My Life with Bob Read online

  In fourth grade, reading Forever felt like breaking the law with every turn of the page. Just acknowledging Judy Blume’s existence, with her frank acknowledgment of tweenish emotions, filled me with shame. That the procuring of such intimate books had to be public was horrifying especially because I cared enormously what the library staff thought of me. I liked to imagine the clerk surveying my outgoing stack with admiration and approval. Look at that wise little girl, he was meant to think. She’s one of us. When I checked out the Blumes, I’d wait until the coast was clear, staring resolutely away from the clerk like a thirteen-year-old buying Tampax, hoping he wouldn’t connect me with that other sage girl who read Louisa May Alcott.

  I was certain I’d lose their respect entirely if they caught me when, following the gateway drug of Judy Blume, I progressed to Paula Danziger and Norma Klein, explicit and positively dirty. That there were books I knew were inappropriate, and that I wanted to read them anyway, was obviously a personality flaw. The climax of exploitative teenage lit was, of course, V. C. Andrews’s scintillating incest series that began with Flowers in the Attic, but those I got at Barnes & Noble. I wasn’t prepared to risk everything.

  Eventually, having worn out the children’s floor, I ventured upstairs toward the grown-up library. On a kind of purgatorial mezzanine stood three rotating racks filled with what then passed as young adult fiction. Most were romances, including Sweet Dreams.

  Clearly there was something disgraceful about the Sweet Dreams series. With titles like P.S. I Love You and The Popularity Plan, they were displayed unforgivingly in a wide-open space where grown-ups could see exactly what you were doing. I would dash up and quickly spin the rack, eyes scanning expertly for heretofore undiscovered volumes. The covers featured photographs of before-they-were-famous teenage actresses gazing soulfully. A gangly sixth grader with a greasy center part, I didn’t look anything like those cover girls, and I certainly didn’t know romance. I had to read every single one.

  But I could easily cross the line into places that still felt decidedly off-limits, even to me. Once, at Barnes & Noble, I chose a novel with the naked back of a silhouetted female torso on its cover, decades before such images became the tired trope of “women’s fiction.” It looked daring, but not dangerous; I had no idea what it was about. When I got home and started to read, I quickly realized I’d entered uncharted territory for a ten-year-old kid in 1980s Long Island. What was this word “lesbian”? If I read the book and was found out, it was certain there would be terrible repercussions.

  Better to just turn myself in. My mom was sitting in the living room when I approached in a sweat, book upside down as if to mask its incendiary contents.

  “I don’t think this is for me,” I said, handing it over with instant relief. My mother took the book away wordlessly, and we never spoke of it again.

  “The trouble with books,” Jeanette Winterson’s mother once admonished her, “is that you don’t know what’s in them until it’s too late.” This is precisely right. We might read about things we weren’t supposed to, find out what adults didn’t want us to discover. But this wasn’t altogether bad. Books, I soon realized, were a way to acquire illicit knowledge, a key to adulthood that otherwise remained hidden, whether you were entirely ready or not. I’d been a fool to relinquish that power.

  Books are how cautious kids get to experience a kind of secondhand rebellion, a safe way to go off the rails. While for the most part I sought out any book bearing the golden seal of the Newbery Medal, safe and “good” books, perhaps in part to balance that as I got older, I was drawn to the troublemakers—the Edie Sedgwicks and Jim Morrisons and Marilyn Monroes. Soon, I had to get my hands on anything remotely “countercultural,” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary, and what I thought of as “bad boy” books—the Beats, cult favorites, any title that had somewhere at some point been banned.

  Not all these books were as fun as expected. I was bored by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and hated On the Road, and I hated The Catcher in the Rye even more. Their heroes seemed more like antiheroes; fundamentally eager to please, I wasn’t open to characters who thumbed their noses at the authorities. I felt compelled to read them nonetheless and have felt equally disinclined to return to them since. But the more downtrodden characters, I positively adored. Anyone who was a heroin addict or knew a heroin addict or wrote about another heroin addict was good enough for me. Accounts of dead drug-addicted celebrities constituted their own lush genre, the more sordid the behavior and devastating the downfall, the better. I felt sorry for them, and this emotional largesse made me feel better about me.

