wondering if a single flake of filo dough could kill me. It seemed almost miraculous when the flake finally dislodged and my life resumed. My boyfriend was directing a production of Antony and Cleopatra, and the birthday party happened after his show, in the massive, dilapidated loft that our friends Alex and Rebecca were renting on lower Broadway. Toward the end, we wheeled out a huge cake from Carvel, layers staggered like a Ziggurat, decorated with Egyptian stencils I'd bought at the Metropolitan Museum Shop. Beginning: The shame memories began early that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting, while he listened to one of his senior executives make a case for pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band Bennie had signed to a three-record deal a couple of years back. Then, Stop/Go had seemed like an excellent bet; the sisters were young and adorable, their sound was gritty and simple and catchy ("Cyndi Lauper meets Chrissie Hynde" had been Bennie's line early on), with a big gulping bass and some fun percussion -- he recalled a cowbell. Plus they're written decent songs; hell, they'd sold twelve thousand CDs off the stage before Bennie ever heard them play. A little time to develop potential singles, some clever marketing, and a decent video could put them over the top. But the sisters were pushing thirty, his executive producer, Collette, informed Bennie now, and no longer credible as recent high school grads, especially since one of them had a nine-year-old daughter. Their band members were in law school. They'd fired two producers, and a third had quit. Still no album. "Who's managing them?" Bennie asked. "Their father. I've got their new rough mix," Collette said. "The vocals are buried under seven layers of guitar." It was then that the memory overcame Bennie (had the word "sisters" brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partying -- twenty years ago was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky: cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, who'd taken vows of silence, singing the Mass. Wet grass under his knees, its iridescence pulsing against his exhausted eyeballs. Even now, Bennie could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns' voices echoing deep in his ears.

Fort Greene March 2008

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 01:21:58 +0000

"Ask Me if I Care" = Fort Greene/March 2008

Original Title: "Class of '79" Where: The soft, ink-stained red-and-yellow checked upholstered chair my husband and I bought at IKEA soon after we got married, in 1994, for me to write in. And sleep in -- I nap a lot while writing. In fact, all those years of napping have so compressed the chair's left armrest that I can feel the wood inside it pressing uncomfortably on my left ear. The sensation doesn't stop me from continuing to nap with my head in that spot, but I'm hopeful that it's reducing the length of my naps. Music: "Sister Little," by the Sleepers, which I found on U-Tube. It's a lovely song, and reminded me that Ricky Sleeper (who died of an overdose many years ago) was weirdly dazzling onstage. History: I went to the Mabuhay Gardens a lot with my high school friends, and even alone, but much as I longed to merge with the scene around me, I was never more than a watchful, anxious, invisible presence. In retrospect, this seems a lucky thing; in the apartment of a pair of punk rock sisters a friend of mine was living with, "getting high" did not mean smoking a joint, as it generally did in San Francisco in the late seventies, or even taking mushrooms, or dropping acid, but shooting heroin with a communal needle. There was one woman who didn't have the money to buy a fix, so she was left to use the drug-soaked piece of cotton left over when the others were done. In her excitement to finally receive it, she dropped the cotton onto the nubby white wall-to-wall carpet. I remember her clawing and pawing at that carpet, bringing up lumps of synthetic lint and examining each one in hopes that it was the missing cotton. I helped her look. I can't remember if she ever found it. Beginning: Late at night, when there's nowhere left to go, we go to Alice's house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Nuns, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in back where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty tops the hills. Still, if it's Bennie and me I hope for the back, so I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump. The first time we went to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she pointed up a hill at fog sneaking through the Eucalyptus trees and said her old school was up there: an all-girls school where her little sisters go now. K through six you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and a white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, Can we see them? and Alice goes, My uniforms? but Scotty goes, No, your alleged sisters. She leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her. They're both fascinated by Alice, but it's Bennie who entirely loves her. And Alice loves Scotty, of course. Bennie's shoes are off, and I watch his brown heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick it muffles every trace of us. Jocelyn and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes we've smoked. I can't smell the gin we drank at the beginning of the night, pouring it into Coke cans from my dad's hidden supply so we can drink it on the street. Jocelyn goes, Watch Rhea. They'll be blond, her sisters. I go, According to? Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins. Believe me, I don't mistake that for information. I know everyone Jocelyn knows.

West 20's 1998

teameight — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:27:19 +0000

"40-Minute Lunch" = West 20's/1998

Where: At the counter by the window of Le Petit Abeille, a little Belgian café near where my husband and I lived on West 28th between 6th and 7th Avenues. Then, our block was crowded with flower wholesalers, although that trade seems to have largely disappeared from our old block. There was a huge amount of traffic, maybe because of the flowers: lots of honking semi trucks that sometimes made even my beautiful workspace, with its view of the tip of the Empire State Building, hard to work in. On the day I went to Le Petit Abeille, it was raining, and I didn't want to go back outside, so I kept scribbling away. Music: Truthfully, I don't remember. But in those years on West 28th Street we listened to a lot of Bjork, Aimee Mann, Everything But the Girl, and (in my case, I'm ashamed to say), Deep Forest. Why: I'd been obsessed for a while with celebrity profiles -- one of the most debased literary forms currently in existence. My reaction to them was complicated: I hated their fawning, yet felt sympathy for the writers struggling valiantly, always, to uncover something new and meaningful -- or at least to present the same tired goods in a way that felt fresh. History: I have written one celebrity profile: of Calvin Klein, for ELLE, many years ago. The occasion, I think, was the follow-up to his wildly successful first perfume, CK1. While I nurtured fantasies of a deep exchange with Mr. Klein, the profile I produced was no different -- and certainly no better -- than any other. However, I did get a lot of free CK1, whose lemony smell I still love. I wore it for years and years before I ran out. Fact: The worst reading of my career -- by far -- happened at the University of Southern Maine a few years ago, and involved "40-Minute Lunch." I'd been billed as an "experimental" writer, so I felt like I needed to read something strange or risky. I sensed a minute or two in that I'd made a colossal mistake. I had read "40-Minute Lunch" aloud once before, at Bread Loaf, with children in the audience, and there had much hilarity. This time I was met with deep, perplexed silence; the folks in Southern Maine weren't feeling my angry, jealous, fawning interviewer. The reading became a split-minded experience: one part of me was boring my way doggedly through the story, while another part was engaged in an active, urgent discussion: They hate it now, and he hasn't even tried to rape her yet! Should I stop reading and say, Look, I can see this isn't working; why don't we all just move on to the reception? Why did I ever think this story was funny? It's offensive, in bad taste -- I can't believe I wrote it. And this is the tasteful part...Etc.

Beginning:

Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way.

Actually, small isn't the word; she's minute -- a human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone. She smiles at me as I take my seat and rolls her eyes at the phone. Her hair is that blond you see everywhere, "highlighted," my ex-fiancée calls it, though on Kitty Jackson this tousled commingling of blond and brown appears both more natural and more costly than it did on Janet Green. Her face (Kitty's) is one you can imagine looking merely pretty among the other faces in, say, a high school classroom: upturned nose, full mouth, big blue eyes. Yet on Kitty Jackson, for reasons I can't pinpoint exactly -- the same reasons, I suppose, that her highlighted hair looks superior to ordinary (Janet Green's) highlighted hair -- this unexceptional face registers as extraordinary.

She's still on the phone, and five minutes have passed.

Madison Square December 2008

teameight — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 15:38:36 +0000

"Out of Body" = Madison Square/Dec. 2008

Original Title: "Your Past is My Future" Where: Near a place where my younger son was taking a day-long Lego robot-building class during Christmas vacation. It was one of those warm December days. After dropping him off, I tarried -- for what felt like the first time in decades -- in Madison Square Park. I was surprised by how fine and manicured it looked, how upscale, really. Then I realized that my point of comparison was 1987, when I'd first moved to New York and was sleeping on a foam couch in someone's dark living room on West 69th Street, and working as a temp. One of my early jobs was on East 23rd Street, right by Madison Square, and on my lunch breaks, I would bolt outdoors and sit in on a bench there, watching junkies nod off on all sides of me. Then I would go back to work, having brushed up the night before on whatever word processing program was required (usually WordStar or WordPerfect) at a place on Broadway where you could rent computer time. I always brought my own floppy disc with fiction I was working on, so that I could switch back and forth between what I was supposed to be doing and what I desperately wanted to do. Music: Curve, DOPPLEGANGER History: After the foam couch on West 69th Street, I moved into a 5th floor walkup studio on East 27th Street. It was a glorious apartment: a narrow room facing south, quiet and flooded with sunset at the end of each day. I lived there for two years, but in my mid-twenties time seemed to pass more slowly, so according to my current perceptions it felt more like five or six years. I worked from 1:00 to 6:00 pm as a private secretary, and wrote fiction from 8:00 am to noon. On weekends I went running along the East River. After the Williamsburg Bridge, I followed exactly the path that Rob and Drew take, past the warehouse, under the FDR. That's when I discovered the garbage beach where the last scene of "Out of Body" takes place. Whenever I reached it, I would stop and stand on the garbage for a while, watching boats pass along the river and listening to the roar of traffic on the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. That garbage beach seems to have disappeared. I've looked for it from the Brooklyn Bridge -- where I run now -- but there's no sign of it; the space between the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge looks as sparklingly refreshed as Madison Park. Beginning: Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it. Drew says he's going straight to law school. After practicing awhile, he'll run for state senator. Then U.S. senator. Eventually, president. He lays all this out the way you'd say, After Modern Chinese Painting I'll go to the gym, then work in Bobst until dinner, if you even made plans anymore, which you don't, if you were even in school anymore, which you aren't, although that's supposedly temporary. You look at Drew through layers of hash smoke floating in the sun. He's leaning back on the futon couch, his arm around Sasha. He's got a big, hey-come-on-in face and a head of dark hair, and he's built -- not with weight-room muscle like yours, but in a basic animal way that must come from all that swimming he does. "Just don't try and say you didn't inhale," you tell him. Everyone laughs except Bix, who's at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were trying to be funny, and they're afraid you'll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail, even at something so small. Drew takes a long hit. You hear the smoke creak in his chest. He hands the pipe to Sasha, who passes it to Lizzie without smoking any. "I promise, Rob," Drew croaks at you, holding in smoke, "if anyone asks, I'll tell them the hash I smoked with Robert Freeman Jr. was excellent."

Brooklyn, NY

teameight — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:30:23 +0000

7:30 pm Greenlight Bookstore 686 Fulton Street (at South Portland) (718) 246-0200 info@greenlightbookstore.com http://abookstoreinbrooklyn.blogspot.com/

Westchester, NY: An Evening of Short Stories and Live Music

teameight — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:11:54 +0000

8:00 pm The Emelin Theater 153 Library Lane Mamaroneck, NY 10543-3609 (914) 698-0098 info@emelin.org http://www.emelin.org/insights.html From best-selling novelist Jennifer Egan (The Keep, Look At Me), a spellbinding new book that circles Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, but the reader does, in intimate detail. Two of these sly, surprising stories will be read by Malcolm Gets (Tony Nominated Star of Amour, Passion, Dreamgirls, and "Richard" on t.v.'s long-running series Caroline In The City) and Florencia Lozano ("Tea" on ABC's One Life To Live and LAByrinth Theater company member), with a live musical interlude with singer/songwriter/piano man, Josh Rutt (recently featured in Westchester Magazine as one of the five best up-and-coming local musicians). The evening will be directed by Lisa Rothe, an award-winning director whose work can be seen on stages across the country. A discussion and reception with the Author, Director, and Performers, as well as a book signing, will follow the performance.

Boston, MA

teameight — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 03:15:24 +0000

7:00 pm Brookline Booksmith 279 Harvard Street Brookline, MA 02446-2908 (617) 566-6660 http://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/

New York, NY: Mixer Reading and Music Series, with David Goodwillie and others

teameight — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:16:25 +0000

7:00 pm Cakeshop 152 Ludlow St., bet. Stanton and Rivington Facebook Page for series

Philadelphia, PA

teameight — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:18:03 +0000

7:30 pm Free Library of Philadelphia 1901 Vine Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103

Los Angeles, CA

teameight — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 03:19:07 +0000

3:00 pm Diesel, A Bookstore in Brentwood Brentwood Country Mart, 225 26th St., Santa Monica, CA 90402 (310) 576-9960 http://www.dieselbookstore.com/

San Francisco, CA

teameight — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 03:19:21 +0000

7:30 pm Books Inc. in the Marina 2251 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94123 415-931-3633 http://www.booksinc.net/event/2010/06/01/month/all/all/1

Menlo Park, CA

teameight — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 03:49:22 +0000

7:30 pm Kepler's 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park, CA 94025 650.324.4321 http://www.keplers.com/

Newtonville, MA

teameight — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 03:51:29 +0000

7:00 pm Newtonville Books 296 Walnut St., Newton, MA 02460 617-244-6619 http://www.newtonvillebooks.com/

Washington, DC

teameight — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:52:14 +0000

7:00 pm Politics and Prose 5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW 20008 (202) 364-1919 www.politics-prose.com

New York, NY, with Jane Mendelsohn

teameight — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 03:53:06 +0000

12:30-1:45 pm Bryant Park Reading Room 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues http://www.bryantpark.org/calendar/wordforword.php

New York, NY

teameight — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:53:47 +0000

7:00 pm Barnes and Noble, East 86th St. 150 East 86th Street, New York, NY 10028 http://store-locator.barnesandnoble.com/store/2278?subtype=detailCalendar

Great Rock and Roll Pauses

teameight — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:27:57 +0000

[slideshow id="2445"]

Chicago, IL

teameight — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 04:00:18 +0000

4:00 pm Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit Fest. On-stage conversation with Elizabeth Taylor, book editor of the Chicago Tribune Grace Place, 637 South Dearborn St., 2^nd Floor. http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/printers-row/printers-row-lit-fest-saturday-schedule.html

8-Tracks Playlist

teameight — Sat, 15 May 2010 19:20:50 +0000

Listen to a playlist for A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD on 8-Tracks here.

