Fathermucker (4 page)

As I polish off the first cup of coffee, I set about composing my own status update, a practice I regard with the same solemnity that Obama does the drafting of an executive order.

I hate when I want to update my status and can't figure out what to say. They should have a Sniglet for that. Wait . . .

Definitely not feeling it this morning. Chalk one up for Eugenia.

Again I consider a shower—almost-scalding water streaming down the back of my pinkening neck is the closest I'll get to a spa vacation until Maude is at Vassar, or whatever overpriced liberal arts school she winds up majoring in English at—but I decide that caffeine intake is more exigent on the priority list, so I pour a refill. Why does the second cup never taste as good as the first? Would it help if I made a fresh pot? Or used a fresh mug? Diminishing returns.

Half past five now. Still pitch black outside, not even the hint of morning. Nosferatu still on the clock, and Bill from
True Blood
.

I wonder if eighty-three is good or bad. There's no context for us non–vampire warriors. It doesn't
seem
impressive . . . unless, of course, Emily has staked the hearts of eighty-three real people.

Better hit the
LIKE
button. Facebook etiquette. Emily Post would advise hitting the
LIKE
button when the hostess of a playdate you're attending updates her status to trumpet said playdate. Even if the hostess is too lazy to write out “to.”

I open Outlook, another of my constant companions. I am a compulsive inbox checker. I pound the
SEND/RECEIVE
button like a Skinnerian rat on the plunger in one of those Eisenhower-era, pre-PETA psychology experiments in which many animals were harmed. More e-mails! More messages! More information! More more more! But when I get actual notes from people, from friends I haven't heard from in a while, from my drinking buddies in New York, from my housemates from college, I let them twist in the inbox wind. I fail to respond. I have a mental block about writing back—probably because I have nothing to say, no self-aggrandizing news to share, no humble pie to serve up. Invariably they ask how the screenwriting “biz” is doing (in no other line of work do people employ that term), if I've sold another script, when we might see
Babylon Is Fallen
playing at a theater near you. While my stock reply—
George Clooney is interested
—is not completely untrue (although the
is
, by now, is probably more accurately expressed as
was
), what I don't elaborate on is that his interest is—that his interest
was
—directly proportional to the willingness of a studio to pour tens of millions of dollars into the project. Actors are the face of Hollywood, but they don't call the shots, literally or figuratively. They're like the British royal family—all pomp, no power. But this is moot. I haven't even opened Final Draft, my screenwriting software, in a good year, and that was to try my hand at a vampire thriller, an exercise in cranking out schlock. What can I tell my friends? That I've given up the ghost? No, better to stay silent, cultivate some mystique.

The hamster spins in the wheel of my aging laptop, and Outlook finally opens. Unlikely that I've gotten any notices since I last checked, what, six hours ago . . . but no, I'm wrong. Not one but
two
new messages. Two! Jackpot. The first one is . . . an offer for
c!@lis
? Jesus. How does this shit make it through the spam filter? And why? Does anyone really open the e-mail, or, God forbid, click the link? Let me rephrase: is anyone stupid enough to click the link? Odds are, this isn't a legitimate offer for knock-off Cialis, but a Trojan horse virus from some bellicose Bulgarian computer programmer, some rogue Russian cyberterrorist, al-Qaeda online. The Biblical tale of Judith, reenacted virtually. An offer of e-sex yielding only e-STDs. The thing is, I don't want Cialis, generic or otherwise. I'd be more interested in the anti-Cialis, the un-Viagra, a magic philter that compels the snail to retract into its shell, that transfers the frequent flier miles of my carnal desire to other, more useful, accounts.
Origen
, call it. Wisest philosopher in all of history. Now this is enlightenment: lust is a waste of time.

Ah, to sublet that apartment! To return to the city! Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Red Hook, Bed fucking Stuy. Anywhere but here. Just me and the undersized refrigerator like the one in my apartment on Twenty-Eighth Street that froze its contents solid in a few hours. That made Diet Coke cans explode. That laid waste to yogurt. Would have to bring Steve with me, though, to ward off the mice. Maybe New York is not such a good idea. There are no snakes in Ireland, they say. Is there a place on earth devoid of mice? Antarctica, maybe? Greenland? Death Valley?

Updated a minute ago. Not quite six a.m. She's up early. And Meg is
not
a morning person. Which, coupled with Soren's drunk-dialed update, can only mean one thing: trouble brewing
chez
Knudsen. Juicy gossip for later, perhaps?

Behind Door #2, an electronic mail message from . . . Christine Keeslar? Holy shit. Christine Keeslar is the editor-in-chief of
Rents
Magazine
.
Rents
, a slangy truncation of
Parents
. I pitched her a story a few days ago—a stay-at-home dad's take on playdates, I think it was . . . or maybe a memoir on why we decided not to circumcise our son, despite pressure from my mother and the medical community. I've pitched her so many stories, I've lost track. Freelancing is the only way I could possibly eke out a living up here without going back to school. In typical me fashion, I'm trying to jumpstart my freelancing career at the exact moment when half of the country's seasoned journalists have all been laid off and are doing the exact same thing. How does Eugenia Last put it on her website?
Psst . . . the Secret to Success, Wealth, and Happiness is . . . Timing
.

I don't know why I bother trying; it's not like Christine Keeslar bothers with rejection letters. So far, she's just ignored my e-mails. And I certainly didn't expect her to acknowledge my existence this time. What the hell did I even pitch? I honestly can't remember. Elimination communication? Free-range parenting? My short-term memory is fried. I blame the kids.

