I Don't Understand What's Going On Upstairs??

I have put my earplugs now, and I can just barely hear the sound of rocks being tumbled in a cement mixer in the apartment above, so now I can gripe. It’s noisy here. Real noisy. I recently bought my first apartment in NY.

I was living the cloistered contented life of an Upper West Sider, living in a solidly built, Pre-War building, with walls a foot thick, taking the quiet for granted, clueless and happy. But I was renting and wanted to own, and so I departed that gentle place.

After the typical tortured search, I found a place I could afford to buy, in a Post War building. My new apartment was the right size, a decent price, in a good location. Being a Post War building meant it didn't have the details of my old place – in fact it looked a little like a hospital inside – but it was immaculate and on a block I loved, and did I mention it was affordable?

The noise didn’t begin until the second month I’d been there. It was the most amazing sound: the crisp, clipped, clomp of high heels, treading down the public hallway upstairs. I sat up and did the human equivalent of cocking my ear as I heard the key upstairs inserted into the lock, the turning of tumblers, the entrance of the high heel-wearing neighbor above.

As my eyes widened (which they do, by the way, whether or not you can see the remarkable thing happening), I heard her (I assumed it was a her – I hadn’t yet gotten into the fantasizing part of this sonic experience), put her lead-lined handbag on the floor, kick off her heels – into the wall – and pound into the kitchen.

After a few minutes of quiet, I relaxed. I comforted myself with the thought that there must be some special level of humidity in the atmosphere, carrying the sound in a particularly extreme way, like how you always hear a train when it rains, or a lawnmower when it’s sunny outside, and never any other time.

An hour later, I was lying in my bed and I heard the woman above clomp into the bedroom above me, and heard her take off her high-heeled shoes again – didn’t she already take them off once?? – that I knew this would be my acoustic fate. As I lay there, now with my book on my chest, I heard her take off her shoes two or three more times, each time flipping them handily off her big toe against one wall or the other. I imagined she was seated and about to recline when I heard her get up and walk around the room WITH HER SHOES BACK ON. (With no actual visual evidence I started now to try to deduce what was going on up there. Fantasies began forming, not of the fun variety).

It was like “Ground hog’s Day” or a Stephen King novel. The shoes would not stay off her feet, and she could not stop walking around. Even more bizarrely, as I followed her path with my eyes marking my own ceiling, it seemed that she was walking on every inch of her bedroom – criss-crossing here, tossing the shoes off on this side of the room, and then the next.

Where is the bed?? I thought to myself. In every bedroom I’ve ever known, you can’t traverse the entire floor because: there’s a bed in the way.

But no matter how I tried to visualize the space above, she kept thwarting me – because she walked here, there, and everywhere, as, I assumed, she tried to shake off those horrible shoes (Manolos?) that kept re-attaching themselves to her feet!!

I finally fell into sleep (dreaming about Savion Glover trying to put out a fire) until 6am the next morning.

My eyes opened without my moving my head because I was on a certain level, still asleep. Working nights means that I sleep in, at least until 7:30am, and this particular morning, my body couldn’t believe that I had set an alarm. Only it wasn’t an alarm.

The woman upstairs gets out of bed and, yes, she already has shoes on. She must sleep in them I think. They must be sleeping stilettos. In a new state of amazement, I listen as she clomps to one edge of the room. A moment, and then I hear her pull out a Titanic-era steamer trunk from her closet, dragging it to the middle of the floor where she unzips it. (I know most steamer trunks don’t have zippers – this one apparently does). She unzips, and then she unzips some more, and then I hear the zipper chattering yet again, or in another direction, and then again she unzips, and then one last long unzipping makes me sit up in bed. This is ridiculous. How many zippers does this thing have?

But it’s the packing that gets me standing.

For apparently she is (I imagine) a shoe salesperson, and she stores her 600 shoe samples in various bedroom closets, and when she leaves each morning, she packs by yanking out pairs and throwing them across the room into the suitcase. Clomp, Bang, Clank, Whap. The banging continues, until she’s finished, and then she zips the trunk’s eleven zippers up again. Finally, she sets it upright and drags it away. Some mornings she has a limp as she drags, making the whole thing fairly sinister.

