I got the job the week before Thanksgiving. I remember exiting the subway at the 47-50 Rockefeller Street Station. I chose that stop because it seemed to be the most-northern border for which I was then familiar. If I’d exited the subway a stop earlier, I’d be at 57th Street, a couple of blocks down from Central Park, a neighborhood that even back then seemed too scrubbed-down and touristy for it to be real. If I exited a few stops later, I’d wind up at the park behind the big library, which was pretty enough, but too far from what I thought I was looking for. There were stops in between that I knew something about, but those were the days before you got free subway and bus transfers, and at a buck twenty-five per ride, I only had so much money to go around. I needed to ration my money. I had very little left. That was one of the reasons why I was looking for a job. But it wasn’t the only reason.
I must have ridden in on the F train that day. The Queens Boulevard Express. If you looked at the F train on a subway map, you’d see a long orange line that snaked all the way across the central part of Queens before crossing the East River and then reappearing in Manhattan. To get to the F train, I needed to take the bus from Elmont, in Long Island, which is where I was staying with my aunt and cousins at the time. The Elmont bus dropped you off at the very end of the F line, in a neighborhood known as Jamaica, which looked nothing like the Jamaica most people knew about, even though there were many Caribbean families who lived there.
When you crossed on the F train underneath the East River, you wouldn’t notice a difference when you got to Manhattan. Everyone on the train still looked the same. No one ever made direct eye contact. You either looked at the floor or the ceiling or the window or maybe at a book that you remember to bring along. But you never looked at another passenger. The seats were set up to be that way, those orange and yellow benches placed throughout the car with their backs to one another. Each set of exit doors had a bench set by them too, with a sign over them reading, “Please save these seats for the elderly and disabled.” Sometimes other passengers paid attention to those signs. But sometimes they didn’t.
Technically, when the train arrived in Manhattan, the F train was renamed the 6th Avenue Local. It ran on the local subway tracks underneath 6th Avenue, a street that an enterprising mayor renamed Avenue of the Americas sometime in the middle of the last century. But no one I was related to ever called the F train the F train, or the Avenue of the Americas Avenue of the Americas. That part of my family had lived in and around New York City ever since their relatives stepped off the boat at Ellis Island. They had their ideas of what streets and subways should be called, and nobody was ever going to change that. They still called the street 6th Avenue, just as they referred to the subway as the Queens Local instead of the F-train, and just as they called oranges ah-renges and almonds ammands and a highway a parkway, and that was how it was always going to be. They still referred to me, the youngest of all the grandchildren, as the delicate one in the family, the dreamer, and, because of my gender, the one unable to function on my own.
I was going to prove them wrong. I was on a mission that day.
Inside of my backpack was a folder with several copies of my resume, all carefully typed. I wore what I considered my best, most corporate outfit – a thrift-store cotton blouse, the sleeves too short but rolled up to hide them, a straight-cut wool skirt that I hoped hit the right height on my knees, and my one pair of black tights that didn’t have runs in them. Over all of this I wore a vintage men’s wool overcoat I bought at Ragstock in Iowa City the first winter I spent there, the shoulders just a little too wide and the sleeves just a smidge too short. The total effect was, I hoped, that of an artsy, yet-somewhat-put-together creative young woman. I hoped the look worked. Because I needed to get a job. Any job. Any permanent job. And to get a job, you had to look professional. And this was about as professional and put-together as my broke twenty-one-year-old self could afford to be.I began my walk south on 6th Avenue and decided to apply for any job I could find. I walked into storefront after storefront – clothing store, stationery store, fast-food restaurant, coffee shop. Once I hit 34th Street, some thirteen blocks down from where I started, I applied at Macy’s, where I had to sit down in front of a computer and take a test. I later learned that this was an honesty test. I must have failed because the person who administered the test gave me a curt, “We’ll get back to you,” with that underlying tone that they never would.
