Free American Subversive by David Goodwillie

already been sold, I can’t remember. My parents had separated and then divorced while I’d been in Vermont. My father—the guilty party—had packed up and relocated to Connecticut, where he’d commenced a series of short, inelegant relationships that eventually led to wedded bliss with Julie, a former cocktail waitress a year older than me (and with three kids of her own). My mother, meanwhile, had gamely soldiered on in New York, until the city became too much for her, the memories and all that. During my senior year she moved upstate. With no family apartment to crash-land in after graduation, I sublet a small room in a friend’s loft just west of McCarren Park, in a then desolate stretch of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. From there I began a cheerless trek through one failing dot-com after another. What I remember from the year 2000 is the paperwork: endless options grants and health-careplans, Cobra applications and unemployment forms. I gave up after the third company went under.
    What to do? I’d majored in English—a fact I kept returning to as if it carried some secret inevitability—and had always been open to writing, in that I could string sentences together and didn’t feel terribly put out doing it. So I found a bartending job on Bedford Avenue and weighed my literary options. This was the great age of freelancing, outsourcing, contract work, and no profession lent itself to the time as much as journalism. But I knew people traveling that rutted road—pitching articles, sending out stories on spec,
building clips
. They’d show up at the bar, proudly waving around their latest piece—a D-list celebrity Q-and-A, a back-of-the-book band review, a restaurant profile in an airline magazine—and I’d pour them a drink on the house and try to muster some enthusiasm. But it was just so much work for so little reward. The cover letters, the rejections, the research, the writing, the editing, the mailbox-checking, the disappointment, the depression, the drinking. And I could drink just fine without the rest of it. I did my best to commiserate, but the unhappy endings took their toll. You can start with all the good intentions you want, but soon enough they’ll drown in a pool of other people’s failures. The idea of writing was losing its luster. Paying dues suddenly felt like an old-fashioned concept. Hadn’t the Internet promised to speed everything up, hustle us along to our true destinies?
    I fell in with a dodgy crowd of young Brooklynites: art handlers, line cooks, waiters, and actresses—always actresses—everywhere I went. We became nocturnal creatures, midnight poseurs, thrift-shop dynamos: thin-waisted and scraggly. Oh, life was heavy out there in the borough, laden with all the irony of the age. We lived on the cheap, carping like victims, carrying on like addicts. In the aftermath of the tech bust,
money,
like
Manhattan,
became a tainted word. Yet we cared a great deal about appearances, how far we could take our various guises, the many versions of ourselves. The truth, of course, is that we could never get anywhere. We were too sneering and self-aware, too busy mocking the earnest, the successful, anyone we didn’t know. We all get lost in little worlds, but they usually have a point—money, maybe, or love. But not us. Never has absolutely nothing been done with more style and determination than in early twenty-first-century Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
    Then came 9/11. I was still half-asleep when I heard the news on the radio, but I jumped up, grabbed my roommate’s bike, and took off toward Brooklyn Heights. The streets were full of people hurrying every which way, some going home, some to the waterfront. TVs glowed urgently through ground-floor windows. All the taxis had disappeared. One of the bartenders I worked with lived in a tall building near the promenade. We’d partied on her roof before, a bunch of us gazing at