America in the rearview mirror as a five-floor walk up on West 15th with my friend A. from school. I slept on a futon in the living room and set up my computer in the kitchen. We both got jobs in publishing. A. landed hers with a literary scout at eighteen grand a year. Mine in the marketing department with a storied house came a few weeks later at seventeen five. A. attended the prestigious Radcliffe Publishing Program over the summer bent on being an editor while I made no bones about working in the book business only long enough to publish my own. Her boss quickly revealed herself to be an abusive psychopath who went through assistants like pills and packs of cigarettes. Mine was an alcoholic mother of six who treated the entire marketing department of a major trade publisher like her own dysfunctional family. A.’s had an upside, however, that presented itself after months of hell when she got her hands on a manuscript of American Psycho. Stories of staffers at Simon & Schuster threatening to quit rather than work on what was being reported as an unreadable and shamelessly violent misogynistic rant by Bret Easton Ellis. The controversy raged inside the publishing world and out after S&S dropped the book at the eleventh hour with very few with anything to say about it having read it unlike A. and I, who trashed it mistakenly a little too loud among friends one night over beers at the Blue & Gold only to be overheard by some writer for the The Voice who did a dicky piece about eavesdropping on publishing grunts brag about having a copy in a crowded bar. It never got traced back to A.’s office, but all of our friends knew it was us and equated into something of our fifteen minutes of fame until it came out from Knopf as an original trade paperback with no author tour or promotion of any kind. We both stuck it out for a year before moving on to better gigs. I got a few stories published. A. soured on the literary life and drifted into music. We eventually earned enough to get our own apartments and rarely saw each other after that. Living with the same people in the same place too long will do that to even the best of friends. Catching up over a couple emails earlier this week, A. said she was based in New Mexico with her wife now and joked about making enough money working with Kanye West before he became a Nazi to buy a house there not far from where this weird Gene Hackman shit went down. I countered that I was keeping up with MAGA from abroad by listening to the Bret Easton Ellis podcast. Kanye, I added, was always overrated as an artist but that we were wrong about Ellis back in the day. Patrick Bateman ratfucked my Tesla, A. wrote in reply true to form by rephrasing the obvious like my editor she was never meant to be.