EDGEBOI [1.4]

The Young Man is trying to move to New York—the Make It in the Big City

4.

May 2019

The second time I went out to NYC for an MFA thing. This time for an admitted student’s night. And to see/harass the editor.

To try to.

Double the attendance of the last. Folks flying out from all over for this. Still feeling like this was some fun game I was playing.

FULL FUNDING OR BUST.

This one at a different location, nearer to campus proper.

Like they were gradually allowing us closer and closer.

Some Faculty House type spot.

After some inspirational spiels about how we were the future, how this spot was the plug spot of all plug spots, they unleashed us into a mingle pool.

Open bar, eats.

Looking around like So these the type kooks that get admitted to shit like this.

~

I got too lit, bullshitting rambling basking in the performance of my newfound functional, social self.

Late in the night, out front chain-smoking talking folks’ ears off, went back inside to nab my pack, inside of which was the first part of Fuccboi, handwritten on printer paper.

Gone.

As was everyone. The party had ended.

Panicking.

Harassing the staff on site for where it might be.

Convinced one of them had nabbed it, out of spite for how privileged we were. A spite I fully understood/felt.

Telling them The only version of my novel is in there. Find that shit!

They looked.

Then told me Hit public safety the next morning. That everything was on camera if someone had nabbed it. That it would be there if someone returned it.

~

I’d arranged to crash with a friend from undergrad I hadn’t seen in years, who worked in tech and lived way downtown.

It was hours after we’d arranged to meet. And, given I had to be back at 6 a.m. the next morning, soon as the public safety office opened.

I asked Daniel, a young writer from Ohio I’d been broing out with if I could crash. He had a hotel room a couple blocks away and wasn’t flying back to Ohio till Sunday.

He seemed slightly unsure. Or actually, he didn’t. Or, if he did, which I was convinced he was, he didn’t show it.

We pit-stopped for pizza and a sixer, despite being double-digit open-bar beers in already, before heading back. Ranting about how we were gonna change the game.

He did standup. Was coming to NYC to do comedy, too.

I said I was a comic also. Or, that I wrote comically. Or that, unless whatever I thought to write made me laugh (or cry), I didn’t write it.

I said I got the sixer. He said Sweet, I’ll get one too.

I told him about Fuccboi. About each of the “baes” I was writing about. That everything was lost, now that I’d lost it. That I was meeting one the next morning.

“Which one?” he said.

“Which bae you mean?”

“Which bae.”

“Editor.”

*