President Giuiliani: Grand Illusion or National Nightmare?

If I were a nicer person, a more evolved, more compassionate, more empathetic kind of a girl, I might feel sorry for the Republican Party right now. Whether they realize it yet or not, they have a vacuum where their viable 2008 presidential contenders ought to be. Alas, I am a work in progress, on my best day. I've tried and tried to feel their pain, but all I can really feel is glee. They've got nothing! Nothing! Nothing at all!

George "Maccaca" Allen and Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum were supposed to be in the race. Then they crashed and burned in last years mid term elections, losing both their congressional races and their chances for the White House. Cat killer and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist left the senate to prepare for a presidential run, but has since had a change of heart. Jeb Bush might have had a shot, if his brother's presidency had gone well. That hasn't really worked out though, not for any of us, and certainly not for Jeb.

So who's still standing over there? John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani are, for the moment, topping the polls. McCain's busy self-destructing though. As one of three or four vocal supporters of Bush's plan to escalate his war in Iraq, McCain has turned his, "Straight Talk Express," into a sad train to nowhere. His once appealing maverick image disintegrates a little more with ever awkward effort to appeal to Bush's radical religious right base. Unfortunately for McCain, he's not quite crazy enough, not quite misogynistic or homophobic enough, to satisfy their needs. Apparently no one told him his best bet would be running to the center, playing to the moderate swing voters who might have been drawn to his much vaunted independence. Or maybe someone did, but he realized that independent, maverick image wouldn't hold up to even a casual glance at his party line congressional voting record.

That leaves them with Giuliani. If anyone's benefited politically from 9/11 more than President Bush himself, it would have to be Rudolph Giuliani. As we all know, on September 10, 2001, Giuliani was an unpopular, lame duck mayor. Between the police abuses left unchecked on his watch, the absurd spectacle of his very public divorce proceedings, and the endless petty power plays with other state and city officials, his approval ratings were on a downward spiral, and his political future looking nonexistent. That abortive Senate run probably hadn't helped matters much either. Then the Twin Towers fell, taking his emergency command center at 7 World Trade Center with them. As Giuliani wandered the streets of lower Manhattan, foraging for a functional workspace, a star was born.

I remember that day, of course. Even safely ensconced in Brooklyn as I was, it was terrifying, confusing, and horrible in previously unimaginable ways. But then, I guess that was the point. Chaos reigned even on CNN, for a few hours that morning. How many planes had been hijacked? How many had been accounted for? Where had they come from, where had they been headed? Where might they be going instead? No one seemed to have a clue. A successful terror attack indeed.

Then the mayor and the cameras found each other. Marching uptown through the swirling debris from the towers, all those bits of paper and ash, Giuliani projected confidence and control. He struck every note with a new found perfect pitch. Even I, erstwhile Pirate Queen of the progressives that I am, felt safer knowing Giuliani was in charge that day.

Once the immediate crisis had passed, Giuliani set about constructing a new reputation for himself as a prescient expert on counterterrorism and domestic security, founded on a few days' stellar tv performance. He's done a good job of it too, even persuading the rest of the world to take his reportedly long standing presidential aspirations seriously. He's transcended all the usual steps required between a stint as mayor of any city, even this one, and the presidency. Some time in the Senate perhaps, or maybe the governor's mansion? Not necessary, not for this mayor. He's like the kid in the mailroom whose great good luck takes him directly to the boardroom, without any tedious stops in middle management.

Sounds a little absurd, doesn't it? I thought so too. In their recent book on Giuliani, before and after 9/11, Grand Illusion, Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins show us just how absurd it really is. Juxtaposing Giuliani's extravagant claims on his own behalf with the realities of his record, they bring the gaps between the two into sharp focus, in prose as clear and engaging as Giuliani himself was on 9/11.

It's not so much that they're telling us anything we didn't already know. The problems with the Fire Department's radios, the long running feud between Giuliani and the Port Authority, and the lack of unified communication and command between the police and fire departments that increased the inevitable chaos of 9/11 have all been common knowledge for years. The ignored recommendations for security enhancements after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and inexplicable choice of 7 WTC for the mayor's emergency command center are, similarly, old news. Maddening, certainly, but hardly revelatory. Barrett and Collins do the work for us, though, of bringing these disparate facts together in the compelling narrative they've created.

