PAUL AND I LEANED against the back wall at Tye’s on Christopher Street. He drank Bud Lights; I prepared myself for walking home in the winter cold by sucking down another Remy Martin. We chatted and lamented our respective vocations, his firmly established, mine potential at best. A successful composer, Paul had zero sympathy for the difficulties of writers, especially young, neurotically unproductive, unpublished writers. I kept a journal that was the equivalent of an emotional toilet (ET write home!) and squeezed out a poem once every six months. I hadn’t tried to publish any of them.

“Ever try to peddle a string quartet?” he asked.

Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and Seiji Ozawa and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra had conducted the premieres of two of his works; Boosey & Hawkes published them, and considering the twenty-six year head start—his forty-six to my twenty-two—I thought this a little unfair. But he did sympathize with my real concern—finding a job that didn’t eat up my life and leave me nothing left over for what I hoped would be my creative work. We’d been having this conversation since we met, while I was still at the Library on Wheels. The morning after our first date, he pretended to be my neighbor, called the library to say I was sick, so we could spend more time in bed. Our brief fling had developed into a friendship. We could even go out drinking and cruising together. Now that I was employed again, I could afford it. Mary Baker Eddy may not have converted any of the succeeding Glovers in our branch of the clan, but Divine Mind seemed to be on my side when it came to getting jobs, this time as stock manager at Carl Fischer Music Publishers in Cooper Square.

I loved walking to work—a mere five blocks away, and even coming home for lunch. But once I checked in each morning, looked at the stock list and began replenishing titles before they ran out, there was little to amuse me. Not even my co-worker, Willard’s gossip, made up for it. Willard’s best story concerned his youthful attempt to speak French at a dinner party. He took an older woman’s hand, kissed it and said “Je vous baiser, madame.” She slapped him so hard his ears rang for an hour and later his host explained that he’d just told her “I fuck you, Madame.”

The job did have a fringe benefit: I once traded stolen sheet music to my pot dealer, a classical musician, and I took home as many guitar manuals as I could. I used the same method as the construction worker who asks if he can have the dirt for his garden. Every night at the factory gate he pushes a wheelbarrow full of dirt. The dirt is carefully sifted for pilferage: nothing. The guard is certain the man’s a thief and promises not to arrest him if he will tell him what he is stealing. “I’m stealing wheelbarrows.” I’d asked the head manager if I could take home some of the empty delivery boxes. I planned to use them in my apartment renovation, and take out rubbish and plaster. I could carry three or four nested boxes in one neat stack. No one ever checked the bottom box, which had as much music in it as I could carry without giving myself away. Paul let me know he disapproved*, and besides, had no use for any of my stolen goods.

When not distracted by cute new arrivals, we talked about music. He explained, as if I could understand him, that the harmonics that thrilled me in so many Debussy piano pieces were often “thirteenths.” He also had great gossip about which famous musicians couldn’t sight read very well. Paul was in constant demand for his ability to play any piano piece set before him, even if he’d never seen it before. Some of the most famous concert pianists, he said, had practically to be spoon fed a new piece bar by bar. I remembered a friend who made his living tuning pipe organs disparaging a famous Bach specialist—“He couldn’t play Come to Jesus on whole notes!”—and now wondered if it was true.

When I was on about my third round, Paul suddenly had a brainstorm—it arrived from wherever is furthest away, and completely unconnected to the proverbial left field.

“I know what you should do to earn a living while you write,” he announced. “You should become an art restorer.”

Whaaa?

Talk about non-sequiturs. But I ran it by as a fantasy and to my surprise liked the idea. I saw myself, wearing an apron and latex gloves, bathed in sharp white, clinically pure light, in a neatly organized conservation studio in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I imagined gently dipping the edge of a pre-Columbian textile in a chemical bath, testing for ill effects before immersing the whole thing. The crisp light and a professional life spent with great art appealed to me the most. Not that I knew shit about any of it.

“There’s just one problem,” I told Paul.

He looked at me and I tried to focus. I was, as usual, a little drunk and on the way to getting truly tight. When I had enough of my blurry attention focused on him to talk I said, “I don’t have a BA. Won’t this require at least a masters?”

“So you finish your BA. Then you’ll go to the Institute of Fine Arts uptown. A friend of mine went through that program. You’ll like it.”

People with advanced degrees always spoke to me like that. As if it was just a matter of hanging around a university long enough to pluck one off the shelf. I suppose if you’ve already earned a PhD with a dissertation called “An analysis and comparison of the motivic structure of Octandre and Intégrales, two instrumental works by Edgard Varèse,” an MA in art history and conservation looks like a cakewalk. And he taught music composition at NYU so it all seemed more than plausible to him.

By the middle of January, I’d taken out several thousand dollars in student loans, and reenrolled in Brooklyn College for the spring semester as an Art History major. I’d like to say I was decisive; impulsive is more accurate.

The student loans allowed me leave Carl Fischer, but with the cost of books, rent, phone and Con Ed, cigarettes, top-shelf cognac, six-packs of beer, and gallons of cheap wine (I contain multitudes; unfortunately, they all love to drink and their tastes vary) before the semester ended I’d nearly run out of money, even with the additional income provided by silk-screening Claude’s pornographic stationary (see Claude’s Little Red Men). I now also had four incompletes on my transcript. But yet again, Divine Mind gave me a little push.

Manuel and some other friends performed several times a week in an off-off-off Broadway show called The Palm Casino Review, which Sheyla produced, with sets designed by Steve Lawrence, at the Bowery Lane Theater. During the intermission a handsome friend of Manuel’s asked me “What are you doing at night?”

“Nothing.”

“How would you like to run the lights for this show?”

Of course I said Yes.

Next up: “Camille’s Hairy Chest—My brief and dazzling ‘career’ as a theatrical lighting designer–1974”

* I have long since made amends for all my youthful theft. But I must still have something of the thief in my aura, because in any large department store, I can immediately spot the house detectives. They also notice me noticing them, and follow me for a while.