SHOPKEEP Excerpt: New York State of Mind

Author Teases 2022 Memoir with Another Chapter Drop

Nothing blew my mind like an amazing 1987 college trip to New York with Dr. Franklin Ashley, my first college writing mentor, who carried his young scribes up to the big city for the long weekend of their lives.

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In March 1987 I find myself standing outside Port Authority Bus Station, and I feel as though I’m in a dream: not even nine o’clock in the morning, I’ve already taken my first ride in an airplane, rode a bus in from Newark and now stand staring down 42nd Street. I watch in amazement as a woman, elegant and mysterious in her all-black outfit, hails a cab which zips over and into it she goes, like in the many movies and TV shows I’ve seen about life in the big city. Nobody in Lugoff, or in Columbia, for that matter, hails a cab. Snowflakes drift down from a wintry sky. Traffic, noise, flashing marquees.

A childhood wish has come true. I’m in New York. At last.

Here’s how I fictionalized the experience in the upcoming novel Reconstruction of the Fables, which is to say, not at all, except for the names and the beret:

The sight of the city on the horizon as the plane winged into the airport had itself been like a vision I could barely comprehend, but being inside its canyons offered another level of hallucinatory disbelief altogether. Once on the streets, Gershwin chimed in my ears—not Woody Allen’s Manhattan opening sequence set to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ but rather ‘An American in Paris,’ my eyes dancing like Gene Kelly’s feet across the myriad sights: the pulsating movement of the bodies and the vehicles, the wispy gray clouds across the sliver of sky visible overhead, an elegant slender woman all in black hailing a cab, street vendors, hustlers outside the strip of porno theaters outside the Port Authority bus station where we disembarked from our airport shuttle from Newark, the bigger than life ads ringing Times Square. Not like in the movies, though. All of it bigger than life itself.

“So this is New York,” I heard Brenda say as we stood clustered with our luggage on the filthy worn sidewalk like an island amidst the flowing river of people. “Smells worse than I expected.”

“At last, we have found El Dorado,” I commented with a Spanish accent low enough that no one could hear, in case I sounded dumb or no one got what I meant or Jaime became offended.

“Train your eyes to find this color.” Max, pointing to a jaunty blue beret on his head corralling his wispy crown of white hair, Doc Brown reborn as a scriptwriting guru. “Now let’s get moving and try to stay together.”

Our fearless leader trooped us five blocks down Eighth, taking a right on 47th to the Hotel Edison, home base for the weekend. As we trudged and weaved through the throngs on the sidewalk and bombarded by sensory input, it really did feel like the center of the universe, New York. No wonder they came from all over.

Crowded, though.

Too crowded, maybe. I grew up amidst pine trees and dirt roads. The thrill and juice of the experience so far had my gut at times teetering on the precipice of anxiety. I kept reminding myself to breathe. New York.

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In the real version, Franklin B. Ashley, Ph.D., with a fur-and-leather men’s winter hat instead of a blue beret, leads his gaggle of wide-eyed scriptwriting students into the maw of the heart of Western civilization, or so Americans tell tell themselves.

We range from green bumpkins like me to sophisticated Larry Campbell, forty, a musician with a past who came to the Media Arts program later in life than the rest of us. He’s been around. A jazz bassist, he knows all about New York. He will initiate me into it simply by the casual way he grabs hold of a subway strap during the first ride on such a vehicle I would take later in the day, the ease with which he hails a cab, the way he holds his cigarette or orders a drink. He isn’t my hero, but he is one cool cat who seems at ease in his own skin, which despite a calm demeanor I am definitely not.

After checking into the Hotel Edison, a vibrant, busy jazz-age relic on 47^th Street in the Times Square theater district, we had some downtime before our first appointment, with a producer whose name escapes me on a soap called (I think) One Life to Live, or perhaps it was All My Children (or even another one). I will remember hanging on every word as this gentleman described the writing and producing process or running a daily soap. I have no intention of writing soap operas, but how they work as a team sounds interesting.

Except for the fact that I do not work and play well with others. In the case of the five-scene group project in Dr. Ashley’s introductory course last semester, this tendency of mine to take control manifested to everyone’s benefit. I spent an afternoon with a pitcher of beer at elbow putting together everyone’s half-hearted attempts at scriptwriting into a cohesive whole I then spent an evening getting typed up in time to turn in to the professor. That we would go on to present our work on stage and win the class competition I credit to the whole group, however, who did a fine job of selling the finished work onstage, but in any honest accounting of How It Went Down in Scriptwriting 321, I was the project’s true author.

It’s fine; nobody minded, nor did I mind sharing the credit and keeping all that to myself. Every group needs a leader. Luckily these souls saw one in their award-winning cohort and gladly let me take the reins. What did they get in return? An A in a challenging class. No thanks necessary.

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But that’s the end of the semester. In New York, before we get to the meeting with the soap producer, other priorities hold sway—my friend Doug Dawson and I embark on a mission to procure a ‘bowl’ or pipe in which to smoke the bag of weed he smuggled on the plane. You can do such things in these innocent days of low-to-no airline security. I will later fly across country to Grateful Dead shows with a bag of nugs and a wooden pipe shoved down in my pants; and on the return trip? A pocketful full of blotter LSD. Different times.

We find a rounded wooden pipe at a tobacco and head shop on 7^th Avenue called the Smoke Scene. Now what? We need to smoke the weed, but we are in the literal middle of New York City, with beat cops strolling all around.

My mind struggling to keep up with the sensory input coming my way, we walk a few blocks uptown until we arrive at Central Park.

“Here we go,” Doug says. This is the place we could smoke and not be noticed.

We head into the park. The traffic noise falls back behind us. The flurries have stopped, but the grass got a good dusting. Seeing snow at all is a rare delight for a Southerner like me—how many delights can I take on one morning?

We walk for a few blocks, pass by the Sheep Meadow and finally find a semi-secluded stand of trees. We smoke.

Mind? Blown.

Check it out: I’m high, I just took a jet aircraft ride from Columbia to New York fucking City, I’m about to meet with producers and writers on such shows as the soap opera and Late Night with David Letterman, but best of all, perhaps, is the play we’ll see later, Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound. It isn’t the play so much as going backstage to visit with one of the actors, John Randolph, whom Dr. Ashley knows.

An amazing synchronicity—Randolph had played one of the visiting generals on M*A*S*H, a critical piece of pop culture in my creative and personal development. (If you ever wondered the source, besides my Gen X/Indigo Child genetics and spiritual bearing, of my deep human empathy couched in anti-authoritarian wisecracking, look no further than the characters of Hawkeye and Trapper John found in the novel, Robert Altman’s movie and the iconic TV series of Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H). Little do I know later that night at Sardi’s Randolph will give me the single best piece of advice ever. But he will. And I thank him for it to this day.

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This trip keeps giving—not only were we snubbed by TV’s Alice, Linda Lavin, who starred in the show—she took one look into Randolph’s dressing room at a gaggle of dewy college students and turned tail—but I’m sitting at big table inside legendary theatre district restaurant Sardi’s, where John Randolph sits to my right.

Randolph, born Emanuel Hirsch Cohen, who along with his wife was blacklisted in 1948 for refusing to name names during the HUAC hearings in, barely worked again until John Frankenheimer cast him in Seconds, in 1966, as a man who pays to have his face and identity changed into Rock Hudson. On a more recent level, he had played ‘Pop’ Partana in John Huston’s Prizzi’s Honor, a fine film we had discussed in class.

Randolph could see in my quiet, drunken, mind-blown eyes that I needed a dose of reality. “You want to hear something useful,” he asked. “Don’t you?”

I nodded. FBA looked over at us with intense eyes.

“Write this down,” he said. “’It’s all bullshit’. Seriously—write it down.”

Randolph turned away. Dr. Ashley said to me, “Write down ‘It’s all bullshot’ instead.” I still don’t know what he meant by this.

Far from looking dour or serious in his proclamation Randolph instead laughed, had such a wry twinkle in his eye. I had no idea what he meant then, but now I do. Getting caught up in the game, taking it too seriously, is a recipe for an unhappy, unsatisfied life. Imagine how it felt being kept from working at one’s chosen trade for having political beliefs. No wonder he called it all bullshit. I took ‘the game’ far too seriously for far too long, and suffered consequences. When I remember Randoph’s advice, trouble goes down much smoother.

