I was forwarded a flattering review of Suspension by film critic for the Connecticut Post, Joe Meyers.  To read, click here and scroll down to his August 22 entry, which is about 9/11 movies and ends with a few paragraphs about my book.  Closing line:  "What is remarkable about this first novel is that Westfield combines so many diverse (and entertaining) elements — mystery, romance and comedy — in a book that never trivializes the most terrible event in the history of a great American city."

A favorite clip of the week was the baby panda sneeze.

Another clip that's slightly frightening...what was this woman thinking?

Have a great weekend...more news, links, and entries starting next week.

September 10, 2006

This is an interview with Charlie Huston, the Edgar-nominated author of Caught Stealing, Six Bad Things, Already Dead and (in stores next Tuesday, September 19th) A Dangerous Man, the third Hank Thompson book.  This marks the close of a trilogy which begins with a New York bartender agreeing to take care of his neighbor's cat, and which ends with the moral:  Do not take care of anyone's cat.  I read each book in a day, pulled along quickly on the ride, laughing over his turn of phrase and chewing my lip at the suspense of it all. 

I met Charlie when we were members of The Working Group, a theater company in New York.  A few years later, he sold his first novel and he's now publishing two a year.  The second part of his vampire series comes out in December, his first stand-alone novel comes out in the spring, and because he's not busy enough, he's also in the midst of writing a new Moon Knight series for Marvel Comics.

For more information on Charlie and his books, check out his Web site at pulpnoir.com.

20 Questions for Charlie Huston

1--What was the inspiration for the trilogy?  Did you know it was a trilogy when you began?  How much of the trilogy was planned and how much was improvised? 

              Initially I didn’t have a plan for a trilogy, so the short answer is, none.  But on a less smartass level, the inspiration to write the first book, CAUGHT STEALING, was a simple desire to be busy doing something creative.  I hadn’t worked as an actor in some time, and had no visible prospects of that changing anytime soon, and needed to be doing more than my 9-5.  I’d written any number of short stories over the years, and a few plays, in various genres, but I’d been reading more and more crime fiction and liked the idea of writing a story of my own.  More than anything, I set out to entertain myself.  When the short story I thought I was writing hit 100 pages, I knew I could only finish it as a novel.  After that it became a personal challenge.  I had few thoughts about trying to publish the thing, I just wanted to finish it.  The idea of a trilogy only occurred to me years later when the book sold as part of a two book deal.  My editor was interested in a sequel. When I thought about it, I knew the protagonist, Hank, wasn’t suited to a series of unrelated adventures.  A second book could only be a true sequel, a continuation of his story.  Once I knew that, I knew it would have to be about his further descent into violence, and that suggested that there would need to be an eventual attempt for redemption.  And there was the third book.  Just like I planned it, yes?

2--What’s the final body count in the Hank Thompson trilogy?

              Waaaaay too many.  Lets see if I can count.  CAUGHT STEALING: 13  SIX BAD THINGS: 8  A DANGEROUS MAN: 8  Looks like I peaked early.

3—How long did each novel take to plan?  To draft?  To revise?  Which was the easiest book to write?  The most difficult?

              Plan?  You plan your books? 

              I do a lot of note-taking.  Doodles and lines of dialogue and snatches of action and little observations.  The usual stuff for any writer, I imagine.  I usually have an opening scene and starting base situation to launch the characters from and an ending in mind along with all those notes.  After that, I start steering things toward the end I think is the right one while working in material from my notes.  I don’t tend to do multiple drafts, but heavily rewrite as I go.  A day’s work usually gets reworked to following day.  Likewise week to week and the same every time I finish a major chunk.  These days it seems to take about 8 months from the day I sit and start typing to a draft I hand to my editor.

              None of them have been easy.  CAUGHT STEALING was probably the easiest just because there were no expectations other than my own.  I just finished writing a book that’s scheduled to come out in fall of 2007.  That was by far the hardest.

4—So we’re both madly in love with your wife, Virginia Louise Smith.  Virginia is one of the most supportive friends I’ve ever had and, in the relationship between playwright and actress, she’s given voice to several of my characters, went out of her way to make rewrites work and offered suggestions when they didn’t.  Tell us some of the contributions Virginia has made to your novels and to your life as a writer…(but keep it clean).

              Virginia is my first reader.  She just left my office about five minutes ago after giving me notes on the first draft of the opening of the third Joe Pitt book.  Her advice, support, faith, love, good humor, patience, good taste are invaluable and I could barely wipe my own ass without her let alone write a novel.  She’s a part of everything I do.  On a concrete level, she helps me to keep it simple and straight and readable.  She also came up with the titles SIX BAD THINGS and ALREADY DEAD.

5—Speaking of Virginia, tell us the story of your author photograph.  Wasn’t a stroll through autumn leaves part of the original plan?

