argument  noun  1 obsolete : an outward sign : INDICATION  2 a : a reason given in proof or rebuttal  b : discourse intended to persuade  3 a : the act or process of arguing : ARGUMENTATION  b : a coherent series of statements leading from a premise to a conclusion  c : QUARREL, DISAGREEMENT  4 : an abstract or summary especially of a literary work {a later editor added an argument to the poem}  5 : the subject matter especially of a literary work

—WWWebster Dictionary

From here on the moon, Earth makes for an impressive sight—a turquoise brooch on a field of black velvet, so huge and perfectly clear that you think you could reach out and touch it.

But that's just an illusion. Of course you can't touch Earth—it's a quarter of a million miles away. And when you look more closely, you begin to see that the clarity itself is an illusion. It's all surface. You can see the clouds on the outside perfectly well, but only occasional glimpses of what's underneath, and not much in the way of detail at all.

Memory is in many ways similar. It may seem as though you can take in its sum total—the current state of your own life—at a glance, but the harder we peer, the more depth and complexity are revealed, and the more the fine details elude your searching eyes.

Every so often, however, those details swim into sharp focus—but they never stay that way for long. You get a sense that if you don't capture them quickly in a photo or a sketch, they'll be gone again soon, maybe gone for good.

Thus Memos from the Moon—an attempt to capture my world of memory in words, one square mile at a time. That planet keeps on turning, so you'll never know which bit I may be gazing at on any given day—a mountain peak, an ocean trench, an orderly city, a roiling storm—but I'll do my best to accurately report whatever swims into focus.

Percival Lowell looked at the bleak deserts of Mars and saw inconceivably long canals irrigating massive agriculture zones. I can sympathize with his misjudgment, but when I see a desert, I'll try to call it a desert. After all, this is a map of my home planet I'm making. If I should someday go back, being able to get around would be nice.

Do you ever have one of those moments where you consider some behavior or predilection of yours—one so deeply innate to your personality that you never thought to question it before—in an entirely new light, and in a sudden flash of insight you understand how it originated and why it persists?

It doesn't happen to me often, but it did happen to me a week or two ago—not uncoincidentally, just as I was coming to the realization that there are at least three distinct (if not yet fully separate) personalities living there in the moist sponge behind my eyes. (But that's another memo for another day.)

Actually, I figured out the reason for two different predilections—quirks which had always seemed unrelated (or would have seemed unrelated had I bothered to give them any thought) but which are in reality very closely linked.

You see, my father liked to go bowling, and when I was small he took me along with him with some regularity. He didn't bowl in a league or with friends, at least not that I knew of—usually on these outings it was just he and I. And the amazing thing was, even when I was three, he didn't just drag me along to watch. He tried to teach me how to bowl so I could play too.

Now, after our outings at the lanes, we would often stop at McDonald's for a burger and fries on the way home. (And how those signs puzzled me when I was small! How could they possibly have served 12 billion when there were only 4 billion on the planet?) My father would get a Big Mac (two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun—and I could say it all backward, just like the people in the commercials), while I would have to be content with one of those flat little cardboardish regular hamburgers with one slice of pickle and a grudging squirt of ketchup.

But then one day when I was still just three or four, a miracle happened. My father and I were bowling at our favorite lanes in Eagle Rock. I stepped up to the line with an eight-pound ball cradled awkwardly in my arms, bent forward, rolled it with all my might, watched it chug down the lane with inexorable momentum . . . and then stood stunned at ball crept almost apologetically into the pocket and the pins toppled one by one. It was a strike! It was the very first strike of my life!

That was great enough, but the day was destined to get better. My father was so proud of me that when we arrived at McDonald's after our game he ordered me not an ordinary hamburger, but that Holy Grail of the fast-food universe—a Big Mac.

And I finished it all. Every bite.

When we got home, I burbled happily to my mother about all of it, and darn if she wasn't impressed with what a big boy I was now. I must have kept talking about it for days and days. Hell, I still tell people that I bowled my first strike when I was three.

So it shouldn't really come as any surprise that as an adult I can't keep away from bowling alleys and Big Macs. But of course, every time I go near them, I'm really seeking to recapture the feeling I had that day when I felt like a man in my father's eyes for the first (and maybe only?) time, and knew that he was proud of me.

Now if only something equally potent could get me hooked on racquetball and health food.

Phys. Ed. was such a traumatic and humiliating experience for me in junior high and high school that there was no way I was going to take any similar courses in college. For me, perhaps the most significant aspect of my high school graduation was fact that it signaled the last time I would be forced to change clothes in a locker room and wear gym shorts.

So I was genuinely distressed when I started attending the University of Utah and realized that there was a P.E. requirement.

My distress was shortlived, however, because it soon became apparent that I still wouldn't have to put on gym shorts if I didn't want to. I could take courses like golf, archery, rock-climbing, or ballroom dancing without ever going near a communal shower.

But it was—what else?—bowling that turned out to be the ticket. You could repeat the class for credit—I ended up taking it during three different quarters in all. But it was the first time I did that I'll never forget.

It was then that I bowled my all-time high game of 201—a line that included a run of five consecutive strikes—but that's not what stands out the most for me. What I remember best is my partner in the class tournament.

You see, in Bowling 101, the first six weeks of class are spent mastering the basic concepts and techniques of bowling, and the last four are spent in a double-elimination partners tournament. That's right—partners.

I was one of the kids who always got picked last when it came time to choose up sides for sports, and I didn't make friends in many of my classes, so I never imagined that someone was going to pick me for his tournament partner. Her tournament partner, really. Because when the time came for the class to divide up into two-person teams, I was approached by a very lovely young blonde woman. Stellar, right?

Well, sure, up to a point. She also happened to be married and pregnant.

Very pregnant, in fact—about eight and a half months' worth. I asked her what in the world she was doing in a bowling class in her condition. "I've been pregnant long enough, and I'm sick of it," she said. "I'm trying to induce labor."

As it happened, we became pretty good friends over the next month, as we bowled our way together into a middle-of-the-pack finish in the tournament. I became quite taken with her, thus lengthening my string of "friend" relationships with attractive women who are involved with other men (a recurring motif in my life story, and one you can be sure we'll revisit it in weeks to come) and inducing in myself adolescent fantasies being there to deliver her baby when her water broke on the boards.

In point of fact, the only thing I ever did that might have affected her pregnancy at all was accidentally letting the bowling ball slip from my sweaty grasp on the backswing of my approach. The ball landed right next to her with a crash, startling her stiff, but if it had gone a foot the other way . . . I don't even want to think about what the result could have been.

But in the end her grand scheme failed. The exertion of bowling didn't do one whit to bring her gravidity to its natural conclusion. The only day of class she missed that quarter, in fact, was the last, but we had been knocked out of the tournament a week before and hadn't bowled since then. So much for the bowling-alley method.

My friend Lynne once attended an Oingo Boingo concert with me when she was eight months pregnant. She says that's why her son Christopher likes rock music so much now. I never saw my bowling partner again after that quarter, but maybe her little boy—because that's how the ultrasound called it—will grow up with an unusual fondness for the sounds and rhythms of bowling alleys.

And if he does, I wonder if he'll ever figure out why.

The following piece was written in May 1997 as part of my former essay series "The Writings of Daedalus," which was in turn an outgrowth of my work for Alexis Massie's now-defunct Web site Pandora's Box of Tricks.

Mine came one morning late this past winter, not long after I'd started my new job in the financial district of Manhattan. I don't need to show up at work until ten, so I usually catch the D train from Brooklyn at around nine-thirty, then transfer to the N at DeKalb Avenue.

The trains are still somewhat crowded at that time of the morning, but nothing like the crush you'd see if you rode an hour earlier. This particular morning, however, as I crossed the platform at DeKalb and boarded the N, I was pleased to spy a large empty zone in the train car. Ah, plenty of room to sit down and stretch my legs without worrying about shoehorning myself into the narrow space between two wide-bodied fellow commuters.

It didn't occur to me to question the big empty space—only to enjoy it.

Blissfully I took my seat, extending my legs into the center aisle as far as they would go and withdrawing a paperback book from my shoulder bag, all the while savoring the blessed lack of human encroachment on my personal space.

It was only then, over the top edge of my book, that I noticed what was sitting directly across the train from me—a big steaming pile of human feces, deposited as neatly and unashamedly in the shallow concavity of the plastic orange seat as if the comfortable transportation of raw filth were the sole purpose for which the public transit system of New York City had been designed.

We stared at each other for a timeless moment, the pile of shit and I.

It won. As unobtrusively as I could, but acutely conscious of the averted eyes of my fellow travelers (some of whom, no doubt, had originally taken the very seat I was in the process of vacating), I moved a few yards farther down the car and pretended to be absorbed in my book.

But I couldn't help it. My eyes kept returning to the brazen fecal display, fascinated and repulsed.

It was with great relief that I exited the train at the Whitehall stop in Manhattan and emerged into the relatively fresh air at street level. A cold sea wind blew in from the water, so I tucked my chin down into the collar of my jacket and hurried off down Beaver toward Broad Street and my office. An armored truck was parked by the Burger King Express at the corner of Beaver and New, right where I usually cross, and without thinking I stepped out into the street to get around it.

I looked up just in time to see a neatly stacked pile of at least two hundred silver ingots bearing down on me.

Well, I hustled my fanny straight over to the opposite curb, and the forklift carrying the pallet of silver ingots from the armored truck trundled on by without incident.

Somewhat shaken, I watched that king's ransom in silver recede up the narrow concrete-and-brick canyon of New Street, and I muttered to myself, "Only in New York."

Then I went to work and forgot about it all. Symbolism like that doesn't bear too much thought.

I really have no idea how I got out to the raft in the first place. I must have swum there—I mean, I know I swam, I was there, I did it—but since I really can't swim, you may begin to understand some of my puzzlement.

I don't remember if we were still living with my uncle's family at the time—that would have been the summer of 1973—or if it was later than that, when we were only visiting. I couldn't have been any younger than six, although I might have been as old as ten or eleven. It's hard to remember.

My uncle and aunt and cousins lived in the small town of Liberty, Utah, in the mountains east of Ogden. They didn't have much money, but boy-oh-boy did they have a wealth of fun things for small kids to do. There were woods and streams to explore, horses to ride, fish to catch, and trees to climb. Oh, yes, and there were lots of places to swim, too. We can't forget that.

On this particular summer day, I accompanied my cousins Steve and Denny, along with a handful of their friends, on a trek across hills and fields to a big square-edged pond in the midst of a cleared field. The pond must have been about two hundred feet on a side, and the other kids swore that it was at least a hundred and fifty feet deep, and that no one had ever managed to find the bottom.

Floating in the middle of this pond was a raft—a big platform made of thick planks lashed and nailed together. We all hopped in the water and swam out to the raft, where we spent the afternoon jumping off and climbing back on and generally having a high old time.

Now, I remember being pretty pleased with myself for actually managing to swim out to the raft. You see, I can't swim, at least not very well, and I'm deathly afraid of "big water"—a status for which this swimming hole was definitely big enough to qualify. I had flunked the basic YMCA swimming class twice, and I would rarely venture out of the shallow end of any pool, so I'm actually quite surprised that I was able to get out to the raft to begin with.

Of course, getting out there was not the same thing as getting back.

As the afternoon shadows began to lengthen, the guys decided it was time to head back home. One by one, they dived off the raft and started stroking for shore—something like a hundred feet of water. I was the last one off, and whatever magic feather it was that had helped me get to the raft in the first place slipped from my fingers as I saw the other boys pulling way ahead, and felt myself growing achingly tired, and began to remember everything I'd been told about just how deep that swimming hole was. I knew I wasn't going to make it back to shore.

Have you ever felt the certainty that you were about to die? The knowledge that if someone from somewhere outside yourself doesn't do something for you, and fast, you're going to sink like a stone into that bottomless black sea of nothingness and the candle of your life will be snuffed out without so much as a by-your-leave from the universe? I have. I felt it that day with my arms and legs turning to lead in the water.

So I hollered for my cousin Steve. Steve is just about four months older than me, and if it requires any sort of physical skill he's always been better at it than I. In later years I would watch him swim a mile at Boy Scout camp in pursuit of his Lifesaving merit badge. He would go on to become a scuba instructor in Southern California. But for right then, all I knew was that Steve could save my life, and that he was the only thing that could save my life.

I really don't know whether or not I could have made it back to shore on my own. I do know that I was right about Steve being able to save my life. He was nearly to shore, but he turned right around, swam back to me, and towed me in to shore. It was a little embarrassing with all the other boys around, but I didn't care. The embarrassment trait always seems to go dormant somehow when it's a matter of life and death.

I don't know if I've ever thanked Steve for what he did for me that day. I should. Hell, I should call him up just for the sake of talking to him at all. He saved my life, and I haven't even talked to him for a year. He's now living on an Army base in Georgia, three thousand miles away from his family, depressed and as lonely as death, and I haven't even gone to the effort of picking up the phone and dialing his number for a year.

Now I'm the one on shore, and Steve's the one out there with his limbs turning to lead in the water. It may not be as big an act as what he did for me, but I think it's time for me to pay back a little of the debt I incurred that day.

I hope I'm strong enough.

Saving my life at the swimming hole isn't all that my cousin Steve did for me. He also taught me how to French kiss. Okay, so he didn't actually demonstrate—he only explained the proper technique. But how many friends do you have that will do even that much?

We were both around eighteen at the time. Steve's family had moved to California years before, but he and I remained very close. Steve had come back to Utah to stay with us for a week or so, as he contemplated attending Weber State College. When Steve was in town, we would do everything together—including the most important activity of all, chasing girls—and we'd have a grand old time at it.

Now, at this time there was a girl I'd been interested in for about two years, by the name of Naomi Osbourne. She and I were pretty good friends. We had met in a community theater group, and we hung out with a larger group of friends that seemed to want to do everything together. She was sixteen, she attended Bountiful High, and she was as sweet as ice cream in July. Cuter than hell, too. And I suspect she knew it.

Anyway, there was a dance at Bountiful High during the week that Steve was in town, so I dragged him off to it. (Actually, I didn't have to do any dragging. Steve has always been ten times smoother with women than I, and he was always on the lookout for ways to meet them.) Naomi was there, along with a nice-looking friend of hers named Tabitha whom I had never met. The four of us ended up spending the bulk of the dance together, talking and laughing and switching partners and so forth. We had such a great time that Steve and I asked Naomi and Tabitha if they would like to go out with us early the next week, on a double date. The girls readily agreed.

As we drove back to Kaysville after the dance, Steve and I began to wonder aloud which of us was actually going to be paired with which girl on the date. Steve knew I had carried a torch for Naomi for a long time, but we were both attracted to her, and we were both attracted to Tabitha, too. Well, we didn't end up worrying about it too much—we just decided to see how things naturally fell out.

When Steve and I went on double dates, we would always split up the driving duties. One of us would drive the car to wherever we were going, and the other one would drive it back. That was so we both got a chance to be in the back seat with our dates. On the night of our date with Naomi and Tabitha, I ended up driving first. And since Naomi lived closer than Tabitha, we ended up picking up Naomi first. And Steve and Naomi just sort of naturally got into the back seat together.

And that was fine with me, really. Tabitha and I ended up having a very nice time that night. In fact, on the way back from whatever it was we did that night—dinner and a movie, I think—I remember snuggling with Tabitha in the back seat while she sucked on my fingers. This was the first time I'd ever had anyone suck on my fingers. I had no idea what it symbolized, but I sure knew I liked it. When we dropped her off at her house, Steve timed my goodnight kiss with her at forty-five seconds. Tabitha and I ended up going steady for the next few months.

But I was still interested in Naomi, too. So when Steve walked her to her front door, and when I saw them up there making out in the shadows on the porch, I felt a little pang of envy. Steve came back to the car, got in the driver's seat, and didn't say anything for a minute. Then he said, "I'm sorry, Bill."

I asked him what he had to be sorry for, and he said, "I know you really like Naomi, and here I am making out with her in front of you."

I told him it wasn't a big deal, that he didn't have to feel bad, because it wasn't like I was hurting for female attention myself.

He was quiet for another minute or so, and then he looked up with a mixture of slyness and guilt on his face. "Do you know how to French kiss?" he asked.

I was a little taken aback. "Um, no, actually."

"Well," he said, "I'd better teach you how, because someday you might end up kissing Naomi, and then you'll have to know how to do it right, because she doesn't."

And then I burst out laughing.

So Steve proceeded to explain all the intricacies of French kissing to me, there in the car in front of Naomi's house, including how you need to do something delicate and sensual with your tongue in the other person's mouth, like running it lightly around their own tongue, instead of just sticking it in and letting it sit there like a big hunk of wet meat—which is what he said Naomi had basically done to him.

I have a great cousin, you'll have to agree. But the rest of the story, including what eventually happened between Naomi and me, and between Tabitha and me, and how and where I finally ended up using what Steve had taught me, will have to wait for other memos on other days. I think I've gone about far enough for now.

Okay, so yesterday's memo, while interesting, was really just a digression so I didn't have to write about what I'm going to write about today: my happy little dunk in Yellowstone's Firehole River.

It was stupid—I'll admit that right up front. Remember, I can't swim, as I learned the day I lost my magic feather in the middle of the swimming hole and my cousin Steve had to tow me in to shore. But for a few critical minutes I forgot that, and I just about didn't live to regret it.

This was one summer when I was twenty-two, although I don't remember whether it was 1989 or 1990. (I was born in August.) Our stake's Young Adults (the Mormon Church's social organization for unmarried folks between the ages of 18 and 30) had taken a trip to Island Park, a pleasant spot in Idaho where relatives of Shauna Toronto—an exceptionally attractive young woman who served as one of my ward's Young Adults representatives, and about whom we will hear more in a later memo—kept a large cabin. One of our many activities that weekend was to take a daytrip into Yellowstone National Park, the Western entrance of which was not a terribly long drive from Island Park.

We saw a lot of cool things that day—Old Faithful, the Paint Pots, and so forth—though nothing I hadn't seen before. But for most of our motley crew of rambunctious yet painfully straight college kids, the highlight of the day came when we stopped off at the Firehole River to do a little swimming and tubing. I say "we" in the loosest possible sense, of course. Swimming was never my intention.

The Firehole is not much a river, really. It's more of a glorified creek winding through a narrow rocky defile with sides no more than ten or fifteen feet high. What gives it both its name and its popularity, however, is the spot where the defile suddenly widens out into a broad natural pool about fifty feet in diameter and thirty-five to seventy feet deep. The water in the pool is perfectly warm, perfectly clear, and perfectly calm. It a great place to swim, if you're the sort of person who happens to like that kind of thing.

The insidious thing about the Firehole, though, is the fact that the section of creek leading up to the pool is swift and rocky and deep enough to make it fun for floating down on an inner tube. Before my mission, I had floated down Utah's Weber River in an inner tube with a church group and had a grand old time. Even earlier, when I was 13 or 14, I had rafted down the Green River and had the time of my life. I knew how much fun it could be.

But the Weber River was shallow and tame. And on the Green River I had a life jacket. Neither condition held true there at the Firehole. So I determined to watch from the lip of the defile while everyone else tubed and swam, but I refused to participate myself.

Until Shauna Toronto started telling me how easy and safe the tubing was.

I won't detail all the mental and emotional gymnastics I went through trying to keep my resolve. But it looked like such fun, and Shauna thought it was safe, and maybe she and I could ride the river in the same tube . . .

So I agreed to give it a try. Through a quirk of fate, I ended up putting into the river upstream not with Shauna, but rather sharing a large inner tube with my friend Craig Topham, and diminutive fellow with an enthusiasm about twice as big as his body. We were both pretty much fully clothed, shoes and all. The plan was to run the river (a short trip of one or two hundred or so feet), then float lazily across the pool and get out on the far shore.

That was the plan, anyway.

The first half of the river run was great. Then we snagged on a rock, the tube tipped up, and we were both dumped into the torrent. We tumbled ass-over-teakettle down the river, trying to hold onto the tube or each other or the rocks all around, but the current was too swift. It swept us along like leaves. And then the defile widened out, and we were dumped into the pool.

We had lost the tube somewhere along the way. All there was to hold onto now, as the river bottom suddenly disappeared and there was only seventy feet of water beneath my feet, was Craig. Craig, fortunately or unfortunately, kept his head a lot better than I did, and he disentangled himself from me as quickly as he could, then stroked for one of the sides. We were maybe a third of the way across the pool by then, and suddenly I was all alone. There were still sounds, but it was like hearing a television from a different room. It wasn't real. The only thing that was real was the water, my sodden clothing dragging me under, the utter fear that filled my stomach.

I misspoke earlier. The pool doesn't really have a shore to speak of. There are rocky ledges and outcroppings on a couple of the sides, but other than that it's pretty sheer from the surface of the water up the sides to ground level maybe twenty feet higher. I'd have to cross the pool to get to any of those outcroppings. I seemed pretty much fucked.

Of course, the outcroppings were densely populated with the other members of my party. There were a dozen or more of my friends and acquaintances watching as Craig and I tumbled out the mouth of the creek and into the drink. With so many people around, so close but so far away, it seemed natural to fall back on old, old patterns. And what alternative was there, really? So, just like that day at the swimming hole in Liberty when I didn't think I could make it back to shore, I hollered for help. And what do you think happened.

I'll tell you. Not a damn thing.

Oh, everyone watched—a few even stood up and got closer to the edge of the outcropping—but there wasn't a one of them who dived into the water to help. Some of them were asking if I was all right. Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick.

So it was up to me. I couldn't seem to make myself swim in any sort of proper fashion—I was far too panicked for that—but I thrashed and kicked and bucked and fought the water for the remainder of those nearly infinite fifty feet to where a wide fist of rock jutted up from the water at the lower end of the pool, shouting for help every time my mouth was out of the water, and several times when it wasn't. As I neared the rock, what seemed like hours later, a different Craig (whose last name I can't remember) reached down and hauled me up onto the warm stone like a fish. I was gasping for air, snot was running down my face, and one of my sneakers was missing. But I was alive, by God. And all I wanted to do was cling to that warm rock and never move again.

But somehow—I don't remember how—I was led from the rock to the larger outcropping and then up to solid ground. A lot of people tried to apologize to me, saying they didn't know whether or not I was really in trouble, or they thought I was kidding around, but I wasn't in much of a talking mood. (Kitty Genovese, had she survived her public stabbing, probably wouldn't have been, either.) In fact, I kept pretty much to myself the rest of the day.

I had saved my own life this time, but that didn't exactly comfort me, because I knew what a close thing it had been. But even so, from that day on, I think I stopped believing that anyone else was ever going to help me when I was in a jam—up to and including God, because I can honestly report that I never felt as if The Big Guy gave me a hand out the water, and I was certainly never tempted to relate my experience with streaming eyes in a testimony meeting. I've since learned somewhat differently about relying on certain people, but the basic tendency not to ask anyone for help is still there, pretty deeply ingrained.

So, I made it out of the water that day . . . but the water didn't make it out of me. It would be two or three years before I realized this and finally started to cough it up. More tomorrow.

