POST-MORMON STORIES
Satori on Flatbush Avenue
Just when you think you’ve found a spot where you can pass for normal, along comes someone who reminds you that everything’s relative.
In June of 1998 I received a startling lesson in perspective. It happened during the NBA Finals, a hard-fought grudge match between the Chicago Bulls and the Utah Jazz. It left me as stunned as Karl Malone when Michael Jordan stripped the ball from him to seal up Game 6 and ice the championship.
I’d been living in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood for nearly three years. My girlfriend and I had broken up a few months earlier, after two and half tumultuous years, when I declined to abandon New York City along with her. My spiffy new job at Children’s Television Workshop (later renamed Sesame Workshop) meant that I could just about afford both the apartment that was now mine alone and the half of our consumer debt I was responsible for.
Though I had made a lot of close friends over the previous couple of years, it was still a lonely time as I struggled to find my place as an ex-Mormon naïf from Utah in the big, cold city. Many an evening found me putting down whatever novel I was reading (or short story I was writing) and heading around the corner to Mooney’s Pub on…
