Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals Confessions, Highly Subjective Journalism, Old Rants and New Stories

CONFESSIONS Writing for Shout was a happy accident. I hadn't heard of the magazine when Afarin Majidi, then editor, contacted me and asked if I'd be interested in writing a column. She sent me a few copies of the magazine. It was a glossy monthly featuring the typical interviews with rock bands and minor movie stars. It seemed geared at hipster twenty-somethings living in New York City. At first glance, it wasn't that distinctive. But I noticed that Jerry Stahl, infamous author of the memoir Permanent Midnight, was a regular contributor as was Reverend Jen, a performance artist/playwright known to travel the entrails of New York City wearing a pair of large plastic elf ears. In short, the magazine was a little idiosyncratic. I was interested. At the time, I was working on The Angelmakers, a sprawling historical novel about nineteenth-century female gangsters. I was consumed by the book and didn't have the time or inclination to write anything else, even for much needed cash. I offered to give monthly excerpts from the novel in progress and Afarin agreed, and for the first four months this is what I did. Eventually, though, the book became an albatross. There was no end in sight and I was running out of money. I shelved it. But I still wanted to contribute to Shout. At that time, my personal life was fairly dramatic. My on-again, off-again boyfriend, a writer from Chicago, was moving to New York. We were going to live together in Brooklyn. Having lived on the Lower East Side for ten years, for me moving to Brooklyn was like moving to Indonesia. Frightening and exotic. Which I guess is what gave me the idea to start writing journal-like vignettes about it all. I presented one of these to Afarin to run as a possible column. I'd call it "Mating Habits" and detail the ups and downs of a monogamous relationship between moody writers. Afarin was delighted. The confessional column was launched. I started getting favorable reports from friends and acquaintances who would pick up free copies of Shout at movie theaters and restaurants. A few months into the column, the boyfriend moved out and my own mating habits became erratic. Which made for good copy. If and when I had a slow or dull month on the romantic front, I'd document the mating habits of my eccentric girlfriends. Or I'd just write about one of my great loves: horse racing. Sadly, a couple years into my tenure at Shout, Afarin was fired and things were never really the same afterward. I didn't have much rapport with the new editor, and he ended up asking me to either write a political column or resign. Since my feeling for and knowledge of politics is limited to strong opposition to war and deep suspicion of anything and everything structured, I resigned. The columns serve as good companion pieces to the rest of my work since they nakedly show the birth of most of my obsessions (racetracks, pianos, deviant hussy friends), but, more importantly, my friends love these pieces and want them all in a book. So here they are. Infested with Love "Oh what the hell," Jack said, "let's just do it." "What if we kill each other?" I said. "Then we'll be dead and nothing will matter," he said. "Oh. Okay," I said, and the next day I started looking for a place for me and Jack to shack up. I'd volunteered to renounce New York for his native Chicago, but since my ancestors were libidinous Spaniards who lived in the south of Spain and never dealt with cold I am definitely not genetically equipped to cope with the wind and freezing rain that shower Jack's place up there on the lips of Lake Michigan. So Jack graciously agreed to move here. But since my one-room hovel on the Lower East Side wasn't big enough for two, I had to find us a new place. I went trundling through Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn with pipe dreams of reasonably priced real estate. I encountered sociopathic realtors and aboEstep, Maggie is the author of 'Love Dance of the Mechanical Animals Confessions, Highly Subjective Journalism, Old Rants and New Stories', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400047550 and ISBN 1400047552.