Illustration by Thomas Pitilli.

Jack is in his 30s. He’s good-looking, makes money and has a nice apartment, and in this city, what all that gets you is almost everything. He meets me on Greenwich Street one morning for black coffee. Two girls he knows come walking by. He smiles, and his blue eyes are warm, but on one girl’s face you can see that whole wringing week she waited for a call.

You’re Jack, and you take a girl out to dinner at Blue Ribbon, and she spends three hours deciding if you’re the kind of guy who will like her more if she sleeps with you or if she doesn’t. If you like her enough, it will mean East Hampton on Memorial Day and Nantucket on Labor Day and New Canaan for life. And God help her, there will be golden retrievers. 

Jack can have any girl he wants. A blond event planner who wears heels on Sunday mornings. A former fit model who looks great in Hanes white. A yoga instructor who makes him spicy tempeh wraps with steamed kale on the side. There are girls who make great Bloody Marys and there are good girls who go to church on Sunday with their families, but last night they were at Jack’s. There are girls who ride horses and lawyers and designers and tall ones and short ones, stacking their needs up across his walls and then saying those are not needs, they are shadows.

So why does Jack prefer escorts?

One night Jack comes over to my apartment. He brings over a girl named Kimberly (her fake name) who says she’s 24 (her fake age). She’s wearing jeans, a black scoop-neck shirt and tall black suede boots. She looks like the part of Florida she’s from, sun-pressed and squeezed out into a glass.

She and Jack have this easy back-and-forth, sitting side by side at the kitchen table. They’ve known each other for about a year. He found her on Backpage.com, which is where people like Jack have gone since Craigslist shut down its Adult Services section.

The first time, she gave him oral sex. She came over to his big apartment, and it was a blinder date than usual because Jack was looking for a quick fix. Normally he does his homework, using Eros.com, which is an escort directory, and The Erotic Review, or TER, which is Yelp for the sex trade, where johns trade information about the escorts and offer specific statistics. Hair length? Photo accurate? Shaved? More than one guy at a time? Full, no-rush session?

Created a decade ago by a john who was tired of being misled, TER sees about 350,000 visitors a day, men between the ages of 35 and 55 with a median income of $80,000. They wax nostalgic about Mistress Natalie and Emma of New York, and if you pay for a membership, you too can read about how WkndWhacker found VIP Daisy’s breasts even fuller in the flesh than they looked on her website, and how the way she kissed was like “honey warming in his mouth.”

At first it seems like a niche thing, and then one night a bunch of guys have four Coors Lights and one general counsel says to another, “Wait, so what’s your TER handle?”

The guys refer to themselves as hobbyists. The hobby is sleeping with beautiful women and then reviewing and categorizing them. It’s as routine as Zagat, clinical in its ratings, exuberant in its quotables and so much a part of a hobbyist’s daily throttle that a group of escorts recently offered a holiday discount to johns who make donations to the K.I.D.S. Hurricane Sandy relief fund.

Many of the girls provide the Girlfriend Experience, or GFE. They rub your back and you take them to dinner, and they are in tune with politics, so you can say how you feel about Obamacare. You share some Kumamotos and Sancerre and then you cab back to the Waldorf.

There’s Venezuelan Goddess, who has long black hair and D-cup breasts in a lace demi and ankle cowboy boots. There is Bai Xi, who always pops up in the top 10; she’s small and Asian and replies to emails promptly. There is Jessica, with her Farrah Fawcett waves and Eastern Bloc lips. She says, “I have very long blonde hair & soft skin with amazing eyes & great smile. My outgoing personality will have you feeling very comfortable from the moment we meet, as if we have known each other for years.”

And that’s the main ticket. That’s why guys like Jack hire Jessicas for $1,000 a night instead of paying $200 for dinner with the lawyer who’s got a CrossFit addiction. The Bai Xis give you the same thing. Why go out with a Wife in Training when you can go out with the Perpetual Girlfriend? She puts out every time like she’s bucking for a rating, while the Wife in Training wants to know why you didn’t walk the four flights of her walk-up to collect her for dinner. She wants your mornings. The Girlfriend only needs your nights.

YOU arrange to meet a married john at a place where a married john would go to meet an escort. There’s a bar on the seventh floor of the W New York hotel called The Living Room. It’s got white leather and no windows. Constant bachelor nighttime. Mitchell arrives, all high-low in monogrammed French cuffs, a great suit and a Kenneth Cole Reaction tie. He carries a briefcase—he’s the general counsel of a CPA firm, which he’s been with for more than 30 years.