  This made the forceful removal of the next “inappropriate” book devastating. It was the early eighties. Saturday Night Live was the height of cool. It didn’t matter that I’d never actually stayed up late enough for the TV show because there was a book, Wired, Bob Woodward’s bestselling biography of John Belushi. Wired had been featured on magazine covers, which meant it was important. When my mother caught me with a copy—and only on the opening chapter!—she swiped it. No amount of tears would overturn her decision.

  The truth is she had nothing to fear. Reading about bad guys scared the hell out of me, reinforcing the line between us. In real life, nothing about the rebels and willful misfits was remotely appealing. Listening to Holden Caulfield moan and groan, I couldn’t help but think, What a jerk. What did he have to complain about, with his privileged life and his private school and his afternoons wandering unsupervised around Manhattan?

  My attraction to the dark side may have been that it allowed me to explore the forbidden from a safe distance, helping me draw distinctions between the kind of person I wanted to be and what I wanted to avoid. When I grim-mindedly chose to read Brave New World, along with 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, for my honors thesis in high school, it was my way of proving I was grown-up enough to make these choices.

  In the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, people are not allowed to spend time by themselves; leisure time is to be spent thoughtlessly in benign group activity. Serious literature is banned and children are taught to stay in their place through targeted subconscious messages. Not surprisingly, Brave New World is one of the most frequently banned books in America, due to its “subversive” content. Brave New World was not for children, and that’s partly what made it irresistible.

  The title comes from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest:

  O wonder!

  How many godly creatures are there here!

  How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

  That has such people in’t.

  This was intended ironically, by Shakespeare and by Huxley, who proposed that, in lieu of beauteous mankind serving the greater interest, the world was full of selfish and nefarious people out to advance themselves. But for me, Brave New World held another, altogether different meaning. Books were my brave new world, my portal into the forbidden adult world, one that I could approach in my own vicarious way, drawing my own conclusions.

  What a thrill it was to read beyond your means, asserting yourself through the books you chose, breaking the rules just slightly but in a way that helped define your own rules. As I got older, it began to dawn on me that nobody really knew or cared what I did inside a book, or why I was there. The clerks at the library weren’t actually monitoring my activity. I stopped feeling embarrassed about my selections and became more confident about my ability to choose what I wanted. I even began to feel proud of those choices and, I liked to think, fairly sophisticated in my judgment. (I wasn’t always right about this.) The brave new world outside might have been intimidating, but I could travel there surreptitiously inside a book, and if I played it right I would never get in trouble.

  CHAPTER 2

  Slaves of New York

  The Literary Life

  Children are notoriously literal readers, and I was no exception. Books, I believed, contained the entire truth about everything, and if you could just read ever
y book or even a good chunk of the Truly Important Ones, you would know what you needed to know about real life. And you could be a part of it.

  Naturally, I got a lot of things wrong. When I was eleven, I told my mother quite adamantly that Norma Klein wrote the classic 1939 folk song “You Are My Sunshine,” because it had appeared in one of her teen-weepy novels, the song a husband lovingly sang to his dying wife. “I really don’t think so,” my mother replied, but what did she know? I’d read it that way so it had to be true.

  All books, to my mind, were essentially guidebooks. I sucked them up the way Martha the dog slurps alphabet soup in Martha Speaks and learns how to talk. I was precisely what Hermann Hesse once called a “naïve reader,” consuming books as one consumes food, swallowing them whole. “This kind of reader is not related to a book as one person is to another but rather as a horse to his manager or perhaps as a horse to his driver: the book leads, the reader follows,” Hesse explained. “The substance is taken objectively, accepted as reality.” Exactly. And what was wrong with that?

  Reading could instruct you on how to live, and not only that—it could teach you how to live the smartest, coolest, most urbane life imaginable, which meant nobody would ever be able to tell how silly and ignorant and suburban you once were. Books about older, wiser, and all-around better people would prepare you for anything that happened outside of books. They would make it clear how to act and how to react.

