Last Friday I had a work
meeting to go to even though I was officially off from work. I had no one to
blame but myself. I set up the meeting and I hadn’t realized that our office
was closed that day. But it was an important lunch and it fit everyone’s
schedule, so it was less of a hassle to see the thing through.
It was a work lunch at the Algonquin Round Table Restaurant, site of the famous Algonquin
Round Table group that rose to prominence in the 1920s around a nucleus of
writers and editors that included Dorothy Parker, Alexander Wolcott, The New Yorker editor Harold Ross and
others.
If the event went well it was all
good and fine but if it didn’t go well it was trouble at work for me. I put on
a suit and tie and rode the subway into Manhattan with nervous apprehension.
I was early in getting to Grand
Central Terminal on the 7 train. Whenever I’m at Grand Central Terminal I
rarely need to go through the large central hall but I can’t resist doing it.
Even when it is crowded with travelers and teeming with tourists, it’s a crime
to be so close to such a beautiful room and not go in it. So I walked into the
room and took up a spot along an unused portion of counter at an unused ticket
window, where soldiers stood at patrol and tourists stood with cameras or
huddled over cluttered luggage.
To look at me in my dapper suit, raincoat and hat, one
would think that I had some important financial reports or lucrative financial
plans in my carrying case. But since I was due to go to a Blackout Shoppers
rehearsal after the lunch, my briefcase contained an instrument cable for a
guitar (in my case bass guitar) and a tuner. It also had a notebook for poetry.
I fished out my notebook and
scribbled a messy draft of a poem, “Impostor” there in the main hall of
Grand Central. I felt like I was some secret poetry agent making some kind of
illicit blueprint. My outfit screamed that I was a self-important financial
person or lawyer but really I was a scatterbrained poet longing for leisure and
rest.
But not to let anyone be the wiser,
I quickly concluded my sweet soul arson, packed up and moved along.
I got to the Algonquin Hotel early
and found our round table waiting for us. I stood waiting in the lobby of the
Algonquin, under the watchful eye of s caricature of Dorothy Parker, and met
people for the lunch.
The lunch went very well and I sat
through it all politely, in some small way hoping no one caught on that I
book-ended my lunch meeting with poetry and punk rock. Then again, I had no way
of knowing the secret artistic endeavors of all of my lunch mates. No doubt
some of them were heading on to sneak in some good works that will ignite great
imaginations and destroy the corrupt worlds of succubae. That’s part of the
beauty of living in the world and keeping a professional bearing at all
appropriate times: you may be daydreaming about sex with supermodels, time
traveling or what would happen if you mated Michael Phelps with an orangutan,
but everyone around you is having similarly inventive dreams. Count on it.
When Walt Whitman wrote “I contain
multitudes,” in his poem “Song of Myself” he was speaking for
all of us in a way. We’re all the impostor in one instance or another, we all
have different selves that we find most comforting and most appropriate at
different times.
The trick is not to hate any one
element of yourself but to embrace them all. Be that guy at the fancy lunch and
act like you belong there. Play that ruckus music until you make someone’s ears
bleed. Live you live by the spitfire lines of mad, mad poetry, cavort with all
manner of hearty souls and don’t look back.
In New York, no one
is really any more of an impostor than anyone else.
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