Author Description

"You're not all there. I mean, we can see that your mind is clearly somewhere else. Sometimes we're sure it's the Pod People. I mean the Pod People can get to everyone, right, but other times we can tell that even the Pod People wouldn't know what to do with you. It's like you're there, but you're not, and the part of you that's there is trying to figure out if it should look for the part that went away, but it can't make up its mind because the other part has it. Does that make sense?" That's what the office secretary, Connie, says to Paul, over coffee and cigarettes at 1:30 in the morning while they're sitting on her stoop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.Paul, 30, is a finance professional who spends his evenings and weekends studying oil painting at a prestigious Manhattan art college where hipsters rule and everyone wants to be the next Andy Warhol. He wants to give up his safe career and pursue his art, but he has some obstacles to deal with. One is that he drinks too much. He also fantasizes about being in spectacular fatal accidents and rarely speaks more than 100 words a week. And finally, he ruminates on the tragedy that consumes his life.On a fateful Saturday, he gets dragged to a warehouse party in Brooklyn where he stumbles into a bizarre love triangle of threeintimate friends: a Dutch pop star who wants to take over the art world, but is at heart a Marxist; a belligerent would-be fighter pilot with a genius IQ and a weakness for Japanese woodworking; a model turned fashion designer who tempts everyone she meets. They are all pursuing success defined by their own terms, fueled by their need to impress their esteemed parents and mentors, but each also has a longing for some deeper meaning.In the course of the evening, Paul is drawn to these three magnetic personalities and encounters a variety of other quirky characters who express their own longings and look to their past for answers. Paul reveals his own tragic history and tries to make sense of it so that he c