047 - Forty-Seven

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[TRANSCRIPT]

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You know, the last time I took a trip was probably...it was ’65. Or—’66? Just a few years before the incident. The last time I took a vacation, I mean—

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Not that this is a vacation, but, you know, it’s not a work trip, it’s uh— [click, static]

I had this...um, friend—a writer I’d met at a club in New York—who had a house upstate. She technically lived in the Village, but she was hardly ever there—I guess writers really like their solitude.

So I’d go up there sometimes, just for a weekend. Take the metro-north to the last stop—she’d pick me up in this old Ford pick-up she had and we’d go straight to the grocery store before heading back to the house. She’d ask me what I wanted to cook that weekend, like I ever had any idea. I’ve got about five dishes I can make with any kind of proficiency, but she loved to cook and she wanted to include me, I guess.

Which was nice.

I’d usually pick out the wine and then we’d take our haul back to the house and put on a record—Joan Baez or James Brown—and we’d drink and cook and eat and talk about books or what she was working on at that moment.

She knew what I did, but she knew not to ask too much about it. So mostly I’d tell her about the weird people I’d met, or the shows I’d seen recently.

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I loved going to see shows on Broadway. Maybe that’s surprising to you —it’s surprising to a lot of people who’ve met me. But I loved it. Loved any kind of live performance, whether it was Broadway, off-Broadway, music concerts, beat poetry, whatever. Just seeing people get up on a stage and open themselves up to strangers in that way...there’s something extraordinary in it. And my friend, she didn’t get to the city much by that point, like I said, so she liked hearing about all the shows I went to go see.

And, uh, if I had enough wine by that point in the evening, I might even get up and act out some of the more dramatic bits of what I’d seen on her living room carpet. She would laugh so hard at that.

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She had a great laugh. [click, static]

There were so many times in the last six years that I wished I’d been trapped with her in her cabin in the woods instead of in Pennsylvania with Harry. I’m sure there would’ve been things about each other that drove the other insane, but at least there would have been... compensations.

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She was a good friend. A really good friend, you know? It wasn’t...um, it wasn’t committed or anything, but...yeah, she was a really good friend.

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