A flair for self-aggrandizement, and a flexible relationship to reality are, admittedly, par for the course in presidential politics these days. Reading "Grand Illusion," though, I found myself wondering if Giuliani hadn't brought both to new heights. An accident of his own bad decision making left him walking the streets, readily available to television crews, without a command center when he needed it most. President Bush's peculiar choices to continue learning about pet goats after he knew both towers had been hit, then to spend the rest of the day jetting around the country on Air Force One, left a void on our tv screens and in our minds. Who, many of us found ourselves wondering, was running things?

Giuliani filled that void the second he showed up on our screens. By simply being present, calm and courageous for the cameras, he won himself a new, and nearly presidential, stature, to which he's held on tightly ever since. Trouble is, that unearned stature was just a trick of the light, and the timing. That impressive figure was only brought into existence by virtue of other absences.

I've learned better than to presume to speak for anybody else, but my personal surge of post 9/11 affection for Giuliani dissipated as soon as he started trying to use the attacks to justify an unprecedented extension of his last term. Reverting to type, he was looking for ways to turn unspeakable destruction into political gain, while fires still burned in the ruined towers. Remember the smell of all that smoke, drifting around the city for weeks? I do.

I also remember Abner Louima, Amidou Diallou, Patrick Dorismond and the other casualties of the policing tactics Giuliani repeatedly defended and endorsed. The endless tension and jockeying for position with Governor Pataki, that benefitted no one. The silly anti-jaywalking campaign, and all the rest of it. "America's Mayor," wasn't always such a god mayor for this city, in case anyone's forgotten.

That's almost beside the point though, in considering Giuliani in his latest role of presidential hopeful. The best of all possible mayors would still be woefully underqualified for the White House. Running a city is quite different from running a country, to put it mildly. It doesn't confer any foreign policy experience, or military expertise, for starters. Giuliani's loud insistence of having both doesn't change that truth.

Nor does he have the temperament to make it through a national campaign. The commanding demeanor we all found so comforting on 9/11 isn't necessarily what Americans are looking for, when we cast our presidential votes. We like presidents who can at least pretend to be just like us. Regular guys we think we'd like to hang around with. Guys who we think would like us back. Giuliani doesn't really seem to like anybody much. And don't let's forget his difficult pre-9/11 relationship with the media. Difficult questions asked of Mayor Giuliani tended to receive snappish nonanswers. A lot of difficult questions are put to presidential candidates. Temper tantrums don't go over so well on the campaign trail.

I may well have gotten my progressive political DNA from my mother. Talking to her about all of this the other day, I noticed she was oddly silent. Half jokingly, I said, "You like Giuliani kind of, don't you?" She answered, "No, but I don't hate him like you seem to." I don't hate Rudolph Giuliani, I promise you, I don't. Rather, I find his rush to power, on the backs of the unburied dead still being found at Ground Zero, offensive, in a personal way I barely know how to explain. I took it personally when my city was attacked, and so terribly wounded. Who here didn't? And I've taken it personally each time that event's been exploited to further a political agenda. Giuliani's doing so feels the worst though. After all, on 9/11, he was my city's mayor.

Rat Assassin! Doing Darwin's Work in Washington Square.

The New Year's off to a fantastic start for Sita, one of my two Siberian Huskies. She's the one I usually call, "the good one," or, "the sweet one," or, "the freakishly smart one who can sometimes find my keys when I can't." Before nine o'clock this January 1st, though, my little monkey girl had gotten herself another name for the day. She started the year off as "Killer."

She's obsessed by the rats in Washington Square Park. They spend a lot of time darting around on the other side of the dog run fence, and she spends a lot of time staring at them, longingly. They tease and torment her, skitter skattering hither and yon, in their ratty way. When one of them makes the foolish choice to squeeze in under the fence, she's right there, ready and waiting to snatch it up.

Huskies like to kill small, squiggly things. There's nothing they love more. Especially when those things make high pitched, squeaky sounds. Then they like to toss them around, because, apparently, dead rats are the best toys ever. It's just part of the package. They are smart and independent, they shed a lot, they've got those pretty blue eyes, and they are expert killers.


Sita and Sasha, also known as"the bossy one," have taken out their fair share of squirrels, rats, and pigeons, in the past. I'm past the point of being too squeamish about their prizes. So long as I don't have to touch the soft, small corpse, so long as they'll drop it, and there's something around to scoop it up with, without making direct contact, we're ok. Maybe I am a little squeamish still, but believe me when I tell you this represents great progress on my part. A dead rat on such a grim, grey, New Year's Day, though, feels like some kind of omen, doesn't it? And not necessarily a good one.

