Hungry heart: in youth, appetite is not just for food - first person

New York City, Albert Camus wrote, is a "desert of iron and cement." This might be true were it not for the Bedouins who call it home. Because of them, New York is also an island of memories. The skyscrapers in which New Yorkers live and work are built, torn down and replaced--or bombed before our eyes. Tenants come and go; nameplates change.

There is now an Organic Market on the ground floor of the run-down Manhattan office building where, 25 years ago, a generous friend--who knew I had a book to write but had nowhere to write it--gave me an office. If you'd have asked me back then what an Organic Market was, I'd have had no idea. At that time, a discount clothing store occupied that location. The garment district is still chockablock with them. Some display the same line of Sergio Valente jeans they were peddling 2 decades ago.

Culinary options, with as little money as I had, were limited. For months I subsisted on food from street-corner vendors, with predictable consequences. Antibiotics from a free clinic in Harlem rescued me from the ill effects of a lifestyle comically deficient ill leafy green vegetables--and in much-needed sleep.

Such shut-eye as I got came on a rump-sprung vinyl couch in that same Manhattan building. I had no apartment of my own, so my friend looked the other way when I slept as well as worked in his office. Those were lean days--and cold nights. Heat in the building was cut off at 5 p.m. When November came, the temperature plunged. My overcoat doubled as a blanket.

Despite it all, I look back to that time and place with gratitude. I was new to Manhattan, and when I would climb out onto the 12th-floor terrace at night and look toward the lights of the Empire State Building, I could hear "Rhapsody in Blue." This didn't take the chill off, but it did remind me that I had artistic ambitions well worth suffering for.

With my manuscript finally completed, I managed to make it to my parents' house for Thanksgiving--to warm blankets and hot food. When the holidays were over, I moved to Washington, DC. Since then, I've gone back to New York only for weekend visits or on business.

Each time, I mark the changes. Harper's in 1856 said New York "is never the same city for a dozen years altogether," which sounds about right. The Lion's Head, a Greenwich Village bar I began to frequent that fall when I was writing my first book, is no more; the all-night greasy spoon on Sheridan Square is now a Starbucks. I don't like that, but there are those, no doubt, who miss the tavern that the Lion's Head replaced or whatever it was that occupied the site of the diner whose passing I now mourn.

An Organic Market, in any case, must be regarded as an improvement. My health could have benefited from such a place, though I see no reason to believe I would have had the good sense to take advantage of it. We should be thankful for the ignorance of youth, when the hunger in your heart can make you forget the emptiness in your stomach.

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