              A stroll through the autumn leaves to a couple bars may have been in the plan, but we never made it that far.  I needed a jacket photo and paying a pro to take a picture was out of the question.  Also, I liked the idea of my wife taking my jacket photo.  Our process involved a six-pack, an old Kodak camera, one roll of film and fifteen minutes of Virginia following me around our apartment while I frowned in front of various pieces of furniture.  We used the one that graces the hardback of CAUGHT STEALING and my website because it was the only shot where I was smiling.  I think Virginia had said something dirty. 

6—What nugget from your recent work do you feel you want to further explore in your next?

              Man, I wish I knew.  Violence just keeps coming back around.  I never set out to write about what hurting people does to the people hurt and to the people who do the hurting, but it keeps coming up.  It’s not like you could say that’s a theme in any of the books, but it plays a role in all of my work so far.  In terms of the technical stuff, I want to try and do more with less.  I love writers who can get across a pile of information about a character without describing that character in minute detail.  I want to be able to do that, make an observation about how someone crosses a room and have that say everything that needs to be said.

7—Is there a book out there in the world that you wish had the name Charlie Huston attached to it?  What’s the book (that’s not out in the world yet) that you most want to write?  (Do these questions make sense?)

              The Bible.  Just imagine, In the Beginning there was Charlie Huston.  And then it could go on from there.  Barring that, The DaVinci Code.  Which sells a bit better than The Bible.

8—What are you reading now?  Which writers do you see as direct influences and who are some of your favorite authors who have little to no impact on your writing?  In other words, who are your favorite writers as a writer and who are your favorite as a reader?

              I’m reading some Chandler short stories. I’m working on a Joe Pitt book, and I find it helpful to read classic noir while I’m writing Joe.  Some other writers that I’ve blatantly stolen from are Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy and Alan Furst.  They all have specific style or technical moves that I’ve lifted and put to use.  Looking at my book shelves I see William Goldman, Steinbeck, George V. Higgins, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, Iain Banks, Don DiLillo, Patricia Highsmith, Hammett, William Gibson, Vennegut, Tolstoy, Jack Womack…  Those are all writers who do things I wish I could do.

9—How much does place figure in your writing?  As a subject and as an environment in which you’re typing?

              So far, quite a lot.  The geography of New York ended up playing a huge role in CAUGHT STEALING and the Joe Pitt books.  And most of the locations Hank visits in SIX BAD THINGS are places I’ve been.  I don’t have a terrible vivid imagination, so I guess I rely on seeing things and going to places for inspiration. 

              I do most of my writing in a solitary environment.   I like quiet.  Although I used to enjoy making notes on long subway rides.  I miss that about NYC, being able to get work done while traveling.

10—Is there any interesting method you use to come up with the names of your characters?

              Several have been named after people from my life.  The names I’ve made up usually come from me flipping through books or newspapers and sticking names back to back.  I think I got Hank Thompson while staring at my bookshelf and seeing a Henry Miller book sitting on the shelf above a Jim Thompson book.  Oddly, I recently found out that there was a player on the San Francisco Giants named Henry Thompson.  This is odd because my Hank is a huge Giants fan and his obsession with the team plays a big role in CAUGHT STEALING.  The real Henry Thompson was one of the first black players to follow Jackie Robinson into the Major Leagues and led a life that made him a bizarrely suitable, if coincidental, namesake for my Hank.  I recommend looking up his entry on Wikipedia:  Hank Thompson.  

11--How much of the structure was outlined and how much evolved?

              I don’t know how to outline. 

12—If you weren’t a writer you would be a ________?

              Realistically, I’d be a bartender.  Hopefully, at this point, a bartender segueing into teaching.  In a fantasy world, if not a writer, I’d still be acting.

13—What experiences as a published author have been the headiest, the most exciting, the most gratifying?

              Calling my folks after my first book was sold.  The high point of any achievement is still sharing it with them.

14—What’s the worst experience you’ve had as a published author?

              The day I learned SIX BAD THINGS would be published in as a paperback rather than the hardback it was planned to be.  This was a disappointment because it was a reflection of how poorly CAUGHT STEALING had sold in hardback and indicated a lack of belief in the book from the retailers.  And if the retailers don’t support your book, you’re screwed.  There was real pressure to show that my books could sell as trade paperbacks.  Had they not, I’d likely be finding out the true answer to question #12. 

15—Has your process changed since becoming a published author?

              I think it’s more accurate to say that I have a process now. Mostly it’s jerry rigged and dictated by the circumstance of needing to produce two titles a year (a blessing by the way), but it’s there.

16—What traits are shared by Charlie Huston and Hank Thompson?  In what ways are they completely different?

              Both Giants fans.  Both bartenders for many years.  Foot pain.  From California.  Both been to Mexico.  And some other odds and ends.  The differences are far more profound in that Hank is resourceful and tough in a way that I am not.  He also has wellsprings of compassion and love that are rarely seen outside of fiction.  He’s a survivor.  I would fold like a bad poker hand if I was ever confronted with a millionth of what I put Hank through.

17—I’m always surprised at the amount of knowledge a writer needs to have to fill the blank page.  After I finished reading Six Bad Things, I told you that if ever I had to go on the run, I hoped you’d be around to help out.  Which aspects of the trilogy flowed naturally and which required the most research?  What kind of research did you have to do?  Where did it take you?

