Truckin'

By Cornelia


Truckin, I'm a goin' home.
Whoa whoa baby, back where I belong....

I am, believe it or not, a native of Manhattan. It is the closest thing I have to a home town, though I've only resided there in scattered and jagged pieces along my personal arc of timeline.

I have been there both when the streets were piled with crunchy toxic brown snow and when August heat enticed forth the bouquet of urine and garbage and old cigar from every sidewalk crack and manhole cover, in shimmering waves. I have served frozen yogurt in the bowels of Grand Central Station and labored in the midtown salt-mines of publishing. I have eaten at Cuban-Chinese diners and "21." Between contractions the morning I went into labor, I argued with the cab driver about whether we should take Sixth Avenue or the FDR Drive to the hospital.

Agatha Christie once said that "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story." Everything changes, between stops. I was born in a hospital that no longer exists, and carried home from it to a brownstone in which strangers have now lived for some decades.

I got to go back to The City for five days this past week. The last time I'd set foot on my indigenous island, we still used tokens for the subway, and the World Trade Center was a place I didn't think about much unless we had guests from upstate who wanted a bit of touring around.

There is one place in New York, however, that never changes: Ariel's parents' apartment on Central Park West. I have hung out there since I was nineteen, and know it well enough to find my way around in the dark. They've reupholstered the low-slung sofa on which I first had a conversation with the guy I ended up marrying (about FDR's policy of "Farm Parity"), but otherwise it's perfectly intact. There's even still the same swath of bandana-print wallpaper along the punchboard potrack in the kitchen, and the furry revolving loveseat hasn't lost a hair of its cocooning allure.

Last Wednesday night, Ariel threw a party for me there to celebrate my having a published novel at long last. As we were slicing baguettes and laying out platters of crudite and dip hours before people were due to arrive, she said to me, "This is like a wedding... so many people from throughout your life are going to show up, you know?"

The doorbell started ringing, and people piled in to the long, high-ceilinged living room. The juxtapositions were mind-boggling. Over by the piano was Judith Goldiner-- whom I hadn't seen since we graduated from high school twenty-five years ago-- chatting with John DeLalio, with whom I used to play Peruvian Speed Quarters when I was home from college at my mother's boyfriend's house on Centre Island. Freshman-year dormmate David Hutchinson came out into the back hallway to smoke Marlboros with me and Lee Child and Maggie Griffin.

My old boss from The Reader's Catalog, Geoffrey O'Brien, came over to say hi to Peter Riegert, the actor-director dude who's optioning A FIELD OF DARKNESS, since they'd met a few months earlier at some charity thing downtown. My agent Rolph Blythe and his gorgeous wife Rebecca came, celebrating their first night out since the birth of their daughter a month ago. Les Pockell and Celia Johnson and Susan Richman from Mysterious Press sipped wine and chatted with Cousin Winthrop Hoyt.

Uncle Tony Hoyt and I discussed Jonestown, since he was the publisher of New West magazine in LA when they did the first expose on The People's Temple. Curtis Edmonds and his wife Ellen came in from New Jersey, which was the first time I'd met him in person though we've known each other since we both wrote for epinions.com back in the mid-Nineties.

Somtimes the relationships seemed to be begging for flowcharts and overhead-projector tranparencies to keep the tangles straight: Sarah Weinman was hanging on the sofa with Muffin Humes, whose sister Immy was the reason I ended up working at the Catalog for Geoffrey, since she'd hired my sister Freya to be her assistant photo editor. Ariel knows Immy because Immy went to Radcliffe with HER sister Judy, and Ari ended up working for Muffin and Immy's former stepfather Nelson Aldrich at Lear's Magazine while Freya and I were at the Catalog. The title of my novel comes from a quote from Nelson's book Old Money, and Nelson himself once told me that my Uncle David Read, his English teacher at St. Paul's, was the first person who ever told him he should be a writer.

My pal Candace came from Cincinnatti, bringing along her daughter Hope and older sister Katie, with Katie's daughter Megan. Katie picked up the copy of my audio book from off the top of the piano. She read the blurbs on the back and then cracked up laughing, since it turns out that the summer she was fifteen she was hired to be the mother's helper for Hillary Huber, who did the voice work.

And then there was the contingent from Backspace--the online writers' forum sponsoring the conference at the Algonquin Hotel, which was my reason for the trip--led by the inimitable Karen Dionne and her lovely daughter.

SOOOOOOOO... talk about the whole "what a long strange trip it's been" thing, you know? I wish the party had lasted for three days, so I could've talked with everyone to my heart's content. It's all a blur. Like my wedding, only I didn't have to beg people to bring me beer while I was stuck inside having my picture taken.

Plus which, DeLalio came up right after Peter Riegert said goodnight and went home.

"Dude," asked DeLalio, "was that the guy from Animal House?"

I told him it was.

"So what the hell was he doing here?"

"He wants to make a movie out of the book," I said.

"Dude," he said, holding up a hand to give me a high five, "that is so totally excellent!"

So was the party, and the conference, and especially Ariel.

I miss New York already... even the sidewalk/manhole fragrance of eau de cigar.

I would like to be Eloise when I grow up, only I'd hang out at the Algonquin way more than the Plaza--with Ariel and Candace and DeLalio and Geoffrey and Immy and Muffin and Sarah and Karen and Rolph and Curtis and Peter and David Hutch and Lee and Maggie and Winthrop and Judith and EVERYONE, plus all of Backspace.

I mean, dude, that would just be so totally excellent....