You could say it was my fault. I could have been watching them more closely. I was feeling inordinately pleased with myself though, in a, "What a good dog owner I am! At the park, in this downpour, at 8 am on New Year's Day. How lucky my dogs are to live with me!" kind of way. Chatting with the only other person in the dog run with her puppy, about more or less just that. The three dogs were playing, and everything seemed just fine. I didn't even see the thing until Sita had it in her mouth. At that point, it was all over for that rat. Sita doesn't mess around. One quick shake, maybe two, breaks the neck, and that's that. At least it's quick and painless, right? She is a stealthy and efficient rat assassin. Maybe she should look into a career with the CIA, as a Secret Agent Siberian, and then I could live vicariously through her death defying exploits!

Washington Square Park is rat central, in case you've never noticed. They are everywhere. I think it may have something to do with its having been a graveyard, and a public hanging ground, before it became a park, but that's not really something I like to think about, walking through it every day, whose bones I might be strolling over, who might have swung from that nice old tree I'm passing under.

You could also say that rat was asking for it. What kind of a defective rat, with an entire park to play in, comes inside the dog run? That's what I never understand. They have sense enough to dart away when my dogs and I cross their paths on the sidewalk. Are the dogs somehow less scary when I take their leashes off? Even on a slow day, the dog run's no place for a rat. The rats of Washington Square Park should really hold an emergency Community Board meeting, to reconsider the wisdom of that approach. It's not working out for them so well.

Maybe this particular rat was suicidal. Maybe the holiday season is stressful for the rat world too. I don't know just how functional rat families are, so I can see how that might be the case. Maybe no one had told this one today was the end of that. Whatever its problem was, developmental disability or mood disorder, the rat gene pool is clearly better off without this one's DNA. Sita is simply doing Darwin's work.

According to the Chinese calendar, I was born in the Year of the Rat. The Water Rat, to be precise. According to Chinese astrology, this means I "have a knack for influencing people," "strong intellectual powers," and am, "obliging, generous, and compassionate." There are some other, less flattering attributes, but I'm keeping those to myself today, to maintain my air of mystery. You know how to Google, if you're curious enough to learn the worst about me. 2007, in case you're wondering, is the Year of the Boar. 2006 was the Year of the Dog.

Sita kills a soaking wet rat, on New Year's day. The lazy oracle might suggest she's going to kill me, most likely before this year is through. Listening to the lazy oracle is generally ill advised, though and Sita is, usually, "the sweet one," so I can't really get myself too worried about that. And I have a true talent for envisioning those unlikely worst case scenarios, but that? Not even I can imagine that one..

Sita's the messenger here, but not the message. I'm taking her out of the equation, and singling out that dead, wet rat. Have I mentioned, by the way, how much I enjoyed disposing of that rat? Fortunately, the dog run's well stocked with scoops and shovels, but still. Just what I'd hoped to be doing at the crack of dawn on New Year's Day.

The Death card in the Tarot deck always sounds, and looks, so ominous. In my deck, Death is represented by the simplest of grim reapers, scythe in hand. It's really not a bad card to get though. It doesn't so much foretell your doom, as let you know there's change in the air. Some kind of risky transition you'll have to navigate well and wisely. Something that may look scary, at first glance, but will offer you a chance at reinvention, recreation, rebirth, if you like. But you have to be paying attention, to see the opportunities at hand, and brave enough to take them, no matter how they terrify.

I'd already gotten some big changes lined up for 2007. Not just to finally lose those last ten pounds, or to be nicer to the tourists, things I'm actually going to do, things that matter. It's past time to shake myself up a little. So I'm taking this as an auspicious omen, and a reminder that the path of least resistance rarely leads to anyplace I'd want to be. That the best things only happen when we give them the room they need to take us by surprise.

In the meantime though, I'm still trying to get the last of the rat blood stains off of my pupcake's pretty white face. I've heard a little peroxide might do the trick. It might be easier if she didn't think it was time to cuddle whenever I come at her with the washcloth. Why would I expect anything else though? After all, she is the sweet one.