              I aspire to a certain amount of verisimilitude, but reality doesn’t play a particularly strong role in my books.  I like to be sure of certain technical details and to have my geography accurate, but nobody will ever confuse law enforcement in my books for procedural.  Odd things will send me down the research rabbit hole.  I did quite a bit of poking around before I wrote the SIX BAD THINGS scene set at Chichen Itza.  But mostly, I want it to feel real, for the world in my books to be its own.

18—Who are your favorite characters?  Which came naturally and which took some work?

              There’s a guy in ALREADY DEAD named Chubby Freeze.  I love him and he comes quite naturally.   In Hank’s world, Sandy Candy is a favorite as are Ed and Paris.  You got to have some feeling for all of them.          

19—What’s your favorite Charlie Huston novel?

              A tie between SIX BAD THINGS and the untitled one I just finished.

20—When do you think you’ll make everyone here happy and move back to NY?

              What?  I’m sorry, did you ask something? 

September 15, 2006

I have just put up my myspace page.  To visit, and become a myspace friend, click here.

September 18, 2006

Charlie's Interview with Robert

This week the tables turn.  If you followed the link last week to Charlie Huston's site, you would have already read the following interview.  Charlie's fourth novel since 2004, A Dangerous Man, goes on sale tomorrow.  The guy is a pro and it was his idea that we interview each other, post our questions on our own Web sites one week and our answers the next.  The interviews took a bit of time in August, but this week I didn't have the constant need to feed the blog monster that gets reeeeaaaal hungry by Thursday or Friday.  Today I can just cut, paste, write a quick intro and bam:  main blog entry for the week done.  Thank you, Charlie!

For more information on Charlie and his books, check out his Web site at pulpnoir.com.  And remember, A Dangerous Man goes on sale tomorrow.  This is the book that brings the hilarious and delirious, page-turning, nail-biting, lip-chewing Hank Thompson trilogy to an end.   If you've read Caught Stealing ("Tarantino meets Hitchcock meets Westlake meets Bukowski") or Six Bad Things ("a smooth blend of Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, and Robert B. Parker"), you definitely don't want to miss the third installment, and if you haven't read either of them, I recommend reading them in order, so...pulp noir it.

Charlie:  One of the things I’m most interested in is how people get drawn into storytelling.  Do you remember the first story you wrote and what it was about writing fiction that worked for you?

Robert:  I don’t remember the first I put to paper.  I made up my earliest stories when I went to bed each night.  I was always the hero, there were lots of chase scenes and they were structured episodically so that I could pick up the next night where I dropped off the one before.  (I guess this means that my earliest stories all put me to sleep.)  I consider my first piece of writing—a hypothetical version of the world offered up for public consumption—a play that remains, on one level, the most successful thing I’ve ever written.  I was seven and my grandparents were visiting.  I wanted my grandmother to stop smoking, so I improvised a one-act to be performed in our living room in San Diego where we were living at the time.  I led my grandmother to the couch and then walked around the coffee table to center stage, where I pretended to smoke one of her cigarettes.  After a few “puffs,” I grabbed my throat, coughed and fell to the floor.  My brother, playing the five-year-old paramedic, rushed in, checked my pulse, looked directly into my grandmother’s eyes and said, “He’s dead.”  That’s it.  Two words, mostly pantomime, but she quit smoking that weekend.  Powerful, powerful stuff.  So why was I drawn to storytelling?  To prevent cancer.

Charlie:  Give me a timeline: did you start out writing prose and then shift to playwriting, or is SUSPENSION your first prose effort?

Robert:  Besides Death in San Diego, I didn’t write a play until my junior year in college.  Growing up, I wrote stories, skits, started a few novels.  During the summer I was 15, I began what has to be one of the most outrageously ridiculous tales ever penned, a novel called A Youth in Tresch, which was about—get ready for this one—a young German boy whose father was the kommandant of a death camp in Poland.  This boy, a mischievous and rebellious teenager, kept sneaking past the Nazis into the camp (quite the rascal!) and having meaningful conversations with a Jewish cobbler.  Yep, you read that right.  At least I had the presence of mind not to write past Chapter Three.  I did finish three other novels when I was 17, 23 and 28, but I never revised them, never looked back at them.  Suspension was the first novel that was more than an experiment (and I went on to revise it repeatedly).

Charlie:  Your plays tend to have a Rube Goldberg structure with many intricate pieces of plot and character fitted together in a seemingly random manner, but, in actuality, they are finely crafted for a single specific outcome.  I found a similar structure in SUSPENSION.  Assuming you agree with me at all about this, does that structure say anything about how you view the world or your experience of life?

Robert:  I view the world as an elaborate and invisible web of cause and effect.  Every once in a while, I think I can make out the cause and effect as it’s happening, though in these cases, the events usually turn out to be totally unrelated.  There’s clarity in retrospect, but rarely in the present.  Suspension plays a lot with this notion—the protagonist seeing none of the connections and then, in his paranoia, seeing far too much.