Suddenly the walls of my apartment shudder with the slamming of her door, and the world is still again. A picture tilts on the wall.

Since then, I’ve come to know her and her partner well without ever having met them or even seen them. He arrived the next night, unzipping his suitcase (!) for he too it seems, is a shoe salesman. He (apparently) sells steel-tipped work boots. Each night, when they get home, the routine is the same. They tip their suitcases onto the floor of the bedroom, spilling the shoes out into an enormous pile (there’s room because there mustn’t be a bed). And then, each takes turn putting the shoes on and clomping around the room showing each other the new product line. Sometimes he wears the heels, sometimes she wears the boots. Each time a route is completed, they ceremoniously remove the shoes and throw them against the wall.

They also (apparently) sell steel cylinders, perhaps thermoses? which they carry from the bedroom to the living room and back, dropping 4 or 5 in each direction. They may also sell aluminum pots, small dogs with unclipped toenails, cymbals, gongs, cue balls, and loose marbles.

There is occasionally an electrical motor of some kind that sounds in the bedroom. This thing is fascinating to me in its mystery. Even as I lie there at 1:30am, exhaustion tugging at my eyelids, I still muster the strength to marvel at the mystery of this sound. There’s electricity involved, simultaneously grinding, creaking and buzzing.

It must be a winch I imagine, perhaps used to lower the bed from the ceiling or tilting down from the wall, like a drawbridge. Even in my semi-conscious state, I admire their clever use of space.

Revenge is not called for since these two are blameless – this is their job (I think). Everyone needs shoes, and I get a sense they’re good at what they do, or at least they have an enormous inventory. But I can’t do nothing.

My newest idea is to start painting. Buy some Benjamin Moore white, and start rolling it on the ceiling. Just start that first layer of paint that every Pre War building started with in the early 20th century, lapping on another coat every year for the next 80 years, until my ceiling is 5 inches thick and soundproof.

By then I figure the market will have improved and I can just sell the place and go live in an Ashram. As long as it’s in a Pre-War building.

I Totally Do Not Understand How to Tell if It's On or Off. I Mean, Everything.

Back to things I don't understand anymore: remember when buttons for off and on were understandable? Clearly marked? Made perfect sense?

When you knew that when you pressed a button, and it responded, the power would be on? And when you pressed it again it would obviously be off? Because it was clearly marked "power"?

These days we have the "smiling cyclops" which indicates nothing when it's pressed. It offers no information, it assists you not, and one might actually forget if one has pushed it, because if it is pressed and nothing happens, one might believe it hadn't been pressed at all.

So today's "I Don't Understand Anything Anymore" post: the contemporary and ubiquitous off/on button. I don't get it. Whose bright idea was this?

Um, I Don't Understand How to Operate Your Shower...

I'm one of those who travels for the holidays; not to anywhere interesting but to the homes of friends and family who put me up in the spare bedroom, on the couch, or who kindly kick their small children to the floor so I have a place to sleep. These small children still seem to like me, because I'm their Aunt who they don't see that often and so I have the advantage of always being a novelty to them. Kids between the ages of 5 and 14 have a kind of instinctive caution about talking back, rolling their eyes, using the kind of foul language reserved for the bowels of slave ships, and borrowing my clothes, which they reserve for their parents and those who they see regularly. In fact, as long as I show my face only once a year, they actually roll their eyes TO me, in a conspiracy against their parents, and how "dumb" or unreasonable they are, especially when those parents ask them to eat vegetables, turn off the video games, or not to have sex with the goth guy in homeroom.

So all in all, it's great, except for the problem of the shower. I live in NYC where, on the Upper West Side where I live, the shower valves haven't changed since 1941 and therefore have a "Hot" device and a "Cold" device, clearly labeled, separated by a natural distance and incredible in their logic and simplicity.



I mean, just by looking at them, you know: 1) how to turn the water on, 2) how to make the water "Hot" or, alternatively "Cold", 3) how to get the water to come out of the overhead valve onto your head, 4) how to turn it all off at the end of the event. You can also figure out fairly quickly what to do if the water is: 1) scalding and your skin begins to redden and peel off, 2) freezing so that everything made of flesh rises in self-defense, 3) brown with chunks.

