Free She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan Page B

before Tina Brown and all that.
    The other magazine being launched at the time was
Vanity Fair
, which had been defunct for many years and was now being brought back to life by Condé Nast. Over at the
Bystander
, we were skeptical about
Vanity Fair
’s prospects. Oh, sure, like
that’ll
last more than a couple of issues.
    Being managing editor of the
American Bystander
was my first job out of Wesleyan, and to this day it is the best job I ever had, aside from the fact that I got paid only $600 a month. I rode around on UPS trucks in Manhattan; I had lunch with the
New Yorker
cartoonists; I went bowling with famous comedians. On one particular occasion, I was one of several people who tried to figure out how to float cartoonist Roz Chast across the Gowanus Canal with weather balloons. It would take a lot of balloons, we deduced, but it was doable, at least it was until Roz got wind of the caper and announced, “Listen, I’m
not
doing that.”
    I lived in a horrific apartment in Spanish Harlem with bad plumbing and bugs and mice. I ate beans. My first roommate was a guy just out of NYU film school named Charlie Kaufman. He was finishing up a movie of his on a giant editing machine he’d rented and kept in a corner of his bedroom. Together Charlie and I put roach poison out for the roaches, mousetraps out for the mice. The mice liked to hang out in our upright piano, one of two pieces of furniture I owned. At night, we could hear their little tails brushing against the strings.
    The apartment was on the second floor of an old West Side building, with high ceilings and wood floors. It looked out into the back of the block, where clotheslines were strung from building to building, and German shepherds patrolled the backyards. Downstairs from us was some sort of homosexual dungeon, where in the middle of the night I often awoke to hear the clank of chains from the flat below, one man crying out in orgiastic delight while another sobbed in a voice of almost unimaginable, mortal despair.
    Big thick iron bars covered all the windows in the place. One afternoon, I was sitting on the radiator, eating a banana, looking out the window at the dogs and the clotheslines. I put one hand on the bars and with the other held my banana. Now wait, I thought. What do I feel like now?
    Later, Charlie Kaufman moved out, and a friend of mine from Wesleyan, John Flyte, moved in. Flyte was a painter, and he sat for hours by the window, painting oils on a canvas.
    Toward midnight, sometimes, Flyte and I would walk out into the night and close down various low dives, the two of us sitting at the bar as the tired waitresses put all the other stools in the place upside down on the tables.
    Come on, boys, it’s closing time.
    Occasionally during this period I would go out on dates. Once I asked a girl I met in a bookshop if she’d “like to go and get some pie.” She found this hilarious and left the store, still laughing uncontrollably, as I stood there ashamed. I didn’t think it was so funny, getting pie. On another occasion I tried asking out the bartender at a nasty bar just down from the Brill Building. I don’t know what her real name was, but everyone called her “the Snail.” She had a buzz cut and tattoos. I tried the pie business again, and to my surprise, the Snail said sure. “You know, I don’t know many guys like you, Boylan,” she said.
    â€œGuys like me?” I said.
    â€œYeah, like non-assholes? You don’t see that many.”
    It was a nice thing for her to say, I had to admit that.
    A few nights later, I waited for her as she shut down the bar. When she finally finished, we walked out into the hot New York night to go and get our pie. A man was waiting for her, though, leaning against a brick wall, smoking.
    â€œWhere the fuck have
you
been, bitch?” he said to my date.
    â€œWhoops,” said the Snail. “Sorry. I gotta run.” She walked over to