St. George, Utah—a desert resort town a stone's throw from Arizona—is the last place I ever expected to find myself drowning. Likewise, I'm sure the last thing the patrons of the Valley Discount Book Center expected to see in their midst was a drowning man.

It happened, all the same.

It was 1993—Valentine's Day or thereabouts—and I was weekending in St. George with Roxie, the nineteen-year-old girl I'd been seeing awfully seriously for a year and a half. (That's not her real name, by the way, though it very possibly could have been. Insert your favorite disclaimer here and get used to the idea, because I'll be concealing more identities than just this one in the weeks and months ahead.) Valentine's Day falls exactly six months from my birthday—I'm the yang to love's yin, I guess—so I would have been precisely twenty-five and a half.

Roxie and I were in the middle of a long slow crawl through the local factory outlet mall. Somehow our conversation had turned to the subject of water and swimming, and I'd been explaining why it is that I go out of my way to avoid them both. As we turned into the Valley Discount Book Center (also a made-up name, but in this case it's only because I can't remember the real one), I was relating the story that you read yesterday, of how I took a little dip in the Firehole River and almost didn't come out again.

Now, I'd talked about the incident before this, but never in very much detail—never in detail at all, in fact. In retrospect, it's pretty clear that my conscious mind was avoiding the subject the way a hemophiliac avoids sharp objects. How do I know this? Because of what happened in that quiet little bookstore.

As we strolled down the aisles of books, Roxie and I, and as I told her how the water had closed over my head—well, there's no good way to put it except to say that the water closed over my head. I began to drown all over again, right there in the middle of the store.

It was a panic attack like none I had ever experienced. A dark fear gripped me, I turned cold, and I couldn't breathe. The closest thing to it I had ever felt was in gymnastics class one day at the age of ten when I slipped off the uneven parallel bars, landed flat on my back, and got the wind knocked out of me. On that occasion, it took about ten minutes for me to start breathing normally again—ten minutes of fearing that I might never be able to breathe again. This time, I didn't get my normal rhythm back for over two hours.

My flailing hands, reddening face, and gasping breaths clued Roxie in that something was wrong. She gently tried to calm me down and get me to breathe, but to no avail. She led me out of the store as the other patrons looked on in confusion and embarrassment—and did nothing, of course.

She helped me get settled in her black Trans Am (not her real car), then followed my mostly gestural directions as I guided her to my grandparents' house in the nearby town of Santa Clara. I hadn't told my grandparents that I was in the area (hey, my grandpa is a patriarch in the Mormon Church, and there I was shacked up in a little bed-and-breakfast around the corner from the Temple with a nubile young sexpot), but I couldn't breathe and I thought maybe having familiar people around me—and perhaps a blessing from my grandpa—would help.

Of course, they weren't home.

Next stop was a hospital emergency room near Dixie College. My health-insurance card got us seats in the waiting room, where I wheezed and gasped for an hour and half before I finally calmed down enough to breathe normally again. Ironically enough, that was about when a nurse was finally available to see me, and after a cursory checkup she dismissed me without even filling out a report. There was obviously nothing wrong with me any longer, so the hospital wouldn't even bother issuing me a bill.

Isn't the mind a marvelous and mysterious thing? On the one hand, it can wait years before fully confronting the knowledge that its brief candle was nearly snuffed out by a spring-fed river. On the other hand, it knows right when to stop acting up in order to avoid a hospital bill.

So which do you think scares me more—drowning, or my insurance company?

It must be going on two years ago now that came home to my Brooklyn apartment to find a message waiting on the answering machine. Much to my delight, the message wasn't for me, and I found it entertaining in the extreme. I made a careful transcription of the message before I erased the tape, and since I've just run across that transcription, I thought I'd share it with you.

Imagine the voice of a cultured New York socialite, probably in her early to mid thirties, who is blissfully oblivious to the face that she's dialed the area code for Brooklyn instead of Manhattan—and, indeed, to the fact that the voice on the answering machine belongs to no one she knows:

Hi, Astrid, it's Maria F_____  calling, and, um, this is a thank-you call from me and, uh, Michael, and it is to you and your husband Jim. We had a fabulous, fabulous time at your dinner party, and, um, everything was wonderful. Um, we thoroughly enjoyed your company, and, um, the company of your friends, and, uh, dinner was just delicious, and the conversation was, as you know, hilarious and occasionally, um, um, terrifically satisfying, if you know what I mean, in terms of the content and absolute RANGE, um, of topics, and, um, I don't know, I just, we were blissed upon leaving, and, um, I just, uh, I'm . . . just want to say thank you for your kindness. Um, bye.

I wonder if Maria ever realized that Astrid never received her stilted but effusive flood of thanks. I wonder if their friendship decayed and dried up as a result of this miscommunication. I wonder if Astrid will ever see this page and realize what a stupid fluke it was that drove their two households apart and brought so much pain and misery to the Upper East Side. I wonder . . .

God. I wonder if I'm going to get sued.

This is the story of why I'm cautious when I cross the street—though still perhaps not as cautious as I should be. I got off easy, after all.

I was—what?—eight or nine years old? The family was living in Bountiful, Utah. I was in Cub Scouts at the time, and my den had just finished up a rehearsal for a pack meeting that was coming later in the week. My den was going to perform the flag ceremony, and we had to practice to make sure we would get it right.

My den mother was a woman named Joyce Benard, who would become my piano teacher a little later in life. A handful of us were piled into her big station wagon, and she was driving us home from the church where we had been rehearsing.

I was the first stop. Sister Benard pulled the car over to the curb across the street from my house, and I got out on the passenger side. I went around to the front of the car to cross the street. I looked both ways—but apparently I didn't poke my head far enough around the big station wagon, because as soon as I stepped out past it there came a big loud roar and a squeal of brakes, and the world went totally crazy.

I flew through the air, bounced, rolled, and slammed into the pavement. Sister Benard, ashed-faced, exited her car and ran to me, as did the woman who had been driving the car that hit me. My mother, having heard the squealing brakes, came running out of the house across the street.

When it became apparent that I was only stunned and not dead or seriously injured, the women helped me across the street to the lawn in front of my house. Sister Benard went inside to call an ambulance (just in case).

It turned out that the car which had hit me—a brand-new Lincoln Continental—was damaged worse than I was. I had been flung up onto the hood, where I rolled up the slope of the windshield, rolled back down, and hit the pavement. The hood of the car was dented pretty good, the antenna was bent ninety degrees right at the base, and the windshield was starred with cracks.

I, on the other hand, was sore, and I had big bruises on both knees. There was also a mysterious tire print on one of my sneakers, which no one could ever figure out. And that was about it.

Now let's flash over to the nearby fire station, which was only about three blocks away. The firemen and paramedics were all fussing over their brand-new shiny ambulance, which had yet to be taken out on a call. In fact, my father and his boss were there, too. It was summer, and during the summer my father would supplement his teacher's salary with whatever work he could get. This year it was working at a small local sheet-metal company. The head honcho at the sheet-metal company was a member of the bishopric, and he was also a volunteer fireman. Combine this with the fact that the sheet-metal company lived just around the corner from the fire station, and it's not hard to see why my dad and his boss were there, admiring the new ambulance.

But then the call from the dispatcher came in—"Boy hit by car, Second North, Code Three"—and the paramedics scrambled into the ambulance. My father, recognizing the street as the one where he lived, said dryly, "Oh, that's probably my dumb kid."

The ambulance drivers had a great time on their three-block journey. They used every different siren they had. I'm sure they were disappointed that the trip was so short.

When they arrived, they checked me over and pronounced me fine. I didn't even get a trip in the shiny new ambulance, which kind of bummed me out. But hey, there was a story in the local paper the next week about the new ambulance, and since I was the first call the ambulance responded to, I got a mention! My dad showed it to me, proudly.

Unfortunately, I was referred to only as "small boy hit by a car." What a downer! Even at that age, I was bitterly disappointed when my name didn't make it into print. Jeez, if I come that close to being killed, the least I can get out of the deal is a little notoriety, right?

August 26, 1985. It began as an evening of high hopes, grand dreams, towering expectations. It ended in dashed hopes, bitter disappointment, and crushing guilt, on almost every front.

But at least the music was good.

It was the Sting concert at ParkWest ski resort (now called Wolf Mountain) in Park City, Utah. There were four of us in the party: Andy Kilmer, my good friend from junior high and high school; Janet Mulrooney, Andy's girlfriend and the woman he would later marry; yours truly; and my date, the lovely and talented Miss Darla Bond.

Now, I'd had a long-distance crush on Darla for many, many moons. (I guess I'd been mooning for her.) She was descended from Scandinavian stock; she was very fair, and very blonde—but only in coloration, not in the sense of being airheaded. For about three years, maybe more, Darla had been the squeeze of one of my school chums, Jordan Bergstrom. I had always envied Jordan that. When the news hit the street that Jordan and Darla had split up, I didn't feel much sorrow. I felt like the opportunity was ripe.

I pursued Darla for months—while my Catholic friend Connor actually managed to get to first base with her on a couple of occasions. (Darla was a quite strict Mormon girl, of course.) I became friends with her younger brother Dan in the process, and since Dan is still my friend today, I don't count the process as a complete failure by any means.

But at last, with this Sting concert, I was managing to get Darla out on a date—much to Dan's consternation, because he was a much bigger Sting fan than his big sister, but his parents wouldn't let him go to the concert. I was so nervous trying to work up the courage to ask her that I actually called her on the phone and let a synthesized computer voice do the asking for me. (Macintosh as John Alden.) She laughed and said yes, and we were set.

The other exciting thing to me about that concert, besides seeing Sting himself, was the chance to see Sting's backing band, which at the time consisted of the young jazz lions Darryl Jones, Omar Hakim, Kenny Kirkland, and Branford Marsalis. Especially Branford Marsalis. I been listening to Wynton for a while then, but about a month earlier I had picked up Branford's first album as a band leader, Scenes in the City, and I was really blown away by it. And furthermore, the liner notes indicated that Branford has been born on August 26, 1960 . . . which meant that the Sting concert fell on his 25th birthday.

My friend Andy and I were both fans of Branford, so together we created this big long banner printed on fanfold computer paper that read:

25   HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRANFORD!   25

It had a picture of a birthday cake at either end. We were certain that we would hold up the banner at the concert and Branford would see it, recognize that we were True Fans, and invite us backstage for his inevitable birthday party after the show.

Well, the first omens of disaster struck early that night. The four of us piled into the Kilmer family VW Bus and headed for Park City, old Police albums playing on the stereo, buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the seats between us. When we arrived at the gates of the ski resort, however, it turned out that I had left my tickets at home.

I didn't have enough money to cover two more general admission tickets, and Kaysville was too far away for me to drive home and grab the tickets. I had to borrow money from Andy, which meant that Andy didn't have enough cash to buy a concert T-shirt that night. I don't think he's ever forgiven me for that.

The concert took place on a big open stage at the bottom of a mountain, with the concertgoers seated on blankets right on the slope. The sun was going behind the mountains as the show got under way, so by the time Branford took the stage, it was too dark for anyone on stage to possibly see our banner. But Andy and I held it aloft anyway, much to the annoyance of the people behind us on the hill, whose views we were blocking. They kept yelling at us, and then a wicked breeze sprang up and rips our banner down the middle. Damn.

And then there was Darla, whose hand I repeatedly attempted to hold, only to have her disentangle herself from it after a few moments. She didn't unhand me quickly enough to make it absolutely clear that she didn't want me holding her hand at all, so I kept on trying. And she kept on disentangling after something of a delay. I got the message eventually, but not quickly enough to keep from embarrassing myself pretty badly.

This last thing is what I remember most vividly about the Sting concert. It's long past the time when I should have forgotten about it, but I still feel guilty and ashamed when I remember how doggedly I ignored the slow signals Darla was sending me. It still colors my adult actions, to the point that it's now difficult for me to take the first steps in a relationship. I have to wait for a clear and unmistakable signal before I do anything. Which means I wait a long time, and then end up with forward, dominant women who are ultimately not good for me.

It's time for that to change. Sorry, Darla, but I'm letting go of your hand now—all on my own this time. Catch you later.

I've got a real thing for tunnels. Not a small thing, either. What I have is a great big oversized granddaddy tunnel jones.

I really don't know why that is. All I know is that I've loved tunnels ever since I was small. On long car trips when I was a kid, I would look forward to going through the tunnels along the way almost more than I'd look forward to getting wherever it was we were going. One of the most blissful experiences I've had as an adult was when I was driving by myself west from Denver on I-70 and entered the Eisenhower tunnel—a two-mile bore carved straight through the Colorado Rockies at an elevation of almost 12,000 feet. What a rush! I don't know if it's some weird birth-canal identification or what. I just know that nothing delights me like a tunnel.

My cousin Linda's husband Devin has a strange thing for tunnels, too, but his thing is different from mine. He likes to hold his breath as he drives through tunnels, and he tries to get everyone else in the car to do the same thing. So there you are, tooling around San Francisco in Devin's Blazer, and along comes a tunnel, and Devin says, "Okay, hold your breath!" and everyone starts turning red as the tunnel stretches on and on, and Linda is saying, "Devin, stop it!" and one by one the passengers give up and the breath comes bursting out of them, but Devin is still holding his and turning redder and redder and redder and Linda is slapping him on the arm and we're only thirty yards from the end of the tunnel now and we're all afraid that Devin will pass out right there in the driver's seat and then we're out of the tunnel and Devin let's out his breath and grins and everything is okay, except for Linda who can't believe how childish her husband is. Devin is a corporate attorney.

If you're like me and Devin and you can't get enough of those fascinating tunnels, and you ever happen to be in New York City, have I got an idea for you. Get on the nearest subway train. It only costs a dollar fifty—and thanks to the generosity of Governor Pataki, if you buy ten fares with your Metro card, you get an eleventh fare for free!

Anyway, what you want to do is go to the very front of the subway train and board the first car. (By the way, this works best very early in the morning, when no one else is on the train, but you can do it most any time of day if you don't care about looking a little silly.) Now that you're on the first car, go all the way to the front of the car where there's a window looking straight out at the track ahead. The engineer's compartment on most subway trains is a little niche tucked off to the side of the car, so there won't be anything in your way as you stand there and watch the tunnel unfurl ahead of you.

You can watch the tunnel rise and dip, watch it twist and curve and straighten out again, watch it widen out and narrow again, try to decipher the arcane mileposts and traffic lights as they screech by, wonder at the side passages and staircases you see half-hidden in the rushing darkness, and watch the bright train stations ahead as they expand like birthing stars and engulf you.

All in all, it's the best entertainment you can get in the city for only twelve bits. There's just one thing that would make it better—watching Devin try to hold his breath on the "F" train.

Teenagers can usually be counted on to do exactly the wrong thing in any given situation, and I was certainly no exception. Take the time I won a gilded sprig of pine needles, for instance.

Now, I used to be obsessed with winning things from radio stations. I had my technique down ("I don't be ticklin' or nothin'"—five points for the reference), and I could dial a whole slew of radio-station contest lines from memory. In high school I used to win stuff from KSL-AM 1160 all the time. In college, I won stuff from Z-93 all the time. When I went to work for WordPerfect, I won stuff from X-96 all the time. I won T-shirts, concert passes, play tickets, free dinners, new CDs, and a whole host of other things. When I worked at the Utah State Tax Commission, my coworker Dallas de Francesco would wait by the radio every day to see if I would manage to get my voice onto the Jon and Dan show on Z-93.

One of my earliest wins from KSL was a rather unusual and striking piece of jewelry—a gilded sprig of pine needles on a thin gold chain. I was able to correctly translate the title of the song "Et Les Oiseaux Sont Chansons" into English—hey, three years of high-school French is good for something—and for my pains I received this interesting little necklace.

That left me only one problem: what to do with it. Oh, what to do!

After the necklace had arrived, I showed it to my sisters. They all oohed and aahed over it, and my sister Seletha, who is only a year and three days younger than I, let it be known how much she would like to have such a necklace.

So what did I do with the necklace? I was teenage boy. It should be obvious.

I left it in the locker of a girl at school named Hope Rayburn on whom I had a serious crush, as a Valentine's Day present.

I faintly remember Hope eventually thanking me for the necklace, but that was all that ever came of that. No dates, no grateful kiss, no pledge of eternal love, nothing like that. I may as well have tossed the damn necklace down the toilet.

I wish I'd been wise enough to give the necklace to my sister, who would actually have appreciated it. It would have meant something then. But like I said, you can always count on teenagers to do the wrong thing.

Okay, we all have dirty little secrets in our pasts that we've never ever told anyone. I'm about to share one with you.

If you're a regular reader of "Memos from the Moon," then you've surely realized by now how long I cling to guilt. I still feel guilty over things I did ten and fifteen years ago. I guess I have my Mormon upbringing to thank for that.

So, I still feel guilty over—heavy sigh—commiting plagiarism in the seventh grade. With any luck, the statute of limitations on that particular crime has run out, and my confession won't lead to my arrest and prosecution. But sadly, for me, the statute of limitations on guilt never runs out.

I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer, and most everyone who knew me knew that. So when we got the assignment in Ms. Easton's English class to write a physical description of a fictional character, I knew that I had to write the best one. Days went by, however, and inspiration failed to strike.

So, the morning the assignment was due, I rifled through one of my Brains Benton mysteries—sort of a low-rent analog to the Hardy Boys series—and cribbed the author's description of the main character. I don't remember most of that description, but one line has stuck with me all these years. It painted Brains Benton as a "long, skinny drink of water."

Well, I got my A. And Ms. Easton read my plagiarized paper in front of the whole class. She also read to my father and mother when they came for their parent-teacher conference. I was terrified that someone would realize that I couldn't possibly have written such a fine bit of description—where in the world would I have picked up a phrase like "drink of water"?—but no one ever did. All I ever received was praise for my fine and precocious way with words.

I didn't need to be punished for my plagiarism. I punished myself enough. I felt like a fraud. And I vowed never to plagiarize another piece of writing again in my life.

And I haven't. So will you absolve me now, please? Please?

I didn't develop my bullshit detector until rather late in life. (If I'd had it earlier, I might have avoided a few psychotic girlfriends . . .)

I guess I was about six—this would have been the summer when my family lived with my uncle in Liberty, Utah, as chronicled in Chapter 3 of The Road to Apostasy—and I was helping in the kitchen as lunch was being prepared. I remember scooping a healthy dollop of Miracle Whip out of the jar with a table knife, spreading it on a thick slice of bread, and then tapping the knife on the rim of the glass jar to remove the excess goop. That was when my uncle Dennis descended in his fury.

"Hey, don't do that!" he cried, snatching the jar and the knife away from me. "You could get little glass fragments in the Miracle Whip! Have you ever heard the screams of a man when little bits of glass are working their way through his stomach and his intestines, slicing them up along the way? Draw the flat of the blade across the lip of the jar if you want to get stuff off, like this."

My uncle had been an Airborne Ranger in the Army—at least, that's what he said—and he always made himself come across as though he had witnessed every hideous thing that men could possibly do to one another. The image of that screaming man with broken glass in his guts stayed with me for months afterward, haunting my nights, and I've never tapped a knife against a glass jar since.

It's only now that it occurs to me to wonder if my uncle had ever actually heard the screams of a man when little bits of glass are working their way through this stomach and intestines. I'd put money on not.

Like I said, I didn't develop my bullshit detector until rather late in life. It meant I was a credulous kid, as you can see from this little incident. But I credit that very lack with helping me to develop a vivid and active imagination. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Whatever. I'll take a little gullibility over the loss of my imagination any day.

So there I was, sitting in the BYU lecture room that served as a chapel for my Young Adult ward in Provo, waiting for sacrament meeting to begin, talking to a girl who sparked a certain interest in me. I have to confess that I don't remember her name anymore—this would have been around the middle of 1994—but since she did have a few brains in her head, we'll call her Minerva.

So there Minerva and I were, chatting before church, when she asked me if I were going to attend choir practice after the regular meetings were over. Now, Minerva had been working on me for weeks, trying to get me to come to choir practice—perhaps sensing that this young backslider needed a certain extracurricular involvement with the ward to keep him from slipping into complete inactivity and apostasy—but she hadn't yet succeeded. I mean, after three solid hours of church meetings, who wants to hang around singing hosannas for another hour?

Most of my excuses were pretty lame, but that particular week I actually had a good one—and a true one, no less. "I can't come to choir practice," quoth I, "because I have to drive my friend Scott up to Salt Lake for a movie audition."

"On a Sunday?" she said.

"That's when they do them," I said.

"Why do you have to drive him?" Minerva asked.

"Because his car doesn't work. I drove him up yesterday, too. They must like him, because he got called back."

"What's the movie?" she asked—perhaps in an attempt to catch me out.

"Halloween 6," I said.

Her face wrinkled in revulsion. "Oh, you're kidding!" she said. "Is he LDS?"

"Yes."

"Well, I hope he doesn't get the part."

I took a deep breath to calm myself. "Look," I said, "my friend Scott works in a nursing home. He has a wife, three kids and one more on the way, and he doesn't make a whole lot of money. But he's also in the Screen Actors Guild, so when he can get a part in a movie or a television show, it means he gets scale, which is about five hundred dollars a day for every day he works. Now, his not getting this part could mean the difference between his children eating or not eating this month."

Then I simply sat back and blinked my eyes, blank-faced.

"Oh," said Minerva. "Well, um, I guess that wouldn't be such a good thing after all . . . "

Oh, those pesky ethical dilemmas! (You try soaking, you try scrubbing . . .) Don't you just love seeing someone full of confidence and self-righteousness, and shoving a big muddy one right in their pious little mug? I sure do.

Hmmm. Maybe that's why the relationship never went anywhere . . .

The following piece was written in January 1997, under the pseudonym "Daedalus," for Alexis Massie's now-defunct Web site Pandora's Box of Tricks. I feel free now to reveal that the Thayne of this essay is in reality author Sean Stewart, and the book in question his excellent novel Clouds End. I did eventually finish reading the novel, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you pick up a copy.

So anyway, I have this writer friend. Let's call him Thayne. Thayne's fourth novel was released a few months ago to a great deal of acclaim and huzzah. Having admired his first three novels immensely, I held the new book reverently and breathlessly when I spied it on the "New Fiction" racks at Barnes & Noble, like a new uncle might handle hold his brother's infant child. But I didn't buy it.

No, since I'm really a cheap bastard at heart, I finally worked up the nerve to ask Thayne if he might have an extra copy lying around that he would mail to me. Thayne allowed as how he did and he would. You may be turned off by my chutzpah, but it really wasn't such an unusual request between denizens of our particular literary ghetto—er, I mean, genre. We merry scribblers are sending one another copies of our stuff all the time, hoping that our fellows might deign to nominate our humble stories or novels for this award or that. It's the Way Things Are Done.

(To be honest, Thayne's first novel was the only book of his that I actually had to buy myself. I recommended it for an award, and the grateful author sent me a copy of his newly published second novel, inscribed and autographed, as his way of saying thank you. And thus our acquaintance was born.)