Charlie:  Playwriting vs. Prose Writing in a no holds barred sudden death cage match!  Which one comes out alive?

Robert:  I can tell you that the prose writer comes out alive.  The playwright is left in a blackbox, battered, bruised and bleeding, with the words “Let’s do another reading!” ringing in his ears.

Charlie:  Seriously, going from writing plays to writing a novel, what are some of the challenges?  What’s harder?  What’s easier?

Robert:  The number of pages a novel calls for can be intimidating as is the amount of knowledge required to fill a blank page, but for me the biggest challenge in moving to fiction from playwriting was the fundamental (and obvious) concept that everything I wanted to convey had to be done in solitude using only black symbols on a white page.  The reader’s imagination plays a major role in the experience of the book, but the writer is responsible for providing everything else.  There’s no collaboration with a cast of actors or a team of designers, so what can easily be expressed by an offstage shout or a lighting effect in the theater has to be delivered in fiction through a string of words. 

(I have to confess, however, that right now the thought of writing a play seems extremely difficult, and I don’t know what kind of play will come out when I finally sit down to write one.)

Charlie:  SUSPENSION has many thriller elements, a mystery, shadowy figures haunting the background, murder; and many farce elements, mistaken identities, slamming doors, a crazed Russian masseuse; all of which lead me to my question: Dude, what the fuck?

Robert:  Well, what can I say?  First, it fits the setting—New York is full of mystery, shadowy figures haunting the background, murders, mistaken identities, slamming doors and crazed Russian masseuses.  There’s the diversity of experience that any decent urban novel should aspire to capture as well as the diversity of tone and perspective—people living their lives, casting themselves in their different movies with their different soundtracks.  Each character that comes onstage (in life or fiction) is composed of a different sensibility and different forms pop up with each and every social interaction.  Does this make sense?

It’s also a part of how I work.  I usually don’t start writing anything until I have about five or six unrelated ideas/scenes/genres in mind and then I try to put them all together, discover what it is about them that intrigues me and find how they all fit together.  It’s not an accident that the central symbol of the book is a suspension bridge, with its various materials and parts all brought together into a cohesive whole.

Charlie:  The fallout of 9/11 plays a strong role in SUSPENSION.  I found that your account of some specific details of that day and the following months jibed very well with my own recollections.  More so, the emotional impact on your protagonist, while heightened, was something I think any number of New Yorkers could relate to.  I kept story notes after 9/11, knowing I might have something I wanted to write later, did you do the same?

Robert:  I couldn’t write for weeks.  My journal during this period is filled with doodling.  At the end of October, I forced myself to sit down and record as many of my recollections as I could, some of which made it into Suspension.  I knew I wasn’t going to write about 9/11 itself, though in the first draft there was a 25-page chapter following all of the characters on that day.  I was more interested in writing about the autumn, or the aftermath of 9/11, the period of instability when everyone was trying to regain their footing.

Charlie:  Talk about process; when you write, where, how many hours a day, pages a week, drafts, only alone, with music, in silence, in cafes, bars, your underwear?  In other words, how do you write?

Robert:  It varies from project to project, but some recent absolutes when it comes to drafting a piece:  never music, always mornings, always on computer, always dressed (though shoeless) and preferably with coffee…though I’ve had to cut back from a full pot to two cups.  I’ve also learned that I have to draft quickly.  I have to write at a pace that keeps me from overanalyzing (I leave that for the revision process), at a pace that permits the characters to speak for themselves.  I love when I feel like I’m just typing or taking dictation of a conversation I’m overhearing.  I know it’s working when the characters are making me laugh out loud or when they speak a sentence in a way I never would or when they correctly use a word that I didn’t think was in my vocabulary.  Like you, I prefer to revise as I go along (I edit in the evening the pages written in the morning), but for me it’s best if I draft the entire story, play or novel before I let anyone else see it.  I need a beginning, middle and end before I ask opinions; otherwise, comments make no sense, I feel they’re just reading excerpts.  I think it would save time if I could hand five pages to someone and ask, “What do you think?” but it never seems to work for me.

Charlie:  You’ve got one of those how I sold my book stories that is either inspiring or incredibly frustrating depending on how many rejection slips a person may have accrued.  Please, rub it in everyone’s faces.

Robert:  First, let the record show that I have a notebook full of rejection letters from theaters over the past decade, so I’ve paid my dues.  But, yes, in the publishing world, I’ve been extremely fortunate.  While writing the first draft of Suspension, I attended a party where I had a stimulating conversation about literature with a stranger who turned out to be a rather significant publisher.  He asked if he could read my novel when I was done with it, and a year later I happily complied, still not expecting anything beyond advice on how to solicit an agent.  After reading the book, however, he offered to work with me as an editor—exciting since he’d worked with four Pulitzer-prize winners—and a week later he secured the funds to buy the book.  As you know, I’d been waiting for that kind of professional validation for years, so it seemed fitting that when I read the email with the words “go to contract,” thunder clapped, lightning flashed and rain began to pour against my window.  A literal storm.  There was a tangible divide between life before that November 19th and life afterwards.