I crossed the street to Manhattan Mall and applied at every store that said they were hiring. I had never worked retail, but it was a bit over a month before Christmas, so I was hopeful. No responses. Just a tired writing hand filling out the same information in each application, over and over. After exiting the mall, I crossed the street again and walked down Broadway and applied to even more places: vintage clothing stores, an army-navy surplus store, more coffee shops, a bakery. By this time it was mid-afternoon and I hadn’t bothered to stop for lunch. My stomach was growling. I was tired, my feet hurt from my cheap Payless shoes, and my tights had already developed a run at the crotch that I hoped no one would notice. The further south I walked, the colder and windier it became, and by the time I hit Union Square, at 14th street and Broadway, one of the buttons had fallen off of my overcoat and the wind was blowing the coat away from me. I sat down on a park bench to rest.
I considered my strategy. It was getting later in the day and getting colder. I knew I’d have to stop the search soon. The worse thing would be to pick up a bad cold while I figured out my future. I decided I would continue my search for the next few blocks, until I got to the next subway stop. Then I would begin the long subway and bus journey back to my Elmont. For my lunch, I would pick up a granola bar at a newsstand on the way back. I only had twenty dollars in my pocket, the remains of my birthday money from the month before, and I wasn’t sure when I would get more. It was important to save–a quality I was not good at back then and have only become marginally better with over the years.
I stood up and began my final walk south. The clothing stores changed to coffee shops and bodegas, which were way out of my job search radar. I saw how waitresses worked, jumping from table to table, taking orders, bringing them out, making sure each order got to the right person, cleaning up after customers. It was too much for me. I’d rather have someone give me just one task, or a bunch of related tasks, and then let me work on it. Like that job I had my last few months in Iowa City. I was doing data entry for a college financial aid servicer. I’d start my shift with a big stack of financial aid forms, all neatly bound up with four rubber bands, two each wrapping around the top, two each wrapping around the sides. I’d pop the bands off, put aside the cover sheet, and start typing. I typed in names, addresses, household income, martial status, military status — just plain data that all flowed together after a while. I wasn’t particularly fast at it, nor was I the most accurate. Each rubber-banded stack, or batch, needed to go through quality control with another, more experienced operator, usually someone who worked at that company for years. I knew my batches needed more work. I could see it on the face of my supervisor, who would give me a little scowl as I came in every morning. My days there were probably limited. But the job market was very tight in Iowa City if you weren’t a student. After I had to leave school because my money ran out, the original plan was for me to stay in Iowa for another year and get in-state tuition. But I found Iowa City so empty without my former classmates. We seemed to live such different lives. They were working towards graduation. I was working towards a nebulous future in which not only did I need to be out of school for a year, I also owed the university approximately six thousand dollars – including a student loan that was immediately due upon my dropping out. I needed to find a way to repay all of it, but I couldn’t. I tried. I switched from day shift to third shift, where the pay was a little higher and where there weren’t as many supervisors. I worked overtime, often working a 12-hour shift. I caught rides there and back with a cartoonist guy whose friend used to date another mutual friend. The cartoonist had two friends, a married couple, who worked at the data entry place too. We would all carpool together. When we got off work at seven in the morning, we would go drinking. I would go back to my room, which was in a big shared Victorian house. I would try to sleep during the day but the sunlight always woke me up. I knew the end came when I was typing in names and making up stories about the names. I passed out on the desk. The next thing I knew, I felt a gentle shake on my shoulder.
“You look terrible.” It was one of the cartoonist’s friends. “Why don’t you go out to the car and sleep? I’ll clock you out.”
And that is just what I did. I fell asleep in the backseat. It was the most sleep I had had for weeks. In the morning, they drove me back home and I started to make my plans to leave. There was nothing for me in the Midwest anymore. Time for me to make my way back east.
Back now to that day in New York. I walked and walked, and then finally, I came to the intersection of 12th Street and Broadway. On one side of the street, the side I wasn’t on, there was a science fiction bookstore called Forbidden Planet. I looked up. I found that I was standing in front of an even bigger bookstore with red and white flags out front. “Strand Books,” the sign read. I considered. I loved to read and had even worked at the college bookstore during book rush. I figured I had enough job experience to work at either. I decided to try my luck at each. But first I would try for the store on my side of the street.