At last, the book arrived in the mail. I stripped the corrugated cardboard from about its snowy white covers as enthusiastically as a child on Christmas morning, and I turned it every which way, flushed with the excitement that can only come from the acquisition of a New Book. After I had riffled the pages a few times and felt that soft breeze caress my face, inhaled and savored that particular New Book smell, I laid the volume down on my desk until such time as I felt I could devote my full attention to it. And since I was working on a screenplay at the time, not to mention being somewhere in the middle of reading a different novel, I figured that would be a few days.

Before long Thayne had sent me email, inquiring as to whether or not the book had arrived. When I reported that it had, and that I was looking forward to diving in, Thayne wrote back to express his anxiety. He was worried that I might not like it. He, whose book has enthusiastic blurbs from Ursula K. Le Guin and William Gibson on the cover, was worried about me not liking his book. How charming and very flattering—and how perfectly like a writer.

The requisite few days passed, I finished both my screenplay and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and I finally had time to turn my attention to Thayne's novel. And I got about seven pages into it before I set it aside again, and raced through a Vietnam-era novel by another writer of my acquaintance. And then a book on the playwright's craft. And then a book on why Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot.

Conscious that the clock was ticking, and that the pages were dropping from the desk calendar like leaves in autumn, I turned my attention back to Thayne's book. This time I managed to forge all the way to page sixty before setting it aside in favor of a book of conservative essays on government, a book of liberal essays on government, and a staccato-paced noir crime novel of pre-Kennedy era Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, poor Thayne is sitting at home sweating bullets as my verdict on his novel continuously fails to arrive. What a bastard I am.

So what's the problem? Why can't I just sit down and force myself through it? Is the novel really as bad as all that?

No. The problem is that it's really as good as all that. Thayne is a damn fine writer, and his texts are thick with imagery, allegory, symbolism, archetypes, and resonance. His characters and their worlds don't unfold so much as they coalesce, as if from fog, the eventual shape of the whole inherent in each small bit—holographic images that achieve their ultimate sharpness on the final page. His plots rarely follow any predictable narrative path, yet in retrospect it seems they have traversed the only possible route. In short, each of Thayne's novels is a treasure—and this latest promises to be his best effort yet.

Unfortunately, I haven't enough attention to spare at the moment to do this book justice. So many other clamorous thoughts and schemes and worries are crowding the stage of my brain that I simply have not been able to devote to Thayne's novel the sort of intentness and regard that it demands, that it deserves.

But how can tell him that without sounding like an utter phony making pathetic excuses? It's like the time a former girlfriend called me to let me know she was in town for only a day, and I told her with perfect truthfulness that I couldn't come to her hotel because I was doing the laundry. It cut no ice that I had an important job interview the next morning and nothing to wear—her first impression from that conversation, however wrong, was of my pathetic phoniness, and that's the impression that has stuck through the intervening years.

So. I'm stuck waiting for the day that I'm whole enough to appreciate a truly challenging novel, while its poor author is stuck waiting for the other shoe to drop. At least my guilt over this issue can be milked for a few measly column-inches, thereby beating back my guilt over the fact that I've let more than a month since my last piece appeared here. I can only hope that Thayne gets as much mileage out of his anxiety.

Of course, with my luck he'll get a whole novel out of it, and then we'll be right back where we started.

I wonder what ever happened to Butch Harper to make him such a mean bastard. He must have had some pretty serious unhappiness to contend with. Of course, when I was in 7th grade, I didn't care two figs about Butch's unhappiness. I was only concerned with my own—and the fact that the bastard was beating me up and terrorizing me every day in band class.

In Kaysville when I was growing up, grades six through eight attended junior high. When I was midway through sixth grade, my family moved to Kaysville from Bountiful, where sixth graders were the oldest kids in elementary school. This meant that I was catapulted from elementary school into junior high in the middle of the school year, with no friends to help cushion the landing.

I could write a dozen memos about how horrible that experience was (and I probably will), but today we'll stick to exploring how it affected my musical education. You see, I wanted to learn to play the saxophone. If I had started junior high at the time as all the other kids did, that would have meant simply signing up for band at the beginning of sixth grade, getting my parents to shell out for a sax, and showing up for class. Because I came to the game late, though, I wasn't actually able to enter the band until seventh grade, when the other kids already had a year on me.

That might have been more bearable had I actually been permitted to study the saxophone, like I wanted. Instead I was saddled with the clarinet. (Don't get me wrong—I have a lot of respect for the clarinet. But it just ain't as sexy as a sax.) You see, my dad, who is a school teacher, consulted with the music teacher at his school as to how to rent a saxophone for cheap. He was apparently told that it would be even cheaper to rent a clarinet, and that it would be easy for a clarinet student to switch to the saxophone later on. Moreover, my father was advised, it's damn tough for a sax player to switch to the clarinet later on.

When my father explained this logic to me, I was both crushed and baffled. "But that doesn't make any sense," I protested. "I don't want to switch from the saxophone to the clarinet later on."

Tough, kid. Here's your new clarinet.

Okay, so the clarinet wasn't all that bad. But the necessity of playing it only became all the more unhappy-making when Butch Harper entered the picture.

Butch was in a situation similar to mine. He was entering the band at the beginning of seventh grade, only his instrument was the bassoon. Butch was a tall, wiry kid with blonde hair and a look of permanent rage burning in the eyes of his otherwise stupid-looking face. Did I mention that he was a mean bastard? Oh, Jesus.

Mr. James Thurman was our band teacher. He was not well-loved by the kids in the band, as I recall, but he was more than competent as a musician and conductor. Still, he had a blind spot big enough to drive a truck through.

In order that Butch and I could catch up with the rest of the students in the class—and not be in everyone else's way—Mr. Thurman would regularly send the two of us off to a little soundproof practice room at the back of the classroom. That was where we were supposed to practice our instruments until we were good enough to be with the rest of the band fulltime.

That was where Butch Harper terrorized me.

For starters, he would usually force me to put his bassoon together for him. If I was lucky, that was all that would happen. If I wasn't, or if I balked from anything he wanted me to do (like setting up his music or turning his pages for him), then he would hit me in the upper arm with his fist or smack me on the back of the head. Sometimes I would cry, and Butch would call me a pussy and hit me again.

I tried to tell Mr. Thurman what was going on, but he pooh-poohed it all. "Just tell him to leave you alone," he said.

"I do," I said. "Don't make me go in there with him any more."

I believe Mr. Thurman once had a few words with Butch. That ended up a pretty bad day for me in the ol' practice room.

After a couple of months of this, I was good enough that I didn't have to go to the practice room anymore, and Butch Harper's tormenting of me ended. Mostly. Every once in a while he would threaten me in the hallway, but I finally put an end to that toward the last days of eighth grade, when he tried pushing me around at a school dance.

I was trying to ask a girl to dance (I don't remember who), when Butch came up and started, well, pushing me around. So I hit him, twice, right in the chest. I still don't know what came over me. The blows were glancing at best, but Butch left me alone after that. At heart, he was just a coward, and pretty pathetic at that.

Mr. Thurman is now a Mormon bishop in Layton, Utah, or he was last time I heard. I've mostly forgiven Butch Harper, but I have a harder time with Mr. Thurman. Maybe he was right to keep sending me back into that practice room to face my demon, and maybe not, but I certainly don't love him for it.

My only hope is that he's not trying the same tactic with the battered wives in his ward.

I rarely walk out of movies. Somewhere deep inside, I suppose I consider the contract between artist and audience so sacred that I can't help but uphold most of my own end even when the artist or artists are failing miserably to live up to their own.

That unspoken contract works like this: I, as the audience, promise to offer my suspended disbelief for ninety minutes or more, while the artists promise to present me with interesting characters who behave more or less like real human beings, who face threatening challenges, who struggle and evolve, and who bring their conflicts to some kind of meaningful resolution, for good or for ill. Not such an unreasonable deal, right?

Well, not everyone lives up to this contract. Lots of times the artists fail in one or more of the areas I listed, and lots of times I withdraw my suspension of disbelief before the movie is over. But I almost never walk out before the end, because I believe there's always something to learn from a movie—even if it's only learning what not to do in your own stories.

In fact, as I think about it, I can only remember one movie that I've walked out of, and that was Fled, and I didn't even walk out of that until about ten minutes before the end of the film. The pointless violence and mayhem that were filling in for an honest climax to the story finally became too much for me. It's not even that it was offensive violence. It was just pointless and dumb—and all the more so, because I had seen it all before in so many other bad flicks, so many other times. But still, I stayed with that movie almost all the way to the end. I stuck it out.

My former flame Roxie walked out of a movie once, though—and I think she was pissed off that I didn't come with her. The movie was Glengarry Glenn Ross, and Roxie walked out because she found the excessive use of profanity offensive. I found that ironic in the extreme, because she certainly wasn't afraid to use the word "fuck" herself if she took a mind to—and she definitely wasn't afraid to act the word out. I think she ended up wandering into another theater and watching The Lion King.

(All of which reminds me of a joke, if you'll indulge me. A panhandler, begging in the street, asks a well-dressed businessman if he can spare a little change. "'Neither a borrower nor a lender be,'" says the businessman with his nose in the air. 'William Shakespeare.' Miffed, the panhandler says, "Oh, yeah? Well, 'Fuck you.' David Mamet.")

This wasn't nearly as distressing to me, however, as the time I had acquired tickets to Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Pioneer Memorial Theater in Salt Lake City, and took Roxie to see it. By the end of the first act, she was insisting that we leave—and at intermission, that's exactly what we did. Now, if I rarely walk out of movies, I've made a habit of never walking out of a play, but there I was, trailing along behind good ol' Roxie as she fled from a theatrical experience that required her to engage any portion of her heart or her intellect.

This and countless other incidents should have clued me in to the fact that Roxie was entirely wrong for me. But I never walk out until it's too late, until I've seen so many derivative repetitions of the same awful dysfunction that I finally have to move or be buried beneath the numbing pointlessness of it all.

I think maybe it's time I learned to walk out earlier on people who aren't living up to the unspoken contract between us.

In one of these recent memos, I mentioned something about how teenagers can always be counted on to do the wrong thing. In the great tradition of using myself as proof of whatever thesis I'm propounding, here's another example to help nail the lid of that particular coffin down even more securely.

It was sometime during the 1985-86 school year—I don't properly recall what season. As one of Davis High School's distinguished alumni—okay, really it was because I was friends with the then-current student body president, Chris Watkins—I was invited to serve as one of two judges of the school's annual lip-sync contest. (I was eighteen years old, still younger than some members of the senior class at the time, and I had graduated in 1984.)

How it worked was this: A handful of students would get up on stage, costumed as musicians, and pretend to play and sing some popular song. Bret Nybo (a graduate of the class of '82) and I were to judge the participants in categories that included costume, performance, creativity, audience response, and the precision of the lip-sync. At the end of the hour, we would add up the scores and announce the winner.

Simple, no?

Ten or twelve acts performed. I recall only three of them in any detail. First, early in the show, was a group led by my friend Mike McAllister, who performed "I Send a Message" by INXS, from the excellent album The Swing. Mike's turn as the recently departed Michael Hutchence was energetic and spirited, featuring plenty of hip dance moves and some nifty tricks with the microphone stand, and his lip sync was virtually flawless. The rest of the group turned in fine performances, as well. Particularly notable was the fellow playing air saxophone, who spun around on the back on the floor, horn raised to the ceiling, during his solo. Mike and crew received high marks in virtually every category, from both Bret and me.

Somewhere in the middle of pack, a group of four sophomores performed the ever-popular "Bohemian Rhapsody," from Queen's A Night at the Opera. The two lead vocalists, who traded lip-sync duties, were twins—diminutive kids but, admittedly, cute as buttons. Their rhythm section consisted of two burly kids with crew cuts who looked like they might have three functioning neurons between them. The crowd cheered and screamed while these sophomores performed, and while we were forced to give them high marks in the audience response category, they hadn't gone to any particular pains to dress up, and their lip sync was absolutely horrid. Frequently it seemed to me that the twins didn't even know the words to the song.

The final group of the hour were four seniors, who tackled the two opening tracks from Van Halen's 1984—"1984" and, if I recall properly, "Hot for Teacher." The first number is a short but blistering guitar solo from Eddie Van Halen, and Blair Leishman, Davis High's own brilliant guitar prodigy, played along with the recording in such a way that you just knew he could have done it for real. That led into the second track, where the vocalist—the senior class president, whose name I can't quite recall—tore into the lyrics with all the relish and sensuality of a born rock star. This group received uniformly high marks as well.

Bret and I added up the scores, the dust settling around us, then took the stage. We had to stand awkwardly close together to both fit behind the lectern. "We've tallied all the scores in seven different categories, and it looks like there's been a tie," I announced. "Your applause will determine the today's winner!"

The audience applauded.

"First," said Bret, leaning in toward the microphone, "is INXS with their rendition of 'I Send a Message'!"

The audience responded with enthusiastic whistles and cheers.

"And next," I said, drawing out the moment, "is . . . Van Halen!"

A few people started to applaud, but they were quickly drowned out by a chorus of boos that swelled until the entire auditorium was giving us that old Bronx cheer. Someone started a chant of "Queen! Queen! Queen!" and before long the whole place was shaking to that thunderous demand.

Bret and I turned away from the mike and conducted a hurried conference. And what did I say to that vast and angry throng when next I spoke? Did I say, "I'm sorry, but audience response is only one of the categories we were asked to take into consideration, and your favorite little twins scored abysmally low in every other category"? Did Bret and I do the right thing?

Here's what I said: "Looks like we made a mistake in our arithmetic. The winners are Queen!"

Bret and I were hailed almost as heroes by the people we ran into as we left the auditorium. Mike McAllister was more than sympathetic, despite his disappointment at having come so close to legitimately winning the contest. No one told us we had made the wrong decision.

But dammit, we did make the wrong decision. We let the tide of popular opinion frighten us into compliance, instead of standing beside the findings that we as judges had been empowered to make. I mean, what's the worst thing that could have happened? Did we think those high-schoolers were going to stone us or something?

It was only a dumb high-school contest, sure, but there are lessons to be found in everything, and I'm afraid the lesson that Bret Nybo and I taught to a thousand mindless mob members that day was that you can always get your way if only you shout loudly enough.

I send a message, indeed.

Well, I want to send different message today. I should have stood by my decision that day. I shouldn't have knuckled under to the demands of the mob. I want the world to know that Queen didn't earn the trophy they took home. It should have gone to either INXS or Van Halen, and if I'd been a stronger person then it would have.

Sorry, guys. I'll try not to let you down again.

Not long ago, a new colleague at the office told me that I reminded her of Dennis Miller. You know, old news anchor from Saturday Night Live who's now in movies and has his own show on HBO? The comic who's so witty and sarcastic and full of obscure pop-cultural references? Yeah, that guy.

She seemed to mean it in a good way, in case you're wondering, and I was surprised at how genuinely pleased it made me feel. I told her it was the nicest thing anyone had said to me in some time, and I meant it. It's been a long time since anyone told me that I reminded them of someone famous. I've missed it.

And isn't that a peculiar thing—that being told I remind someone of someone else is such a positive thing? I mean, don't we all want to be liked for who we are, and not be judged on the basis of comparison with someone else? Why do people find it so pleasing to be compared favorably with celebrities?

I think it's really pretty simple, and that there are a couple of elements to it. First, I think on some level we all recognize that telling someone they remind you of a celebrity is shorthand for enumerating the many positive characteristics they share with that person. We all know what characteristics celebrities have, at least outwardly, so it's an easy way to convey a great number of compliments without actually enumerating them one by one, which might be awkward.

For example, when I hear that I remind somone of Dennis Miller, what I really hear on a subliminal level is that I'm coming across as suave and dry and witty and intelligent and self-possessed and maybe a little sarcastic. And that's not to mention snappily dressed, bearded, and long- and dark- and curly-haired.

Now, whether all those things are things that my colleague meant, either consciously or subconsciously, they are the things I associate with Dennis Miller, and so I'm pleased to hear them. And that's not the only thing I hear. When I hear that I remind someone of a celebrity, there's the subtle implication that, since I share the traits that have made that person so well-known and successful, I have the potential to be just as successful.

It shouldn't be surprising, then, that comparing someone with a celebrity is such a surefire method for making them feel good. (Assuming you've chosen the right celebrity, that is. I mean, most right-thinking people aren't going to feel particularly honored if you tell them they remind you, say, of Rush Limbaugh.) And it shouldn't be surprising that most of us respond to it so well. Most all of us have within us a yearning to be widely recognized for the good things about us, and this plays right into that basic desire.

(I'm typing this with a cat curled up contentedly in my lap, eyes closed. I think his basic desire is to take a nap at the center of the universe.)

Like I said, it's been a good long time since anyone told me I reminded them of anyone famous, and I have to admit that I've kind of felt bad about that. I've thought back wistfully to the days when I was a skinny gawky kid two-thirds of my present weight, and folks like my girlfriend Katrina would tell me I reminded them of Timothy Hutton. (Katrina even went so far as to put "Debra Winger" for the return address on her letters when she wrote to me during my mission.) I remember the starry-eyed girls in the town of Brooks, Alberta, who had crushes on the close-cropped young missionary Elder Shunn because he looked just like a really bad photo of Kevin Bacon from the cover of one of their teen-idol mags. (And, of course, because young Mormon girls always get crushes on missionaries. I swear, I've never had so many women come on to me as when I was wearing that damn black nametag and couldn't do anything about it. It's not fair.)

Well, I'm a long way from being emaciated enough to remind anyone of Timothy Hutton anymore. It was just the other day that I was looking at a photo of myself with my friend Tim Bishop and his wife at an amusement park in Utah, taken in the first year or two after my mission. I looked at that narrow face, that pipestem of a neck, and despite the goofy mustache and the hair worn long in the back, I could see the resemblence to Timothy Hutton, I could see it, and I missed having people comment on it. I felt old and fat and unattractive.

But hey, now that I've matured somewhat, I remind someone of Dennis Miller! I'm still floating. It may be shallow of me, but that one's going to keep me going for weeks.

Now, who is it you remind me of?

I ran into John Turturro again today. (Not today as you read this, but today as I write this, which is more than a month before this memo is scheduled to appear.) Well, okay, I didn't really run into him. I actually just passed him on the sidewalk while I was walking down Seventh Avenue here in Brooklyn, on my way to the hardware store and then to the Second Street Cafe for Sunday brunch.

This is the second time I've run into—or maybe I should say "run across"—John Turturro in Brooklyn. The first time was in the subway station at Grand Army Plaza one morning about six months ago when I was late for work. I was descending the stairs into the station when I saw a tallish fellow with curly dark hair and a goatee determinedly trying to get one of the turnstiles to read his MetroCard. There he was, head down with a look of intense and single-minded concentration on his face, repeatedly swiping his card through the slot, and I thought to myself, "My God, that's John Turturro."

Now, I have to tell you, I'm a really big fan of John Turturro. Barton Fink, Quiz Show, Miller's Crossing, Clockers, Box of Moonlight—I think they're all terrific performances. I'm amazed at the way he can make what seems like a physical transformation in his varied roles. The tough, abusive older Italian brother of Do the Right Thing is nothing like the sweet but picked-on kid of Jungle Fever—and he looks physically smaller in the role. Amazing.

So there he was in the subway station, having trouble with his MetroCard, and the woman with him was egging him on from the other side of the turnstiles: "Come on, John! Hurry!"

My God. John Turturro, despite powerful biceps, looked so much like an incompetent kid being harried by an impatient parent in that moment that I just wanted to go up to him and put my arms around him and remind him that he was John Turturro. And incidentally tell him how much I loved his work.

But, suave and unflappable New Yorker that I have become, all I did was go around him and slide my MetroCard smoothly through the slot in the next turnstile, just as he finally got his to work. The three of us—Turturro, his female companion, and me—all descended the stairs to the platform at the same time, and I said, just one New Yorker to two others, "There's something wrong with that turnstile. It gives everyone problems."

I said that to the great actor John Turturro, who is ten years my senior, because he looked so much like a kid in dutch. He didn't say anything to me, and neither did his female companion.

Today when I saw John Turturro, he was walking north on Seventh Avenue with a woman and a small girl. I honestly can't tell you whether or not it was the same woman as before. I didn't pay much attention to the woman either time. The goatee was gone this time, and Turturro was looking around himself with what looked like open-mouth wonder, and maybe some apprehension. I swear to God he looked like a kid on his first trip to the city. And Brooklyn was where he was born and raised.

I didn't say anything this time. But maybe next time I see him—and I'm sure I'll see him again, since he obviously lives in the neighborhood—I will say something. Maybe I'll say, "John, what the hell is going on inside your skin? Are you just an empty vessel that fills from time to time with these amazingly real and well-defined characters and then lies as slack as a drained wineskin the rest of the day? Or do you look that way simply because the mantle of celebrity the rest of us have placed upon your shoulders, the weight of our awed gazes as you pass, has forced you apart from our company? What can I do to help make your passage through this ordinary world more meaningful?"

Maybe I'll say that. But it's more likely that I'll just look at him and think to myself, once again, "My God, that's John Turturro. Wow."

I guess this is celebrity week here at Memos from the Moon. I can't seem to stop droning on about the subject, and I really can't seem to get away from droning on about the subject as it relates to my observations of John Turturro. So here we go again. I hope you'll forgive me.

Common wisdom has it that New Yorkers are a blasé lot, inured to the sight of celebrities in their midst and not at all star-struck. It's those of us greenhorns from out of town whose jaws drop to the pavement and who start falling all over themselves at the sight of a famous actor or musician. A good example might be my friend Andrew from work, who couldn't stop gushing about catching sight of Parker Posey at CBGB during a Patti Smith show. By his own report, he followed her all over the club trying to make certain that it really was her. Andrew recently moved here from Texas.

But I think the rules about detachment must only apply to Manhattanites. From the reactions I saw when John Turturro boarded a subway car at the Grand Army Plaza train station, it would seem that Brooklynites are every bit as star-struck as the rest of us poor schlubs.

In my previous memo, I described how I came across John Turturro having trouble with his MetroCard one morning in the subway station. I descended the stairs to the platform near him and his female companion, then stood near them, watching, as they waited for the Manhattan-bound train to arrive.

We all boarded the same car when the train came. I sat about a quarter of the way down the car from Turturro and friend. I pretended to read a paperback novel, keeping a watch on him out the corner of my eye. He produced a screenplay from his shoulder bag and began to read, appearing totally absorbed.

I kept a watch on the other passengers as well, mostly older black folks. I was curious to see whether they would recognize John Turturro, and how they would react when they did. It was around Nevins Street when someone did. I saw someone nudging a companion and indicating the actor with a nod of his head. Before long excited whispers were traveling around my end of the car and a dozen pairs of eyes were straining to catch a glimpse.

Turturro appeared to notice none of this, his nose buried deep in his script. A fellow near me was saying to his friend, in a barely hushed voice, "What's his name? Uh . . . Tarantino? Tor . . . ?"

