Blue Plate Special (29 page)

SPINACH PIE

I made this savory, cheesy pie, which I found in Mollie Katzen’s
Moosewood Cookbook
and adapted slightly, as often as I could through the years when I was living in Spencertown with my mother and Emily, and then as a college and graduate school student. It’s cheap and quick and filling, and very nourishing and warming on a freezing cold winter night. It’s also incredibly good
.

Sauté a minced onion in plenty of olive oil. Add one thawed 10-ounce package of chopped spinach with a dash each of cayenne pepper, basil, and nutmeg and plenty of salt and black pepper.

In a bowl, beat together a pound of ricotta cheese, ¾ cup of grated cheddar, and 4 eggs. Add the spinach and onion mixture and stir.

Turn into a pie shell, store bought or homemade, and bake for 40–45 minutes at 375 degrees, until golden brown on top.

On September 1, just after I turned twenty-seven, I moved to New York to start my life as a writer. My first apartment in New York was a share on St. Marks Place between Third and Fourth Avenues, a bleak, scruffy, unnamed neighborhood between downtown Brooklyn and Park Slope. It was a long, spacious place with a kitchen and sitting room at one end and a large living room at the other, and two bathrooms and three bedrooms off a very long hallway. As the newcomer, I got the bedroom in the middle, which had no windows, but it did have an electric ceiling fan, and it was absolutely quiet in there at night, sheltered from all the street noise, the salsa music blaring from cars, the yelling and honking and occasional gunfire. I furnished my bedroom piecemeal, mostly with stuff I dragged in off the street: milk crates, a futon frame, a beat-up blue bureau. I didn’t care that it was a dark little hole: it was mine.

My roommates were two women, Sam and Anne, whom I had barely known at Reed. They had been in New York much longer than I had and were now my lifelines to a social world. Sam was a painter who worked as an assistant to other, more famous painters, and Anne was a copy editor at
Spy
magazine. They had boyfriends, sort of, or girlfriends, sort of. They knew how to talk to the guys who played cards at a folding table in front of the corner bodega when they ran in to buy cigarettes,
cans of Café Bustelo, and milk. They knew where to get the best Vietnamese
pho
in the city, how to shop for fish and vegetables in Chinatown. They brought home pink plastic bags of wondrous things—bok choy, squid, whole fish, rice noodles, and bottles of dark, exotic sauces.

Anne was elegant, chic, and understated; Sam was wild and urchinlike. They both had short blond hair. Anne’s was cut in a fetching new-wave pixie; Sam’s was self-inflicted with nail scissors and sometimes dyed neon orange or green. Anne invited me to snarky, intimidating writers’ shindigs; Sam took me to druggy downtown loft parties.

They struck me as knowing and arrived. I tagged along with them and watched their behavior, squirreling it away into a storehouse of knowledge I was trying to amass. Anne was cool and arch and ironic; I was much closer to Sam. She and I sometimes stayed up all night, talking and drinking and smoking together. After she went to sleep at nearly dawn, I wrote unintentionally hilarious journal entries, the pages of which are now crinkly with spilled vodka, barely legible, describing what it felt like to be totally shit faced. I was so transparently hungry for experience, extremes, Life with a capital L. I was young enough to think that other people were the answer, that I couldn’t find what I was looking for unless I opened myself up to people who knew more than I did and allowed them to define and influence and impress themselves upon me.

I met James early on at a downtown party that Sam took me to. She instantly disliked him. He was four years older than I was, a Choate- and Georgetown-educated aspiring screenwriter from Connecticut who had moved to New York in the early eighties and liked to reminisce about the “old days,” back when New York was cool, exciting, happening. It made me feel as if I’d missed the whole party. But I hadn’t, I knew; it was still in full swing.

When we met, James happened to be living with his ex-girlfriend, although I wasn’t so sure about the “ex” part, since she wasn’t supposed to know about me. It should have been a red flag (there were many), but I was too young and naive to pay much attention. He was helping me get over Adam, since we’d broken up when I moved to New York. And I felt a sense of camaraderie with James. We were both frustrated young writers who thought we were much smarter than we were, which engendered a kind of chaotic melancholy that needed blotting out. Consequently, we drank—a lot. After drinking only beer on weekends in high school, almost nothing in college, and one glass of Jim Beam at a time in grad school, I started getting soused and blotto on a regular, almost nightly, basis.

One night, I chugged a whole bottle of Jameson in a stall in the ladies’ room of some club in midtown at some show, it could have been the Fall, it could have been Richard Thompson, it could have been the Mekons. I saw almost everyone perform live at least once back then. James constantly won free tickets to shows from radio stations by being the fourth or ninth or eleventh caller and giving a different name every time. He possessed an uncanny genius for speed-dialing. The first show he took me to, the Jayhawks on Ludlow Street, I recognized that I hated hearing music in bars. I preferred to listen to recorded music in a quiet room where I could actually hear it. Bar music was too loud, distorted, and raw—I hated having to make conversation while a band was playing, hated feeling deaf for hours afterward. But I kept saying yes whenever James asked me to go.

That whole year, and for several years to come, my life consisted of loud music and a lot of booze, and then impersonal, physically demanding sex afterward with more booze, and then I’d go on the subway to my mindless job the next day. At my desk at work, I’d call the deli downstairs and order
my favorite postbender breakfast: a Western omelet sandwich on toasted rye with extra ketchup. With it, I’d drink an enormous, sweet, milky cup of coffee, and get on with my day, and then I’d walk down Broadway after work through streets crammed with people and shop windows and noises and traffic and smells and do it all again that night.

Somehow, all this drinking seemed to have no effect on my physical health, at least not in any way I could feel. Despite my poor eating habits and excessive drinking and smoking, I rarely got sick. Hangovers were almost unknown to me except as a pleasant, muzzy state with life’s edges blunted—almost a better reason to drink than getting drunk the night before. Luckily, I never blacked out; unluckily, this meant I usually remembered much of the night. I was a terrible drunk, in that I acted outrageously and stupidly; I imagine I was a pain in the ass, but I was too drunk to know it. I thought I was witty and carefree and madcap, oh dear.

I drank excessively out of my chronic and ongoing sense of self-loathing, to escape myself, to flee the annoying chirpiness of my too clear, too verbal brain, so recently educated, so freshly imbued with the powers of literary analysis and writerly dogma. I had never been bad in my life before; I’d always been the responsible firstborn daughter of a single mother, and as a kid I worried that, if I didn’t keep it together, it might all fall apart. In my late twenties, I finally realized that I didn’t have to pretend I could help anyone by being good anymore. I realized I had no control over anything at all, even my own fate, and so I let myself totally lose control for the first time in my life.

My first job, shortly after I arrived in New York, was as an editorial assistant at William Morrow on Twenty-eighth and Madison for a starting salary of $17,500 a year. I got hired thanks to strings pulled by my stepfather, Ben, who’d been an editor in New York for many years before he started teaching
at Bard. I had an hour-long commute to work every morning, when I took the 4 or 5 train from the Atlantic Avenue station and switched to the 6 at Fourteenth Street. Sometimes my boss, a tiny, brilliant, doe-eyed editor named Susan, asked me to stay late, but only rarely. Usually, I left the office at five sharp and took the elevator down to the street. On the sidewalk, I put on my Walkman and headed down Broadway, the spine of Manhattan, to catch the subway to Brooklyn from South Ferry at the tip of Manhattan Island. I pressed Play and flooded my head with music, my own personal soundtrack to my nightly walk through Madison Square Park, the carpet district, Union Square, the East Village, and SoHo, then across Canal to the windy, empty, trash-blown streets of Tribeca, and finally the deserted, tiny, crooked streets of the Financial District, with its sheer-sided skyscrapers and old churches, all the way down to New York Harbor.

I loved this time of day. Leaving work meant shucking off my office persona, whatever that was, and returning to my daydreamy, solitary, observant, anxious, arrogant self. It was a glittering, colorful, dramatic walk every day. I never got tired of it. It was all new to me, this city, this life I had chosen for myself and embarked upon. I had no history here yet; it was all mine for the making. I was thin and aerodynamic, streamlined. I knifed along the sidewalk, impatiently skirting slower walkers and darting through traffic, away from my work life and toward whatever adventures lay ahead that night. I listened to my favorite tape, the same one every day: “Flying Cowboys,” by Rickie Lee Jones. Walking down Broadway day after day, I tried to wear a groove, make a physical mark of some kind on the city, while “Flying Cowboys” made a parallel groove in my head of jazzy, ethereal, hopeful music. When I got to the station at South Ferry, I took off my Walkman—the train lurched and screeched its way under the river—and both Broadway
and music closed themselves to me like something disappearing underwater, slipping back into itself, untouched by me and not mine to keep.

Although I’d supported myself, of course with some tuition and other help from my mother, for the past eleven years, working at William Morrow felt like my first real job. For the first time, I had a taxable salary and benefits, a nine-to-five, five-day-a-week schedule. As work went, it was easy and undemanding. Susan was a generous, fair, uncritical boss, which was a lucky thing for me because, to put it mildly, I was a lackluster editorial assistant, which is to say, my heart was not in it. My only real usefulness to Susan was that I had a great knack for quickly reading and articulately rejecting manuscripts. Her office was crammed full of boxes and boxes of these labored-over, sweat-stained, treasured would-be books. I saw it as my Sisyphean mission to get rid of these boxes as fast as I could, but of course their supply refilled as quickly as I could empty them.

Susan seemed to have an excellent life, a career it might have done me well to aspire to if I hadn’t had other, more egotistical and less practical ideas. She arrived at 10:00 or so every morning on the train from Larchmont, made a lot of phone calls, worked on editing and writing jacket copy, wrote letters, and then, at noon, went out to have lunch in restaurants I had never set foot in and wouldn’t dream of venturing into. I made reservations for her there, and found myself imagining the food as I waited on hold for the French-accented, vaguely snooty person who would write down her name and the time; Periyali was the one that most caught my imagination. Every time I called them, I sat with visions of grilled octopus, which I had never eaten, dancing in my head: stuffed grape leaves, grilled sardines, roasted potatoes.… I might have become an editor if the entire job had consisted of going out to lunch.