I walked into the bookstore with the red flags and someone pointed me to a desk near the middle of the store. The desk was piled high with stacks of books. I spoke to the man behind the desk. He was pricing the books in the stacks. He was short and bald and looked like a cross between Sigmund Freud and Vladimir Lenin. I reached into my backpack for a copy of my resume. I was hoping he’d read it. No one else had asked for it that day.
“You have to take a test first,” he said, without looking up. Then he reached into a drawer and handed me a sheet of paper and a pen. On the sheet of paper, you had to match all of the book titles in one column with the authors in another. Fair enough, I thought. I had always been a reader. Maybe that plus the half-finished English undergraduate degree I had would be useful for once.
I finished the matching – and to this day I only remember one of the titles I could not find a match for, a book called The Lives of the Painters. Luckily it matched up with another title whose name I have now forgotten. Because when I showed the finished test to the man behind the desk he checked it over with a sharpie and then gestured for my resume. A few minutes later, he said, “I see you can type. Go up to the third floor and ask for Karen. Tell her Fred sent you.” And then he went back to pricing books.
And that was how I started working at the Strand.

I worked at the bookstore phone desk. The phone desk was four giant old metal desks pushed together. On each desk was an IBM Selectric typewriter and a telephone with various flashing buttons. While sometimes people would call to ask the store hours, or directions, we mainly took book orders. There was a large stack of half-torn-apart paper and a container of pens and pencils at each desk, next to the phone. Someone would call in and we would ask for the title, author, and subject of the book, and write them all on the half-sheet of paper. Then we would toss the paper into a wire tray. Every hour or so, someone would come up from the sales floor, take the wire tray, and replace it with an empty one. They would then disappear with the book requests. Customers were advised to call back in several hours and ask for Extension 12. Extension 12 was the desk in the bookstore basement where all of the book orders were kept. The book request slips were later wrapped around each stack of books that were found, with the largest rubber bands I had ever seen.
At first, I was terrified to work on the phones. They were the type of phones that had multiple phone lines and big flashing buttons. I was always scared that I would hang up on someone important, swap someone to the wrong phone extension, or do something else ham-fistedly to mess up something irreparably.
And I did. About two weeks in, I picked up a phone call with someone who was very insistent on selling us his textbooks.
“We don’t buy textbooks,” I said, trying to be as professional as possible. And it was true. The Strand did not buy or search for textbooks. Which made it somewhat inconvenient for students, because there were at least four universities within a twenty-minute walk of the store.
“What the fuck do you mean?” The voice said. “I just bought these. These are brand-new.”
I figured a deadpan canned speech was the best way to go. “No textbooks. It’s a store policy.”
“I had to drop the goddamned class and now I’m out $200. Come on!”
“No.”
“What the fuck, lady. What the fuck am I supposed to do with these goddamned books? You’re right near NYU! How the fuck do you people make a living anyway?”
“No textbooks.”
“Fuck you, bitch.”
I had had enough. I pressed what I thought was the disconnect button. Then I said, under my breath, “Oh yeah, well fuck you too, you goddamned idiot. My boss doesn’t fucking sell textbooks. I just fucking work here. How the fuck do you think I can ever change that? Stupid fuckface.” I let out a deep breath, satisfied. Then, in horror, I saw that instead of pressing the disconnect button, I pressed the speaker button. I froze.
My coworker Ron, who sat next to me, looked at my phone and started laughing. “He’s long gone now, girl,” he said. And sure enough, I heard a dial tone come out of the speaker button. I clicked disconnect, for real this time.
The staff at the phone desk rotated many times since I had started working there, a year or so before, but the two fixtures who seemed to have been there forever were Ron and Bill.
Bill was a tiny, birdlike man, with tanned, leathery skin, and with collar-length hair that I knew was the same shade as those bottles of Wella Colorcharm red rouge éclatant you could buy at the beauty supply shop up on 14th Street. He had bright blue eyes that always stared at you just a little too much, and a voice that sounded exactly like a small-town New England boy turned middle-aged big-city homosexual — which was who he was. Ron was in his late twenties then, tall, blond, and handsome, in that all-American heartthrob kind of way, but his face was already weathered by years of drinking and tough living. Ron liked to decorate the wall next to his desk with pictures of glamorous models from fashion magazines, taping them all the way from the ceiling down to his desk. Between phone calls he would flip through a fashion magazine taken from a high stack of them next to his chair and let out a little appreciative shriek whenever he came across a picture he admired.