"John Turturro," I said.

The man nodded. "That's right, that's right."

Another fellow asked, "What's he been in?"

"Do the Right Thing," I said. "Jungle Fever."

"Oh," this fellow said, his eyes lighting up. "Yeah."

To their credit, no one on the train went over and bothered Turturro for an autograph, at least not before I disembarked for work at Wall Street. (This stands in sharp contrast to a story my ex-girlfriend Katrina told me about a friend of hers, whom I'll call Bambi, who had visited Katrina at her home in Bozeman, Montana. Katrina and Bambi were in town when they spied Meg Ryan, who lived with Dennis Quaid on a ranch outside of Bozeman, coming out a store. Bambi insisted not only on bugging Meg Ryan for an autograph, but she had to have her picture taken with the actress as well. I saw the snapshots. Bambi looks giddy. Meg Ryan looks unhappily tolerant. I would have been mortified.) But now I know that Brooklynites are just as human as anyone else.

Anyone else but Manhattanites, that is, who can't see the stars in the sky above them, and don't care about the stars in their own midst.

Most writers, if asked what questions they field most frequently, will answer with something along the lines of "Where do you get your ideas?" or "What are your work habits?" Not so for me. The questions I get most often, at least from visitors to my Web site, are "What happened to that missionary story of yours?" and "Is it true you went back to being a Mormon again?"

For a period of about two years, I ran one of the more notorious anti-Mormon sites on the Web. The biggest draw was, no doubt, "Terror on Flight 789," the true story of my days as a Mormon missionary in Canada, and of how I was charged with terrorism and then deported. But readers of that story were often drawn into The Road to Apostasy, an ongoing and never-completed account of my life as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—the Mormons—and of how I came to abandon my faith in that institution. I had completed only seven installments of The Road to Apostasy when I put it aside indefinitely—when, in fact, I removed all those religion-oriented writings from my Web site.

As long-time followers of this site will recall, that was around the time that I posted an essay entitled "The Devil's Advocate's Angel," about how my infatuation with a distant woman to whom I referred as Aimee had enticed me to have another go at Mormonism. And that was my last public word on the subject.

Until now.

My intent at the time—my fierce desire, in fact—was to offer up for public consumption no further accounts of my struggles with faith and disbelief. It was, and remains, my belief that there is little more pathetic than the writer who feels compelled to reveal all the minutiae of his life to a voyeuristic and unknowable audience. (And for the sake of clarity, let me point out that, while I may have been tending toward that extreme, I believe I stopped short of actually reaching it.) Selected elements must be revealed, certainly, but in the flood of confession the writer risks draining himself of the poetry, passion, and pain that is the lifeblood his art. Put another way, I stopped writing directly about myself in order that I might put myself back into my fiction, which had suffered mightily during those years.

My prolonged silence on the subject of religion, however, has placed me in an awkward position, in which my private self and the public perception of that self are wildly divergent. Not that outside perception must necessarily mirror reality, but in my case the two are now so widely separate that I fear my image stands for principles and philosophies with which my private self takes vehement exception.

The common perception among Mormons is that I have seen the error of my ways, humbled myself, and rejoined them on the trek to godhood. When old friends who have not corresponded with me in years write to me now, they celebrate my return to the fold with joyousness and a certain glee. They would kill the fatted calf and fête me if they could. The perception of my reconciliation with the religion of my youth has made me once again a fit candidate for association, and has justified, I feel certain, the continuing unexamined faith of many of the loudest celebrants.

The common perception among those on the other side of the fence is that I have returned to the bosom of the church, tail between my legs, and embraced again the precepts I once attacked with such fervor and abandon. They hold me up to the light, turn me this way and that, and examine me with the superior disdain a slipshod anthropologist might reserve for an interesting but obviously degenerate tribe of cannibals. The perception of my reconciliation with the religion of my youth has made me into the punchline of a particularly groan-worthy joke.

So what is reality? No attempt I make to answer that question will capture the truth with a perfect degree of accuracy, but I can say that the answer lies somewhere between those two extremes of perception, and perhaps a little ways left of the beaten track.

I did indeed revisit my affiliation with the Mormon church during the spring of 1998. I did so at the urging of a woman who was and remains no less confused about her religious leanings than was I at the time. I managed to get myself out to sacrament meeting three or perhaps four times that spring, but my interest in continued association with the church had waned even before I realized that Aimee's interest in me had waned to the point of nothingness.

But while my belief in Mormonism has dwindled and perished, it seems that my belief in God has survived—somewhat against my wishes, in a way. It seems, in fact, that this belief in God has always been there, no matter how many layers of rhetoric and obfuscation with which I've attempted to smother it—as those closest to me are fond of pointing out. For a whole host of reasons, I cannot accept Mormonism or its theology as anything but a misguided hoax filled with a lot of good people. For a whole host of other reasons, I cannot deny that I've always felt, and that I continue to feel, the influence of God in my life. I felt it even in the days when I denied his existence and his hold over me utterly.

To allow you, my readers, to believe anything else has been dishonest and an oversight—one which I've intended for many weeks now to correct, but which has been difficult to approach.

Where this reemergent belief will take me, I have no idea—and I'll confess quite frankly that I feel a certain amount of trepidation on that score, for with belief comes responsibility, and with responsibility . . . well, who knows what will come? What I do know is that my struggle with God and belief will remain central to my writing for the foreseeable future, and probably for years after that to come.

Before I close this confession, I feel it important to stress that, despite the fact that I still hold to many of the conclusions drawn in Terror on Flight 789 and The Road to Apostasy , there are elements of those earlier writings for which I have cause to feel great remorse—namely, the sadly disrespectful and uncomplimentary light in which I painted my family in those works.

As much as I take issue with the religion in which my parents raised me, I take no issue with my parents themselves. I love them very much, and as I struggle to repair my relationships with them, I want it known that I hold no animosity toward them, nor do I bear them any grudges. In fact, I'm very sorry for the great pain I know that I caused them, as a direct result of the calculated and callous way I portrayed them in my writings. While my struggle with my religion is my matter and mine alone to deal with how I see fit, any issues I may have had with my parents are our own, and my vicious grievances should not have been aired in public, as part of the sensational circus of confession to which I refer (shamelessly coopting a phrase coined by a friend) as the "great American freak parade." I apologize to them, and to anyone who felt uncomfortable or offended at having witnessed that display.

Having said that, it should be known that I will continue to examine and question my past and present religious choices in my writing, whether in fiction or otherwise. I understand that, having made this choice, my family will inevitably feel a certain amount of pain and distress, but my solemn intent is to limit that pain to what is to be expected when one member of a family chooses not to participate in the faith of the rest, and not to give any of those good people cause to feel that they have been personally slighted or attacked. We may differ in our approaches to God, but I pray we will continue to hone our approaches to one another until they are as closely in harmony as they can possibly be.

And now it's time for me to get back to work on the twelfth-odd draft of the screenplay adaptation of Terror on Flight 789. Thank you for your attention, and my sincerest hope is that you'll be interested enough to come back and see what I have to say on the subject next, however I may choose to say it.

Hard to believe, but last month Laura and I celebrated the first anniversary of the day we met, which we decided was as appropriate as any other day for celebrating. That was December 16, 1998.

It wasn't actually the first time we had met—in the strictest sense, it was the third. Here's how it all happened:

I worked for a company called N2K for 15 months, from February 1997 to May 1998. I was the technical producer for a web site called Rocktropolis, which was the rock-music community adjunct to the now-demised and much-lamented Music Boulevard (a competitor to CDNow).

1998 was a banner year for me. It was when life got good again. First, the horrid woman I'd been living with moved across the country, while I stayed in New York. Then I wrote 5 new stories in rapid succession, and sold 2 of them right off the bat—my first stories and sales in three years. Then I quit N2K, which was going to the dogs, and started working for CTW—you know, Sesame Street. That was in May.

Laura started working at N2K in August, so we never overlapped as employees. A couple of months later, it was announced that CDNow would be buying N2K, and there would be a lot of layoffs. N2K had always been a company with a small, homey feel, even when it grew to 200 employees. So on December 9, 1998, N2K held its last-ever Christmas party, and invited all former employees to come.

The party was held at Irving Plaza in Manhattan—probably the best mid-sized venue for live music in town. (On Halloween 1997, I had helped produce a live Webcast of The Cure there.) My friend J.B. told me there was someone I had to meet. He introduced me to Laura, and we spoke for all of thirty seconds before someone else snatched away her attention. But I kept thinking about her smile all night. As Renee Zellweger said in Jerry Maguire, she had me from hello. She really had me when she told me how much she had heard about me, and what a genuine pleasure it was to meet me.

What I didn't realize is that she had been drinking a lot that night, and later she wouldn't remember having met me. At any rate, I managed to catch her as she was leaving the party (early), and said I hoped we could talk again sometime. That was #1.

The party was so much fun that I decided to a party of my own for a week later—a drinking outing like the ones we had held so many times in the past while I still worked at N2K. I drafted a long, involved email, as clever and funny as I could make it, and sent it out to all my friends, inviting them all to meet at a bar called The Opium Den for drinks on December 16th. Specifically, I asked them all to forward the invitation to the new folks at N2K, the ones whose names I didn't know. I was hoping to get Laura to my little gathering.

The 16th was a Wednesday. That day, I emailed two of my friends directly, asking them to forward my party invitation to that Laura women. Midway through the day, my friend Ric AIMed me—said there was a woman at work I should meet who had questions about things Mormon. He started up an AIM chat room, invited me and Laura into it, and we proceeded to have a discussion about temple garments, which she had always been curious about.

When Ric introduced Laura in the chat room, I asked her, "Didn't I meet you at the Christmas party last week?"

She said, No, you must be thinking of someone else. She didn't remember, because she had been pretty plastered that night. She did say that she had received my party invitation and would be there that night so we could continue our conversation.

"Until then," I said, "you can look at my Web site for more Mormon-related stuff. It's www.shunn.net."

She said, "Oh, cool. I have a Web site too. Take a look. It's www.krista.com."

I immediately clicked to her Web site . . . only to discover that www.krista.com is really a porn site. There was a kneeling woman on the front page, covering her breasts with an arm. My manager happened to be standing right behind me, but I got the browser backed up to the previous page before he could see the naked woman. Whew!

That was my first encounter with Laura's strange (and completely compatible-with-mine) sense of humor. That was Meeting #2, even though I was the one who didn't realize it this time.

For her part, when Laura looked at my Web site, she realized that some friends at work had showed it to her months earlier, when she first started at N2K. Even then, she later told me, she had been attracted to me—to my mind, anyway—and wanted to meet me. Now she had an even better reason to come to the Opium Den party.

She was also attracted by the invitation. She told me later, "I had to meet the person who had written it. It was so clever and funny."

All that writing practice pays off.

Laura goes to an exercise class every Wednesday night. She always goes straight home afterward, and she was tempted to do the same thing that night. But finally she said to herself "What the hell, this guy does sound interesting," and showed up at the party. It was apparently a close thing.

And I . . . er . . . ignored for the first hour or so after she arrived. She showed up, sat with some friends for a while, then stood up and signaled for my attention, across the crowd. "Hey, recognize me?" she shouted, and mimicked the pose of that woman from the front page of krista.com, with her arm across her chest. I laughed and laughed, but I was in a conversation, and I didn't want to look like I was a predator, just intent on hitting on Laura, and zeroing in on her the moment she walked in. This was almost a fatal mistake.

After an hour, Laura was ready to pack up and go home. She made one more bid for my attention. "What are you drinking?" she said from across the crowd again. She figured if she bought me a drink, I'd have to talk to her. If I'd known how close she was to walking out, I would have gone and chatted her up in a second (despite the fact that that's not my style), but I didn't know that, and fortunately I didn't have to know that. She brought me a beer, and we sat down together and talked about Mormonism and religion in general.

When we looked up, a couple of hours had passed and everyone else had gone home. I offered to walk her home, and we shook hands on her doorstep. I went home, floating.

Laura on the other hand was devastated. I hadn't tried to kiss her, I hadn't asked for her phone number, and I hadn't said I wanted to see her again. (Not being in the habit of picking women up in bars, I didn't think to do any of these things. We'd just met, but I knew exactly how to get in touch with her—call N2K and ask for Laura. Why did I need to ask her phone number?) She had just been walked home by someone she found interesting, funny, and attractive, and then he just walked away. She figured I didn't like her. (That was #3, the one that stuck.)

But we talked the next day, and then we went on our first date, and then we both made ready to leave on our respective Christmas vacations. I dropped by her apartment the night before I was leaving for Utah, to give her printouts of a couple of my stories. I arrived at her building to discover Laura out front, digging frantically through her purse. She was locked out. She had left her keys on her kitchen table that morning.

A neighbor buzzed us into the building, and we walked up to the sixth floor (no elevator in this building—New York is not for wimps!). The neighbor let us into her apartment, and I crawled out onto the fire escape, opened Laura's window, and climbed into her bedroom and unlocked the apartment from the inside. I hate heights. I liked Laura.

And so it was that the first time I entered Laura's apartment, I went in through the bedroom window.

That's also how I acquired the nickname "Knight in White Armor."

Then we were both out of town for two weeks, though we talked on the phone every day. My phone bill the next month was $300. When I flew into Laguardia late on January 2, 1999, my luggage was lost, and I spent an hour filling out forms. By then it was half past midnight, and only one cab was waiting at the taxi stand. Before long, the old driver had proved himself incompetent behind the wheel, and I was in fear for my life. There was an ice storm going on—beautiful little crystals falling out of the sky—but unfortunately they turned the BQE into a skating rink.

A mile and half from my exit, the cab skidded. We hit the center divider, spun around. I watched another car slide and start spinning directly toward my side of the cab. That car hit us in the right front fender, and we all spun some more, then came to a stop. In some kind of shock, I hopped right out of the car and onto the freeway, and immediately lost my footing on the ice. I got up again and very carefully made my way across to the shoulder. (Well, the edge, anyway—we were on an elevated stretch of road.) Fortunately there wasn't a lot of traffic, and what traffic there was was moving pretty slowly.

Still, twenty minutes later, someone else went out of control and slammed into the cab again.

I ended up standing in the ice storm with an insufficient jacket for two hours before I finally hitched a ride in an ambulance to Brooklyn Hospital. (We passed seven more wrecks in the mile and a half to the exit, all with emergency vehicles in attendance). Then I took the subway home from there.

Good thing my bags weren't with me in the cab! That might have been a little unwieldy. (But then again, if my bags had arrived with me at LGA, I wouldn't have ended up in the bad cab during the ice storm.)

But the upshot is, I was sick for week after standing out in the cold, so I didn't end up seeing Laura for another week after that. By the time of our second date, it was three weeks since we had seen each other.

And now Laura is in the Caribbean on a cruise with her mother, and I miss her. It still no fun to have her gone, but at least it's not unbearable. We got past that early on, because she had to travel so much in her job for Skymall.

But now it's time for me to get to work, since I am at work, so I'll sign off. Just had to get that all off my chest for some reason.

Just got back from the doctor's office, and through the miracle of medieval medical science I can hear again!

I am, as Dr. Kong terms it, "a little waxy." "I am too," he said. "Some people have no wax at all. It's amazing. But you and me . . . like a beehive."

I try to swab regularly, and when things get a little too clogged, I use some Debrox ear drops to dissolve the wax. (It makes pleasant little cracklings sound in the ear, like Rice Krispies, and the drops sometimes foam right out of the ear canal.)

Last Friday morning, though, I was swabbing and I guess I went a little too deep in my left ear. Tamped the stuff right down, like tobacco in a briar pipe. Even the Debrox, applied twice a day since Friday, didn't make a dent.

The last four days have been extraordinarily annoying. It's amazing how much we take our hearing for granted. I could hear non-directional environmental sounds just fine, but if someone walked up to me on my left side and started talking, I'd have to tack around like a schooner to understand.

Also, my left ear is my telephone ear, since the telephone is to my left on my desk at work. Inevitably, I would put the phone to my left ear, realize I couldn't make out what was being said, and then have to stretch the cord awkwardly across the keyboard over to my right ear.

I had several social engagements during those four days, too, including Laura and I having dinner and drinks with a really interesting couple we don't know very well, and whom I still don't know very well, because I had a lot of trouble following the conversation in the loud Lower East Side restaurant.

The stereo sound on my headphones at work was decidedly right-channel-heavy too, and I missed some of the lyrics I was unfamiliar with at the "Weird Al" Yankovic concert I attended at the Beacon Theater on Sunday night. Bummer.

It's been hell in meetings here at the office too, but the worst was to realize that thanks to the ear problem I was not very well attuned to danger on the street. We rely not just on simple hearing, but on directional hearing for a whole lot of cues about our environments, as you discover when your sense of hearing is impaired.

Anyway, I made an appointment with the doctor this morning to have him look at my ear. Dr. Kong pulled out his trusty speculum and stuck it in his ear and said, "I can't see much of anything in there. Too much wax."

Yeah, exactly.

"We're going to have to flush that out and see what's what," said Dr. Kong. He left the room and returned with what I can only describe as an instrument of medieval torture.

Okay, I'll try to be more specific than that. He returned with a stainless steel "ear syringe," which looks like an oversized cake decorating tool—long fat barrel, tapering snout, big-as-heck plunger with circular grips for the fingers. Wait, you're putting that thing in my ear? I thought this was the year 2000!

But I trust Dr. Kong, so I didn't complain. He had me take off my sweater and put on a protective gown, then he piled some paper towels on my shoulder. He handed me a small kidney-shaped stainless-steel trough. "Hold this against the side of your neck for me, just below the ear," he said. "We don't want this going everywhere."

What? Blood and tissue? It looked like the tray in which he would deposit the cartilege of my outer ear after he blasted it from my skull.

Dr. Kong donned a long protective apron, drew plenty of warm tap water into the syringe, placed the cold snout into my ear canal, took up a riveter's stance, and said, "This is going to feel a little weird."

Like it didn't already.

Then he slammed in with the plunger.

Weird was right. It felt like sand blasting my inner ear. The pressure differential between the two sides of my ear made me feel as though I'd sucked a bunch of water into my sinus cavity, and my teeth ached like I was hearing fingernails on a chalkboard. The water felt like it was coming in rapid short bursts. Then the water ran out, and Dr. Kong refueled and did it again.

I could hear the water, of course, but dully. And then, miraculously, on the third or fourth dose, there was a sound like rocks sliding over each other and suddenly I heard the water—a firehose in my ear, a white-water rapid, a Niagara Falls. Dr. Kong removed the syringe and I said, like a healed believer at a revival, "I can hear!"

"Look at this," said Dr. Kong, taking the trough from my shoulder.

I won't describe the water in the trough, except to say that it was really unpleasant to look at.

"Ugh," I said.

Dr. Kong peered through the speculum. "There's still more. Hang on."

A couple more blasts and the doctor declared me clean. Whereas the first batch of watery sludge was light brown and silty (okay, I couldn't help describing it), this time what he dumped into the sink was chunky and black, like rotted pencil erasers. I couldn't believe all that gunk actually fit in my ear canal.

But now I can hear. I'm sitting here with my headphones on, listening to Jim Hall's Concierto, recorded in 1975 with Chet Baker, Paul Desmond, Ron Carter, and Steve Gadd. Bliss. Every note is sharp and clear and sweet. I'm walking around with a huge grin on my face. I'm asking people to talk into my left ear.

I am healed. And all with an instrument that looks like something Torquemada would have had fun with. Amazing.

By the way, are you missing a pencil eraser? I think I know what happened to it.

Dear Fiona:

Last night, my girlfriend and her friend and I paid more than a hundred dollars between us to watch your slow on-stage meltdown at Roseland Ballroom on 52nd Street in Manhattan. We want our money back, at least some of it.

We arrived early, excited—after each having spent the previous couple of days listening to Tidal, your fascinating debut album, and When the Pawn . . . , its brilliant and ravishing follow-up—and staked out a position next to the sound boards with a good line of sight to the stage. We anticipated a real show. We certainly got one, though it wasn't the one we expected.

But maybe that's not a fair thing to say. We did get the show we expected—gorgeous and passionate vocals, piano-playing both percussive and sensitive, stimulating music from a band of crack musicians—even if it was shorter than we hoped. Let me not put too fine a point on this: You nailed it. You were on. You kicked ass. Your amazing voice sounded amazing last night. Clear and confident, right in tune, and achingly beautiful.

Too bad you had to go and ruin it with that other show you put on. Too bad the confidence in your voice is only a show.

I got the first whiff of trouble during the third song, after you had left the piano and gone to the mike at center stage. You kept looking off to the side angrily between lines, with some furious little jabs of your arms. I think most people thought it was part of the passion of the song, but I leaned over to Laura and Liz and said, "She's getting really pissed. I think she's having problems with her monitors. I don't think she can hear herself. She's going to throw a tantrum."

Not that I'm patting myself on the back for being all that perceptive. I have to admit that I was on the lookout for signs of temper. I read all the reports three years ago, when you were touring for Tidal, about the breakdowns, the walking off in the middle of shows, the general bratty, primadonna behavior. I hadn't read anything about such behavior on the current tour—indeed, most every reviewer praised your new maturity—but it's always there in the back of the mind: "Is this 'new maturity' for real? Is this the night Fiona's finally going to lose it again?"

Well, it was.

I've watched plenty of other musicians deal with monitor problems on stage. Most of them deal with it simply through hand signals to the sound crew. Sometimes they'll get to the end of the song and say, "Hey, guys, I need my voice higher in the monitors," and that's that. Billy Corgan, when I saw the Pumpkins at Tramps, even took time to explain calmly, even chattily, to the audience, that it gets pretty damn loud up on stage and if he can't hear his voice in the mix then he doesn't know whether or not he's in tune.

All these examples? That's called "being professional," and it's something you really need to learn.

Things not to do when you can't hear yourself in the monitors?

First of all, don't panic. It happens to everybody, and most musicians have learned to deal with it. It's just one of those things you can't plan for, and that you have to be ready for emotionally. A show can't go perfectly every time.

Next, don't apologize to the audience after every song for how much the show sucks. I know you're a perfectionist, but perfectionism only sets you up for failure. Ask us how the show sounds, because it's our opinion that matters. If you really need some reassurance, just say, "How is it sounding out there. Am I okay?" I've seen plenty of other musicians do just that—there's no reason not to. If you'd stopped beating yourself up and actually listened to the audience, then you would have known that we were with you. You were doing fine. You sounded great. We were your friends (at least until you really started turning into a brat).

Finally, don't threaten to kill the reviewers in the audience if they give you a bad write-up. That's just childish and immature, and by the end of the evening, when the tears were streaming down your face, we were all pretty sick of it. Reviewers could have gone away from the show saying, "Fiona Apple, despite sound problems, put on a powerful show last night, with a voice in fine form." Instead, they're a lot more likely to focus on your tantrums than they are on your music, which is a shame, but that's the way news works. If you're going to threaten reviewers, then you're only creating your own bad press.

