1. THE CARD
It was me & Gaby’s 4 year anniversary on Monday.
(YES, it is a total coincidence that our anniversary is June 16th, the day Ulysses takes place.)
I’d been so deep up HUMPTY DUMPTY’s ass that I couldn’t think straight; I didn’t plan nothing anniversarily: we were just gonna go to the movies.
30 min before I leave to go to meet her I realize I don’t have a card.
The worst Duane Reade in the city is on my block: the windows are always broken, the clerks are always too high to work; getting anything from there is a miserable experience.
In front of the card section, there’s a big old fucking restocking contraption or something, which limits the selection immensely.
I grab a card with a heart on the cover with the words, LOVE CONQUERS ALL, attributed, inexplicably, to Virginia Woolf.
I run home & hastily write some sentimental dreck.
I know the card is a flop, I just hope Gaby doesn’t mind. I got her this perfume set as her official present. But it came in on Saturday, and girls tend to have difficulty remembering gifts given not on the DAY of the special occasion.
And we hadn’t fought in a while, so statistically, we were due for a fight.
She has a beautiful card waiting for me: handmade, heartfelt, funny. I hand her my card and she’s like, “I bet this is gonna be funny!”
Reader, it was not.
She sees the cover and says, “did Virginia Woolf even say this?”
Gaby thanked me so much and didn’t even mention how weak the card was. Phew.
It is clear to me, that what Gaby wants is for me to have some sort of plan on our anniversary, doesn’t matter what it is, just for it to be intentional: so shrugging my shoulders & mumbling, I DUNNO, when she asks where we’re gonna eat, is NOT propitious.
We went to Chipotle. Immediately, we got into thorny ground, topic-wise.
2. INTERRUPTION B/C MY STREET IS LOUD AF RN
This terrifying Cuban guy who lives on a bicycle is outside my window right now flipping off the bodega clerk yelling, FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER, over and over again.
He’s about 5 foot 3, has an enormous white beard, he’s wearing what looks like a gray sheet as a toga, like a Roman, and he has on a red MAGA hat.
I met him 5 years ago b/c I was in the bodega and he came in wanting a coffee and the clerk was like, “No! No! Get the hell out of here!”
And in my moral indignation, I thought, He’s just a person like anyone else, he deserves a right to buy coffee!
So I got him a coffee, handed it to him. He told me he’s from Miami, he went to prison for killing a cop (he has NO REGRETS); and he wishes, desperately, that he had an AK-47, so he could “light up”, everyone on the street.
“Well,” I said, “at least I got you this coffee, now you’ll be focused for the plan!”
(I don’t think he remembers me well enough to spare me from the shootout.)
Now he’s yelling to the young lady, “I will SNAP you! I will SNAP you!”
Though of course, they could be lovers. . . who am I to intervene?
3. BACK TO THE CARD
(He biked away, I can finally pay attention.)
Gaby got real quiet, ate her Chipotle bowl methodically as always, like a reverse game of Tetris.
I said, “What are you thinking?”
She said, “That’s such a dumb ass, guy question.”
“I just wanna know what you’re thinking.”
“Are you sure?”
“YES!”
“I’m thinking your card was pretty half-ass.”
“OH MY GOD! GABY! COME ON! Don’t you realize my brain is FRIED!?! I’ve been writing ALL DAY!”
“All you do is talk about what a genius writer you are, what a genius book you’re writing, ok, GENIUS! take 10 minutes to write a GENIUS card for your girlfriend.”
“DO NOT BRING HUMPTY INTO THIS.”
“Why don’t you go and finger Humpty, I know you want to.”
“GABY! COME ON! What about those perfumes I got you?”
“I sent you the link.”
“I PAID for them!”
“And I’m very thankful.”
“I do SO MUCH for you!”
“All I said was your card was half-ass.”
You know I’m sure, that when someone calls you out on something you know you did wrong, there’s a tendency to double down & defend yourself. . .
I was embarrassed by my paltry card, and so I was willing to defend it to the death.
We argued all the way down to the movies. (It wasn’t just about the card, the thorny topic from Chipotle was also heartily involved.)