“Oooh! Kristen McMenamy!” he would exclaim. “Flawless! Gorgeous!”
I would sit at my desk and answer the phone, and in between answering the phone, I would either try to look busy or zone off. It was important that I looked busy when the bosses would come upstairs. The bosses were either Fred, the man who had hired me, and who scared everyone, or his daughter Nancy, who I remember had straight blond hair and acted very businesslike. I never had a problem with her, but many of my coworkers did. This was probably because we usually ignored each other. The only words I ever remember having with her were about orange juice. I was talking to another coworker one day about a drink I liked to make from the bodega, orange juice and seltzer water. “I don’t like just plain orange juice, ” I said. “Oh, because it’s acidic?” Nancy commented. I nodded. I was surprised she ever spoke to me.
The staff was full of smokers, and the smokers would often gather on the steps of the building next door to the main entrance. Sometimes I would brush past them as I hurried upstairs with one stack of books or another. They were an assorted crowd. I remember Chelsea, the very tall, transgender woman, who seemed to be smoking the most. Bill would often go down and smoke, and then, coughing, would pull out his asthma inhaler. Then he would take a few puffs of the cigarette again. Decades later, he would pass away from COPD.
Every Friday was payday, and the only time the staff could buy books. We would line up around the Art Books desk on the main floor, and the main floor managers would price our books. We were supposed to get a special set discount, but one of the main floor managers didn’t care and would price our books at a quarter or less.
This was kind of like a paradise, I thought one evening while bringing home a whole stack of books. And I had no idea how I had managed to get there. I was kind of liking it.

In the first few years I lived in New York, I lived in what were generally called bad neighborhoods. They were usually called bad neighborhoods because the streets were eerily quiet at night even though you could hear heavy traffic noise from several blocks away. There just were never that many people around, except for myself.
I would hear the whispers as I walked home at night.
“Smoke, sense?” The words came in a soft whisper, a question that punched into the air.
And then, as you walked further east, the streets emptying out more and the brick facades of all the of tenement apartment buildings becoming softer and crumbling with more wear.
“Express, express. Hey baby. You want to buy some express?”
I ignored them all and kept to my route. I never was afraid when walking home by myself. I walked on the streets with the most lighting and most traffic, sparse as both were in that part of town. I never wore headphones to block out the world. The only thing I carried was a backpack strapped tight across both shoulders. I walked with purpose. My hair was short then, and with my body towering over most everyone, I cast a genderless shadow. Many people assumed I was something I was not. I was willing to go with it so long as I could walk home in peace.
The only times the bad things happened at night was when I was walking with others. Like the time Ron and I were walking down 6th Street in the neighborhood that used to be known as Alphabet City. The sidewalks were icy, with the deep impressions of hundreds of footprints pressed down into the snow. It was New Year’s Eve.
“I’m going to walk down this other block and get some cocaine,” Ron said. “I’ll meet you at the end of the block.” And suddenly he was gone.
The block was crowded with people, milling around in the early evening. I was upset that Ron had abandoned me with no warnings. I walked faster to the end of the block. Suddenly, I heard three gunshots from behind me. Someone screamed. I ran to the end of the block, hoping that my boots would not slip on the ice. It seemed like a long block even by Manhattan standards. By the time I got to the end, I was panting and almost in tears.
I felt a small tap on my shoulder and jumped. I let out an audible gasp and turned around. It was Ron, smiling.
“Did you miss me?” he said. “I told you I’d meet you at the end of the block.”
I felt like I was going to punch him. Instead I gave him a hug.

Ron and I first became friends when we were fighting over who could pick up the phones with the least amount of ring. At first, this all happened when we got the warnings that Nancy was coming upstairs to talk to Karen. Karen always got the warnings from someone who worked on the Main Floor. We know she’d get the warnings because her own phone would ring and then, within a minute or so of her hanging up, she would yell out to the rest of our floor, “Nancy’s on her way up!”