  I didn’t question, I didn’t ponder, I didn’t criticize. I merely absorbed, down to the word. Books were where I picked up my vocabulary, extracting the words I needed to get around. Germaine Greer recalls how she would adopt a word from a given book, using it “for a whole day until I got the feel of it, ‘fetch’ or ‘directly’ or ‘capital’ or ‘coaxing’ or ‘melancholy.’” I made lists of aspirational words. Like Greer, I wanted to think and speak the way writing did. This, alas, had the unfortunate effect of making me sound awkward and pretentious, precisely like the poorly socialized kid I was.

  Having learned how to speak more from what I read than from what I heard, I excelled at mispronunciation. Mildred became “Mild Red,” like a soft shade of scarlet, which seemed rather pretty. I was always horrified to be corrected, and occasionally insisted my way was the right one even in the face of decisive evidence to the contrary. I did not, like many other readers I know, take to saying “mih-zled” in place of misled, but I nonetheless repeatedly embarrassed myself, feeling exposed as a fraud when someone pointed out that “vogue” was not, in fact, pronounced “voe-goo.” (Years later, the literary critic Liesl Schillinger would dub these “mumblenyms”—words mispronounced by heavy readers who’d encountered them only on the page.)

  It was important to me to feel book smart, because my future depended on it. Once I’d gleaned the right information, I could decide which books were part of my desired world and will myself into them. I could imagine leaving behind where I was physically (grayish-pink bedroom, cat wallpaper, Long Island), stepping through a hardcover door, and venturing “out there.”

  Out there, in stories, was the City I knew from Divorced Dad weekends at my father’s apartment on the Upper West Side, a place that felt like a parallel Almost Existence, a place where I might have lived had the divorce played out differently, a place where I may have felt more at home. As it was, I was a part-time and therefore inauthentic resident, which made any book that smelled at all of Manhattan deeply alluring. Mine but not mine. Tell-alls about downtown bohemians, books by theater types, gritty street stories—this was the life I wanted, full of sophisticated people, arty events, sparkling conversation that was all about words, spoken by people who knew.

  Andy Warhol was my literary guide. Any book about or endorsed by Andy Warhol, still alive and ineffably cool, roaming coolly around midtown, I had to get my hands on. One afternoon in the city, I was thunderstruck to spot Warhol himself, oohing over a shelf of impulse buys in the extremely hip and expensive store Fiorucci. Here was a veritable City Celebrity and obvious literary authority, in real life, in my life. I shadowed him for forty-five minutes, prolonging the moment of Art Become Real. He picked up trinket after trinket. He didn’t buy anything.

  My best friend, Ericka, and I may have been the only teenagers in America who appointment-viewed Warhol’s short-lived MTV program, Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes, which we religiously recorded on the VCR, practically taking notes. As far as we were concerned, Warhol and his circle had the ultimate say, perhaps along with Spy magazine, on what we construed as literature of the moment. Anyone who appeared on Warhol’s TV show and had a book, I read it. Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero. Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City. Sandra Bernhard’s Confessions of a Pretty Lady, with its scandalous line in which Bernhard casually confessed to picking her nose while walking down the street. For someone who felt self-conscious walking down the street just trying to appear normal, Bernhard’s audacity dazzled.

  Ever since Ericka and I had met in Girl Scouts in second grade, we’d shared a propensity for fantasy. In fourth grade, we constructed an elaborate world called Oopleepia; this planet was located in the tree house outside my father’s rental house upstate and ruled by the great god Oopleep. Ericka was an alien named Eep and I was Oop. Years later, I confessed that I’d always been jealous that she’d had the cuter name. “You had the cuter name,” she replied. We were always slightly competitive.

