The Best American Essays 2013 Read Online Free Page A

point drop in history. There’s nothing on TV except talk about it. You can’t even watch
General Hospital
. Everyone says we’re headed for the next Great Depression.” His eyes sparkled as if we were all about to go on a field trip to paint tulips and the bus were waiting downstairs. “They’re already calling it ‘Black Monday.’”
     
    I had never paid much attention to the Ferris-wheel vicissitudes of the New York Stock Exchange, but when $500 billion in stock value simply evaporates, when nearly 25 percent of the market ceases to exist, when the president of the United States preempts soap operas and game shows to urge everyone not to panic and numerous respected experts explain that the country has seen no comparable financial event since 1929, even the poor take heed. I had also been observing the wastrel, arrogant, and bellicose habits of my country for years, and my sensitive, aesthetic side tended toward portent and hyperbole. So I trusted the news media’s Henny Penny proclamations that our Day of Reckoning had finally come.
    Heading down the alley away from the artists’ studios an hour later, I thought I would remember forever this day of ruin, October 19, 1987, the same way I remembered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A man in a white shirt and blue tie staggered toward me with a dazed expression, and from the sky above I expected to see falling stockbrokers. I pictured myself on a freight train full of hobos. From every corner came the dire chatter of radios and TVs. Like all the gloomy broadcasters, I was convinced that the next Great Depression was upon us.
    The fishing boats were in from their morning runs, and it now seemed imperative that I buy that albacore. Food would soon be in short supply, and there would be mobs in the streets, breaking windows and overturning cars.
    The rheumy-eyed fisherman shrugged when I told him the news. “They can’t break you if you’re already broke,” he said.
    My fish, cleaned and bled, weighed fourteen pounds, and because albacore spoils rapidly, it was frozen as hard as a chunk of iron. Incongruous as it might seem to walk away from a fishing boat with a frozen fish, you couldn’t beat the price, and albacore were much easier to cut into steaks this way. I carried it by the tail with a newspaper so it didn’t freeze my hand.
    I lived downtown in an apartment complex that, for its Second Empire façade, transient tenantry, and despotic manager, I had dubbed the Totalitarian Hotel. The manager, Mrs. Vollstanger, was a gouty old Prussian and always wore pearls and thick, embroidered white sweaters. She met me at the top of the grand staircase, arms folded, chin trembling, and glowered down at my fish.
    “It’s an albacore,” I explained.
    “Yes,” she said. “I saw you coming.” Mrs. Vollstanger had a telescope in the window of her third-floor apartment and kept track of all the goings-on below. “I have an eviction notice for you to serve.”
    I considered asking if she was aware of the stock market plunge but thought better of it, since bad news seemed only to cheer her. “Who’s it for?”
    “Hot Pants,” she said, meaning my common-wall neighbor, a young woman named Annabelle Taft.
    It didn’t take Mrs. Vollstanger long to find derogatory nicknames for all her tenants. There was Moon Child and Clydesdale Maria and Porky Pete. I suppose behind my back I was Machine-Gun Typist.
    “Annabelle?” I said. “Why?”
    “I’m not running a brothel here,” she retorted, one of her fondest declarations, along with “I’m not running a crack house/animal shelter/home for unwed mothers here.”
    “Just let me get this fish in the freezer, and I’ll be right up,” I said, resisting the urge to salute. “Would you like a couple of tuna steaks?”
    “No, thank you,” she said.
    My apartment was a single room with a set of high, arched, greenish windows, an electric stove, a fridge, a sink, and a very long entryway. Sometimes when