Oh, right. Daryl “Duke” Reid. Now I remember.

November 14. My thirty-seventh birthday. A little gift from the gods! Take those two stars, Eugenia, and stick 'em where the sun don't shine.

I write back at once, something to the effect of
Thanks, I accept, looking forward to working with you
. While the e-mail constitutes good news, for sure, this particular rose at my doorstep comes with a fresh thorn of a problem: how to get access to Daryl “Duke” Reid. Just because he lives in New Paltz and both of us have kids at the Thornwood Education Center doesn't mean he'll grant me an interview. Or acknowledge my existence.

But hey—at least I know
WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND
:

Josh Lanksy
Rents Magazine accepted my pitch!

Within seconds, Meg Stein Knudsen, Jessica Holby, and Gloria Gallagher Hynek all
LIKE THIS
.

W
E MOVED HERE DURING
B
USH'S SECOND TERM, WHEN TENSIONS
between the Blue and the Red were at their peak. We didn't know a single person in New Paltz, but we moved here anyway. It was a long time coming. When we lived in the East Village, Stacy and I, like most New York City Bohemians (or wannabe Bohemians; New York hasn't been a true boho town since the heyday of the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side; thirty dollars hasn't paid the rent on Bleecker Street in my lifetime, Paul Simon), operated under the assumption that, with the possible and debatable exceptions of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the part of the United States extending beyond a twenty-mile radius of Union Square was populated in the main by subliterate, slack-jawed, Walmart-shopping, country-music-listening, Jesus-loving, gay-bashing hicks. The old saw about what happens when you assume applies here. Kingston, the artsy Ulster County seat, is Williamsburg without the hipsters, and the eighty thousand people who flocked to Central Park to see Garth Brooks a few years ago were not all from out of town. There are cool people beyond the boundaries of Manhattan, just as there are plenty of New Yorkers, Lord knows, whose coolness is in short supply (we have a name for them up here, über-urbane urbanites who assume the rest of us are rubes:
citiots
). We just didn't acknowledge this when we lived there.

Or maybe we did, and chose to ignore the signs. In order to accept the dreary and oppressive conditions of life in Manhattan, or even Park Slope or Astoria—in a city where five million dollars is not enough to buy an apartment all that much bigger than the one you live in—you need to drink the Big Apple–flavored Kool-Aid. You must bow to the false idol that is the god of Gotham. As Born Agains evince a faith in Christ's salvation that borders on the delusional, so a not terribly successful screenwriter-cum-HR-generalist and a not terribly successful actress-cum-marketing-manager who pay two grand for six hundred square feet of squalid living space five elevatorless flights above the ground-level grime must rationalize this prohibitive expense by believing absolutely that New York is an Artist's Paradise, and the rest of the nation so many benighted circles of Limbaughian hell.

It took the birth of our son for us to see things for how they really are, to recognize that the Empire State emperor was, and always had been, butt naked. In just six weeks—six cold, dead-of-winter weeks—we went from
We could have two kids in this apartment
to
Let's get the fuck out of here
. Roland was born on Christmas; by Valentine's Day, we were househunting in New Paltz. The charms the city offered, so alluring to us as childless thirtysomethings—conveniently placed casting calls, movies opening two weeks earlier than anywhere else, the theater, fine dining, the only-in-New-York personalities teeming into the IRT, the ability to drink copious amounts of alcohol without having to worry about driving home—held no appeal for us as new parents. To raise kids, you need space, safety, good schools, fresh air, and a roomy car, none of which are readily or cheaply available in Gotham. When you're wearing your infant son in a Baby Björn, the only-in-New-York subway lunatic becomes not so colorful.

My friends were stunned when I relayed the news.
We're moving to New Paltz
, I told them, my group of New York drinking buddies, a hodge-podge of comrades from high school, college, and the city, loosely affiliated by a bi-monthly beer night. They didn't get it. Noo Yawkers never do, especially residents by choice rather than birth. I should know; I was just as gung-ho once, the notion of escaping just as unfathomable to me. Why would anyone want to leave nirvana? Aside from, you know, the crime and the grime and the mice and the noise and the price tag and the claustrophobia and the all-permeating negative energy, the volcanic Bad Vibe that seems to seep up from the abysmal warren of overheated subterranean tunnels.
The snow doesn't stick on the streets of New York . . . because it's so close to Hell
. I could have told my friends I was leaving to enter rabbinical school; they wouldn't have been more shocked. They were still in Lady Liberty's dastardly and delusional thrall.

And none of my city friends had—or, indeed, have—kids. Some of them aren't even married. It's impossible to adequately convey to someone on the outside the radical level of change that takes place when you cross that threshold from childlessness to parenthood, especially to someone living in the bubble of arrested adolescence that is the East Village. Every aspect of your life is altered, forever. It's like pre-9/11 and post-9/11. Nothing—
nothing
—remains the same.

New Paltz? Why
there
, of all places?
That was the next question, once it sunk in that I wasn't pulling their collective leg, that my intention to skip town was sincere. Start with this: a rare combination of affordable houses and nationally ranked schools. Vibrant, activist, communal community. Top-notch restaurants. Plus, this is a college town—SUNY maintains a campus here known for its fine arts program—and college towns always have a youthful energy. But the clincher was that, at the time, then mayor Jason West, of the Green Party, was performing same-sex marriages at Village Hall, in blatant disregard for state and federal law. We figured that any town whose mayor could so audaciously, and in our view so heroically, champion gay rights—heck, any town that installed a member of the Green Party in City Hall to begin with—must have a low hick-factor.