Powerless at the Algonquin

This wasn't how things were supposed to go

"The Algonquin Round Table," by Al Hirschfeld, 1962.

I sometimes feel like I was born in the wrong era.

I’ve seen every Marx Brothers movie countless times. Same with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, together and apart. I became obsessed with Frank Sinatra at a very young age. I have strong opinions about who should wear fedoras and when.

Another way this condition manifests itself is my fascination with the Algonquin Round Table.

If you’re not familiar, for about ten years starting in 1919, a group of people—mostly writers—met for lunch every day at the Algonquin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. They sat around a large, round table. The group called themselves The Vicious Circle.

Among its impressive members were humorist Robert Benchley, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, playwright George S. Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winner Edna Ferber, The New Yorker co-founder Harold Ross, and the legendary Dorothy Parker.

As the New York Times put it: “The wattage of ribaldry and verbal dexterity around the table was enough to electrify all of Manhattan.”¹

If there are two things I love, it’s ribaldry and verbal dexterity.

Infatuated with its history, I’d stayed at the Algonquin before. Then, 21 years ago this week, I used some vacation days to write there.

Tapping in

To say I have a somewhat obsessive personality is like saying O.J. had somewhat of an anger problem. When I’m working on a project, I tend to get carried away and go all in, ignoring trivialities like eye strain, sleep, or the ability to distinguish reality from hallucinations. It’s quite charming.

For my self-designated Algonquin writer-in-residence program, I set some ground rules so I wouldn’t turn into Howard Hughes, urinating in jars and wearing Kleenex boxes on my feet. Or, if things got really bad, the other way around.

I’d write from 10:00 to 5:00, and there would be no leaving the hotel except to grab a sandwich and bring it back. If I wanted to do anything New Yorky—maybe visit the Carnegie Deli, or push someone off a subway platform—I’d have to do it in the evening.

I was excited to be writing in that illustrious building. I was also excited about what I was writing. I’d been working on a comic novel for a while. It was slow-going, but I hoped that this atmosphere, coupled with days of uninterrupted time, would help to jumpstart things.

That first day was magical. I got into a flow relatively quickly and relished the ability to focus. It felt amazing.

Sometime around 4:30, though, I noticed that my plugged-in laptop was running on its battery. I checked the connection, then the plug. All systems were go. “Shit,” I thought. “Is my cord shot?”

Just to be thorough, I tried one of the lamps in the room. Nothing.

Good, it wasn’t my cord. But this was strange; I’d never been in a hotel that lost power. Not ever, let alone on a clear, sunny day.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

But I was sure it would be back on at any minute. And it was; that minute just happened to be about 29 hours later.

I’ve seen the lights go out on Broadway

The Northeast blackout began in the late afternoon of August 14, 2003. Seven states and most of Ontario, Canada were affected. The culprit was a software bug. It’s comforting to know that catastrophic software problems are now a thing of the past thanks to our increasing, unproblematic reliance on AI.

Without electricity or cell service, I had no way of knowing the extent of the blackout. All I knew was that I was getting hungry, and was glad I’d brought cash.

I left my room, took the stairs to the ground floor, and walked out onto West 44th Street, where I was assaulted by the twin bullies of east coast summer: heat and humidity.

It was then that I panicked. No electricity means no air conditioning. No air conditioning means a slow descent into madness. I feared I had maybe a few hours before my room would become an intolerable brick oven, and I’d transform into Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.

The streets were packed with people. Nobody wanted to be inside. Impromptu jam sessions were popping up, and restaurants were giving away food from their fridges before it spoiled.

You’re probably thinking, “But there were marauding bands of looters, right? Surely a few Duane Reades were burned to the ground.”

Nope. It was slowly turning into a giant party. The darker it got, the more the weirdness of the situation reactivated people’s long-dormant sense of camaraderie, like a joyful shingles virus.

I walked around for hours, ultimately ending up in Times Square.

Now, I’ve seen some strange things in my life. Once at a club, also in New York, I saw a bulldog dressed in a leather jacket and cap, with a cigarette dangling from its mouth. Another time, at a bar, I saw a procession of men pay to wrestle a clearly drugged-out bear. I saw that movie where John Wayne played Genghis Khan. That one still confuses me.

But to see Times Square completely unlit, with thousands of people milling about in the darkness, is one of the most surreal things I’ll ever see. It wouldn’t have been shocking to spot Will Smith or Tom Cruise sprinting down Broadway trying to elude a low-flying UFO.

Morning does not become electric

When I woke up the next day my room was warm, but not sweltering, so I still had some time before delirium would take hold. Regardless, I had a bigger problem.

