Bex O’Brian

Word Count 1351

I was eighteen, lying in bed in my Greenwich Village sublet when my mother called to tell me she and my sister were moving to New York from Montreal and that I was to start looking for an apartment. "Somewhere on the Upper West Side."

I rolled over and sobbed into my pillow.

New York had never been my dream. If anything, it was London where both my parents had been born. But back then I was so under the yoke of my mother's passions, her dreams, her desires, that it was impossible to untangle what was hers and what was mine. So I came to New York to study acting but also, I now understood, to play the real-life role of advance scout for my mother. 

I had no real notion of the city. The only time I had been there was in 1967, when I was seven. I remember women leaning out of windows, pillows under their arms, staring down at the smouldering wreckage of a car below. I did have a notion about acting, which involved living a lie, living outside oneself, never there, never held to account. Turns out, acting is all about honesty. At least that was what I was told at HB Studio. Honesty, certainly of the emotional kind, was beyond me at that time, so I dropped out. The next two years were strange and very lonely. I lived in Westbeth, a subsidized housing project for artists in the West Village, in a sublet that, as far as I could tell, was three degrees removed from the owner, a dancer named Viga Vetra. I paid the rent to a man who passed it on to another man. I let the place run to ruin. I had no work, because of visa restrictions, but didn't have the courage or know-how to work off the books. Not that there was anything practical I was capable of doing. My high school jobs, orchestrated by mother, included being an assistant to a movie projectionist, fun until he set his sights on me, and helping residents of an old age home find the right numbers during their daily game of bingo. Not much of a resume. With nothing to do, I'd spend my mornings watching the PIX 11 am movie. Afternoons, I would wander around, hoping for a New York encounter. Nothing ever happened except for the time a crazy man tried to punch me in the face. The low point was the morning I felt a faint tickle on my lip and woke to find a cockroach sipping at my drool.

Still, I sobbed into my pillow. I mourned the end of my admittedly shitty life in a city that eluded me, while for my mother, who had a book contract from Simon and Schuster for her novel Love Bites, life was about to begin anew.

Of course, things didn't quite work out the way she envisioned. Instead of a glittering book party, her agent took us all out to lunch at The Russian Tearoom. We were seated near the bathroom. The agent tried to cover up her embarrassment by talking nonstop. Mother was also told that if she signed copies of her book, the bookstores couldn't return them to the publisher to be pulped. The book sank like a stone. The money ran out. I, having slept with the manager, got a job (using a fake SS number) at O'Neal's Baloon, a restaurant opposite Lincoln Centre. I became the family breadwinner and, with all the extra shifts I took on, an ace waitress. To this day, it’s my only real-world skill.

All along, New York was going up around me, encasing me, becoming my home. Still, I felt uneasy. No matter what clubs I went to, what movies I saw, what streets I came to know, what shops had become second nature, what friends I made, it wasn't a love affair. I felt like I was constantly running into a granite wall. I wasn’t unable to parse the racial tensions, or fathom "Love it or leave it." Nationalism was an unknown concept. My Canadian education– scant at best— did not include much American history, not that Americans are ever taught the worst of it. I was dismayed, as well, at table manners, the switching of the fork to the other hand, the sawing at food.  Many of the kids who waited tables while studying acting had come to New York from small provincial cities or rural hamlets. They didn't know PG Wodehouse or Lady Diana Cooper. I was an Anglophile by maternal influence. Mother had led me to believe New York would be a literary wonderland. But I was unschooled in American literature. No matter how much Bellow, Roth, or Wharton I read, they still felt foreign. Perhaps I was too stupid to figure out the world around me. I was at sea.

So, I married. A young up-and-coming writer. Mother approved. Imagine what he could do for her. Things changed, however, when she realized she would not be invited to the book parties my husband and I now attended, ones filled with notables like Richard Ford, Robert Stone, Don DeLillo. Not that they noted me, I was the wife. But, I too, thought this might be an entree into something as yet undefined. The parties felt entirely male. Women were there, of course. One soirée, the maleness all around was so egotistical, so overbearing, that the writer Joy Williams and I dove beneath a grand piano and stayed there the rest of the party. What we talked about is gone, but our act felt radical and freeing, and I remember thinking that men's shoes were silly.

We always walked home from those parties. In my memory, it was usually rainy or snowy. This was New York at her loveliest. Still, I resisted. There was no geographical mystery. Merely a grid of streets, at least till you reached the Village.  The way that worth was bestowed on me for having communed with the great made me uncomfortable. Manhattan was a place of commercial zeal, a financial town, a city for money-makers. Since money seemed to hate me, I decided to hate it back.

I divorced, married another writer, this one Brooklyn-born. The parties went on through the ‘80s, but when the nineties ended, most magazines disappeared along with it. By now, my mind having settled down from high to low panic, I found that writing gave me the most solace. New York was hardly my muse.  In fact, it was the opposite.  If you were not A Twenty Under Thirty, well, then your chances of getting published dipped to zero. I tried to drown it all out, but there was the example of my mother right in front of me. For years, she published in Lears, GQ, and The Village Voice. But by the time she was sixty, she found it almost impossible even to get a meeting with an editor. She never turned on New York, however, despite being told she was too British, that American readers wouldn't appreciate her humour. Even when she was so poor she had to live on beans. Nor did she feel any guilt in pressing her daughters into supporting her. To live in New York, as she must, we all had to come together and make it work.      

Forty years have passed, my whole adult life, thirty of which I have lived in the same Brooklyn apartment. I have known each part of the city, usually through a local bar or restaurant– The West End when I was at Columbia as a mature student, the Dublin House on West 79th, where I met my first husband and got to know my second, The Lion's Head, then full of writers, Fanelli's in Soho, where more times than not, we stayed until the gates clattered down.  Then to Brooklyn, to Montero's, the Brooklyn Inn, endless nights in the heart of New York. The booze, the food, the low lights, the friends. The city, one would think, should be in my blood, should be who I am, yet I still cast a gimlet eye on the place. Not sure why. It's just never felt like home.

Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She’s been scribbling around on various projects for the better part of thirty years and made very little money as a result. Thus conditioned, she is thrilled with the advent of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.