All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Read Online Free PDF

of a man tailing the ghost of himself after digging up his own grave and finding nothing in it. I felt authentically bohemian as I pounded on my manual typewriter, earplugs in place, while the muffled soundtrack of the week’s feature film pulsed and droned through the wall. One of the theater employees was a daytime drinker who liked to stop by my room in the late afternoons and slyly proposition me, vodka fumes on his breath. He probably did so with all the bachelor boys, but I was vain enough, and lonely enough, to take it as a compliment. The building’s manual elevator, one of the few of its kind still in operation west of the Mississippi, was staffed in part by a woman who’d never abandoned the apartment upstairs where her husband had shot himself a decade earlier, or so the rumor went. Riding the lift with her after a night out drinking, I fantasized about holding her hand in mine and telling her she was not alone. More than once I heard another rumor that David Lynch had spent some time around the place, long enough to use it as a model for the apartment building in Blue Velvet . Once you’d lived there awhile, the story had the ring of plausibility, though of course it turned out to be a fabrication.
    Every so often, when I felt myself slipping into a neurasthenic funk, I’d walk to the Orange Street entrance ramp on I-90 and hitchhike to Seattle to visit my uncle, hoping a brush with danger would snap me back to reality. Nothing very interesting happened on those trips, except for the time I was aggressively solicited to proffer my cock so my driver could fondle it with his right hand while steering with his left. He claimed all he wanted was to touch my cock for awhile, then pull off the road and finish the job with his mouth. For this he’d drive me all the way to Seattle from the Idaho border. When I demurred, he stuck his thumb in his mouth and removed his dentures, allowing them to dangle in the space between us. He said, with real conviction, It’ll be the best damn blow job you ever had .
    For a time I convinced myself that I’d given up on journalism. Life was too weird for journalism. I wanted to devote myself to art, to a bleak and eccentric vision along the lines of David Lynch. But the fact was I’d borrowed twenty-five grand to pay for an education in print journalism, so I had little choice but to pursue a career in print journalism, in order to pay off the twenty-five grand. Baking bread for six bucks an hour in Missoula, Montana, was not going to cut it, and there was nothing else I was any good at.
    New York beckoned once more.
    My first apartment in the city was a Hell’s Kitchen sublet arranged on my behalf by a friend. An actress owned the apartment; she’d gone to some backwater city in the American South to appear in a Shakespeare festival. I covered her co-op payments and looked after her cats while she was away. There were four of them. Three had come off the streets, and their ways had rubbed off on the fourth, so that all were now at least part feral. Perhaps they felt abandoned by their owner, perhaps they just didn’t like me, but they ceased to use their litter box, or rather they made the entire apartment their litter box. I chased them around with a broom, tried to frighten them into behaving, but that only provoked them to new outrages. I came home one night and found they’d torn apart my pillow, now just a cloudscape of synthetic stuffing floating across the bedroom floor. From then on I made my home away from home at McHale’s, a bar off the west edge of Times Square, four blocks from my apartment.
    The hamburger at McHale’s was the best in the city, the bartenders—all of them female and all of them comely—poured spirits with a heavy hand, and the stools felt as if they’d been designed by ergonomic specialists devoted to the comfort of the human rump. Soft orange lamps burned dimly through the cigarette haze, and ceiling fans spun languidly in the sepia-toned