For the past year or so I’ve been unpacking. I don’t mean this in a literal sense but in the sense of revisiting my past, spending time in contemplation there, in the hopes of getting a slightly better understanding of who I am and where I come from — how I got made, I guess you could say — so I can enter my sixth decade with a modicum of self-knowledge.
This summer I reunited with my friend Joe Heithaus, a poet and professor of English at DePauw University. Joe and I met in 1986, when we both worked as publicity assistants at St. Martin’s Press in the Flatiron Building in New York, where we were dreaming of becoming writers. A little more than a year later, we left our jobs, drove cross country together and then went our separate ways, but the time we spent in New York and on that drive was formative for both of us. It was the beginning of us becoming the people we are today.
Since then, Joe and I have kept in touch and remained close in vocation and spirit, but we’ve only seen each other a handful of times. He’s had a distinguished career as an educator and a poet. He’s published two books of poems, Poison Sonnets and Library of My Hands, and is the only person I know who has had his verses rendered on a glass mural at an airport, painted on the side of barn and sent to the moon.
So at our brief reunion this year, on an early morning walk to Barnegat Light at the northern tip of Long Beach Island in New Jersey, we resolved to keep in better touch, and since we’ve always wanted to write about our friendship, we agreed to unpack it and recount it in correspondence — one that would be a hybrid of genuine letter writing and storytelling that might also appeal to others. We don’t know where this will go but Joe has agreed to let me publish my first recollection to him here.
To the lighthouse, then.
August 2023
Dear Joe.
I was going to say that it was auspicious that we met at Barnegat Light this morning at dawn and walked along the northern tip of Long Beach Island overlooking the bay. It’s a place that feels like the end of something, of dry land, of earth, but also a beginning, affording a view of the open sea. An invitation to set out somewhere new. But auspicious is not the right word, is it? We planned it this way, as a sort of reunion. Maybe, it was appropriate — but words like appropriate or fitting sound too bland to me. Maybe the word is resonant.
At the end of our walk, we resolved to write to each other. To write the book of our friendship. To write it together. As an editor I tend to frown on joint bylines unless I’m very sure that both authors are truly represented. But in this case, it’s clear. I don’t think that either one of us could write this story without the other.
All this has meaning to me because we have come a long way since we met that day in the Flatiron Building in 1986, in the surprisingly dingy publicity offices of St Martin's Press. I think it was the 17th floor. That building is so — I almost said “iconic” — dynamic, forward facing and energetic, and gloriously representative of New York and all the promise of creativity and life by design. A three-pointed structure radiating energy in each direction. Or a knife through water, slicing northward.
I can't tell you how many times I think of those days — our Flatiron Days is what I’ve named them — and of each of our beginnings. We had just finished college. I was ending a painful romance, living at home with my parents in Staten Island until I could find a job. I had almost never worn a suit and I bought one for the occasion of my job interview. In my memory it was gray, something that might have been worn by an extra in Saturday Night Fever. I waited on a bench in Madison Square Park on a fine fall day, arriving early so I had time to prepare to make my case for my hiring in the language of friendliness and charm I’d learned on campus. That was when the bird shat on my lapel.
Oh, there was panic. I ran into Eisenberg’s Coffee Shop to desperately ask for a glass of seltzer and handful of napkins and I stood there at the counter under the bemused gaze of the counterwoman there, wiping, furiously, hoping the shit — Out! Out! — would soon be gone, that it would leave no stain and that it would be dried before I entered the storied building and what I imagined to be the glamorous offices of this publishing house.
I went back into the park and sat at another bench. You’ll recall the park was still a busted up, dirty place then. More O. Henry than Danny Meyer. I turned my lapel to the sun hoping the water spot would dry but it didn’t. I went into the building acting as though the stain wasn’t there.
I got the job.
On my first day they showed me to my desk there in what seemed more like a truncated corridor than an office. You and Holly were already there. We now sat back to back or side by side, I don’t quite recall, the three of us. It must have been mere days before we became friends, a trio of sprightly underlings who seemed to elicit a parental fondness from our superiors. We were early 20-somethings from different places intoxicated by the promise and peril of life in New York. It was fall and it was buzzing. I remember we had a tiny black and white TV on one of the desks to watch the Mets and Boston in the World Series when the games were on.
