The setting was the East Village in the mid-1990s, and we were just two of the many writers you could have conked if you threw a rock in any direction. We had washed out of the arts and culture scene of the previous decade, and although we didn’t know each other then, we were familiar with the personalities who had basked, for a time, in the underground celebrity of those heady days.

Writers made up my circle, youngish men and a couple of women too, who chattered about titles and headlines between ordering drinks, which sure beat languishing at a desk trying to come up with something somebody might want to read. The big-boned loud talker accompanying me had nine unpublished manuscripts, I had one and was halfway through another, yet we were convinced the pot of gold would be ours as soon as a few conflicts got resolved in our favor. Prizes. Awards. We’d live like mini-Hemingways—expatriates, bullfights, all of that. Insisting I get a preview of his current bestseller in progress, he pressed upon me a hundred or so pages stuffed in one of those old interoffice mail envelopes with the holes in it.

Back home, I had a look. There wasn’t much of a plot in what he’d written: a memoir masquerading as a novel whose drugged-out main character, too wounded by this world to carry on, eventually takes a dive from a high floor of some hotel. What came across wasn’t sensitivity but self-indulgence; my friend, who had known this tortured soul, cared more about his story than any reader ever would or could. I knew a number of those guys, none of them worth writing a book about. They’re dead, too.

In those waning days of the 20th century, I was dating a lovely girl. Overcoming an initial indifference to my many charms, or maybe a reluctance to take me seriously, she finally accepted the bartender who thought he was a writer, and we married in 1999. There’s a picture of Mr. Nine Unpublished Manuscripts and me at the reception, wearing the finest suits we could afford, basking in a mutual glow, relishing the prime of life. The snapshot lives among my treasures.

Between weddings—mine and not long afterwards his—my friend cranked out more sentences. Another manuscript found its way to my desk. This novel was different, signaling the advancement of a literary consciousness and a recognition of the author’s own strengths. But it did bear a startling similarity to a now-famous book by a then-esoteric author we both admired, and I assumed any serious publisher would dismiss it on those grounds.

Au contraire. He sold the book for what seemed to me a princely sum. A movie deal for even more money followed, and when he gave me the news, lights blinked at the edges of my peripheral vision. There was a buzzing in my ears. I was so sick with envy I came close to passing out.

No one’s success diminishes me. Nor does another’s failure enrich me. I know that, and I knew it then. I tried to be happy for my friend, and to manufacture some gratitude for all that I had, which, big picture, was and is more than most people ever have here on earth. “Dude,” he said, sensing my ambivalence, “I felt like we were standing side by side, and I got struck by lightning.”

Months passed. I sweated out a crime novel on a Royal typewriter, 300 coffee-ringed, tearstained pages that soon commanded pride of place—under the vacuum cleaner in a closet. And then I got a call from somebody who said, “I heard you wrote a book I should read.”

Thus was born what I’ve come to appreciate as My Little Crime Story That Could, which ended up selling about ten thousand copies. Not bad. Soon after I struck a deal for a true-crime-as-history account of a murky chapter in the American story. When I was working on it and people asked what I was up to, I would proclaim I was “taking history back from the Left.” Something of a love letter to the men of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, the book was panned by a progressive trade publication. To be fair, I picked this fight; they brought it to me.

My friend by that point was riding, if not high, then midaltitude on the West Coast. He congratulated me, and provided a thoughtful blurb for the book, but warned, “Whatever they do for you”—meaning the publisher—“it isn’t going to be enough.” He was right. I solicited marketing help from a boyhood schoolmate who was running a boutique PR firm, and got it, free of charge. A reading he arranged scored a “community calendar” hit on local TV news, and I was interviewed during a drivetime radio program. I made a handful of in-bookstore appearances, one in Miami, where the book is set, for a polite audience of 50 souls.

Meanwhile my friend brought out a second novel, which by my lights drew a specious equivalence between two brothers, one chanting slogans and carrying signs objecting to the combat missions that the other, an army colonel, was prosecuting in Iraq. Naturally, The New York Times loved it, but very few people bought the book, and even fewer read it.

You get one bite at the apple in the writing racket, maybe two. Agents (however good they are), editors, publishers—they’re always going to revert to the sales generated by your last bargain-bin tome, and my friend’s most recent numbers, Times review notwithstanding, left a great deal to be desired. So did mine.

I devoted the better part of the following decade to writing and rewriting a gangster operetta—actually, just another crime novel—which I pulled from submission after receiving notes like this one:

Thank you so much for the opportunity to consider [Pavia’s latest opus] . . . clearly the work of a great talent, a novel that really hits the ground running. The dialogue is filled with effortless wit, and I can see what you mean about Pavia pushing the envelope of genre. A very solid read from a talented writer.

Unfortunately, [emphasis mine] I was unable to quite shake the feeling that with its 1980s setting and almost photorealistic grittiness, [this book] lacks the strongly commercial quality that would be necessary in breaking Pavia out of the mass market track into trade paper or hardcover publication.

