By the time I left that program, with the writing of my MFA thesis deferred for the future, I had packed in the notion of becoming a schoolteacher, along with my musical aspirations, leaving them to molder in that realm of passed-over possibilities. At the same time, I did not think of myself as a writer by any stretch of the imagination. Instead I considered myself an appreciator of writing with some hands-on experience of it, some three or so years’ worth, though without a thing to show for myself by way of publishing, save a single Barthelme-like short story, which appeared in an issue of a literary magazine called Persea. (Perhaps only because it had happened to be edited by one of my fellow students at City, a certain Karen Braziller.)

Any ambitions that I might have developed weren’t helped by my then in-laws who thought me self-deluded for ever having wasted my time in graduate school. Even before I’d married their daughter, they sat me down as someone who wouldn’t have much of a future without their assistance and offered to get me, through connections, into the University of Chicago Law School. Of course, once we were to move out there and I started attending classes, we’d need a car and a place to live, which they would most generously provide, as well as their active financial support. But, even without thinking seriously about my future, that whole notion about becoming a respectable lawyer son-in-law, living the middle-class life with all those strings attached, just wasn’t for me. (And the mother could be condescending: While discussing seating arrangements for a wedding dinner that never happened, when someone suggested that it might be nice if she sat next to my mother, she quipped, “Then who would I have to talk to?”)

Which brings me back around, at the expense of mentioning so many of the other wonderful folks I worked with, to that wintry day when I turned up at the office despite the fact that I could barely take a breath without having a coughing fit. Bad as I looked, no one said a word to me about going home. It wasn’t unusual for the employees at TDI to keep on working through an illness—as some of the higher-ups, pricks at heart, frowned, to use that corporate euphemism, on excessive absences—in fact, I probably caught that flu in the office, where it had been going around. But because of my flu, I was given light duty (mainly answering phones with my rasping voice) and even allowed to take a long nap in the midafternoon, on a couch kept way in the back for the King Perceval production staff, who often worked late hours. Somehow, dosed on cough medicines and blood-pressure-raising syrups from the Duane Reade down the street, I managed to get through the day. (Thank God, it was a Friday.) Finally, heading home, however, I made the error of allowing myself to be swayed from my course by the company photographer Sid, a black dude, who, catching me in the hall and pleading a conflict, begged me to wait out in front with a package that he wanted me to give to a woman. We had no concierge in the lobby—and he hadn’t the time to wait for her himself.

It took me a while, though. Getting out from under the ghosts of what my mother referred to as that “matrimonio loco,” I ended up in a cheap first-floor studio apartment on West Eighty-first Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, a block that, as it happened, had the highest murder rate in Manhattan for a few years running.

Eventually hooked up with a new girlfriend, I headed back uptown, settling into a fifteenth-floor apartment on West 106th Street. Situated in the back of a 1920s high-rise, its windows looked north over West Harlem and the towers of St. John’s Cathedral. (In essence, I had moved back into my old neighborhood.) I most loved the church bells that rang at about eleven every Sunday morning in unison, the clarion of St. John’s, the Ascension, Notre Dame, Corpus Christi, and, at the greatest distance, Riverside Church casting an ecclesiastical spell over the world and, in the spring, set every bird for miles around to chirping, their songs inseparable from that chiming. (All right, so I’m going over the top, but New York City was so seedy in the 1970s that one came to appreciate anything that approached gentility.)

In that time, I really didn’t have much contact with writers—just on a very occasional basis, as when a friend would call me up and say that so-and-so had a reading somewhere. Otherwise, it was a rare thing for me to spend time with anyone talking shop. At work, the only well-read person there was my counterpart, David. As I recall, he had some literary aspirations of his own: A Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe aficionado, he also wanted to write a novel, perhaps about his upbringing in western Pennsylvania, though, working hard in the office and putting in a lot of overtime, as the sort of conscientious sort whom bosses loved, he never got around to the point of having anything to show me. I did spend the occasional evening hanging out with my friend Wesley Brown, who was then writing a great novel called Tragic Magic, and I’d bump into former colleagues on the street—all of them seemed to be getting wherever they were going much more quickly than I. While walking down Fifth Avenue one sunny autumn afternoon, I ran into Philip Graham. On his way to the offices of The New Yorker, where he was about to publish a story, he could not have been in a more ecstatic state, while all I could think about was what I would hopefully eat for dinner.

