I was at this soul-food joint sitting at a bar chain-mailed with Mississippi license plates when I began to suspect I kinda-maybe liked Oxford. Folk art mingled above the red vinyl booths with old photographs of Cajuns shucking oysters. A thousand tasseled toothpicks had been blow-darted into the dingy ceiling tiles. Occasionally one fell into the hair of a passing waitress. The floor was a red-and-black chessboard. There was a stuffed squirrel behind the bar.
I was thirty-nine then, a kid, and had just published a novel about a druggy teenager raised by a Pasquale’s Pizza franchise in South Mississippi and was living in New York on the Lower East Side with a fancy Upper East Side girlfriend. The reviews of my novel kept pouring in—I could recite