I'm curious to know what David Byrne thought of your show. He was in the audience, you know—yes, the genius behind Talking Heads came to Roseland and stood right down there on the floor, in the middle of the crowd, two paces away from me, to listen to you perform. He left about five minutes before you left the stage for your "break" that never ended. I think he was embarrassed for you. I sure was. The embarrassment in the room was palpable.

I know that succeeding in New York was very important to you—you said so enough times during the hour you spent on stage, when you were apologizing for the quality of the show. Apparently it was too important. My opinion is, if it hadn't been the monitors then it would have been something else. You are making things way too hard for yourself, and until you can relax a little you're only going to keep shooting yourself in the foot.

Maybe the problem is that you've had too much success too early. Your first album came out when you were 19. You're only, what, 23 now? You never had to pay your dues, working in small clubs in front of hostile audiences. You never had to learn to deal with the picayune problems other musicians do as they buy their success with sweat, a little at a time, night after night. You never had to learn to be a professional, like David Byrne or anyone else who cut their teeth in holes in the wall like CBGB.

Well, now it's time, before you've undermined your career, to become a professional. You have the talent to do it—that much is blatantly apparent. Get therapy if you have to, but don't let that unhappy little girl inside, who obviously doesn't feel like she's good enough to please anyone, ruin it all for you by throwing tantrums. Whoever poisoned that little girl sure did a good job of it.

Take a page from your own book, honey: "Don't make it a big deal, don't be so sensitive."

Oh, yeah. And give us our money back.

Sincerely,
Bill Shunn

So I commented to Laura at about 8:00 pm last night that we were having a perfect and quintessential New York evening. She had come uptown to meet her friend Liz for some skating training in Central Park, but, rained out, she and Liz went to Starbuck's at 70th and Amsterdam instead. I was at the office a little late, so I wandered over and met them there, and then Liz's boyfriend Jim wandered by, and it was a real . . . well, I hate to say it, but it was kind of a "Friends" moment, a real New York yuppie moment, hanging with our gang at the coffehouse, wandering in and out of each other's evenings like characters in a harmless sitcom.

Laura and I grabbed some soup at a nearby restaurant (Soma Soup—they have a fabulous cheeseburger soup on the menu, and yes you read that right), and we were descending into the subway station at 72nd and Broadway when I mentioned this sentiment to Laura. She was having a brainstorm about e-business, and she completely agreed with me.

Thirty minutes later, we stood outside the gaping doorway of her sixth-floor walkup apartment in the East Village. The metal door was crumpled at the edge, and it stood open. Laura went in—I held her back and entered the living room, then bedroom, first. This was no easy task, since most of her possessions had been dumped onto the floor, in both rooms. The living room floor was covered with CDs from the shelves and purses from inside the coffee table's storage space. The bedroom was littered with clothes, sewing supplies, and costume jewery. The drawers from the dresser were lying everywhere, and the contents of the shelves in the closet were all over.

A quick inventory showed that the television was still there, although it was lying face down on the floor. The DVD player I gave her for Christmas was gone, and so were any plans of watching the Dark City DVD that I had bought from Urban Fetch just that day. The VCR was gone. The portable MiniDisc player/recorder I gave her for the 100-day anniversary of our first date was gone. The digital camera she gave me for my birthday last year was gone. The stereo receiver and the 5-disc CD player were still there, and still functional, but the cordless phone/answering machine combo was gone. One of Laura's suitcases from the bedroom was open on the living room floor. Half a stick of butter on the floor in the kitchen indicated that the fridge had been opened.

One thing we both looked for first thing was our fishbowl, with Frank inside. Frank is the Siamese fighting fish I won as a table prize at World Fantasy in Providence last fall. Frank's bowl was untouched, and he was fine. I wish he could talk to us. He must have seen everything.

Laura called Liz and Jim first, who promised to come over right away. Then she called the police. We tried to touch as little as possible—a good trick, since the stuff all over the place made it hard to walk. Parts of the bedroom were practically inaccessible.

Then we went to a few of the neighbors' apartments. The woman next door, who is an artist and is always home during the day, is away on vacation this week. The people at the other end of the hall weren't home. We met two of our neighbors on the fifth floor for the first time—neither had been home during the day.

The police showed up very quickly. The two officers were very friendly. "Geez, they really took this place apart," they said. "Haven't seen anything like this in the East Village for years." They helped us take inventory quickly, asked us when we had left the apartment that day, clarified which of us lived there and which didn't, and asked if Laura had renter's insurance. When she said no, both cops recommended it—then admitted that they didn't have it themselves, either of them.

More poking around revealed that the antique watch Laura bought me for Christmas was missing—I kept it there at her apartment, and only wore it only special, fancy occasions. An antique silver polo trophy—a big two-handled loving cup—was missing from the dresser. Laura kept it full of quarters; a couple hundred dollars worth had collected there. It was the only cash in the apartment.

The police surmised that the thief or thieves had jimmied the door with a crowbar. It had to take a while—they said a usual M.O. is for thieves to get buzzed into the building on some pretext or another, and then knock on doors asking for, say, Jill—"No, sorry, no Jill here, you must have the wrong apartment"—and thus determine what apartments are currently occupied. If there's one with no neighbors around . . . in they go.

"They were probably looking for cash, mostly," said the police. Laura's costume jewelry was still there, as was her string of pearls. The expensive purses by designers like Kate Spade were not touched. "That suitcase there on the floor? They probably brought it in here to put the stereo stuff in, but it didn't fit. Must have had their own bag. Just carry the stuff out like they belong here, and they're leaving for vacation. As much as they can take."

In the bedroom, one officer pointed to the overturned sewing kit on the bed. "Be careful when you sleep," he said. "You're going to be finding needles and pins in your bed for weeks." No kidding.

They phoned for detectives, who showed up not long after. The detectives had been investigating a similar burglary nearby—same M.O., same big mess. That brought the total of wrecking-ball burglaries to three for the evening, we found out later. Liz and Jim showed up soon after, as did a print team, who did their best but didn't get much. We watched them dust dark surfaces with white powder and light surfaces with black powder. They got a couple of prints from the door, but only smudges elsewhere. "If you find anything while you're cleaning up that might hold a print, call us," said the printers. "We'll come back and see what we can do."

Laura kept saying, "It's only stuff we lost, right? It's all replaceable. We're safe, no one got hurt, we lost some sentimental stuff, but it could have been a lot worse." She was right. "You know what I think I'm most broken up about? The cable box. They didn't take the TV, but they took the stupid cable box. I mean, everybody has a cable box. What do they need that for? The TV is useless now.

"You know, my car got stolen once," said one of the original officers. "I didn't care about the car, but my term paper was in the back, and I didn't have another copy."

The print guys fingerprinted Laura and me both. They were fazed by Laura's seven fingers. "I call this one the finger and this one the thumb," she said, and that's how the cop divvied up the prints on his card. This was a much more pleasant fingerprinting than the first time it happened to me—the cop was polite and we actually got to wash our hands afterward.

One of the printers had the collar of his uniform shirt open. His clip-on tie clung to one half of the collar, wilting over to the side like a dead flower. He noticed Laura staring. "It's so no one can choke you with it," he said. "We all wear clip-ons, so if they grab your tie it just comes off." Like a lizard's tail, I thought. Cool.

When I pointed out some marble coasters that had been taken out and discarded, the cops said, "Marble is porous—it doesn't hold a print really well, and if I put black powder on there, you're never going to get it out." So much for Junior Detective Shunn.

When the police were all gone, we tried to close the door, but the lock was jammed open. Laura called the super, who was annoyed to be disturbed. "I can't close or lock my door," she said.

"What do you advise?" he asked.

"Come over and fix it!"

We all set to work cleaning the apartment. The mess was mostly cosmetic. Things had been dumped everywhere, but nothing was broken. Within an hour, the apartment looked almost as good as new—except for the gaping absence in the area of the entertainment center, and the black print-powder footprints from cops' shoes on Laura's white rug.

The super buzzed from downstairs, and it took him about fifteen minutes to climb the stairs to the sixth floor. At one point, I went to the stairs and looked down. I saw his hand on the railing a floor and a half below. He didn't make it up for five minutes after that.

Once there, the super removed the broken locks from the door so it would at least swing shut, then gave Laura a card for a 24-hour locksmith. The 24-hour locksmith turned out not to be willing to come until nine the next morning. The super left.

Cleaning up clothes in the bedroom, we had found the silver polo trophy cup, but none of the quarters. We set the trophy aside, to be printed later. Laura was very glad it wasn't gone—it was her grandfather's. I kept finding pins on the bedspread—more, every time I thought I was done.

When everything was straightened up, we went to a Polish-style diner nearby for some food and beer. We pulled the apartment door shut, and prayed no one would go in while we were gone. I had buckwheat banana pancakes with syrup and Pilsner Urquell for my late supper. It was after midnight. Then we sent Liz and Jim home in a cab, and went to sleep with only a little chain to keep the door locked.

Laura slept badly. I slept like a rock.

The locksmith installed two new locks this morning. Those locks will be transferred to a new metal door tomorrow morning, one with a jimmy bar to prevent it from being pried open. The managing agent for the apartment had to approve that, and he didn't deign to drop by until 1:30, when it was too late for the work to be done today.

Laura and I had bought some hardware earlier in the day. I set about repairing a shelf that had broken during the burglary, while Laura scrubbed the fingerprint powder out of the rug. We ordered Indian food for lunch, and went to the police precinct to report some additional items we had found missing: two cellular phones (both old and out of service), and fifty or sixty of the recordable MiniDiscs that I had made for Laura on my deck at home. (That's the first thing to replace, since it's an indispensable jogging accoutrement for her.) We also reported the discovery of the possibly printable trophy.

We didn't report one of the more vexing missing items we had discovered at lunch—a bottle of spring water from the fridge. Apparently burglary is thirsty work.

Moral: be careful when you invoke the specter of a "quintessential" New York evening.

I hope those are the sounds of contented deep sleep I'm hearing from the other room. I hope I'm not busted.

We live in a three-floor house. Laura and I occupy the main floor, and we have a neighbor upstairs and one downstairs. The upstairs neighbor and we share a common entrance, since this used to be a single-family dwelling. We often hear him coming home late at night in the entrance hall, right on the other side of our nailed-shut bedroom door (we sleep in what used to be the house's living room), and prowling up the stairs to his apartment. The downstairs neighbor has his own entrance, but we share a common storage area in the basement, a narrow hall that runs the length of the house.

Well, down in that narrow hall is where I've been hiding Laura's present from Santa all week. Santa had me pick it up for him at Home Depot, him being busy with other things and not having much room in the sleigh and all, and asked me to stash it until the big night. I rearranged some boxes and nestled the big blue carton back in a niche, disguised it with some artfully placed bubble-wrap, and then stacked chairs on top and in front of it.

Tonight Laura was feeling tired and a little ill, so I read to her from Watership Down until her eyes grew heavy, and then I lay in bed beside her reading Black House to myself for another hour, until I figured she was good and asleep. Then it was time for Santa's little helper to go to work . . . since Santa had called frantically earlier in the day to report that he'd be just a little too busy to manage the transfer of the big box from the basement to the room we use as the living room.

I can get to the basement three ways: from the basement door out front, from the basement door out back, or from the staircase going down from the entrance hall. Reasoning that it would frighten Charlie, the downstairs neighbor, less if I were heard to be descending the interior stair, that's what I resolved to do. I dressed quietly, slipped my Red Knit Cap of Stealthiness down over my ears, and set out for the basement.

Only trouble was . . . well, when Laura arrived home from work today around 5:30 pm, her first words were, "Put on your coat! I need some help garbage-picking!" A block away, she had passed a nice cupboard with intact glass doors put out at the curb with the garbaage. We beat the other neighbors to it, and wrestled it home. Not sure where else to put it until we strip it, refinish it, and find a real place to put it, Laura insisted on leaving it in the entry hall—blocking the door to the basement stairs.

All right, no problem. I can't believe I didn't wake her up with the noise, but I did manage to wrangle that cupboard out from in front of the door and down the narrow entrance hall far enough to get the door to the stairs open, despite the fact that one of the cupboard doors won't stay closed and swings out with a crash at the most inconvenient moments. Of course, the top of the stairs themselves were blocked, because that's where Laura likes to store such items as her ladder and a folding cart and roughly seventeen square yards of black plastic sheeting.

So I moved enough crap stuff to get down the stairs. At the bottom, I could see light behind Charlie's door. I hoped that meant he was still awake and I wouldn't bother him too much as I moved heavy objects behind his wall.

Well, I got the chairs out of the way and got the big box scooted out into the downstairs hall and was just putting everything back when an only slightly worried-looking Charlie—thin young Asian fellow with spiffy horn-rims—ventured out into the hall. I realized later looking in the mirror how menacing I might have looked, with my Red Knit Cap of Stealthiness pulled down very low (and it should be mentioned that I've been wearing the RKCoS every chance I get, ever since a waiter down at Sanford Diner told me I looked like a rock star—no, that guy from Smash Mouth—no, the Limp Bizkit guy—but you get I'm saying something good, dude).

Fortunately Charlie is not one to confront nightwanderers with a baseball bat or a .38. We had a very pleasant conversation while I stood at the base of the stairs holding this big blue box that contains a 10-inch compound power mitre saw, my love's one true desire, all the while shrugging off the offer of help and worrying that the sounds of our voices through the open door at the top of the stairs would wake my sleeping beauty.

At last, after having invited Charlie to come up for a Christmas toast tomorrow, I hauled my quivering, compound mitre saw–cradling arms up the stairs. I negotiated the stuff crap at the top of the stairs and lugged the box into the living room (the current living room). I arranged the box in the corner with all our other presents on top of it, stuck a tag on the front that Santa had sent 'round labelled "To Laura, From Santa the Pagan Myth" (that jolly old elf sure has a sensayuma!), and added to the tableau as a last touch a 12-pack carton of the Sam Adams winter assortment—two bottles each of six seasonal varieties, including the Winter Lager and the can't-find-'em-separately Old Fezziwig Ale and Cranberry Lambic—that Santa sent over as thanks for helping him out of the mitre saw jam.

(I'm an ex-Mormon. I love having beer under the Christmas tree. Well, under where the tree would be if we had one, anyway. Santa left me to pick up the tab on the mitre saw.)

When I saw myself in the mirror, I quickly swiped the RKCoS from off my head, then I closed all the doors, replaced the cupboard in its stair-blocking position, and sat down at the keyboard to report this all. Now I will have a little Christmas fudge (hey, Santa's not coming to eat it), check that all the Christmas lights are functioning, check the locks, check the locks again, and then retire to bed with my sugarplum.

I hope I'm not busted.

It was a maybe six to eight weeks ago that Rob came back from grabbing some lunch and said, "Guess who was behind me in line for the salad bar at Così."

"Who?" I said.

"Chazz Palminteri."

"No way."

"Yep. He's really tall, too."

Rob came back from lunch a couple of days later and said, "I saw Chazz Palminteri at Così again. And guess who was with him."

"Who?"

"Al Pacino."

"No way!"

"Way. They must be filming a movie around here or something."

But that didn't make sense, because on the set they would have had craft services. I didn't think any more about it, though, until one day the next week. I was returning to the office after getting a gyro from my favorite street vendor, when I saw Chazz Palminteri walking down the street toward me. It was surreal. He was wearing a black beret, a black leather duster, a black scoop-neck T-shirt, and black parachute pants tucked into black army boots. I thought for a minute he was going to offer me a Vanilla Coke, but he just walked past. Probably on his way to Così.

When I got back to the office, I delighted in telling Rob that I had seen Chazz too. (By now we were calling him just Chazz.)

A couple of days later, I walked into Così to get a salad for lunch. Unsurprisingly, Chazz was there, but he wasn't alone. It wasn't Al Pacino with him, though. It was Dominic Chianese.

Of course, I didn't think to myself, "Holy cow, Dominic Chianese is at Così!" I thought to myself, "Holy shit, Uncle Junior is at Così, and he looks like he wants to shoot somebody!"

Rob came into the office one day last week with a copy of that week's New Yorker. (Yes, computer programmers read The New Yorker too.) "Hey, I figured out why Chazz and all those guys were always together. They're all together in this Brecht play."

The play was The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, an allegory on the rise of Hitler that casts him and his cronies in the roles of Chicago gangsters. It was a production of Tony Randall's National Actors' Theater at Pace University. Pace University is down by City Hall, nowhere close to my office, but we figure they must have been rehearsing somewhere in our neighborhood before opening. The cast included not just the three mugs we'd already spotted, but also Billy Crudup, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Charles Durning, Paul Giamatti, William Sadler, and Tony Randall himself.

The play runs through November 10. It was Halloween when Laura and I decided to try to get tickets. Success didn't seem likely, but we figured we'd try. We called Telecharge, and surprise! There were still seats available and while I was purchasing two tickets, our friend Brian (who happened to be over at our place) asked me to get two tickets for him too. We ended up with four seats together.

So last night Laura and I arrived at the theater about forty-five minutes early. We went to the box office to pick up our tickets. The girl in the box office directed us to the will-call table set up around the corner. There were two lines at will call: A-L and M-Z. There was a long line at M-Z. There was no one at A-L. Go figure.

When we reached the head of the line, the helpful fellow behind the table couldn't find any tickets for Shunn. "Did you purchase them through Telecharge?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Okay, you should probably go to the box office then, because they can check your purchase on the computer and print your tickets. I hope."

So we went back to the box office. After waiting in that line, I explained to the girl that our tickets weren't at will call. I gave her my name. She checked a printed list and couldn't find my name on it. "Let me just look you up on the computer," she said.

By now, Laura and I were getting a little nervous. Brian and his boyfriend would be meeting us soon. What would we tell them about this ticket snafu if we couldn't get it sorted out?

The girl swiped my credit card, which brought my ticket purchase record up on the screen. "Um, I'm sorry, but this says you purchased tickets for October 31st."

"No," I said. "I made the purchase on October 31st. We bought tickets for tonight."

"Well, this says your tickets were for October 31st."

"That doesn't make any sense," said Laura. It was already ten at night when we made the purchase. "Why would we buy tickets for October 31st on October 31st? We bought them for tonight."

"I'm sure you did," said the girl, making clear she was sure we hadn't. "We do have seats you can purchase for this evening. I have four free. Would you like to do that?"

"You mean make another purchase?" I said. "What about the ones we already bought?"

"You'll have to call Telecharge to get that straightened out. Meantime, would you like to buy these four tickets?"

I didn't have another four hundred dollars available on my credit card, which is really a debit card, and I told the girl so.

"Well, you're free to call Telecharge now and see what they say." The girl very helpfully (yeah, right) printed us out the records of the original purchases, slid them under the glass, and turned her attention to the next customer.

"Do you have your cell phone?" Laura asked, getting agitated. If we couldn't straighten this out, we were going to have to find a branch of our bank and transfer money from savings.

I just studied the printouts, looking for a clue to what was going on. First thing I saw was that my name was down as WILLIAM CHUNN. The second thing I saw was that the printouts each very clearly said, 2 TICKET(S) FOR WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2002.

In smaller type, further down, the printout said, Sale date: 10/31/2002. The girl at the box office had been looking at the wrong field on her screen.

We got back in line.

"Oh, I'm sorry," said the girl a few minutes later, sounding anything but, when we made it to the head of the line again. "Your tickets will be under this name at will call."

So this time we got in line at A-L, and the helpful man there found our four tickets under CHUNN immediately.

"See, I knew they could straighten it all out at the box office," said Mr. M-Z, smiling. We were just glad we'd arrived at the theater with plenty of spare time for dealing with silly snafus.

As we were leaving the will-call table, Laura suddenly began slapping my arm in excitement, saying something that sounded like, "Laura Shunn! He said hi to me! Laura Shunn!"

"What?" I said. "Who? What are you talking about?" I looked where she was pointing and saw the back of a short man in a blue windbreaker, in line for will-call tickets. "He called you Laura Shunn?"

"No! He's Wallace Shawn! He said hi to me! You know me, I usually can't place people right off, but I saw him and I knew it was Wallace Shawn, so I just said hi, and he said hi back to me, but not like just hi, it was more like hi-i-i-i-i-i in that Wallace Shawn way, you know? Like he knew I knew who he was, and he enjoyed being recognized."

"In-con-theev-able!" I said. (Actually, I didn't say that, but I wish I had.)

"That's so cool," I said, and then the man in the blue windbreaker turned, and yup, it sure was Wallace Shawn.

We found Brian and Neosho outside, and we all settled into our seats for the show. It was a spirited play, delightfully and cleverly staged, and there wasn't an actor who didn't leave teeth marks all over the scenery. Pacino himself must have been dehydrated at the end of the performance, considering how much spit flew from his mouth on every plosive. The incidental music was original to the production, and was composed by Tom Waits, and the first act ended with a song sung by Steve Buscemi. (Buscemi Sings Waits—coming soon to your local record store.)

The strange thing, though, was that Chazz Palminteri's costume looked familiar to me. It wasn't just déjà vu. It was exactly the getup he'd been wearing the day I saw him on the street.

As much fun as the first act had been, the second act dragged, and it was hard to escape the realization that this was not a great production. But much of the play was enjoyable, some of it immensely so, and who could beat all that star-power on one stage?

After the show, the four of us decided to go for a drink. None of us knew any bars in the neighborhood, but across an empty parking lot we could see an Irish pub called the Beekman on the next block south. We beat a path for it.

The bar was only middling crowded, but the manager kindly seated us in the dining area, which was completely empty. When we saw the menu, we all realized we were hungry and decided to order food.

That was when Charles Durning entered with two of the other actors from the play and was seated at the table next to ours.

And that was only the beginning. Dominic Chianese showed up a few minutes later with a tiny entourage, and a couple of other groups of actors wandered in shortly as well. We realized at that point that it was probably inevitable—this was the only open bar in the neighborhood, and if we had found it, no doubt it was the obvious post-show hangout.

Anthony Heald was not in the play, but he was probably in the audience because he and a female companion ate dinner at the table across from ours. John Goodman showed up halfway through dinner, and as he bent to say something to Charles Durning, Laura looked at him and raised her pint of bass. He tossed her a nod and a smile.

By the time we finished eating, the dining area was crowded with gangsters. The only high drama may have taken place at the box office, but it was a thrilling evening nonetheless. It might not have been worth eight hundred dollars, but we certainly got our four hundred dollars' worth.

Too bad Rob is home sick today. I can't wait to tell him all about it.

Yesterday, as you may know, we had a veritable blizzard here. The storm dumped 25 inches of snow in Queens, most of it in our back yard.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) it was a federal holiday, so neither Laura nor I had to work. However we did go into the city, despite Mayor Bloomberg telling us not to. We left the house at about 2:30 in the afternoon.

Laura had originally intended to go to a Pilates class, but she had called the studio and it was closed. So she planned to spend the afternoon bumming around with her friend Shana. I had been planning on Indian food and a movie with my friends Bob and Ken for several days, and in fact had purchased tickets for us days earlier. I carried my laptop slung over my shoulder in its handy nylon carrying-case, intending to camp out in an East Village Starbucks and work on a story until time to meet Bob and Ken at Baluchi's at 6:30.

We had nearly two feet in our backyard by this time. Laura and I had each taken a turn shoveling the front steps and walk earlier that day (she, heroically, went first), and getting to the N/W station was quite a hike. Going over the snowdrifts at each corner, I felt like Edmund Hillary. As we schussed along, we made fun of the people trying to dig their cars out of the snowbanks. I guess they were eager to play demolition derby with the snowplows.

We knew the W wasn't running in parts of Brooklyn, but weren't sure how often it was running in our neighborhood. As luck would have it, we arrived just in time to catch a W with no wait. The heaters weren't running in our car. We could see our breath as we rolled along. Laura got up to look out the windows at blizzard-struck Long Island City, but from the elevated tracks it didn't look much different than usual.

We made it to Union Square at about 3:15. We went west on 16th Street, walking in the street because it was easier than on the sidewalks. When we reached a clear enough stretch, we returned to the sidewalk, and Laura shoved me not quite hard enough to put me in a snowdrift. I think this was because she was frustrated that she didn't get a chance to make fun of me for being too tightassed to walk in the street.

Unfortunately, the snow was too powdery to pack into a good snowball.

We got cash at the Citibank around the corner on Fifth Avenue, then continued our traipse south. Fifth Avenue is good to walk along in a blizzard on account of all the doorman buildings. The sidewalks were wide and mostly clear. We split up at 8th Street; Laura went west to the West Village to meet Shana, while I went east in search of food and coffee.

I hadn't eaten since breakfast and I had a bit of a headache. I thought I'd grab a light salad somewhere so as not to spoil dinner, then ensconce myself at a Starbucks for the long haul. But none of the places I had in mind seemed to be open. By the time I reached Broadway, I was cranky enough to turn into Sbarro and order two slices of pizza—one sausage, one super veggie pan—and a Pepsi. I read Ken MacLeod as I scarfed down every bite.

Time now for Starbucks! I kept west on 8th Street to Lafayette. There's a Starbucks there between 8th Street and Astor Place, one of about five that are all nearly within eyeshot in a few square blocks. But I could see from the north side of the street that the Starbucks was closed, so I kept going across Lafayette.

There's another Starbucks about thirty seconds away on a normal day, on the northwest corner of Third and 8th. But that one was closed too, and I started to have a bad feeling about my chances of finding an open Starbucks.

At this point, I plowed up Third Avenue to 11th Street, skirting a snowball fight in progress (concerned about my laptop being hit), where I picked up the movie tickets at the Loews theater. Then I crossed east to Second Avenue and started south again. Before I'd reached the Starbucks at Second and 9th, I could see that it too was closed. In fact, there was a hand-lettered sign on the door of this one:

WE WILL CLOSE TODAY AT 10:00 AM BECAUSE OF THE WEATHER.  ALL SHOPS ARE CLOSED.

"Pussies," I muttered. If I could lug my damn laptop all the way from Astoria to the East Village, the least these fuckers could do was to show up for work. I would have jumped up and down and thrown a tantrum if it weren't for a) all the pedestrians around, b) the heavy laptop over my shoulder, and c) the slick pavement underfoot. Instead, I continued south in search of a place to set up camp with my laptop and a cup of coffee.

First candidate was Veselka, but though it wasn't crowded I wasn't sure how thrilled they'd be to have me sitting there for two and a half hours nursing a cup of coffee. Didn't seem like a good atmosphere for writing, either, so I kept going (warily skirting a game of touch football in the street this time). Soon I passed Baluchi's, where I was to meet Bob and Ken for dinner, and out of morbid curiosity I tried the door. It was locked. So much for that plan. I kept walking.

Cooper Diner at 5th Street was pretty crowded, but then I spied a place I'd never seen before—A Salt & Battery, a little fish & chips shop between 4th and 5th, with several tables and shiny metal counters along the walls. There were only three customers inside. I went in.

By now it was about 4:00. Intellectually, I didn't really want more to eat so soon after two slices, but I did want a nice, clean, uncrowded place to camp out, and there was a part of me way back in my animal brain suggesting pretty insistently that, as hard as it was snowing out, I really should load up on as much as I could eat in case the next mammoth didn't happen along for another moon.

So I ordered a small cod & chips, plus a large can of Boddington's, and I retired with my spoils to the counter by the window.

I got some good work done on my untitled missionaries-in-space story, and I pretty much demolished my basket of food. A top-40 radio station from London was playing overhead, so I missed the ring when Bob called to cancel. I felt the vibration when his voicemail arrived, though, and soon learned that the Q train was suspended in his neck of Brooklyn. I called Ken then and verified that he was stuck in Brooklyn too. So I called Laura, to see if she and Shana were interested in seeing The Quiet American at 8:15.

Turns out they had just left One & One, and fish & chips joint at First and 1st. The bar there was open but not the kitchen, the waitstaff having not showed up, so they were walking up to Telephone Bar. I packed up my laptop and hurried there, feeling vaguely pleased with myself for having foraged myself plenty of food despite the cancellation of dinner.

Telephone Bar is on Second between 9th and 10th, and I got there first, around 5:45. I got there soon enough, in fact, to lie in wait behind the one of the red British-style telephone booths out front with a loosely packed snowball in hand. When Laura and Shana walked by—coming from uptown because they'd walked too far on First—I lobbed the snowball right onto the front of Laura's coat. "Hey, asshole," said Shana, then saw it was me.

The place was not crowded. Laura and Shana each ordered a pint of Guinness and a fish & chips. I ordered a midnight cocktail—Guinness and port, not a mistake I'll make again—and let the waiter convince me to order a Pacific shore salad, which he promised was light and which turned out to be shredded cabbage and seaweed garnished with scallops, shrimp, and mussels. It tasted a lot like cole slaw, but infinitely better, and I ended up eating most of it . . . plus some of Laura and Shana's fish.

Laura and Shana were drooling over the waiter, a tall, strapping fellow who looked and sounded a little like Clive Owen. I said they probably had a pretty good shot with him, since from what I'd ordered he probably assumed I was the gay friend. Next time he came round, I ordered a pint of unadulterated Guinness.

At 7:30 we headed over to the theater. Still in caveman mode, I bought a pound and a quarter of that serve-yourself candy in the plastic bins. I discovered that candy by the pound is very expensive.

The movie was excellent. Afterward Laura and I bid goodnight to Shana and got on the subway at Union Square. We were home by shortly after eleven, whereupon I commenced shoveling the front steps yet again. I'd only been at it for a few minutes, though, when three fellows speaking Spanish wandered up the sidewalk. One of them asked me if he could borrow the snow shovel for two seconds. I handed it over, the caveman inside only belated wondering if he meant to bash me over the head with it and drag my woman off into the blizzard.

Instead, he started shoveling snow while one of his friends took pictures. After a bit they traded off, until all three had shoveled and been photographed. Then the first had his picture taken with me on the front steps of the house, and off they strolled down the street to take pictures of each other standing the back of someone's mostly buried pickup truck. Most of my shoveling had been done for me.

This morning I woke up and went out front to sweep the night's skiff of snow off the front steps. Then I walked up and down the street taking pictures. As I stepped back onto the sidewalk, an older gentlemen with a pencil-line mustache, looking and sounding a lot like Jerry Stiller, stopped and said, "You must come from Florida."

No, I said, I was from Utah but my parents would still be keen on seeing pictures of the blizzard.

"You should-a seen when I was a kid," he said. "It was like this every winter. You could-na seen across the street, just the swoosh when the plow went by. We're spurled nowadays, lemme tell you. But you know, this snow is good. Cleanses all the bacteria out of the air. Not enough we hafta fight those Ay-rabs, those Muslims, now we got the Koreans to worry about. This snow's good. You take care now, kid!"

He clapped me on the shoulder and off he went.

It's eighteen days since the burglary, and I've only just now finished writing out my account of the event for our insurance claim. Boy, does my hand hurt. They wanted detail. I gave them detail.

I'll try to hit the highlights, and I'll try to make it a more colorful account than the one in the insurance report.

Laura called me at the office at 3:45 that fateful Friday to tell me that our upstairs neighbor Jason had called her from his cell phone to say there'd been a break-in. I left the office immediately and got on the subway. I had a book in my bag, but I couldn't read. I was consumed with a sick anticipation of what might be missing. My laptop, surely. Stereo components? Possibly. What else? I didn't care what else. I just hoped the mess wasn't too bad.

When I changed trains, I realized that I didn't want to think any longer. I want to read about violent things happening to bad people. Fortunately, the book in my bag was Hard Freeze by Dan Simmons, and he and his antihero Joe Kurtz cheerfully obliged me for the next segment of the trip.

Thirty minutes after leaving the office, I reached the house. Jason was standing in the street outside with a police officer. I joined them. Jason had not yet been inside. He had been coming home from class when he saw the front door open and a panel missing from the bottom of the solid-wood inner front door. Through the hole left by the kicked-in panel, he could see that the door to my and Laura's apartment was open. Rather than going in, he called Laura's cell phone, then called the police.

The officer with him had not been responding to the call. Jason had simply flagged him down as he drove past, since no one else had showed up yet. Two more officers showed up within the next few minutes, and the three of them went inside the house with their hands on their guns, to be sure the place was empty. It was.

Going inside, I inspected the panel that had been removed from the inner front door. The trim from around the panel had been pried off and stacked neatly to one side, along with the panel itself, which had split lengthwise. Every police officer I spoke to that day put this down to the work of crack addicts, lying down in the tiny vestibule out of sight of people passing in the street. They all used that phrase exactly—"crack addicts." By the end of the day, it started to sound like "boogeymen," or "weapons of mass destruction." Scary, meaningless phonemes.

Inside the house, the door to our apartment had been kicked open. My office was in disarray with items from the desk strewn around the floor. I saw immediately that the laptop was gone. I'd been right about that. I also registered the absence of Laura's Palm V, which she hasn't carried with her for several months, from its cradle.

In the bedroom the mess was worse. Every drawer of every dresser had been opened. Much of the contents had been laid out on the floor. Her jewelry chest had been dismantled and the small drawers were all laid out neatly on the bed. Not being familiar enough with the jewelry, I couldn't say immediately what might be gone.

In the living room and kitchen, every cabinet had been opened but nothing appeared to be missing.

The door from the entry hall to the basement was open, and downstairs the door to our neighbor Charlie's apartment had also been forced open. I could see a mess inside, but didn't go inside.

The upstairs apartment was intact, perhaps thanks to Duke, the dachshund who lives there and barks whenever someone opens the front door.

Jason's roommate Chris showed up before long, and Laura wasn't far behind. Shana accompanied her home from the office and stuck around for the next couple of hours, for which Laura and I both were grateful. Laura, agitated, went in to have a look around. She emerged from the house with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Johnnie Walker Blue Label in the other.

To the assembled residents and police officers she announced, "Well, thank God they didn't get the good scotch!"

Laura told me it looked like the modem was missing. I gave a statement to one of the investigating officers, reporting the laptop, Palm, and modem as stolen. Then the police left and we sat around to wait for the evidence team to arrive.

Meantime, I found the modem. It hadn't been taken; it had simply been knocked behind the desk. The connections were still intact, so I booted up, sent some email, and made a brief LiveJournal post. Laura called the bank to cancel our accounts, because there might have been information about them on the Palm.

Around 8:00 two officers, a man and a woman, showed up to dust for prints. They came up with nothing, although Laura learned a lot about printing from the female officer, and I learned a lot about burglary prevention and how it's only a game of holding them off long enough, not stopping them, from the male. After they were gone, we started cleaning up.

The cleanup actually went quickly, unlike the time this happened to Laura in the East Village. The burglars had not trashed the place. They had removed a lot of items from their proper places, but had done so fairly purposefully and methodically. We had everything straightened up in half an hour or so. (Is it right to be thankful for disciplined burglars?)

In the course of this, I found an opaque blue plastic shopping bag lying in the middle of the office floor. Inside was a couple hundred bucks in change, a pair of headphones, and Laura's Palm. It looked as if the burglars had thrown these items into a bag they found in the kitchen, then set it down or dropped it and forgotten as they left.

Sadly, the laptop didn't turn up, and Laura was also able to catalogue her missing jewelry. Five or six pieces, all sentimental.

Our friends Stephanie and Andrew, who lived in the apartment before us, brought us dinner that night. They also very generously watched the place the next day, devoid of locks as it was, while we went into the city to deal with the bank accounts.

We managed to get a bunch of new locks installed fairly quickly, but we're still working out more of the physical repairs to the house. We're also trying to get the insurance all squared away. Fortunately we have renters insurance this time, and we'll probably be able to replace the laptop. But who knows about the jewelry? Probably not.

The more difficult thing is replacing our sense of security at home. The new locks and other measures help, but Jesus—burglars at one end of the spectrum, terrorists at the other. It's enough to make you want to kick a panel out of reality's door and wriggle through.

Bear with me a minute or two. This takes some explaining.

Back in 1994, I wrote a story I called "L.A. by Night," about a software developer who has volunteered to be a guinea pig in an experiment about tracking parolees via implanted devices that let the monitoring AI see and hear what he sees and hears. The story was about the havoc this wreaks on his marriage, and on the unlikely (and unwelcome) protectiveness the AI comes to feel toward him.

The story wasn't all that great, and I had no luck with the first couple of submissions. A year later, having moved briefly to Seattle, I hit on an image that seemed to embody for me the central metaphor of the narrative and which I thought might jumpstart the story. I rewrote the story as "The Sweet Scent of Night-Blooming Jasmine" and sent it off to Scott Edelman at Science Fiction Age.

Scott liked it a lot, but ultimately rejected it because he thought Age readers might not be able to look past the prurience of the story to what it was really about. "I'll probably live to regret this," I remember him writing in his rejection.

Years passed—seven, to be precise. Sometime last year I read the story aloud to Laura, as I do now with everything I've either newly completed or am contemplating revisiting. She didn't read much in the way of science fiction before we met, but she seems to have a literary sensibility that's extraordinarily attuned to what I'm trying to accomplish. Moreover, she's almost unerring in her ability to judge that a particular piece is ready to go to a particular market. (With stories she doesn't like, this ability is diminished—she hated "The Practical Ramifications of Interstellar Packet Loss," for example—but when she likes a story, she's really on, and her enthusiasm is uncontainable and contagious.)

So I read "Jasmine" aloud to Laura, and she found it pleasant and charming, though nothing to write home about. Rereading the thing myself, I came to feel that the prurient elements were indeed unnecessary, and that the story would work better without the almost-adulterous episode that opened it. But the story still needed something else, and I didn't immediately know what that was.

It was last month, while I for some reason couldn't quite bring myself to tackle revisions on my Varley pastiche "Inclination," that I thought to look at "Jasmine" again. Why not? I've been having good luck this year with ancient trunk stories revisited—two of them should run in the next two issues of Realms of Fantasy, and one is out now in the current Electric Velocipede. As I thought about the story over the next couple of days, the solution came to me. I'd let the AI itself narrate the story, and I'd make the protagonist one of seven participants in the parolee experiment. Only now, the experiment would be more like an unholy marriage between blogging and reality TV—subscribers could tune in at will to their favorite participants, and experience all the same sensations in realtime.

The work went very slowly for the first week or so. I found that I'd essentially be starting over, and throwing out almost every sentence that had come before. I only managed to slog through two or three pages in the first half-hearted sessions. But over the long weekend just past, things started to come together. The pace of the work accelerated, and in fact on Sunday I wrote well over half the eventual wordage in one marathon session that followed a two-hour bike ride out to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. I put the finishing touches on it Monday morning before work.

That evening, I read this new story, "Observations from the City of Angels," aloud to Laura at the kitchen table, marking typos and making small revision notes in the margins as I went. About two-thirds in, Laura burst out, "I see this as a movie!" Her final verdict was extremely positive, and her only suggestion—a directive, actually—was that I change what the wife is wearing during the last scenes from baggy to tight jeans. "Fix that and send it to Ellen tomorrow," she said.

I had submitted a story to Ellen Datlow at Sci Fiction (to whom Laura referred) just a couple of weeks before, however, and hadn't heard back yet, so yesterday morning on the bike ride to work I was idly wondering where else I might send it in the meantime. Not Asimov's yet—that would take too long—do that after Sci Fiction. . . .

I'm not sure exactly where the idea came from, but by the time I reached the office I was raring to check the submission guidelines for Salon. Hey, Cory Doctorow pulled off the unlikely feat of selling them two near-future 'Net-centric stories in the past year. What did I have to lose?

I dashed off a note to Cory asking what editor to approach. He replied quickly and generously, and I labored a bit longer over my query email, sending it over to Laura for her to vet. The editor responded to the query very quickly, inviting me to submit the story. I converted my WordPerfect file to Word format, cleaned up the formatting, and emailed the attachment at 4:15 pm.

The acceptance came back sixty-two minutes later. I didn't get anything done the rest of the day. I walked around in a daze, hands shaking.

My agent has just finished negotiating the contract, so it looks like we're in business. I hope to sign the thing and fax it back this afternoon. I just hope Scott doesn't regret making the decision he did about the earlier version. I sure as hell don't hold a grudge.

Looking back over the past few years, I'm astonished at some of the things I've accomplished. I don't need to enumerate them here (although it would be fun), but I will point out that I now ride my bicycle to work once or twice a week, over the Queensborough Bridge and through Manhattan traffic. For anyone who knows me well, this intelligence should astound. And that's only one small astonishment among many.

As I attempt to apprehend the responsible party, one culprit stands out by far: belief. I'm not talking talking about belief in myself. I've always had that, even at the darkest times when it was squashed out of shape and jammed deep into a locked box hidden out of sight in a secret chamber of my heart. No, what I'm talking about here is the belief of one person in another when the two share space and lives.

Like ether, that fabled invisible McGuffin of 19th century science, facilitated the transmission of electromagnetic radiation through what otherwise appeared to be vacuum, so does belief facititate the transmission of ability toward accomplishment. Never mind that the Michelson-Morley experiment drove the first nail into ether's coffin over a hundred years ago. I have demonstrated to my own satisfaction the efficacy of belief.

Its effects stand out most clearly when viewed side-by-side with the results of a control culture from which it is absent. For me, this was the period from mid-1995 to early 1998 when I lived with another writer, Genevieve. Our apartment was an environment singularly and utterly devoid of belief. Once, I ventured the opinion that perhaps someday she might support us with a job while I stayed home and pursued my writing career. After some thought, Genevieve allowed as how that might possibly work—so long as she retained the power of approval and oversight of the projects I undertook. It shouldn't surprise you that I didn't manage to sell a single piece of writing during that period.

Come to think of it, I don't recall that she did, either.

Contrast that with the past five years, wherein my writing career has slowly gathered steam and seems to be continuing to accelerate. I haven't accomplished all the goals I had for that period, true, but I've reached many of them, and some startling and pleasant surprises have popped up along the way too. Things are looking better now than they ever have.

So thank you, Laura, for bringing your belief to our relationship. I might have been able to do all this on my own, but it surely would have taken longer, and it wouldn't have been as satisfying. I used to roll my eyes at books dedicated to the ones who make "everything possible," but I don't any longer. My only hope is that my belief in you will prove just as nourishing, and that you'll astonish yourself too.

You should have seen me swell with pride hearing through the back window last night as you played "Sunshine of Your Love" on the electric bass. Keep it up.

Boy, did I have a memorable birthday yesterday. Really, I'm glad everyone turned out to celebrate, but I didn't mean for us all to take over the Queensborough Bridge like that....

I was at work in Manhattan when the lights went out. It was an odd thing—they didn't snap off so much as slowly give up the ghost, occasionally reviving a bit, over the course of two or three minutes. I tried urging my officemates to leave almost immediately, but we dithered so much as a committee that we didn't pick our way down the fire stairs (pitch dark at some landings) until more than half an hour later. Our phone system relied on office electricity, and none of us could get a call out on our cell phones.

I work at Park and 32nd. I bent my course straight downtown to Union Square (Park and 17th, more or less), where Laura and I have arranged to meet in case of emergency. I walked with two officemates, one of whom was listening to a portable radio with headphones and issuing such reports as that power was out all the way to Ohio and Ottawa. A little disconcerting.

Laura was waiting at our prearranged spot, bless her soul, and the two of us walked across to 2nd Avenue and then uptown. At first we were salmon—everyone seemed to be coming downtown. Some businesses were giving out water (though Laura and I had both filled bottles before leaving). Around 35th or 36th, we bought very soft ice cream cones from Baskin-Robbins.

At first, there was almost a festive atmosphere. People were gradually spilling into the streets, and vehicular traffic was gradually disappearing. Whether this was because of foot traffic or because the police were blocking off streets, I don't know. But when we crested the rise at 45th Street and looked uptown, the sight was amazing. Second Avenue was filled with a sea of people, as far uptown as we could see. Occasional cars and buses made their way down the street, but mostly it was a pedestrian game. The bars along the street were full and spilling out onto the pavement, and men in shirts and ties were ambling down the street with open 40s of Bud in their hands.

Laura suggested stopping for beer, but I pointed out that the temperature was in the 90s and it would taste real cold and good until we started walking again and found we were dehydrated.

When we got to 58th, we realized that people weren't just using the pedestrian walkway on the Queensborough Bridge to get across to Queens. People were walking onto the roadways, along with the cars. We decided we may as well take the upper roadway—when would we ever get a chance to walk across the bridge like this again?

Before long we decided this had been a mistake, but it seemed like a worse idea to try to turn around and go back down the onramp. For the first quarter mile or so of the bridge, the cars were putting along in both eastbound lanes. Further along, though, the pedestrians had basically forced all the traffic into the left lane, and by the time we reached the midpoint of the bridge the pedestrians had taken over both lanes. If I looked back, I could see the cars still moving along, more slowly than the pedestrians.

Unfortunately, by this time most of the people were wearing out and getting more short-tempered. I felt like a grain of dust in the air of a wheat silo—one spark and we could all explode. The trek down the far side of the bridge was pretty tense, but the tension dissipated as we curved down the offramp to 21st Street in Queens.

From there it was just a long slog north. I've just looked up the figures on Mapquest, and in all it would appear that we each walked over six miles. We were both wearing sandals, though Laura was far more used to hers than I was to mine. The last mile and a half was brutal, with the thong digging between my first two toes. But at 7 pm we arrived home and blessedly kicked off our shoes. My feet were numb.

(Note to self: Next time there's a disaster, wear comfortable walking shoes.)

Our power was off in Astoria, of course, but the water and beer in the fridge were all still sufficiently cool and stayed that way throughout the evening. I unplugged all the appliances and electronics. I got a call from our friends Andrew and Stephanie, with whom we had planned to go out for dinner that evening for my birthday. Andrew had just arrived home after his long walk. We decided we would regroup for dinner another day.

All the residents of the house (an apartment on each of three floors) eventually congregated in the back yard, and eventually Laura defrosted some steaks from the freezer by sealing them in Zip-Loc bags and floating them in a sink full of hot water. In darkness, with stars overhead, beers in our hands, and a battery-powered boombox tuned to WNYC, I cooked four steaks on the propane grill out back, which we ate on the patio with Jason from upstairs and his girlfriend Kristin, who contibuted a green salad.

Laura, Jason and Kristin cleaned up, insisting that I, the birthday boy, stay out back and relax. I put the cover back on the grill, then was surprised by a procession from the house led by a Hostess Cupcake with a candle stuck in it. I endured the inevitable birthday song and blew out the candle successfully, a feat eerily reminiscent of the afternoon's events. Then we each ate a cupcake.

We retired by eleven, and fell asleep to the strains of the Mister Softee truck idling in the street outside, doing brisk business.

This morning our power is back on. I'm not getting a TV signal, not even enough of one to set the time on the cable box, though our Internet connection seems to be fine (strange, because it's on the same cable as the TV). The subways are still out of commission, though the bus routes that aren't feeder lines to the subways are running. They're telling us on the radio not to go into the city if we can help it, and we're only too happy to comply. In fact, I think I'll go now and crawl back into bed.

It didn't actually turn into a riot two weeks ago at Iridium, but it looked like it might for a few minutes there.

The first indication of trouble came early, though we didn't recognize it as such as the time. My brother Lee and his wife were in town from Stanford. They wanted to see a jazz show while they were here, so we made reservations to see saxophonist Lee Konitz play at Iridium. The evening was part of a week-long stand at Iridium in celebration of Konitz's 76th birthday. (Konitz was playing in Miles Davis's nonet way back in 1949, so it's not a small matter that he's still around and blowing.) Lee and Emily specifically wanted to see the Iridium show because guitarist Bill Frisell was playing with Konitz, and they're both huge Frisell fans. Rounding out the quartet would be Gary Peacock (perhaps best known for his work in Keith Jarrett's old trio) on bass and Paul Motian (who played in the Bill Evans Trio in the '60s) on drums.

However, there was an extra enticement to the Tuesday night shows. The Iridium web site proudly trumpeted that, for one night only, the set would feature SPECIAL GUEST ELVIS COSTELLO. We were quite happy to be able to secure three reservations for the first set of the evening.

Doors would open at 6:30, so I arrived at Broadway and 51st nice and early to queue up to secure a good table. I was fourth in line outside Iridium, in fact. A portly, hale fellow arrived shortly after me, and the line was not much longer when Lee and Emily got there and butted in line with me.

While we caught up, a forest green BMW sedan with smoked-glass windows idled at the curb. Once or twice it drove off, only to return a few minutes later, apparently having circled the block. The guy behind us in line pointed it out and said, "That's Elvis Costello's car."

"How do you know?" asked Lee.

"I'm a huge fan. Been to a *lot* of shows, hung out, you know."

Suddenly Elvis Costello himself was walking from the car to the front door of Iridium. Lee and Emily were looking the wrong way so I tapped their arms and nodded, trying not to be too obvious about the celebrity-spotting. Elvis looked fit in a muted plaid coat and his trademark horn-rims.

He also looked somehow pained, distressed.

He peeked inside the door of the club, looked around, said something—and then, rather than going inside, closed the door, spoke for a moment to the two women at the head of the line, then got back in his car.

The Beemer disappeared in the chilly night.

The woman said something to the guy ahead of me, who turned around to me and my brother and sister-in-law. "Apparently he's unhappy with the way the show was advertised," said the guy. "He says he was only supposed to do two songs."

I shrugged. I didn't figure Elvis Costello was supposed to be the focus of the set, but I could see why he didn't like the advertising. I passed the word to the guy behind us. The message continued Telephone-like down the queue, which was still less than a dozen people long.

We shivered in the cold for close to forty-five minutes more before being admitted to the club. By then the queue stretched all the way past Ellen's Stardust Diner.

From what happened later that evening, I must surmise that Elvis's message didn't filter back to the newcomers. Hell, even those of us who heard it didn't read the subtext entirely correctly.

The doors opened at six-thirty, as promised. After a check of our names on the reservation list, we descended a narrow stair to the basement and were shown to a table with seats right at the corner of the tiny stage. This was a long banquet-style table; three or four had been set up in rows perpendicular to the front of the stage. We were seated right down front. Lee and Emily were on the outside, looking straight onto the stage. I was seated on the inside, so that I had to turn my head or sit sideways to look at even the left side of the stage. I practically had to break my neck to see stage right.

I also practically had to break my legs to get out of my seat to visit the men's room, the patrons were packed so close together down each row. The back part of the club, filled with little round tables, was just a crowded. I doubt Iridium gets that full even on Monday nights when Les Paul plays.

We placed our dinner orders and rubbernecked as Bill Frisell sloped through the crowd on his way to the backstage door, looking relaxed, low-key, and a little befuddled. I sipped a nice Balvenie 12-year double wood with my burger, and was still nursing it when the show began.

Lee Konitz at 76 is a portly fireplug who looks a little like Colonel Sanders cast as a Fisher-Price toy. He plays with his alto extended to the limit of its leash, in front of his stomach. Bill Frisell, 52 (whose face I practically had to look straight up to see), is fuzz-haired, bespectacled, and mild-looking, and seems awkward even as he cranks out his strangely angular and distinctive electric licks. Gary Peacock, 68, is gaunt, wiry, and weathered; put a cowboy hat on his head and he wouldn't look out of place in his hometown of Burley, Idaho. His eyes are so hooded that when he closes them while he plays you're hard-pressed to tell he isn't blind. Sitting in for Paul Motian (who, Konitz mentioned in the space between the set's two long improvisations, was out getting his "metronome" adjusted) was avant-garde drummer Matt Wilson, 39, who wouldn't look out of place behind the kit for a jam band like String Cheese Incident.

The set was jazz in a defiantly free mode. Konitz and Frisell didn't play leads so much as trade cryptic lines, as if taking turns talking to each other about two entirely different subjects. Two or three times I recognized a snippet of some standard melody in Konitz's parts, as if in the course of throwing shirts out of his closet he occasionally came across one emblazoned with a commercial logo. As much as I enjoyed the set, I felt myself drifting sometimes, particularly during the first half, and I sort of halfway understood what they were doing onstage, and had even come expecting it. I had the sense that large portions of the audience were simply baffled.

The second half of the set meandered around before settling into a startlingly funky (if low-key) groove that Peacock and Wilson somehow plucked out of the swirling oil-and-water tones of the lead instruments. The rhythm section's joy was palpable; Peacock in particular looked like one of the Happy Haunts from Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. The mother was having one hell of a good time.

At last the jam came in for a landing (as did the Chimay that followed up my whisky), and the musicians accepted their applause and filed through the backstage door. The lights came up, and we kept applauding, all anticipating the band's return accompanied by Elvis Costello.

Minutes went by. The band didn't return. The crowd murmured.

We gradually became aware of an escalating commotion at one of the first round tables, near the middle of the club. Someone yelled something sharp and angry. We turned our heads, thinking some table had gotten a little carried away with their joking.

No. It was obviously club management, flanked by some muscle, trying to calm down a table of angry patrons. "That's not what was advertised!" yelled one man. "You *knew* he wasn't going on, and you didn't say anything before the show!"

More yelling, back and forth, as the crowd's murmur turned ugly. Granted, I'm quick to jump to the conclusion that a situation like that one is going to turn violent, but that's how the atmosphere felt. I was acutely conscious that I had a brother and his three-months-pregnant wife under my care (as my out-of-town guests, you know). I was trying to figure out what the best exit would be (answer: none, as I had already determined when scouting the fire exits as we first took our seats) when the yelling man stalked his way to the front exit.

"Demand your money back!" he adjured the crowd as he crossed the room. "They knew he wasn't performing and they didn't say a word!"

Then the room dissolved in cacophony. Everyone was trying to attract his waitperson to get the music charge removed from his bill. At our table, everyone near us was asking each other whether they were here to see Lee Konitz or Elvis Costello, as if to reassure ourselves of our superior jazz cred. It looked to me as if most of the rest of the room had trucked themselves in from Jersey on the promise of an intimate club gig with Declan MacManus himself. They weren't happy to have been rooked.

People were moving around in places where they didn't need to be. Over my sister-in-law's shoulder I watched some guy with a droopy black mustache and long black hair shouting down into Lee Konitz's face. "You tell that motherfucker he'll never play in this town again!" he shouted, punctuating his words with finger jabs in the old man's chest.

"Tell him yourself. The door's right there," said Konitz calmly.

"I just will!" shouted the man, and tore through the backstage door.

I thought he was referring to Elvis Costello, but my brother Lee heard more of the exchange and reports that they were talking about Gary Peacock.

Similar confrontations seemed to be taking place around the room, though none came to blows. While the three of us dithered about whether or not to pay our bill, whether or not to stick around or just get out, the manager finally made an announcement about how people could see their waitperson to get the music charge removed from their bills, and how there would be passes available at the exit which would be good for free admission to any show Tuesdays through Thursdays. He didn't apologize for the advertising, nor for the lack of a pre-show announcement.

The crowd members who were through with their waiters began struggling toward the exit, many of them grumbling about how passes for a free jazz show were worthless to them. Lee and Emily and I paid our full bill and joined the queue that was forming to talk to the manager and (we thought) get our free passes.

The manager, a 20-some Brit with a shiny pale suit and suspect good looks, was hearing petitions right next to the exit to the stairs up to the street. When our turn was almost up, a livid Gary Peacock suddenly appeared from the stairwell, pushing himself up in the manager's face.

I don't recall a lot of what was said, but it included Peacock inviting the manager out to the alley behind the club to settle this right now.

"Look, mate, I'm dealing with a lot of angry customers right now, thank you very much," said the manager. "When that's taken care of, fuck yeah, any time, any place, I'll meet you."

I thought Peacock was going to pop the manager one right there, but another club employee appeared to usher him toward the bar, not without some resistance.

When our turn with the manager came, we asked for our passes. "I'm just reversing credit card charges here," said the manager. "You can get the passes upstairs as you leave. We've got a lot of good shows coming up. Ahmad Jamal. McCoy Tyner. Jack-o Pastorius. Plenty."

"Jaco?" I said incredulously. I couldn't believe what I'd just heard. I wondered if the manager were deliberately fucking with me, to see whether I was a real jazz aficianado or just philistine VH1-addicted clubtrash.

"Yeah, Jack-o."

"You mean, the dead musician," said my brother Lee.

"It's a tribute band," said the manager, sneering like we'd soiled his spats.

"All right, whatever," I said, and we headed up the stairs.

Sadly, Lee and I had to go back down in the melee to retrieve our coats from the coat check. And then Lee had to go down again to look for a lost glove. Which he found. But we all made it out alive—no thanks to Iridium, who advertised the show so crassly, nor to the bulk of the audience, who were too ignorant even to reason out what the words "Special Guest" mean in the context of a jazz show.

Turns out, as I learned later that week from the New York Times, Elvis Costello was supposed to bring out a birthday cake for Lee Konitz at set's end and sing "Someone Took the Words Away" from his new album North. Apparently Gary Peacock didn't want to play backup for that and an argument during soundcheck resulted in Elvis walking out.

If he'd just come out and told us that in the first place. Jesus, these sensitive artist types.

For less dramatic reportage of the fateful Iridium show, see this NY Times review:

A $400 Cake Wasn't Served, but the Band Played On

(Free registration required to view story.)

My attendance here has been rather spotty lately. I was derailed from this and many other activities early last week by an unexpected hospital stay.

I was sitting at my desk at work on Monday the 7th, minding my own business, when mild chest pains set in. This was soon followed by shortness of breath, lightheadedness, and dizziness. Finally, when I felt what may or may not have been phantom pains in my left arm, I hauled my butt out of my chair and made a couple of coworkers take me to the nearest emergency room. This happened to be the NYU Medical Center on First Avenue.

The triage nurse whisked me quickly to a bed in ER, past the fifty or so other people crowding the intake area—even past the woman who was writhing on the floor in the throes of a kidney stone attack. Minutes later I was berobed and hooked up to a saline IV and electrocardiograph.

My office manager Joe was meanwhile phoning Laura, who happened to be in a cab just pulling away from the Diane von Furstenberg studio on West 12th Street near Washington, almost a river-to-river trip away. She's been working part-time with the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and was at the studio helping prepare an opening for two days later of an exhibit of some of the prize-winning artwork from this year's competition. She told the cabbie there was a change of plan and directed him to the hospital.

It was a godsend to see Laura appear in the ER. The only worry I really had was how worried she would be about me, and how inconvenient my illness had to be coming as it did at the start of her busiest work week of the year. She left me her copy of Family Circle—which drew sniggers from at least one nurse—so I would have something, anything, to read while she ran home to walk the dog. When she returned and sweet-talked the security guard into letting her visit me again, she had brought me a collection of Michael Bishop stories, which helped partially restore my sense of manliness. It was also a far more effective salve than Family Circle for the fact that I was only 40 pages away from finally finishing Cryptonomicon—and Cryptonomicon was sitting in my shoulder bag back at the office.

The long and short of it was, I was admitted to the hospital and held there for nearly 24 hours while being subjected to every non-invasiave cardiac test known to man, and a few that I suspects the residents just made up for the fun of it. (Let me remark briefly on the bewildering array of doctors and technicians to whom one must rehearse one's case history when one is incarcerated in a teaching hospital. Let me remark also upon the bewildering percentage of said doctors and technicians who are, pardon the phrase, cute girls. Let me remark also upon the fact that one thinks the tall, leggy, blonde sonagram tech-in-training who runs six miles a day and got out of advertising after seven years because it was too stifling might possibly have been flirting with one. At any rate.) The final determination was that not only had I not suffered a heart attack but that my heart, cholesterol, and blood pressure were all in altogether fine and healthy condition.

I was released late Tuesday afternoon with my affliction still undiagnosed. Let me remark briefly here on the sharklike feeding frenzy that is departing patients vying for cabs outside the NYU Medical Center. It's even worse than the spectacle of the gray-haired children of privilege who feel entitled to all the cabs outside Lincoln Center after the opera lets out, regardless of who might have had his hand out first. After having three cabs kited out from under me, I decided to walk to Third Avenue to catch a ride uptown rather than suffer a really coronary thrombosis under the hospital's front awning.

The puppy was beside herself to see me back home.

I still don't know what the problem was, but I am following up with my personal physician. Our friend Stephanie, having suffered similar symptoms in the past, suspects I may at last have succumbed to that scourge of longtime city dwellers: asthma. That is for a pulmonary specialist to say, but it would be preferable to the other scary options that occur to me late at night.

I made the gallery opening Wednesday night at Diane von Furstenberg's studio, by the way, which went terrifically well as far as I could see. Laura's coworkers were startled to see me walking around in a suit in the 90-plus-degree humidity after my trip to the brink of death. Frau von F. offered a little toast (to the artists, not to me), and I even glimpsed what other people assured me was the back of Lauren Bacall as she crossed the room and entered the store. (Laura waited on Lauren Bacall once as a seasonal employee at the Williams-Sonoma on the Upper East Side a couple of years ago, and recognized her in a flash.)

Anyway, that's why my homework is late.

The following remarks were delivered at the Sheraton City Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, on the occasion of the Davis High School (Kaysville) 1984 class reunion. The opening paragraph is in response to master of ceremonies Jodi Allison, my employment by the National Council on the Aging having prompted from her some mordant comment or another.

I'll tell you how I'm doing with that aging thing, Jodi. I'm still 36. At least until tomorrow.

I hope you'll forgive me if I read from my notes. I'm afraid if I wing it I'll start talking like a New Yorker from sheer nerves. Anyway, it's an honor and a humbling experience to stand before you on this beautiful Friday the 13th and remember the Davis High School Class of '84. Looking out over this crowd—man, a lot's changed since high school. Speaking for myself, I don't think I'd even fit in my locker anymore. But that's why we're here tonight—change. We've come together to celebrate not just old times but having survived all the changes between then and now. So when Cheri asked me to speak, I started thinking what it was like in that year George Orwell made ominous, 1984, and how different our world is two decades later from the one we knew then.

Let's go back to May of 1984 for a few minutes and try to remember what it was like. Ronald Reagan was in the White House and we didn't know for sure about the Alzheimer's yet, and Walter Mondale was shortly to chose Geraldine Ferraro as the first (and so far only) woman to run for vice-president on a major-party ticket. The Iran-Contra scandal was still two years from breaking, the Berlin Wall was five years from falling, and the Soviet Union, the only significant threat to world peace most of us could imagine, was seven years from collapsing under its own weight. The space shuttles Challenger and Columbia were both still flying, and the president would not use the term "AIDS" in public for another year. Closer to home, Scott Matheson was governor of the state. Today his son is running for the same office, against the son of chemical mogul Jon Huntsman. In sports, John Stockton had just been drafted from Gonzaga by the Utah Jazz. Karl Malone would be drafted from Louisiana Tech the following year.

The Billboard #1 hits so far that year were "Owner of a Lonely Heart" by Yes, "Karma Chameleon" by Culture Club, "Jump" by Van Halen, "Footloose" by Kenny Loggins, "Against All Odds" by Phil Collins, "Hello" by Lionel Richie, and, the week we graduated, "Let's Hear It for the Boy" by Deniece Williams. The Police were the most popular band in the world, Sting was still cool, and Darin Goff was the only one in the school who'd heard of R.E.M. (And Darin, you'll be pleased to hear my father still doesn't like me hanging out with you.) You could like new wave or hair metal but not both, and no one would ever have guessed that in 2004 you could put on your white socks and sandals and sign up for a week-long Caribbean cruise with Styx, Journey, and REO Speedwagon. Oh, yeah, and we mostly listened to this stuff on cassette or LP. The compact disc had been around for a year or two, but most of what you could buy on CD was classical music.

In movies, the Star Wars saga had ended the year before—or so we thought. The top flicks the year so far had been Footloose, Police Academy ... One, Romancing the Stone, and the one I cut seminary to see, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Kaysville Theater was a year away from getting picketed when it showed its first R-rated movie, Beverly Hills Cop, and still to come that summer were Star Trek III, Ghostbusters, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, and Purple Rain. (Purple Rain. Man. Last month my wife and I had front row seats at Madison Square Garden to see Prince, together with Morris Day & The Time. What a show. It's funny how nostalgic we get for music we didn't even listen to when it was new.)

On television the top shows were Dallas, Dynasty, and The A-Team. M*A*S*H had been over for a year, and Cheers was only two years old. Seinfeld was still six years in the future, Friends ten, and The Sopranos was, you know, fuhgeddaboutit.

The state of the art in home computers was the Apple IIe, which had a ceiling of a whopping 128 kilobytes of memory. Today I carry one thousand times as much storage capacity on my wrist, in the form of a USB drive built into my watch, and at least fifty times as much as what existed in the entire computer lab at Davis High. And even that is just a tiny fraction of what comes today with the lowest-end home computer.

The Internet existed in 1984, but it linked only government, university, and research institutions. If you went online, you were probably dialing into a bulletin-board system somewhere. On today's Internet, it may indeed seem that Big Brother is watching far us more closely than in 1984, but on the other hand we have a much better view of him. The sum total of human knowledge is at our fingertips, just a Google search away, right alongside and sometimes indistinguishable from warnings about organ-harvesting rings in Cabo San Lucas, pleas for help getting money out of Nigeria, and lists of what kids in 2004 no longer know that kids from 1984 did. Back then the research for this little summation would have taken me half a day at a good library. Instead I did it at my kitchen table in less than an hour while my laptop computer played Beethoven sonatas over a wireless network connection to my desktop computer in the next room.

Okay, that's a little of what the world was like when we were in high school, but what about high school itself? In a way, every one of us went to a different high school, with different schedules and different teachers and different friends. That's one of the things that makes a reunion like this so interesting—comparing and contrasting our different memories to get a more complete picture of what that time was really like. So keeping in mind how subjective this is, I want to share some of the random things I remember from high school.

I remember the teachers. I remember English class with Mrs. Storey, who made discussing Faulkner fun, and who always had personalized suggestions of great books that weren't on the curriculum but which she was pretty sure we'd enjoy reading anyway.

I remember economics with Bryant Jensen, who made me feel as if I actually understood economics, at least for as long as he was explaining it, and who occasionally made me feel like the dumbest kid on the face of the earth, which was probably good for me.

I remember chemistry with Frank Stevens, who we convinced ourselves was the lost seventh member of Monty Python. And there was his stuffed mole, which we kidnapped as often as we could from behind his increasingly paranoid security measures and held for ransom.

I remember Lenzi Nelson, a great math teacher who always complained that in twenty years all we'd remember from his class was that he threw chalk. Well, I'm sure anyone who had him remembers the chalk, but he was my first computer teacher, and I'm still doing that today, so something else must have stuck from all those hours in his classes.

I remember Mrs. Hill, who was the advisor to the Dart staff, who let Matt Kimball paint a giant ska man on the back wall of the Dart staff room. I wasn't even sure exactly what "ska" was, but I liked having that big black silhouette gazing down on us as Emilie Bean and I laid out the paper every month.

I remember football games in the fall and winter, and how the social scene in the stands was almost as important as what was happening on the field. And then I remember the excitement of the state playoffs, going to see our team play at Rice Stadium, and showing up at those games in my black trenchcoat, long before black trenchcoats started becoming seen as a "danger sign." (Don't worry—there was no easy access to firearms at home.) But damn, that team was good, with Steve Sargent and Greg McNabb and everyone else, and not taking State was one of history's great tragedies.

I remember the marquee out in front of the school, and the little jolt of anticipation wondering what the thing was going to say this time. Often as not, it was a message from someone to someone else asking if they'd go with them to the next school dance. I mean, how could you say no to the Davis High marquee?

And that's another thing I remember—all the effort and elaborate planning that went into asking someone to a dance without actually walking up to them and doing it face-to-face. And every time, it had to be bigger and better than the time before. It was like Mutual Assured Destruction. The U.S. hires a skywriter, so Russia plans a fireworks display. Russia gets the Utah Jazz to deliver its message, so the U.S. gets the Utah Symphony. And the best part about it is the victim's reaction when the operation goes into effect. You come home and find that someone has brought in dump trucks to fill the entire basement of your house with Styrofoam packing peanuts, and the first thing out of your mouth, with genuine puzzlement, is, "Oh my heck! What's this?" So you spend the next three days cleaning it all out, and when you finally get that last final packing peanut out from under the couch and put it under your electron scanning microscope to find that someone has used a calligraphy brush made from the eyelash of a fruitfly to write "Will you go to Christmas Dance with me?" on it in ancient Chinese—then, then, you slap yourself on the forehead and say, "Oh, thank goodness. For a couple of days there I thought it might be Al Qaeda."

I tell you, we should have gotten graded on asking people to dances. We should have gotten credit toward graduation for it. There are Pentagon generals who've never done as much logistical planning as went into asking someone to a dance. But I digress.