Charlie:  Through a series of events beyond your control you ended up working with about ninety-eight editors.  Or maybe it was three.  Something like that.  What was that like?  And what was the single biggest change you needed to make to your manuscript to accommodate any or all of them?

Robert:  Technically four, but really only two during the revision process.  The single biggest challenge was to improve the product by building my confidence as a novelist.  Specifically, there was a major plot line that had to be cut for the sake of credibility and to refine the narrative.  I was reluctant, because to remove it required a major alteration of practically every single chapter.  It turned out to be a blessing to have numerous editors, because I needed to hear a second opinion.  I thought my first editor was just being overly British, but when the Americans agreed with him, I knew I had to rip open the novel and restructure.

On a related note, I’m also beginning to rack up my fair number of publicists.  Two weeks after my book’s release, my second publicist left to take a job at The New Yorker.  At times, Suspension seems like King Tut’s tomb—no one has died, but whoever works on it seems to vanish.  They always start off the same way:  “Hi, Robert.  So I have something to tell you.  I’m leaving HarperCollins…”  I don’t know what else they say, because this is where I black out.  (If my editors and publicists got together they could almost make up a softball team.)  I guess a positive spin would be to say that after working on Suspension, they all felt they had reached the pinnacle of their careers and so left their jobs, convinced the only direction now was down.  All right, I like that.

Charlie:  You spent many years as a tour guide in NYC—one of your characters is actually a tour guide–-and the city itself, its geography and its history, plays a major role.  Was it inevitable that your first novel would be a New York story?

Robert:  Probably.  I love cities with their complicated webs of social interaction, and New York is my favorite, it’s the city I know best.  But I only recently started setting my stories in New York.  In fact, A Wedding Album, a play you know well, is my only other work that takes place here.  For this novel, however, because I was setting out to capture the sense of bewilderment in the months following 9/11, New York was the most likely setting.

Charlie:  What are you working on now?

Robert:  You’ll be happy to know that I’m not revisiting the manuscript for A Youth in Tresch.  I’ve just begun drafting a hybrid—part guide book of New York, part novel—in which the reader follows an itinerary with 43 adults and students from Seattle and a rural community in Georgia.  The city and the action is presented through the eyes of ten or twelve main characters as they sightsee for four days throughout the Big Apple.  It seems a logical next step since I’ve given tours for the last ten years to approximately 30,000 people.  Why not consider that decade research and write a book?

September 22, 2006

I've spent much of this week working on my new novel, finalizing my myspace page, and improving the LINKS page on this site.  I'll also start providing NYC trivia here...an example:  On this date in 1776, what famous execution took place?  (Answer tomorrow.)

September 23, 2006

Answer to yesterday's NYC trivia question:  On September 22, 1776, what famous execution took place?

Hints:  He's considered America's first spy, assigned to report on British troop movements around New York City.

There are several statues of him--one at the CIA, one at Yale (his alma mater), and one in City Hall Park among others.

He was a schoolteacher and only 21 years old.

He was captured in Flushing Bay, Queens and accused of being one of the men who set the Great Fire of 1776, which burned a quarter of New York.

He was hanged, according to plaques and guide books in three different locations; however, most historians agree he was hanged at 66th and 3rd Avenue, near present-day Hunter College.  He was famous for his last words which, if they were uttered came from a contemporary play of the time--Cato by Joseph Addison:

"How beautiful is death, when earn'd by virtue!
Who would not be that youth?  What pity is it
That we can die but once to serve our country."

All right, the answer:  Nathan Hale, famous for the words:  "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.".

Today's NYC anniversary:  the founding in 1845 of the Knickerbockers Baseball Club which was the first to play under the modern rules...which makes me wonder:  Who were they playing against and weren't they playing under the same rules?  (Well, if you wonder, you have to research.)  I just read the entry in Wikipedia which reports that the club was just founded on September 23, 1845.  There were a few games played within their club but the first officially recorded game under the new rules between two different teams was in June, 1846 in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Finally, my favorite overheard monologue yesterday was delivered by a teenage girl to her friends at Columbus Circle.  An excerpt:  "An opera singer is coming over to my house on Sunday.  She wants to check out my (inaudible).  She's my mom's friend.  She's super famous, everyone knows her, and she has houses in like every country in the world." 

Every country in the world!

Clip of the week:  I guess this is a video for people in Japan who want to visit the U.S. but are terrified of being mugged.  And so they watch this to get in shape and learn just enough English to file a police report:  I WAS ROB-BED BY TWO MEN.  (It gets stranger each time you watch it.)

From October, 2004 through May, 2005, several of my friends had children.  On Christmas Eve, Peter and Andrea had a boy and named him Hudson Rafael Flynn.  Four months later, Julie and Mike, who don't know Peter and Andrea, gave birth to a boy and named him Hudson Flynn Harris. 

