I was sitting at the bar with a book in front of me, when a famous man sat next to me. I’d brought a notebook, but I hadn’t taken it out of my purse. I didn’t have writer’s block so much as writer’s dread. I couldn’t face the pages, their hideous blankness.
“What are you reading?” the famous man asked.
I looked at the cover, suddenly unable to answer. It was a book I read about online, something about magical realism: a father turns into a lamp. I showed it to him.
“Haven’t read it,” he said. “I don’t even know why I asked. I’m not much of a reader.”
I knew immediately who he was, of course. I’d known about him for what seemed like my entire life—as long as I’d known about my parents, about myself.
“I wish I were a reader,” he said. “I know it’s something I should be.”
He was more handsome in person, somewhere in the shallow end of his sixties, wearing a soft-looking black sweater and smelling of expensive soap. I could picture the place where the soap was purchased: one of those quiet, ritzy stores that only sells artisan toiletries, a striking woman at the cash register, a handsome gay man in an intimidatingly stylish outfit by the door. Probably this famous man had never set foot in that store; probably someone else did that kind of thing for him. He sort of looked like one of the monied, liberal dads that sometimes showed up at the expensive private high school where I once worked, dads who drove expensive electric cars and wore hats that said The Future Is Female. Still, those dads showed up a lot less than moms. No-Dad’s-Land, the staff called it, joking.
“I think everyone means to read more,” I said. “Even you?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, “not me. I already read a lot. I read at stoplights. I read all the time.” I felt his nearness in my pulse now, speeding it up. I’d heard his voice all my life. All my life, he’d been in the background. I couldn’t figure out a way to say this out loud without sounding absolutely demented.
I’ve been listening to you all my life!
He was the most famous radio personality in the world, the most famous radio DJ to have ever lived. How many radio DJs was he competing with? That wasn’t the point. He changed the form, everyone said that. Also, this man served as my father’s conscience, the cricket on his shoulder forever whispering rights and wrongs. The Problem’s hero. The god of my house. Rather, my father was the god of my house, and he was the god of my father. I’d inherited my father’s gods, just like I’d inherited his knobby knees and an allergy to shellfish.
This man, Reid Steinman, was saying something now, and I asked him to repeat it. Goddamn it. I was a bad listener! The membrane between my thoughts and my words was still dangerously thin. My brother died two years ago. The light in every room still looked changed.
“May I ask what you do?” Reid repeated. I felt struck by the “may”—the politeness, the formality. “For work I mean.”
People in this city were always asking what I did for a living! Even famous people wanted to know! I bounce around, was what I wanted to say. No, “bounce” sounded too easy, too fun. I don’t bounce so much as slide down the wall like something splattered or spilled. But I couldn’t say that— it made no sense! I was having trouble accessing what people said when they met someone attractive, what to say when you wanted to win someone over. “Deep down I’m a good person,” maybe. “I have sex enthusiastically.” These things must be conveyed with subtext of course, but I couldn’t figure out what that subtext might be.
Also, I thought he might be waiting for me to impress him—to make him laugh with the strangeness of my small and singular life. Or maybe ask- ing about my life was just a pickup line, to show that he understood women want to be asked this kind of thing—what do you do, what are you interested in—as opposed to just being looked at.
I’d read that in a magazine profile of him once. He’d said, “Yes, I ask women about their sex lives on the radio, but I also want to know what they do every day, and more so, what they do in private. And not even sexually, just what they do when they’re alone.”
Like a writer, I’d thought, when I read that. Turning rocks over and seeing what’s beneath.
“Before you got here, I was sitting next to someone weird,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about what I did every day. Honestly, I didn’t think I could describe it if I tried. The days passed without my consent. I barely got to look at them. One morning, I kept thinking, I should grab one of my days by the shoulders and look it in the eyes and ask, What’s been happening?!
And what I said was true: I had just been sitting next to a weird man. He left only moments before Reid sat down. This man tapped me on the shoul- der to show me his phone, more specifically an Instagram account, which depicted an Asian woman grilling what looked like a skewer of hamsters on an outdoor flat top grill. He laughed when I recoiled.
“Isn’t the world crazy?” the man said.
