Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [82]
Sally started as a way to avoid getting evicted from my apartment on Amity Street. But when I got back from Vermont, I still owed rent and was evicted anyway. I had to have two friends come over and pack all my things in the middle of the night and help me get them to my new apartment in Park Slope, before the sheriff arrived in the morning to put a lock on my door.
Shortly after I moved into this new place with a roommate, the economy started to pick up and I got a bunch of little jobs. I freelanced for a branding company: two hundred bucks and a catered breakfast for a three-hour workshop to come up with ideas for new products and snappy language for old products—a great gig. There were not enough workshops to survive on, though, so I also worked at a vintage clothing store in Brooklyn, for nine dollars an hour. I picked up my niece, Louisa, a couple days a week from school and babysat at night. I read books and wrote reading guides for HarperCollins. I was always scrambling for more work, always late on rent and often just plain out of money. Once, after concluding a workshop at the branding company, I was too broke to take the subway home and too chicken to jump the turnstile. I was so tired of being the loser, the mooch, always borrowing from my sister Katharine. I could have called and said, “Can you loan me ten bucks,” but there is something—I know this from my father’s borrowing—something even sadder about borrowing a small amount of money than a large one. Ten bucks is a sad sum. A thousand bucks is understandable somehow. A million bucks is downright dignified. So I walked from Thirtieth and Seventh, just down from Madison Square Garden, to Berkeley Place in Park Slope, about six miles. Most people in New York do this only when radical Islamists fly planes into the World Trade Center. I walked everywhere. I have always liked to walk, but I also had to walk everywhere I went. I needed every dollar.
One month when I couldn’t pay rent at my new, cheaper Park Slope pad I devised a financial plan of a rent reading. I decided to read Sally on the Mount, which had been staged only once at the barn in Vermont, in my apartment living room. Katharine made brownies. We gave away beer and charged people ten bucks. In three nights I made over eight hundred bucks, which was my rent. The reaction to the play was really good, good enough to make me decide the play should be produced. I brought it back to the barn in Vermont that summer as a more finished work. Then it went to the Lower East Side, then Hawaii, then Puerto Rico over Christmas. Never went near a theater. Halfway through the run at Tonic, a jazz place on the Lower East Side, I got a grant for seven thousand bucks. My work for the first time felt real. I was a playwright. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t pretty but it wasn’t a fantasy, either.
IT TAKES A WEST VILLAGE
MY MOTHER OFFICIALLY DIED of a stroke. It’s difficult to detect when alcoholics are having the small strokes that precede a larger, deadly stroke because often people assume they’re just drunk. My father had spoken to her a few times that week and nothing seemed terribly wrong. When he went to her apartment to do the little things he did for her he found her on the floor unconscious. By the time the ambulance got her to St. Vincent’s she was in a coma and was almost immediately pronounced brain dead. I had called her a few days earlier, on Valentine’s Day, but got a busy signal. For some reason that was our day. On Valentine’s Day she felt like my mom, which was not always the case with my birthday or Christmas. On Valentine