I needed another job, and after a few months I found one as a translator with a small literary agency run by an amiable and educated black American named Gerald. I’d read about Gerald in the New York Times; he was a fluent Dutch speaker, from time spent in Amsterdam and Surinam, he’d translated a Dutch children’s book on gnomes that became a surprise bestseller. With his share of the proceeds he’d started the Gotham Literary Agency and was looking for a French translator. I applied; we met; he gave me the job, and I was sitting pretty, for awhile. By my low standards, that is; at the same age of 27, most of my friends had well-paying jobs and families and had long since crossed the threshold into middle-class independence and maturity. Only I was still out in the adolescent wilderness, holding high the tattered banner of bachelor’s Bohemia, so I was—unrealistically, as always—thrilled at the prospect of a real job, with all its concomitant apartments, girlfriends, paid vacations, swimming pools, oaken tans, etc. In reality, over a period of six months of reasonably hard labor, squinting at serif-heavy French fonts in the diffuse light of the single lamp in my cell through long New York nights with police sirens chirping and gibbering in the avenues outside, I received payment for my translation of a popular history series (Sumer: The First Great Civilization, by Amar Hamdani; probably still available in remainder bins and on the world’s most obscure web sites) only after much telephoning and hanging around the office, thereby squandering what meager goodwill I and Gerald had mutually built up over a series of beers, most paid for by him, in nearby bars. My tenacity increased; his glares became more pronounced; suddenly there were no more chummy beer-drinking sessions and he was nowhere to be found. I dealt with him par personne interposée, a willowy secretary who did nothing but buff her nails and look bored, in the fashion of secretaries in 1950s movie comedies. Then, one day, she too was gone, and the Gotham Literary Agency was no more: Closed, said the sign on the door, but a German translator left similarly high and dry told me that Gerald, colorfully, had absconded to Surinam with both the company’s payroll funds and the shapely “secretary” whom even I, in all my naivety, had spotted for nothing more or less than his squeeze, the first time she’d appeared on the scene; now, as his accomplice, she seemed more glamorous. Righteous anger at being screwed competed in my soul with envy at the cinematic denouement. There’s a distinct panache in having the balls to abscond with the company brass and decamp to far corners of the earth where the drinks come in fishbowls and trade winds ruffle the palm trees, but the massed realities of the shits and bad weather and homesickness and Interpol will sooner or later hit you hard. Still, Gerald had not only the company funds but also the proceeds of the Dutch gnome book to keep him and his girlfriend going . . . but Surinam? I wished them joy of it, and for awhile thought of the episode as a promising short story, a sub-Graham Greene piece with some kind of revenge or redemption at the end. But I never wrote the story, and soon forgot about the whole business because I needed another job. For about a week I distributed leaflets for a “burlesque” show on West 48th Street until scared off by my fellow leaflet-distributors, a bunch of failed punk rockers, alcoholics, and aspiring sex maniacs—and scared off, too, by the real, rather than romantic, proximity of the gutter.