by Jeff Hobbs
And while my father ruffles through the Baltimore Sun and my mother tries to misplace all my ripped jeans and black T-shirts, I streamline everything I have into a duffel bag and a backpack and board a train to Penn Station in Manhattan.
“You want to be a what?” my father asks as I purchase my ticket. “You want to be a writer?”
“No, not a writer,” I reply brazenly. “A journalist. I just want to sit down with a pen and paper somewhere and figure out what intrigues me in this world.”
I stay a few weeks with a girlfriend on the Upper East Side and very soon she isn’t a girlfriend anymore and I find new places to live because that’s what young people do in the city—that and find work. My first employment is as an associate editor three days a week for a duck-calling catalog. My career—if you can call it that—limps forward from there.
I don’t think about Ethan. I push him out of my thoughts until he doesn’t exist. And when you’re twenty-three and twenty-four and making your way in New York, you don’t think about anyone, really, except yourself, so forgetting people is an easy game. I also do not want any memories of him because they are too painful and I cannot afford the distraction.
In the end it isn’t hard to do. His name is mentioned by various college friends, but as time goes on those friends become fewer. Meanwhile, moderate professional successes come and go: small bits in The Observer, The Sun, middling human-interest Web sites, a left-wing newsletter. I cover restaurant openings and book parties to pay the rent and do well enough to live in Brooklyn for a while (“Only six stops on the L!” I remind friends) and then—after graduating to movie premieres and celebrity charity events—a studio sublet in the East Village (sixth floor of a six-story walk-up, the stairs keeping me from the post-college weight all my friends are gaining).
Ultimately, as I drift through these motions, the defiant idealism that appalled my father so deeply at the train station morphs into a jadedly self-aware fading of ambition.
This happens in less than two years.
Nothing intrigues me.
When Ethan Hoevel and I finally cross paths again in November, two and a half years after graduation, it’s one of those encounters that seem preordained.
An editor at The Observer who has a long-standing crush on me and has thrown a significant amount of paying work my way because of that crush, invites me to a Chelsea gallery opening filled with young and pretentious New Yorkers, and I know it will be painful and hard to endure—the usual—but because of the way the city works, I find myself in the position of not being able to say no to the editor at The Observer who is burdened with the crush.
Ethan sees me first. I am waiting at the bar for my fifth glass of wine.
“Things fall apart.” The voice is behind me.
“The center cannot…hold?” I reply haltingly.
“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
It is the preface to the one class we ever took together—Literature of Imperialism, fall semester, junior year. The first book we read was Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. And since the class was filled with irritating students who liked listening to themselves talk, Ethan and I would sit alone in the back of the room, where he scribbled unflattering caricatures of our classmates. That was also the semester Ethan played bass in a rock band called the Amber Blues and wrote a song (which became a hit at campus parties) about a guy missing an arm and a leg, pining for the woman he would never get. “It only takes one arm to hold you/but we have two hearts between you and me.” (I have no idea why I remember those lyrics as clearly as I do.)
I turn around. “Ethan Hoevel,” I say, weaving a little from all the wine.
“I wasn’t going to say hi,” he says. “I was going to let you enjoy getting on with your life while I got on with mine.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Only because I’m bored and alone.”
“That sounds like a line of a pretty sad song, Ethan.”
Automatically we’re back to the gentle sarcasm that couched all our conversations at Yale.
“Don’t you want to ask me what I do? Where I live? Why I’m at this ridiculous place?” he asks, staring straight at me.
“Not really.”
He takes my arm and leads me to a small plastic cube on a pedestal in a corner. DRUGS, SEX, ROCK ’N’ ROLL is its boldfaced title, Ethan Hoevel Designs in italics underneath. Inside the cube are three objects: a piece of plastic the shape and size of a credit card, one condom, and a pair of mini-headphones that looks like something a Secret Service agent would wear. I point to the plastic thing.
“It’s a bowl,” he says flatly.
“Like…for…?”
“Pot.”
“Oh.”
“It fits in your wallet.” Ethan shows me the small bulge running down the center that ends in a little concavity. “Somewhat clever.” He shrugs. “Nothing brilliant.”
“I guess the real question is: Will it sell?” I ask.
“Already has.”
“How much?”
“I don’t want to embarrass you.”
I don’t know it now (I don’t know anything, really, during this time) but since Ethan returned from Peru he’s been quickly gaining a name for himself in the design world. New York is always in search of the next big thing in any field and somehow Ethan has become one of the select few in his. The speed with which he attained this notoriety is impossible. He has lived in different villages in the Andes Mountains for two years and then—only six months later—he’s making a down payment on a dream loft in Tribeca. People I knew didn’t do that.
We leave the opening together. I tell the editor I’m feeling sick and don’t think I can handle dinner but maybe sometime soon.
Ethan and I go to a bar in the meatpacking district and he buys. He savors a martini (he hasn’t yet acquired his taste for wine) as he tells me that in Peru all he did was snort too much coke, which—it took him two years to realize—he could have been doing here.
“The moonshine snake brandy was kind of interesting, though.”