Let me be the first to report that this is not true outside of Manhattan. Apparently everyone else in the world lives in a house that was built post WW2, and at some point, some smart-ass engineers decided that having separate faucets was "too much trouble" or maybe simply not cool, and started building these things into one unit so that the person of average intelligence, and perhaps even people with advanced degrees, cannot figure out how to take a shower without being injured or asking a 7 year old for help.

This phenomenon is most obvious at the gym, where a shower needs to be fast, not only because other people are waiting, but because there’s always a chance that the naked girls with the “buns and abs of steel” might shove you out of the way because, let’s face it, they’re stronger and worked out harder and need showers much, much more than you.

I don’t live far from my gym, so usually I work out and walk home and shower there, with my normal, logical shower that leaves me confident and cheerful at my ability to operate something mechanical without breaking it or having to call in professionals. But sometimes I have to shower at the gym because I’m headed somewhere other than home and I don’t want to have people do that sideways-shifting-away-on-the-subway-bench that I do sometimes when people are… let’s say, unfragrant. So at my gym, here is what I’m faced with:



Now I get the color scheme, ok? I get it. Red is hot, and blue is cold; this is common most cultures and I don’t want to visit the countries where it’s not. But… please. What the hell? There is no way to figure this thing out without getting in there and just – doing it. This means, in my case, getting alternately scalded and frozen, at least twice, until I find the mid-point of water comfort. Those shrieks and whoops coming from the third stall? That’s me, and I’m alone and there is in absolutely no sex involved. The small crowd that gathers around the extra towels awaiting my exit exhibit the collective expression of a group that is concerned, but maybe not enough to risk their own lives to find out what is going on in that glass chamber. And of course, upon my exit, I act like I don’t know where the yelling came from either and walk out shrugging blithely at the be-toweled clique.

And the problem only gets worse outside of Manhattan. This is Cleveland. House of Brian. Nice house, modern, many bathrooms.



There’s an “H”, a “C” and an “Off” which you’d think would make things oh-so-obvious, but is it hot when the faucet handle is pointed at the H or when the handle is pointed at the C? Why isn’t there an arrow? Where’s the color scheme? There are many teen-agers at this house and if you think I’m asking their help, when I’ve already been humiliated not only playing Wii baseball, but even the low-tech board-game “Risk”, you’re nuts.

My family is a “Four Christmases” kind of a deal, so from Brian’s house, I went on to Alison’s (his ex-wife and my friend), also built in the era of the ambitious engineer. This shower is in the redone basement, and so it’s super special, and makes even less sense.



It’s a kind of diamond shape (and tastefully, looks like an actual diamond! Your guests will actually think you have the Hope Diamond in your downstairs bathroom!) and comes to a point, leading one to believe that if you point the point at one of the key letters (H, and C), you’ll have Hot or Cold water. Getting started here is the issue. You pull it out and then you have to dodge that spray until you can snake your hand in there and adjust it until you can safely get the whole body in there. A flushing toilet somewhere in the house can add layers of confusion and trauma, trying to understand whether it’s you controlling the spray, or some outside agent, and whether you should passively wait until things settle down, or go bold, adjusting wildly as armies of 13 and 14 year old girls dab their make-up upstairs, tossing little tiny pieces of toilet paper away, flushing each time, in their quest for Bratz-like slutitude.

I also visited Kelly who just redid her bathroom (what’s wrong with having an old, functional bathroom? People: leave your showers alone!).



This one stumped me utterly. The Barbie was ecstatic: I was glum. What’s that long metal thing over there? What does that do? How can that help matters? Why do we need extra devices protruding from the spigot? It was getting late and people were waiting for me for yet another blended family walk by the water. I tried, I honestly did, but ultimately I had to open the bathroom door and call for assistance. Her 7 year old, with an expression reserved for people who visit regularly (that is: disdain, annoyance), showed up and said, “Let me do it” and she did, getting it right the first time as I towered above her, wrapped in a towel, reminding her that I had a Masters and a driver’s license and also many boyfriends and my own apartment, which didn’t seem to impress her. This one required doing something under the faucet at the bottom, which I pretended I understood (like when I took Chemistry and stared dumbly at the blackboard for a whole semester), just so I could preserve some dignity and not let the little girl get the upper hand. “Oh yeah,” I said, “that’s what I thought, it’s so simple, much easier than mine at home,” I suggested.

