Do Something - Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York

Informationen zum Autor GUY TREBAY has chronicled culture, high and low, since the 1970s, writing for The New Yorker, The Village Voice , Interview , Esquire , Artforum , and many other publications. For the past two decades, he has been a style reporter and critic for The New York Times. Among his professional recognitions, Trebay has twice been the recipient of the Meyer "Mike" Berger Award from Columbia University. His work is widely anthologized, and he is the author of In the Place to Be: Guy Trebay’s New York. He lives in New York. Klappentext "This is a Borzoi book"--Title page verso. Leseprobe Much of that winter I spent kicking through the wreckage. Snowfall was unusually heavy that season and, trekking up the long driveway, I sometimes sank hip-deep into drifts, stumbling and lurching until, at the end of a curve, the remains of what had been my father’s house came into view. The chimneys were now blackened. The shell of the place was gone. The interior was left open to the elements. Wallpaper seared off the walls in ice-glazed scrolls. With nothing visible to support it, a section of the second floor cantilevered into thin air. People often say houses burn to the ground. In truth it doesn’t work that way. Fire is a hungry and alive thing, devouring what it wants and brushing past what it can’t be bothered to consume. Seeking fuel, the flames licked across a floor and up a stair leading to my little sister’s room and then stopped. Everything around it was torched, yet her bedroom remained as though nothing had occurred. Her canopy bed was covered with a favorite patchwork star quilt, rumpled as if she’d just left it. Hanging above it was a lithograph of a red fox crouched atop a mossy hummock, lying in wait for two rabbits huddled below. At the three windows overlooking what had been a dense hedge of yew bushes, curtains still hung from their rods, rigid ice flutes frozen in place. The view from those windows took in the trampled mounds of the bushes, which opened onto the broad rear yard, itself backed onto a hedge separating our property from that of an adjacent estate. The yews now resembled filthy bread loaves, blanketed in ash. Part of the roof remained intact so, tenuous as it was, it provided me with some kind of cover as I prowled through the gutted remains. Here were the charred dining room chairs, their sleek modernist splats burnt to spearpoints; here, in the pantry, the homely Pfaltzgraff everyday dishes—relics of an earthy sixties phase of my mother’s—stood molten together by heat in a lopsided accordion; here, an Italian modernist dining table my parents shipped home from Rome, its figured rosewood surface dulled with frost, legless and flat to the floor, bedded in a heap of soot. What exactly I was looking for was not altogether clear. Much was destroyed or had been stolen. Vanished were the contents of a silver cabinet in the pantry that curiously remained otherwise intact. Its locked door had been pried and the contents of the shelves, with their linings of felted fawn Pacific cloth, cleaned out thoroughly. I looked further to see what, if anything, was left behind from among those fancy, useless objects we possessed: the deep walnut box containing a seldom-used set of Gorham silverware in the King Edward pattern, presented to my parents on their engagement along with objects like a filigreed sterling Georgian cake basket; twelve stemmed silver goblets suggestive of a future in which, for a newly married couple barely in their twenties, sterling champagne coupes would be thought essential. Such were the things we had, and now there was nothing. Whatever the fire spared was carried off by firemen, who helped themselves to our stuff once the flames were out. It surprised me at first to think that firemen steal. Later I would learn that it is not so unusual for things to walk away with the hero...

Product details

• Authors: Guy Trebay
• Publisher: Knopf
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.06.2024
• EAN: 9781524731977
• ISBN: 978-1-5247-3197-7
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 137 mm x 208 mm x 25 mm
• Subject: Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies