I Trust You to Kill Me

It is two in the morning and you could pick up the phone and order any number of exotic dishes delivered right to your door but for some strange reason, in a city of twelve million people, in what some argue (stridently, loudly) is the nerve center of the West, you can't find an all-night hardware store with a toilet plunger capable of dealing with the mess boiling up through your pipes. Standing in my Red Army t-shirt and a pair of ghost boxer shorts, awakened seconds before by the sucking sounds emanating from my bathroom, I stare into the toilet and mentally beg the thing to retreat before it reaches the brim. And it does.

The next evening I purchase the aforementioned plunger, stride into my bathroom, announce to the still-burbling plumbing that "It's Giuliani time," and proceed to correct the situation with extreme prejudice.

Thus begins my third week in New York.

I understand why a friend of mine, over beers last week, pronounced this the unhealthiest city in the world. You grow used to juggling ten things at once, spending eleven hours in the office and then another five in front of your laptop at home, drinking cup after cup after cup after cup after cup after cup of white tea, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping away while trying to calm down a bull-goose loony in Mexico or arranging a helicopter race or asking your contacts in DC (politely but with clenched teeth) where exactly your fucking money is. You're always *on.* On the weekends you see the Pogues at Roseland or a dance production or simply cruise Chinatown negotiating in your bullshit three words of Mandarin over three oranges. Which is fantastic; indeed what you've always wanted. But at the end of the day your hands shake and you feel too drained to do anything but sit on the couch and watch Daniel Craig snap a few necks while you eat an egg-white omlette with roasted garlic and sundried tomatoes.

So you start another novel. Never mind that your first one is still being considered by an agent, or that it's winding its way through the Gather.com contest. You take up again what you started in the scrub-jungle six lifetime-long weeks ago, churning out another 2,000 words a night. In the morning you awake from dreams of being torn apart by dogs and boil your skin under the shower, and start again.