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By Root 1279 0

writers are nice, ordinary people you wouldn’t mind living next to or allowing your daughter to date. Most, though, have the sort of large and colorful personalities you expect from artists. There are the flakes who, having devoted every cell in their brain to penetrating the unconscious, have forgotten how to do mundane tasks like getting themselves to a bookstore for a reading by seven P.M. And there are the social misfits who, as a result of cutting themselves off from the world outside their own head or spending too many years trying to climb through a blank computer screen, have a tendency to show up drunk, pick a fight with an audience member, make a pass at the person introducing them or not show up at all. In short, readings are scary, because you never know what’s going to happen when you unleash writers on the public.

On that Thursday in late July I have an evening reading with Robert Pinsky and Jamaica Kincaid scheduled at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I’m supposed to work at the deli in the morning, then jump into the car and drive up to Cambridge in the afternoon. However, Dwayne, who’s never even a minute late for work, inexplicably fails to show up when his shift starts. Half an hour passes, then an hour. I call him, and no one answers. When I finally see him coming down Atlantic Avenue, his gait is unsteady and his face looks mangled and swollen, as if he’s been in a brawl.

“What happened?” I say.

“Had a toothache,” he says woozily. “But it’s over. I got it out.”

“You went to the dentist?”

“Hell no. I ain’t gonna pay no hundred and fifty dollars.”

“So who did it for you?”

“I did it myself.”

“With what?”

“Pliers. Then I passed out. That’s how come I’m late.” He rubs his jaw with bloody hands.

Hearing this I almost pass out myself, but there’s no time—I have to get on the road. I’m running at least an hour late, and by the time I get on the highway, the afternoon congestion has already started to build. It takes me an hour just to get out of New York City, and in Westchester there’s highway construction, and in Connecticut there’s a traffic jam that looks like it extends all the way to Hartford. This is terrible. I’ve always been bad at budgeting time, giving myself the smallest margin of error possible. And this time I’m going to pay for it by not showing up at a reading that I organized, where not only will the writers and the audience be unable to figure out what’s going on, but at which several writers and editors from the Boston Globe whom I personally invited will be on hand to witness the “professionalism” of the new Paris Review.

Even worse, this is probably the most stressful reading in the whole series. Robert Pinsky is a man who seems to have made a terrible decision going into poetry, since he is handsome enough to have been a Hollywood leading man and has a voice that sounds either like God himself or a classic rock DJ. (He could have made a fortune intoning movie previews but instead chose to translate The Inferno.) As maybe the best-known poet in America, he will bring a crowd that I fear will overwhelm the bookstore.

And then there is Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid is the sort of writer who unsettles people—me in particular—maybe because she once wrote about giving herself coffee enemas, or maybe because she famously quit a staff writer’s job at the New Yorker because she thought Tina Brown, the magazine’s outrageously successful editor, had sold its soul, or maybe because of the stories about her walking around Manhattan in a hospital gown and other outrageous garb. (Her best friend, the writer Ian Frazier, once wrote about the difficulties of getting a cab when accompanied by “a six-foot-tall black woman in pajamas.”) Quite possibly it’s because in the cozy little social world of writers and editors, she’s a true outsider, a writer from a poor country (Antigua) who came to New York to be a nanny for an Upper East Side family and worked her way up from there. Maybe it’s all of these things. In any case, the only thing I feel more strongly than delight in anticipation of her reading