Two days ago I was emailing a friend—we went to high school together, both ended up in New York—saying it had been too long, we should get a drink and so on. We hadn’t seen each other in over a year, though we live in the same part of Brooklyn. I took this picture with my phone and turned a corner and there he was. He asked if I was still working at the website. I was. Was he still working for that woman? No. He was no longer an assistant. Now he had assistants, whom he fired for making the same mistakes he had made when I’d last seen him. He said he liked the challenge of styling advertiser’s ugly products, mixing them in with beautiful things to make it work. “But you love ugly things,” I said. “True.” We considered the idea that New York was over when the thrill was over; that what would be left was only bad—things that made life harder than necessary, like trains late at night that never come or high rent. Maybe. Maybe soon. Our coffee had overlapped at last. “Fun Factory,” is what the wall says. Maybe even, “Phun Phactory,” although that seems ridiculous outside of spray paint.
