Sounds Like Titanic - Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman Page 0,1

to New York City, where we will perform our final concert to a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall.

After an hour of kneeling by the broiler, The Composer places the still-liquid cake on the stovetop and spoons on dollops of Cool Whip before arranging whole strawberries on top. While his back is turned, the RV hits a bump in the road and the cake flies off the stovetop, through the air, across the RV, and directly into the trash can by the door. Berry-whipped carnage covers the cabinets, the floor, the sides of the trash can. The Composer retreats to his bedroom in the back of the RV and closes the door behind him.

I open the small, cake-splattered kitchen cubby assigned to me. Inside are books that seemed appropriate to bring on a three-month tour across America with The Composer: Kerouac’s On the Road, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Twain’s Roughing It, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. But instead of a book I take out my journal. Even though the ride is so bumpy I can barely keep the tip of my pen on the paper, I begin to write.

There is something about The Composer that I need to know, but I’m not sure what it is.

I look around at the cake-smeared cabin. The Composer is someone who will bake himself a birthday cake in a moving vehicle, with a broken oven, in front of four employees who believe he is doomed to failure, if not death by fiery explosion. The fact that the cake had no chance didn’t stop him from trying to bake it.

It will be a long time before I understand anything much about what I write in that journal. Many years later, thinking back on this moment, I come across an article asking why so many memoirists are writing in the second person these days. The prevailing theory is that memoirists use second person when they are writing about something traumatic. But I have an additional theory: For many people, myself included, sitting down to write something in the first person feels like the worst type of fakery. There is no way “I” am in front of the live microphone, no way anyone would want to listen to “me,” no way anyone has paid to attend this concert starring “myself,” and so I become “you,” and in faking you, I am finally able to say what I want to say.

New York City

1999

You spend your first night in New York City in Penn Station with an elderly homeless woman named Rose. She eyes you from across the station—an eighteen-year-old girl wearing khakis and a white t-shirt from the Gap, sprawled on the floor between a bare-breasted goddess mural and a McDonalds, pretending to read The Iliad—and decides you are in over your head.

It is almost two in the morning and the rust-colored concourse is suddenly empty. There is a calamitous noise as the food vendors unroll the floor-to-ceiling security cages in front of their darkened shops. But then the pretzel-scented air falls still, and where thousands of people walked just a few hours before, the footsteps of a single person can now be heard from a long distance.

Unlike the other names of places on the subway map—125th Street, 72nd Street, Columbus Circle—Penn Station suggests something familiar: a station! Having nowhere else to go for the night, knowing no one in the entire city of eight million people, and not daring to call your parents, you choose Penn Station because you have vague recollections from movies of a beautiful train station in New York City where men in business suits hurry along marble corridors underneath a chapel-like, star-painted ceiling. Penn Station, you think, will be a reasonable place to spend the night. You have yet to learn that even in New York City men in business suits go home after a certain hour. You have yet to learn that in the dead of night, another, slower-moving civilization—the city’s homeless, many suffering from mental illness—pace the station’s dingy, labyrinthine corridors. You have yet to learn that the beautiful train station in the movies is Grand Central, and that Penn Station has all the charm of a crime scene.

Rose sidles up to you, asking if you have missed your train. She appears to be in her sixties or seventies and wears her graying hair in a tight, greasy bun. Her t-shirt and jeans are worn and she