I wasn’t sure what he found crazy: that people grilled hamsters in an Asian country he surely hadn’t bothered to learn the name of? Or the fact that he had access to that knowledge—a video of it!—at a bar?
I’d just said “huh” and looked back at my book. I’d been trying to shut the door on the conversation. I always wished I looked like the kind of woman a man might be intimidated to talk to at a bar. Instead, I looked like the kind of woman to whom strangers on airplanes often told secrets. “Approachable” is probably the word.
Reid nodded and I felt embarrassed at letting the story of the weird hamster man spill out like that. I need to talk to more men, I thought. I need to practice talking to men.
Now Reid wore a puzzled expression, as though I might have some- thing on my face—an eyelash or a stray piece of dryer lint.
“I’m glad I came and saved you,” he said. “I don’t normally have such impeccable timing.”
I knew without a shadow of a doubt he wanted to sleep with me. Even if you are a woman whom not every man wants to sleep with (maybe only some men, maybe even only a fraction of them), you still knew this look. You are born knowing.
And listen: I do not think most men want to sleep with me. But some— some definitely do. And yet, the way he was looking at my face—closely, not lecherously—felt intimate, rather than invasive. I’d always found the idea of being with an older man a little sinister. Don’t older men want to control you? Or was that just a leftover scrap from something my mother had said?
Meanwhile, I’d never dated a bald man; had never even slept with one. I’d turned twenty-eight just last week.
“And what do you do for work,” I said suddenly. I’d pretend I had no idea who he was. It felt good to render him anonymous, like I’d grabbed a little power back.
“I’m on the radio,” he said. “You have a radio show?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have a show. I’ve had it for a long time.” “What’s your name?” I asked.
“Reid,” he said. He stiffened a little, having to say his name in a bar. “Reid Steinman.”
“Reid Steinman.” It was a thrill to say his name back to him, right to his face. I repeated it slowly, as though I were sounding out words in a different language. Then I said it again. “Reid Steinman,” like it was suddenly becoming familiar to me, lyrics from some long-forgotten song. “I think my dad’s a fan.”
He smiled. “Is that good or bad?”
“Neither,” I said, though I couldn’t decide if that was true. “I think he listened to you when I was growing up.”
“A lot of dads like me,” he said.
I could picture these dads, on the other side of the proverbial hill, saggy- faced and beer-drinking men who liked to hear a dirty joke in a bar. But I knew that was only a stereotype. If I knew anything about dads: They were complicated.
Reid smiled again, but there was a tightness. Maybe this was a tired ritual. How many times did he have to sit and listen, his face as open as a menu, while a fan recounted the many hours they spent listening to him growing up, or their parents had. Or maybe this felt exciting to him, the way something you were good at—that always ended well for you—was exciting, like teaching sometimes was for me. Like writing used to be. I didn’t want the conversation to end and suddenly I felt very worried about what I might say next. I wanted to extend the moment. Surely it was just a moment. I thought around for something to say.
“Do you have any kids?” I said. I knew he had one. He almost never spoke of her on the radio.
When he did, it was only in passing: I visited my daughter in college. Oh, my daughter plays the guitar.
“I have one,” he said.
I knew from listening to the show for so long that his family was off-limits. And maybe his daughter would’ve been, had he known I was a fan. But luckily I wasn’t. I was just a girl in a bar.
“And what does she do?” I asked.
“She’s in between things,” he said. “She’s back from college.”
I wondered how old he was. My father’s age? I’d google it as soon as I was alone. He looked sort of ageless, in the way well-tended bald men sometimes look, shiny and smooth and elaborately moisturized. In the dim, buttery lighting of the bar—beneath those stylish naked bulbs I some- how associate with lonely geniuses—his edges appeared softened. It was romantic comedy lighting. There was a doglike quality to his face, a sort of turned-up nose, like a pug. But he was not unattractive. Probably he had spent a lot of time looking at himself in the mirror, at different angles, in different clothes—testing, trying. And so much could be improved with money! Could be massaged and papered over. Had he gotten plastic sur- gery? I’d google that too.
“So your father listens,” he said. “But you’ve never heard me?”
Of course my first instinct was to continue to lie. Lying had always been my first instinct, for as long as I could remember. Something to do with my dad—I’d take any pains to hide a truth that might upset him. But where had my instincts gotten me? And what could I lose from telling the truth? Dig- nity, maybe, but I didn’t have that much dignity to start with.