Instantly, people would jump to their tasks. The inventory staff would studiously type something on their terminal screens. Those of us in the front, on the phone desk, would type up mailing labels or address envelopes or do something when the phones weren’t ringing. Even the shipping staff, who were located way in the back of the floor, would pack up boxes or wheel them around on a dolly. The guy who made up the store catalog had it easiest of all. He had his own office and would simply close the door when she came up. I wondered about him for a long time. It was only later that I found out he was in some famous No Wave band in the 1980s downtown scene. Maybe he got some special treatment because of that. The boss, Fred, had a way of hiring the downtown artist types. The more famous and well-known they were, the better.
We weren’t lazy on the third floor. We just had our own way of doing things. We were also completely separated, hidden from view from both customers and our management. Looking back, it was a great place to work because we rarely had anyone yelling at us to stay on task, which is so often the case in retail.
But one day Nancy came up and caught that Ron was reading one of his fashion magazines rather than picking up the phone. Word of this got back to Karen, and soon Karen was lecturing not just Ron, but the rest of us at the phone desk about phone etiquette.
“Nancy has a rule that we really should pick up a phone after three rings,” Karen said. We don’t want to leave the customers waiting for too long.”
“Nancy has never worked a job outside of working for her father,” Bill said. “I suspect that most of our customers don’t care.” Bill was right, for once. I certainly didn’t care how long it took for someone to pick up the phone when I tried to call them. I was surprised he sounded so practical. Most of what he said to us revolved around celebrity gossip from two decades ago. He was the oldest one of us who worked at the phone desk.
“Whatever you think, this is a rule that Nancy put together and we have to follow,” Karen said. She stared at Ron.
“What? What did I do?” Ron asked.
“You let the phone ring 5 times before you picked it up. You need to put away those magazines, Ron.”
“Oh, this is stupid.” Then the phone rang. Ron immediately picked it up. “Strand Books, how can I help you?” he said. He glared at Karen.
The phone rang again. I decided to join in too.
“Strand Books, how can I help you?” It turned out they were looking for a book. I filled out the order. After I tossed the paper in the request box, I noticed Ron was staring at me. “What?” I asked.
“You let that phone ring twice, Alissa. Nancy will be so upset if she comes up and sees how you are doing today. Think about the customers! How do you think they’d feel?”
“Oh, I give up,” Karen said. She went back to her desk across the room.
“That’s crap, Ron,” I said. “I bet I can pick the next call up on the first ring.”
“Nope.” Ron said. “That will be…me.” And sure enough, the phone rang, and he immediately picked it up.
This went on for the rest of the afternoon. Finally, near the end of the workday, as we were about to clock out, Ron said to me, “You did good, girl. You got eight calls on just the first ring. But I got twelve! I beat you!”
“You think so, Ron? Let’s see how we do tomorrow. I bet I can beat you too.”
“Loser buys dinner?” he asked. “Whoever gets the most one-ring calls at the end of the week gets to pick?”
“Sure. Sounds like a deal to me.”
At the end of the week, I found myself buying him dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant on Saint Mark’s Place. I was curious how Ron always seemed to win.

One week, Ron wasn’t in. This was unusual for him. Then, just as suddenly, he came back. He was wearing sunglasses now. He wore them all the time. “I was mugged,” he would tell anyone who asked.
Soon it was time for lunch. “I have to tell you something,” Ron said. “But not here.” His glance shifted around the room.
“Uh, sure,” I said. I was concentrating on correcting a mistake I made while typing. I hated typewriters. I had to get this little piece of correction film, slide it into the typewriter, and type back the letters exactly. I hated that. Why don’t they just get computers or word processors here, I thought.
“Today, Alissa,” he said. Something in his voice sounded different. Pleading, maybe? No. Scared. Worried. I looked up. The typing could wait until later.
“Lunch maybe? The falafel place? It’s a few blocks away. Doubt we’ll find anyone else from work there.”
He nodded.