They live only nine blocks apart and have yet to meet, but what happens when these Hudson Flynns do?  Stay tuned.

It looks like I'll be reading from Suspension at Labyrinth Books in New Haven at the end of December.  If you know anyone at Yale, send them over to York Street.  I'll be posting the date in the next week.

Walking on 57th Street today, I came across the end of a film shoot.  I know nothing about the movie other than Will Smith is the star and, judging from the greenery breaking through the asphalt and the soot-covered bus, something bad has happened to New York (AGAIN!)...and time has passed.

I walked down 44th early Sunday evening and passed the theater where the cast of The History Boys was finishing its award-winning run which started back in the spring.  Mere hours later, on the way to the subway, I passed by the theater again to find men already at work ripping the signage off the wall and putting up the new ads.  Wow.

Just imagine:  you bow one last time as the audience ovates, you sign autographs at the stage door and then head off with your friends and colleagues for a closing night party, returning a few pints later to clean out your dressing room.  And suddenly you're lost, your theater's gone.  Bewildered, you stumble up and down 44th.

You are history, boy.

Your picture's nowhere to be seen.

What is?  What has suddenly replaced your existence between Spamalot and Phantom of the Opera?

Do you hear the people sing?  Well, you're about to.  Here we go again.

Last weekend, as I was buying my morning coffee at Frank's, one of the women behind the counter asked the question, "Are you taking a day off?"  I wasn't.  I had an extensive to-do list which would keep me busy until ten or eleven that night.  I tried to remember the last day that I took completely off, and finally recalled one I spent at the beach back in July.  That was a long time ago.   So this past weekend I decided that there would be no writing, no research, and no efforts of promotion at all.  It was Open House New York and I planned to spend a leisurely weekend visiting locations around the city.  Perfect!

I woke up early on the first day of my vacation and rushed out of the house, buying a coffee and an almond pastry so dry I almost choked to death on Fort Washington and 185th.  The chest pains were so severe I pulled out my cell phone to dial 911, but a few gulps of coffee either melted the blockage or pushed it into my stomach, so I was able to hop on the A, which took me Fulton.  From there, I made a quick dash down Broadway to the beautifully renovated Battery Maritime Building to meet Marc Wolf and catch the first ferry over to Governors Island.  We took a tour with a couple of volunteers who had grown up there and then explored the island until the 12:30 boat.  We walked up to Wall Street to take the 2, because the 1 wasn't running below 14th (the MTA still believes that no one takes the subway on weekends).  We had lunch in Chelsea and I signed copies of Suspension at the Barnes and Noble on Sixth Avenue.  (Wait a second!  I wasn't supposed to be doing any promotion.  Oh, who cares?  Book signing is fun.)  We walked to the Grand Lodge of the Masons where there was a thirty-minute line.  We decided to try this one later, because our priority that day was a walk on the High Line, the old elevated railroad being converted into a park.  Of course, the High Line was one of the stupidest events of the entire Open House NY.  We weren't the only ones who didn't read the description carefully and thought we would have an opportunity to walk at least a few blocks on the abandoned, grass-strewn railroad.  There was a cell phone tour, for God's sake!!  But that tour, it turned out, was to be taken from the sidewalk (or from your apartment).  The "tour" they were offering required at least a thirty-minute wait before you walked up a few flights in an old meatpacking building to stand for four minutes on a small concrete platform looking at construction materials and more concrete.  That was it.  Tessa Derfner had joined us by then--though, after this, she wasn't sure why.  We were obliged to salvage the afternoon.  We grabbed a cab back to the Masons where the line now stretched down the block, and where they closed the doors three minutes before we reached the cut-off point.  But we wouldn't give up.  We walked to the Prince George Hotel on 28th Street and visited the ballroom.  In 1996, Common Ground purchased this once grand hotel near Madison Square to provide "housing for low-income or formerly homeless adults, including people with HIV/AIDS or mental illness and the elderly."  The ballroom was restored by Common Ground and other non-profit groups, giving jobs to "at-risk youth, high school students interested in restoration arts, architectural students, and individuals with HIV/AIDS."  Inspired by that beauty and collaboration, we kept pushing on.  We took the subway to 59th and walked over to the Paul Rudolph House at 246 E. 58th and then up and down its narrow staircases to explore its countless (at least by me) horizontal spaces.   Afterwards, we had sake at Tao and called it a day.  Not bad.

