
Smoking Grass
New York
If, as the New York Public Library’s promotional literature promised, last Wednesday night was when the twentieth century would go on trial, I began the evening as the Millennium Baby, trailing Father Time, played by Norman Mailer, as he ambulated glacially on twin canes toward his date with Günter Grass. Due to audience overflow—the event sold out in four minutes—members of the press were shunted through a long, spartan back hallway to the loading dock, where we were to check in. It was in this concrete fallopian tube that I found myself following Mailer—brought low by time and entropy—a living