College Buddy, part 1

My friend, Tony, was a writer. He had a computer to do his classwork at NYU which in 1985 was a pretty fancy toy. I used to borrow my roommate's memory typewriter to do my papers and it would only hold onto my document long enough to print it out, proofread it and give it back to her. The fact that Tony had his own PC was significant. It gave him credentials as a serious student as well as a writer. He also had a CD player which astounded me and I remember thinking that CDs were indestructible and luxurious, even as I spun my favorite songs on vinyl. This was not really all that long ago-because I'm not that old!-and yet it seems almost light years away.

Tony graduated high school in New Orleans which was much more glamorous than my home city. We met in Manhattan while I studied acting and he was consumed by political science and writing short story after short story in his big heavy desktop computer. He was born in Bogota, Colombia, while his parents were living down there working for some kind of oil company. He was mostly of Italian heritage but loved the Spanish language and the magical realism of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He was a Jeopardy fanatic and used to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen.

I so admired, Tony, because he was adept at capturing his thoughts on paper. I thought he would become a great novelist and that I would say, "I knew him when..." He was good looking and funny and we and our other friends the Jewish comedy writer, the rabbi-to-be, the promiscuous yet vulnerable actress and the neurotic yet adorable actress would all go out at 4:00 AM for coffee and hot gooey brownies at Tiffany's in the West Village. I wonder how they would all have described me back then...