We’re big fans of Pavia’s work here—he’s out there doing innovative things—and I’d be happy to take a look at any future work from him moving forward.

In other words, chum, better luck next time. Hey, at least the submission received a response. The current crop of ink floggers “ghost” you; that is, your months, your years of work are met with stoney silence. At least this cat afforded me the dignity of a rejection.

Fortune’s wheel continued to spin. Hollywood’s golden horizon eluded my friend, and he moved back to New York with his wife. I was a proud father by then, and while the siren song of literary riches beckoned us still, they might have to wait. Realities like groceries and rent pressed in on our visions.

He parlayed an erratic and annoying social justice bent—that sounds mean, I concede, he earned his credentials—into a low-level professorship at one of New York City’s institutions of higher learning while I, in his words, “street corner poet-patriot” that I am, lowered a shoulder into my default career as a bartender. He chose the better part by a long shot. His teaching contributed to a New York State pension, while my labor found me rubbing drunken spittle off eyeglasses that weren’t doing much to help me see. By this time, my hearing was shot, too.

Another guy we knew in the ’90s, a refugee from Lit World and loyal pal to us both, had landed a gig editing a woolly but well-funded online magazine. He accepted my pitches and posted my copy without touching it. I wondered if he even read the pieces I submitted. I collected direct deposits that pushed the upper reaches of their stingy pay scale and was grateful to receive them.

While my literary ambitions migrated online, my now-professor friend was mounting a retrograde mission to the East Village with a pack of nostalgists misty over the way things used to be. This gang staged multimedia happenings featuring, say, a film projected behind a speaker recounting tales of woe or temporary triumph while a saxophone blurted an offkey note here or there. I was invited more than once but never went. Maybe I had to work. Under the influence of the multimedia shtick, my friend’s writing morphed into poetry, which wasn’t exactly terrible; it just didn’t read—to me anyway—as connected to anything real. And here were the signs, not the first ones, that he was slipping away. I sent him a copy of that unpublished gangster novel, which, yes, I had by then retrieved from under the vacuum cleaner and reworked one more time. I didn’t expect him to read the whole thing; what he did was rewrite the first several paragraphs according to his current poetics. The result was . . . not uninteresting, but it was insane.

It’s hard to say what pushed him over the edge. His marriage had been rocky for I don’t know how long—I mean, the wife who blessed him with three children had a boyfriend and it was plain to everyone except him that it was over between them. But how do you tell a guy that? He lived in exile in the Land of Longing, convinced that he was one word, one gesture away from being taken back into her heart. Was it the busted marriage that turned him to drugs, or did his sneaky drugging bust the marriage? I wasn’t asking him many questions, and I wasn’t getting straight answers when I did, so every once in a while, I’d just drop in to see what condition his condition was in. The visits didn’t inspire confidence.

His pot smoking had become habitual. I don’t know if he was treating it like the stuff on offer at Sara Roosevelt Park in the 1980s—there’s a nostalgic Lower East Side nod for you—but marijuana for a while now has had a psychoactive potency that is wreaking havoc on intact minds, let alone on one as fragile as my friend’s was by then.

With his history of drug use deadset against him, he lapsed back to using heroin, the bête noire of artists like Charlie Parker, a longtime addict who, ravaged by drugs, died at age 34, and Nelson Algren (my friend loved Algren), whose fascination with addiction gave birth to the oil stained-realism of the once-shocking novel The Man with the Golden Arm. One problem: The dope on the streets in the 2020s wasn’t heroin; it was fentanyl, cut with other poisons and inert substances that did nothing to lighten its lethality. My man overdosed twice, once flopping to the floor and turning blue in front of one of his classes.

You won’t be surprised to hear that I didn’t learn of this from him. He talked about his children with me, and about baseball games that were played long before either of us were born, and about books I was never going to read. During one call, he recruited me to cosign on his daydream of starting a literary magazine, spending several minutes, as my would-be editor in chief, outlining my assignment. And after he had talked himself out, he said, “Actually, dude? You know what? You can write whatever you want. You approach everything professionally.” Hearing that was humbling. There would be no magazine, and I never tapped out a single word for him, but still.

Contact by then had devolved into telephone reports of late-night panic attacks and psychotic breaks, of detoxes and rehabs, mental wards and, inevitably, experiments with psychotropic medications that weren’t making him better. He refused to suffer my opinions on any of these subjects, and good for him. He wanted to expound on his recovery, telling me he had unearthed this “sponsor,” or discovered meetings that would, in the end, be mile markers on his road to Well-ville.

My patience thinned, and although I’ll take any opportunity to chuff about how I never turn my back on anybody, and I don’t, he was relegated to my Third Phone Call list. Let the first two go by. Return the third. And I restricted the topics of conversation to kids—his kids, my kid—and baseball.

