By the time you reach Canal Street, you think that you will never make it home. You look for taxis. A bum is sleeping under the awning of a shuttered shop. As you pass he raises his head and says, "God bless you and forgive your sins." You wait for the cadge but it doesn't come. You wish he hadn't said anything.
As you turn, what is left of your olfactory equipment sends a message to your brain: fresh bread. Somewhere they are baking bread. You can smell it, even through the nose-bleed. You see bakery trucks loading in front of a building on the next block. You watch as bags of rolls are carried out onto the loading dock by a man with tattooed forearms. This man is already at work so that normal people can have fresh bread for their morning tables. The righteous people who sleep at night and eat eggs for breakfast. It is Sunday morning and you haven't eaten since… when? Friday night. As you approach, the smell of bread washes over you like a gentle rain. You inhale deeply, filling your lungs. Tears come to your eyes, and you feel such a rush of tenderness and pity that you stop beside a lamppost and hang on for support.
The smell of bread recalls you to another morning. You arrived home from college after driving half the night; you just felt like coming home. When you walked in, the kitchen was steeped in this same aroma. Your mother asked what the occasion was, and you said a whim. You asked if she was baking. "Learning to draw inferences at college, are we," you remember her asking. She said she had to find some way to keep herself busy now that her sons were taking off. You said that you hadn't left, not really. You sat down at the kitchen table to talk, and the bread soon started to burn. She had made bread only two other times that you could recall. Both times it had burned. You remember being proud of your mother then for never having submitted to the tyranny of the kitchen, for having other things on her mind. She cut you two thick slices of bread anyway. They were charred on the outside but warm and moist inside.
You approach the tattooed man on the loading dock. He stops working and watches you. There is something wrong with the way your legs are moving. You wonder if your nose is still bleeding.
"Bread." This is what you say to him, although you meant to say something more.
"What was your first clue?" he says. He is a man who has served his country, you think, a man with a family somewhere outside the city.
"Could I have some? A roll or something?"
"Get outa here."
"I'll trade you my sunglasses," you say, You take off your shades and hand them up to him. "Ray-Bans. I lost the case." He tries them on, shakes his head a few times and then takes them off. He folds the glasses and puts them in his shirt pocket.
"You're crazy," he says. Then he looks back into the warehouse. He picks up a bag of hard rolls and throws it at your feet.
You get down on your knees and tear open the bag. The smell of warm dough envelops you. The first bite sticks in your throat and you almost gag. You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.
Jay McInerney
As a prolific writer of numerous novels, Jay McInerney burst into the literary scene with his first book Bright Lights, Big City, in 1984. This would be the first of many books set in the backdrop of Manhattan, where McInerney worked – starting as a fact-checker for The New Yorker Magazine – throughout his luminous career.
Bright Lights, Big City, which was loosely based on his own life starting out in this glamorous city, with its jet-setting club scene in the 80's, was later made into a movie starring Michael J. Fox, Kiefer Sutherland and Phoebe Cates. McInerney wrote the screenplay for this movie, which, despite its star cast, did not receive the acclaim and attention of the book upon which it was based. Once McInerney was catapulted into the world of editors and contracts, he began writing a steady stream of novels about the city and its characters. His writing life was set in motion with Ransom, which came out in 1985, followed by Story of My Life, in 1988, and Brightness Falls, in 1992. As he dated models and lived the nightlife, he used the city and its people as fodder for his books, writing The Last of the Savages, in 1997, Model Behavior, in 1998 and How it Ended, a series of short stories, in 2001. He began writing about one of his favorite subjects, wine, with the book, Bacchus and Me – Adventures in the Wine Cellar, in 2002. His next book, The Good Life, got mixed reviews in 2006, and later that year he published his wine writings in A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine. He became the wine columnist for House and Garden Magazine, choosing to write as someone who was not a complete wine expert.
"I wanted to write about wine in a funny way – with the point of view of someone who knows something about wine, but not everything about it," he said in an interview in Salon Magazine by Dwight Garner written about twelve years ago, when he was 40.
In Garner's interview he said, "McInerney is sometimes thought of as a satirist, because he writes about the social scene that is a frequent subject of satire, the Manhattan Wasp haute bourgeoisie."
McInerney recently married for the fourth time, to publishing heiress Anne Randolph Hearst of Bridgehampton, in November of 2006. Hearst is well-known for hosting gala events at her Bridgehampton estate, where she held a fundraiser for the Riverkeeper organization, an environmental (clean water) group led by Robert Kennedy, Jr. At this event, held in the summer of 2005, Kennedy attended with his wife and gave an award to Lorraine Bracco for her involvement in the group.
McInerney's third wife was jewelry designer Helen Bronsford of Nashville, with whom he had twins (Maisie and John Barrett McInerney III) by a surrogate mother in 1995.
His second marriage was to Merry Reymond, from 1983-91, and his first marriage was to Linda Rossiter, a half-Japanese fashion model, in 1979. For four years, he also lived with fashion model Marla Hanson.
McInerney was born on January 13, 1955, in Hartford, CT, to a corporate Vice-President, and grew up in a privileged family. He lived almost half his childhood in Europe. He later attended Williams College in Williamstown, MA, where he graduated in 1976. He also studied writing with Raymond Carver in Syracuse.
Although he has endured harsh criticism throughout his writing career, mostly from his New York critics who know him, McInerney has been quoted as saying he feels he is better received outside New York, where he feels he's been "overexposed," in both his social and writing life.
But despite the harsh critics, he was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1998 for Oustanding Writing for his screenplay of the movie, Gia, starring Angelina Jolie. In 1999, he was also nominated for this same screenplay by the Writers' Guild of America. McInerney has been called, "the 80's version of F. Scott Fitzgerald," to which he responded that he hoped he wouldn't have the same luck as Fitzgerald, a heavy drinker who died at 44.
McInerney has been quoted as saying, "There's always been a personal element to my critical reception as a writer – people say I'm too much of a public figure – too successful. My relationship with the press is an odd hall of mirrors."
McInerney divides his time between Manhattan, where he meets with his Random House publisher, and the Hamptons, where he relaxes in between parties and social events. He is presently off to Europe. His books are available in local bookstores or at www.Amazon.com. For more information, check his website at www.jaymcinerney.com
