da and Neal live in a nice big Brooklyn loft beneath a sewing factory. Every morning, later than it should be, I am woken up by the mysterious thunks, wheels rattling over wooden floors. Everyone at work but me and the three cats. I spend the afternoon sitting at the computer, pitching stories and finishing stories and trying to come up with stories that I can either pitch or finish. Money: What happened between us? The cats stretch out on the floor or lie on their backs like corpses, their little paws stiff in the air. Their desires are simple: They want to climb in the refrigerator, they want to sleep in the sink. The cat named Trouble loves my feet, can't get enough of my feet. My feet are squirmy about commitment -- notorious for day-after blowoffs -- but he's wearing them down. Trouble has a nice touch.
Saturday night Neal has a show at the apartment. I love this, that he just has it here. It's a funny/goofy performance piece, the kind he used to do in Austin when he sent the paper three-page advances on his shows, complete with charts and equations, shows with titles like "Will Anybody Ever Love Neal Medlyn?" The titles are pretty arbitrary; he usually doesn't know what he's going to do until that day. Anyway, the nutty emails got our attention, and Ada wrote a great piece about him, this inspired and prolific artist performing in parks and hotels for nobody. They fell in love and moved to Berlin and then back to New York, where Neal works an office job in the financial district and Ada just became the newest staff writer at New York Magazine.(We're all very proud.)
Saturday night's show is short and fast and fun. It's called "My Name Is Neal and I Am the Baddest. I Am a Genius and You Can All Suck My Ass and My Balls." But really, it's more like this: Neal thrashes around to an Andrew WK song and pours water on his head. Neal performs a sexy dance with scarves to Peabo Bryson's "Tonight I Celebrate My Love." Neal shows weird videos of himself in extreme close-up, saying things like, "You ain't nuthin but a muthafuckin asshaw. You ain't nuthin but a muthafuckin asshaw." Neal puts on a dress and sings "Truly" (and later more than a few people will comment that I mouthed along to every word). It's a mixed bunch -- friends and colleagues and strangers -- but everyone is laughing, even the older woman from across the hall who took care of their cats when they were out of town.
The party is a blast. Afterward, everyone scurries up to the roof to smoke and gush about the view. There's the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, all four bridges, strung up with lights. We talk about the career of Stephen Soderbergh, about the livability of Queens, about my favorite bad movie Showgirls. A Polish intellectual, the son of a prominent Shakespearean scholar, spends significant time explaining why every story pitch I've made so far is terrible.
"But why do I want to read this story?"
"Because it's interesting. Because it's something you didn't know before."
"There's plenty of things I don't know. That doesn't mean I want to read a story about them."
"But I'm a pretty good writer."
"It doesn't matter if you're a pretty great writer. I still don't want to read those stories."
This is what New York has been for me, a big lusty blur of talk and laughter. I haven't been to bashes like these in a while. Like last Saturday, the Brooklyn party my friend Bryan Christian threw, all of us dancing in the basement like we can't get close enough. What time is it? Three? Four? None of it will matter till the next morning at 11 o'clock, the clatter and buzzing of the factory upstairs, and I sit back down at the computer, smoke in my hair and Trouble at my feet.

written in Brooklyn, New York