I woke up even earlier on Sunday.  Despite my resolution to spend the weekend relaxing and not working, I took a tour job, because it was good money and only lasted three hours.  I took the subway down (eschewing the almond pastry heart attack) and met one of three buses from North Carolina.  I gave a tour to fifty kids (and parents) from a marching band that had come in second at a competition at Giants stadium the day before.  We took off and in three hours drove or walked through Hell's Kitchen, Times Square, Columbus Circle, Lincoln Center, Central Park, much of Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, Herald Square, Madison Square, Union Square, Greenwich Village, Little Italy, Chinatown, Foley Square, City Hall Park, Ground Zero, the Financial District and South Street Seaport.  This was followed by a mad dash to the A train packed with families traveling to the Medieval Fair in my neighborhood.  After a half an hour of screaming babies I was walking across Upper Manhattan to wait in line above the Harlem River and climb the High Bridge Water Tower with Marc who was up for a second day.  (The usually indefatigable Tessa had fallen to the wayside, exhausted and beaten.)  The High Bridge Water Tower was the highlight of my Open House weekend.  We climbed the 149 steps for a stunning 360-degree view of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and a brief but thorough explanation of how the water was first brought to New York (over High Bridge) and how the tower pumped water up to a reservoir for the elevated portion of Upper Manhattan.  After the descent, though we were tired, we chose to keep going strong and head back downtown for the Masonic Lodge and the Ling Loft which was set to close at five.  The subways were screwed up, of course.  No one apparently had told the MTA that it was Open House NY this weekend.  Because our train became an express, we had to get out at Penn Station and walk the rest of the way to the Grand Lodge of Masons.  Here we were given an orientation and then a tour of many rooms, most of which were laid out identically but all differed in style, from Wacky Egyptian, where the Shriners meet, to French and Colonial.  The largest meeting hall with its yellow ceiling windows by Tiffany was copied by the men who designed the ballroom on the Titanic.  By the time we got out of the Lodge, it was too late to visit the Ling Loft.  Eh, next year.  As we were walking toward the subway, Marc who was headed home for a nap, told me that I really should see the Gustave Klimt paintings at the Neue Gallery, because the show was closing at midnight.  I boarded my train home but, at the last minute, transfered to a local at 59th and then to a bus across Central Park.  Imagine me crawling with my last reserves of strength up the steps into the museum, because that's what it felt like.  But it was worth it.  Klimt is one of those painters of works best seen in person, because the reproductions literally pale in comparison.  Adele Bloch-Bauer I is gold and silver with such rich texture that I wanted to reach out and caress some parts with my finger, rub others with my palm.  (I called Tessa to tell her to get up to the Neue Gallery, because though the Golden Adele was now part of the permanent collection, the others, including the transcendent Birch Forest would soon be gone.  She was still too wiped out but promised one day to buy me a Klimt if I forgave her.  I did forgive her, but since the Golden Adele was just purchased for $135 million and Tessa couldn't pay for her sake the night before, I'm not holding my breath for a Klimt.)  After brief visits to the other rooms, I returned my admission button and limped towards the bus.

At home, on both evenings, while I had pictured myself pouring a glass of wine, putting my feet up and reading a book, I instead answered emails, did work on myspace, wrote notes in my journal about the Kant and Schopenhauer entries from the philosophy book I've been studying since June, and looked up New York historical facts to reconcile, confirm or discount the information I'd heard during the day.  Last night, as I stretched my legs and massaged my feet, I thought to myself, "That wasn't relaxing at all."

Ah, well, it's Monday:  back to work.

I've begun researching four very different articles/essays/stories about various aspects of the city and loving where the research has been taking me.  I was at Madison Square Garden on Saturday for the CFA-Iams Cat Championship and will be visiting an Animal Care and Control Shelter in Harlem at some point this week as well taking 10-16 literary walking tours of New York on Thursday (feel free to join me between sunrise and sundown).  I also found myself in the men's room at Penn Station (not for research, I had to pee) and it was here that I overheard one of my favorite lines of the year.

A homeless man, washing his armpits in one of the sinks and shouting to himself through a mouthful of scrambled eggs:  "I only need twenty-two more dollars and I can see Avenue Q tonight."  Maybe Broadway is coming back. 

October 20, 2006

No, I'm sad to report that I did not do the 10-16 literary walking tours I'd planned for yesterday.  There were five reasons why not.  One, I woke up late.  Two, my partner-in-crime, Tessa Derfner, who wanted to walk the Village with me, had to stay home for her refrigerator repair man who promised to arrive in the window of 11-3 and then at 3:30 said he would be there between 3:45 and 6.  11-6.  That's not really a window.  That's more of a french door.  Three, I stopped in several bookstores to sign books and to chat with booksellers.  Four, the first tour took me all over lower Manhattan and by the time I made it to the East Village I was hungry and took a leisurely lunch at the Cloister Cafe.  Finally, I turned a corner at one point in the late afternoon and saw a man bent over his wheelchair, his pants around his ankles, his flabby alabaster butt and bloated dangling parts exposed to the world as he urinated into a plastic container (the kind you get with soup to-go) before flinging the contents at commuters walking along 50th Street.  That's when I thought I'd call it a day.  I went for a swim in hopes that the chlorine would somehow burn the image out of my mind.  Nope.