The holidays are over and I’m back home and I’ve been taking showers with no problem at all, and planning my trip to Miami in March, hoping against hope that either the retro-rebuilt town hasn’t touched the showers since 1941 or has redesigned them for the simple-minded, or perhaps, that a smart 7 year old is down the hall.

The Book Club: A great place to discuss Angelina Jolie's upper arms. And, oh yeah, books.

I was incredibly flattered recently when a friend whom I consider one of the most sophisticated and intellectual of my circle, invited me to join her book club. It's not that I don't already have many other intellectual things to do with my evenings (as long as "The Simpsons" is over), it's just that I was thrilled to participate in what has become the urban equivalent of sorority rush. So many of my friends had started or were already in book clubs that I began to fear I wasn't going to get asked to "pledge". In cities across America, large and small, book clubs are taking the place of extra-marital affairs as distraction for intelligent urban women, and if you haven't yet been asked to join a book club well, either you're a Foreign Legionnaire hiding out in a distant, sand-locked outpost of the desert, or more likely, it's only a matter of time.

For the present generation of women, book clubs became popular when Oprah began reading and promoting books on her daytime television show. This was of course in the days when first-time book authors were poor and grateful for any crumbs of attention that might be tossed their way, unlike the present, when 21-year-old authors are annoyed if they are the second guest on Leno. Soon after author Jonathan Franzen became irrationally insulted when Oprah read his book "The Corrections" and lifted it from the oblivion wherein it would have most likely lingered, Oprah decided she herself didn't want to be in a book club, complaining that there just not enough "good books" (perhaps she meant "humble authors").

The book club baton was passed to Kelly Ripa, which had the potential to make even the most bookish of us give up the whole thing for periodicals. But instead, the reading thing has become a newly found old pleasure that has sort of wafted into our collective unconscious like the smell of fresh bread through an open window. Book clubs provide today's over-extended women an acceptable way to socialize without the guilt of it being purely leisure.

Many people talk about how they used to read all the time when they were young and how much they used to love it. I for one, remember getting books for Christmas, usually Nancy Drew mysteries, and spending all that day reading, not speaking a word to my brothers (who were busy outside in the back yard with their own Christmas gifts, attempting to put each other's eyes out). Even then, girlfriends would pass beloved books to each other: mostly sweet, girlish stories about girl sleuths or clever airline stewardesses. These were supplemented of course by books we considered "sexy", by Erica Jong or Philip Roth, found on our parent's bedside tables or more likely, under their beds. A book that had a scene where two people disappeared into a bedroom or any mention at all of anyone's "panties" would send us into red-faced paralysis and would be passed around with guilty terror at slumber parties for the whole slumber party season.

(I could top even those by pulling out one of my father's medical journals, wherein photos of bizarre genital afflictions were guaranteed to send at least one girl screaming out of the room. These were met not with titillation but with wonder and would change the party dynamics so that instead of talking about sex, we'd end up discussing seriously tangential topics like, "What would you do if you didn't have any eyebrows?")

But most people find they just don't have time to read. It takes a certain kind of a commitment, not unlike exercise or marriage, all of which ultimately make you feel good but are awfully hard to start. So I was extremely pleased when my girlfriend Pam called me and asked if I would be willing to join her book club to which each core member had invited one friend. "How does it work?" I asked. "'How's it work?’ It's a book club!" she responded. "We choose a book, we read it and then we get together and talk about it. How hard could it be?" Not so easy as it turns out.

