IN MY LATE TWENTIES, I found myself beginning a job as a corporate lawyer. I had harbored many dreams of la vie bohème. I wanted to be Marguerite Duras. I wanted to be Allen Ginsberg. I wanted not to be a middle-class child of a Sunbelt suburb. But what was I supposed to do? Pretend to live off freelance writing commissions? Try STEM? I wasn’t good enough at math. So I went to college, I went to France, I went to grad school, and then, accepting the inevitable, to law school. Finally, I went, hat in hand, to the New York City I had dreamed about all those sweaty adolescent years in Florida. New York City, I discovered, was not a city of beatniks. It was a city of office buildings.
I started in one on Third Avenue and 55th, across the street from the “Lipstick Building,” Philip Johnson’s elliptical ’80s icon, where Bernie Madoff had worked on the seventeenth floor. Ours was more aloof, a professional-managerial prism of black glass by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that had been, in the mid-1960s, erected on top of P. J. Clarke’s when the venerable burger restaurant refus…
