Jay McInerney and Me

When Rex returned home from his San Francisco trip earlier this month, he brought me Jay McInerney's new collection of short stories, How It Ended, for Mother's Day. I've been hooked ever since and have a story to tell... but the train is about to go into a tunnel and I will lose my Internet connection before I finish... more later!

Later, back on the train...
I've always had a strange connection to Jay McInerney... it feels like we live strangely parallel lives, or that he lives my life before I do, from Syracuse University to the Meatpacking District in the Far West Village to The Good Life, his September 11th novel. Though as I read the story that turned into his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, I remarked to Rex that I'm no closer to Bolivian Marching Powder today than I was when I first read the novel in the 12th grade... and while the last of the transvestite hookers hadn't left the West Village by the time Rex and I moved into a little apartment on Bethune Street in 1996, they had all been replaced by the Hudson River Park playground and pricey boutiques by the time we left our West 12th Street loft for the Roxiticus Valley in 2003.

Saturday, May 23, 2009
I'm reading the first of the short stories, "It's Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?" in the early light of day on the porch in Bay Head. I'm reminded what an amazing writer he is, how his words come together to make me feel like I'm there in the moment. "You were the boy and she was the girl, your college sweetheart. You weren't famous yet, but you had the rent covered, you had your favorite restaurant where the waitresses knew your name and you could bring your own bottle of wine... You didn't know how soon it would be over, that within a year she would go back to Michigan to file for divorce."

Ah, The Dance... "Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain, but I'd've had to miss the dance."