“Do you want to keep any of these pans?” I asked my mother as we worked our way through another pile of rubble on St. Marks Place. We stared at the pots she’d used to host all those dinner parties. All were blackened; many were broken. They littered the countertops, full of moldy water and soot. In the back of the apartment, water poured through the ceiling. Nothing stood any longer between the clouds and the apartment floor.
My mother and I did debris removal for hours, stuck in a cloud of foul air because the windows were all still boarded up with plywood. We made piles of things to throw away. We cleaned out the closets, with their boxes of ornaments, and the desk with my old Garbage Pail Kids in the drawer, and the bookshelf with my great-uncle’s P. G. Wodehouse books. When we left, our clothes were blackened and permeated with the smell of something gone very wrong. While we were scavenging, I found a clock in the rubble, mostly melted, stopped at 1:30—right around the time of night my parents were running for their lives down the stairs.
My throat felt raw. The cold and the dirty air made it worse. The demolition guy showed up in his emergency-services jacket and baseball cap and told us that before the apartment could be rebuilt it would be “taken to the walls,” turned into a big empty box. My mother and I looked at each other and looked around and didn’t have anything to say. Sure, tear down all the walls, I thought. At this point, why not?
After we finished working, we got some food and brought takeout to my father.
“I’ve been rereading Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace,” he said. “Do you know her?”
“I ordered you that book,” I said. “Didn’t you read the note that came with it?”
“Oh!” he said. “I was sort of wondering why it showed up.”
One night after seeing a play, my friend Jason and I walked through Times Square to catch the subway to our respective parts of Brooklyn. I told him the original Frank O’Hara book idea was dead and I was trying to figure out what to do with the material.
“Would you go there with the book?” he asked me. “Talk about the problems you’ve had with your father?”
“Probably not,” I said. “It’s not like I was abused. Besides, it’s hard to write a memoir while you’re living it. It’s like eating a cake while it’s baking. Maybe after he dies, I’ll be able to make some sense of it.”
“Come on!” Jason said. “Take no prisoners!”
I thought of the John Ashbery line:
Fine. I don’t want any prisoners.
I tell Jason I don’t know what the book is about; the way this year is going, I feel like I don’t know anything.