What Lies Beneath; Our Skeletal Streets

I once heard horror defined as what you feel when things that are supposed to be safely hidden away inside a living body suddenly become visible on the wrong side of its skin. When some poor girl gets sliced open by a Texas chainsaw, for instance, and her insides come spilling out all over the big screen. Even though that's what you came to see, you can't help but cringe and turn away, for just a second, until you turn right back to get an eyefull. That gush of blood, those oozing organs, they're just like yours, after all, it's only natural to be curious about them, isn't it? But then again, curiosity did kill the cat, and they are just like yours. You do want yours to stay safe inside where they belong, but how can you not look at hers, so big and shiny up there in front of you? She's looking at them too, so slow to die. That moment there, that's horror.

I've been thinking about this lately, trying to figure out why I'm so horrified, which is indeed the word for it, by the ongoing construction of the Trump Soho condo-hotel down on Spring Street. It's not just that Trump's heading downtown, bringing his gleaming modern towers with him, where they are not necessarily wanted. I thought that was bad enough, but no. In mid-December human remains were found at the construction site. The Department of buildings issued a Work Stop order, but that only lasted one week, then the work started up again, churning up more bones and bits and pieces.

I didn't think I could be shocked anymore, by anything to do with Manhattan real estate. Tell me you're planning to pave over the East River, fill that up with luxury lofts, I'll smile and nod politely, maybe wonder what the prices will be like. Or perhaps you're thinking you'd like to do a condo conversion, in the Statue of Liberty's torch? Someone's probably working on that one already, but good luck. This indifference to the dead though, has really thrown me for a loop. Something about continuing construction, right over all those dead bodies, is just horrible.

The bones are most likely remnants of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church's graveyard. The church stood on Trump's site from 1811 until 1968, though it was nearly burned down by an angry mob in 1834 because of its abolitionist activism. There's been recent speculation that it might have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. As far as I'm concerned though, it doesn't matter much whose they are, when you start digging up bones, you stop building. Someone else beat you to the space. It happens all the time.

Even before the remains were found, the building had already been controversial in the neighborhood. People are skeptical about the concept, suspicious that it's nothing but a way to get around the zoning laws, which allow a "transient hotel," but not a residential building. People can buy their hotel rooms, or suites, or whatever. They are allowed to stay there, but not to use them as permanent residences. When they aren't around, their rooms generate income, for them and for the hotel, by being rented out to guests, like any other. To me, this plan has no appeal whatsoever, buying something I'd never really quite own. The simple fact of not being able to leave my things in the closets, or in the dresser drawers, defeats the purpose of the pied a terre, if you ask me.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation doesn't think it's such a great idea either. Director Andrew Berman has said, "Mark my words, you will see a boom in condo-hotels in manufacturing zones as soon as the city allows this." That sounds about right to me. The developers insist it's meant to offer a "a place to stay while you're in the city; a glamorous address - you can rent it and make money." Not a permanent year round residence for anyone, they promise. I'm wondering though, for all this talk of transience, once the building's built, the condos sold, who's going to enforce those rules, and how? Once the precedent is set, the model tested and successful, Berman's boom will begin. He has suggested that "If we're going to open up manufacturing zones to luxury residences, there should be aboveboard hearings and reviews." Do we really want a neighborhood taken over altogether by residential towers, and with the people who think it's a good idea to buy condo-hotels? People who will be getting the good tables at our brunch spots, snagging all the cabs, and clogging up the sidewalks. How much investment, or even interest, will these part time residents have in our communities? I'm thinking those are not really the neighbors I'd most like to have. But of course, it isn't up to me.

If this project didn't have such neighborhood destroying potential, I might not feel so strongly about those bones. I do spend half my life in Washington Square Park, without worrying over its history as a potter's field and public hanging ground. I've walked through City Hall Park without giving a thought to the city prison that once stood there, with its attendant graves and gallows. I know perfectly well that I'm walking over bodies, or what's left of them, all the time. Those bodies though, and all their parts, are still decently covered up underground.

At the Spring St. construction site, they're bringing the bones out into the light. An archaeologist is participating in the excavation now, which, I guess, is meant to offer some assurance that they won't be destroying anything of significance. The archaeologist they've hired would never allow that,would he? The developers further assure us that the area in which the remains turned up is going to be used as an open plaza space, no part of the building will be built over it.

Archaeologists and open plaza spaces sound lovely, don't they? But they are still pulling out all those bones, and no one's talking about putting them back, or putting them somewhere, anywhere. I can't help thinking they're going to end up in dumpsters, on dusty office shelves, maybe a few in a museum. A soft, familiar, muddy grave sounds so much more appealing than those options.