New York, NY

teameight — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 03:54:24 +0000

10:00 AM "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll (But I Like It)," with Steve Almond and Colson Whitehead Brooklyn Book Festival, St. Francis Auditorium Brooklyn Borough Hall 209 Joralemon Street Brooklyn, New York 11201 http://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/BrooklynBookFestival/events.html#bookends

New York, NY

teameight — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:59:42 +0000

7:00 pm 192 Books 192 10th Ave. (at 21st St) http://www.192books.com/

Metuchen, NJ

teameight — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 03:59:35 +0000

8:00 p.m. The Raconteur, 431 Main Street, 08840. 732-906-0009 http://www.raconteurbooks.com/

Syosset, NY

teameight — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 03:58:04 +0000

7:00 p.m. Adult Summer Reading Club at the Syosset Public Library 225 South Oyster Bay Road, 11791. 516-921-7161

East Hampton, LI

teameight — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 03:59:39 +0000

9:00 pm Book Hampton 41 Main Street EH 11937 631-324-4939 http://www.bookhampton.typepad.com/

New York City

teameight — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 03:59:56 +0000

6:30 pm, with Darin Strauss The Pen Parentis Literary Salon The Libertine Library at Gild Hall 15 Gold Street (2nd floor), Lower Manhattan www.penparentis.org

New York, NY

teameight — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 03:59:22 +0000

8-10pm The Franklin Park Reading Series, with Coriel Gaffney, Jesse Sposato, and Matt Stewart Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden 618 St. Johns Place, between Franklin and Classon Avenues Crown Heights, Brooklyn http://franklinparkbrooklyn.com/

Brooklyn, NY

teameight — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 03:59:44 +0000

7:00 pm An impromptu reading and discussion among friends, with wine! All welcome. The Community Bookstore

143 7th Avenue (between Carroll and Garfield)

718-783-3075

http://communitybookstore.net/messing/?p=220

International Literature Festival of Berlin

teameight — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 03:59:06 +0000

5:30 pm Prosa, Punkrock und PowerPoint in Jennifer Egans »A Visit from the Goon Squad« Collegium Hungaricum Berlin Link to Event Details

Conversations on Practice/McNally Robinson

teameight — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 03:55:31 +0000

A series devoted to the artistic process, in which artists of various stripes describe the way they work 7:00 pm McNally Robinson Bookstore 52 Prince St. (between Lafayette and Mulberry) New York Bookstore Link Series Link

Spoken Interludes, With Darin Strauss and Martha McPhee

teameight — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 03:55:17 +0000

7:30 pm (Supper Buffet opens at 6:00) Chutney Masala 4 West Main Street in Irvington, NY $25 for dinner/readings Make Reservations Online Driving Directions

Bard College at Simon's Rock

teameight — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 03:59:10 +0000

7:30 pm Reading and Discussion The Oak Room of Blodgett House 84 Alford Rd., Simon's Rock Great Barrington, MA 01230 413-644-4400 http://www.simons-rock.edu/events/listings/poetry-and-fiction-series-jennifer-egan/

Texas Book Festival: Austin, Texas

teameight — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 02:59:24 +0000

3:45-4:30 pm A conversation with Amanda Eyre Ward Followed by a booksigning State Capitol Building, Capitol Auditorium Room E1.004

Texas Book Festival: Austin, Texas

teameight — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 03:59:09 +0000

8:00-9:30 pm Teleportal Readings 2.1 With Maira Kalman and Doug Dorst, Emceed by Jess Sauer The ND at 501 Studios, at 5th and Brushy http://www.teleportalreadings.org

Happy Ending at Joe's Pub, New York City

teameight — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 03:59:10 +0000

With Julia Holmes, Teddy Wayne, and Musical guest: Elizabeth & the Catapult Doors open 6:00pm; show at 7:00 pm 425 Lafayette Street, @ E. 4th and Astor Tickets $15 http://www.amandastern.com/happyending.html

The Center for Fiction: Craftwork Series

teameight — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 04:59:57 +0000

A talk entitled "Character, from an Array of Angles" followed by discussion and a booksigning 7:00 pm 17 E. 47th St., New York City http://www.centerforfiction.org/events/#egan

Brooklyn College

teameight — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 04:59:58 +0000

With poet Ben Lerner 6:00-7:30 pm 2900 Bedford Avenue Boylan Hall, Rm. (Barker Room) http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/php/calendar.php?param=id&condition=11179

Miami Book Fair

teameight — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 04:59:34 +0000

With Julie Orringer and Vendela Vida 2:00 pm Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus Auditorium: Bldg. 1, 2nd Floor, Rm. 1261 http://www.miamibookfair.com/events/

Manhattan College, Bronx New York

teameight — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:00:24 +0000

4:00 pm A reading, followed by discussion Alumni Room O'Malley Library

GOON SQUAD makes some superb "Best of" lists for 2010!!!

teameight — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 15:08:36 +0000

The New York Times Book Review-Top Ten Time Magazine-Top Ten Fiction NPR-Lynn Neary's Favorite Book of 2010 Washington Post-Top Ten The Week-Top Five most critically acclaimed novels of 2010 People Magazine-Top Nine Ron Charles-Top Five (link to hilarious video) NPR-Pankaj Mishra's Five Favorite Fictions of 2010 Chicago Tribune-Top Nine Laura Miller for Salon.com-Top Five Slate.com-Top Ten EMusic-#1 Audiobook of 2010 Booklist-#1 Fiction Miami Herald-Top Six Daily Beast-Top Ten Boston Globe-Top Twelve Fiction San Francisco Chronicle-Top Ten New York Newsday-Top Ten Village Voice-Top Ten Oprah Magazine-Top Ten WNYC Soundcheck-Top Five Books About Music Seattle Times-Top Eleven Fiction Minneapolis Star-Tribune-Top Nine Minnesota Reads-Top Nine Kirkus-Top 25 Fiction Publisher's Weekly-Top Ten

New York University

teameight — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 04:59:27 +0000

Writers in Conversation: With Justin Taylor and Darin Strauss 7:00 pm Lillian Vernon House, 58 W. 10th Street, New York City http://www.cwp.fas.nyu.edu/page/readingseries#dec

Barnes & Noble, 86th & Lexington Ave.

teameight — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:59:48 +0000

The New York Times Best Books of the Year 2010

With Sam Tanenhaus and Siddhartha Mukherjee 7:00 pm

Eat, Drink & Be Literary, Brooklyn Academy of Music

teameight — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 03:59:48 +0000

Reading and Discussion 6:30 pm 30 Lafayette Avenue Brooklyn, NY http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=277

Thalia Book Club: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

teameight — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 03:59:28 +0000

With Margot Livesey and Siri Hustvedt 7:30 pm Symphony Space 2537 Broadway, at 95th St, New York Buy Tickets

The New School: Fiction Forum

teameight — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:59:52 +0000

6:30 pm Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, room 510 http://www.newschool.edu/eventDetail.aspx?id=58152

2 Events/Columbia College Chicago Story Week

teameight — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 03:59:16 +0000

2:30 pm A conversation/Q&A with Joe Meno *** 6:00 pm A reading/conversation/signing with Donna Seaman Both events in: Harold Washington Library Cindy Pritzker Auditorium 400 S. State St. http://www.colum.edu/specialevents/story_week/Schedule.php#tue

Book Court

teameight — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:59:37 +0000

7:00 pm 163 Court Street (between Pacific and Amity) Brooklyn, NY http://www.bookcourt.org/category/events/

Westchester Libraries Author Luncheon

teameight — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:00:12 +0000

With David Shenk and Diane Mott Davidson Noon Abigail Kirsch's Tappan Hill 81 Highland Avenue Tarrytown, NY http://www.westchesterlibraries.org/baLuncheon

New York Public Library

teameight — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 03:59:38 +0000

A Conversation with Laura Miller 7:00 pm Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street: Berger Forum Use the Discount Code "goon" and get reduced price tickets ($15) at: http://www.showclix.com/event/30525/

DePauw University

teameight — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 03:59:49 +0000

7:30 pm Meharry Hall Greencastle, IN http://www.depauw.edu/acad/english/visitingwriters.asp

Writers in the Loft Series, Portsmouth NH

teameight — Tue, 17 May 2011 03:59:09 +0000

7:00 pm The Music Hall Loft 131 Congress Street Tickets: http://www.themusichall.org/calendar/event/jennifer_egan

Lutyens & Rubinstein Bookshop, London

teameight — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 03:59:47 +0000

6:30 for 7:00 pm 21 Kensington Park Rd. London, W11 2EU SEATING IS LIMITED; to reserve call 020 7229 1010 http://www.lutyensrubinstein.co.uk/

GOON SQUAD is a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction!

teameight — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:08:57 +0000

http://bit.ly/hhPUj8

!!!A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD wins the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction!!!

teameight — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:20:44 +0000

http://nyti.ms/gfP9aB

Bedminster Township, NJ

teameight — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 19:00:48 +0000

11:00 am 10th annual Junior League of Morristown: Lunch with the Authors Fiddler’s Elbow Golf Club 811 Rattlesnake Bridge Road Bedminster Township, NJ Buy Tickets

New "Special Edition" App (excluding the US and Canada) available for GOON SQUAD

teameight — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:20:38 +0000

It includes (in App language): full text and audiobook sync, exclusive chapter artwork, exclusive audio, video and author content, unique interactive reading navigation. It also includes the color version of the PowerPoint below (scroll down). Investigate it Here.

Brookdale Community College, Lincroft NJ

teameight — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 03:59:04 +0000

7:00 pm Student Life Center (Navesink rooms I & II) 765 Newman Springs Road

GOON SQUAD wins the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction!

teameight — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 05:36:23 +0000

http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2011-Fiction

LA Times Festival of Books

teameight — Sun, 01 May 2011 03:59:54 +0000

Panel Discussion: Breaking Boundaries With Olga Grushin, Benjamin Hale, and Frederick Reiken; Moderated by Richard Rayner 10:00 am University of Southern California, Tapen 201 http://events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks/general-information/

