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By Root 419 0

in-house grammarian. He must have been sixty-eight when he was offered this job, but he turned it down because he was getting “very close” with the Fitzgerald book. The whole family was astounded that this book project was still going strong. It was stronger than his desire for a regular paycheck, which would mean it was stronger than his need to know his rent would be paid, stronger than food, a movie here and there, dinner out with his daughters and grandkids, a cab in the rain. It seemed there was nothing more important than “the project.” And it was always almost there. It was more than a decade at least at this point. “A few months at the outside and it’s ready.” I knew what he was doing looked crazy to everyone else and it looked crazy to me, too. But I had just done the very same thing. Left a really good job. My mind could say, “That is crazy behavior. Fantasy. Delusion.” My soul, however, said, “That’s what we do. That is just what we do.”

I HAD NO IDEA how to help him. He was in total denial that he even needed help, but he ate almost everything off our plates at restaurants. For our birthdays we always got a check from him that he’d tell us to “wait a couple days on that one, would you?” And the birthday girl would wait and ask a few days later if it could be deposited. “Better hold off a day or two just to be sure,” until eventually it became like an acting exercise, pretending the check was something other than a piece of paper. Sometimes I would see my father a couple blocks down Court Street, coming out of a bakery with a loaf of bread under his arm, and I would turn the corner. It was too painful sometimes to talk to him, he seemed like a real-life Court Street tragic hero/figure. Like running into King Lear outside his Clinton Street walk-up. He may not have enough work, enough, God forbid, to eat, and my life was no different.

I WAS NOW THREE MONTHS behind on rent. Was this a good time to write a play or a bad time to write a play? My friend in Vermont who runs a theater company in an old barn offered me an August spot to do a show. I took it. It wasn’t the first time I had accepted an offer to perform a play that had yet to be written. I sublet my place and headed to Warren, Vermont, to live in a trailer in the woods and finish this play.

I stayed in a 1954 Prairie Schooner trailer that the owner, an architect at a university in Seattle, had made into a crazy compound with an Airstream down the hill and a wood deck and French windows. A stonemason had built a beautiful stone wall around the trailer. There was an outdoor shower off the back of the trailer. The main attraction, though, was the glass outhouse in the woods. It was a compost toilet and his girlfriend, a Seattle artist, had put broken plates all over the front of it. It had amazing views of the mountains. I called it the Julian Schnabel outhouse. People were always coming by from local colleges and environmental building classes to check out the famous glass compost outhouse. And they never called first, so I’d be out there using it and crowds of design/build geeks would come over the hill and find me there in my bathroom.

In the trailer in Vermont, I managed to finish the play about a prostitute named Sally who was raised on a commune in Northern California, started by her father, where they grow endive and wear old fencing clothes discarded from the California College of Arts and Crafts. She moves to New York City as a teenager after all the kids are kicked off the commune by the father. She becomes a sex worker in the meatpacking district but decides, amid all the art world craziness of the ’80s in New York, that what she does is actually art, that her fucking is so rich, so expressive, that she’s a “fucking artist.” She adapts Orwell’s Animal Farm into a blow job and collaborates with a man who calls himself Ken Burn on a seventeen-part PBS series called The American Anus. She stops charging people and becomes a full-time fucking artist and sets up a nonprofit. She eventually winds up experiencing a Thoreau-style look back at