First of all, when you join a book club it means you actually have to read the books. No kidding, there's no way around it. And not every book is going to be one that you want to read or would even enjoy using as a paperweight. At these moments, when you see the nine hundred page life history of Moses Cleveland held up for your approval, you must either say "Yeah", "Nay" or "No way, Sister"! Of course the latter is generally considered rude, and reserved for gigantic leather bound books with dictionary sized print and tissue paper leaves, pulled out just as summer is starting and it's all we can do to finish our "OK!" magazines. To ensure that no one goes away thinking they'd rather have joined a knitting circle, the book decision process is a fairly democratic one.

The first thing we do in my book club is weigh the book. By that I don't mean we weigh its length against the time we have available or weigh it against other books of its genre, or weigh its educational value versus its entertainment ratio. I mean we actually weigh the book. Each of us in turn gets a chance to heft the book, holding it in one hand or both hands, lifting it up and down slightly, turning it over, seeing if it gets any lighter if we split it open and heft it again.

We utilize our own personal sense of weights and measures: "light" weighs about as much as a single fork: that would be your Penguin paperback and your pithy-quotes-at-the-cash-register type books. "Not too light" would be the approximate weight of a pair of strappy sandals in a shoe box, like for example, your latest Abused-Intern Tell-All, or the: I'm-A-Married-Woman-Who's-Having-Trouble-Having-It-All novel. A middleweight book might balance the scales against a wooden cutting board, depending of course on the thickness of the cover; those would be your "Memoirs of a Geisha" or a biography of someone with very little to say like, perhaps, Larry Birkhead.

"Heavy" as far as we're concerned would be the approximate weight of an empty clay casserole dish: those would be your original hardback editions of a typical Tom Wolfe novel or any one of the recent Looking-Back-At-the-Last-Century-By-an-Attractive-Newscaster tomes. "Too heavy" would be the weight of a full casserole dish, with maybe lasagna in it, which would include Webster's dictionary, anything by Salman Rushdie or any biography of a philandering politician from the '30s. It's not precisely that these books are "too heavy" in content but that they are in fact, just too heavy and have the potential of spraining your wrist if you try holding them with one hand, and will, in fact, demolish anything below them in your purse. They can be used effectively for self defense: one can always throw them at a mugger.

So now you have your assignment, and the first thing you do is look at the calendar and count each of the days between now and the date you have to finish the book, figuring in several days of trashy magazine reading, one or two Sunday papers, a couple nights of reality TV, and at least one indecipherable instruction manual for yet another digital product.

And then comes the reading. Not every book makes you long for the moment when you'll be alone with it, to crack its spine and dive into its world. Some of them sit on your nightstand like a fat Buddha, arms crossed, glaring at you, wondering when you're going to pick them up and get to work. Some of them make you so depressed by the third page that you have to rush out to a magazine stand to buy a "Vogue". There've been afternoons when I've sat among piles of laundry and dirty dishes, one eye on the clock, reading frantically to finish before the meeting that evening.

But every once in a while there's that one you'd never have picked up on your own: a book that is utterly enchanting or hypnotically interesting, or which makes you giddy with its observations and glad that there are writers like these. At those moments, you remember your love of reading, happy to be an explorer once again.

Our meetings are held at each member's house in turn about every six weeks. The reunion itself usually takes a good thirty minutes before we even get to the book, as follows: 4 to 5 minutes of telling each other how fabulous we look, 2 minutes denying how fabulous we look, 3 minutes complimenting each other's home furnishings ("Is that new?"), 2 minutes discussing how difficult or how easy it was to find the furnishings, 12 minutes talking about our spouse, child or boyfriend (or lacking those, the cute guy we rode up with in the elevator), and then roughly 8 minutes where we tell each other how we're doing ("I don't know; lately I've just been in a funk. Do you think I should get my teeth whitened?" to "We have finally concluded that my sister-in-law is an idiot," to "I've decided to get implants."). These are crucial bonding moments and are essential to the expediency of the actual meeting. Without them we've found the group tends to get distracted during the book discussion, breaking into subgroups to discuss shoes and Angelina Jolie's upper arms.

Like I assume most book clubs brag, our membership is made up of women who are strong, smart, independent thinkers who are, more importantly, very, very funny, capable of hilarious and pointed opinions. The discussion of the books is always interesting. A book we all love is rare, translating into an hour of favorite moments recalled and favorite lines reread aloud with reverential enthusiasm. More frequently is the book we all hate, for which the evening turns into a trash fest of the author, his or her beliefs, and the book jacket photo. The most passionate discussions erupt around book endings: half the group disappointed that for example, it didn't end happily; the other half insisting that it couldn't. After we've dissected the book to our heart's content, we eat (fattening food at a friend’s house doesn’t count), drink (lots) and chat, sometimes about topics the book has generated, more frequently about how unbelievably expensive it is to get a hair cut these days.

Once the selection of the next book has been made, our evening, for all intents and purposes, is over. Reluctantly we gather our stuff and head out, but the rate of chatter that starts up as we're nearing the door is like last call at a singles bar. We say our good-byes like we're standing on a dock watching a ship pull away, as we leave one world to reenter another.

New friends were not the point when the book club was started; we have barely enough time for our own. But being with new people, discussing things outside of the realm of redundant days and predictable conversation has been a powerful thing; an opportunity to use our intellect for more than figuring out how to gracefully exit a department store after our kid has thrown up on the clerk. It's not the books that keep us juggling our schedules, it's the whole package - the camaraderie, the conversation, the pure haven it provides in the context of lives filled with errands. For me, it has become a necessity for health and well being: like an aerobics class for the brain.

If you haven't been asked to join a book club (yet), start your own. The way I look at it, it's an organization devoted to the protection of at least one natural resource we can all get behind: our minds.

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Looking For Peter Mehlman, serialized, Pt. 6 (Finally!)

7:30pm (one week later)

I return to my apartment from yet another visit to the local Starbucks to see the telltale flashing light on my answering machine. I listen. Oh my God. It's Peter Mehlman. He's calling me, himself, to give me the date and the name of the article ("Star Trekking", The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 16, 1988). It’s like that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when Indy just gets annoyed with all the flash and flourish of saber and knife combat and just shoots the guy. One quick call, and my search, my agonized, obsessive search, is over. Deus Ex Answering-machina.

He’s surprisingly relaxed and open for someone who is as famous as he, calling someone who is as not famous as me. Mensch that he is, he even left me his phone number. My hand is trembling as I fumble for a pencil to write it down. This phone call has me swearing that, down the line, I myself will call some other fledgling writer and do this pro bono gesture for them. If only I could become someone whom they’d actually care to hear from. I lean in and listen as each digit is offered.

“… 4-3-7 [beep]” “Beep”? BEEP? Wait a minute, “beep” on the 8th digit?? What have I ever done to my answering machine that it hates me so much it must cut off the last digits of Peter Mehlman’s phone number?

I become very still. Perhaps this is not my path. Perhaps I am not meant to write in the world of Hollywood where there are so many layers between the writer and the writing. Perhaps I should just be watching TV, perhaps “The Office” where this kind of stuff happens in a really hilarious way that ends up with some kind of gentle moral.

10:00pm:
Called it a typical day as a New York freelance writer. Turned on the TV. Finished wine. Tomorrow I’ll go back to work on my play, perhaps adding a scene wherein the woman with one too many cats finds a message on her answering machine from an old boyfriend, asking for her hand in marriage, only the last two digits of his number get cut off.

You gotta admit, it’s not a bad twist.

(Coda: I called Mehlman’s agent back, gave him my email address and Peter and I emailed for a while, and eventually actually met. We became friends of a sort; he’s a great guy by the way.)

Looking For Peter Mehlman, serialized, Pt. 5

4:31pm:
I stand, sling my backpack jauntily over my shoulder and then freeze, as I realize that I never closed my change purse and that loud, Vegas-slot-machine clanging and rolling and loose-metal-hitting-tile sound is coming from me. The actors in the room (of which there must be dozens, this being New York City) must truly envy me now, because all heads are turned my way and all eyes are on me. This would be a great time to break into song. Trouble is, I don't know any songs and I can't really sing. So, feeling the bad kind of deja-vu, I find myself back on my knees, picking up nickels.

