All You Need to Know: In which all stories are one

In 1979 V.C. Andrews wrote Flowers in the Attic, which started a series of books that became a blockbuster hit in the Eighties. Laced with incest, switched parents, and warped family secrets, the series sold millions while establishing Olivia Foxworth as the quintessential evil grandmother, who held her grandchildren hostage in the attic while their weak-willed mother caroused with other men. In 1987 a prequel to the series, Garden of Shadows, was published, which told Olivia’s backstory from her point of view. This served two main purposes: first, it deepened the story’s narrative arc by showing how the flawed parents became who they were; and second, it showed that everyone has a story, or perhaps it’s all one story, told from an infinity of possible perspectives.

Just added to All You Need to Know

My Aughts: In which fatherhood becomes me, and vice versa

My fears were only partially unfounded. My wife’s water broke before she had any contractions, and when we went to the hospital the nurses were concerned that the other, smaller heart rate dropped about 40 beats per minute every time the contractions started. The contractions weren’t getting any stronger, and the cervix wasn’t dilating. Two hours came and went, and the next hour I was in scrubs and getting sanitized, my wife was on an operating table with a curtain up below her shoulders so I couldn’t see the rest of her, a roomful of doctors and nurses were coaching my wife while cutting through layers of skin, muscle, and finally uterus, I was wiping her brow, and then I saw a baby come up, heard “It’s a girl!” and ran over to see her and describe her to my wife while she tried to remain conscious. And that was how, in the last year of the Aughts, I became the thing I feared the most—a father.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which past becomes present

A mere two weeks after we were married, we found out my wife was pregnant. The following January, I started writing letters to my unborn child. Then, less than a month before the due date, I began having a series of dreams, in which terrible things happened to both my wife and child in the course of the delivery. My panic attacks returned. I made a mistake and told my wife about these dreams, and she told me to leave our apartment until I’d talked about my dreams with someone besides her. So I called a few people, and when they didn’t answer I called Wayne Martin. My brother J.P., his son, hanged himself at age ten in 1999, and my brother Brian’s first son had died in childbirth just two years earlier. I thought, even though I hadn’t even met Wayne Martin until I was 15, and even after running away from home and making a home of my own, maybe I was finally subject to some sort of family curse. I told him that I just needed him to be a father for 20 minutes. And then, despite my expectations, he was. He told me about being on anti-depressants for seven years after J.P.’s death, about his fears for my sister Brianne, who was two years old when J.P. died, about missing even getting to be my father. “I think you learned how to be a good father from a bunch of bad ones. Now the only worries you got are the ones in your head.”

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which the list becomes the story

Sometime in the course of writing about the Aughts, I had a thought. I started writing about them as a list, much like my To Do list, only backwards since I was doing the things first, then writing them down. But somewhere along the line my list became a narrative, a series of events became a story, my past became my present, an invention became a life.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts are almost up!

Wow, almost at the end of My Aughts! Ironic that, one of writing's ostensible purposes being to capture moments and stop time, this project seems to be moving so swiftly. We have three more entries, then I'll take a break for the Thanksgiving holiday and we'll go back to the Seventies for All You Need to Know on Sunday, December 1.

Allow me to get all mushy for a few seconds, if only in honor of the holidays. I've gotten so many wonderful responses over the last three months, I feel like the most popular guy in the world. Well, except for maybe George Bailey. And he's a fictional character. (I'm only a quarter fiction, which was enough to get me into a traditionally nonfiction graduate college.)

My Aughts: In which we will know them by the trail of dead

By the end of the Aughts, a death was coming for which I felt no empathy or remorse: the bankruptcy of Borders. After spending most of the Nineties modeling its franchises on local independent book and record stores and then systematically putting them out of business, the global K-Mart affiliate was out-Bordered by an even more ravenous market structure—Amazon. The block-long, nearly identical carcasses of its many stores still litter the landscapes of many downtown areas, including the 700 block of New Hampshire Street in Lawrence, Kansas. Both as an independent bookseller whose retail channels include Amazon and as a product of nearly forty years of reading, I like to think quixotically that my Lilliputian arrow protrudes along with millions of others from the hide of the fallen giant.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which we go under the bridge

I became a Visiting Professor at that little liberal arts college. For the first time in years, I had a regular monthly income. I used it to buy an engagement ring. Later that year we got married under the Brooklyn Bridge of which Whitman and Crane sang, on the same pier where I’d seen Galway Kinnell and Bill Murray read at the beginning of the Aughts.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I make a decent proposal

I brought my new girlfriend out to rural Pennsylvania to meet my mother and my 40,000 books. Our first morning after arriving, lying on my mother’s couch, I asked her if she’d want to move in together. “I would,” she said. I then asked her, hesitantly, what she’d think about a factory loft, with bookshelves for walls. Her eyes widened. “I’d love it,” she said.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I turn around

After a semester of teaching, I’d begun having drinks regularly with the chair of my department. One night, a new professor at the college joined us at Vol de Nuit in the Village. She sank into the couch luxuriantly, and I immediately wanted to sink into it with her. I asked her out later that week, and four dates later I was in her apartment in Astoria. She introduced me to her Chihuahua, and turned on her stereo to a Bill Callahan song. No matter how far wrong you’ve gone/You can always turn around. I slept that night in her bed. It was softer, kinder than any I’d ever slept on. Turn around, turn around, turn around/And you may come full circle/And be new here again.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which the grievous angel returns

