And so to a little sketch of the flatmates. Saturday morning was our first outing together. We trotted in a line down the six or seven steps of the four storey brownstone of which we have the first floor and started walking north along sixth avenue to the Chelsea flea markets. Matt Rogers, Mark Wimberley and me, a ragbag of something or rather. We walked up sixth avenue with the Empire State looking very large under the bands of light and dark grey cloud which have sat on top of New York for the last couple of weeks. We talked about nothing in particular. Rogers and Wimberley, as they call each other, have a fine patter of nothingconversation. We walked past a woman running as a Democrat for some school board or other, “I’m running for the Democratic nomination for the District….” “So am I,” said Matt, who is from Texas, immediately. “I like Bush,” said Mark, who is gay, a bit crudely. And so we carried on. We were looking for furniture for the apartment. I don’t know why. It seems like it has about the right amount. “Nothing too dark,” said Matt, as we turned into one of the carparks that get converted into markets on Saturdays. “There it is again,” said Mark, who is black and has dredlocks and a beard which has two little points, “the racial slur.”

I came back from a lecture the other day. It was late and I was hungry and Rogers and Wimberley were sitting in the sitting room talking avidly, using each other’s surnames. During the day, Rogers had chucked out Wimberley’s favoured furnishing, a slim black metallic psychiatrist’s chair. Rogers had put the chair on the patio where it sat in the rain, calling it ‘garden furniture.’ (You get on to the patio, which is really the bottom of the fire escape, by climbing out of the kitchen window, It’s not very difficult. On Friday, bravely, I climbed up the fire escape and up the ladder at the top onto the roof of the building. It wasn’t much. It’s not a big building. But as soon as you get up high in New York and you see the water towers plonked on the roofs and the greys and the reds and the whites it feels exciting. It feels like you can jump from one to other in a chase and then leap over streets and roll around like a stuntman or that Frenchman in the BBC adverts). And I had arrived in the middle of the argument that followed. It seemed funny at first, the use of the surnames, the polite waiting until the other had finished (I was immediately asked what my surname was and then occasionally asked for contributions), the measured tone and nodding heads, but my friends this conversation went on. I had to leave and make myself some food as Rogers talked about the “cohesion” of the design of the sitting room and Wimberley came back arguing strongly for an added dash of pow, something to offset the staidness of the leather and the brown floor…

Matt Rogers is from Dallas where he didn’t just used to have a car, oh no, he had trucks: red ones, yellow ones, grey ones which he bought and patched up and sold on and loved to tinker with. Matt cut his hair the other day. Just stood in front of the mirror in the kitchen with some clippers and mauled off all his hair. I was dutifully reading something about journalism in my room, which really isn’t far away from the kitchen (I’m in the kitchen now), and he called me in to help cut off the little neck hairs which he couldn’t reach. Matt went to college in Texas but dropped out of his bum tourism and marketing course and headed for the lights of NY to see what happened. Now he works as a decorator and construction-type in upmarket apartments on the upper easts and upper wests. He has a picture perfect girlfriend called Lauren who occasionally comes over. She is from Texas and has a part in a reality tv show about a restaurant that’s on. She arrives in episode 5, next week, we’re waiting tonight to see if she made it into the ‘coming soon’ section at the end of the programme. Matt has recently got all the tv channels so I normally come back and find him there on the strangely clubby / library furniture that causes so many arguments, flicking through the hundreds of channels until he settles on a movie that he’s already seen, or some very dangerous looking wrestling we watched this morning or car racing. He drinks protein drinks and gave me a Stanley knife this evening as a present, ‘you’ll never know when you’ll need one…’ Also, quietly, very quietly, he is a born again Christian. Mark, the other one, told me that on the way back from the flea markets as it was starting to rain. I don’t know why or if he is really ‘born again,’ he is not very old. I don’t think he ever fell or died (?) or suffered anything needing rebirth but there it is. He hasn’t said anything yet, but he did invite me to a church in Brooklyn one Sunday to hear the choir.

Mark is more complicated. He is older, maybe around 40 or something. Do you become more complicated just because you get older? Then simpler? He is a photographer but he’s done other things under the vague word of designer. It’s a bit like producer. “I’m a producer.” Mark is from Queens and when he was young and he got ill his mum would heat up some orange juice on the stove and make him and his brothers and sisters drink it and then climb under the covers and not come out. How they sweated! But they got better. Mark eats eggs and whipped up vegedrinks of spinach and watermelon and other virtuous, gritty things. Next to Matt’s mixed diet of protein drinks and extraordinary powermeals – breakfast this morning was scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon and cinnamon toast – enough to make your eyes disappear into your head with the rush of it – my food looks quiet in the fridge. Maybe Mark’s food and drink is why he looks so young and lithe. More questionable are his clothes. I’ve only seen him in one outfit: brown boots, white vest and black pinstripe trousers which fan out at the bottom as the seams split before safety pins keep them in check. I like to think Mark has several copies of this outfit but really I fear that he doesn’t. He seems very clean though – he insists on a scrubbed kitchen to prepare his scrupulous diet – the habits must extend. Mark has lived in Paris and Japan and spent time in Russia. “I’ve got to get out of this country,” he said the other day. He has worked for Donna Karan and designed knitwear and now he takes photos (good ones I’ve seen them) of models who occasionally come round to the apartment, handily situated as it is in the west village and above a sex shop called Tic Tac Toe which has a big pink sign. Next door is Birthday Suit and across the road are some tattoo parlours. Today I'm on a bus trip around some ugly neighbourhoods in Brooklyn. Yesterday I had a wierd conversation with a pastor from the Pentecostal Church of Chile.