July 2nd
I wake inside a sublet in the lowest, most eastern edge of the Lower East Side. I haven’t slept in Manhattan since 2009 when I moved to the city after working in Paris. Back then I hosted at Lucien, and following a couple months of enduring the bistro’s tyrannical owner, I went to LA where I’ve lived ever since.
In LA I flitted around the edges of many scenes and watched them all swell, crest and collapse. These days I’ve been thinking specifically about those scenes for here, improbably and quite surreally, I find myself near the epicenter of LA’s underground literary earthquake.
What drives scenes? What attracts so many artists and dreamers, graspers and grifters to them? I’ve come to NYC for many reasons: to hook a lit agent, to schmooze with publishers and editors, to debut Casual Encountersz. But mainly I want to experience NYC’s literary scene to get a better understanding of my own.
That night friend invited me to Clandestino.
“This is NYC’s Prado,” they assure me.
The two bars, like America’s twin great metropolises, are impossibly different. Their one similarity: I spend many nights watching poets and sex freaks doing drugs in their bathrooms.
July 3rd
Honey’s rooftop is ringed with Bushwickerati: blue hair, septum rings, stick-and-poke tats. Poet Lily Lady emcee’s the reading with an aristocratic flair, as if they can’t be rushed nor bothered.
“What about a Casual Encountersz at the Ritz?” Lady asks after the reading, once they realize I’m the writer who’s been pestering them the past few weeks. “I’ll have a room there, actually.”
I plan to host three NYC Casual Encountersz, a mini tour of sorts. Debuting CE as an invite-only reading inside a five-star suite with Lady’s gang of queer poets?
“Sounds chic,” I say.