I’d been an English major and, like so many others, wanted to get into the publishing business after graduation. Therefore, like so many others, I moved to New York City and started job hunting. Five hundred resumes and forty interviews later, I was working as a waiter and living with five other friends in a two-bedroom apartment in a bad section of Brooklyn.
Then I caught a break. It turned out my grandfather actually knew someone in the publishing industry, and when he found out about my dreams he called in a favor. The upshot was that I managed to land an internship at a real publishing company. The bad news was that the internship paid only the minimum wage, so I still had to wait tables at night after I got off from my day job. The good news was that I was now actually working in the industry to which I aspired and had the chance to learn what publishing was all about from the inside.
I was now working two full jobs and earning one meager salary (including tips), but the wonderful thing about youth is that you have both the energy and the naivety to put up with such conditions for longer than anyone not in actual slavery.
It was on a Tuesday night when I wasn’t scheduled to work at the restaurant that my roommates and I decided to head to a midtown Manhattan bar and waste some of our precious earnings on overpriced alcohol. As we were talking boisterously, I glanced up to see none other than Glenda Preston walk into the bar with two girlfriends.
He stopped his narrative suddenly. “Can you leave her name out of this?” he asked.
“Why?” I asked curiously.
He looked at me a bit sheepishly. “I guess I’m still trying to work my way through all this. Somehow, starting open warfare with her doesn’t seem like it would help.”
I was surprised; it seemed my nut case had more depth than I’d suspected.
“Actually, that will make it easier on me,” I told him. “That way I won’t have to track her down and get her side of the story. More to the point, this is supposed to be about Superman, not his ex-wife.”
“Okay, good,” he said, and resumed his story.
When I spotted her, I almost knocked my roommate’s beer bottle out of his hand as I rushed over to greet her. But as I neared her little covey, I pulled up short, suddenly hesitant. Would she be as eager to see me as I was to reconnect with her? But at that instant she glanced up, and when she spotted me she squealed, “Alex!” and rushed to embrace me. We hugged, then she drew back, looked at me carefully and kissed me on the mouth. I wasn’t sure where that was coming from, but it felt wonderful so I really didn’t care.
She put her arm around my waist and introduced me to her girlfriends. I, in turn, dragged them over to meet my roommates, thereby earning innumerable brownie points with them, since none of us was that comfortable trying to pick up girls.
Glenda and I had a great time that evening; it was as if we were still back in college. Much later than I had originally intended, we finally had to call it a night, and after exchanging phone numbers she gave me another kiss, this one full of promise.