There's more I remember, but most of all I remember people who are no longer with us. Who could forget, or hasn't tried to, the morning intercom announcements from Mr. Cook, which always wrapped up with a rundown of the lunch menu including that "one—half—pint—milk"? I remember hearing the news about Mr. Cook's passing many years ago, and I imagine he's now singing lustily with the heavenly choir—and goosing the other angels when no one's looking. ("What are you whining about, Chumley?")

And then there's Mrs. Beattie, one of the most influential and most frustrating teachers I ever had, who passed away just this spring. As far as I know she never moved to Florence after she retired, which she always said she intended to, but she lived quite a life nonetheless, and left her mark on countless students through the years.

There are no doubt others I don't know about, and there are classmates, too, who sadly are no longer with us, and who we miss. John Whicker, Kim Burton. Alan Rushforth, who's been gone for more than twenty years. If there are others, we're thinking of them all, and of the family and friends who no longer enjoy their company and presence.

Finally, one monumental part of the Class of 1984 is longer with us. I've just driven along Main Street in Kaysville for the first time in a couple of years, and I saw there's a new building that's gone up where our Davis High School stood for nearly a century. It's funny how there are some buildings you spend so much time in, whose corridors you scurry through for so many years, but you take them for granted, and it isn't until they come down that you realize what an important symbol and landmark they were in the community while they still existed, and what a long shadow they cast. I'm sure the new school will serve its students just as well, but it's still strange to think of the town without our dear old Davis High School

To close, I'd like to consider one of the great myths we tell ourselves about high school—that it's an either/or proposition, that it was either our glory days and the rest of life is all downhill, or it was hell on earth and we spend the remainder of life trying to recover from it. I think for most of us the truth is probably somewhere in between. I know it was for me, and I thank you, Class of '84, for helping to make my high school experience the good thing it was. I hope it was good for you, and that as the world has changed and our children have started taking our places, things have kept getting better from there.

The fact that so many of us actually showed up tonight would seem to indicate that this is, indeed, the case. Thank you.

Ladies, there's a rather delicate topic that's been weighing on my mind of late, and I feel it urgently begs addressing. I will attempt to be circumspect.

For about a year now, I've been hearing and reading in various places reports of women's disgust for men on the subways and buses who sit with their legs spread wide, airing out their, er, jewel purses. While I share these ladies' unease at the blatant and provocative display of these, er, squirrel hoards, and deplore the way practitioners of said sitting position so often take up a seat and a half or more on crowded conveyances with their callously splayed limbs, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that your male fellow travelers are in all likelihood not truly attempting to impress you with the contents of their, er, fruit baskets, except possibly in an entirely unconscious evolutionary sense.

These men may indeed be clods, but they are clods in the sense of blithe social obliviousness rather than one of creepy cloddish lasciviousness. My attention having been called to the queasy-making effects of this practice on the distaff sex, I've been putting forth a concerted effort to monitor the degree of the interior angle between my own resting appendages, and I've been horrified to discover that even a male as relatively enlightened as myself tends to open his, er, equipment locker to public inspection during unguarded moments on the commute. I have striven mightily to keep my knees in close proximity but have discovered to my dismay that this necessitates concentrated effort. I'm sorry indeed to report that the airing of the, er, lumber bin would appear to be the natural state of the seated male Homo sapiens.

It's all in the construction of the pelvis bone, you see. The way our femurs connect makes the leg turn naturally outward when sitting. To draw our knees together, our thigh muscles must flex, must perform work, must burn actual calories. I say this not to excuse our troglodytishness but merely to explain that our wretched behavior is directed at you only on a genetic level, not a conscious one, and that when our, er, birthday parcels are pointing your way we've merely momentarily relaxed our vigilence, if indeed we possessed any in the first place, in exhaustion.

With knees locked firmly together and thighs a-tremble, I remain
yr humble servant

When I first secured my own domain, shunn.net, one of the pleasures of that vanity acquisition was catch-all email forwarding. What this meant was that any email sent to shunn.net—whether hunkylitfox@shunn.net, scumsuckingasswipe@shunn.net or mr.mxyzptlk@shunn.net—would end up in my inbox. In essence, I had an infinite set of email addresses to call my own.*

This was back in those heady days when spam was still a relatively scarce and benign offense, though even then the prudent were being warned not to put "mailto" URLs on their web sites, owing to the many robots out harvesting just such creatures to feed into their nefarious spam machines.

Over the years, as the tide of spam has risen, I've applied an increasing rigorous series of filters to hold back the onslaught. I've watched my daily spam intake increase logarithmically—maybe one a day back in the day, then ten, then a hundred, then a thousand. Yes, a thousand.

Part of this was due, I admit, to having placed many of those pesky bill@shunn.net links on my site. By the time I realized I seriously needed to scour them, the damage was done. My email address was out there, prominently listed amongst the ingredients for spam. But that was not all of it. Spammers grew more clever by leaps and bounds. They took to running whole dictionaries of common and not-so-common first names through their software, pairing each with domain names that anyone could glean from a handy DNS server. I received spam targeted at everyone from aaron@shunn.net to zusu@shunn.net.

I began filtering for spam at the client level, but then the spammers started targeting long lists of last names. smith@shunn.net, jones@shunn.net, and hickenlooper@shunn.net all were wooed with offers of low remortgaging, ch34p v14gr4, and penile enhancement. I erected my fortress walls higher, applying filters at the server level as well as at the client level.

Still the floodwaters continued to rise as spammers came up with ever-cleverer techniques for foiling the ever-cleverer filters. But even as good as the filters became, if I didn't leave my email client running all night, it could take upward of half an hour for my software to download and process all the messages that arrived in the course of eight short hours. I finally shut down bill@shunn.net entirely, shifting the burden of my personal correspondence to a different address that I'm not stupid enough to print here.

Still the levels rose.

I'm not sure quite why I waited so long—perhaps because I was loath to lose any of the increasingly rare real email messages suspended in that rising tide. But today something snapped, as I awoke to the prospect of downloading more than three thousand email messages to find the wheat amidst the chaff. Projected out over a full day, that's ten thousand emails in 24 hours. That's just unsupportable.

My catch-all forwarding is no more. I have set up a bare handful of email addresses where messages can actually get through to me, but everything else at shunn.net, and indeed at any of the other domains I now own, but everything else will bounce. And the bounces contain a message that wishes the ingestion of shards of fused silicon dioxide and subsequent painful expiration upon the senders of unsolicited commercial email.

So far today, since slamming the fortress gates shut this morning, exactly two spam messages have gotten through. I feel as if, having lain awake at night for months upon months while the neighbors run heavy excavation and construction equipment, they've finally been evicted and I can hear the crickets chirping again. Ah, blissful quiet!

If only I wasn't certain those two messages represent the leading edge of another slow logarithmic assault.

Yes, we all seem to be more up in arms today about James Frey and his partially made-up memoir than we are about domestic wiretaps, freedom of information in China, and terrorists taking power in Palestine. And it makes sense to me why.

Countless hordes of people feel like they were lied to by James Frey. The reason this is more upsetting than being lied to by the President and his cronies—which happens and continues to happen on a regular basis—is that we're used to being lied to by politicians. We may be appalled by it, but we take this as expected behavior.

Writers, however, are a breed apart. Yes, their main job is to entertain us, but when they're doing their job well they are saying something true to us about what it means to be human, something that resonates in us, the readers, to our very cores. Thousands upon thousands of people felt that James Frey had told them something very resonant and true about their own lives, only now it's come out that what he said was, in many ways, made up. Of course people are upset. Of course they feel betrayed. On some level it must feel like finding out your spouse has been leading a double life.

I feel betrayed as well, but not because I read and believed A Million Little Pieces. I have not read the book. I feel betrayed as a writer on behalf of my profession. James Frey's responsibility as a writer was to tell the truth, and he failed to live up to that responsibility.

But what do I mean by "telling the truth"? Certainly writers of fiction do not "tell the truth" in the conventional sense of the phrase. They make up stories. But the stories they make up should speak to a deeper truth, saying something true about the way the world and the human soul work. The best fiction is made up from whole cloth yet woven from the fabric of reality. It is true in a way more meaningful that mere facts can be.

But a memoir is a different case. It's a work that stakes a claim to a different sort of territory. By saying "This really happened to me," the memoirist sets up a different set of rules for himself. His job is still to entertain and to illuminate the truth of the human condition, but even as he employs some of the same tools as the novelist, he has excluded himself from using a certain other subset of those tools—namely, the right to freely invent incidents and events.

Note that I say "freely." No memoir can possibly be unimpeachably factual in its every aspect. Conversations from years past can never be reconstructed accurately, for instance—unless they happen to have been recorded—and would likely make for less than compelling reading if they were. Events in the real world rarely have the dramatic arc of compelling fiction. Participants in those events may be less than thrilled to see themselves portrayed in all their factual warty glory. The memoirist deploys the novelist's tools insofar as he chooses what events to emphasize and how, in what ways to distill amalgams of old conversations to their most readable, meaningful essence, and what balance between literal reportage and obfuscating detail to employ in order to avoid embarrassing the real participants—or prodding them to legal action.

What the memoirist definitively cannot do is make up events without letting the reader know.¹ To do so is to shatter the delicate surface tension between real-world facts and the amount of distortion they can bear while still rendering a more deeply truthful report of the world. Or, if not to shatter it immediately, certainly to set up conditions to make it more likely to be shattered at some point in the future. As has happened with James Frey and A Million Little Pieces.

Never has a book's title reflected the state of its pretense to truth more accurately.

For all that I feel betrayed as a writer, I can understand and even sympathize with what happened to Frey. He says he tried marketing his manuscript as a novel originally. And perhaps as a novel A Million Little Pieces could have survived as a work that speaks to a core truth. But the moment Frey decided to call the book a memoir instead, he changed the nature of relationship between the outer and inner worlds of the work. Whatever truths lay at its heart were now subject to a different set of torsions from without, were now viewed through a different prism—choose what metaphor you will. The work changed.

The work changed in a way that no doubt made it easier for him to sell to a publisher, and consequently made it easier for a publisher to sell to the public. It had to have been a very tempting and even easy choice to make—but once made it led, as lies will, to even bigger lies, and then to bigger lies still. At what point does to stop seeming possible to reverse the avalanche you've started? How much effort must it take to keep trying to outdistance it? I don't envy James Frey the last couple of years, let alone the past few weeks.

I'll come clean here. Part of what pisses me off about the whole situation is that Frey, at least at the moment, is continuing to make money off his big lie, big money. He may be taking a world of shit, but you know what? At the end of it all, he still has the wherewithal to write—a pursuit for which he obviously has vast talent—full-time. And he has the wherewithal for all the therapy and/or rehab he still so richly needs.

And still The Accidental Terrorist, over which I labored hard, and in which I went to exquisite pains to adhere to the truth as best I could, sits unsold, while I sit here in a 7th floor office in Manhattan doing a job that merely pays the bills and doesn't feed my soul.

Okay, whatever. We all have it tough, and I feel real sympathy for James Frey and the hole he's dug for himself. I live in fear of the mere thought of the accusations of lying that may be leveled at me by pissed-off Mormons when my memoir finally sees print. Hell, I have moments when I fear that I did make up the whole story of my arrest and conviction. Being caught out and called to task can't be a very pleasant experience. But that doesn't change the fact that James Frey lied and lied his way to the top of the bestseller lists, and if the worst he has to endure as a consequence is a stern tongue-lashing from Oprah, well boo fucking hoo. We should all be so well rewarded for our bad decisions.

That doesn't mean Oprah herself get a free pass on this one. I'm sure she feels genuinely pissed off at James Frey, but I doubt very much it comes from a personal sense of betrayal. No, James Frey put her precious Book Club in jeopardy. Do you think Oprah would have chosen Elie Wiesel's Night as her latest club selection, let alone announced a high school essay contest about it, if she didn't need to distract us from the unpleasant little storm brewing over A Million Little Pieces? Not a chance. Frey taking his lumps on television yesterday was all business. Bank on it.

I'll buy Oprah's sincerity when she gets someone like George Bush on her show and lambastes him for lies that matter to something more than just our feelings.

The first science fiction magazine I ever saw, read, subscribed to, submitted to, and was rejected by was Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. Back in 1983, when I was almost 16 years old, my father brought a copy home for me after it became clear to him that writing SF was just simply going to be something that I did, and there would be no use complaining about it. He found the magazine at a 7-Eleven and showed me the address for fiction submissions. It was a generous gesture on his part, especially since a few years earlier he had forbidden me to read the evil stuff.

That first issue had a Fred Pohl story on the cover, I recall, "The High Test." I read the magazine greedily, then called the phone number inside to subscribe. The woman on the other side of the line wanted me to give a credit card number. It took some doing, but I convinced her to enter my subscription without one, and to bill me later. I'm not sure why I didn't just mail in a subscription card. I think I was just too excited to get my subscription started.

Before long, I had my first rejection in hand—a photocopied sheet of possible reasons my story was not of use to Asimov's, with editor Shawna McCarthy's second-generation signature at the bottom. Crushed but undeterred, I sent in another story. Same outcome.

Every time the new issue arrived, I would read it cover to cover. Those pages are where I first read Lucius Shepard, Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, John Kessel, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, Connie Willis, Michael Bishop, Norman Spinrad, Dan Simmons, and a host of other exemplary short fiction writers I'm forgetting now. I still have many of those issues, the ones with the stories that affected me most. "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler is one of the first that comes to mind. More even than the novels I had long read, those stories were my first real education in the art and craft of writing science fiction.

I would lie in bed some nights and picture myself in that company. I would picture my name on the cover of Asimov's.

Years went by. Editors changed. I kept writing and submitting stories. Eventually I started making sales—to other magazines. I made a lot. I even landed Shawna McCarthy as my agent and received a Nebula nod. And still that stack of Asimov's rejections got higher and higher. Something like 50 sheets high.

Then last year an email came from Sheila Williams, the newest Asimov's editor. She had received, read, and wanted to buy my novella "Inclination." The streak was officially broken.

Today Associate Editor Brian Bieniowski dropped by my office. He hand-carried me my contributor's copies of the April/May 2006 Asimov's, which should be available on newsstands early next week. (I do have the tremendous good fortune of working ridiculously close to the Dell Magazines offices.)

Twenty-three years later, my name is on the cover of Asimov's. I will admit to having to swallow a lump in my throat. I'm glad that young, starry-eyed kid is still around to see this—especially in an issue that Sheila describes in her editorial as coming-of-age–themed.

For the past few days, I've thought I might smell just a dash, just a soupçon, just one wafer-thin mint's worth of natural gas in the kitchen. I would sniff, and Laura would tell me I was crazy. It happens.

Last night I thought I smelled it, and this time Laura allowed as how she might smell it too. I didn't call ConEd immediately, having a vague memory of a similar situation in my Brooklyn apartment and being made to understand by the man who came to check it out that I had been kind of silly not to know this wasn't the dangerous kind of gas smell.

So I called up ConEd very late this morning, from work. In the voicemail treet, I deliberately did not choose the emergency options. I waited for a customer service representative. I said I might have smelled a little gas in my kitchen.

"What's your address, sir?"

I gave it, expecting that next we would schedule a little confab for later in the week at which I would sit home for hours wondering what time the gas man would deign to arrive, and the gas man would fritter away his day and finally show up with five minutes to spare before the end of the agreed-upon appointment window.

"Thank you," said the customer service guy. "Someone will arrive within forty-five minutes."

"Um." My brain shut down. "It was just— I was expecting— I'm not home. I'm calling from work."

"Sir, we take gas leaks seriously. They're very dangerous. We treat them as emergencies."

"But, I thought— I'm not—"

"Is someone home?"

"No."

"Is there a neighbor? A landlord?"

"No, there's not— I'm— Can't you—?"

"Sir, we dispatch these calls immediately. If they arrive and no one is home, they will break down the door. We treat these as emergencies."

I finally got my head around it. "So they're on their way."

"Yes, sir. Where are you?"

"In the city. How long do I have?"

"Zero to forty-five minutes, depending. Sir, I suggest you get there if you don't want your door broken down."

I dashed off a terse email to Paul Witcover, with whom I was supposed to have lunch, and dashed out the door. The elevator refused to come, so I ran down the stairs. I grabbed a cab on Park Avenue and directed it homeward.

As we flew up Park Avenue, I tried calling Laura, but she was doing presentations at work and didn't answer. I tried calling a friend who lives nearby to see if she was home or working today, but got no reply. I would have tried calling our other friends who might both have been home because they are moving out of state soon, but I needed to talk to the first friend to get their number.

I was thinking less about the doors to the building and the apartment than about Ella, and whether she would end up wandering the streets after the ConEd men burst through the splintered portals like Big Brother's henchmen.

The cab seemed to crawl. It was like a race against time from a movie, except it never seemed to end. Everything that could possibly get in the way did. Trucks backed up into intersections. People abandoned cars in the street. Vehicles failed to move in time at traffic lights and we missed our chances. Traffic snarled and gridlocked. Traffic actually got worse in Queens the closer we got to home, and I watched the time edge past 25 minutes.

At 30 minutes, after I'd been calculating for some blocks at what point it would be faster to just hop out of the cab and run the rest of the way, we finally turned onto my street. I had 22 bucks already in my hand, my shoulder bag strapped around me, and my door keys at the ready. Heart in throat, I spied a ConEd van pulled over at the curb opposite our apartment. I scanned the front of the building from half a block away, but didn't think I could see any door-busting damage.

Then as we slowed down and I tossed the money at the driver through the plexiglas window, I saw one lone ConEd man loitering by the van. He wore a visored cap and had a long gray mustache. I hopped out of the cab almost before it had stopped and ran to the door, greeting the ConEd man over my shoulder.

As I hurriedly shoved aside the stack of mail that had been shoved through the door slot, I asked the ConEd man, "Have you been waiting long?"

"Just got here," he said.

He looked to me as if he had been loitering for a bit, but I was grateful and relieved (though my hands were still shaking) and I didn't want to push it. I warned him about the dog, burst into the apartment, shoved a very confused Ella out into the back yard and shut the door on her.

I was doing everything in movie-hero time.

The taciturn ConEd man checked the stove and told me we had a pilot light out. He relit it, then used a length of rubber hose connected to what looked like a small car battery with an LCD readout to check for natural gas. "Negative," he said. "You're fine."

And he left. And I joined the dog in the back yard, where she flung herself at me repeatedly and covered my head with licks while I let the jammering of my nerves dissipate.

Then it came to me. That's what the other guy had told me in Brooklyn that one time. One of my pilot lights had gone out then too, and he had shown me how to light it again. I wonder if I'll still remember this by the next time it happens.

There is a literary agency directly above me, on the 13th floor of this office building. (And thank god we're in a building that's not afraid to admit it has a 13th floor!) Sometimes when the 12th floor men's room is occupied, I go up to the 13th floor, and inevitably I see, through the glass of the agency's door, a little spaniel of some sort lying on the floor, asleep. I never see any people.

On my most recent visit to the 13th floor, though, I saw people in the office but no spaniel. This is not a story about mysterious happenings on the 13th floor, but it is a story about a runaway spaniel, and I was reminded of it by the absence of the agency dog. This happened this past Saturday night, as Laura and I were on our way to a wedding celebration.

We had just left the house. It was cold and dark and windy and wet out, and when we reached the corner a brown and white adult spaniel of some sort, probably a Cavalier King Charles, was wandering around. Its person was not in evidence.

"Hello, little puppy," said Laura, bending down.

A woman in black was hurrying toward us. "I was just trying to catch it," she said. "I don't see its owner."

"Let's see if it has a tag," I said.

The dog was dragging a sparkly silver leash. Laura reached for the leash, but the dog ran out into the street against the light. A car was coming. I yelled—it wasn't a word, just a loud primal sound. The dog came three feet or less from running right under the tires of an SUV. It got to the far corner before the next car could squash it.

Relieved, Laura and I dashed across the street (when traffic allowed), and she caught the dog half a block down. I turned and flashed the lady in black a thumbs-up. "It has a tag," I shouted.

We walked the dog farther down the block to where we could read the tag in the light from an Eckerd. It was a rabies tag. The only contact info was the phone number of the vet.

"What do we do?" Laura said.

"I'm not sure," I said. Then we realized that we had both left our cell phones home. Not that the vet was likely to be open at that hour.

"Maybe take it to the pet store?" We were on our way to a wedding, remember. "They might be able to keep it until they can contact the vet."

"I wouldn't take it there. Maybe that vet down Steinway is open?"

"Okay."

We started walking. The spaniel was not a quick walker, not like Ella, and it was whimpering and maybe limping a little, so after a bit I picked it up and carried it. We didn't like the vet idea, really, but was also didn't want to leave the dog at our apartment unattended, not unsupervised with a dog of our own. But the farther we walked from where we first saw it, the more the dog began to whine and squirm.

Finally Laura suggested we take the dog back the way we had come. We would see if maybe the owner was somewhere around looking for it. If not, we would close the dog in one of our rooms with the door closed, and with water. It would drive Ella nuts, but we didn't know what else to do.

As we approached the corner where we had first seen the spaniel, we could see about four people. The woman in black was there, as was a long-haired woman in her mid-twenties. The long-haired woman had her back against a wall, and a man in a big black coat was standing very close to her, talking. There was also a kid of about twenty, standing near the entrance of a little store around the corner.

"Here they are!" said the woman in black.

Laura and I both saw that the long-haired woman had tears running down her cheeks. "Is this your dog?" I asked.

The woman burst our sobbing and took the dog from me. "Oh, I thought you were gone!" She clutched the dog to her chest and slid down the wall until she was sitting.

The woman in black said, "I told her the dog almost got runned over, but a nice couple went after it."

Laura had squatted down beside the long-haired woman and was making comforting small talk. I noticed the dog was standing next to the sobbing woman.

"For God's sake!" I told the sobbing woman. "Keep that leash in your hand and don't let go!"

According to Laura, when I yelled, the woman wrapped the leash around her hand several times. Also according to Laura, the woman was on something.

When the long-haired woman had calmed down some and was standing up again, she said, "Where did that man go?"

"What man?" said the woman in black.

"The policeman. He was talking to me right here. He has my wallet."

Indeed, the man in the black coat had somehow slipped away in the confusion of returning the dog.

"Why does he have your wallet?" asked the woman in black.

"He said he was a policeman," said the long-haired woman. "He asked for my wallet."

"Did he show you any I.D.?"

"No, but he said he was a policeman."

"That guy took her wallet," said the woman in black. "Did anyone see where he went?"

The kid near the store said, "I think maybe he lives upstairs?" Another kid had come out of the store by now.

"We need to call the police," said the woman in black. "The real police. Who has a phone?"

We didn't, but the kids outside the store went inside to call.

Laura was already hurrying up the block, trying to see if a man walking up the sidewalk was the same one who had been at the corner. He wasn't, but that didn't keep me from worrying that Laura was going to get herself shot peering into people car windows.

We returned to the group on the corner, reported that the man in the black coat was nowhere in sight, wished the long-hair woman good luck, said goodbye to the spaniel, and rushed off to our wedding. We don't know what happened next.

Moral of the story? Um, if your dog is missing, don't give your wallet to a random stranger?

And for God's sake, don't let go of the leash!