The Liberation of Lori Berenson

teameight — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 16:10:27 +0000

From the New York Times Magazine (cover story) Lori Berenson has always loved to walk. When she was a high-school student in Manhattan in the mid-1980s, she walked home at night from her job at Pasta & Cheese, on the Upper East Side, to the apartment where she grew up, on East 25th Street. When she began her prison sentence in Peru, in 1996, for collaborating with a terrorist group, convicted terrorists had to spend 23½ hours a day inside their cells. Even then, Berenson walked in the 6-by-9-foot space she and another woman shared — two steps forward, two steps backward — for hours. “People ask, what did you miss most?” she said in August, two and a half months after she was released on parole, having served nearly 15 years of a 20-year sentence. “This was definitely it.” It was after dark, and we were taking a rapid, circuitous walk through a park that clutches the crumbly cliff tops in the Miraflores district of Lima, where Berenson and her 15-month-old son, Salvador, had been living since her release. (Berenson’s parole requires that she remain in Peru until 2015.) They were sharing an apartment with a family friend and, temporarily, Berenson’s parents, who were visiting from New York. Berenson had recently separated from her husband — Salvador’s father — whom she’d met in prison while he, too, was serving a sentence for terrorism. Soon after his release in 2003, they married, and Salvador was conceived during a conjugal visit. The boy spent his first year of life with Berenson in the women’s prison in Chorrillos, Lima. In the gusty winter darkness, bicyclists and skateboarders wheeled along paved paths that snaked among graffiti-carved cacti and fluorescently lighted soccer games. Berenson insisted we wait until dark to go out; since her parole, she has been hounded by strangers who scream obscenities or call her “assassin” and “murderer.” Just that day, on her way back from the playground with her mother and Salvador, “this woman said: ‘You’re under house arrest! You should be in your house!’ She was with a cellphone, taking pictures. I don’t like going to the park, because people stare at you and make you feel as though you’re not welcome.” Berenson wasn’t under house arrest, but she might as well have been; the media frenzy surrounding her release on May 27 meant that during her first 10 days of freedom, she never went outside. A horde of photographers stormed the car in which she was driven away from the prison — three cameramen thrust themselves into the backseat; more jumped onto the roof, leaving dents; a TV van crashed into the back. Another gantlet awaited her outside her apartment building, surging against the surrounding gate with such pressure that it buckled. For many days, the press lingered outside, interviewing Miraflorans incensed at having Berenson in their midst. Such an outpouring of rage at a 40-year-old woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that never took place, is a measure of the degree to which Peruvians are still traumatized by the violence that convulsed their country during the years when the Shining Path warred with the military and nearly 70,000 Peruvians were killed. It also underscores the fact that terrorism, all but defunct in Peru for more than a decade, is still a hot political issue. In person, Berenson is an unlikely fulcrum for all this drama. She is slight and mild-mannered, with wire-rimmed glasses, an inquisitive gaze and wavy brown hair that she often wears in a single braid down her back. She dresses simply — often in jeans, occasionally dangly earrings. Her speech is polite and a little stiff, in the manner of both a native English-speaker who has lived much of her life in another language, and a person who resists self-revelation. When she’s comfortable, a dry sense of humor emerges — a willingness to laugh at her predicament. She is most forthcoming on general topics: Peruvian politics, the economy and its inequities. Personal questions she often greets with a hurried, “Yes, yes, yes,” or “Oh, no, no,” as if she were physically brushing the query away. You feel that she would go to almost any length to avoid exposing her emotional life to a relative stranger: deny its existence — even forget it, as she appeared to when I asked, on our walk, what part of her early life she remembered as especially happy. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought of that.” Berenson was first detained on Nov. 30, 1995, when she was 26. She and another woman were pulled off a public bus after leaving the Peruvian Congress building. Berenson had journalist’s credentials and assignments from two American publications; the other woman, whom Berenson said she’d hired as a photographer, was the wife of Nestor Cerpa, a leader of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or M.R.T.A. Within hours of the women’s arrest, police officers raided a house Berenson had rented with a male friend who was an M.R.T.A. member. (She had moved out before the raid.) The police engaged in an 11-hour gun battle with M.R.T.A. fighters who were holed up inside; M.R.T.A. members and one police officer were killed before the M.R.T.A. surrendered. The M.R.T.A. was a much smaller insurgent group than the dominant Shining Path, and historically less violent. But on the top two floors of the house, which Berenson had sublet to another M.R.T.A. leader, the police discovered a large cache of weapons and ammunition, along with evidence of a plan to forcibly seize the Congress and hold its members hostage. Berenson claimed she was innocent: she had known the people by different names, she said, had no idea they were M.R.T.A. members and had never visited the top two floors of the house after subletting them for what she thought was going to be a school. Five weeks after her arrest, on Jan. 8, 1996, Berenson was taken to a small auditorium in the headquarters of Dincote, Peru’s antiterrorist police, and presented to the press. Her performance was indelible: she took the stage bellowing in Spanish, hands clenched at her sides, long dark hair tumbling down both sides of her face. After denouncing suffering and injustice in Peru, she denied that she was a terrorist by shouting: “In the M.R.T.A. there are no criminal terrorists. It is a revolutionary movement!” — words that, to Peruvian ears, amounted to a confession. She looked scary: big, ungoverned and enraged. To this day, clips from that 15-year-old tirade are part of any news story about her on Peruvian TV; stills from it, in which she appears to be baring her teeth, appeared on the front pages of Peruvian newspapers when she was paroled. Her father told me ruefully: “Forty-four seconds, and it ruined her life. It doesn’t take much.” There are practical explanations for Berenson’s behavior that day; she was told by the military police that there were no microphones and that she would have to shout to be heard. She spent the prior four days in a rat-ridden cell with a woman who had five gunshot wounds; Berenson was strung out and sleepless. Before facing the media, she had no access to her lawyer. She was arrested at a time when the Peruvian government, under President Alberto Fujimori, had achieved a state of hyperefficiency at shutting terrorism down. Fujimori was elected in 1990, at the height of Shining Path aggression, and in 1992 he dissolved the Congress, suspended the Constitution and passed a number of laws that gave the military expanded powers to fight terrorism. The leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzmán, was captured that year. By the time of Berenson’s arrest, thousands of people had been imprisoned for terrorism, many innocent; Fujimori’s Law of Repentance offered strong incentives to name names, and little evidence was required to convict. (Fujimori himself is now serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations committed during his government’s war against the Shining Path.) Recalling her mind-set that day, Berenson told me: “I was indignant about the whole judicial process. The lawyer had already told me they were asking for 30 years, no parole. It was like: I have nothing to lose. I saw such inhumanity, particularly in the case of the people who were wounded. And thinking that no one would ever hear about it. I just said, Well, I know someone will listen to me if I say something. That was the most naïve and stupid thing I did, was thinking that by saying that, it would be helpful.” It was helpful to Fujimori, who got credit for locking up a dangerous American who now personified, in the public mind, the irrational violence that had racked Peru. Cynthia McClintock, a professor of political science at George Washington University who has studied Peru since the 1970s, told me: “That she was going to be behind bars served Fujimori’s purpose of highlighting the success of his intelligence work, and the government’s judicial process. They did a very good job of showing the activists in these movements in their worst way.” It was also helpful to the prosecution, which upped its request from 30 years to life in prison without parole. Three days later, Berenson was convicted of treason against the Peruvian State for being an M.R.T.A. leader and financier. She was sentenced, along with 22 others, by hooded military judges — then a customary procedure for dealing with accused terrorists. Her parents were not allowed to be present. It’s hard not to wonder — as people close to Berenson do — whether things might have unfolded differently for her had she cowered, rather than shouted, before the press, or betrayed even a modicum of the panic and despair most people would have felt in such circumstances. But anyone close to Berenson knows that she would never expose herself in that way — indeed, her toughness may extend to not even perceiving her own vulnerability in the way most people would. “When they sentenced me to life, I started cracking up,” she told me. “It might have been sort of a nervous reaction. They started saying things I supposedly had done, and it was like, What? What’s going on? It was insane.” A few days later, she was transferred with a group of about 40 prisoners to the infamous Yanamayo prison in Puno: unheated, at an altitude of 12,000 feet. They were flown in a cargo plane with their heads covered, guarded by armed soldiers, then moved onto a bus. “I don’t remember it being particularly scary,” she told me. “My logic at that time was different: you’re put in this bus, you can’t really hold on because you’re handcuffed behind your back, and you need to hold on because you might fall on your face.” She chuckled, remembering. “And so that was your concern.” Not perceiving your own vulnerability is a bit like not perceiving physical pain; it may allow you to tolerate extremes that would crush other people — as Berenson certainly has — but it can also hinder your ability to calculate personal risk. For all of her emotional self-protectiveness, at critical junctures Berenson has been unwilling, or possibly unable, to perceive the dangers incurred by her words or actions. “My coming here, in retrospect I can say it wasn’t the best decision,” she told me, with a wry laugh, “but I was fascinated by the diversity of cultures and peoples, and I guess I didn’t see the consequences of not just coming here but getting involved.” Berenson’s emotional opacity has made her the locus of myriad contradictory visions: to many Peruvians, she is chilly and unrepentant; to Americans who worked for her release and visited her in prison, she is brave and stoic — almost saintly. But what I heard most often, especially from women, was that Berenson had reminded them of themselves: young, passionate, risk-taking. Robin Kirk, director of the Duke Human Rights Center, who worked in Peru as a journalist throughout the dangerous upheaval of the 1980s, said she identified with Berenson but also — as a mother — with Berenson’s parents: “Your bright, adventurous child goes off, and you have to be supportive, of course, but what kind of things are going to happen to change their lives? For me, it was all for the better; I would never have traded that experience in Peru. And I had good luck.” Lori Berenson had a middle-class Manhattan childhood. Her parents were professors: Rhoda taught physics at Nassau Community College; Mark taught statistics at Baruch College. Her sister, Kathy, now a research psychologist, is two years older. When Lori was in kindergarten, the family moved from Queens to an apartment in the East Midtown Plaza housing complex, in the East 20s (her parents still live there), and Lori went to Public School 40 and Junior High School 104. The Berensons were neither overtly political nor religious. “I’m not from a political family at all,” Berenson told me. By all accounts, Lori was a busy, sociable, highly musical child. She played the lead in junior-high productions of “Annie” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” An organized, diligent student, she was the sort of kid who resists telling her parents exactly what she’s up to. “They come home at 3 o’clock; ‘How was your day?’ ” Rhoda recalled. “For Lori, it was: ‘It was great. I’m leaving.’ ” She continued, “Quite honestly, she does take after me.” All three female Berensons are profoundly private — to an extent that seems quaint in our self-exposing era. In October, Kathy explained to me why she preferred not to provide childhood anecdotes about Lori: “To some extent, my private memories of me and my sister as a child are all I have left that hasn’t been already given over to this traumatic series of events,” she said, with visible discomfort. “So it’s both my private nature and my sense that we’ve already given it all away.” Mark Berenson, Lori’s father, is the vivid exception: effusive and mercurial, prone to occasional exaggeration and oversharing, he routinely embarrasses his wife and daughters. The writer of many textbooks on statistics and a self-professed workaholic, he berated himself for not having listened enough when Lori might have wanted to talk as a child. “I was not a good parent,” he told me, over his wife’s protests that he was better than most men his age. “I called for them at school, I took them home, but they were talking, and it went in one ear and out the other.” According to Mark, when Lori left for Central America, she made him a mixed tape that began with Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” followed by Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” — that classic ballad of parental neglect. “She zinged it to me,” he said. A love of animals prompted Lori to become a vegetarian by age 8 — in 1978 — with such well-reasoned vehemence that her mother and sister soon followed suit. At 12, she began spending her summers in the Hamptons as a mother’s helper, the first of many jobs she held, and saving serious money. In 1980, when Lori was 11, three American nuns were murdered in El Salvador. “That stayed in my head,” she told me. “I remember hearing about it, seeing a movie about it, saying: ‘Wow, it’s terrible, it’s not fair. They were helping poor people.’ I wanted to be a nun. Of course, you can’t do it if you’re not religious. You adopt another kind of religion, I guess, and that was sort of what I did.” Berenson is not a creator of romantic self-narratives. When she speaks of adopting another kind of religion, she means that at M.I.T., where she arrived in 1987, after graduating from LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, she had a conversion experience. She began working for Prof. Martin Diskin, who was doing research on the policies of granting political asylum to refugees from Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. She learned that those who received asylum were likely to be the ones fleeing groups that the United States opposed: the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, or the guerrillas fighting in El Salvador. “The others would get sent back to be killed, even though they had been tortured,” she told me. “Why wouldn’t you give someone who’s being pursued refugee status? Politics. My awakening to the world.” Berenson spoke of this revelation with a forceful clarity I rarely heard in discussions of her personal experience, which she tends to minimize. Her political views, expressed in periodic statements from prison that her parents posted on their FreeLori.org Web site, haven’t measurably changed over the years; on the contrary, her discovery of a world built on oppression, exploitation and imperialism has — in Berenson’s view — been ratified by her experience in Peru. “I realized that behind suffering was politics. It wasn’t just like, Oh, these people are poor and they’re destined to suffer. No. There are interests behind that — political, economic — in having a social class be relegated to dying in misery, and being exploited, and being harmed, and suffering repression.” At M.I.T., Berenson lived in co-ed housing off-campus. Her roommate, Kristen Gardner, still a close friend, recalled: “She had a great sense of humor, she played the guitar. We both had a lot of friends who were involved in politics. Neither of us were big partiers. It was very down-to-earth.” During spring break of that freshman year, Berenson joined an interfaith religious delegation to El Salvador. “When I got there, there was something about it that I just loved,” she told me. “I loved the hills. I’ve been a city person all of my life, and saying, Wait a minute, this is a different world, and I want to be part of this world.” She lasted only one more semester at M.I.T. “In high school, I was a dedicated student,” she told me. “I was excessively disciplined. And I just decided it was all wrong — my vocation was something else.” Mark Berenson recalled her decision with a lingering air of helplessness. “What could we do?” he said. “She had her own money. We taught her to be independent. So we said: ‘O.K. Go.’ Hoping that it wouldn’t be a horror.” After Christmas break of her sophomore year, Berenson went to El Salvador for three months with a student delegation. Back in the United States, she worked briefly for the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador, or Cispes, in New York and Washington. “And then someone asked me if I would be willing to work with an F.M.L.N. representation in Washington.” The F.M.L.N., or Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, is now the ruling party of El Salvador; its candidate was elected president in 2009. But in 1989, when Berenson took the job, the F.M.L.N. was an aggregate of five Marxist guerrilla groups locked in a long civil war with the oligarchy of El Salvador. In early 1990, Berenson moved to Nicaragua to work for the F.M.L.N. there. The work was mostly secretarial, but she also had contact with the Salvadoran refugee community. When a cease-fire was declared and peace accords signed in 1992, Berenson moved to San Salvador and became the secretary of one of the F.M.L.N.’s commanding generals, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a signer of the peace accords (he is now vice president of El Salvador). Though she wrote letters home and made occasional visits, she was distant from her parents during her years in Central America. They never knew her exact role with the F.M.L.N. until after her arrest. Close proximity to a successful guerrilla war, peace negotiation and ensuing political legitimacy must have been a heady experience for a person of 22, but Berenson would acknowledge this only theoretically: “It was feeling like I was part of a project that was going to help resolve problems of inequality — social, economic.” As I puzzled over her reluctance to evoke that triumphant moment, I found myself recalling her sister’s reason for not divulging childhood memories: that in giving them away, she would diffuse their private power. By 1994, two years into the peace, Berenson had grown unhappy. She married a Salvadoran economics student, but the marriage quickly foundered. “In civilian life, the urgency wasn’t the same,” she told me. “Since I had dedicated 12 hours a day — almost 24 hours — exclusively to a project that was positive, once I stopped having that level of dedication, I felt as though there was something wrong.” Berenson left El Salvador in October 1994, traveled in South America and arrived in Peru in November with plans to stay. The morning after our walk in August, under the depthless white sky that seems to hang over Lima in winter, I visited Berenson in her apartment, on the corner of a quiet residential street. Parolees are expected to live with family; because Berenson is separated from her husband, her friend Marie Manrique — Salvador’s godmother — is serving that function. Berenson was supposed to have moved into Manrique’s apartment in another neighborhood, but shortly before her release, the antiterrorist police came to the home of Manrique’s landlord and asked whether she knew that Lori Berenson would be moving in. The landlord hadn’t known, and she threatened to evict Manrique. There was a last-minute scramble for new housing; a succession of landlords refused to have Berenson under their roofs. The current apartment, which came furnished, is more expensive than they’d like (Berenson’s parents pay the rent), and a sixth-floor walk-up is not ideal for a toddler and a stroller, but they were lucky to get it. Berenson and Salvador share a bedroom beside a kitchen alcove, where a flight of steps leads down to the front door. Berenson hadn’t fully unpacked, and several fat woven-plastic bags with black prison markings were barricading the top of the stairs to keep Salvador from tumbling down. He settled for tossing a small car over the bags, listening with satisfaction as it ricocheted down the stairs and smiling impishly. He was 15 months old; a sturdy, sweet-faced boy with dark curls and a fierce attachment to his mother, whom he liked to keep in sight at all times. Mark and Rhoda Berenson were getting ready to take Salvador to the park, as they did each day. Mark is tall and boyish, with a clipped gray mustache and beard; Rhoda is tiny and serene, clearly the anchor of the two. Together, they form a kind of living encyclopedia of their daughter’s legal history, finishing each other’s sentences as they narrate a litany of close calls, near misses and what ifs. (What if they’d hired the Miami lawyer they refer to as Mr. Slick, who cost $60,000? What if Lori had gone to Oberlin instead of M.I.T.?) Since Berenson’s arrest, they’d devoted themselves to her release, both retiring early from their jobs and, for a time, renting a Washington office to lobby members of Congress. (In recent years, they accepted new teaching positions.) During the four months in 1998-99 that Berenson spent isolated at Socabaya prison near Arequipa, her parents alternated visits every two weeks: flying to Lima, spending the night on the airport floor, catching another flight at dawn. In fact, Berenson’s greatest source of conflict with her parents arose from her wish that they would do less. At a certain point, she told me, “I just said: ‘To hell with it. It’s over. We lost.’ ” She begged her parents to suspend their efforts. “It’s very painful to see them wasting their lives away,” she said. “And it just created an expectation of something changing when I knew nothing was going to change.” From the start, the Berensons’ chief hope was that the United States government would effect their daughter’s release. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who in 1989 worked with the State Department to negotiate the freedom of a young American woman in El Salvador under uncannily similar circumstances, said the State Department’s efforts fell short in Berenson’s case. “The government in Washington didn’t act with alertness in the way that a government committed to protecting its own citizens ought to,” he told me. But Dennis Jett, who was the United States ambassador to Peru from 1996 to 1999, vigorously rejected the notion that the State Department could have done more. “What leverage do we have over Peru?”he asked. “I think this is a colonial, somewhat-racist mentality that these countries are always wrong, and all we have to do is apply pressure on any underdeveloped country” and it will deem an American prisoner innocent. As Mark and Rhoda Berenson prepared to leave for the park with Salvador, he realized that his mother wasn’t going along and began to cry for her. Berenson hugged him tightly at the top of the stairs and kissed him goodbye. Her tenderness with her son is a striking contrast to her usual reserve, and his wish to cling to her was made more poignant by the fact that her parole was in jeopardy. The state prosecutor had appealed it within days of her release in May, challenging whether she’d served enough time (prisoners can reduce their sentences through work or study, and Berenson had done so), as well as whether her psychological reports — which must affirm a prisoner’s rehabilitation — were credible. If her parole was revoked, she would have to return to jail for five more years. By law, Salvador could remain with her until age 3, but by now he’d grown used to running freely in the park. “He’s had a taste of life outside of prison,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy for him to go back.” Salvador could return to New York with his grandparents (as he would have to in nearly two years), but he was still so small, and nursing overnight. “I’m tense, and I’m very tense with him,” she told me. “I feel bad about it.” She had been trying, subtly, to prepare Salvador for a possible future separation. “When we’re alone together or he’s going to sleep, I tell him that I love him and I’ll always love him, but I may not be with him physically always,” she said. There was an enforced intimacy about life in the Chorrillos prison. Berenson was among women from the M.R.T.A., some of whom she’d known from other prisons, and likened to a big family. Her history of good behavior meant that she was allowed to move freely between her cell and a communal courtyard. “I used to be with Salvador from 6 a.m. until about 7 at night, and then sometimes we’d get together to watch the news with other inmates from 7 to 8,” Berenson told me. “I’d take him into the cell and close the door, and it’s like a playpen. I could make his food or mush his banana.” But when she needed to wash clothes or clean the cell, she would avail herself of “aunties,” fellow inmates who enjoyed caring for Salvador. “They’d give him his dinner and a bath, and I would join them at 8:30 or something, depending on how many clothes I had to wash.” Berenson says she met Salvador’s father, Aníbal Apari, at Yanamayo prison, where Apari was transferred as part of a 15-year sentence for being an M.R.T.A. militant. Now a lawyer who often litigates on behalf of prisoners (despite their separation, he was defending Berenson’s right to parole), Apari is a rangy, thoughtful man, easily moved to laughter. When I spoke with him in his office in December, he affectionately recalled hearing Berenson’s notorious press presentation while in another prison, on a contraband radio. “Of course everyone said, ‘Well, now she’s sunk,’ ” he told me through a translator. “I only heard her; I didn’t see her. I thought it was courageous, a bit ingenuous.” When Apari was moved to Yanamayo prison a few months later, he spotted Berenson on his second day. Prisoners for terrorism were housed apart and separated by group. He was able to get someone to deliver her a note wrapped in Scotch tape. She sent back a note of her own. “When you’re in prison, the only way you can show affection is through gestures,” he said. “The authorities allowed us once a week to exchange presents with the women. Some people sent sweets or candies. I sent a yellow scarf to Lori. It’s cold up there, of course. I saw her with my scarf on — that’s a sign. There was a spontaneous chemistry between us, a natural feeling.” They overlapped at Yanamayo for a year; then Berenson was moved to Socabaya prison. They communicated by mail from that point on; Apari would send a letter via his father in Chile, who would send it to Berenson’s father in New York, who would send it to Berenson in Peru. The cycle took about two months. When Apari was released on parole, in 2003, they were married while Berenson was at Huacariz prison. Berenson said, “The idea was that once we were both free, we would celebrate it in a different manner.” Apari was allowed two conjugal visits each month, and for the first four or five years, he visited often. Berenson wouldn’t discuss the details of why the marriage didn’t work out, but she told me: “The last couple of years, he came less. I knew there must be a reason for that.” In their final year, Apari visited only twice, and on one of those visits, Salvador was conceived. The couple separated before their son was born. In retrospect, Berenson said, she wasn’t surprised that the stresses of prison proved too much for them. “We were far away,” she said. “A lot of not being able to express emotions for a long time. It’s very common.” At the mention of the separation, Apari grew sober, uneasy. “It doesn’t make me happy,” he said, “but these things happen.” Apari became involved with the M.R.T.A. as a young man through his Lima neighborhood, long before Berenson arrived in Peru. He stressed what I’d heard from others: that the group had come into existence in the early 1980s largely to oppose the neo-Maoist Shining Path. Robin Kirk, who covered the Shining Path as a journalist, told me: “The Shining Path, especially for Latin America, was absolutely new. It was like a cult. The Khmer Rouge in Spanish.” Abimael Guzmán, a philosophy professor, formed the group in 1970 and served as its prophet and commander in chief, later directing his militants to kill anyone who rejected their principles or failed to do their bidding. There was a scant social program; the vision was simply to wipe out the past and let the future take care of itself. “In a way, the M.R.T.A. wanted to show that you can have an armed struggle in a different way,” Apari told me. “More like the Sandinistas, like what happened in Cuba, where politics were the most important thing, and weapons were simply a means. When confrontation was impossible to avoid, it should be done respecting the adversary.” This formula proved successful in Latin American countries in addition to El Salvador; the current presidents of Brazil, Uruguay and Nicaragua are all former guerrillas. But the violent unreason of the Shining Path made Peru a different case, and toward the end, many say, the M.R.T.A. began to emulate its more cutthroat rival. The Peruvian historian Nelson Manrique told me, through a translator: “A lot of the M.R.T.A. leaders were sent to prison, and those who took the lead were the more-militant leaders, which gave it a different sort of character. They said: ‘We’re acting like little nuns. We’re not growing, and the Shining Path, which is brutal, is growing.’ ” By the time Berenson arrived in Lima in 1994, the Shining Path was severely diminished, and the M.R.T.A. had been reduced to a skeleton crew with one big idea left: to seize a public place, take hostages and demand the release of M.R.T.A. prisoners. A year after Berenson was jailed, the group did exactly that: 14 of its members, led by Nestor Cerpa, stormed the residence of the Japanese ambassador to Peru during a party, and held it, along with 72 hostages, for four months. (Berenson was one of the inmates whose release the M.R.T.A. sought, but none were liberated; the siege ended with a commando raid of the residence by government forces, who killed or executed all 14 M.R.T.A. members.) Berenson’s life sentence was nullified in 2000 by the Fujimori government, which stated that new evidence had come to light that she was not an M.R.T.A. leader. She was granted a new civilian trial in 2001, although much of the evidence against her was the same. Throughout that three-month trial, which was televised, Berenson asserted her innocence, insisting that she hadn’t known her various associates were M.R.T.A. members yet also refusing to condemn the group. While this time she was absolved of being a member of the M.R.T.A., she was still convicted of collaboration: renting the house for the group and entering Congress in the guise of a journalist, with the intention of assisting in a takeover. She received a new sentence of 20 years, including time served. Today, while Berenson refuses to discuss in detail what happened during the year she spent in Peru before her arrest, she does admit that she knew her associates were M.R.T.A. members (without knowing their real names — a customary practice in subversive groups) and willingly helped them to rent the house. “It might not have been intentional, but the bottom line is: I did collaborate with them,” she said. “Shortly before I was detained, I had the sense that things were out of my control,” she told me, referring to activities in the rented house. “I didn’t imagine what it was, the magnitude of it. But I knew enough to have been able to say, I should get out of this.” Instead, she said, “I avoided the situation. I rented another place. Very head in the sand.” What she never knew, she still insists, was that weapons were being amassed in the house, or that violent action was being planned. She maintained that her visits to Congress were genuine journalistic explorations. “At that time in Fujimori’s dictatorship, Congress was the only place that there was some sort of democratic process.” She called the notion that she was casing the building for a takeover “ridiculous,” since anything she might have seen there was public knowledge. No one I spoke with in Peru seems ever to have believed Berenson’s original claim of total ignorance, and such an obvious untruth may have been self-defeating — not just legally, but by further damaging her image. When I asked Berenson why she had hewed to that story during her civilian trial, she told me it was because she was innocent of the charge of posing as a journalist for the purpose of seizing Congress. More critically, had she admitted any inside knowledge of the group, she said, the Fujimori government would have pressured her to implicate those around her. “They wanted me to say: ‘I condemn them. They are horrible people. They’re terrorists who obliged me to do this.’ Look, I didn’t believe in social justice since I was young to get up there and blame someone else for my own wrongdoings. Maybe I was naïve, maybe I was convinced of things that weren’t true, and I intentionally avoided dealing with reality. But no one put me at gunpoint.” When I pressed her on whether the M.R.T.A. trapped her, she responded, “I was willingly trapped.” The days I spent with Berenson in August were marked by the drumbeat of her approaching parole hearing, scheduled for Aug. 16. The day before, while her parents took Salvador to the park, she came out to lunch with Marie Manrique and me in a neighborhood far from Miraflores — the first time she ventured to a restaurant since her release. Manrique, who is half-Peruvian but grew up in the United States, is Berenson’s age, open-faced and garrulous; she worked for years in human rights and is now studying political journalism. She first read about Berenson in 1996 and began visiting her in prison a few years later. I asked how her Peruvian friends felt about Manrique’s making Berenson’s parole possible by living with her. Reactions were mixed, she said; she’d just received an e-mail from a friend who referred to Berenson as soberbia, meaning “haughty.” “You know, I can’t win,” Berenson said unhappily. “I’m quiet, I don’t joke around. I’m just like that.” “Here’s a question,” Manrique said. “You didn’t cry.” She meant that Berenson had never once broken down in public — a fact Peruvians saw as proof of her coldness and lack of remorse. “I’ve always been a very private person,” Berenson said. “I sometimes have cried in front of people — I haven’t intended to — it’s something I’d definitely avoid doing. For dignity.” Berenson told us that on the day she left prison last May, she avoided saying goodbye to her fellow inmates — to women she regarded as family — purely to prevent being exposed in an emotional state when she appeared before the phalanx of press that was waiting outside. “I said goodbye from the door, and they said, ‘Oh, you’re coming back,’ and I said, ‘No.’ ” Manrique suggested that letting her emotions show at tomorrow’s hearing — even just a little — would only make her more sympathetic. “They would just make fun of it,” Berenson said. “I give that to you,” Manrique said. “Some press would be like, ‘She’s faking.’ But then other people would be like, ‘O.K., there’s something under that hard veneer, and it’s a person that’s worried about five and a half more years in prison.’ If something cracks for a few seconds, it’s O.K.” Berenson considered. “For me, it would be much harder to crack and be able to control it,” she said. At the hearing, she seemed relaxed. She wore a pair of gray slacks with a matching jacket and silver hoop earrings. It was a small, crammed courtroom. Berenson was allowed five minutes to speak, during which she apologized if her presence in Peru contributed to violence and expressed her wish to be with her family and to raise her son. Back at the apartment that evening, she was upbeat. “I think I did it better than I’ve ever done before,” she said. “Public speaking is not my strong point.” Although the three judges would have 15 days to render a decision, Berenson had already begun packing; she felt that the decision would come fast and would probably go against her. Like virtually everyone I spoke to, she believed that the furor around her parole had been politically engineered (her address was printed in newspapers and broadcast on TV) and that politics would most likely land her back in prison. “Her release fell into the lap of the reactionary right in Peru, and it was like a gift from Santa Claus,” Jo-Marie Burt, an associate professor of political science at George Mason University, told me. “What they try to do is manipulate the fact of Lori’s release, use it politically to discredit the judiciary, which is in the process of prosecuting a handful of members of the armed and police forces for gross abuses of human rights.” These forces are believed to be responsible for roughly 45 percent of the nearly 70,000 killed over two decades of conflict. I left Berenson’s apartment that night wondering whether she was being alarmist. But less than 48 hours later, she and Salvador were back in jail; because of the last-minute change in Berenson’s housing, the police had inspected the Miraflores apartment after the court papers had been filed. Berenson would have to remain in prison until the technicality was addressed. Then, assuming that she was paroled again, another hearing would be scheduled to decide the issues. Berenson turned herself in at the U.S. Embassy; the press was tipped off and mobbed her on the way to a holding cell. Carrying Salvador, she stepped from a car into an aggressive throng of cameras, all of which captured his panicked tears and Berenson’s visible strain as she tried to shield him and push her way to the door. Berenson and Salvador were still in jail two months later, in mid-October. The clerical problem had been quickly solved, but the state prosecutor was trying other legal maneuvers to prevent her from being paroled again. Salvador had been running a high fever and was on antibiotics; he wept and clung to Berenson when she tried to leave him with the woman in the next cell while she went to speak briefly with the prison doctor. She’d been having bouts of vertigo — a recurrent, undiagnosed problem. Since her return to jail, it had been so severe that she’d had to crawl sometimes to keep from falling. She and Salvador were sharing their cell with another inmate; the bottom bunk, where they slept, had sheets decorated with lions, birds and zebras. The front wall of the cell was bars draped with linens for privacy. A single fluorescent bulb hung from the ceiling, but natural light came through frosted hallway windows. Clothing hung from hangers attached to loops of string suspended from the ceiling. In the corner opposite the bed was a kind of stall that seemed to be both toilet and sink; there was a hole at the bottom and two wedges on which to place your feet. The water ran cold, but the prison would provide warm water to bathe the baby. After returning with Salvador from the doctor, Berenson tucked him into his stroller under a blanket that said, “Te quiero mucho,” and squatted on the orange concrete floor to read him Dr. Seuss’s “Mister Brown Can Moo!” Then she reclined the seat so he could lie back for his nap and pushed him into the small, dusty outdoor area populated by moth-eaten-looking doves. Berenson walked back and forth, pushing the stroller, for more than an hour. Certainly prison life had improved since Fujimori’s reign; for the first year she was at Yanamayo, Berenson was not allowed a single visitor. After that, she could see her family for only a half-hour through a double layer of mesh that made them hard to see and impossible to touch. Prisoners in for terrorism weren’t allowed music, radios or any media — they were utterly cut off. In Yanamayo, the guards often withheld water; inmates blocked up the drains of the prison yard during storms so they could collect the dirty rainwater. Berenson joined other prisoners to protest these conditions with hunger strikes, but now she underplayed the hardships and spoke warmly of the community: singing together; calling out chess moves in virtual games; the euphoria of someone’s being released. At the beginning, many terrorist prisoners, like Berenson, had life sentences. “It was somewhat carefree because you didn’t have any concrete sense of the future,” she told me. “In 2003 a lot of people had new trials” and received reduced sentences. “There was definitely a sense of, O.K., this is the amount of time I’m going to be here.” Berenson’s second trial had already happened. In 2002, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights declared it unfair and therefore invalid. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, in Costa Rica, agreed to review the case amid widespread expectations that Berenson could be freed. But in 2004, after heavy lobbying from Peru, the court took the highly unusual step of reversing its commission and upholding the validity of Berenson’s civilian trial. (The court is charged only with assessing due process, not innocence or guilt.) During this time, Berenson was managing a bakery in the Huacariz prison, in Cajamarca, supplying the jail with bread and sweets. “There is some satisfaction of doing something with your hands: it begins, it ends, you clean up and it’s gone,” she said. But in retrospect, she seemed to regret her utter commitment to that job. “It was all day and sometimes all night. I think I got so absorbed in the whole thing, I just felt time was passing in vain. I could have done other things — reading, writing.” Recently, she enrolled in an online translation course at New York University and, with Manrique’s help, was managing to keep pace from jail. As for her broader goal, it was still unclear. “I’m not going to have anything to do with a violent organization,” she told me, “but that does not mean that I accept the status quo; I have to do something about it.” Berenson was granted parole a second time — still contested, and therefore conditional — and released from jail on Nov. 5, 2010, two and a half months after her reimprisonment. She and Salvador made a quiet return to the Miraflores apartment, without the uproar of the last time. When I visited the next month, in early December, the sun was finally shining and the heavy, gray waves below the Miraflores cliffs were studded with surfers. When I arrived at Berenson’s apartment, after dark, she seemed harried and worn out. She was still awaiting a date for her next parole hearing. Salvador was recovering from the croup, and her vertigo was so severe that day that she was afraid to bathe him without someone nearby. Her parents had gone back to their jobs in New York, and she was grappling with the problem of trying — without child care — to create some kind of routine. She’d had fewer confrontations outdoors, she said, but she seemed haunted by some recent ones. A woman said, both to Berenson and her father, on separate occasions when they were with Salvador: “Watch after that kid. Something is going to happen to him.” Another time, a woman with two dogs called Berenson “garbage.” “She came up behind me and gave an order to the dogs, and they were put on the alert. Salvador was on the ground, so that really bothered me. She started yelling: ‘Why are you in this park? You should be embarrassed to be in this park.’ ” I sat in the living room while Berenson bathed her son in a deep bathroom sink. He was cranky and fretful. ‘‘Qué quieres, bebé. . .?” she asked him gently. She dried him off and dressed him in a diaper and pajamas, and Salvador lay back in her arms on the couch, clutching a handful of her hair as he drank his bottle and began to drowse. Berenson carried him to their bed and tucked him in. Mother and son seemed a lonely pair that night, in a dim apartment, surrounded by a city she believed was hostile. “I was much freer in jail, in a certain way,” she said. “I wasn’t ostracized. Is there any way I would ever be able to function in this country? Or have they created a situation such that the only place they want me to function is in jail?” On Jan. 24, after another hearing before three judges, Berenson’s parole was sustained; by law, she must remain in Lima until 2015, at which point she must leave the country forever. The decision is final. The press reaction was surprisingly muted, as if the paroxysm of her first release and return to jail with Salvador had drained it of energy. Last month, about three weeks later, I spoke to Berenson via Skype. It was summer in Peru, and she’d cut her hair to shoulder-length. There was crashing in the background; Salvador was throwing things and crowing joyfully. Berenson seemed more forthcoming and ready to laugh. The harassment had subsided enough that she’d started taking long walks around Lima with Salvador in his stroller. “As I become familiar with it, I find it more livable,” she said of the city. “It’s incredibly huge. And it’s quite pretty.” It was hard, she said, to shake off the dependent state of being a prisoner. “I’m asking Marie for help because I don’t realize that I can just deal with it,” she said. “I think most Peruvians who were in jail go out to their families, their friends. My social base in Lima is basically Marie. It’s not rebuilding my place in society — it’s building it from scratch, constructing absolutely everything.” In the 15 years Berenson spent in prison, her peers have moved from early adulthood into middle age. “The world has changed,” she told me in August. “Internet, giant malls.” Technologically, she’s catching up, and has grown comfortable using e-mail and Skype. But at 41, she is still grappling with the fallout of youthful choices that have ended badly: her vocation; her marriage; her love of Latin America. The passion that fueled her move there seems to have left a kind of void, and beyond the need to support herself and her son, her future remains a blank. Of course, Berenson’s future won’t really be her own until her parole ends; for now, she is raising Salvador alone in Peru, with limited options. If she ever feels despair or defeat at these conditions, she wouldn’t show it — not at 26, with a life sentence in front of her, and not now. Her capacity to absorb fear and discomfort is partly what has saved her — and also, most likely, what got her into trouble in the first place. But this is speculation; Berenson resists such storytelling, leaving the rest of us to our own devices in trying to unlock the mystery of her biography. What she can’t elude is our desire to do so: a notoriety she has sustained, uncomfortably, for most of her adulthood. “I am always conscious,” she said, “of who I am.”

