THE EIGHTH PAGE

Thus, we bid adieu to the groves of academe, disposed of twenty-one years of treading water in a desert, and headed for the big city. Life begins here on the eighth page at Idlewild Airport and in the longest, scariest, and most expensive taxi ride in the world.

The tour of Brooklyn on the way to Manhattan seemed unnecessary, but if one has never been to New York, all things are new and intensely interesting. And what the hell? I didn’t have a place to live or a job, nor did I have a friend. I knew the taxi was close to the city because the Manhattan skyline spread before us like a huge piece of sophisticated sculpture or the world’s richest kid’s Lego set.

The driver explained that we were in Brooklyn Heights. The sun was setting and the streets were dissolving in an autumnal haze. As I squinted, the cars and electrical lines and poles faded away. It seemed to be more like the 1860s than the l960s. I could almost see Dickens and Thackeray and Emerson speaking at the randy Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational church. And later out-of-towners like me: Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden--all cruising their sullen craft. Literary history was frozen there.

Soon we were clattering through the potholes of lower Manhattan and as we jerked our way to the Hotel Broadway Central I realized I was home.