Goodbye to All That by Sari Botton

Author:Sari Botton [Botton, Sari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781580054959
Publisher: Seal Press

CURRENCY

ELISA ALBERT

1.

Maybe you’ll be an actress. Maybe you’ll do stand-up. Maybe you’ll suck dick for money. Maybe you’ll wear intense glasses and make dramatic proclamations into a swank office telephone. Maybe you’ll meet your married lover for a drink on a rainy night somewhere dark wearing nothing but lingerie under a coat. Maybe you’ll make art in an airy loft in a deserted part of town. Surely there’ll be long ruminative walks through the park. The voice-over will be witty as hell.

You can be weird in New York; you can be strange and melancholy and buxom and tall and dark and discerning and behave generally like the exuberant dyke you believe yourself to be. Apparently they value that sort of thing there!

Ape the hell out of Didion’s prose in conversing with Dear Diary and get into a decent college despite your hilariously low GPA. Damn, her sentences are cool. Mr. Bellon’s English class is the only thing about which you can muster a shit to give.

“Let’s go down to the East River and throw something in,” Ani DiFranco growls over and over again, louder and louder over the din of your mother’s tirades outside the locked bedroom door. “Something we can’t live without and then let’s start again.” Mutter this phrase tunelessly to yourself while you ride out panic attacks in the shower. Soon you’ll be there and here won’t matter anymore.

It won’t be Didion’s New York, though. Not Ani DiFranco’s. Not Nicole Holofcener’s, Nora Ephron’s, Fran Lebowitz’s, Jonathan Lethem’s, Susan Sontag’s, Andy Warhol’s, or Patti Smith’s either. Silly, though tempting, to pretend otherwise.

You’re neither spoiled nor truly reckless enough to fully inhabit the extremes of the experience, but do what you can. Get regularly shit-faced with a gaggle of girls more or less exactly like you. Give spike heels a try. Take strangers home from bars. (Fucking dork: keep a list of their first names, the names of every man with whom you ever so much as make out.) Rarely turn down an invitation or a narcotic. Wind up in strange/desperate/squalid/exorbitant apartments, clubs, bars, restaurants. Forget how you got there. Guzzle jack-and-cokes until everyone seems like a dear friend you’ll meet again in another lifetime. Bring the house down at Marie’s Crisis with your off-key “Adelaide’s Lament.”

The Second Avenue Deli, Veniero’s, Tompkins Square on the verge of sanity. Grey Dog Coffee, where your first husband gets himself banned for general orneriness. City Bakery. The community garden on Avenue D. St. Mark’s Bookshop. Flatiron office job, Midtown office job, Gramercy office job, Chelsea freelance job. Forever late to work. One boss gives you an embroidered robe from ABC made of wool and silk, which almost a decade and a half later turns out to still be one of the nicer things you own. LifeThyme Natural Foods, Cobble Hill Theater, Yoga Lab, the Victory, Flying Saucer, Blue Sky Bakery. Read The New York Post and The New York Daily News cover to cover over lunch.

There are so many people, other people, always more people.

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