Basically, all our arguments are the same:
I try to defend an untenable position for a while, pelting her with COME ON, GABY!s, my voice getting shriller & shriller until I’m yelping like a castrated poodle and she says, Oh my god, you’re so shrill!, and I say, Can’t you give me just a little bit of charity?, and she says something like, Charity? Charity!? This guy needs some Charity! What, do you work for the Red Cross?
To not bother people, we continued the argument via typing back & forth on her Notes app while the previews were going on.
Eventually I conceded the paltriness of my card & apologized for being mean. . .
I tried to kiss her, and she recoiled. I hate when I apologize and am not immediately forgiven.
The movie was Materialists and at one point the main girl says, “either you’re the kind of couple that fights out on the street or you’re not”.
That made us both laugh and we were hunkydory in love again.
The movie was kinda bullshit, philosophically. But it was still moving pictures! on a big screen! You can’t get mad at that.
4. BRUH, I SAT ON A WALL. . .
Gaby has been a bit jealous of HUMPTY DUMPTY lately.
All I wanna do is write the book and talk about the book and insist on how hard the work is. . . but to be completely honest it ain’t exactly the coal mine.
So this is the way I wrote this book right.
It was fiddle-faddle gestation for a while, where I would just add to it slowly.
But once I had a first draft, I rewrote the whole thing in a 20 day binge, and then immediately after the second draft, I took 21 days and rewrote it again.
This binge-immersion is how I like to do it. I’m not a good writer, but I’m a really good rewriter. When I have the architecture of the book down, it’s like painting by numbers, I can fill everything in beautifully.
That’s why I like to start from a blank page every new draft, following along the sections & chapters exactly and rewriting every word.
I don’t know why everyone don’t write like that; it helps you to learn the book intimately.
Now I’m in the midst of the 9th full version of this book.
I sold the book to my boy Ben Brooks at FSG as Steubenville; the powers-that-be, soaking wet with East Coast elitism: didn’t wanna put the title of a bumfuck Ohio town on their Elite urbanite product.
So we brainstormed new names for a while and HUMPTY DUMPTY struck me like lightning.
My agent Clive Clamhands despised it; myopically, he thought it was silly, he don’t realize the deep mythic current Humpty is connected to; he wanted to call the book. . . I shudder even uttering this:
Winners & Losers.
OH GOD!
I screamed, CLAMHANDS! YOU THINK I’M WRITING A STATISTICS MANUAL!?
You don’t realize how something like that, a title change, can shift your whole orientation. All of a sudden, I knew exactly what the book needed to be.
And I set out to turn what was a nice little book in Steubenville into the beast that is HUMPTY DUMPTY. . .
I mean you’ll see this shit when it’s hard-boiled, Fall 2026.
I ain’t kidding you, you’re gonna wanna strap your socks on with duct-tape b/c it’s gonna knock em off.
But I’m in the midst of this: going to the gym to work in the morning, and then just writing all day.
I don’t wanna hang w/ anyone, I don’t wanna talk to anyone.
This is how serious I was about this last stretch: I ain’t drink or eat a cookie for 9 days.
5. THE REAL REASON YOU HAVEN’T EATEN ANY COOKIES
OK! I haven’t been eating cookies b/c Maks, a Ukrainian coach at the gym said I looked fat.
I was telling everyone at the gym he called me fat, he objected, he said,
“I did not say you are fat, I said you look like comedian, not boxing guy.”
Reader, I think you can interpret that.
And just to put everything out there, he caught me when I was leaving the gym, I had changed shirts, I put on my worst shirt, a shirt, that, —I’m not bullshitting!, —makes me look several dozen pounds heavier than I am. Whenever I wear this shirt, I look in the mirror and think, Oh god. . .
(After Maks’s comment the shirt is relegated to the bag in my room of shirts I was gonna give to the Salvation Army 2 years ago but that now I use as cum-rags.)
Then Maks said, “you are not fat?” and he pulled up his shirt: he wanted to do an Ab-comparison and let the public decide.
I said, “you are right. I am fat.”
