Back to New York

New York New York, Las Vegas NV, 2012. For my 60th birthday, I'm going back to New York. I haven't been there since I lived there, 1988 to 1989. There's a reason for that. I have never been so alone as I was when surrounded by 7 million people. I tried to be social. Even succeeded a few times. The best was when I crashed a party at Columbia, met a pretty French girl who was taking English classes there, and we dated until she went home six months later. That was the good part. The bad part is much, much bigger. At my first job, I got death threats; we'd published something the Ayatollah didn't like. The admin who worked next to me jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Not because of the Ayatollah; she was just unwell. She'd come out from Iowa, couldn't admit to her parents that she'd made a mistake, and couldn't cope with the city. She drew pictures of herself as a ballerina and thumbtacked them to the cubicle wall between us. The church where they held the service was cavernous.…