I only worked at the Met (the museum, not the opera) (I never know if that's clear) nine months, from September to May my first year after college—I was working as an assistant at a talent agency, but it didn't pay enough to cover my bills, so after a summer poorly telemarketing for an off-Broadway theater, I started working Saturdays at the audioguide rental counter at the Met. I've written about this before, in essays that probably don't exist anywhere online, how I'd walk every morning from my shoebox apartment on First Avenue, north and west through the richer and richer blocks of the neighborhood, until I reached the Met. But it's the sort of thing I could keep writing about forever, finding and repeating the sentences for what that weird year (less) felt like, being broke and young in a rich, old city, feeling small in a huge museum until it, very weirdly, started to feel like a home.
Most of the time I worked at the counter in the Great Hall, but sometimes I'd be stationed with a cart at the entrance to a special exhibit, where visitors would be so mystified or intrigued by the Chinese Golden Age or Diane Arbus that they'd decide to shell out the six dollars for a guide. My lower back always hurt and everyone was always asking where the 0 button is. My small indulgence to my own irritation was to tell them, "Here, where it would be on a telephone."
I didn't know anything about art then, and I still don't, not really, beyond the handful of artists or movements I decided at some point I like (like Edvard Munch, because we share a birthday and someone bought me a little blow-up of the Scream when I was twelve). But it was magical, really, to spend my Saturdays in the museum, walking to my post through the quiet before we opened, spending my lunch break sitting in front of a painting (usually Clyfford Still). I was 20 and 21, and still had a kid's imagination, filling the Met's evocation of an Assyrian palace with a nineteenth century archaeological scene that I realize, now, as ripped off and adapted from the opening of Stargate.
I feel about the special exhibits the museum held during my tenure the way I feel about the CDs that played during my high school Barnes & Noble shifts—not quite like I imprinted on them, but that they were pressed into me, like a penny into molding clay, and the shapes are still there. There was the Gilbert Stuart exhibit with a room full of iterations of his Washington portrait, a room I hope recognized its own absurdity. There was the Gates, Jeanne Claude and Christo's Central Park installation that from the Met's roof turned the park's path into rivers of orange. (Looking now I see the Gates was only up for two weeks, which is a wildly short time for how big that project was, how many times I walked through it.) And there was Max Ernst.
To whatever extent I knew what art I liked, I didn't think I liked surrealism. Maybe what I didn't like was Dali's melting clocks. But these Ernst paintings were different. Now I can compare them to those botched AI-generated images, the ones that circulate erroneously labeled with this was designed to simulate what it feels like to have a stroke. I hate looking at those pictures, they wig me out, but the Ernst paintings wigged me out in the right way, beautiful and impossible and a little sinister. (I don't like art that's too sinister, I'll admit.)
I've come back to Ernst lately because I've been thinking about my book's future cover. On the one hand, procrastination: I haven't finished a first draft yet, I am terrified to think about all the ways what I'm writing is falling short of what I imagined, of what this book could be. But book cover day dreams are also an anchor, to the hope and the fact that one day this book will be finished and real (a relief that this won't go on forever and a relief that I will, somehow, finish this book and in such shape that it will be published). And it anchors me in what I want the book to be. I've never understood how anyone writes a whole book, it's way too much to hold in your mind at once—how do you make sure it's cohesive, fits together, that you sound the same at the beginning and the end? That's what mood boards and playlists are for, I guess. (I'd always thought the book's mood would be Psapp but I realized recently it's basically Dar Williams.)
These Ernst paintings are what I think of when I think about my book's cover. I don't think they're necessarily the right choice—my book is more like zero percent sinister—but they might be the beginning of a vision board, if I'm allowed to submit a vision board to the powers that be when the time comes.
It's not even the right aspect ratio for a book cover.
I usually worked the opening shift at the Met, but sometimes I'd work two-to-close. The way they'd clear the museum of straggling patrons at the end of the night felt like epic choreography, simple but staggering because of its scale. Starting at the farthest reaches of the halls, the security guards would clear room by room, converging as they approached the Great Hall, the museum's center. One or two guards from each of the most distant rooms would join the one or two from next door, accumulating and continuing forward, herding any would-be stowaways ahead of them, certifying every room behind them clear. They'd come like a wave down the main staircase, through Egyptian Art from the north and Greek and Roman to the south, until the Great Hall was ringed by the entirety of that day's outgoing security shift. Once everyone was there, they dispersed, as the after-hours crew made their way to their positions. And I hoped as I walked out that I'd catch a bus across 79th Street, to cut some of the walk that stretched between me and home.
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