“Moonshine what?”
“Actually, viper, to be more specific.”
“Well, that sounds like it would be intriguing until you drink it.”
“There’s an actual dead viper fermenting inside the bottle. It’s coiled up.”
“Aren’t vipers poisonous?”
“One bite can kill you.” He shrugs. “Depends on the viper.”
And then I can’t help myself. A rush of feeling courses through me. I have not seen Ethan for two and a half years and I grip his forearm.
“Peru must have been so amazing, Ethan.” Now that I’m fawning all over him, he stops talking about Peru but doesn’t push my hand away. He lets it linger. Because of Ethan I get very drunk that night, even though he does not—he chooses not to. When he decides to stop buying drinks that means it’s time to leave. He mutters something about wanting to take a walk. The only thing I’m feeling as we put our coats on (it’s winter now) is a flood of admiration existing just on the fringes of envy, which I have yet to realize is what most people feel in the presence of Ethan Hoevel. He has these deeply probing eyes that seem to absorb and admire everything about a person, and I can’t help feeling special and wanted. Yet through the haze of feeling special and wanted, it strikes me that he must treat everyone this way, and that, really, in the end, I am not that special, I am not so wanted. It becomes apparent how little I have to say.
My disappointment sobers me up slightly as we leave Pastis. Ethan says he’s going to take a walk through the West Village to his new place in Tribeca. And then he asks me if I want to come. I pause briefly—thinking about things, sorting them out—and then say I do.
“What do you remember about me?” he asks as we start walking.
“Ethan,” I warn.
“No. Seriously. What do you really remember about me?”
“You were in a band.”
“What else?” he asks. “I’m curious
.”
“Now?”
“You remember about us? Right?”
“Yeah, Ethan, I remember about us.” I say this with fake-heavy sarcasm but it comes out sounding wrong since I am so drunk. “Why are you asking me about that? It’s in the past.”
He studies me curiously for a moment before saying, “Forget it.”
That he’s just messing with me is obvious even through the haze. He’s having fun trying to make certain memories—the memories that seem dreamlike—all too real again.
The mood shifts and Ethan tells me I’m drunk and that it would be best for both of us if he sends me on my way. As he hails a cab I walk up to him, slurring my words. “Maybe I can help you, Ethan.”
“How?”
“I mean with your work…maybe with my connections…I have a lot of them…I’ve been in the city awhile—I know how it all goes down.”
“I’m sure you do,” he murmurs, his arm raised, concentrating on the cabs coming down Ninth Avenue.
“I’ve had a lot of success with this, Ethan.”
“That’s really great,” he says in a monotone.
A cab cuts across three lanes and pulls up to where we’re standing.
“I think it’s something you should consider…I’d be happy to help you…” Now I don’t know where I am and I reach out to Ethan to steady myself. When I touch his arm I say genuinely, “And, yes, I do remember…”
Ethan opens the door for me. I climb in, mumbling my address. Ethan gives the driver a twenty and watches from the curb as we drive away, and a few minutes later I’m passed out in my bed.
When I wake up the next morning I start looking in my pocket for matches to light a cigarette. By the time I pull my hand out and his number is in it (when had he done that?), I’ve already figured it out. The one thing Ethan doesn’t want or need is my help.
Which brings me inevitably to a second conclusion: Ethan wants something more.
Senior year at Yale Ethan becomes a myth. He locks himself in the mechanical-engineering lab up on a hill a mile away from campus to work on his senior project. Every month or so people glimpse him at meals and at the more notorious parties, dancing with guys, grinding it out to the hip-hop blasting from the wall of speakers before disappearing again, back to the lab. There are only rumors because no one knows what he is doing.
Except me.
I only see his senior project once: a single wing suspended in a glass vacuum, a confluence of art and physics. He calls me to come and visit him after he finishes it that April and I reluctantly agree to see him again after a year of barely seeing him at all. That walk up Science Hill is not easy—the steep incline, the icy spring weather, and the fear of being alone with Ethan in a contained space far away from the quads and dining halls filled with people. I linger in the cold outside the building for ten minutes, seriously thinking about turning around. He doesn’t say anything when I walk in. He just switches on the machine.
Air flows through the vacuum at various speeds and angles, and the wing begins to oscillate according to predetermined graphs stacked on a table beside it, and it becomes clear that what Ethan has done—what he has spent almost a year of his life doing—is isolate one of the most beautiful and magical of worldly phenomena—flight—and strip away the beauty and the magic until there’s nothing left but a form—black and smooth and shapeless—that he controls. A year of his life is inside this glass box, that dubious and uncertain final year of college. He has put himself in his claustrophobic lab surrounded by stacks of thick books about airplanes and birds and wind. The walls are covered with posters of jets and rockets, the Wright brothers, eagles, clouds, a map of the planets. He has created another world for himself.
I glance around the room, then back at the box. I don’t know what to say.
When he sees my reaction he shoots me a disapproving look.
I am in the lab at the top of Science Hill for less than ten minutes.
Three months later Ethan Hoevel disappears into Peru.
