Jonathan Franzen on New York City in the summer of 1981: “In theory, V and I were trying to write fiction, but I was oppressed by the summer heat and by the penitentiary gloom of the Atkins place, the cockroaches, the wandering neighbor.”
The author and his brother on the roof of the Cable Building in New York City.My girlfriend, V, and I were finishing college, with a summer to burn before the next thing, and New York beckoned. V went to the city and signed a three-month lease on the apartment of a Columbia student, Bobby Atkins, who may have been the son of the creator of the Atkins Diet, or maybe we just enjoyed imagining that he was.
Luckily, my brother Tom was in New York that summer, doing a loft conversion for the hot-shot young photographer Gregory Heisler. Tom, who was then based in Chicago, had come east with a Chicago friend of Heisler’s who wanted to start a renovation business and hoped to pick up some skills from my brother and split the profits. But Heisler could see that Tom had all the know-how. Before long, the friend was sent back to Chicago, leaving Tom without a laborer. This became my job.
On the evening of the Fourth, when Morningside Heights began to sound like wartime Beirut, V and I went over to East End Avenue to watch the official fireworks from our friend Lisa Albert’s family’s apartment. I was astonished when her building’s elevator opened directly into the apartment’s front hall. Her family’s cook asked me if I’d like a sandwich, and I said yes, please. It had never occurred to me that my background and Albert’s weren’t more or less the same.
It was people like Tom and me who didn’t recognize the value of what they had in hand. Tom realized too late that he could easily have charged Heisler two or three times as much, and I left Manhattan, in mid-August, owing two hundred and twenty-five dollars to St. Luke’s Hospital. To celebrate the end of the summer and also, I think, our engagement to be married, V and I had gone to dinner at a Cuban restaurant on Columbus Avenue, Victor’s, which her former boyfriend, a Cuban, had frequented.
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