“I think we can sneak out and take it at the same time. Karen isn’t here.” No more than one of us was supposed to take lunch at a time. This was in case there were a lot of calls at the phone desk.
At 2:00 we clocked out. When we were walking, I noticed Ron was walking faster than usual, dodging around the crowds that started to congregate on St. Mark’s Place for their afternoon shopping. I did my best to keep up.
Once we got to the falafel place and placed our order, we sat down with our drinks at a table near the back. Ron nervously shuffled his fingers on the table.
“I wanted to tell you about what really happened last week,” he said.
“Oh yeah – about the mugging. I’m really sorry that happened, Ron. Are you okay?”
“No. I mean, no, I wasn’t mugged.” He took a sip of his soda. “I OD’d.”
I looked up. “Huh?”
He took a deep breath. “So, I was hanging out with these girls who lived down the hall from me, in the hotel. We were all using. I took too much. So they tried to wake me up. First they tried to put me in a cold bath. So they carried me, with all my clothes and shoes on, in a bathtub down the hall and filled it with cold water. When that didn’t work, they started hitting me in the face.“ He took off his sunglasses and pointed to his eyes. “They gave me two black eyes. That didn’t work either. So they called the paramedics and ran. Next thing I knew, I was waking up and saw these two paramedics standing over me.”
I was quiet. I didn’t know what to say. Or why he was confiding this in me. The only illegal drug I had ever been exposed to was pot, and that never killed anyone.
“All I remember was that it felt so good, but it felt too good, you know? Like I hit this edge and got scared I’d never come back.”
Our number was called and I went up to get our falafels. Once back at the booth, Ron picked at the lettuce on top of his. He didn’t look very hungry.
“Wow.” I said. And then, “Do you need help, Ron? What can I do?”
I said this even though he and I knew there was nothing I could do for him.

A few months after that, I picked up the phone. This time, I picked it up on the second ring. I would have picked it up on the first, but somehow I couldn’t get to the phone quickly enough.
“I’m looking for a book.”
“Title?”
“City of Goats.” It was hard to pick out what the person on the other line was saying.>/br>
“City of Goats,” I wrote, in block print on a sheet of half-paper.
“And who is the author?” I asked.
“Saint Augustine.”
I started writing Saint Augustine in block letters on the paper, then stopped.
“Ah hah, I got it. City of God….“
“That’s right,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “City of Goats.”
I finished filling out the book request form and tossed it in the request box. I looked around me. It was a Saturday. There were always fewer people in the office on a Saturday. The shipping area was empty. The inventory workers were out. The catalog person’s office was unoccupied. Even our supervisor’s desk was empty, the desk chair pushed all the way back against the window. There was only one other person on the floor that day, and that was the new person who was hired for the phone desk. I forget her name. I do remember that she was from New Jersey and just a little bit younger than I was. I remember this was her first job outside of college. I also remember that she still lived with her parents and had to take the long bus ride into the city every day by herself. She always seemed so overwhelmed whenever she walked in. But it was an unusually quiet afternoon and I figured now would be the only way I could get this chance.
“I’m going out for a break,” I told her. “I’ll be right downstairs. I shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes or so.”
She nodded. She was reading a book. I remember her saying when she first started that she was looking forward to working around all of those books. This was the first time I had ever seen things so relaxed on the third floor. “See you soon,” she said.
I thought about taking the elevator downstairs but decided it would take too long. So I went down the stairs, all three flights of them. Once outside, I stretched and yawned.
It was an early spring afternoon, unseasonably warm and sunny. Broadway was full of people heading to do their Saturday errands. I stepped into the bodega across the street and bought a soda. Then I walked back to the building entrance and leaned against the stoop where the smokers usually sat. But there were no smokers out today. I was the only one outside.
Pretty soon Chelsea joined me. She was probably the first trans person I ever met. She was at least half a head taller than me and very very thin. She always seemed to wear vintage 1940s dresses in brightly colored prints that somehow were always the right length on her. I wondered if she made them herself.
“I thought you were off today,” I said.