It's easy enough, necessary even, to ignore what's all around us, most of the time. Not just the bodies underfoot, but those still above, sleeping on our sidewalks, asking for our change. The guy on the subway, ranting to himself, or perhaps to an imaginary audience, about who nature is a whore, and the end of days is nigh. The old friends too, who serve as such good reminders of out old selves, and our old aspirations, who's calls we almost never answer or return. Everyone's got one or two of those. Old loves and longings, opportunities dismissed, chances wrongly taken or not, so many things not to think about. We don't have time for all of that. We have too much to do. It takes a lot of work to keep our city running smoothly as it does.

Buddhism teaches us that attachment to our physical selves, to the very idea of a self at all, is nothing but a distraction. A delusion to be shattered, if we hope to come to any understanding of reality's true nature, to liberate ourselves from the endless karmic cycle of rebirth, and the suffering it entails. Letting go of that attachment creates a space in which the world's endless possibilities can begin to open up, to give you a glimpse of the unimaginable.

Legend has it that, once upon a time, Tibetan practitioners could sometimes be found meditating in charnel grounds. Surrounded by the rotting flesh and dusty bones, they sought to realize their own impermanence, the inevitability of death and decay, the uselessness of the self, in the face of death. Death isn't going anywhere, no matter how many towers we build over it.

Maybe it doesn't matter what happens to those unearthed bones on Spring St. What use are they now, without the flesh, that fat and muscle they upheld, the hearts and lungs they enclosed, the eyes staring out of their sockets? Not much , if you think of it that way.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Is Flying really Necessary?

After five years of bickering, stalling, making themselves look ridiculous, and frustrating the rest of us, the powers that be have finally started doing something about rebuilding at Ground Zero. There's been another ground breaking, but this one looks like it's going to take. Columns going up, Bloomberg and Pataki making speeches, things are happening. I am sincerely happy for the families who have been waiting all this time to memorialize those they loved and lost. All of us downtown, and those families espescially, for whom bringing life back to that site will offer some sense of resolution, a reminder of inevitable renewal,in the face of unimaginable destruction. I hope those who were able to inscribe the various columns that will become the new building's strong skeleton felt they had honored themselves, the lost, and the endlsess unknown future in so doing. I look forward to walking by that site and seeing activity, forward motion, anything but the bleak, empty space I go out of my way to avoid whenever I find myself in that part of town. I think it's important, in ways both real and symbolic, that this happen, and cannot fathom why it's taken so long to get it started. Part of me can't help wishing though, that having waited this long, they could have given it just another week or two. Part of me can't help wishing, that this wasn't all happening in the few days before I have to get on an airplane.

I'm told some people enjoy airplanes. That, once upon a time, air travel was an exciting and even glamorous thing. One friend explained to me how she loved dressing up and going to the airport, hearing the high heels she almost never wore clicking their way across the tiles.I thought that was sweet. I thought it was adorable, in some Grace Kelly kind of way. But I wasn't sold. I've never liked the whole thing much. Even before 9/11, I just didn't trust the plane to hold together. At any moment, it seemed to me, it could just dissolve into thin air, spin apart into its separate pieces, and leave me to drift down to a destiny uncertain, at best. I could do it though. I knew I wasn't being reasonable. I could get past that, get myself onto the airplane, and go wherever it was I had to go. But I didn't like it. Not one bit.

That, among many other things, all changed on 9/11. A new, much clearer vision replaced my vague worries about airplane dissolution.I couldn’t then, and still cannot, imagine anything worse than being on one of those planes. Those moments of knowing what's about to happen, not just to you, but to everyone you can see, and to lots of people you can't, never have and never will, but you know they're there. Watching the city's beautiful skyline get closer and closer, and entirely too close. Seeing that wall of glass you're about to glide into, and realizing a fast disintegration's become your.best bet. Moments of knowing, of waiting, of powerlessness. So much terror in those moments. Terror for yourself, terror for the people behind that sleek and opaque glass, who have no idea what's coming their way. The terror of your impossible, and simultaneous desires to warn them, and to be one of them in their terribly lucky ignorance. To pound a warning to them on the glass and steel that's just about to pull you under. To smash through from your side onto theirs. To shatter it all before it shatters you.