Mitchell’s a master hobbyist. He sees about 25 girls a year. He makes over a million annually and spends about $50,000 a year on the hobby. He pays a minimum of $500 an hour for a girl, and doesn’t price shop. Mitchell has a girl in every city he travels to. I know his New York girl. Her work alias is Katelyn, and she’s a blond Australian with large breasts, a small waist and an equestrian face. She charges $5,000 for an entire evening.

They catch up on the couch for 45 minutes. There are tagines from her trips to Morocco and sweet-smelling candles. He tells her about the grandchild he’s raising with his wife. She tells him about her dives in Mexico. After a glass or two of wine, they start to kiss. Every man I speak to about Katelyn talks about the way she kisses. Deep French Kissing. DFK.

“She is also incredibly smart,” said Mitchell. She was a marketing executive in another life, and she is well-read in the classics and on current events. She reads a lot about human psychology, and she understands the pathos behind the desires she fulfills.

“She will send me a catch-up email every once in a while, when she hasn’t heard from me.” Over Super Bowl weekend, she sent pictures of herself dressed in a cutoff jersey and boy shorts, exulting over a play on the television, on her knees on a white hotel duvet.

Mitchell calls his hobby “seeking relationships outside of marriage.” He has sex with his wife only sporadically. She’s overweight again. A few years back, she lost 150 pounds, but now she is back in the upper 200s. “I don’t see it as cheating,” he said. “I believe what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

It’s 2 a.m., and Kimberly is drinking orange juice. She is talking to Jack and me about some of her other clients, the fat ones and the grandpa types.

“Are the old ones difficult, because they take so long?” Jack asked.

She laughs and punches his arm. “There are tricks,” she said. “But guys will do anything to just come. This one guy rolls in with a colostomy bag, and it broke my heart.” This was at the Waldorf.

“But this guy,” she said, jerking her thumb at Jack, “this guy is like the dream client. You walk into his door and he’s good-looking and sweet, and he like makes you any drink you want, and he doesn’t even want to get laid most times. And in case you couldn’t tell, he can have any girl he wants.”

On nights when she’s not working or she hasn’t had a call yet, Kimberly will let Jack take her to a hookah place in the West Village. He’ll pay for her dinner and her smoke but nothing else, and she’ll check her phone and leave when she needs to.

“She’s like my buddy,” Jack said. “That’s what the girls I date don’t understand. We can have a nice romantic night together or whatever and then I don’t text her for three weeks, and she doesn’t even miss me.”

“I always miss you,” she said to his face in the mirror.

“Yeah, whatever. Look, Kimberly and I have an understanding.”

Jack has seen a good 50 percent of the stock on Eros. He sleeps with older women, mothers and women with overgrown roots. Some months he pays for their car insurance. He shows me a text from a stripper in Pennsylvania whose TV he hung on the wall for her.

“How about this one?” I asked, pointing to Nikki Irish on the screen. She is older and not Jack’s usual type. “Oh yeah, Nikki,” he said. “Don’t make that face. What’s great about Nikki is she loves sex. Maybe it’s just sex with me,” he said, winking at Kimberly. “The point is we’ll do it, and then 10 minutes later, she’ll want to do it again, and we’re over her time and she doesn’t ask for more money. Look, I’m not one of those fools who go to strip clubs and think the girl falls in love with them. But I know when a woman likes sex. And men like women who genuinely like sex.”

On a Monday night at Katelyn’s apartment on the East Side, she is wearing a melon-colored shirt and loose jeans, and her blond hair is up in a clip. Her male chef friend is drinking wine and smoking cigarettes at the window.

There is a shoe closet where the spiked Louboutins and the slick yellow YSLs are in labeled bins. “You take care of expensive things,” she said, which is why she charges a high price—twice as much as Kimberly. “The more you charge, the more worth it a man thinks you are.”

On her couch, where most dates begin, she pulls out a three-ring binder that houses a sheaf of spreadsheets, one for each of the 290 men she has known professionally. Here’s a knee surgeon. Here’s a national branding manager. Here’s a diplomat. Here’s a philanthropist. He’s very cool, tall and charming and has a great head of curly hair. He is married and wears traditional suits. There is a cinematographer in his mid- to late 30s who likes her in sweats.