“Usually, yeah. But I’m helping them in the basement today. They’re setting up a new section. I need the overtime.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from a dress pocket and offered one to me. I shook my head. I didn’t smoke.
“Have you ever thought that we might live in a city of goats?” I asked her.
She laughed and lit her cigarette. “That’s weird, but I guess you can say that.”
“I guess I’m thinking of that time I was reading a novel about the devil and vice. And somehow, all of the bad characters in that book were goats.”
Chelsea smiled.
“All of the goats did things like be in the drug trade and be promiscuous and just — just like the opposite of what I guess most people were supposed to see as being a good, responsible citizen. But none of the goats were bad or mean. In fact, they all seemed more interesting than what we thought the good people would be. But maybe that was just the author’s perception, who knows?”
“Do you think that’s like us here?”
“Maybe.” By “here,” I wondered if she meant the Strand or all of New York City. But I thought it would be impolite to ask.
“Well, I gotta go back upstairs,” I said. “I bet that new phone desk person is going crazy. I guess I’ll see you later.”
She gave me a little wave and I headed back upstairs.
Upstairs, at the phone desk, it was still quiet. My coworker was still reading. Her feet were propped up on the edge of the desk. I looked at the clock. I was gone for almost a half hour. It was a good thing Karen or Nancy weren’t here, I thought. They’d be pretty upset I was gone for so long. Then I blinked. Nah, I thought. It didn’t matter.
“Thanks for holding down the fort,” I said. “I hope nothing big happened while I was out.”
She shook her head. “Nope. No calls.”
I pulled out my chair and sat down at my desk. Ron’s was empty. It had been that way for weeks, it seemed. His fashion models had begun to fall. No one paid attention. So I taped them back. Then I realized I had no idea where he was. Someone at the store knew, but they hadn’t told me.
“What’s that you’re reading?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s a really old book. This copy I’m reading is from the 1950’s, I think, but it was written during the Renaissance.” She lifted the book up so that I could see the title. Once I caught the title, I laughed.
“You’re reading Lives of the Painters?”
“Yeah, it was on the two-dollar cart downstairs.”
“No kidding! That used to be on the test that Fred gave!”
She looked at me blankly. “Not anymore.”
“I wonder if that’s why it was on the two-dollar cart.”
“Maybe!”
“I need to run to the bathroom,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
I did not know then that my life was about to change, would change, over the next eight months. My parents would finally scrape together the last of the six thousand dollars to pay off my University of Iowa debt. Soon I would be taking the 6 train from my apartment in the East Village all the way up to Hunter College, where I would finish my bachelor’s degree, an endeavor that would take twice as long as it was supposed to, but I would finish. I would hop from apartment to apartment as higher rents and an assortment of roommates of various temperaments shifted me around. I would leave the Strand to get a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing house, a dream that I had had for many years finally realized. I would stop working for my great aunt and uncle, as I had for years, because there was no time for it anymore, not with school now on the plate. I was on my way up and out, moving far past the Strand and what it ever could have given me.
And as for Ron, I would see him just one last time. We would never work together again, but one day, he would call me, inviting me to a Patti Smith concert at Central Park with some of his friends. It was a free concert. When I got there, I was shocked. I had never met any of these friends before. They all looked strung out, thin, tired, their skin sinking into their faces. Ron on the other hand looked fantastic, his skin glowing, although he was thinner than I had ever seen him before. He would introduce me. I would sit down next to them on the bleachers, trying to be polite, but feeling uncomfortable. Finally, one of them would break the silence by asking if I had any crystal meth. Are you joking? I would think, and finally notice the friend’s arms, thin and marked with small sores, all in various states of healing. I would shake my head and look down at my own unscarred arms, which seemed unremarkable in comparison, covered by sweater sleeves that were just a bit too short and think of ways to make my escape as fast as I could.
But now let’s go back to that Saturday afternoon. On the way to the bathroom, I noticed that the big cartoon painting of a pig Ron had done several years ago was still hanging on the wall outside the third-floor office entrance. Ron had a thing for pigs, I couldn’t remember why. The more cartoony, the better.
I thought how funny it would be to have a big cartoony painting of a goat instead and I started laughing.