I suppose you could say I became the third point of our Flatiron triangle. We were a trio, yes, three friends — there would be no such story to tell without our friend Holly — but you and I would have our own bond, and that is what I speak of here. I recall you saying to me one day in conversation. I am a poet. And then later, again and again, as if it were the simplest fact in the world, I am a poet. I am a poet. I was astonished. I had never heard anyone say that.
We made the best of our jobs, though I doubt either of us felt we belonged there. We commenced to hammer out press release after press release for mass market paperbacks that we would never in a million years pick up to read ourselves, but we had fun with it. And every now and then we’d get a book or poetry or literary history to represent, and that one book a month made us feel that we were at least close to what we wanted to be doing. To just be around the real stuff in the making.
You had a paperback of your own that you read from often: The Voice That Is Great Within Us, an anthology of American poetry edited by Hayden Carruth. It was a white brick of a book. I’d never seen a paperback so squat and thick. Your devotion to this little book inspired me to get my own copy and it became a sort of talisman for us, an object that seemed to be singing a Whitmanesque song of America as a vast promising expanse of land to be roamed and celebrated. You could open it anywhere and be transported to the heart of Missouri or California or Colorado or Kansas in a moment.
I don’t know how you felt about working where we did. St. Martin’s was terrific, storied in its own way, and important books were coming out there: James Baldwin’s essay collection The Price of the Ticket and Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On about the AIDS epidemic stand out for me, but I had developed a snobbishness about the historical importance of certain publishers and had longed for an entry-level editorial position at the more glamorous FSG or Vintage or Knopf. But no. While I had managed to graduate from Cornell I did so without any distinction, to say the least, struggling through a introductory Chemistry class at Tomkins County Community College the summer before for my last three credits. I was an enthusiastic but distractible, haphazard student who would never make it to Bob Gottlieb’s or Gerry Howard’s office door, suit or not. It was going to be publicity for me.
We were camped, I suppose, in these low level jobs only to be around books and people who like them and to be in New York. Maybe we would meet a famous writer or two. Maybe we would become friendly with an esteemed editor. And later, when we quit our positions and began writing stories and poems and reviews, we would send those works to these writers with whom we’d established friendly relations. We would feign a sort of chumminess with them in our cover letters and ask that they consider our humble offerings for publication, all the while feeling anything but humble, secretly hoping in our furious post-adolescent hearts that our words would set the world ablaze the way our heroes’ words did. This was our version of ambition.
We made the best of it by having lunches at the Old Town and after work, going to Peter McManus and drinking beer and playing exquisite corpse at the heavy wooden tables. Just using alcohol and camaraderie to write poetry collaboratively was exciting. It was almost as exciting, in a sensual way, as the romances I imagined with the sophisticated and beautiful women I saw everywhere around me — on the subway, in the streets, in the elevator of our building — but to whom I never dared speak. This was so much simpler. The mugs of stout raised in dark, the scrawled-on, beer-soaked paper place mats, the sturdy tables, the not knowing what line in the poem we were writing would come next.
I don't remember who quit the job first. I think it was you; you got into graduate school for English at Indiana, right? And you decided to leave the job. I was applying to graduate school, too, more haphazardly, mostly to fiction writing programs. This was the trend if you wanted to be a fiction writer then. Maybe it still is. But I recall I had nowhere to go at the time.
You were going away to be a sort of Midwestern poet like Richard Hugo or somebody like that, somebody with a moral compass and credibility and fierce but gentle, poetic drive. With dark strains running through it. Really very American. Joe, I’ve said this before — I always thought you were the most American person I knew. We used to joke that you were like a young Jimmy Stewart. You were! And of course, you know, because of how thoroughly I love and admire you, I mean this in the best possible way. You were our lanky, sandy haired, blue eyed American boy. Wide eyed in the great metropolis, in Oz. And I was — I don’t know, a middle class kid from Brooklyn and Staten Island, without any of the sophistication you got when you were raised in Manhattan, who had somehow faked his way into literary New York, just sort of hanging out there, showing up at poetry readings or book events trying to look cool, not thinking about the kind of work that would be necessary to actually become Frank O'Hara or Allen Ginsberg or Paul Blackburn or Barry Hannah or John Cheever or Saul Bellow. These figures were just luminaries to me. They glowed in the air above me, but I didn’t understand them as real. I was overexcited by these fantasy of them. I could force myself to sit still long enough to read their work and develop a kind of worshipful embrace of them, but I did not understand the toil, the uncertainty, the danger involved in taking that path.
