ON ESCAPING NEW YORK / Ethan Watters
Hours of daylight in New York City in February 1988: 298
Hours of darkness: 374
I went to New York for a five-month internship at Harper’s magazine in the winter of 1988, bringing with me the misapprehension that charm and gumption were all that were needed to make a success of myself in publishing. I shared the small intern office with two other transplants, Mark from Austin and Paul from Toronto. The Harper’s office was in the Village was on the 11th floor — a height that was not impressive by Manhattan standards but one I was pretty excited about. The buildings I had known in the small town I grew up in maxed out at four floors. To put that height to use, by end of the second week, Mark and Paul, and I had taken to throwing things out of windows and off the roof.
At lunch, we’d pool our money to buy a few apples or liters of some knock-off soda at the corner deli and drop them from the roof into the alley behind the building. We were all David Letterman fans and he was doing a similar stunt on late-night TV with more dramatic objects: bowling balls, glass lawn ornaments, flaming birthday cakes, gallons of paint — stuff that was far out of our price range. Nevertheless, it was a deeply satisfying thing to watch; the steady acceleration of the object and the symmetry of the splatter.
Other items, which were less likely to hurt the pedestrians below, we’d launch out of any unattended window. Used cassette tapes could be broken open and unspooled in long graceful arcs. A 90-minute interview tape could reach all the way across the intersection 11 stories below. The ever-growing stack of unsolicited manuscripts, the “slush pile” — that we interns reviewed, gave us plenty of paper for folding ever more elaborate paper airplanes. I owe many hopeful writers apologies for not sending their manuscripts back even though they dutifully enclosed a self-addressed stamped envelope. So many poems about dying pets and parents and short stories about homeless men who turn out to be wise and kind-hearted went floating on the cold winter wind out over the corner of Bleecker and Broadway. If it is any consolation, this was a time when people were publishing popular zines devoted to found scraps of writing. So there’s that.
Lewis Lapham, then the editor of Harper’s, witnessed my moment of glory when, at one Friday office cocktail party, I decided to show off my paper airplane design skills. The editorial staff was in the midst of preparing an issue that featured stories about the decline of biodiversity, the ethics of suicide, and worldwide financial panic. In the intern room, we had been tasked with counting the number of exclamation points in Bonfire of the Vanities.[1]
Everyone needed a stiff drink. To lighten the mood, I launched a paper airplane out of the corner window of Lewis’ office; it caught an updraft turned twice and flew right back in the same window where I caught it. A few of the editors put down their cocktails and applauded politely. I looked to Lewis who was, as usual, outpacing the rest of the staff drink-wise. He never got drunk, just increasingly loquacious. “You are going to be famous,” he said to me.
The stock market hadn’t yet recovered from the crash of 1987 and the low-level publishing jobs, which interns could usually count on, were harder to come by. It wasn’t my imagination that New Yorkers were in a particularly sour mood. The winter was a bitterly cold one and area murder rates were approaching an all-time high. The future of magazines and publishing was bleak, although no one had yet informed the interns.
That moment with the paper airplane in Lewis’ office would probably have been my high point at Harper’s, had it not been for one other remarkable event. One day, near the end of my internship, Mark, Paul and I decided to splurge on a cantaloupe for our lunchtime bombing run. As I was walking back from the elevator, cantaloupe in hand, I glanced out the window at a pigeon sitting on the ledge. I took two more steps down the hall, froze and then backed up and took a closer look. The bird was grey, like a pigeon, but it was several inches taller and had a shock of red plumage on its tail, a large head, and a curved black beak. What I had taken for a pigeon was a beautiful African Grey parrot.
For about a minute, we both stood stock-still and appraised each other. It had clearly escaped from captivity, but with the sky darkening and threatening snow, I got the feeling that it was having second thoughts about its newfound freedom. Trying not to make any sudden moves, I opened the window and reached out a hooked forefinger. The bird hopped on like I was an old friend. I walked it back to the intern’s office and set the creature on the back of my chair.
“Found a parrot,” I said to Mark and Paul.
Anyone who has lived in New York for any period of time knows that it is a place where inexplicable things occur with regularity. When you tell the story of your time in New York later in life you begin to see that your personal series of odd events weren’t random; they held to themes. For some, these events take the form of wild sexual adventures. For others, it’s repeated encounters with fame and wealth. For the less fortunate, it’s experiences with crime and violence. Looking back now, I can see that the strange things that happened to me in New York always had something to do with rescuing semi-exotic pets.
One night at 3 a.m. coming back from Brooklyn, I helped a Hasidic family chase an albino frog across the floor of an F train. Being drunk, I wasn’t as helpful as I would have been at other times and I might have damaged one of the frog’s translucent webbed feet. Where they were headed with the frog at such a late (or early) hour remains a mystery. Then, on Madison Avenue one afternoon, I snatched up the leash of a teacup poodle that was making a break from its elderly owner. I was rewarded with an expensive lunch; the owner did not stay to eat with me. One snowy Friday evening, a week later, a woman on the advertising staff invited me to watch a movie at her house-sitting gig only to have our quasi-date devolve into a mood-killing search for her friend’s escaped tarantula. I had shared all those stories with Mark and Paul and so, when I introduced them to the stately parrot that I had just produced like a magician, neither showed much surprise.