It was my old open mic friends who brought me back home. My old poet friend Frank, now in his 50s, had had six heart attacks in the previous year, had stopped working, and was waiting for his SSID to be approved, so he needed help with the rent at his apartment in Sugar Hill. And my friend Meagan, a poet who before the end of the Aughts would have a long-term book deal in the young adult market, got her boyfriend, the chair of the English Department at a local liberal arts college, to give me a couple of classes teaching writing as an adjunct. I moved in with Frank for six months and never bought a mattress.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I bury myself

I spent one year of the Aughts outside the city. I quit my teaching job, took out a business loan, bought my ex-girlfriend’s car and the inventory of a bookstore in rural Pennsylvania for a total of $14,000, and moved with those 40,000 books and the rest of my belongings into my mother’s basement. For the next year, I sorted through all those books, sang lots of karaoke at the local townie bar, and wondered how I could bring 40,000 books back home to New York City.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I head south one last time

My last trip to New Orleans was in June of 2005. Three months later, the city was underwater. That September I took a week off from work, found an ad hoc rescue group on Craigslist, and went looking for my lost city. I couldn’t get into New Orleans, and ended up at a camp for reformed convicts outside Slidell. I stayed in a Winnebago where the rooting of a pen full of wild hogs kept me up at night, and emptied trucks with donations from New Jersey for two days. Then I was sent to a Christian summer camp where I cut and burned felled trees for another four days. I still haven’t been back to New Orleans, but I wake up at 3am to the rumble of boxcars, the smell of beignets, or the sound of rooting hogs at least once a month.

Digitized from Converting the Lovebugs

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which something begins

While I was teaching English to new immigrants, one of my fellow teachers got cancer. He was like a father to his students, and to me. He fought through his treatment in front of his class, his family, and me, not missing a day of work until a month before he died, saying he was like Scheherazade: as long as he kept talking, telling his stories, he couldn’t die. He died anyway. After that, I dreamed of conversations he had with the unborn child I’d had aborted two years earlier. I wrote them down when I woke up, eventually titling them “The Ghost-Child Speaks with the Dying Man.” I never finished writing that piece.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which something ends

My first relationship that lasted more than a year was with a girl I met on Lavalife. For three years, she refused to laugh at any of my jokes. I got her pregnant and she broke up with me. But I paid for the abortion, and she asked me if I would take her back. I remember that day at the Planned Parenthood off Bleecker Street more clearly than any other day of our relationship. She was wearing a beige knitted sweater that made her look like a mom. We held hands on the train all the way there. One solitary protester outside the building told her not to make a decision she’d regret for the rest of her life, and she almost fainted. I held her up, and palmed the guy in the face. That day was the closest I ever felt to her.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

New Resident Dad post - The Tuna Casserole Matrix

Big news - I'll now be posting regularly again on A Child Grows in Brooklyn, twice monthly! They've scheduled my posts for the first and 15th of each month. For today's post, I give you my Tuna Casserole Matrix.

My Aughts: In which I sell out

I went into business as an independent online bookseller. This sprouted from selling off my own books, CDs, and videos, but was rooted just as much in a wish to get back at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and every other corporate bookseller that put my favorite independent bookstores out of business in the Nineties. I took out a DBA, got a tax ID, and started itemizing space in my room for tax purposes. I picked up books from the street and the trash, bought collections from teachers, museums, libraries, a radio/TV personality, and one former hit man. I called Wayne Martin at his furniture store, and finally had something to talk about—he told me what to write off, expounded on the importance of customer service, and asked me if I’d started an IRA. I didn’t quit my day job.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which time passes

Sometime in the months after 9/11 I began compulsively planning every hour of my day, making an Excel file with a cell for every hour. Every empty cell was a step closer to a panic attack. I got at least one of these a day. Wherever I was, I would find the nearest bathroom and run cold water over my wrists until my pulse returned to normal. I rarely get panic attacks anymore but I still obsess over time, and the importance of every hour.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I start my first career

The night of September 11, 2001, I was supposed to go straight from my day job to the New York City College of Technology on Jay Street, where I would start my first semester teaching English to new immigrants. I’d found the job from a guy I’d met at the poetry reading under the Brooklyn Bridge. He published my poem about the skyline swallowing the moon in his zine, and introduced me to his boss at CityTech. I started that job a week late, but worked there for four years. I taught a little bit of writing while serving as INS liaison, counselor, and surrogate brother for a group of 25 immigrants I saw for 25 classroom hours a week each semester. I was needed.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which it happens

I was working in market research on 25th Street. I arrived at work at 9:01. Co-workers were already gathered at the rear picture window, watching the first tower burn from the top down. I called my mom. “Do you think it’s terrorists?” she asked. I told her not to jump to any—and watched the shadow of the second plane collide with the other tower. One woman collapsed screaming while everyone else just stood there frozen, like those people in Kansas on The Day After right before the nuclear explosion turned them all to skeletons. I walked to the Upper West Side with my friend Meagan, found a Tower Records open, and bought Bob Dylan’s new album, Love & Theft. I then walked all the way back to Sunset Park, through roadblocks and makeshift water stations, past bars full to capacity, then home over the Manhattan Bridge. I looked back over my shoulder at the orange sky over the cloud of dust where the two towers used to be. Somehow, at least for that day, it seemed less real than the nuclear disaster I’d seen on TV when I was nine.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts

My Aughts: In which I ride further

Every spring I took a bus to Louisville, then drove with my friends Andrew and Todd from Louisville to New Orleans, starting with the Kentucky Derby and ending at Jazz Fest. We’d sit on the banks of the Mississippi, hop railroad cars, listen to Robert Belfour at the Circle Lounge or Anders Osborne at the Rock 'n' Bowl, and stay in hostels for $25 a night. Every year at least one of us was broke.

Just added to The List and the Story: My Aughts