There was really nowhere else to go in room 317. The closet is where I hid things. Things I did not want the maids to find. Things I did not want neighbors to see if, in the course of opening the door in the morning and thus revealing the totality of my life, they happened to be walking past.

Magazines and books and annual business reports retrieved from laundry room trash cans made up most of my reading material. Someone who lived in the building must have been a stockbroker, because periodically he would throw out hundreds of glossy "Annual Report" publications.

I collected these vacuous, saccharine documents and cut out the faces of the people pictured within. I quickly accumulated thousands of faces of important executives, middle managers, secretaries in candid poses, movers and shakers and sweepers and rakers cleaning up the corporate park, all surrounded by glib, evasive text proclaiming the success of the company whatever the reality.

I glued those pictures of people's faces to a giant sheet of plywood, not to look at the thing but only to accumulate the distance between myself and those people. Those people with jobs and money and houses and nice radios and VCRs (this sounds pathetically adolescent now, but what else could i have been thinking?).

I think that somewhere in the darkness I imagined myself a historian building his reputation on so much accumulation and volume that some level of insight or analysis must certainly be inevitable.

With that wall of so-called humanity I vaguely planned to sit at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue not to sell anything, just to sit there, so people could look at me. Look at me. And people could look at the board of faces and search for people they had worked with or stupidly idolized. I thought it highly risqu�, but today I think it rather droll, and am glad I never did it.

I had always imagined that the intersection of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, two of New York City's most famous throughfares, would be remarkable in some way. And for the first few years living here I convinced myself that it was great. That everything was great. That I had to re-visit those famous intersections weekly in case I might miss something.

I still hate leaving New York even for a few days, for fear of missing something.

But that intersection, despite the forcibly famous New York Public Library, is really nothing better than a hive of smarmy temporary employment agencies, ratty delis and pizza joints, and the gutters of filth pouring toward Grand Central Station.

Room 317