I did happen to notice him at an oversubscribed dinner where we both knew many of the invited and—you do develop a despondent feel for these things—I was sure this would be the last time I saw him. I had arrived late and sat alone, spying on him as, after his fashion, he worked the room. I may have nodded in his direction, but we didn’t exchange any words.

The call came from a man I rarely speak with and, naturally, I knew what it was about. I closed my eyes and listened. I was with my daughter on a subway platform, waiting for the 7 train to take us out to Citifield for a Mets game. Got that? His kids, my kid, baseball. It was as if he were tipping one of his stupid hats at me from the other side.

The official cause? He died in his sleep, which is like saying he died because his heart stopped beating. Maybe you’ve noticed that the cause of death is almost never revealed in obits these days, another quirk of contemporary life. But what’s the difference? It’s not as if the facts were going to alter that finality. (Like Vinnie tells Jimmy over the phone in Goodfellas, “He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.”) I wasn’t angry with my departed friend, not for long anyway. I was mourning where this life had taken him, grieving for him, and sad for myself because I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore.

No funeral was held. Instead, somebody staged a memorial at a forlorn chapel in the Bronx. I couldn’t bring myself to join the bereaved, and to my everlasting shame, watched a video transmission instead. I should have been there. A presumable man of the cloth presided, and I appreciated his prayers, but then came the “celebration of life,” and let me just say this: Not all of us are public speakers, nor are we intended to be. Suggestion: Should you find yourself at such an occasion and feel compelled to uncork a eulogy, please make it brief.

A final anecdote: Around the time of the last birthday I would celebrate before my friend left this world, he called and told me it was imperative that he see me. I was like, yeah, okay, alright. We hadn’t said hello before he was unveiling a sweatshirt emblazoned with the shield of the Rochester Americans, a hockey team hailing from my hometown. I haven’t lived there in over 40 years but anything Rochester made him think of me. (“Did you know Stan Musial played there in 1941?”) He spotted this rag somewhere—the gift does have a garish allure—and he made up his mind that I had to have it. Rochester. Hardscrabble, working class, striving. He revered those qualities. It’s how he saw the hollowed-out city, and how he saw himself. It’s how he saw me. He admired me. I would go so far as to say he loved me. I treated him as an embarrassment and a bit of a nuisance, and while he was at all times an advocate and an ally, I harbored him in my darkest heart as a rival. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.

* * * * *

I lifted my title from the last line of the 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon, which in turn purloined it from Shakespeare’s Tempest. The phrase doesn’t appear in the Dashiell Hammett novel on which the film is based. Hammett, a hardboiled boozehound with a thing for lefty playwrights, would’ve known his classic literature well enough to recognize the source, and so would John Huston, who adapted the material and directed the film.

At the story’s end, murder and betrayal, deceit and the convolutions of the plot throw the cast of shady characters into the office of private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart in a star-making role), who might be the best of this amoral lot, but not by much. The “priceless” figurine of the title is within reach of all the principals. The stuff of dreams is at hand, standing in for luxury and limitless sexual license—and expatriatism and bullfights—but for one brutal reality: The bird is a fake, a lacquered manque of no provenance, a fraud, a fugazi, a nothing. It’s worthless. Does an authentic Falcon even exist, or is it a myth, itself the mere stuff of dreams? We never find out. I’ll pass my 65th birthday before you read this, provided a girder from a high-rise under construction doesn’t break loose and land on my head, or a more mundane occurrence like a cardio infarction doesn’t prompt my last goodbye. Am I being dramatic? Sure. It’s in my blood. But I’m not being morbid.

I’m being realistic. I’ll be a bona fide senior citizen, and although I try not to worry or wonder too much about that which I do not know, if I were hitting this milestone and not ruminating over a few things that might’ve been, there’d be something wrong with me.

Throughout my essaying here, and maybe this is what lit the fire underneath me, I’ve been coping with a medical issue—I’ll leave it there—that’s landed me up in the hospital six, maybe eight times, I’ve lost track, over a two-month period. Medication, scans, ultrasounds, various treatments. The crisis has eased for the moment, but I’m not done. More technicians; more ice-cold jelly and probes; more appointments to schedule. Another “procedure” looms.

Pretzeled by pain during one of my emergency room pitstops, with great beads of sweat gathered on my brow and a draft chilling my exposed ass, I pulled away the curtain of my bay and whimpered: “Can somebody please help me? Please?”

A nurse did come along with a blast of morphine that neutralized my anguish, against the better medical judgment, as she put it, of the attending physician. The doctor wasn’t questioning my need; she was concerned about the opiate’s effect on my kidneys. So, let me express my heartfelt thanks to the caregivers of Shock Corridor . . . but do you know what was the last thing on my mind while I was there? The very last thing? Making it as a writer.

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Original Bio:

Peter Pavia is the author of The Cuba Project and Dutch Uncle, a novel. His work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Diner Journal, and many other publications.