Altogether, in terms of keeping any sense of myself as a writer alive, books made a big difference, as did my occasional trips down to West Eleventh Street, where I would spend a few hours talking with Donald Barthelme, who, for whatever reasons and despite the fact that I was a nobody, always made time to see me. These visits entailed, from the very start, oddly familiar evenings that began no later nor sooner than five thirty. Donald, sitting across from me, an ashtray and a bottle of Scotch set out on a coffee table, chain-smoked and drank as quickly and as much as my pop used to, but with the difference that he did not speak a mangled Spanish nor go into sad meditations upon his mortality. (Thank you, Donald.) I wish I’d been more attentive to recording our conversations like so many literary sorts do—if I had felt that I were literary, I might have. What I do recall of those evenings came down to the manner in which he’d extract information from me about his other former students (“And Wesley, how is he?”) and make inquiries about my former wife (“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that it didn’t work out”) and my current job (“You do what!” and “Are you sure you don’t want me to put in a call to The New Yorker to see if they’d have something for you?”). In turn, I’d ask him about his stories, or mention something I’d noticed in one of his longer works, like The Dead Father, or, intending to butter him up, make him aware that I had noticed some new translation of one his works on the wall shelves behind us. On at least a few occasions, I offered to set up a jam session with some of my jazzier friends for him—though I had never seen the kit, he apparently played a high hat and snare drum (he always refused). Making him laugh, I’d come out of nowhere with an offer to provide him with the kinds of tickets that were readily available as freebies to the employees of TDI—for the Ringling Brothers circus and Friday-night boxing matches at the Felt Forum. (“No, thank you,” he’d say, stroking upon his beard.) Along the way (I’m compressing here), we’d speak about any number of things—injustice, as when an actor friend of his had been stabbed to death on the street for no good reason, and how lousy it was that his friend’s widow, a Swede, as a consequence, had been deported; or the capricious habits of certain writers—he always talked about Thomas Pynchon (whose writing I found opaque) as having a penchant for hiding out in closets when he’d visit someone; or we’d slip into a civil discourse: The government, of course, charged too much in taxes, and as far as salaries were concerned, at least for writers trying to live honestly and without ostentation, we once arrived at the figure of one hundred thousand dollars a year as a reasonable wage. He’d ask me about Cuba—was I planning to go?—a question that always made me feel a little guilty, as if I should, though as soon as I’d leave his apartment, it would seem, as always, unthinkable. Much as I loved the guy and felt thrilled to be with him, I’d wonder how he would feel if he had to contend with censorship, or if he came home one day and found someone else living in his flat, or woke up to find that his bread and butter, The New Yorker, had been nationalized, his salary cut to a tenth of what it had been before. I do not recall, however, voicing these questions to him, though I wouldn’t have put it past me.

Still, I kept fooling around on a typewriter at night and on the weekends, while accumulating stacks of unfinished scenes, vignettes, and, I suppose, what might pass as chapters of something about the way I had come up in life, too raw in both content and style, I thought deep down, for anyone in the publishing world to really care about.

Along the way, I came up with some writing that didn’t make me completely ill: in one instance, a narrative of some length that I’d written in a month or so of such sessions, involving a Cuban woman of an indeterminate age, remembering her childhood in Holguín, and a later romance with a fellow from the countryside. I have it somewhere, haven’t read it over since, and what I mainly recall is that it had a rather lyrical and nostalgic tone. Tightly written, during one of my anal phases in which I tried to be as “literary” as possible, I lavished upon it nearly every exotic word I could find in a dictionary and thesaurus. (There was no such thing as blue, rather it was cerulean, and pink became roseate and so on.) Xeroxing a few copies of it in the office, I sent one off as part of an application for some grant, and the other became the writing sample I attached to my application toward a “working fellowship” at a well-known writer’s conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Later, it thrilled me to learn that I had been accepted: I mean, what else would a young man working a nine-to-five full-time job want to do with his precious days off in the summer than wait tables?