“I’ve listened before,” I said. “A casual listener,” he said. “Something like that.”
“So you do know who I am.” He raised his eyebrows in an exaggerated way. I remembered he played a role in a superhero movie once, as a bank teller, but he wasn’t very good, and had never been cast in anything again.
I kind of liked that he’d already caught me in a lie, at least a small one.
He’s getting to know me! I thought.
“I know who you are,” I said. I grinned, like I’d wanted him to find me out.
“Good,” he said. “If you didn’t—” He touched his head as though miming a headache. “It can be difficult to explain.”
The bar was uncrowded, but I could feel the static of other people’s eyes on us. Uh-huh, someone whispered, that’s him. A few people craned their necks to look. But at other tables nobody cared. Life in this city went on: a script was purchased, a dream was crushed. “That was her fourth affair!” someone shouted, to an eruption of laughter. I was always getting distracted by other people’s lives.
“I’m a teacher,” I said, “in answer to your earlier question.” I liked how noble it sounded, and humble too. I wanted to help people! I did not mention the other strung-together jobs: the horoscope app, the lingerie website, the book clubs. Then, I thought I noticed some slight change in his face: a drooping around his mouth. Teachers were boring. They did not do, and that was why they taught. “I’m a writer too,” I said and immediately regretted it.
“What have you written?” he asked.
“Nothing you’ve read,” I said. And if he knew that meant things had not gone well, writing-wise, he didn’t show it on his face. “But I’m working on something new,” I lied.
“I’d love to read it,” he said.
“Maybe someday,” I said. I meant it: I found the whole idea of him reading something I wrote terrifying and exciting both. I might even say arousing.
“And do you like teaching?”
I was not used to being asked so many questions, to being the center of someone’s attention. “Yes, well. Yes, I do. But sometimes I wish I was doing something else.”
He smiled, and I noticed his teeth were unnaturally white and straight. Capped? Veneers? These were things I hadn’t known existed until recently. I’d moved to Los Angeles one year ago, after I’d gotten tired of the private high school where I worked up north. (I liked calling it that: up north. It made me feel like I was a frontierswoman, or an explorer.)
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” an ex-boyfriend had said, “for someone who reads so many books.”
“What else do you wish you were doing?” Reid asked now, flashing his much younger teeth.
“At this moment?” I said. “Nothing.” I was flirting now, leaning closer to him. It was trite choreography, but I was relieved I remembered the steps. “Instead of teaching,” he said, but he was leaning closer too. “Did you always want to be a teacher?” No, I thought. “Sort of.”
“I sort of wish I’d done something else,” he said. “I guess that’s easy for me to say now, right?”
A man approached from behind Reid, and I wasn’t sure if I should say some- thing. I liked the idea of giving Reid some sort of signal: like we were on the same team, two people colluding. The guy was middle-aged, in a baseball cap, its brim optimistically stiff. Before he reached Reid, he turned the cap backward in one fluid motion. When I first moved to LA, I couldn’t believe how many of the men wore backward baseball caps and frequently asked for help.
“Are you from the Midwest?” a coworker had asked when I’d said this. “No,” I’d said, “I’m from the middle of nowhere,” which wasn’t really true. Of course it wasn’t true—everywhere was somewhere, but I was from somewhere very specific: outside of Reno, Nevada. The town has a name but I won’t use it. The whole place still feels difficult to explain, in the same way it is difficult to explain the taste of food, or your own childhood.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” said the fan in the backward baseball cap. He was talking to Reid, of course, not to me.
“I can’t believe you’re standing right in front of me.” He looked like he might be on the verge of tears. “You are like my hero, dude.”
Reid greeted him with alarming neutrality. “I’ll sign something quickly,” he said, “but I’m in the middle of a conversation.”
“Great,” the man said. He was smiling so hard it looked painful, like he’d stepped on a piece of glass but was too embarrassed to tell us. Reid spread out his empty hands as though to say, “What should I sign?” and the man looked stricken. “Umm,” he said, looking around.
“Here,” I said, and handed him my book, the one about the father who turns into a lamp. “You can have this.”
An old childhood instinct: to prevent a problem before it snagged on a thorn and began to drag, unspooling itself all over the room.