4:34pm:
Clutching the treasured article to my breast, I quickly find the Xerox machine, which, in this new millennium, no longer takes coins. It needs a card of some sort which one can find only in another room (far, far away), at the end of another line. I'm learning the ropes of the Library Universe, a microcosm of the City where things, good or bad, come to those who wait at the end of interminably long lines.

4:50pm
Repeat line experience from 12:20pm. Now, instead of a pencil, I have a "copy card", the equivalent for a Library patron of a backstage pass to an Elton John concert. Eager to get this over with and now, of all times, overwhelmed by an irresistible urge to write, I swipe the card on the copier, slip the original into the copy machine's maw, make the copy, return the original, stuff the Xerox in my back pack and run.

5:50pm:
Home! Where a writer ought to be. Where, if I had been this day, I might have something to show for these past six hours.

And as I empty my backpack onto the desk next to my closed laptop, it slowly dawns on me that if I had spent the last six hours writing – doing my own work - instead of looking for some other writer’s work, I might have the jump on my play, a really profound and touching piece about a woman who owns just one cat too many. But here it is, dusk, and once again when someone asks me how it’s going, I’m going to have to answer, “Well, the big news is that I decided to move the page numbers up to the upper right hand corner from the bottom of the page and I feel like the rest is just going to be smooth sailing.” There’s nothing worse to a writer than that empty feeling of not having written.

I guess when they say if you want to be a writer you’ve got to write, they’re, well, right.

But wait! I do have something to show. I have the Mehlman article! I did research today, and research is intrinsic to the writing process! It’s actually almost writing! I realize that instead of berating myself I should be patting myself on the back. This document is going to help me, inspire me, teach me the true definition of compelling.

I pour myself a glass of wine, sit myself down, unfold the article and... I turn over the piece of paper to its front side. I turn it over again. The article seems to have two backs. No front. I've Xeroxed nothing. I've paid to copy a white sheet onto another white sheet resulting in two white sheets. I look up at my ceiling in time to see a little drop of water forming at the far corner.

5:59pm
Just under the water droplet, my eye is drawn to my bookshelf, where I notice a book listing the names of Writer's Guild members. I look up Peter Mehlman and find the name of his agent. The agent seems to be St. Peter at the Gates in this particular world. I write up a letter describing my day, seal it in an envelope and mail it. To the agent.

Looking For Peter Mehlman, serialized, Pt. 4

12:20pm:
I arrive at the New York Public Library in all its cavernous, intimidating glory and proceed to look for the reference room, aka "the room with all the answers". Not too surprisingly, that room has a line snaking out of it thirty people long and when I approach the counter in an attempt to ask if this is the "right" line, the Man at the Desk, the Master of the Line waves me back as if I were a gate crasher jumping the ropes at a celebrity wedding.

"You see the end of that line?" he asks me. "Yes, but..." "That's where you go." I wait for the cheers from those already lined up but fortunately they're on my side; all they want to know is if they're in the right line. The people in front look slightly happier than those in back who are just hoping someone else gets behind them. That's where I come in.

12:45pm:
I'm first in line! The Line Master gestures me forward. For some reason, I feel like Oliver about to ask for a second bowl of gruel. "How do I find articles by specific authors?" I ask, and he lifts a bony hand and points… back to the end of the line, right by the entry doors I passed thirty minutes ago on my way here. "Back there. Computers. Use this." He hands me a pencil that's not even a whole number 2 but more like a fraction. It has no eraser. That's O.K, I think. I'm getting closer. Soon, it will all be worth it.

12:46pm:
The Library computers are so ancient they look fake, like the computers on a Star Trek episode before the Enterprise upgraded its technology. Touching the sticky keyboard makes one think not twice but six times. In order to spare my fingerpads the Ebola virus or whatever else might be stuck on the smudged keys, I decide to type with my knuckles. Looking like a smartly dressed Neanderthal, I enter "M-e-h-l-m-a-n". Several catalogue numbers appear and I jot enough numbers down that I feel like I’ve covered all the possibilities. I ask the guy next to me, "What do I do now?". He answers "Give 'em to the guy. He gets you the articles." "What guy?" Yes, you guessed it. The Master of the very same thirty-person line I was, only minutes ago, at the head of.