City Arts and Lectures, San Francisco

teameight — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 03:59:56 +0000

With Vendela Vida and Michael Krasny 8:00 pm Herbst Theater 401 Van Ness Avenue http://www.cityarts.net/n.vida.html

"Under the Influence" Crosby Hotel, NYC

teameight — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 03:59:20 +0000

7:00 pm 79 Crosby St. A screening of Quentin Tarrentino's PULP FICTION followed by a conversation with Michael Maren For reservations visit here or call: 212 226 6400

Ocean State Summer Writing Conference/U. of R.I.

teameight — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 03:54:09 +0000

Keynote Talk, Reading, and Q&A 12:30 p.m. University of Rhode Island Swan Hall, 60 Upper College Road Kingston, RI http://www.uri.edu/summerwriting

GOON SQUAD Wins the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction!

teameight — Mon, 23 May 2011 02:08:00 +0000

http://events.latimes.com/bookprizes/

BookHampton

teameight — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 03:51:12 +0000

8:00 pm 41 Main St East Hampton

New York

http://bookhampton.indiebound.com/event/july-15-jennifer-egan-visit-goon-squad

Minnesota's "Talking Volumes"

teameight — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:59:32 +0000

7 p.m. Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul Tickets: $25 651-290-1200 http://fitzgeraldtheater.publicradio.org/events/

Brooklyn Book Festival

teameight — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 03:59:28 +0000

"Unholy Paths to Redemption," with James Hannaham, John Burnham Schwartz and Timothy Houlihan 5:00 pm St. Francis Auditorium, St. Francis College, Borough Hall Festival Information

Bryn Mawr

teameight — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 03:59:02 +0000

7:30 PM Goodhart Hall (McPherson Auditorium) Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania http://www.brynmawr.edu/arts/cwprs.html

Pete's Candy Store

teameight — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 03:59:41 +0000

With Emma Straub 7:30 pm 709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn http://www.petescandystore.com/reading/index.html#schedule

National Book Festival, Washington DC

teameight — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 21:00:50 +0000

"Fiction and Mystery" 10:55-11:40 am Book Signing: Noon-1pm http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/author/jennifer_egan

The New Yorker Festival

teameight — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 03:59:32 +0000

"Writing About America," with Junot Diaz and Yiyun Lee, Moderated by Lee Ellis 9:30 pm Directors Guild Theatre, 110 West 57th Street For More Information

Wordstock Festival, Portland OR: THREE EVENTS!

teameight — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 03:59:09 +0000

1:00 pm Reading, Conversation: With Greg Netzer 4:00 pm "Pushing the Limits of Form in Fiction": With Charles Yu, John Freeman and Elissa Schappell 8:00 pm The Live Wire Wordstock Extravaganza: With Steve Almond More Information and Locations

Boston Book Festival

teameight — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 21:59:21 +0000

"Fiction: Goons and Greed," with Lawrence Douglas and Peter Mountford 12:45 PM Old South Church Sanctuary, 645 Boylston St. For More Information

Philadelphia Free Library

teameight — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 03:59:11 +0000

With Jaimy Gordon and Karen Russell 7:30 pm Central Library For Information and Tickets

92nd Street Y

teameight — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 04:59:16 +0000

With Jeffrey Eugenides 8:00 pm Kaufmann Concert Hall Lexington Avenue at 92nd St Information and Tickets

University of Michigan Reading/Reception

teameight — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:59:27 +0000

5:10 PM Location: The Apse, UMMA For More Information

University of Texas in Austin

teameight — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 03:59:46 +0000

Michener Center for the Arts Reading and Q&A 7:30 pm Avaya Auditorium at UT Austin Campus, E 24th St, Austin, TX, 78705 Free and open to the public (no tickets required) More Information

Muhlenberg College, Allentown PA

teameight — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 04:59:48 +0000

7:30 pm Miller Forum, Muhlenberg College Campus, 2400 W. Chew St., Allentown, PA 18104 Free; no tickets required More Information

GOON SQUAD wins Galaxy National Book Award's 2011 International Author of the Year Award

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:14:13 +0000

Voting for Galaxy Book of the Year

GOON SQUAD shortlisted for the 2011 Irish Book Awards

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:25:05 +0000

http://www.constablerobinson.com/?section=news&news_item=225

Amherst College, MA

teameight — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 04:59:20 +0000

Reading and Signing 8:00 pm Pruyne Lecture Hall, Amherst College Campus, 220 South Pleasant St., Amherst, MA 01002 Free; no tickets required More Information

Colgate University, Hamilton NY

teameight — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:59:38 +0000

Reading and Signing 4:30 pm Love Auditorium, Colgate University Campus, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, NY 13346 Free; no tickets required More Information

GOON SQUAD Chosen as Amazon UK's #2 Book of 2011

teameight — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 17:40:58 +0000

http://amzn.to/vcBMWq

Order Signed/Personalized Copies of Egan's Books for the Holidays!

teameight — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:22:03 +0000

Jennifer Egan will sign and personalize any of her books--including hardcovers of GOON SQUAD--ordered from Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore (718-246-0200). Holiday greetings encouraged! Books can be gift-wrapped and shipped anywhere; no sales tax if you're outside NY State. ***Please Note: 1st editions are unfortunately not available.

End-of-Year love for GOON SQUAD in 2011

teameight — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:11:13 +0000

Though it came out in 2010, GOON SQUAD still made some "Best of 2011" reading lists in North America: Newsweek/The Daily Beast, The Vancouver Sun, and the Atlantic Monthly.

GOON SQUAD is second "most chosen" fiction in the UK for 2011!

teameight — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:20:12 +0000

Read the Evening Standard article, or this one in Bookseller.com about how GOON SQUAD's success has given a much deserved boost to its spectacular publisher, Constable & Robinson.

Rutgers-Camden University, Camden, NJ

teameight — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 04:59:24 +0000

7:00 pm Reading, Q&A and booksigning Stedman Gallery, Fine Arts Building at Rutgers-Camden University, 409 North 4th Street, Camden, NJ 08102 http://mfa.camden.rutgers.edu/visitors_2011.html

Gonzaga University Writers Series, Spokane, WA

teameight — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:59:24 +0000

7:30 pm Reading, Q&A, booksigning Cataldo Globe Room at Gonzaga University, 502 East Boone Ave., Spokane, WA 99258 Event Website

Seattle Arts & Lectures, Seattle, WA

teameight — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:59:04 +0000

7:30 "Fiction Writer as Journalist" Lecture, Q&A Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., Seattle, WA 98101 http://www.lectures.org/

Columbia University, New York, NY

teameight — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:59:36 +0000

6:30 pm On-stage Q & A International Affairs Building, Room 1501, 420 West 118th St, New York, NY 10027 No tickets required http://ircpl.org/2011/event/jennifer-egan-rewiring-the-real/

Valencia Community College, Orlando, FL

teameight — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:59:06 +0000

1:00 pm Reading, Q&A, booksigning Valencia Community College Campus (auditorium TBD), 190 S Orange Ave., Orlando, FL 32801 No tickets required http://valenciacollege.edu/events/

Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

teameight — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 04:59:14 +0000

8:00 pm Reading, Q&A, booksigning Diamond Concert Hall, 600 N. Copeland St., Tallahassee, FL 32304 Open to the public (tickets required) http://www.fsu.edu/indexTOFStory.html?lead.sevendays

Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA

teameight — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:59:35 +0000

4:30 pm Reading, followed by an on-stage conversation with a moderator Newhouse Center for Humanities at Wellesley College, 106 Central Street, Wellesley, MA 02481 http://www.newhouse-center.org/

Bergen Community College, Paramus, NJ

teameight — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:55:23 +0000

1:45 pm Reading, followed by a Q&A Ciccone Theater, 400 Paramus Rd., Paramus, NJ 07652 No tickets required http://www.bergen.edu/las/Welcome.html

Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

teameight — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:59:52 +0000

6:00 pm Reading, followed by a Q&A and booksigning Anita Tuvin Schlechter Auditorium at Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 17013 No tickets required http://clarkeforum.org/

Community College of Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD

teameight — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:59:27 +0000

12:30 pm Reading and lecture, followed by a Q&A Community College of Baltimore County (auditorium TBD), 7201 Rossville Blvd., Baltimore, MD 21237 No tickets required http://www.ccbcmd.edu/

Arlington One Reads at Arlington Public Library, Arlington, VA

teameight — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:59:25 +0000

7:00 pm Reading, followed by a Q&A and booksigning Arlington Public Library, 1015 North Quincy St., Arlington, VA 22201 No tickets required Website Link

PEN World Voices Festival, New York

teameight — Sat, 05 May 2012 03:59:15 +0000

Dialogue Series: How to Create Your own Rules with Jacob Weisberg 6:00-7:30 pm The School of Writing at The New School Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th St. Information on Tickets, etc

PEN World Voices Festival, New York

teameight — Sun, 06 May 2012 03:59:29 +0000

Messiah in Brooklyn With Teju Cole, Karl O. Knausgaard, Riikka Pulkkinen, Luc Sante, and others 8:00 pm Invisible Dog 51 Bergen St., Brooklyn Tickets etc

HuffPost SF's New Book Club!

teameight — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:59:28 +0000

Join Jennifer Egan for a live online video discussion of A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD 7:30 pm PT, 10:30 pm EST Visit HuffPost SF's homepage on May 22 for a link to the discussion. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/san-francisco/

GOON SQUAD is one of 10 Finalists for the IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award!

teameight — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:05:58 +0000

A winner will be chosen on June 13th! http://www.impacdublinaward.ie/award-archive/winners-1996-2012/2012-shortlist/

THE NEW YORKER is serializing "Black Box," Jennifer Egan's new short story, on Twitter

teameight — Sun, 27 May 2012 21:00:56 +0000

Tweeting happens from 8:00-9:00pm, from 5/24-6/2; follow @NYerFiction to read the tweets as they unfold. Installments are posted here as soon tweeting is complete. Jennifer Egan's explanation of why and how she chose to write "Black Box" is here. The story will appear in print in the NEW YORKER fiction issue--on stands Monday, May 28th.

Chilmark Community Center, Martha's Vineyard MA

teameight — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 03:00:06 +0000

Reading, Q&A and Booksigning 7:30 pm 520 South Rd Chilmark, MA 02535 Tickets are available at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven, the Chilmark Community Center office between 9 am – 12 pm and at TicketsMV.com Questions? Call 508-645-9484 www.chilmarkcommunitycenter.org

Deschutes Public Library Author! Author! Literary Series: Bend, OR

teameight — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 04:54:24 +0000

Lecture: Novelist as Journalist/Journalist as Novelist 7:00 pm Bend High School Auditorium, 230 Northeast 6th St, Bend, OR 97701 Open to the Public (tickets required) Event Website

Artists in Residence Program at University of Central Arkansas, Little Rock, AR

teameight — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:56:47 +0000

7:30 pm College of Business Auditorium, University of Central Arkansas, 201 Donaghey Ave, Little Rock, AR 72035 Open to the public; no tickets required Event Website

Butler University, Indianapolis, IN

teameight — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 03:59:30 +0000

7:30 pm Reilly Room, Atherton Union Hall, Butler University, 4600 Sunset Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46208 Open to the public; no tickets required Event Website

Clemson University Literary Festival, Clemson, SC

teameight — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 03:59:30 +0000

Reading and signing 8:00 pm Clemson University Alumni Center, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634 Open to the Public; no tickets required Festival Website

Bexley Community Book Club, Bexley, OH

teameight — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 03:59:25 +0000

Lecture 7:30 pm Schottenstein Theatre, Bexley High School, 348 S. Cassingham Rd, Bexley, OH 43209 Open to the Public; tickets required Event Website

Rosamond Gifford Lecture Series, Syracuse, NY

teameight — Thu, 16 May 2013 03:59:25 +0000

Lecture 7:30 pm Crouse-Hinds Concert Theatre, Mulroy Civic Center, 800 South State St, Syracuse, NY 13202 Open to the public (tickets required) Event Website

Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey

teameight — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:59:50 +0000

Reading and signing 7:00 pm Chancellor's Suite, University Center Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Avenue, South Orange, NJ 07079 Free and open to the public http://www.shu.edu/news/article/426179

Thalia Book Club at Symphony Space, NYC

teameight — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:59:40 +0000

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, with Siri Hustvedt and Margot Livesey 7:30 pm Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space $25; Member $21; 30 & Under $15 Event Website

Tom Wolfe Weekend Seminar, Lexington VA

teameight — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:47:08 +0000

Lecture on "Journalist as Novelist/ Novelist as Journalist" followed by Q&A and Book signing 4:15PM-5:15PM Lee Chapel, Washington & Lee University, 204 W Washington Street, Lexington VA 24450 Free and open to the public http://www.wlu.edu/x11068.xml

Vassar College, Poughkeepsie New York

teameight — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 03:59:05 +0000

2013 William Starr Lecture: "The Sausage Factory: Making Fiction out of Instincts, Hunches, and Glaring Mistakes." 5:30-6:00 pm Villard room, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie NY, 12604 Free and Open to the Public Event Website

Texas State University, San Marcos & Kyle, Texas

teameight — Fri, 18 Oct 2013 03:59:09 +0000

3:30 pm Reading and Q&A Texas State University, The Witliff Collection, San Marcos TX Free and Open to the Public Event Website

Texas State University, San Marcos & Kyle, Texas

teameight — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 03:59:37 +0000

7:30 pm Reading, Q&A, and Signing Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center, Kyle, TX Free and Open to the Public Event Website

Lighthouse Writers Workshop Writers Studio, Denver, CO

teameight — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 03:59:53 +0000

Evening Reading, Q&A, and Signing Lighthouse Writers Workshop, 1515 Race Street, Denver, CO 80206 Open to the Public (tickets required) https://lighthousewriters.org

Great Writers Great Readers, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY

teameight — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 04:59:16 +0000

7:00 pm Reading, Q&A, and Signing Hofstra University, The Cultural Center Theater, 779 Hempstead Turnpike, Hempstead NY, 11550 Free and Open to the Public

The Open Book Series, University of South Carolina, Columbia SC

teameight — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 03:59:30 +0000

6:00 pm Lecture on A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD University of South Carolina, Hollings Library Program Room, Columbia SC, 29205 Free and Open to the Public

The New Yorker Festival, New York, NY

teameight — Sat, 05 Oct 2013 03:59:37 +0000

A Conversation with Michael Chabon, moderated by Deborah Treisman 7:00 pm MasterCard Stage at SVA Theatre 1 333 West 23rd Street Purchase Tickets

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

teameight — Mon, 15 May 2006 20:33:56 +0000

Kirkus Reviews (starred) 5/15/06 "Intelligent, challenging and exciting... The characters' emotions are so real, the author's insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away."

Booklist

teameight — Fri, 19 May 2006 21:19:41 +0000

Booklist 5/19/06 "Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story."

Library Journal

teameight — Tue, 16 May 2006 20:33:35 +0000

Library Journal 5/16/06 "An engrossing narrative told in prose that's remarkably fresh and inventive."

Amazon.com

teameight — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 20:34:29 +0000

Amazon.com June, 2006 read review "In Jennifer Egan's deliciously creepy new novel, two cousins reunite twenty years after a childhood prank gone wrong changed their lives and sent them on their separate ways...To reveal too much would ruin the story, just know that The Keep is a wonderfully weird read--a touch experimental in terms of narrative, with a hefty dose of gothic tension and mystery--balanced by an intimate and mesmerizing look at how the past haunts us in different ways. "

The Oregonian

teameight — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:34:54 +0000

The Oregonian August 6, 2006 "Half tall tale, half literary experiment, Jennifer Egan's "The Keep" is more than the sum of its parts...Egan lets her writing romp...How she weaves the story of these four people together--and the unexpected links between them--is fascinating." --April Henry

Time Out

teameight — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 20:35:19 +0000

Time Out August 3-9, 2006 "The Keep is an example of literature responding to current events not with a mirror but an artful mindfuck." --David Bahr

Vanity Fair

teameight — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:35:40 +0000

Vanity Fair August, 2006 "Jennifer Egan spins a haunting tale...Egan's brilliance is in balancing the deliciously creepy elements of gothic-castle novels with the dead-on realism of a prisoner's life, to create a book worth keeping."--Elissa Schappell

The Washington Post (Media Mix)

teameight — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 20:36:05 +0000

The Washington Post (Media Mix) July 30, 2006 "Egan is an exceptionally intelligent writer whose joy at appropriating and subverting genres and cliches--from prison memoir to Gothic ghost story--is evident on every dizzyingly inventive page."

The New York Observer

teameight — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:36:28 +0000

The New York Observer August 7, 2006 Read the Review "Intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive...Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood, if unexpected, kind of sense." --Nan Goldberg

O: The Oprah Magazine

teameight — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:36:49 +0000

O: The Oprah Magazine August 2006 "Roiling and captivating...As you finish this novel, part horror tale, part mystery, part romance, the mind lingers over it, amazed by how vivid Egan has made it, how witty, how disturbing, how credible, and yet how utterly fantastic."--Vince Passaro

Elle Magazine

teameight — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:37:08 +0000

Elle Magazine August 2006 "Visionary...at once hyperrealistic and darkly dreamed...With Egan's powers of invention running at full tilt, The Keep reads like a twenty-first-century mash-up of Kafka, Calvino, and Poe, in which the absurd meets the surreal meet the unspeakable--to edgy, entertaining effect." --Lisa Shea

Rocky Mountain News

teameight — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 20:37:28 +0000

Rocky Mountain News August 11, 2006 "The complicated plot comes together seamlessly, marvelously. The characters crackle with life...their pain palpable and strangely inevitable. It's a novel that engages and haunts the reader, a psychological who's-who, who-dun-what and how-do-they-go-on. The Keep is a fast and furious read, a perfect summer novel." --Ashley Simpson Shires

San Francisco Chronicle

teameight — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 20:38:21 +0000

San Francisco Chronicle August 23, 2006 Read the Review "[A] remarkable piece of work...Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe ("The Mysteries of Udolpho") and Horace Walpole ("Castle of Otranto"), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It's tricky; but it's a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off." --Ron Antonucci

People Magazine

teameight — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:38:11 +0000

People Magazine August 21, 2006 *Critic's Choice* (Four stars) "Dazzling...Egan gets everything right--from the convolutions of the strung-out male mind to the self-deceptions of a drug addict--and her skill will keep you marveling at the pages that you can't help turning." --Francine Prose

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

teameight — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 20:39:12 +0000

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune July 30, 2006 "Jennifer Egan is a contemporary American storyteller in the vein of Stephen King or "The Sopranos" scriptwriters. Her latest novel, a slightly gothic tale of love and the (possibly) supernatural, is a pleasure to read...Egan's eye and ear for contemporary America places the whole saga too close to home for fantasy." --Emily Carter Roiphe

The Onion

teameight — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 20:39:34 +0000

The Onion August 31, 2006 Read the Review "With The Keep, Egan breaks the mold from page one. Her muscular, lively prose achieves a haunting effect...[The book] maintains a frightening, vertiginous velocity...And the immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror...outstanding." --Donna Bowman

USA Today

teameight — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:39:55 +0000

USA Today August 10, 2006 Read the Review "Arresting...insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives...strange and beautifully drawn, a place well worth visiting." --Susan Kelly

The New Yorker

teameight — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:40:18 +0000

The New Yorker August 21, 2006 "This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites...Egan's clever scenario presents Danny's mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous--imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests--and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics."

The Los Angeles Times

teameight — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 20:40:59 +0000

The Los Angeles Times July 30, 2006 "A novel as daring as Jennifer Egan's "The Keep" makes us think hard about one of the murkiest mysteries of all: the mystery of perception, that uncertain border where reality and imagination meet...irresistibly suspenseful...A novel like "The Keep" shows us what it's like to live outside of today's categories and to exist in unreal situations, in dreams, in confusion, in the experiences of others."--Joanna Scott

Chicago Tribune

teameight — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:41:19 +0000

Chicago Tribune August 13, 2006 "The events that transpire are so surprising and provocative, the humor so wry, the sheer pleasure of reading "The Keep" so great, one instantly feels impelled to read it again, an impulse that is grandly rewarded, so masterful is Egan's foreshadowing, so nuanced and mysterious is the story. Gothic and chthonic, "The Keep" is satirically sublime." --Donna Seaman

The New York Times Book Review (Cover)

teameight — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 20:41:44 +0000

The New York Times Book Review (Cover) July 30, 2006 Read the review "Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist...Egan sustains an awareness that the text is being manipulated by its author, while at the same time delivering character and story with perfect and passionate conviction. Very few writers, in our time or any other, have been able to bring that off...the dazzling presentation makes us believe that it really is a matter of life, death and salvation...The result is a work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving."--Madison Smartt Bell

Emerald City - New York Times Book Review

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:44:25 +0000

"Fiction writers are connoisseurs of memory...Jennifer Egan, a writer of understated elegance, is no exception, and it's clear that she retains keen memories of girlhood, that quicksilver time of eagerness and fear, vulnerability and conviction. She nmined this deep vein with great success in her bittersweet novel, The Invisible Circus, and it fuels her boldly modulated short stories, tales of displacement and blazing moments of truth...riveting, vaguely Hitchcockian...piercingly tender...outstanding." -- New York Times Book Review

Emerald City - Philadelphia Inquirer

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:59:10 +0000

"Lustrous...these stories sparkle with Egan's fresh imagery and precise renderings of mood and place...A writer of tremendous intelligence and grace." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

Emerald City - Time

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:59:46 +0000

"Affecting accuracy...quiet but disturbing...She deftly depicts the ways in which women can create glamorously detailed personas for one another based on passing observations." -- Time

Emerald City - Entertainment Weekly

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:00:15 +0000

"Masterful...Discovering Egan in the nineties is like discovering Ann Beattie in the eighties." -- Entertainment Weekly

Emerald City - Seattle Post-Intelligencer

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:00:49 +0000

"Distant settings and enticing writing...all bear the unmistakable stamp of a rising talent at work...Egan takes chances, ventures afar." -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Emerald City - Elle

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:01:21 +0000

"Immensely appealing...Told with dazzling insight and emotional daring." -- Elle

Emerald City - People

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:01:39 +0000

"A seamless collection...displays a gift for cool, clean, wrenching prose. Jennifer Egan has modern life down pat, and in this smartly crafted collection, she hands it over." -- People