“Thanks,” the man said. “Are you guys—”
“Maybe,” Reid said, to a question that had not yet been asked.
If he was being forward, I didn’t mind. Lay it on thick, I thought. Slather it on me.
I knew Reid’s reputation: that he was the most charming man on the radio, that he slipped information out of celebrities like a pickpocket slipped money from a purse, even as those people thought they were being tight-lipped. And it was true what everyone said: His voice was lovely, even in person, without any sort of technology to enhance or modulate the tones.
It was not the low, smooth, syrupy voices of the radio DJs that came before him; but rather reedy and higher pitched, like the voice of a professor in some remote but sought-after field—linguistics or archaeology. Distinguished. How many times had I heard this voice? If I closed my eyes, I could be back in my father’s truck. I could be somewhere else entirely. Outside of Reno, Nevada. With my brother. Creeping through the Haunted House that was rotten to its core.
Yes, it made me feel special to be charmed by this man, or for him to attempt to charm me. He saw something particular in me, something hidden. Maybe that something was only sexual, but that was something, nevertheless.
“Who shall I make it out to?” Reid asked the fan.
“Oh hey actually,” the fan said, “can you sign my hat?” He handed my book back. “Sorry,” he said. When he removed his hat, he, too, was bald, though he had a medical condition that left his head red and scaly. I looked away, to give his head privacy.
“See,” he said to Reid, pointing to his own baldness. “I’m part of the club.”
“That’s what I’ll write,” Reid said, though he didn’t pry his gaze away from me. “Part of the club. Your name?” he asked, still looking at me.
“Jay,” the man said, and Reid repeated, “Jay.” Did he feel a thrill hearing Reid say his name? Could he, too, close his eyes and pretend he was in his car or his childhood bedroom—anywhere else? Suddenly this man, this Jay, couldn’t help but look at me too, as though he’d previously missed something significant about me, whatever it was that Reid saw. They were both staring at me while Reid gestured at the man for a pen. I pulled one from my purse.
“Thanks,” the men said together.
On the other side of the bar, the group of people the man came with looked excitedly on. Was the woman in a matching baseball cap the man’s girlfriend, or his wife? She smiled at me and gave a tiny quarter-moon wave. How strange, she must have been thinking, that this famous man is sitting at the bar with someone so ordinary. Or maybe, she was thinking, someone so young.
Maybe the woman was trying to place me—had she seen me in a movie or a TV show? I think I look like I could play a woman in a digestive yogurt commercial if they had hair and makeup on set, someone to make my lank hair look fuller, wind-blown. More likely, I’d be offstage, handing a yogurt to the woman in scene. That’s what I looked like: a background actor who accidentally wandered into the foreground.
Often, I had the feeling that my life was somehow moving on without me, as though I had no say in it at all. I’d even recently took up jogging. I used an app on my phone called Couch to 5K that was supposed to train you how to go from sitting on your couch to running a 5K. Believe it or not, I was still in the couch phase of the process. Suddenly, on that Tuesday in that bar, I wanted to take control of my life. I wanted to make something happen. It was for this reason that when the fan walked away, I turned to Reid and said, “Should we meet here again tomorrow?”
“I work tomorrow,” he said.
Of course! Tomorrow he’d be back on the radio, back to his normal life. We were merely having a brief encounter. This was not meant to extend. I felt so embarrassed the shame came to me as a bodily sensation: a hitch in my stomach.
Then Reid said, “How about the day after? But not a bar. To tell you the truth, I don’t really drink.”
“Of course,” I said. I already knew he didn’t drink. Only sparkling water, and never the flavored kind. There were so many things I already knew about him.
“Do you have a card?” he asked.
“A card?” Did people even carry cards around anymore? And even if they did, why would I have had one? What would it say? I’m trying embossed in smooth red lettering. Can’t you see that I’m trying?
Instead, I ripped off a piece of the menu, with the hard, starchy good- quality paper restaurants like that used, the kind of restaurants with flattering, soft bathroom lighting, where influencers took photos of themselves in the mirror’s golden light, a restaurant where Hollywood types took meetings, swiping at their cell phones in the high-backed booths, lying about their projects—it might just get made. The menu offered sixteen-dollar deviled eggs and whimsical drinks with names like the Blue Desperado. I lived thirty-five minutes away, in a studio apartment in the armpit of the valley, in a place called Van Nuys. I’d never laid eyes on the apartment before I’d arrived—I’d seen none of its boxy stucco glory.
