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to take me in and teach me to write for sitcoms. It didn’t. Bitter at the rejection, I ended up at Lang College at the New School. I just needed to be in New York, where there was music.
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    I met Mumlow in an acting class. We were supposed to bring in monologues; she brought an American flag as a prop. She folded the flag deftly while doing her monologue in a Southern accent. She was clearly brilliant, but the shtick was irksome.
    There was another guy in the class named Seth. He had a lazy eye. The gaze of his good eye was bracing, while the other eye shot off to the periphery. He did a monologue taken from a layman’s physics book, standing on two chairs, leaping between them, talking about the constant stream of molecules or light waves or something like that. We shared a glance of mutual annoyance at Mumlow’s flag shtick.
    Mumlow’s apartment was called the universe. She called it that because her downstairs neighbor, an aged flower child, had come up to ask her to turn her music down, telling Mumlow that she knew that she created her own universe and thus the problem wasn’t really Mumlow’s loud music, it was that she created a universe wherein this music was disturbing her.
    It was a studio apartment on the eleventh floor of a building overlooking Sheridan Square, bigger and cleaner than anything anybody I knew could afford. She lived alone. So she was a rich girl. Seth and I ended up at the universe doing something for the acting class: Mumlow’s energy was crazy but alluring. I wasn’t attracted to her, but her eyes were gigantic and blue.
    I wrote a script in which two people sat across from each other in a diner, arguing in fake David Mamet language:

    MUMLOW: I came here. From space.
    SETH: From space.
    MUMLOW: That’s RIGHT.
    SETH: So you say you came here from space.
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    We ran the script competitively. They wrote down who they thought won each scene. At the end of the play, the winner got a dime bag of weed. Seth added a comparison to fabric: “I won. Give me the weed. Wet gabardine.”
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    Ani DiFranco went to Lang. She had her thing utterly together. I was half formed as a songwriter; her songs were acute, her deployment of them wickedly agile. She made me want to get good.
    She came to New York from Buffalo, where she was packing clubs. New York was a jungle of shitty bands; she gained no audience except us kids listening to her, astonished, in the dorms. She went back to Buffalo, discouraged and aggrieved. Oh well, I thought. We’ll never hear from her again.
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    Ani and I were in a class called “The Shape and Nature of Things to Come,” taught by an African American poet named Sekou Sun-diata. He taught us to cut our writing pitilessly. We pleaded the purity of our precious compositions as he cut words, cut whole verses, and as we sat there dazed, beaten up, he’d pause, and say, “Is it soup yet?”
    He would press the poet in question until he or she mumbled what the poem was supposed to be about. “That’s great,” he’d say. “Why isn’t that in the poem?”
    He taught me not to pretend to be black. “They call it soul because it’s the truest version of yourself.”

    We read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces , and Sekou analyzed Malcolm’s life spellbindingly, using the paradigm of the universal hero’s journey as a lens.
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    He asked one kid where he was from. “Outside Boston,” the kid said.
    â€œOutside Boston where? ” Sekou asked.
    â€œUh, the suburbs?”
    â€œNo, no,” Sekou said, “where are you from? ”
    â€œTown’s called Braintree?”
    He wrote BRAINTREE in huge letters on the blackboard and spent the rest of the class speculating on the roots of the name. Often, we didn’t even get to our poems; we sat, transfixed, as he zoomed off on rapturous tangents.
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