Daily Blague

Ms NOLA had been recently and advised me to get there early, so aimed for six o'clock. That would have been overdoing it. I forgot the address, and had to call Kathleen from the street. (Bless you, Google.) Even so, six twenty was plenty early. There were three patrons and the bartender. I asked where the reading would be, and the answer was "here." I asked again, and the bartender pointed to a podium in the corner. I took a seat at the bar and hunkered down. For one reason or another, I didn't feel like reading. Nor was I inclined to strike up a conversation with the much younger men alongside me. I just sipped my martini and quietly marveled at the fact that I was perched on a stool in a dark little bar on the second floor of a walkup in the East Village. If I were twenty-one, I'd have thrilled myself into a heart attack. (KGB Bar wasn't open when I was twenty-one. Or when I was thirty-one. How about forty-six?)

The KGB Bar is only somewhat larger than our living room, which is just as well, because the microphone wasn't working and the readers had to speak up. A statue of Lenin graces the bar, and, as you can see in the photo, a Soviet flag hangs from the ceiling. The cupboards with stained-glass doors hold - well, I don't remember what they hold. The extra liquor, though, will be found in a locked compartment down below. Needless to say, KGB is a cash-only operation. By seven, the place was almost crammed.

The reading was sponsored by Open City, which published Mr McIntyre's nonfiction piece about his hometown, Nampa, Idaho. Editor Joanna Yas introduced the readers, beginning with an odd question: how many people learned about the reading on MySpace? Or one of those sites. It seems that no one present did, which baffled Ms Yas. It appeared to me that another network had roped in most of the audience/patrons: the one that connects junior staff at publishing houses - young women, for the most part, who'd brought their boyfriends. Mind you, I could only swivel my stool far enough to see the podium, so I have no idea of the demographic, but it sounded extremely youthful to me. Which is very heartening.

The first reader was Rakesh Satyal, a writer from Cincinnati. Well, he studied writing at Princeton with a host of luminaries, including Joyce Carol Oates. Whether the novel from which he read is in the publishing offing or not I don't recall - now you see how abysmal a reporter I am when they don't hand out program notes - but I'm going to look for it. The excerpt was very funny, and it wound up with an ingenious and very satisfying twist. It was somewhat difficult to imagine the densely bearded reader playing with his mother's makeup - if playing is the word - but Mr Satyal's voice was apt. We all laughed heartily.

There was a short break, during which the bartender was very busy, and then Mr McIntyre read "The Trailer at the End of the Driveway." Although much shorter, it shares the bittersweet tone of "Mom-Voice," the writer's contribution to From Boys to Men; but it has nothing of the mordant grimness of "Sahara," the one Nampa story in You Are Not Alone. The humor takes the form of conversational offhandedness - raised eyebrows in print.

I liked her. If we met we would talk about how it was hard to be gay (or whatever she was) in Idaho. For me, it had been impossible.

It was just as quietly funny to hear as it had been to read.

Afterward, I lost no time in pressing my copy of You Are Not Alone into Vestal McIntyre's hands for an autograph. He could not have been more gracious.

I thought about downing another martini, and then thought better. I'd had a very nice time, and I wanted to leave it that way. Time for the dinosaurs to clear out. It was just past eight, and of course I beat Kathleen home.