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for myself, and give the rest to the charities that the MF wiped out. That thought elicits a chuckle. It feels so good to laugh. A sense of humor and a sense of the absurd are crucial in my situation. When Paul dropped by yesterday to check on how I was doing and saw me head down on the kitchen counter, he said, “Hey, you look a lot younger. Crying makes your face puffier, much better than Botox.” He took me by the shoulders and said, “Don’t lose your sense of humor. It’s the only thing that will really get you through this.”
    In fact, I am not a weeper and have shed no tears over my situation. And yet when a friend wrote me yesterday about the death of her husband after a horrible illness, the e-mail undid me. There are so many worse things happening in the world—and I remind myself of this all the time—but still, each of us, no matter how bad things are for others, has his own worries, his own horror stories, especially now with the deepening economic turmoil.
    I think of that grieving friend again for a few moments and I am surprised to realize that some good has come out ofthe MF debacle. I jot down a quick list of the positive aspects beginning to emerge from the horror of the experience:
    Agonizing but energizing
    Terrifying but clarifying
    Frightening but strengthening
    And then I add:
    Weight loss from money loss!
    The sun has vanished suddenly and the morning light has turned a most forbidding opaque gray. The windchill factor has fallen by a steep eighteen degrees. On my windowsill are four orchid plants. Three were gifts from friends and the fourth I bought a few months ago at the flower market on Twenty-seventh Street.
    Those poor plants are living in the worst conditions, but I love them and talk to them like some sort of lunatic—this is what green thumbs recommend. The sill is freezing in the winter and hot as a pancake griddle in the summer. I water them from a pretty copper watering can, and feed them, but they never seem to blossom. What would, under such circumstances? But this morning, looking out at the moody gray city, I see a shoot with some unmistakable buds on it. My orchid will bloom again. I will see the pristine white flowers by the new year.

CHAPTER 5
Road Trip with “The Girls”
    MF + 2 WEEKS
    O n a cold December day, I set out in my dented white ’95 Mercedes wagon for Florida. I need to make sure my cottage is in shipshape order for a potential buyer. The newspapers have announced that the real estate market is worse in Florida than anywhere else in America and the broker who is trying to sell the place says, “The buyers are bottom feeders and they’re all out for blood—if indeed there are any buyers at all.” I will have to sell the tiny house for much less than I paid for it two years ago, not to mention that I will lose the money and effort I put into rejuvenating it from its previous trashy state. But no matter how much I lose, I must sell the little house. I need the cash for daily living.
    I have an additional, more inspiring plan for my trip,though. I want to take on-location photographs while I’m down south—it’s emotionally crucial that I stay focused on my work.
    Several years ago I began to photograph plastic blow-up sex dolls that come equipped with cavernous open mouths and huge breasts. The irony is that my work comments on insatiable consumerism, greed, dishonesty, and the deformed and warped values of our times. The dolls, with their gaping mouths, are symbols or ciphers that provide a visual scaffolding for social observation. Nothing in the pictures is genuine (unless you consider plastic “genuine”) and neither, of course, was the MF.
    Now “the girls,” as I call them, are stacked in open wine cartons behind me, along with their wigs, clothes, lingerie, bags, shoes, gloves, and jewelry, all of which I bought on Canal Street in Manhattan—two bogus Hermès Birkins