There is a section for referrals. There is a slot for Spouse. A CPL slot, for whether she has been with him and his spouse. A DBL slot, for whether she has been with the man plus one of her fellow escorts.

What he drinks. Where he works. Average meeting length. I tell her about Jack, and she says that yes, she does have a Jack type. A financier originally from Austin had his friend in from home. They were in the Hamptons, at a house on the beach. They sent a Town Car at 4 p.m. on a Sunday to pick up Katelyn and her friend Eva, who is an Australian brunette. The rest of the shares had left the house. Katelyn and her friend got there, and there was a note on the door that said, “Go inside. There are envelopes on the table. Have a swim in the ocean, we’re picking up dinner.”

And the girls came in from a swim, shaking off their wet hair on the patio and the boys were on the deck grilling rib eyes and tongues of eggplant, and they had wine and then dinner, and then they watched television, and afterward they coupled up and went into separate bedrooms, and there was nothing strange. It was nice. These nice boys from Texas.

“I would date them,” Katelyn said. At around 11, Katelyn’s date, who was high, was in the mood for cookies, so they decided to drive back into Manhattan. They dropped the girls off at Katelyn’s, and Katelyn said to Eva: “Well. A few hours in the Hamptons, and cookies. Did we really just make $3,500 to do that?”

Katelyn is sensuous, elegant and smart. Men buy her La Perla lingerie and leave her money in envelopes on coffee tables, and she knows how to dress a roast and when to listen.

When Katelyn is not working, she is working out and reading and dining out with friends and going to London for the weekend and Paris for the week. She is practicing yoga and bettering her body and her mind and advancing her entire being so that she will continue to appreciate in value, in a world where youth is prized over experience, and in a city where women will sleep with men for less than Katelyn makes in a minute.

“What women don’t understand is that with married men, their wives don’t listen like I do anymore, and it’s not because they’re bad people. They have children, and they have had 20, 30, 40 years with this man. Boredom sets in. Life sets in. And for the young guys like the man from Austin, he could have sent a town car to pick up any girl he knew in New York. But with me, we can still talk about politics, but I go home and the night is over. Women underestimate the importance of a night being over.”

 The level of self-awareness among johns varies. But for most men who sleep with escorts, they’re getting what they need from women without having to give back. If they do something nice for the escort—which many of them do—it’s purely voluntary. There’s a joy in doing nice things when they’re unexpected, like at the beginning of a relationship.

There is, too, the excitement of the secret life. When your friends have gone home to their girlfriends, or the girl you’ve gone on a first date with has gone home to dream of your wedding, there is the promise of the evening that follows. “Sometimes it’s just that I can have this beautiful girl sitting on the couch beside me,” Jack said. “I don’t even want to fuck her necessarily, it’s just nice to know I can reach across and touch her right boob, if I want to.”

The thing is, with Mitchell and Katelyn and Jack and Kimberly, it is an intimate relationship with boundaries. With Katelyn, you pay for a certain amount of time, and you feel for her and she feels for you—during that time. What she has that Mitchell’s wife doesn’t is the magic switch. “Ideally,” said Mitchell, “you want to have the feeling of making love without having the emotional requirement thereafter.”

Men want to be loving. They want the GFE without the LTR. They want to make love and nibble on lips and watch television and Herbal Essence a woman’s hair in the shower and even tell her that they love her, and know she won’t turn it into something else. They feel it in the moment, then they go to work and the moment stays home, until next time, or until they fall in love.

Mitchell has said to Katelyn, “I love you.” She has said it back. Both of them mean it in the moment. But you can’t turn every ride into an odyssey. So you’re Jack, and you are single and disarming and the world is waiting for you, but you’re not ready. So you sit back on your couch and you watch the game, and you crack a beer and you call a girl up, and she comes over in a black turtleneck dress and thigh-highs, or she comes over in sweats. She comes over and then she leaves, and she leaves more than she comes over.

editorial@observer.com

Cawsey. (Photo: Jackson Waite)

I was looking for an apartment, which in Manhattan means you have to sell your soul. Your W-2s are not signed in enough places; your hair does not make enough money.

You refresh Craigslist every 40 seconds and wait for virgin blue links. Doesn’t matter, because nothing is real. As in online dating, everything pretends to be a shade better-looking and younger. The West Village is the best and the worst. It’s where the smartest and the prettiest pay to live beyond their means and below their hygiene thresholds: celebrities with great dogs, public relations beauties, dark-haired analysts and models emerging from their rat holes on Bank.

I was moving out of Wall Street and I wanted to live in the middle of it. I wanted to thumb wrestle with the roaches. On Day Two, my phone rang.

“Hey you looking for an apartment in the West Village,” a questionmarkless question.

Who is this?

“Don’t worry about it. Meet me on the corner of Perry and Hudson, at 4 p.m. I will send a text to confirm.”

There were maybe 15 more words exchanged, but mostly it was me asking for answers he wouldn’t give. So I went to meet a man who wouldn’t tell me his name. He texted that he was two minutes late and then he arrived two minutes later, walking down the street, rippling in all liquid black like Johnny Cash, heavy in a way that meant he had once been fit. His hair was dyed the brown of pecans and shoe polish.

He introduced himself just as Cawsey and we shook hands and I followed him onto a block I loved into three apartments that hadn’t yet come on the market. The last was a sunny triplex that wasn’t for me, and when I told him why, I didn’t get the look I had gotten from other realtors, that of, You cannot have that kind of a kitchen for your budget in the West Village. The look of, You will not be happy, or even mildly pleased. You will pay more to have less and yes, that fire escape is outdoor space.

As we descended from the triplex and alighted on Grove, a younger man stopped him, palming some bills against my new real estate broker’s hand. Cawsey winked and said, “Don’t worry, dearie, nothing illegal. Get in my van.” And I did.

It was a 1996 forest green Nissan Quest minivan. It was dusty and the interior smelled of a lot of different owners. “Let me check the back,” Cawsey said. “Okay, all clear. Last client got in the van and there was a tranny hooker asleep in the very back. It’s hard to be taken seriously in this business when you smell like hookers.”

That was the first one. The first truthfictiontruth of the man named Cawsey, who said he was 70 but really he was 67, who indicated out the window, driving too fast, a wraparound second-floor on Horatio and called it his home.

Cawsey is the only realtor in Manhattan I know who drives his clients around, and I don’t mean from way downtown to uptown. I mean he drives you from Christopher and Waverly to Bleecker and Jones, from Horatio and Hudson to Barrow and Hudson.

The minivan gets towed on a pretty regular basis. Even more regularly, it runs out of gas on the Avenue of the Americas, and it is up to Cawsey and Edgar, the young man he calls his Tonto, to push the Quest out of harm’s way.

Edgar is 22 and has a rich, glossy, swirled 1950s baby pompadour. He walked off of the SUNY Binghamton campus, clutching his B.A. in economics tightly to his soul, and into a real estate company looking for a regular real estate job. Then he met Cawsey.

“Hey kid, you wanna work with me,” a questionmarkless question. He showed Edgar a W-2 form that said that last year Cawsey took home $350,000, and Cawsey said “You work with me and you will make that, Year One.” It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, when I was in the van with the two of them and Cawsey was suffering an honest hour did he admit to doctoring the W-2. From the back seat, Edgar said, “You fuck. You fucking fuck.”

 IT WAS AROUND  Day Four that I sent an email to my friend and she replied, “Please stop seeing this person.” On Day Five, I was moved by events to send a follow-up:

Cawsey had on the same shirt from yesterday and whereas some days he looks dapper, today he looked like a slob. So I asked to see his driver’s license, and he showed it to me; it was 40 Ann Street, which is the Coalition for the Homeless. I was pretty sure he lived out of his van. A homeless broker. Yesterday he asked me for two dollars, and today he paid me back from a roll of hundreds.

At first, this was a source of amusement. I would tell my friends, I can’t meet for brunch, I’m looking at apartments with my homeless realtor. I wouldn’t say Cawsey and I were friends, but it was becoming more than an apartment hunt. Seeing a place would get combined with a macchiato at Café Angelique. Faxing something merged into an hour at the bar next to the Christopher Street PATH that nobody I know has ever been inside.

One night, he picked me up from my apartment, he and Edgar, and we drove to a REBNY party, which stands for Real Estate Board of New York. I’d brought him a toothbrush and soap because he said he didn’t have any. Turning around to fully look at me even though he was driving, he said, “You gave me a toothbrush, like I’m homeless, you jerk?” Because he was not really homeless, not that week. He had rented a room for $80 a week up in Washington Heights.