I didn’t know how long this blackout was going to last, and laptop batteries have an unfortunate tendency to run out.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

I had to pivot. I’d brought a legal pad, so I dug it and a pen out of my bag, and began writing.

I’d like to take a moment here to give the backspace key its due. It’s one of mankind’s most significant inventions. With just a few clicks, an embarrassing, hacky sentence I wrote can be erased for all eternity, as if it never happened. It’s wondrous.

The notepad equivalent, of course, is the scratch-out. Or the strike-through if you’re one of those people who employs a single, straight stroke across the offending passage. I take the frenzied, all-over-the-place scribble approach, the result looking like the grubby cloud that follows Pigpen around in the Peanuts comics.

When you couple that with handwriting that resembles the scrawl of a man having a seizure on a speedboat, before long my legal pad looks like a piece of evidence left behind at the scene of a Manson family crime.

It’s hard to write like that. There’s no deluding yourself that you know what you’re doing when the transcript that proves otherwise is staring you in the face.

My second day wasn’t nearly as productive as the first, leaving me frustrated and disappointed in myself.

I imagine a disgusted Dorothy Parker looking down, reciting a biting quip:

Without his keys, he’s at a loss

His page is filled, though it’s with dross

With pen in hand, he cannot write

It’s not the normal writer’s plight

The power’s out, his laptop’s spent

This man of letters? Impotent

With nothing else to do, I sat in the lobby, people-watching and reading a book. A bit later, the power came back on. People in the hotel cheered. Soon enough, the lobby got busy again, which I took as my cue to go upstairs.

Curtain call

The next morning, after transcribing the hieroglyphic mess from pad to computer, I hunkered down, pressuring myself to make up for lost time. It was my last full day, and I wanted to make it count.

Even though I got a lot done, I didn’t think it was very good; it certainly wasn’t enough to lessen the sting of yesterday’s failure. This trip hadn’t gone as I’d hoped. Still, I was looking forward to my evening plans.

Thinking it would be a nice way to close out my Algonquin residency, I’d bought a ticket to a play: Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. The cast was incredible: Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard.

It was a stunning production. Embodying the Tyrone family with the appropriate pathos, the actors matched the level of O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-Winning writing. O’Neill based the Tyrones on his own family, and let’s just say they weren’t the Von Trapps.

I left the theater in awe, but also more than a little depressed. I wasn’t particularly optimistic about my writing, and, based on absolutely nothing, was half-convinced I’d contracted tuberculosis like Edmund Tyrone.

I picked a nearby restaurant to grab a quick bite, and by the time I finished, I saw a scrum of people crowding someone by the stage door. I walked over and saw that it was Brian Dennehy. After waiting my turn, I handed him my Playbill to sign.

As he took it, he gave me an angry look. It wasn’t just anger, though; there was something else in his eyes. Something akin to disgust.

I was taken aback and, if I’m being honest, I may have peed a little.

This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

I thanked him and headed back to the hotel, taking a roundabout route to give myself time to parse out what I’d done to raise the ire of frighteningly imposing actor Brian Dennehy.

The only possibility I could think of was that, because I hadn’t been waiting outside like the others, he saw me saunter up and—even with my Playbill—thought that I hadn’t actually gone to the show, that I was an opportunistic autograph broker. If not that, then it was a textbook case of hate at first sight.

As uncomfortable as it was, the experience didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the play.

Throughout its four acts, Long Day’s Journey Into Night depicts the struggles and chaos that come from addiction, avoidance, resentments, and more denial than a Senate trial. It’s a tragic story.

Each member of the Tyrone family believes that, as far as their lives are concerned, this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. And while their feelings are understandable, it’s their inability to accept their reality that dooms them.

The other thing I thought about on my late-night walk was that sometimes you get perspective from unexpected places. Okay, I’d planned this writing retreat with lofty goals, but things didn’t work out the way I’d wanted. I had to remind myself that there was nothing riding on this trip except my own expectations. Not that my productivity wasn’t important to me, but a few days didn’t really matter.

I knew enough about the Round Table members to know that their writing wasn’t always smooth sailing either. (I’d love to see the alcohol bill from one of those lunches.) But they weren’t unique in that, and neither was I. No one’s writing goes smoothly all the time.

I got back to the Algonquin and went inside. I sat down in the lobby and absorbed its special vibe. For the first time, I felt like I might actually fit in there.

Then I scanned the joint to make sure there was no sign of Brian Dennehy.

1. The Vicious Fun of America’s Most Famous Literary Circle, July 20, 2019.