I didn't fly at all for four years. I took trains. I discovered I love long train rides. They're very peaceful, a kind of time outside of time. Pretty things pass by your windows, people quiet down after the first few hours, and you get to experience the distance you are travelling in a whole new way. You have no obligations, no real control over any of it. Your only responsibility is to stay put on your train, and to let it pull you on through.

There's weird food, that you'd never normally eat. But while you're on the train it becomes a kind of guilty pleasure. Microwaved pizzas with that soft, sweet kind of crust, shiny bagels with packets of cream cheese or butter on the side, crumbly and enormous cookies. The walks up and down the train to get another soda, check out the people in the other cars, be glad you aren't in the one with all those babies, or the other with the pack of 15 year old girls on their way to cheerleading camp. Or maybe it's Jesus camp, who can say?

There's something amazing about spending the time it takes to get from point a to point b, in this world so completely transient and temporary it barely exists. It allows me to appreciate both sides of my trip for their own solid specificity, and to summon more of the fluidity I need in navigating each.

The thing I love about trains, though, the requirement of all that lovely empty time, is, of course, the problem with them as well. You can't go much of anywhere for a long weekend on a train. Unless you maybe stay on the train the entire time, which might not be so bad, all things considered. But realistically, sooner or later, something will make you get back on an airplane.

My first post 9/11 plane trip was to a wedding in Chicago, with my boyfriend at the time. It was a weekend trip. Both of our schedules made flying the only option. And so I did. That one wasn't so bad. His presence kept my panic level down, and gave me some incentive to at least pretend I wasn't about to die. It was kind of ok.

The second was a disaster. The flight to Florida was fine. Plans had been made in too much of a hurry, for reasons too important, to give me much opportunity to terrorize myself. Packing to do, arrangements to make, all in about a day. No time to visualize my doom. On my way back to Manhattan, however, I was a mess. I'd already stayed one day longer than I'd planned, largely to avoid the flight. Between the time I got to the airport, and onto the plane, my anxiety spiralled beyond the reach of the ativan I nonetheless kept taking. I somehow missed one plane, despite being in the airport well before it's departure time. There was one nearly incoherent conversation with a client, an unnecessarily nasty email to a colleague I barely remembered having written, until I saw it in her admirably restrained response. When I got home, I was sick for two days, maybe from all that ativan, maybe all that fear had just done me in. Suffice to say, a really bad time was had by all.

Now, the holidays are here . I haven't been to see my parents in two years, haven't seen my grandparents in longer still. I really have no choice, but to fly down there. Since the last time, I've been therapized, medidated, switched the ativan for klonopin, and felt almost ok about doing it again. As ok as is possible for me. Telling myself it would be efficient and easy, travelling on a sleek, modern airplane. Progress is good, regression is bad. Then, these last few days before I have to leave, they've broken ground, again, at Ground Zero. So it's been all over the news, the papers, the radio, and my mind. That worst of worst case scenarios. But it's too late now. The plans are made, the tickets bought and nonrefundable. Too many parents and grandparents to be disappointed by my anxious self indulgence if I cancel. My fate is sealed.

Walking through Washington Square yesterday, I ran into an eminently reasonable friend. As I was telling her about my trip, and my certain doom, she said, as reasonable people will, "There've been how many thousands of flights since 9/11? And they've all been fine. Why would yours, out of all of those, be the one to have a problem?" Without thinking I answered, "Because I am just that special." We both laughed, and went on about our days. But I'm not sure I was entirely kidding, in that thoughtless slip. Narcissists Anonymous, anyone?

Automated Regret Machines and Miracles of Modern Medicine; There might be worse things than a successful friend or two...

By any standard, Matthew Zapruder is that rare creature, an MFA success story. For all the promising young things flooding graduate English departments from California to Alabama, every fall, visions of book deals and New Yorker publications dancing through their heads, there are only so many book deals, only so many pages of the New Yorker to go around. Only so much success, in other words, to be divvied up. While it doesn’t always go to those who most deserve it, in this case, happily, it has. Mathew’s first collection of poems, “American Linden,” was published to critical acclaim in 2002. His second, “The Pajamaist,” appeared this fall. In between, he’s been busy teaching at the New School, publishing in everything from the Alaska Quarterly Review, to the New Yorker, and co-curating the KGB Monday night poetry reading series with Deborah Landau. And, best of all, his poetry has only gotten better in the time I’ve known him.