4:30pm:
Hours later, seated at a wooden table that could seat sixteen in some Hamptons French farmhouse-style kitchen, I'm beginning to feel faint. My research has expanded to the point that I have now looked in every periodical going back to immediately after Mehlman's birth. The chances of him having written an article before he was 10 years old are slim I realize, but I am obsessed. He's written plenty of items, all amusing, but none seem to have that naïf-in-New York City, pre-LA quality that I'd heard about.

Almost everyone else who was at my table has gone, having found what they came for. Each time one of my tablemates stands to leave, I feel a pang of jealousy and a strange sense of abandonment. "I thought we were in this together! What do you mean you're leaving?" I think. My jealousy springs from the knowledge that soon they'll be breathing air that doesn't feel like it's been strained through a sock.

In four hours I've only found one article by Mehlman specifically about New York (a practical guide to summer shares). But I'm tired, the wooden seat is getting hard, and I don't want to be the last one who gets to slam her books shut, shelve them and depart. I'll take it! I'll copy it here and pore over it at home. I tip one open side of the big green book atop the other, resulting in a soft slam. My companions look up at me briefly, jealously. "Yes!" I exude silently. "I'm done. I get to go home!"

Looking For Peter Mehlman, serialized, Pt. 3

11:17am:
I rise to the disappointed shaking of heads and the sense that I've let the team down. Sullenly, we file onto the platform, into the sad silence of a platform without a train. It doesn't matter that in three minutes there'll be another one: the train you miss is always the "best" one. I avoid the eyes of my fellows and keep myself busy thinking about the treasure at the end of this tunnel, metaphorically speaking: the Mehlman article and the secrets it will reveal about the what makes the written word grab someone's, besides one's own mother's, attention.

11:20am:
A local pulls in and I step inside. Oddly, even though it's 11:20am on a Wednesday, there is not a single vacant seat. I realize at that moment that I've never actually seen "a seat" on the Number One line. True, I've seen hints: a 5 inch strip of orange between two sets of American thighs, but that 5 inch beam of color is quickly blotted out by the not-to-be-trifled-with hips of a middle-aged woman who would certainly complain if her seat on an airplane was only 5 inches wide but here on the subway, seems overjoyed.

The resulting effect is a sort of checker-boarding of passengers all the way down the row, knees protruding in and out as people try to retain a portion of the bench; the pattern shifting as one passenger stands and another slides back. It’s kind of like the Wave, only performed horizontally instead of vertically. I stand, because I'm only passing through, just until I can catch the express.

11:23am:
We pull into the platform just as the express does. Perfect timing. Only our doors aren't opening. "How ironic!" we all exclaim in our different ways, some grinding their teeth into nubs. Some travelers lean on our doors, watching like children with noses pressed against a candy store window as the express opens, and then closes its doors.

"I can wait," I think, "Let someone else fight this battle," and I sit.

Suddenly, our doors explode open. I look up with only the slightest curiosity -- this is typically a tease. But suddenly the express across the platform re-opens its doors. In spite of my naturally low blood pressure, my subconscious throws out the challenge: "You can make it!"

As one, the entire human contents of the local scrambles for the openings -- The Great Subway Escape -- just as our doors begin to slide shut. It's right out of "Raiders of the Lost Ark": the squeezing doors, the second set closing just beyond; the ever-narrowing passage to freedom! All that's missing is rolling boulders. Are we quick and agile enough to get out before the poisoned spears appear?

Twang! Evidently not. My body's out, but I'm not moving. The doors have closed on my backpack. My fellow commuters, always eager for a free show, surround me, some trying to yank me out, some shoving me from behind and, as always (this being an entertainment capital), a few watching, Snickers bars in hand. Helpless, I watch as the doors on the express, barely 10 feet away, slowly hiss closed. It sits there briefly, taunting me.

Suddenly, the local opens its doors and spits me out onto the platform. I'm free! From my knees I look up, just as the express shudders to life and begins to chug away. Quickly, I spin back around just as the local, insulted no doubt by my abandonment, slams its doors shut and departs.

Back on the island of "Missed Trains", I wait.