The next time we hung out, Gary drank me under the table. At one in the morning on a cool autumn night, we split a bottle of Polish vodka and a pack of Camel Filters at his apartment, a bone-white, three-room railroad in the East Village with a bathroom out in the hall. He’s been living there since 1980 – books don’t fill the apartment, they infest it.
After we got loosened up a bit he told me about his family. His father’s side consisted mostly of gentleman farmers from Vermont. “They had a lot of pretentions,” he told me. “They didn’t think of themselves as middle class.” In the 40s, his father won half shares in a lumber enterprise during a poker game, and Gary’s family experienced a windfall of sorts. Nothing obscene, but the business helped to keep his family out of financial trouble. His home state, Gary says, didn’t offer much. “Southern New Hampshire was like rural Mississippi. Shopworkers, factory workers, people who had never read a book. They weren’t stupid; they were poor.”
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