The party was in the basement, where colored lights hung from the ceiling and a dance floor was dotted with realtors. Tonight, Cawsey was spiffy. He was dressed in a suit with his nice glasses on, and he walked through the crowd, tossing his trademark, “How AH you?” in four directions at once. Here was the head of Benajmin James, who was the first man who hired him, and also fired him several times. “This is the man,” said Cawsey, “who rescued me out of homelessness.”

The CEO smiled. “There is nobody like him,” he said, “in the entire world.”

We looked at the dance floor. “Most of these people,” Cawsey said, after dropping his pants once because I didn’t seem to be listening, “thought they’d be doing something else by now. Most of them also have second jobs.” He pointed to a girl in black patent leather platform pumps, double-fisting two glasses of wine with long red nails. “She’s a dominatrix in between showing apartments.”

A famous actor’s sister introduced herself in a jangle of bracelets and rich curls and handed me her card. She purred that Cawsey is the best. That in a city of appearances, he tells people what they need to hear.

This is true. With two gay men recently, he stood outside the building and held both their hands and said, “Do you know who lived in this apartment? Marlon Brando and his lover, Wally Cox!”

Really?!

“Of course!” said Cawsey, “when he was doing Streetcar!”

They took the apartment.

To a blogger looking for a place, he said, Did you know Hemingway lived here while he wrote A Farewell to Arms? To a financial journalist seeing the same apartment, he said, Can you believe this was the apartment that made Joan Didion rethink the whole California thing?

At Trattoria Spaghetto on Carmine, Cawsey’s nephew, Gus Waite, who is also a broker, explained the illusion of the perfect New York apartment over a bowl of minestrone. “People come here, they say, ‘I’m going to live in the Village in a cool loft with trees outside my window and a hot guy living upstairs.’ What they find instead are sleazy landlords and brokers and a toilet that hasn’t been switched out in 15 years.”

YOU MEET A LOT of people in Manhattan, and their life stories, like rental apartments, are never as great as they appear. You find out the truth, then wish you hadn’t. Investment bankers say they own your favorite restaurant on Hudson Street, but it turns out they own 1/16th and the chef does not even know their name. Cawsey—whose full name is Bruce Cawsey Waite—is different.

He ran away from a troubled home in White Plains at 14. To survive, he found a job as a bumper at a carnival—hired to bump into people and pickpocket their wallets.

In his early 30s he became the owner of a chain of restaurants called David’s Potbelly, open from 8:30 p.m. until 6 in the morning. Madonna and Cyndi Lauper once worked for him, his brother told me. There was also a place called Shakespeare’s at Macdougal and Eighth Street, where he had a massive oil painting of himself hung high and Alec Baldwin waited tables.

Cash-rich, Cawsey would roll up to Elaine’s on a BMW motorcycle in brown leather pants, a Great Dane named Clay swiveling about in the sidecar. One night he saw a beautiful woman sitting beside Woody Allen, and he wrote on a matchbook, I’m going to marry you.

He asked her if she liked yachts and she said yes, so that night he went around to all his Potbellys and raped their safes. He rented a yacht for $20,000 dollars for the week, paid an extra $1,000 to have someone paint The Bruce Waite on the back of it, loaded it full of live lobsters and a private chef and sailed her and her friends to Newport.

Her name is Cydney, and it is years later that we meet for coffee on the corner of Lispenard. “As we sailed past Block Island, he swept his arm across the sea and pointed to it. ‘All of that,’ he said, ‘is mine.’”

She said she realized he was full of it early on, but she was already madly in love. They lived life on high, a red Mercedes and a few houses and horses galloping through cornfields on Hamptons estates. “I wanted to rent a summer house between David Geffen and Ron Perelman,” said Cawsey in his Nissan Quest. “So I would steal all my restaurants’ money and pay cash up front.”

They divorced after two years and one son.

“Image was really important to Bruce,” Cydney said. “He created a painting of what he thought his life should look like, but he couldn’t live up to it. It infuriated him that we needed more from him—intimacy, emotional maturity, commitment—none of the things he was capable of. Sadly, he thought the image should be enough.”

Asked how he lost it all, Cawsey laughed. “Lost it!? I never ‘had’ it. I never owned a damn thing in my life. I was generating a ton of money, but the second it got to me, I spent it.”

His ex-wife sent me a picture a few days later, of her and Cawsey and their son in a cornfield in the Hamptons. Here is this beautiful family living a dream that looks like the right one. And here today is this man with a coffee stain on his nose, asking me for gas money to get back to the Heights.

