A ‘freelance dealer’ escapes drugs, debt and New York in a Reagan-era memoir Peter Kaldheim begins his story in a part of Penn Station familiar to New York daytrippers and passengers stuck in long layovers: the luggage lockers. Three decades ago he used one of these lockers to store all his belongings. He was broke, unemployed and homeless in the city. His life, he writes, had become “only something to survive, and for that I had no one to blame but myself and my accomplices: alcohol, cocaine and a deep-seated streak of what my old Greek philosophy professor would call _akrasia_ – a weakness of will that allows one to act against one’s better judgement”. Born to working-class parents in Brooklyn, he had graduated from Dartmouth. At 22, he was married to his high-school girlfriend and working as a copy editor at Harcourt Brace in New York. He dreamed of publishing his first novel by the time he was 25. But there is a rift between one’s dreams and one’s deeds that Kaldheim tried to bridge by staying past happy hour every evening in the West Village. His wife left him after she found out he had been cheating. He quit Harcourt and became an acquisitions editor at another publishing firm. The new job came with a pay rise that he again squandered on his drinking. He developed a taste for speed and cocaine, and resigned from his job after spectacularly failing to meet a deadline. Kaldheim landed in prison in Rikers Island after selling coke to an undercover agent. He got married again and lost his wife to a brain aneurysm during a trial separation. By the time he was homeless in his mid-30s, he was spending his nights hopping from bar to bar, drinking and “freelance dealing”. When he realised he was too deep in debt to a violent drug boss, he decided to get out of the city. He abandoned all his clothes in the locker at Penn Station, fleeced a customer for cash one last time and caught a Greyhound bus to Richmond, Virginia, even as a terrible blizzard kept other New Yorkers indoors. Continue reading...
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