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We have been drinking for hours, now, since a screwdriver on the plane at seven in the morning. Did I mention we could also smoke cigarettes on the plane? No kidding.

Being in New York, however, means that despite downright physical exhaustion, I’m so mentally amped I cannot truly get into deep sleep.

While Doug, in similar condition, lay next to me in the double bed but in his case snoring, dead to the world, Larry and Ann, the other ‘adult’ learner in the class, a sweet thirty-something with an angular nose and big, beautiful eyes, seemed to assume we were both asleep, and began making out on the other bed.

Mind you—Larry has a relationship back home with Sabrina, later his wife and mother of his child. Larry, however, is something of a wolf.

Once the whispering starts, I realize they are about to screw.

I crack open an eye in the midnight gloom.

They’re both looking right at me.

I quickly close my eye, feign a deep sleep-sigh and reposition.

“Donnie Mac’s unconscious,” Larry whispers. “They both are.”

“Okay.”

More rustling.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

“God,” I hear him reply, “I love to fuck.”

I roll over and try to drift off. Whatever happens, from there it stays pretty quiet.

Next I seem to blink and everyone’s stirring at first light for our breakfast meeting with the writer from the David Letterman show. Maybe a quick smoke around the party table will knock out the hangovers. I feel as though I have not slept at all.

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On Sunday afternoon our little group is having its last meal—legit greasy, cheesy New York slices—before we convene with the others in the lobby of the Edison. I met up with Larry, Doug and Ann here after stealing away from my hard-partying partners earlier in the day to go with the other sci-fi genre geek in the class to visit a memorabilia, comics and toy store called Forbidden Planet. As I will discover, some youthful predilections we never quite shake.

But the true master of his passions and prejudices, as I will find, may find it possible to transmute such affections and interests—the things he loves—into a living. I will go on to do so at every turn, but at this point I can’t know that. I’m merely checking out the models of starships and the display of graphic novels like Alan Moore’s Watchmen, which seems intriguing, as well the dark takes on the Batman character that seem all the rage.

All I know in the moment at the pizza joint, however, besides being high from our final session around the small, round hotel room table by the cracked window is that Ann, sitting across from Larry and beside a zoned-out Doug clutching a half-eaten slice of pepperoni, has burst into tears.

Larry leans forward. A gentleman, he gently shushes and comforts her while Doug and I sit in awkward silence.

“It won’t be the same back home,” I hear her say, tearful. “I know that. It’s okay.”

He mumbles some platitude.

But she knows. A spring-break fling with the handsome, teacher’s pet sophisticated jazz-playing Larry. Bless her soul. Sometimes I wish I didn’t take notice of all the little human interactions playing out around me.

The lobby of the hotel, another bus ride and then the flight home, this time in the evening; seeing the nighttime urban sprawl from the air, a powerful and unnerving experience. It’s only my second time on an aircraft. This one is filled with what seem other returning college kids. We party hard for one more hour and a half. Larry manages to sit with FBA instead of Ann.

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Back home, Allyson awaits. She has missed me, maybe feels threatened by my new Media Arts connections jetting me off to the big city, including a number of attractive women. Most of them treat me like a colleague rather than a potential romantic partner, though, which is fine.

We are glad to see each other, revel in one another’s affection. In six weeks time, she will be dead. And for a brief time, all my hopes and dreams along with her.

And while I will return to New York many more times after this epic student trip, including once later that fall with Jenn at my side  as I visit NYU to think about grad school in the filmmaking program there, being on the streets will never feel as vivid as the first time. And once Jenn and I become business partners our regular, twice-yearly trips as retail buyers to The City will become routine, but not until almost ten years later.

Yes—I will return to the streets triumphant and successful, but neither as writer nor filmmaker; rather, a retailer.

It’s fine. The Loose Lucy trips are wild and glamorous parties on their own terms, and for a good long while, they will satisfy my need to connect with that New York energy. I need it. At one point, the mid-90s, not only am I pulling double duty by flying my desk at USC but I’m not yet writing, not even faking-it-till-I-make-it as a writer—at this point the dream is still all fantasy, with no daily discipline, no direction, no pages, nothing but memories of my high school work and college screenplays like a scratched jukebox version of Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’ playing on the wrong speed. But that’ll all change. You bet it will.