In my travels, I came across the announcement posted below.  I found myself very distracted as I walked along Broadway in search of the site of John Jay's eighteenth-century home.  What is total sex?  WAIT A SECOND!!!  I just realized that her appearance was at 1:00.  I was still downtown at that point and could have gone back and found out.  Damn.  That might have been an educational reading!  Or did she read?  Maybe she just signed.  Certainly she answered a few questions... what kind of questions?  I'm sure they were different from the questions I keep getting.  I seriously doubt Nina Hartley was asked, "Is Ruby Green based on your mother?" or "How different is writing a book from writing a play?"  Maybe she gets:  "How different is writing a book from starring in a hardcore film?"  Answer:  "There's not much difference at all."   And who showed up at that reading?  I would wager half the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  That could have been an interesting blog!  But nnnooooooo, I had to go find the street where Washington Irving grew up. 

And another reason I was distracted was because the cover you see above was the cover I first proposed to my publisher for MY book. 

Editor:  But why?

Robert:  Sex sells.

Editor:  But your novel isn't about sex.

Robert:  Let the reader find that out later.

Editor:  What would you wear on the cover?

Robert:  I don't know, jeans and a t-shirt.  Probably a hat.  

Editor:  I'm sorry, Robert, it just doesn't make any sense.

Robert:  Fine.  But mark my words: there is someone who's going to do a shoulder stand with pointed toe on the cover of their book and if it sells more copies than mine, I will buy forty plastic containers (the kind you get for soup to-go) and I will...

A week ago, my friend, Becca Gippin, read my last blog which referred to Nina Hartley's appearance at Borders to promote her new book, Guide to Total Sex, and that evening, Becca Gippin sent me a text message telling me that she was attending the party for that book.  We recently met for dinner.  While waiting for her sister, Sarah, two hours after we were supposed to have dinner, I thought I'd take the time to interview Becca, as if she were a correspondent for robertwestfield.com.

Robert:  Were there more adult film stars at my launch party or hers?

Becca:  Um, I would have to say that there were probably more professional porn stars at hers.

Robert:  Hm.

Becca:  I know there were some people at yours who were holding their amateur status.

Robert:  Really?

Becca:  How random was it that I ended up at that thing?  I wasn't invited to it, I just...are you taping me? 

(The recording is shut down.  Then resumed.)

Becca:  I've been partying too hard.  I have to detox.

Robert:  (pointing to her glass)  What's that?

Becca:  Vodka.

(The recording is shut down.  Then resumed.)

Becca:  It was just a party.  There wasn't any like announcement or anything, but I didn't get there until midnight.  But, yeah, there were definitely porn stars there.  They were all kind of old and tired and...I mean they were all kind of skanky- looking.  I definitely felt, I was a little nervous people were going to mistake me for a porn star, but that was NOT the case.  I had like a turtleneck on and, compared to everybody else, I was like a librarian.  (Which is not what Becca was wearing in the picture taken a couple years ago and which I'm about to post.)

Robert:  What were they wearing?  Were there any great outfits?

Becca:  (matter of fact)  They were just skanked out.

(The recording is shut down.  Then resumed.)

Becca:  I thought we were eating at 6:30.

Robert:  I know.  What's that about?

Becca: I'm starving.  This is bullshit.  Typical Sarah.

PET PEEVE OF THE WEEK:

This past weekend I took many different trains to a variety of stations, somehow disembarking each and every time directly in front of the sign which marks the precise spot where a man lost his MetroCard on the fourth of January.   You would think if City workers were trying to demonstrate to the riding public that they "deserve world-class healthcare," then they would plaster the walls with example after example of all they have genuinely contributed to keeping the "city working."  Instead, they choose to settle for one egregiously fabricated sentimental soul-crushing anecdote.  Let's look at this sign.

"4 January, 11:09 a.m."  Sure.  Someone could have lost their MetroCard at this time on this date, but the rider tends to doubt it after seeing two signs in two different stations.

"Man loses his MetroCard here."  Is that supposed to mean that this is where he realized he had no MetroCard?  If so, then why in the world would anyone have to lend him the fare?  He is already inside the station, standing on the platform.  Most likely, it means that this is the spot where the card was lost, unbenownst to him, and, really, unbenownst to anyone.  MetroCards litter the ground throughout the system, but somehow this card was picked up by detectives or investigative journalists who spent months tracking down the owner whom they learned had been lent fare (for some reason) by a City worker he was going to marry.

"City worker lends him the fare."  HIGHLY unlikely.  Their normal responses would be more along the lines:  "Use the machine," "Send your complaint to this address," "No transfers, take this train one stop down and walk to the other side of the platform," "Use the machine," and "Use the machine."

"A year later, they're married."  Aww.  The Hollywood formula.  Everything is right with the world.  What they don't post is this:  "Two years later, after the man loses his job--because he's always late to work--he begins to steal money from the City worker's purse, where he finds a picture of his wife with another man, which starts a seven-month period of accusations, denials, recriminations and physical abuse, which only ends when the City worker stirs shards of glass into his mashed potatoes, which is mistakenly eaten by their dog, who, in his pain and panic, bites the City worker, who has insufficient healthcare and bleeds to death in the emergency room.  4 January, 12:04 a.m.  Man returns to subway platform and jumps in front of the Uptown C."

"Only in New York."