Chapter 1

Everything OkayPrologue: “You Change”

Let me be very clear.

I’m not mocking the tiny cashier’s fractured English.

As someone who is breezily called “ma’am” by pizza delivery dispatch, I don’t dare.

I hesitate to even quote her. I was raised not to ridicule the accent or language barrier of another. Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi and his buck teeth in Breakfast at Tiffany’salways disturbed me. Jonathan Pryce’s eyes taped back to look Asian as The Engineer in the original production of Miss Saigonwas just wrong.

I could rephrase it more PC: “Here’s your change.” That would sound better. But I just handed this woman with a bun a twenty-dollar bill, and it’s what she said.

“You change.”

My attention is elsewhere. I am lost, as friends have called it, in aesthetic astigmatism, my eyes twirling different directions in survey of my radius. It’s what I do, what I usedto do, edit your stuff, reduce clutter. I’m that precious someone who finds exposed electrical cords distasteful and wishes all lamps ran on batteries. I’m the dumbass who complains in the sports bar if an HD broadcast isn’t set to the right aspect ratio. Little things, big things, they all count, and gift or curse, OCD Me is compelled to mentally reset this bodega, counter to shelf, beginning with the crowded checkout.

Yes, I know bodega is Spanish. This Hell’s Kitchen mart is Korean. But everyone in New York calls them that, and I am a Newer Yorker.

The first thing I’d do is find a new place for those small foreign-made American flags, since I stopped counting at fifty-two stars. A chalkboard tells me I can have a $3 Sanwich!For fifty cents more, can I get the D? Only in New York City is a cellophane-wrapped stale corn muffin an impulse purchase. Vials of ginseng energy drink provide companionship to spools of twine. It takes a lot to lash your nerves together here, I guess.

This is the stuff that drives me bonkers.

A lot drives me bonkers.

Like that dairy case, which I want to squeegee. It looks like someone’s been kissing it. I can barely see the Yoo-Hoo behind the glass.

She says it again, serenely. “You change.”

The cash register says eighteen dollars and three cents.

A male employee, trying to activate an edible color from the bottom of a soup kettle, stops stirring.

“You change.”

Here’s an idea. Why don’t youchange? And how’s that courtship working out for Eddie’s father?

It has been said that most of the biggest moments in your life pass unnoticed or unremarked upon. That’s funny. My last year has been accompanied by a John Williams’s score. I just did my damnedest to stay afloat. I can make order of your disorder, but for my own life, I’d need a considerably bigger feather duster.

This is not, you see, notwhere I thought I’d be on my forty-sixth birthday, buying two bunches of daisies in dripping, crinkled plastic for myself, ahead of another customer holding a plastic container of fake crab with the real stench.

No, this is not the life I thought I’d be living. 1: Blue Roses

We make our way downtown as others scurry home in a Friday night rush hour in the final breaths of summer.

“The sunset is like the healing stages of a bruise,” Andy observes.

“It reminds me of a church window lit from within,” I suggest.

“Like you’ve been in church to know.”

“Does the ‘Church of the Poisoned Mind’ count?”

The nightclub for which we’re bound isa temple of sorts—a sanctuary of hymns, sisters, at least one choirmaster—and there is sure to be ritualistic sipping. It is as close as we’ll get to a place of worship on this, my birthday weekend.

At his request, Andy is at the wheel. I brake too much, he says. We’re in my 1971 Mercedes 280SL Pagoda convertible—Mercedes-Benz red 576 over a black leather interior. It’s the same model and year my father once owned and always regretted selling. I called it Mercy B. The broad assumption was the car, purchased via auction, was the prickly heat of a midlife hot flash. A Caesar haircut would have been cheaper, friends mocked. After my winning bid, the car was transported to the Mercedes Benz Classic Center in Irvine, California, where it spent weeks—at one-hundred bucks an hour—being rebuilt, restored, rechromed, repainted, replated. The wood in the car is show quality; even the upgraded armrests match the veneer. Mercy B. has only gotten better. Damn shame I haven’t.

At first, Andy isn’t taking one of the many alternate, and shorter, routes, giving us more time for what we do best: banter. He pushes my buttons until his finger cramps. I yank his chain until I need a heating pad. We pick each other’s scabs like bored kids at summer camp.