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April 21, 2004
TT: Adventures of an author
The cleaning lady chased me out of my office this morning, so I decided to get cracking on some chores I'd shoved under the desk. I retired to the back table of Good Enough to Eat, where I ordered waffles and started filling out an inch-thick application (don't ask) that required me to answer all sorts of questions whose answers I couldn't recall off the top of my head (in what month did I move to the apartment where I was living seven years ago?).Temporarily stymied by the long arm of bureaucracy, I finished my breakfast and strolled over to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see whether A Terry Teachout Reader was on sale yet. It wasn't in New Non-Fiction, so I climbed the stairs to the arts section in search of something to read. There I found three copies of the Teachout Reader shelved under Jazz/Blues, meaning that no one at Barnes & Noble had bothered to look at the contents of my book. Only a year ago, I was basking in the red-carpet treatment at that very same store, including an evening reading and deluxe placement for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Now I'm relegated to Jazz/Blues (though at least I got what booksellers call "face-out" placement, meaning that the front of the dust jacket is visible). As Robert Mitchum says in The Lusty Men, "Chicken today, feathers tomorrow."
From there I went to the police station to get myself fingerprinted (I told you it was a long form). I'd never before set foot inside a New York police station, and this one proved to be an oasis of dingy, demoralizing grayness in the middle of a cheery Upper West Side neighborhood. I put myself in the hands of a policeman who reminded me of the chauffeur in My Favorite Year, except that he was the most blasé person I've met in my entire life. As he went to work on my left hand ("Hey, you have great prints!" he assured me, allowing himself an unexpected surge of enthusiasm), it suddenly occurred to me that I was wearing a canary-yellow shirt and that the slightest false move on my part would smear fingerprint ink all over my midriff.
When we were done, the policeman gave me a handful of Fingerprint Ink Removal Towelettes and a useful piece of advice: "You really have to work it to get this stuff off, but it's just ink. When you go home, try some dishwashing liquid. That works pretty good." I struggled with the towelettes for five minutes, said the hell with it, and went home to the kitchen sink. One minute's worth of vigorous massage with Joy and my fingers were as good as new. Not only that, I managed not to get any ink on my shirt. Now all I have to do is finish filling out that endless form and go see Jumpers on Broadway tonight, and I can call it a day.
Glamorous, huh?
UPDATE: Later at lunch, this Chandlerian metaphor came to me: The precinct house was as gray as an old dishtowel.
Posted April 21, 2004 12:11 PM