“I’ll take it,” I’d told the landlord, a woman with a buzz cut who seemed forever in a rush.
“You’ve already paid,” the landlord said. “You have no choice.
Now I took the scrap of paper and wrote my name and number down in the neatest lettering possible. It didn’t look like my handwriting at all. It looked like the handwriting of someone organized and dependable.
“Last name?” Reid asked and I wrote that too. “Jewish?” he said.
This question, in a small town outside of Reno, Nevada, would have made me nervous. But with him, I felt it might give me a leg up, or at the very least, make me seem familiar to him in a way I hadn’t seemed before. We shared something—some secret, bubbling historic anxiety.
“Sort of,” I said. “On one side.” Enough to wreak a kind of havoc on the nervous system.
“I have to go,” Reid said, looking at his blank wrist. I looked at it too, noticed his long fingers, his manicured nail beds. Pianist’s hands. Though I’d read somewhere that “pianist’s hands” was a myth—that actual pianists have gnarled hands, often large, with swollen knuckles from playing so much.
Still, I knew—Where had I heard it? From Reid himself?—that even though he just played piano for fun, that he was actually very good at it. In fact, he took piano so seriously he almost wrung the fun right out of it, like an old towel, practicing for hours every day. This is the problem with modernity maybe, you never know how you know things.
“I wish I could pay for your drink,” he said, “but I didn’t bring my wallet.” He’d walked into the bar with no wallet, no plans. Was this what it was like to be rich and famous? Wandering and restless? Loitering in bars and chatting women up?
“That’s fine,” I said, clinking the ice in my now-empty glass. “I already paid.”
“What did you drink?”
“An old-fashioned.” My father’s drink. Though he just as often ordered a piña colada or a strawberry daiquiri, a man filled to the brim with contradictions.
Reid leaned forward and plucked the cherry out of my drink, holding the stem gingerly between two fingers, jiggling it slightly to let the residual whiskey drip off. It was a strange gesture, compelling in its complete and utter lack of sexiness.
“May I?” he said, and ate the cherry before I could respond, tucking the stem into his front pocket.
I watched as Reid moved through the arched doorway—he was very com- pact, almost a whole head shorter than me—and thought about calling my father.
“Atta girl,” he might’ve said, as though it were an accomplishment to be able to attract men, to carry on a conversation with one I wasn’t related to. But he wouldn’t have really meant it that way, more like, Atta girl, letting your life unfurl so far away from your mom and me, whatever that life had become. And anyway, this wasn’t just any man—it was a man my father would’ve liked to attract, though not in a sexual way.
My life seemed to bewilder my dad, not just because of its bookish- ness, but also the way it seemed to have paused suddenly, at least my writing-life, stunned like a snake in the sun, or an opossum frozen with fear, having narrowly missed being run over by a car. I had started over in a new city for this very reason: to use phrases like “I’m starting over.” Sometimes all you needed was a phrase to repeat aloud, one you might speak into existence.
“You were such a smart kid,” he’d recently said. “All those books. Notebooks you’d fill and fill. We thought you were the smartest kid we’d ever seen. Je-sus Christ,” he said, “even your brother thought so.”
* * *
The only book other than the Guinness World Records I’d ever seen my father read was Reid Steinman’s autobiography. He never read novels, though he could recite whole scenes of movies by heart, and not just The Godfather either, but romantic comedies too. Show business impressed him, in the broadest sense of the phrase. You could hear the exclamation point in his voice: Showbiz! Surely this had influenced my brother, who had become a stand-up comedian.
Reid wasn’t just a famous person, he was a man my father admired more than his own long-dead father, who died when he was only two years old, and about whom he knew almost nothing, always invoking his memory in a reverent whisper.
“I bet he’d be so happy to know you’re out in LA. Starting over,” he’d said.
The fact that I’d never met the man was beside the point. My father’s gods were my own.
This is an excerpt from the novel First Time, Long Time by Amy Silverberg, published July, 2025 by Grand Central Publishing.