In any case, when you got into the graduate program at Indiana you decided to drive across the country to visit your friend Rob in Montana, to Glacier National Park where he seemed to have had some sort of job. My heart was still broken. I decided to go with you — I assume you invited me but I don’t really remember — and gave my two weeks notice. Soon after we left in your sister’s battered car. It was your sister’s, right? There was also some mythological excitement underlying our trip, two young writers who had not made their mark yet taking off like Jack and Neal (another mythological tale). And then a few hours into the trip something in the car died and we had to pull off the highway in Pennsylvania. Was this going to be it? I saw the sign for the town as we rolled off: Mechanicsville. I could hardly believe it. We broke down in Mechanicsville. I suppose now in hindsight that this, like the bird shitting on my lapel in the park, was a sign of good luck. Auspicious, yes. I believe it took about an hour for the Mechanicsville mechanic to replace the busted hose, and just like that we were back on the road.
Once we escaped the Northeast you drove flat out across the Plains. We listened to cassette tapes from a A Prairie Home Companion boxed set, drinking in the great promise and geological grandeur of America, not thinking about its difficulties, its wars and horrors. It's bloody sores. I can't help thinking now that the wonder we felt driving from New York to Montana was wonder at native lands from which the natives themselves had been erased. But we were boys not men, middle-class children of the American project at the tail end of the Reagan era. We weren’t supposed to know history. I saw from the Plains and onward nothing but landscapes, shapes of the natural world, the awesome tectonic sculpting of the continent.
It is characteristic of my memory that every moment of rapture that I felt on the road had a model derived from some sort of American artistic canon. Do you remember that gas station with the little breakfast counter in the middle of fucking nowhere? But of course, it wasn't nowhere. It was the heart of the great land. Entirely flat, nothing to be seen for miles. We pulled our car up to the pump. I seem to see nothing but the gas pump and the flat land. I remember the feeling I had while I was pumping the gas in my jean jacket and work boots, pretending to be someone who worked the land somehow, seeing myself from the outside, a self watching the self, a Nick Carraway-like character in an American epic. Behind the pumps was a little café or diner. With the few locals populating the counter, the waitress wiping down the tables and behind that the endless, endless fields. And I thought it made sense to me, it had meaning because I saw the scene as an Edward Hopper painting. The image had an almost religious sheen, a composition in blue and red and gold and now here I was inhabiting it, a character in the story of my own making.
I make light of this self-consciousness now, but it meant something to me then that I wasn’t going to be forced to merely accept the life I was given, that I could take art and imagine it as a setting for the life I was living, the places that I was walking through and driving through with you. That was how I saw the land and the entire trip. When we crossed further west, I saw images and I thought of Ansel Adams. And being on the road, of course, I thought of Kerouac and Neal Cassidy and all the Beats and all the speed-fueled excitement and revelations they reportedly had on the road. I fantasized Jack blowing his drunken, mystical, horn through me onto heavenly scrolls and that I would then turn that music to books. While I look back at this person now, meaning 23-year-old me, always needing to justify the meaning of what I was doing and where I was going through some sort of art or literature, I see someone who wasn’t mature enough or ready to do what he thought he wanted to do. But I am fond of him, too.
I see the seed of some later self there. A poet within who was struggling to get out. I remember writing a few lines during our drive. I called it Entering Murdo, South Dakota, at Dawn. I wanted to capture that moment, us driving into the silence and soft light that seemed to envelop us. I thought, I nailed this. It’s like a Gary Snyder haiku. But I was making an “argument from authority” as they say in philosophy. I had to have something already validated that I could associate it with. I'm going to look through my pages for the poem, but I believe it is lost now. Anyway, we kept going and going.
So here we are at the lighthouse. We are both 60 years old. You've just suffered a heart attack, a scare I've imagined many times for myself, losing my grandfather as I did 50 years ago to one at 61. So last year you had to look to your own death in the eye. And with the help of others, you survived it. Now you have to think about what you will do in your remaining time. I'm thinking that, too. After 25 years, I'm being released from my work at the New York Times, for just a short while, to write. I feel a little bit like a ship, a dinghy, rather, just being cut loose from an ocean liner. And I see the massive ship drifting away. I'm drifting away, too, in my little boat, into an ocean where there are no signposts and no markers. The big ship is sailing out of sight. I will be just a tiny creature on my own, alone in a small boat in the middle of the sea, not knowing which direction to go, letting myself drift.
So what now?
Yours,
Peter