  Naturally, our fantasies evolved as we got older, ditched Girl Scouts, and ran with and then away from a bad crowd, making our way through the gross injustice of junior high school, remaining best friends all the while. By the time we graduated from eighth grade, most of our imaginary life revolved around downtown lit and the New Wave music we deemed forward-thinking, a mix tape of one-hit wonders that also made room for perennial heartthrobs Sting and Duran Duran. Ericka’s mother worked at Billboard, her uncle was the lead singer of a seventies rock group, my stepbrother played in a band—all this translated into assorted brushes with fame: backstage passes to teenybop concerts like ’Til Tuesday at the old Ritz, INXS at the Meadowlands, Simple Minds at the Beacon Theatre. We snuck into the Limelight and Nell’s, me covering my braces with one hand. We even managed to speak to Simon Le Bon on the phone, a conversation during which one of us—name redacted—blurted out, “Is John Taylor getting married?” The apotheosis was snagging a bit part dancing in the background of a Nile Rodgers video, my colossal hair threatening to blot out all else on-screen.

  We may not have gotten ourselves married off to Sting or Simon Le Bon, but we considered them part of our lives, earning us cultural passports out of the high school world where we were ignored by the popular girls in their capacious Champion sweatshirts (overpriced, essential) and Silver City Pink lipstick. We could dip into the milieu we read about in Spy magazine as long as nobody else (our parents) knew about it. If only the other kids at school could know.

  Tristate-area alumni know how terrible it is to be merely New York–ish when, inside, you feel like a New Yorker. The City was only forty minutes away and yet so far from the minds of my classmates. How could you not want to at least read about it?

  Something had to be done, and luckily, someone had made the senseless error of putting me in a leadership position in a key high school organization. The Human Relations Committee sounds like a nefarious political lobby but was actually an extracurricular activity that had some kind of ineffable touchy-feely purpose. The nature of this purpose remained elusive to me and my coleaders, two attractive and more socially adept classmates; I had an unrequited crush on the arty one and spent copious amounts of time vacillating wildly between the conviction that he knew all about my crush and the certainty that he had no clue about my true feelings. He was either totally mortified to even be liked by me or secretly in love with me too. I could never be sure. What did I know about human relations?

  And what was Human Relations? How had we landed these roles? Did we even have a faculty advisor? Unclear. As best I understood it, we were to
convene a handpicked sample of twenty-five students every month from each stratum of high school society for a day of interclique bonding at the local public library. It was like The Breakfast Club, but without Judd Nelson and not a movie.

  In a quixotic effort to make my high school classmates more book—and Manhattan—aware and because we met in the library, which was my turf (also to impress the arty one), I decided one of the group’s activities would be a read-aloud. I chose the reading, and it was always the same: Slaves of New York.

  Tama Janowitz had recently published the book, her debut collection of stories, with a blurb on the back from Andy Warhol that said, “Great! Sizzling! Wow!” Janowitz, with her bushel of black hair, wide apple cheeks, and tiny beak of a nose, had read parts of the book aloud on Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes with great panache, in a mocking, deadpan voice dripping with insouciance. I taped the episode and watched it over and over, studying her delivery. She was the coolest author I’d ever seen and she deserved a wider audience. She would also prove to my audience that I was cool just for reading her.

  Because oversight of the HRC was minimal to nonexistent, I was able to force my group of twenty-five peers each month into a circle and read to them from Janowitz’s “Case History N4: Fred,” aping her unassailable nonchalance, her unforced charm, her indifference to resolved endings. She didn’t care what anyone thought and, dammit, I’d pretend I didn’t either.

  The story had a killer opening: “Fred had a problem: he liked to approach strange girls on the street and offer to take them shopping at Tiffany’s.” As I read, I watched everyone’s face to make sure they were registering the appropriate level of appreciation. The story was only three pages long; even so, I made a few judicious cuts. My classmates didn’t need to know he was an out-of-work musician who lived near the Williamsburg Bridge, for example. But there were key parts, like this exchange:

  “To his surprise, he found himself saying, ‘Listen, I like your linear definition. I was wondering—just for the hell of it—would you let me take you shopping at Tiffany’s? It would give me a great deal of pleasure, and naturally I wouldn’t expect payment of any kind.’