HE HAD NO BUSINESS CARD until yesterday, but he has over 30 offices. The Lenny’s at Ninth street and Sixth Ave. The tops of newspaper dispensaries. Park benches in Abingdon Square. The bar by the Christopher Street PATH. A table in the back of the Fantasy World sex shop. Café Angelique, both of them. Doma on Perry. “I tell people to meet me on Perry. Ooh, Perry, they’ll say. But I have nothing to show them on Perry. In New York it’s all about the promise of a name.”

He has 10 different numbers. Turns out I had called one of them, and he called me back days later in a shroud of mystery—which is part of his game.

He posts fake pictures. A beautiful picture window overlooking gorgeous thick plank floors with a headline that says Charles Street Fireplace $3500. Jane Street Private Elevator $3500. Then you call his numbers and he tells you to meet him on Perry, and you don’t get what you saw, but maybe you get something real. “I am selling the Village, so I post seven different pictures that represent seven different types of buildings. I have been reposting the same ads every day for the last seven years, and then I sell you what you didn’t know you wanted.”

He picked me up on a cool Saturday morning. He was in a good suit with a red rose remembrance pin.

“Where did you get the suit?” I asked.

“From the morgue.” Really. A friend of his is a funeral director who used to pay him in his homeless days to go to Goodwill and pick up suits for corpses. This suit was meant for a dead man.

We saw an apartment on West 12th Street. It was pretty great. Walls of mirrors and a beautiful kitchen with a Miele stove. There are three levels and halogen track lighting and an entrance off of street level with a big terrace and a separate small office and a bedroom downstairs with a walk-in closet. $4,200. My friend later described it as the kind of place that you end the night in when you’re 22 and an older man brings you home, and you tell your friends the next day how cool the place was, and not much else.

Cawsey watched me fall in impossible love with it. Afterward he took me to lunch at Barbuto on his dime, because he had a stack of 20s. The chicken arrived, parsleyed and glossy. He stabbed the biggest piece and thumped it into my plate. “Fuck it, get the place,” he said. He glorifies risk the way my parents denounced it.

He told the waiter to take away our plates, because the moment he is done, he wants to go someplace else.

I asked him to show me where he lived.

We drove a thousand blocks up into the ungated heavens of Manhattan. The Starbucks and the FedExes turned into Noche Mexicanas and pawn shops. Divorces for $299. He pointed out the Popeyes where last week he bought a transvestite named Veronica Lake some fried chicken. The theater where Jimmy Cagney emerged from a Packard for the premiere of White Heat. Then we arrived at 172nd and Audubon. His room was above a Tu Sonrisa Restaurant and Then’s Laundry.

He danced down the street to the tune of Spanish music coming out of a bodega and I followed behind, past a throng of drug dealers.

He opened the door onto a chubby Honduran 12-year-old watching TV in a small humid room that smelled of boiling coxcombs. Cawsey said, “Is abuelo home?” And the kid shook his head no, surprised by my presence. Down the narrow hall, Cawsey showed me the room he pays $80 a week for. “From a castle,” he said, opening the door, “to this.”

The room was an old box. There was a window with a towel over it. There was a frame with no picture hung from the wall above the bed. On the other side, there was a picture of the son whose life he has been in and out of for 30 years. There are pictures of Cawsey as a strapping young man, smiling, dashing, posing with beautiful women. On a small table near the window there were sardines in water and loose Lipton tea bags and an ancient tube of hair dye and a jar of shoe polish the same color, along with the SparkNotes for The Great Gatsby.

As we drove back to the Village, he told me about his brother Ralph Waite, who played the father on The Waltons, and how they used to hang out with Al Pacino, Jon Voight and Martin Sheen before they were famous. About Max’s Kansas City and Elaine’s. How he was on the cover of Hearst’s short-lived Eye Magazine with Penelope Tree.

He asked if I was listening. I said yes, but I was mostly thinking of the apartment. He said, “You’re thinking about that apartment, right?”

Several weeks later, I was in the new apartment, aware of what every minute was costing. Cawsey called and asked how it was, and how I was doing. He was reading a stolen newspaper on the hood of his car, screaming at Edgar to get off the computer and start “kissing the buildings,” to lay his young working ear to the ground and listen to what New York was saying.

There were horns honking outside wherever he was, probably because his car was parked in the middle of the road. “I’m overwhelmed,” I said. “It’s better than being underwhelmed,” he said. Then he began to say something else and the battery on his phone died and I could no longer hear what New York was saying.