Emerald City - Detour Magazine

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:01:58 +0000

"Astounding...The wistfulness of her characters, her transcendent prose-concise and lyrical-and the consistently high caliber of stories in this collection mark Jennifer Egan as a tremendous talent." -- Detour Magazine

Emerald City - Glamour

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:02:37 +0000

"Egan displays wonderful empathy toward people who are standing at the brink of life; her tales celebrate the power of hope and redemption. Like a necklace in which every stone is a stunner, Emerald City will take your breath away." -- Glamour

Emerald City - New York Newsday

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:02:54 +0000

"Accomplished...sharp eye and effortlessly graceful prose...She brings us to the transcendent place where reality becomes illusion." -- New York Newsday

Emerald City - The Dallas Morning News

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:03:10 +0000

"Ms. Egan's voice is boundless...The moment of change is so carefully constructed in each story, so fascinating in Ms. Egan's offhand way, that one recognizes a great new writer." -- The Dallas Morning News

Emerald City - Charlotte Observer

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:03:26 +0000

"Egan displays a mastery of voice for a young writer...Her voice moves easily and accurately between the characters, her stories as beautifully crafted as they are darkly moving." -- Charlotte Observer

Emerald City - Publisher's Weekly

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:03:45 +0000

"Egan's writing is even more assured and convincing than it was in her debut novel, The Invisible Circus...a writer of admirable ambition and accomplishment." -- Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

The Boston Globe

teameight — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 20:38:54 +0000

The Boston Globe September 3, 2006 "If Kafka's Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll's Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan's Danny...No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles...the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting." --Merrill Kaitz

The Atlantic Monthly

teameight — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 20:40:39 +0000

The Atlantic Monthly October, 2006 Read an Excerpt of the review "Egan's third novel...is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life."--Joseph O'Neill

The Seattle Times

teameight — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 20:42:02 +0000

The Seattle Times September 15, 2006 Read the Review "An experimental novel wrapped in gothic velvet...as tautly paced as a classic thriller."--Moira Macdonald

The Boston Phoenix

teameight — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:42:24 +0000

The Boston Phoenix September 26, 2006 Read the Review "At the heart of The Keep is a love story with so much pull, its bruises can be found on almost every page. Like an old spirit who refuses to go away, this is one fantasy that haunts long after its physical end."--Sharon Steel

The Philadelphia Inquirer

teameight — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:42:49 +0000

The Philadelphia Inquirer September 14, 2006 "Filaments of suspense fan out in all directions...The whole book is surprising; you just don't realize how surprising until the end...The book itself is a stronghold of imaginative story telling, the last stand of the Gothic novel."--Dorothy Lehman Hoerr

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

teameight — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 20:43:09 +0000

Seattle Post-Intelligencer September 15, 2006 Read the Review "Jennifer Egan is one of the most gifted writers of her generation...The risk-taking writer has created an original, postmodern take on the gothic thriller."--John Marshall

ivillage: Stuff We Love

teameight — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 20:43:28 +0000

ivillage: Stuff We Love October, 2006 "When Halloween comes around this year, forgo the tired old horror movies and curl up with National Book Award nominee Jennifer Egan's new novel The Keep...Part gothic romance, part ghost story, and peppered with Egan's startling insights into the role of communication and loneliness in contemporary life, this is one brainy page-turner that will have you leaving the lights on at night."--Amy Shearn

Emerald City - Booklist

teameight — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:04:10 +0000

"Each of these stories comes fully loaded with believable characters, a story arc, a resolution-all the satisfying elements that seem so elusive in modern fiction. Egan is a generous, gifted, and spellbinding writer." -- Booklist (starred review)

the Invisible Circus - New York Newsday

teameight — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:18:35 +0000

"Searing....keenly observed....remarkable for its shapeliness and control....Egan's strongest suit may be her language." -- New York Newsday

Look at Me - Vogue

teameight — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:19:16 +0000

"Egan's ability to move with ease between sincerity and satire sets Look at Me apart....Her authentic-feeling details give a sense of unusual immediacy." -- Vogue

Booklist

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:10:32 +0000

"Egan attains an electrifying level of emotional intensity that translates into some the most vivid and original descriptions of place found in recent fiction." -- Booklist (starred review)

Elle

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:11:08 +0000

"Punches home like a blow to the stomach." -- Elle

Baltimore Sun

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:11:41 +0000

"Adroit....The Invisible Circus deals with a number of compelling themes....[Egan] infuses this book with considerable intelligence and sensitivity." -- Baltimore Sun

Alice Adams

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:12:11 +0000

"A startling book, full of unexpected words and sentences. And ideas. Jennifer Egan is a highly original, unusually intelligent writer." -- Alice Adams

The St. Petersburg Times

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:12:35 +0000

"Extraordinary....Egan's gift for storytelling captures the era with extreme ........Her writing is so fresh that it raises goose bumps and causes the heart to race. One can hardly wait for her next work." -- The St. Petersburg Times

Orlando Times

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:13:01 +0000

"A wonderfully light, but finely tuned first novel. Jennifer Egan writes beautifully, her prose evocative and her plot considered and intriguing." -- Orlando Times

Cosmopolitan

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:13:26 +0000

"Elegant and brilliant....spellbinding, heartbreaking, and told by a master." -- Cosmopolitan

Robert Stone

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:13:48 +0000

"Jennifer Egan's The Invisible Circus is a real page-turner. Dramatic, suspenseful and beautifully written, it is also a thoughtful evocation of the world fo 1960's European radicals, featuring some memorable characters of the past and present." -- Robert Stone

The Boston Sunday Globe

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:14:10 +0000

"Wonderful....a triumph....told beautifully and energetically....by a writer who dances right along the scary edges of the material without ever losing control of it." -- The Boston Sunday Globe

The Philadelphia Inquirer

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:14:32 +0000

"A lustrous, intelligent novel that ultimately is less about an era than about timeless human yearnings." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Washington Post Book World

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:15:00 +0000

"Evocative....an auspicious first novel for a very promising writer." -- The Washington Post Book World

The New Yorker

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:15:21 +0000

"A trip that takes the reader through stunning emotional terrain." -- The New Yorker

Boston Globe Book Review

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:15:46 +0000

"Brilliant in its authenticity and overwhelming passion." -- Boston Globe Book Review

New York Times Book Review

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:16:15 +0000

"Mesmerizing....told with great assurance and power....Ms. Egan portrays the sisters with a quiet, heartbreaking clarity." -- New York Times Book Review

Los Angeles Times Book Review

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:16:36 +0000

"Wonderful....words glide through her fingers and enter the pores like cool San Francisco fog" -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

Pat Conroy

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:16:57 +0000

"If there were justice in the world, no one would be allowed to write a first novel of such beauty and accomplishment." -- Pat Conroy

SF Weekly

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:18:29 +0000

"This masterfully plotted work bears the stamp of a perceptive -- if not clairvoyant -- writer whose disturbing vision...rings all too true." -- SF Weekly

Francine Prose, The New York Observer

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:18:50 +0000

"Fresh, accurate, clear and inventive....The vocabulary, the crisp, graceful sentences, the intelligence of tone, all suggest that behind the narrative is a consciousness, and behind the consciousness a writer who knows what she's doing." -- Francine Prose, The New York Observer

Us Weekly

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:19:13 +0000

"Intelligent and refreshingly dark, Egan's eerie tale has the same mesmerizing pull as the culture it skewers." -- Us Weekly

Elle

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:20:00 +0000

"Dark, hugely ambitious....As riveting as a roadside wreck -- and noxiously, scathingly funny." -- Elle

Newsday

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:22:01 +0000

"[A] scintillating inquiry into the complex and profound dynamics of perception. Egan...animates a superb cast of intriguing and unpredictable characters, and tells an elegantly structured, emotionally arresting and slyly suspenseful story." -- Newsday

Seattle Weekly

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:22:26 +0000

"Egan has created a compelling world....With [her] graceful prose and vivid characterizations, she navigates her plot lines' churning waters with admirable skill." -- Seattle Weekly

O: The Oprah Magazine

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:22:47 +0000

"Riveting....As the book gains momentum, Egan's writing is both fluid and driven, with wonderful slashes of satire....A remarkable study of our culture (where we all seem to be wearing masks) and of our palpable need to be known." -- O: The Oprah Magazine

San Francisco Chronicle

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:23:14 +0000

"Part mystery, part cultural critique, [Look at Me] masterfully entwines the novel's secondary characters, building to a conclusion that is unexpected and disturbing, and making an incisive statement about our society's obsession with fame and glamour." -- San Francisco Chronicle

People

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:23:44 +0000

"An imaginative, well-paced read with serious questions about the elusiveness of meaning inside the gilded cage. Egan has intelligence to burn but plenty of feeling too." -- People

BookPage

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:24:02 +0000

"Breathtaking....combines the tautness of a good mystery with the measured, exquisitely articulated detail and emotional landscape of the most literary of narratives..... Sure to leave readers thinking about these very real characters for some time to come." --BookPage

Hartford Courant

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:24:27 +0000

"Egan's take...is surreal and profoundly ironic and exaggerated, but it still rings true....Beneath it all, she finds characters worth saving." -- Hartford Courant

The Nation

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:24:47 +0000

"Egan's rich new novel...is about bigger things: double lives; secret selves; the difficulty of really seeing anything in a world so flooded with images." -- The Nation

Chicago Tribune

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:25:09 +0000

"Look at Me makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process." -- Chicago Tribune

Salon.com

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:25:30 +0000

"Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me...takes us beyond what we see and hints at truths we have only just begun to understand....Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth." -- Salon.com

Philadelphia Inquirer

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:25:51 +0000

"Prescient and provocative....The characters...jump from the pages and dare you to care about them....The prose is crisp and precise....The pieces fit together at the end with a satisfying click." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

The Wall Street Journal

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:26:19 +0000

"Ambitious, swiftly paced....Egan writes with such shimmering élan that it's easy to follow her cast on its journey." -- The Wall Street Journal

Los Angeles Times

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:26:43 +0000

"Look at Me is a complicated novel...but the questions it raises are worth following a lifetime of labyrinths toward the answers." -- Los Angeles Times

The New Yorker

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:27:06 +0000

"Comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written....An energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America." -- The New Yorker

The Washington Post Book World

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:27:36 +0000

"Egan has created some compelling characters and written provocative meditations on our times....[She] has captured our culture in its edge-city awfulness." -- The Washington Post Book World

Time

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:28:02 +0000

"Intriguing....An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary....The novel's uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency." -- Time

Newsweek

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:28:30 +0000

"Egan goes deeper, surprising us again and again. [She] limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel." -- Newsweek

The New York Times

teameight — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:28:50 +0000

"Brilliantly unnerving....A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel." -- The New York Times

teameight — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 20:18:35 +0000

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (Starred Review): Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive and well in this graceful yet wild novel. We begin in contemporaryish New York with kleptomaniac Sasha and her boss, rising music producer Bennie Salazar, before flashing back, with Bennie, to the glory days of Bay Area punk rock, and eventually forward, with Sasha, to a settled life. By then, Egan has accrued tertiary characters, like Scotty Hausmann, Bennie's one-time bandmate who all but dropped out of society, and Alex, who goes on a date with Sasha and later witnesses the future of the music industry. Egan's overarching concerns are about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, and lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn. Or as one character asks, "How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?" Egan answers the question elegantly, though not straight on, as this powerful novel chronicles how and why we change, even as the song stays the same. (June)

BOOKLIST (Starred Review)

teameight — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:18:42 +0000

BOOKLIST (Starred Review): Egan is a writer of cunning subtlety, embedding within the risky endeavors of seductively complicated characters a curious bending of time and escalation of technology's covert impact. Following her diabolically clever The Keep (2006), Egan tracks the members of a San Francisco punk band and their hangers-on over the decades as they wander out into the wider, bewildering world. Kleptomaniac Sasha survives the underworld of Naples, Italy. Her boss, New York music producer Bennie Salazar, is miserable in the suburbs, where his tattooed wife, Stephanie, sneaks off to play tennis with Republicans. Obese former rock-star Bosco wants Stephanie to help him with a Suicide Tour, while her all-powerful publicist boss eventually falls so low she takes a job rehabilitating the public image of a genocidal dictator. These are just a few of the faltering searchers in Egan's hilarious, melancholy, enrapturing, unnerving, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a novel. As episodes surge forward and back in time, from the spitting aggression of a late-1970s punk-rock club to the obedient, socially networked "herd" gathered at the Footprint, Manhattan's 9/11 site 20 years after the attack, Egan evinces an acute sensitivity to the black holes of shame and despair and to the remote-control power of the gadgets that are reordering our world. -- Donna Seaman

Kirkus (Starred Review)

teameight — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:20:12 +0000

Kirkus (Starred Review): "Time's a goon," as the action moves from the late 1970s to the early 2020s while the characters wonder what happened to their youthful selves and ideals. Egan (The Keep, 2006, etc.) takes the music business as a case in point for society's monumental shift from the analog to the digital age. Record-company executive Bennie Salazar and his former bandmates from the Flaming Dildos form one locus of action; another is Bennie's former assistant Sasha, a compulsive thief club-hopping in Manhattan when we meet her as the novel opens, a mother of two living out West in the desert as it closes a decade and a half later with an update on the man she picked up and robbed in the first chapter. It can be alienating when a narrative bounces from character to character, emphasizing interconnections rather than developing a continuous story line, but Egan conveys personality so swiftly and with such empathy that we remain engaged. By the time the novel arrives at the year "202-" in a bold section narrated by Sasha's 12-year-old daughter Alison, readers are ready to see the poetry and pathos in the small nuggets of information Alison arranges like a PowerPoint presentation. In the closing chapter, Bennie hires young dad Alex to find 50 "parrots" (paid touts masquerading as fans) to create "authentic" word of mouth for a concert. This new kind of viral marketing is aimed at "pointers," toddlers now able to shop for themselves thanks to "kiddie handsets"; the preference of young adults for texting over talking is another creepily plausible element of Egan's near-future. Yet she is not a conventional dystopian novelist; distinctions between the virtual and the real may be breaking down in this world, but her characters have recognizable emotions and convictions, which is why their compromises and uncertainties continue to move us. Another ambitious change of pace from talented and visionary Egan, who reinvents the novel for the 21st century while affirming its historic values.