And you know, sometimes you do need a little Ukrainian truth; my cookies & beer connoisseurship was taking a toll on me.
It’s amazing how rare real candor is when it’s the most useful social orientation you can have toward another person.
Of course, Maks don’t know my traumatic history as a fat kid.
I still weep into my monogrammed handkerchief when I think of my young self playing soccer on the beach in Rio to the frequent shouts of passersby, “CORRE GORDINHO!”
Which led to my anorexic summer/fall of 2012; where I was only eating a single hot dog & 22 almonds every day for 3 months.
It’s a mighty diet: you will lose weight, but you will also literally never have any energy.
I had a horrible soccer season, and I think it stunted my growth too. I could’ve been 6 foot 9, but now I’m just a measly 6’7.
Coincidentally (or maybe not), Gaby got duped into a membership at Equinox, and at the “assessment” (where they make you feel fat so they can sell you personal training), uhm. . . I’ll just say she didn’t like what she heard.
The trainer was like, “what kinda food do you like?” She was like, “idk, Mexican.”
The trainer said, “but you’re not like eating Mexican food every day?”
Reader. . . we had been eating Mexican food every. single. day.
Now we are trying to be a #fitcouple.
6. A DISGUSTING THING YOU OUGHTA PROB SKIP 4 UR SANITY
Me & Gaby went to the Luísa Sonza concert at Irving Plaza.
That’s not the disgusting thing.
We were in line, I thought I had a fuzz in my shirt, I go to pluck the fuzz, I look in my fingers, the fuzz is no fuzz, but a beetle, oh god, legs turned up, I killed him with my pinch.
He tried to eat me, Reader. He left a wound on my chest that’s a little oozy, and I ain’t talking Vert, (if you feel me).
Now I feel phantom bugs all over my body. I was truly violated.
But it’s my fault. I know you shouldn’t victim-blame, especially when the victim is you, but my room has been in disarray due to my Humpty-grind, and I’ve just been leaving my clothes in a pile on my bed, and when it’s time to sleep, I throw them on the floor, and plus, I was just wearing the same outfit the whole week, so I think I accidentally created ripe conditions for a beetle to think he could live in my shirt, maybe he thought the shirt was like an egg and my body was the yolk and he was gonna turn into something cool, if he ate me out (pause).
Yes, I guess I am a fat slob.
7. I JUST REMEMBERED I GOTTA STOP STEALING FROM BARNES & NOBLES
I went to Barnes & Nobles in Union Square to use the bathroom.
I was still wearing the beetle-shirt, after the attack, I hadn’t washed it, I am disgusting.
As the security guard was punching in the bathroom code for me, I heard on his walkie talkie, “keep an eye on the guy in the green shirt.”
Reader, the beetle-shirt was green.
8. THAT EGG IS COOKED!
I finished HUMPTY DUMPTY on Saturday, June 21.
My editor & Machado de Assis's birthday.
To celebrate, Gaby brought me to Equinox on a guest-pass.
I didn’t wanna go b/c I was like, “I work at a gym, why would I wanna go to a gym for fun? That’s like me taking you to a marketing office on the weekend.”
“No, it would be like if I worked in a crappy little shoe box, and you were going to the most amazing marketing office in the world and invited me to check it out.”
I have to say, the amenities at Equinox are. . . a bit. . . better than at Church Street Boxing Gym.
The boss at Church Street put these posters up, in manic excitement, that say, “your shitty old gym sucks”.
He really thought he ate with that; he thought it was his Got Milk.
Obviously he means former gym, but I don’t think you wanna get into peoples’ heads as they walk down into the cavernous, fetid basement: “old”, “shitty”, “gym sucks”.
The point is, I’m Mr. Fucking Fitness now.
Except for the beer I had last night. . . OK, 2 beers. . . OK, they were both tall cans.
9. THE AMAZING CULMINATION
I was gonna tell you something really sick,
but the Cuban guy is back, and he sees me looking out the window
he’s yelling, FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKER, to me,
I gotta go deal with this. . .
EPICCCCCCCCCCC
9th rewriting! Can't wait to read Humpty Dumpty