Ghost Writer - Part VII
I had just moved back to New York City and was staying with my parents temporarily while waiting for my own apartment to be ready. I was also desperately looking for a job. Eventually I had the luck of meeting a very unusual woman who was looking for a ghostwriter.
THIS IS PART 7 of a SEVEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Image: Liza Summer
What was important to me in the early days of sobriety was consistency, going to the same meetings every day so that they became habitual, a crucial part of my schedule. I was two weeks sober when I slipped into the dim church basement in the Bowery with Chrysis and Harry. I was used to orderly meetings, where a designated person told their story for twenty minutes or so, and then people raised their hands and spoke from the floor. But the meeting in the Bowery was different. When we entered the room an argument was in process. The speaker, a rough-looking woman in her forties, was yelling – hurling insults – at another woman seated in one of the rows of auditorium chairs in front of her. They were screaming at one another. The three of us sat down gingerly. This was more like theater than an AA meeting, and we didn’t know what to make of it or how to behave. We were prepared to be entertained, but in the orthodoxy of AA this shit show was shocking.
I had been sitting there for a few minutes when a scruffy-looking man in faded jeans walked in carrying the Sunday Times. He was about my age, thin and scrawny with wire-rim glasses and shaggy hair. I wondered briefly if he was a down-and-out Bowery bum, here for the coffee and cookies, but then, perhaps a little stupidly, decided a bum wouldn’t be carrying the Sunday Times. The next morning I saw this same man at an upscale meeting near my house on East Seventy-ninth Street. He was dressed more neatly and somehow we left the meeting together and he walked me home, talking about this and that in a deep baritone voice that immediately crept into my heart. We have been talking together ever since, and that was forty years ago.
In a way I could say this was the story I ghost wrote, rather than the grand, titillating, bestseller I had tried to create with Lauren. But there was an element of destiny to it.
Two years before, on a sweltering day in August, I was walking down a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when it occurred to me that thoughts were like radio waves and I could radio ahead to my soul mate, whoever he might be. I focused my mind to arrow sharpness. Whoever you are, I messaged, I’m going to start walking to you, so why don’t you start walking to me.
I had the odd feeling those words were traveling to someone very specific, someone I could actually sense out there in the universe. A moment later, I had an answer. A voice in my head (but was it really?) said: Two years, Brooklyn.
Perhaps it was because of that that I decided to move back to New York. Two years later, I walked into an AA meeting in the Bowery and there he was, my soulmate in wire rim glasses and faded jeans who happened to live in Brooklyn.