Nightcap with Gian

This is a story I now wish I could revisit in more precise detail, the way I’d read work on the written page. We were not really friends, and he did not publish me; I never sent any writing his way. I doubt he’d have recognized me years later and to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have recognized him either, despite our having been in the same room more than once since this happened. I have heard his name a lot in more recent times. Spoken of like an anchor amid the storm of literary ambition, or to put it more clearly, a pivot around which a great lot turns. I met Gian only once, though, circa 2012. It was with some finance guys a couple of years older than me who I used to go drinking with (round after round on them), among whose number was a friend in common. I remember the beatific energy, and his eyes, that hilarious mercurial shine, the way he leaned in to share an opinion. It was late, a vast, posh, nearly empty space in TriBeCa, all copper and dark glass, our final destination of the night. Since almost nobody else was there, we eventually left our booth and were perched at the bar. He didn’t say that he was a publisher or an editor, only that some of his own writing could be found here and there, like in , really being modest about himself, while I plumped up about, you know, whatever I believed. He talked up , and by Eugene Marten, which I had to read because I’d love it, he told me. I texted “Eugene Martin Firecracker” to myself. He asked whether I was working on a novel manuscript in a way that suggested I had no excuse not to be working on a novel manuscript. But I want it to be perfect, I believe I probably said: you know that feeling—of wanting something to be perfect? Doesn’t have to be, I believe he answered, laughing: Have you seen the kind of shit they publish? I had no understanding he was someone who could have published me himself; we were speaking only as avid believers in the art of fiction. I was truly, thoroughly soused, and another four or so rounds were ordered after his arrival, none of which I paid for—the kind of night into which you grow more intensely present for the knowledge of what you and your cohort are doing to your bodies, while at the same time your awareness starts going swimmy at the edges, slipperier and more unsteady, a state preceding the obliteration of consciousness. Even in your proximity to another human being, the force and style of increasing candor—my God how eloquently you are now finally saying all the things you really mean!—recognition dawns that you will soon start to forget, are already forgetting, for example, what just happened. What did just happen? In the end it was him and me. What I do most definitely recall is Gian ordering another round—I might have just as well told him not to, however many sheets to the wind I was, but didn’t want to be rude. I remember watching as he leaned over the leatherette check presenter, penning his signature. Then, when I looked again, after taking another slug of scotch, his own drink was sitting there to my right, on the corner of the bar, just barely touched. And he was gone. I initially had the thought that he’d ducked into the bathroom and would be back. I continued to nurse my drink. The bartender asked, “Is he coming back?” I said that I didn’t know, maybe not. Eventually the drink, which had started to spin like a barrel over a waterfall, was cleared. A friend I’ve told this story to called it an “Irish goodbye,” but it seems to me to go beyond that… More lavish somehow, and prompting a different set of thoughts in the aftermath. What kind of a goodbye is that? I remember how the fact of his mostly full drink on the dark bar made his absence feel provisional, as if the drink itself, unconsumed, were a commentary on what all we’d just been rapping about. I remember how my attention clung to it, attempting to will my surroundings into a steadiness that my swimming consciousness refused. Absence as a precondition of the power of literary fiction was a favorite topic of mine back then. Maybe it had come up along the way. More certain is that he punctuated his gesture of magnanimity by disappearing, whether deliberately or on the spur-of-the-moment, I can’t say. Through the next morning’s hangover I went on Twitter, where I’d only recently started an account (30 followers), and found my erstwhile interlocutor: , publisher of Tyrant Books (probably about 7,000 followers at that point). Honestly can’t remember exactly whether I followed him, then unfollowed a week later when he didn’t follow back, or if I was just too cowed to show myself, fellow of grand literary ambition, as a fringe character with tweets of little to no traction. Either way, how totally ridiculous. The main feeling I took from that night, as pieced together over the course of the following day? I actually had better finally write a novel manuscript if I was going to continue calling myself a fiction writer. This, to be able to, if not impress someone like Gian, then, at least, hold my own in that kind of company. If you take a look at what he published at Tyrant, with probably being the most well-known among several other darkly glimmering titles, you’ll see his taste was pretty pronounced: granular gritty evocation of states of sexual and drug-induced derangement that skirt up against titanic emptiness, with a major emphasis on authenticity. You couldn’t doubt when reading these texts that the authors had experienced something very much like the extremity of what is described. He lived hard himself, and published work that reflected his own openness to experience, and while I wouldn’t say we need more like him—because, honestly, who could be just like him?—we definitely do need more generous readers with the courage of conviction in their own taste, who believe in books and are willing to stand up for those convictions, which he was, and did, in spades. Who know, as Gian did, that artistic integrity is tough to maintain without opposition to the reigning pieties.