Professor X by In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

positively ache to do it; for some, piloting a ride-on mower across their holdings is the summit of existence. But I felt I was called to the life of art. I wanted to write, and living in an apartment gave me the time to do that. Except for the ever-looming possibility of cockroach infestation, I enjoyed apartment life. I liked having neighbors. I had been blessed with unobtrusive ones. I have always taken comfort in the faint stirrings of life going on outside my apartment walls. The sound of a stereo a couple of doors down adds a nice rhythm to my movements. I love the sound of a husband and wife arguing across the hall. Better them than me , I think, and feel very cozy. I like the vague sociability of a laundry room. I like the smell of food in a hallway, garlic or meatballs or the sharp sweetness of crumbled bay leaves. I like the sound of a dog’s toenails click-click-clicking on a hardwood floor.
    After marrying in the mid-1980s my wife and I bought a two-bedroom apartment with a river view. The neighborhood was not so hot. There was vague, empty talk of gentrification, some of it quite strident, with some in the neighborhood for it and some against. Nothing came of it while we lived there. The problems of the neighborhood ran both deep and wide, and no one seriously believed it would ever improve. We didn’t really care. There was a funky charm to our building, even to the drunken doormen in their threadbare uniforms. We rented out our second bedroom to a friend, and lived more like college students than people nearing thirty. We installed a nice butcher block in the kitchen. We lived there happily for several years. I waited tables in the afternoon and pursued my calling. I wrote essays and a couple of half-novels. Periodically, I would grow discouraged, but then I would sell a short piece or two, just enough to stoke my ambition and make me at once hopeful and miserable.
    I continued to wait tables, working lunches at a place favored by local executives. I wheeled around trolleys full of food, transferring meals from sizzling platters to plates of white china: slabs of scrod and T-bone steaks and ladies’ portion filet mignons the size of a Rubik’s Cube. I struggled with my writing. I had nothing to write about. My life seemed too restrained. I thought that part of the problem was that I was seeing the same meal played out day after day; I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was privy to only a fraction of life. I tried working a few dinners, but it didn’t help.
    On Black Monday in 1987, the stock market crashed. That day, I was serving the tables in the bar. There was a TV on. The stock prices crawled by at the bottom of the screen. My customers weren’t eating. They weren’t drinking, either. Their faces were ashen. I looked at the TV screen in great puzzlement. I couldn’t make head or tail of the numbers and symbols. The silence in the bar was eerie. The only sound was that of my trolley wheels clattering on the tile floor. I brought lots of uneaten food back to the kitchen that day. The owner of the restaurant sat at the bar. He looked up to the TV screen then down to his cup of coffee, up then down, up then down, like a child playing peek-a-boo.
    I felt so much on the outside of things. I knew nothing of stocks and finance, the real world. What gall I had trying to set myself up as a novelist. Who was I to think I could illuminate anything for anyone else? There seemed no one quite as ill equipped as I to take on such a task. I felt very stupid. I leaned against the wall in the restaurant’s kitchen and thought about my life, and tucked into someone’s virtually untouched plate of coho salmon.
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    Rising Action. Meanwhile, my wife had gotten pregnant. Clearly it was time to grow up. I started to feel that trying to be a novelist had actually stunted my experience. I didn’t quite abandon my literary dreams, but I knew I would have to do more living before I had