Looking back, I see those years as a cheap, happy time. It was a time during which a certain kind of poverty was appropriate. Unlike the West Seventies and Eighties, my neighborhood seemed like a place for people who knew the city, for peoplethe city. Though I was living hand to mouth, I loved it there, and looked forward to moving ahead in my career and one day being able to afford my own place in the neighborhood. Then, that seemed well within the realm of possibility.
If there is in this story a single moment when I crossed the boundary between debtlessness and total financial mayhem, it’s the first dollar that I put toward my life as a writer in New York—despite the fact that I was hanging out at the Cuban coffee shop and traipsing through the windblown trash of upper Broadway. The year I entered graduate school was the year I stopped making decisions that were appropriate for my situation and began making a rich person’s decisions.
As I was finishing at Columbia, however, I began to get some freelance work, so I continued to hedge my bets. I was publishing magazine articles regularly and, after a few months of temping at insurance companies and banks, scored some steady assignments that, to my delight, allowed me to work as a full-time freelance writer. After five years and eight different roommates in the 100th Street apartment, I was earning enough money to move into my own place.
It was around this time that I started having trouble thinking about anything other than how to make a payment on whatever bill was sitting on my desk, most likely weeks overdue, at any given time. I began getting final disconnection notices from the phone company, letters from the gas company asking “Have you forgotten us?,” collection calls from Visa. A friend who had been a member of Debtors Anonymous urged me to put a note over my phone that read, “Owing money does not make me a bad person.