When word got around the office, my stock as an intern went up as one by one editors came by to see the parrot. First was Senior Editor Gerry Marzorati, who would become the Editor-In-Chief of the New York Times Magazine. He always seemed most at home in Manhattan, a proto-hipster in his converse tennis shoes and shoulder-length hair. Jack Hitt showed up and frightened the bird with his booming laugh. He would eventually put his humor and voice to work in the growing radio and podcasting world. Then executive editor Michael Pollan came in to see the bird. We interns would roll our eyes on Monday mornings when he’d tell us how much fun he’d had tending his Connecticut garden over the weekend. He’d eventually write books about plants and eating and head West for richer soil.
Associate Editor Charis Conn, who was in charge of hiring the interns, was genuinely thrilled by my find. Her New York future would be tougher — a severe head injury after a bicycle crash, an eviction, and a novel contract she’d never finish. I kept in touch with Charis until her death a couple of years ago . She abhorred naked ambition and the glad-handing world of New York publishing and because of that, never advanced. She remained a steadfast cheerleader for many of the interns she hired over her tenure.
Finally, Lewis showed up at our door. The cocktail cart had yet to make its rounds, so he was more reserved as he searched for the proper thing to say to this 20-something intern holding a parrot. To break the awkwardness, I set the parrot on the back of my chair, bummed one of his Parliament cigarettes and reminded him we were both from California. It was a point of connection, although our California experiences hadn’t exactly been similar. I was raised on the edge of a farm town in the Central Valley while Lewis grew up riding in San Francisco parades at the elbow of the mayor, his grandfather.
“Do you miss it?” he asked, and I admitted I did.
“The air is different out there,” he told me, “the way it holds the light. If I could move this whole operation to San Francisco, I would. But New York is where you have to be to stay in the conversation.” I didn’t exactly understand what he meant — about the light or who this conversation might be with — but I took a drag and agreed. We both looked at the parrot who was looking back at us with head cocked.
Figuring out what do with the parrot wasn’t difficult. By this point, we interns were skilled at tracking down information of all sorts. We were in charge of researching the Harper’s Index, which was a compilation of loosely connected numerical facts. On a daily basis, editors would show up at our office door, look at one of us and ask something like: “How many pounds of fat did cosmetic surgeons remove from Americans last year?”[2] or “How many snowflakes have ever fallen on the Earth?”[3] Then we’d hit the phones to find experts who might answer these quixotic questions. This was way before the Internet and we prided ourselves on talking to the lead experts in any given field.
It took three calls for me to get hold of an ornithologist at the University of Florida to find out what parrots ate. I had assumed seeds and nuts but was told that they lived much longer — often 50 to 60 years — on a diet of mostly fruits and vegetables. We chatted for a bit and I learned that the birds’ native habitat cut across equatorial Africa, the area covering Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Congo, Uganda, Kenya, and Angola. I looked at the bird and wondered whether it was an immigrant with some bird-like memory of its native forests.
After the call, I sliced open the cantaloupe with an Exacto knife liberated from the art department and the bird ate greedily. Cantaloupes are descended from a tropical fruit first harvested in Africa and Asia some 5000 years ago, but that particular melon had likely been shipped from Florida or Texas. Everyone and everything I encountered in New York, it seemed, was from someplace else.
Finding who had lost the parrot took only a single phone call to the Manhattan office of animal care and control. A bird fitting the description had been reported missing from an apartment a mile away in the East Village just the day before. And so, a little before 5 p.m., the owner showed up carrying a large cage. I was taken aback when I met him in the lobby. He looked more like me than my own brother. Little wonder the bird trusted me. We were the same height and had the same hair color, the same pale complexion. But this fellow was older, maybe by 10 years — a vision of my future self. I didn’t ask him what he did in Manhattan or where he had come from, but he looked tired in his rumpled suit and unimpressive tie. When he saw his bird, still perched on the back of my chair, he fought back some tears and gave me a crisp $50 bill.
That parrot is likely still alive and perhaps, like me, it retains a memory of its brief adventure loose in New York. That it had found its way to the intern’s office at Harper’s Magazine was undoubtedly random but only slightly more so than how I got there: My brother happened to see the application announcement in the back of the magazine and offhandedly mentioned it one day when we were home from college. Sure, I thought, why not.
If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we are all blown through life by chaotic winds. I wonder whom one would call to find out how many window ledges there are in Manhattan.
When the thaw finally arrived that spring, I didn’t look for a job in New York and none were offered to me. I did chalk up one other memorable moment at a Harper’s reception when I asked Kurt Vonnegut how he got such a whopper of a black eye. “Ice, pavement,” he said with an economy of language I think about every time I sit down to write.
Paul went on to be a senior editor at the New York Times Magazine and then an author. Mark rose to the executive editorship of Esquire and then Random House. Some people are great at migrating and thriving in new habitats. It’s taken humans only a few thousand generations to populate every corner of the planet. But let’s not forget all the generations that stayed put; those who never truly felt at home unless the foliage was the proper shade and density and the sun sets at the correct latitude for the season.
I flew back to California that spring but not to my little hometown. I migrated a couple hundred miles southwest, to San Francisco, where I would write books and I come to understand what Lewis meant about the air holding the light.
# # #
[1] 2,343
[2] 200,000
[3] 10 to the power of 35