Elle Magazine

teameight — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:55:22 +0000

Elle Magazine May 07, 2010 Read The Review A novel that's a globe-trotting, decade-leaping romp about music-industry people with fashionable foibles -- Lisa Shea

Marie Claire Radar: Books/TV

teameight — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:57:18 +0000

Marie Claire Radar: Books/TV Need to Read A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD Discover your inner Joan Jett (without the requisite hangover) in a new, hell-raising novel Warning: Those who have a hard time imagining the words *punk rocker* and *great novel* together in a sentence should stop reading now. The great novel in question is Jennifer Egan's A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, an exhilarating, big-hearted, three-headed beast of a story that explores the secret lives of some seriously screwed-up people, most of whom have been in love either with punk rock or with someone who sang it...We see ourselves in all of Egan's characters because their stories of heartbreak and redemption seem so real they could be our own, regardless of the soundtrack. Such is the stuff great novels are made of--even when the hearts in question belong to aging rock stars.

Vanity Fair/Hot Type

teameight — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:58:37 +0000

Vanity Fair/Hot Type: "Jennifer Egan's slamming multi-generational San Francisco saga, A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD, pogoes from the romantic, Mohawked youth of the 70s to the present-day hell of selling out."

BookPage A DAZZLING SPIN THROUGH TIME

teameight — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:23:29 +0000

BookPage: A DAZZLING SPIN THROUGH TIME Read The Review Fans riding high from Jennifer Egan’s critically acclaimed The Keep have much to look forward to in her new novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which turns away from the neo-gothic and mind-bending while retaining the unexpected humor and postmodern breadth of her earlier work. – Jillian Quint

Los Angeles Times

teameight — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 19:43:00 +0000

Los Angeles Times, 6/6/10 "It may be the smartest book you can get your hands on this summer." Read the Review

San Francisco Chronicle

teameight — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:35:27 +0000

San Francisco Chronicle, 6/6/10 "Like a masterful album, this one demands a replay." Read the Review

Chicago Tribune

teameight — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:45:47 +0000

Chicago Tribune, 6/6/10 "Jennifer Egan's decision to render portions of her new novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (Knopf), as a PowerPoint presentation is: Clever. Edgy. Groundbreaking." Read the Review

Newsweek

teameight — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:21:25 +0000

Newsweek, 6/3/10 "Her aim is not so much to explode traditional storytelling as to explore how it responds to the pressures and opportunities of the digital age." Read the review

Cleveland Plain Dealer

teameight — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:56:31 +0000

Cleveland Plain Dealer, 9/8/10 "I expect this brilliant, inventive novel to become enshrined. Such rash speculation is foolish, I know -- we live amid a plague of bloated praise. But "A Visit From the Goon Squad" is emboldening. It cracks the world open afresh." Read the Review

Philadelphia Inquirer

teameight — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:24:59 +0000

The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10 "In her audacious, extraordinary fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan uses the pop-music business as a prism to examine the heedless pace of modern life, generational impasses, and the awful gravity of age and entropy." Read the review

The Huffington Post

teameight — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:26:23 +0000

The Associated Press, June 9 "A Visit From the Goon Squad" in its way resembles the kind of social novel that Charles Dickens once cranked out regularly. It features more than a dozen disparate but vivid characters, from a powerful businessman to a Latin American dictator to a group of teenage punk rockers; and the action ranges over five decades and three continents. "But Egan has abandoned the straightforward narrative that marks most socially minded novels in favor of a series of linked stories that jump around in time and space and between a set of characters with sometimes tenuous connections. It calls to mind nothing so much as the fragmentary experience of surfing the Web." Read the review

Entertainment Weekly

teameight — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:28:34 +0000

Entertainment Weekly, 6/9 "Egan's expert flaying of human foibles has the compulsive allure of poking at a sore tooth: excruciating but exhilarating, too." Read the review

All Things Considered

teameight — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:30:19 +0000

Alan Cheuse, All Things Considered, 6/14 "Told with both affection and intensity, Goon Squad stands as a brilliant, all-absorbing novel for the beach, the woods, the air-conditioned apartment or the city stoop while wearing your iPod. Stay with this one. It's quite an original work of fiction, one that never veers into opacity or disdain for the reader." Read/Listen to the Review

New York Press

teameight — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:31:43 +0000

New York Press, 6/9 "It is a great work of fiction, a profound and glorious exploration of the fullness and complexity of the human condition." Read the Review

New York Newsday

teameight — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:08:11 +0000

New York Newsday, 6/13 "Jennifer Egan's bold, thrilling new novel examines the sea change from an analog world to a digital universe as it plays out in the lives of vividly imagined, richly complicated individuals." Read a Preview

The Observer's Very Short List

teameight — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:14:27 +0000

The Observer's Very Short List, 6/15 "How the private lives of these two characters—and plenty of others—intertwine makes for good, compelling reading, in this un-put-down-able novel." Read the Post

Washington Post

teameight — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:30:15 +0000

Washington Post, 6/16 "If Jennifer Egan is our reward for living through the self-conscious gimmicks and ironic claptrap of postmodernism, then it was all worthwhile." Read the Review

Book Page

teameight — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:15:44 +0000

Bookpage, June 2010 "Egan’s scope remains simultaneously manic and highly controlled."

Bookotron

teameight — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 23:22:44 +0000

Bookotron, 6/12 "Jennifer Egan is back with 'A Visit from the Goon Squad,' a brilliant and brilliantly enjoyable novel that manages to use the tropes of experimental fiction in a manner that make the book grippingly intense, funny, and endlessly enjoyable to read." Read the Review/Listen to a Podcast discussion between Rick Kleffel and Alan Cheuse

The Dallas Morning News

teameight — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:08:58 +0000

The Dallas Morning News, 6/20 "Egan takes a risk on an unusual structure and succeeds in moving the story forward while offering a welcome surprise." Read the Review

The Boston Globe

teameight — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:12:04 +0000

The Boston Globe, 6/20 "Readers of her three previous novels and story collection have already discovered Egan’s unique sensibility and style, which defy easy classification and which some newcomers may find disorienting. Others will come away exhilarated and pleasantly breathless from the unpredictable ride." Read the Review

The Miami Herald

teameight — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:14:50 +0000

The Miami Herald, 6/20 "A Visit from the Goon Squad flares into flamboyant life. It mulls the sort of big-picture ideas good novels ought to ponder."

The New York Times

teameight — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:20:20 +0000

The New York Times, 6/21 "Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it." Read the Review

People Magazine

teameight — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:44:11 +0000

People Magazine, 6/28 "Egan introduces a dizzying array of characters...but it all makes brilliant sense in the end. A thought-provoking examination of how and why we change--and what change and constancy mean in a Facebook--era world where 'the days of losing touch are almost gone.'"

Time Magazine

teameight — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 05:49:47 +0000

Time Magazine, 6/28 “It’s as if the author has taken an epic novel covering five decades and expertly filleted it, casting aside excess characters and years to come away with a narrative that is wide-ranging but remarkably focused.” Read the Review

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune

teameight — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:34:19 +0000

Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 6/27 "The effect over 13 chapters is that of a collage, choral work or puzzle, reminiscent of Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," or Robert Altman's ensemble films." Read the Review

Kansas City Star

teameight — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 13:53:42 +0000

Kansas City Star, 6/27 "For all its sensory richness, social and psychological insights and brilliant layering of ideas and commentary, Egan’s time-bending tale is laced with suspense and punctuated by emotional ambushes of profound resonance."

Bookotron

teameight — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:17:50 +0000

Bookotron, 6/28

"'A Visit from the Goon Squad' is first and foremost, fun and startlingly engaging to read." Read the Review

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

teameight — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 04:37:29 +0000

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/27 "Ms. Egan's concept is seductive, and her judicious marshalling of the right details of our contemporary life reveal a writer's peripheral vision that sees the whole playing field." Read the Review

NYTBR

teameight — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:41:19 +0000

New York Times Book Review (cover review), 7/11 "Remarkable...Is there anything Egan can’t do?" Read the Review

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

teameight — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:10:19 +0000

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7/11 "Poignant, provocative and ultimately profound." Read the Review

Taylor Antrim/Daily Beast

teameight — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:15:47 +0000

Daily Beast/Taylor Antrim, 7/12 "A Visit From the Goon Squad should cement [Egan's] reputation as one of America’s best, and least predictable, literary novelists." Read the Review

The Globe and Mail

teameight — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:24:56 +0000

The Globe and Mail, 7/16 "In her brash beauty of a novel, Jennifer Egan understands the power of shame, simply because it makes one present in the moment as effectively as fear or desire." Read the Review

The National Post

teameight — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 06:17:07 +0000

The National Post (Canada), 7/17 "Jennifer Egan’s stunning fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, is a collection of linked stories that don’t follow a conventional narrative structure but works beautifully because she takes chances that succeed." Read the Review

The Post and Courrier

teameight — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 13:44:50 +0000

The Post and Courrier (Charleston, SC), 8/1 "Egan's smart, unpredictable novel doesn't pretend to have the answers. It just charts the shifting ratio between hope and dread, as the goon stalks."

Read the Review

The National

teameight — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 14:23:58 +0000

The National (Abu Dhabi), 8/5 "Egan, too, has been swiftly, silently mounting an assault on the highest reaches of American fiction, beginning with early works like The Invisible Circus and Look at Me, and her remarkable 2006 novel The Keep. The Keep was a refreshing hybrid of postmodern playfulness and classical storytelling, and Goon Squad maintains its predecessor’s experimental daring while dramatically expanding its emotional reach." Read the Review

The Record: Music News from NPR

teameight — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:06:32 +0000

The Record: Music News from NPR, 8/17 The Novelist's Advantage: Great Books About Music Read the Review

Austin American Statesman

teameight — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 14:59:15 +0000

Austin American Statesman, 10/13 "This is art at its best — as a bulwark against the goon, as it embodies everything at once." Read the Review

The New York Review of Books

teameight — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:18:51 +0000

The New York Review of Books, 11/11 Reviewed by Cathleen Schine "Jennifer Egan’s new novel is a moving humanistic saga, an enormous nineteenth-century-style epic brilliantly disguised as ironic postmodern pastiche." Read the Review

The New Republic

teameight — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 13:18:36 +0000

The New Republic, 12/1 "It ends in the same place as it starts, except that everything has changed, including you, the reader." Read the Review

Village Voice

teameight — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 13:53:11 +0000

Village Voice, 12/8 "This Goon is all grace." Read the End-of-Year comment

Slate.com

teameight — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 23:08:56 +0000

Slate.com, 12/8 "Goon Squad is intricately crafted, wildly imaginative, and written with verve and grace...Give it to the superannuated goth in your life." Read the Review

The Guardian (UK)

teameight — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 02:56:38 +0000

The Guardian (UK), 3/13/11 "This is a difficult book to summarise, but a delight to read, gradually distilling a medley out of its polyphonic, sometimes deliberately cacophonous voices." Read the Review

The Independent (UK)

teameight — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:04:13 +0000

The Independent (UK), 3/13/11 "The sparky disconnect between generations is sometimes rewired with brief but joyful connections." Read the Review

BBC Saturday Review

teameight — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:40:25 +0000

BBC Saturday Review, 3/19 The group discussion of GOON SQUAD begins 13 minutes in (ie, almost at the end, after a long discussion of a Neil LaBute play) Listen to the Podcast

Independent (Ireland)

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:31:53 +0000

The Irish Independent, 3/26 "A Visit from the Goon Squad is a tremendous novel: thoughtful, subtle, funny, wacky, energetic, profoundly authentic." Read the Review

London Review of Books

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:36:46 +0000

London Review of Books, by Pankaj Mishra, 3/31 "Egan commemorates not only the fading of a cultural glory but also of the economic and political supremacy that underpinned it. The sense of an ending has always appeared to spur Egan’s inventiveness." Read the Review

The Telegraph

teameight — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:48:34 +0000

The Telegraph, 3/26 "Jennifer Egan’s new novel, her fourth, is playful in a serious way, complex in a straightforward way, more culturally penetrating than a shelf of Don DeLillos and contains some of the fizziest prose of the year." Read the Review

The Guardian

teameight — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 23:03:51 +0000

The Guardian, 4/2 "This is an incredibly affecting novel, sad, funny and wise, which should make Jennifer Egan's name in the UK." Read the Review

Panel Review by Lisa Brown

teameight — Fri, 20 May 2011 01:39:11 +0000

Panel Review by Lisa Brown/SF Gate, 5/15 A panel review is even better than PowerPoint! Read the review

London Evening Standard

teameight — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:25:29 +0000

London Evening Standard, 6/9 "A Visit From the Goon Squad is now making its own way inexorably, because almost everybody who reads it is going to recommend it to everybody they know." Read the Review

Paste Magazine

teameight — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 14:08:44 +0000

Paste Magazine 5/2 "Again, Egan has taken a leap of faith, trusting her audience will follow her, past the old nonlinear stand-bys such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, into even newer territory." Read the Review

The Short Review

teameight — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:47:31 +0000

The Short Review, 8/1 "For Egan, even tossed-off moonlight energizes and illuminates." Read the Review

Everyday E-Book

teameight — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:18:46 +0000

Everyday E-Book, 12/4 "Put the Needle on the Record: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad Rocks" Read the Review

The Independent, 12/11

teameight — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 18:03:55 +0000

The Independent (UK), 12/11/11 "I can't do this 514-page novel justice in 250 words. It's funny and serious, dry, sly and wry. The writing is as pin-sharp as the perceptions. If you didn't read it in 2011, make it your New Year's resolution to read it in 2012." Read the Review

National Post (Canada)

teameight — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:08:41 +0000

National Post (Canada), 1/10/12 "When finally I read the first pages, I was transfixed. For the next 36 hours I found all other activities bothersome because they took me away from this marvellous book." Read the Review

Great Rock and Roll Pauses

teameight — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:07:20 +0000

Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake

Some slides have audio. Be sure your speakers are on and "play" button is activated to hear it.