Super bad

I woke up this morning on the leather couch. It was either seven, eight, or nine minutes past seven o'clock, depending on whether I believed the VCR, the cable box, or the stereo. I had stayed right where I had fallen when Mrs. McP and I tumbled in the door last night. We hadn't hung on all that late at my artist pal Ken Gallup and his wife Stephany's Super Bowl party, but it was late enough to reap a whirlwind of hangover.

Stephany, to my amazement, spent nearly four hours cooking for us as we drank and watched the game. (Her method, no doubt, of paying as little attention to the football as possible.) First came some carefully crafted crab cakes, then chicken wings, then broiled shrimp wrapped in bacon, then jalapeno poppers. All of it was perfect.

The walls, meanwhile, were hung with Ken's painting, which Mrs. McP and I both thought were strikingly good. Ken said that his portrait of Hillary Clinton's head lying on its side had been a huge hit down at Mars Bar, a notorious East Village hangout that features the works of downtown artists. Mars Bar is such a filthy little hole in the wall that it's one of the few dive bars that offends even me. But the place is known around the world, apparently, with tourists dropping in to experience the grittiest end of the New York art scene.

My main concern throughout the evening was keeping an eye on Comet who had his eye on a fat wedge of Camembert that was sitting on the edge of the coffee table. By rough estimate, he cruised past it with intent no less than fifty times. During the holidays he had taken to cheese thieving from our coffee table upstate, and we know him to have a thing for cheese that eclipses even his hardwired taste for meat. He ignored the slab of pate just inches away from the Camembert. Other than his edginess at being restricted to the carrot sticks that Mrs. McP was slipping him and a radish that I baffled him with, he performed his dogly duties well, keeping the perimeter secure by surveilling from the front window the suspicious activity four flights below on Second Avenue.

Yesterday began with a sprint down the New York State Thruway from the upstate compound. I was up at five, out of the gate at six, at the GWB by quarter after seven, and into a parking spot, luckily, on Tenth Street by seven forty-five. Then I attended Mass at Immaculate Conception on Fourteenth Street, celebrated by Father Joey Francisco, at nine.

After that Mrs. McP and I went to Barnes & Noble at Union Square, where we bought copies of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and The Dain Curse, the February issue of First Things, and a marked-down copy of a biography of Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who was, according to the dust jacket, "the youngest American regiment commander to see combat" in World War One, and "the oldest American (fifty-seven years old) and only general officer to land with the first wave on Utah Beach at Normandy" in World War Two.

The mission to the B&N was mainly for The Maltese Falcon, however. The movie based on it, with Bogart playing Sam Spade, is my favorite of all time. Yet I am embarrassed that I've never read Hammett's novel, or anything else by him. What finally spurred me to go get the book was that Mrs. McP had bought me an exact replica of the black falcon statue that is the treasure sought in the movie--the stuff that dreams are made of. It now sits on our mantelpiece upstate.

While in the store I wandered onto the second floor where they keep everything that's going at a bargain (that's where I got the TR Jr. bio). The offerings there are changed routinely, and yesterday there were perhaps fifteen tables full of novels being sold at deep discounts. Despite my negligence unto failure as a writer of fiction, that remains what I consider my main identity as a writer. It would be too hard and probably too boring for me to explain why that is the case.

But seeing this barge of busted novels being pushed upriver into the heart of literary darkness, ninety-nine percent of which I never knew existed, written by authors whose names brought shrugs, aroused the most immediate force of depression about the business of writing fiction. These books were now junk parts sold by the bucket, and what it all asked about the prospects for any novelist not already in either the pantheon of the critically acclaimed or the ranks of the best sellers was "so you want to do all that work, put your heart and soul into it, and wind up here?" It reminded me of the quip repeated to me by my world traveling friend Frank Evans: "In China, even when you're one in a million, there are ten thousand more just like you."