This took place during the last weeks of August 1979, just as I was about to turn twenty-eight: the conference, involving rustic housing, antique barns, and an ambience somewhere between that of a college campus and a wooded Zen retreat, had a pecking order that began with the paying writer aspirants, then the working fellows (like myself, usually folks who hadn’t published much), then regular, betterpublished fellows—minor stars as it were, whose only duty was to show up and read the auditor’s work (only if they wanted to)—and upward to the staggering Olympian heights where the great literary geniuses of our time apparently resided. Among those staggeringly great literary geniuses: John Irving, Tim O’Brien, Howard Nemerov, and the pharaoh himself, John Gardner, with his head of flaxen Prince Valiant hair. I, for one, had not read his famous and brilliantly titled Sunlight Dialogues—I’d peeked at it and found it, well, a bit on the plodding side, but what the hell did I know? I did read his On Moral Fiction, which, in its general attacks on many a postmodernist author, seemed to single out the work of Donald Barthelme as a model of the very worst kind of writing. However, it was one thing to read of such an opinion, quite another to breathe it in the air.

As waiters, we actually had an advantage over everyone else in that we had a built-in community, whereas many of the attendees, arriving as strangers, had to endure a great deal of loneliness and, as a member of a large anonymous crowd, a low standing in the strict pecking order of things—until, inevitably, at one of the post-reading nightly barn dances, where the booze flowed and love flourished, they’d find a companion. (Also, I’m sure, as they’d gather with small groups of writers in workshops or in a meeting room and share, often enough, quite intimate information with one another through their prose, that too became a way of finding a kindred spirit.) More exclusive were the senior faculty cocktail parties that were held in a house called Tremont, which we, delivering liquor cases there, nicknamed Delirium Tremens. Since one could attend only by invitation, few of the waiters ever saw its interior: I only went once, and caused a row, as I had snuck inside through the back. The cocktails mainly took place (as I recall) in a cozy parlor with a fireplace, the mightiest writers on the planet talking literature with their favorites, who, I happened to notice, were, with perhaps one or two exceptions, the best-looking women at the conference. It was so blatantly sexist and hypocritical, given the air of sanctity hanging over people like Mr. Gardner, that even the more misogynist pricks I knew from the advertising world (and believe me, I met one every day) seemed, by contrast, far more earnest. What took place there was so blatant—one of our crew of waiters, a quite beautiful southern girl, had fallen under their spell and tended to come back to her quarters dead drunk and disoriented at three in the morning—that I couldn’t understand how those same folks could look at themselves in a mirror without sensing their own darkened souls, let alone participate in discussions about morality in fiction. (No wonder they were so awful in the mornings.) I recall having a brief and somewhat pleasant conversation with Gardner about Tolstoy before getting kicked out by an assistant to the gods. (“Are you aware that you’ve broken the protocol here?”) Mainly, I remember leaving Delirium Tremens with the impression that, for some of those writers—not all—the conference was mainly a way of what my friend Tommy would call “pulling some beaucoup pussy.”

After about a week, there were afternoon sessions devoted to student works. One delicate-seeming young man, his voice trembling, read a too lyrical and tender narrative about a son following a broken-down drunk through a small midwestern town at night and its resolution and climax, at story’s end, is the narrator’s discovery that said broken-down drunk is his father; the audience, so seriously disposed, dissected its various elements quite thoroughly, though never too bluntly nor cruelly, and generally seemed to like it, while I, having lived with such a father (except my Midwest town happened to be situated in West Harlem), felt almost contemptuous of the way it ended, as if the guy didn’t really know what he was talking about—A pop like that is just there from the time you are old enough to become aware. In those moments, for whatever my reasons, I formed a notion that I have since, rightly or wrongly, usually clung to. This I shared with just about anyone I could that day: Stories often end just where they should begin. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant insight—a lot of writing is thinking aloud on paper, and necessary if only to discover the real heart of a story—but I can remember realizing it was the first opinion about craft or an approach to narrative I’d ever voiced aloud.