I was once a promising young thing. Really, I was. The kind of girl about, and to, whom lots of phrases using the word, “potential,” are used. Always with the clear implication being that, well, potential’s not a guarantee of anything, now is it? For a little while, though, when I started working on my own MFA, even I thought things just might be looking up. I remember obsessing over words, single words, stretching them out as far as their endlessness allowed, before they’d collapse back in upon themselves, and their own inevitable limitations. I remember keeping my sentences tucked away for safekeeping in the darker recesses of my mind. Relishing each one as it enfolded what had come before and blazed the trail for whatever was on its way. The feeling of pen in hand, or keyboard underneath, the sound of my own creations, the sensation of reading them, then reading them aloud. I fell in love with all of it, all over, every day.

I remember that ecstatic energy, the staying up, night after night, reveling in my own words. I remember feeling so full of language, of talent, of all that much vaunted potential finally coming to some kind of fruition, it seemed I might just be getting something right, and I might never get enough. I thought everyone around me must be feeling more or less that way. Until I said some such thing to a friend at the time, and her blank look told me otherwise. I was a promising young thing then though, so all I could see was how much more that left for me. And that was just exactly what I wanted. More, of everything, already and always. More.

But more is never quite enough, and yet somehow, it always turns into to much. All that energy lost its ecstasy and turned itself against me. I can’t say when, or how it happened. There wasn’t one particular moment, but then again, it didn’t take so very long. I became insatiable, irascible, and endlessly inconsolable. Overwhelmed and overwhelming, especially to myself. This went on for years, during which I produced nothing but destruction, for myself, and anyone unlucky enough to get caught up in my wake. Whatever romantic clichés there may be about artists or writers needing to be a little on the crazy side, to get anything done, I can tell you they’re all wrong. Being crazy, even just a little, relatively speaking, is a full time job. It requires hours of dealing with doctors and drugs, experimenting with different, newer, bigger, better versions of each. And of course, the prodigious energy required to pretend you’re fit to be out amongst the normal people. All this leaves you with none of what you need to write so much as one single word. Nothing even close to what you’d need to make a whole life for yourself.

If I’d ever been a “glass half full,” kind of girl, I’d probably see the extent to which the miracles of modern medicine have settled my internal storms the last few months as nothing short of miraculous. I’d be full of visions for the future to come, the work to do, the life to lead. And it’s true, I do have some of that going on. More often though, I think of all that wasted time. All the harm I did to myself and others, all those others, and then that one in particular. Nonetheless, things are, once again, looking up, it seems.

As I walked over to Mathew’s reading at KGB Bar last Monday night, I couldn’t get that Morrissey song, “we hate it when our friends become successful,” out of my head. Wondering if I’d be happy for him, jealous, or a bit of both. We’d never been the best of friends in grad school, but were in the same circles, and shared a lot of that kind of silly, boozy fun that involves things like empty bottles of blackberry brandy. You may not know this, but as a rule, writers like to drink. We’d even read together once. My very first reading, I think.

Unsurprisingly, I was late, and I’ve always found it hard to really get a handle on poetry read aloud anyway. I was assured by those who know more than I about such things that the reading was, “fabulous,” “life changing,” and, indeed, “so life changing, it changed everyone’s lives once, then changed them back to what they’d been before.” I hadn’t been to KGB in ages, and had forgotten how much I liked it. All that red, those steep stairs and nooks and crannies. The last time I’d been there, though, I’m not sure any of the people I was with were entirely capable of reading, let alone writing anything.

If I were generally a nicer person, I might not have been so surprised to find myself only genuinely pleased for Matthew, and that all is so well with him. Even after reading some of his new poems myself – they are, indeed, fabulous – the jealousy doesn’t seem to be popping up. They’re very different from what I remember of Mathew’s poetry. Less formal, differently, though still tightly structured, and maybe less afraid of leaving meaning unresolved. I seem to just be glad these poems are out there in the world now, even if it hadn’t realized how much it missed them, before.

And really, who could resist titles like, “Automated Regret Machine,”? Or its final lines,

“One could say I am cruel. Once late at night after getting a drink of water I waited behind a door to jump out at whoever came first, my brother or sister. Until now I had chosen to think they were too thirstily waiting in bed to fear any longer, but fear was what pushed them to rise and clear the room they knew I did not know my stories had filled with actual vampires or ghosts.”

I couldn’t have put it any better myself.