When Ethan comes back to New York two years later—when he’s just on the cusp of his wealth, his notoriety, his face in the magazines—what I know of him still lingers in that little room on Science Hill.
He is now a products designer—mostly chairs and living-room settings. It is something he has done in his “abundant free time in Peru”—creating forms in his mind that people could sit on—where he has been inspired by “the simplicity of the chairs and benches” (this is a quote from a feature on Ethan in Dwell). But there is nothing simple about Ethan’s designs, which are embodied in the type of chairs you see in SoHo (Interiority, Interiology, Format, King’s Road Home) and which you never think of buying because they’re all so ungainly and abrasive and expensive.
The first piece I see of Ethan’s—coincidentally in a Tribeca store window a few days after our encounter—is his most popular and lucrative: a gleaming silver aluminum sheet, maybe a few fingernails thick, that loops up and down like a breaking wave (which actually served as his inspiration; Ethan is from California and loves the ocean). It resembles an h in graceful script. My instinct is to consider it an eyesore—sci-fi pretentious, obtrusive even in the darkest corner, outrageously other. And yet, over the next year, almost every engineering design firm and computer tech company in the country (this is all happening at the height of the Internet boom) will fill their conference rooms with full sets. Spurred on by this success, he’ll begin designing tables and lamps and sometimes entire rooms to match them. His more earthy designs—oranges and reds, plush cushions—will find their way into boutique clothing stores in Nolita and yuppie bars in midtown, in Madison Avenue salons and West Village restaurants and lounges in the Flatiron district.
He returns from the other side of the equator in the spring of 1999, and by the summer of 2000, it will be Ethan Hoevel Designs everywhere.
But to me, when I meet him at the gallery in November—where he’s just part of a group show before his fame truly blossoms—and he gets me drunk and he puts me in that cab on Ninth Avenue, Ethan is still the guy I was afraid to visit on Science Hill.
The morning after, I’m staring at his phone number in my hand and realizing that for all his coolness the night before, Ethan Hoevel does, in fact, want something from me. The question he’s asking me by slipping his number in my pocket is: Do I want something from him?
Later, still severely hungover, and leaning toward the dusty floor to pick up a spoon I dropped while stirring my instant coffee, I make a decision to call Ethan. He doesn’t answer. A few weeks later, when he jokingly informs me that he was standing there listening to my halting, fumbling message—that he knew it was me and simply didn’t pick up, that he was still keeping me at arm’s length—I am once again outside that lab at the top of Science Hill in my navy blue winter coat, wondering if I should go in.
I try staying in touch but only sporadically. We are almost friends again but not quite. There is a new separation between us now. From various distances over the next few years I glimpse him walking into a bar or a nightclub or I pass him sitting with some hot guy in the corner booth of a new restaurant that I have to write up for New York. I find myself following the trajectory of his career in obscure magazines: the products’ design that leads quickly to interiors, and then sets for music videos, and finally to art-directing a film for Miramax. His life flows on like someone’s dream. He is seen and adored and he never has to look for work or invitations to parties or publicity or sex—it all finds him, which is an anomaly in a city where the vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time hopelessly seeking all of those things. But this dream is not necessarily Ethan’s. From my vantage point—that of a freelance writer who spends his days composing pitch letters to editors and arguing for bylines and jockeying for story space and waiting on hold for fact checks and hoping that I’ll find someone, sometime—I know he’s dreaming of something else, and that for Ethan everything that is so effortlessly offered to him is just the b
usy surface of pseudo celebrity (which is why he travels so often—to Costa Rica, to Mexico, to Iceland, to Japan, to all kinds of places, everywhere).
Ethan Hoevel has a deeper need, and I will come to know (and I still believe I am the only one who will ever truly know) that it is a need for something darker.
I know that what he really wants exists beyond the fame he’s already promising himself that night at the gallery opening.
My favorite chair of Ethan’s is the most simple: two identical sunset-red circles, one for the seat and one for the back, connected with a single L-shaped aluminum tube that turns down into a sleek spider-leg swivel. It is one of the few things Ethan designs that don’t sell very well, and on my twenty-sixth birthday he gives me a pair for my writing desk and breakfast table—with the exception of a mattress, the only furniture I own.
3
AFTER THAT SPRING night on the rooftop where Ethan Hoevel mentioned Samona, it occurred to me on the long walk home that I had seen David Taylor, her husband of four years, back in the dead cold of January during one of our Yale track reunions—a sports bar in midtown, cheeseburgers, the Knicks losing on an overhead TV screen. Things were tough for me that winter. I hadn’t been able to pay more than the minimum on my credit-card bill for the third month in a row and there was a widening gap between me and everyone surrounding me—and this disparity became especially noticeable sitting at a hardwood table with a group of ex-athletes in expensive suits concealing beer bellies, and scalps that were starting to shed hair but still managed to maintain a youthful color via $150 highlighting treatments at the Avon Salon in Trump Tower. I didn’t hate them, or even dislike them, and it was easy to talk and laugh over shared memories. But hovering above all that was my particular insight that manifested itself like a hallucination: