Marc Held Quoted In NYT, Featuring Augusten Burroughs
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New York Times: Marc Held, Partner, Held & Hines, LLP Quoted In Article with Client and Award Winning Author Augusten Burroughs
Augusten Burroughs, the gothic serial memoirist, has found a home in a bankrupt building in Battery Park City. Naturally, he loves it.
Published: October 21, 2009
“THIS is the first apartment I’ve ever owned,” Augusten Burroughs said. “Wouldn’t you know it would be in a building where the developer went bankrupt and fled the country?”
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Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
Mr. Burroughs designed his apartment around his king-sized bed.
It does seem an oddly appropriate backdrop for the gothic serial memoirist, who turns 44 on Friday. While it is not clear if Yair Levy, the developer of Mr. Burroughs’s new home at 225 Rector Place, a condominium in Battery Park City, actually fled the country, it is true that the building’s ill-fated conversion process has been as dysfunctional and miserable as a tale from Mr. Burroughs’s own famously dysfunctional and miserable childhood.
Mr. Levy, the developer, has had an awful year: his other condominium, Sheffield57, which he bought for $418 million with a partner, Ken Swig, went into foreclosure in August, and last fall, Mr. Levy was charged with assaulting Mr. Swig with an ice bucket.
Still, Mr. Burroughs worried that he had brought his own bad luck to the building. Indeed, in 2005 when he built a house with his former partner, Dennis Pilsits, in Amherst, Mass., Mr. Burroughs said he installed lightning protection, “because I’m the sort of person who gets struck by lightning.” Instead, the house flooded, wrecking the place their first Christmas there. This tale and others are collected in “You Better Not Cry,” Mr. Burroughs’s seventh book, out next week, a slim handful of hapless holiday stories, including one detailing a wincingly gross tryst with an aging sidewalk Santa. (Mr. Burroughs describes him with typical pungency as “Ebola in need of a back wax.”)
But we are digressing from the horror at hand: With Mr. Burroughs’s Battery Park building now in receivership, its creditor, Anglo Irish Bank, has begun foreclosure proceedings against its developer. Meanwhile, Mr. Burroughs and the other 50-plus unit owners in the beleaguered building — all of whom endured days without heat or hot water last winter, and have been tiptoeing around a maze of live wires and drywall in their empty, unfinished halls for nearly a year — are requesting that they be included in the foreclosure proceedings, as they endeavor to wring some sort of justice from their experience.
“Not that I could sell you this place for $15 now,” said Mr. Burroughs, who paid $625,000 in cash for his studio apartment last year. But he has no regrets. On the contrary, of all the owners, he may be the happiest, despite some personal travails we will get to later. (Also, he probably has the deepest pockets here; most residents, he said, are young, first-time buyers who have sunk all their money into their apartments, which at this point they can neither sell nor refinance.)
To Mr. Burroughs, his apartment is weirdly, comfortably home. “It fits the person I am,” he said. “Not the person I’d like to be.”
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Burroughs, lanky and boyish despite the tattoos curling around his forearms, was stretched out on the king-size four-poster bed he has set smack in the middle of the apartment. Draped and swagged in a manner that would please the Libyan dictator, the bed is a sumptuous galleon and office for him. Little seating arrangements ring the tiny room, which he decorated this summer, downloading photos of art, furniture and objects found on 1stdibs, shrinking them to scale and laying them out on a floor plan using Gimp, a Photoshop-like program from Linux, the free operating system that Mr. Burroughs compared with Alcoholics Anonymous: “You can get help from total strangers anywhere in the world.”
Mr. Burroughs, who skipped college and most of high school, but did spend nine months at the Control Data Institute, he said, quoting its jingle — “Train for tomorrow’s future today!” — is something of a tech geek. Born Christopher Robison, he changed his name on his 18th birthday to Augusten Xon Burroughs, deriving his three new names thusly: Burroughs was once a manufacturer of mainframe computers; “xon” was computer-speak for “in a state of accepting input”; and “Augusten just sounded cool and modern,” he said.
“I’ve micromanaged everything here,” he said, directing a visitor to a spot on the Borge Mogensen sofa at the foot of his bed. “What do you see?”
A very nice view of the Statue of Liberty, as it happens. You can also see the shaded windows of what Mr. Burroughs said was his first Manhattan apartment, chosen because he had seen the lights of Battery Park City from a plane once and had an experience akin to Gatsby’s, gazing at the lights on Daisy’s dock. Not that he explained it that way.
“I grabbed my boss’s Marimekko blazer and said, ‘God, I want to live there,’ ” is how he put it. A serious affair with a man he nicknamed “Pighead” — which began, as careful readers of the Burroughs oeuvre will remember from “Dry,” his rehab memoir, when the two started joking around on a phone sex line — makes Battery Park City a memento mori. Pighead was George Stathakis, a Wall Street broker who worked in an office across the West Side Highway; the two met in person at the Winter Garden. Mr. Stathakis died of complications from AIDS in 1998, an event that sent Mr. Burroughs on one of his last epic benders.
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Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
The fate of the Battery Park City building is still unknown.
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Later, sober for nearly a year, he met Mr. Pilsits, who had placed a personal advertisement online. “It was all very old-fashioned,” Mr. Burroughs said. “We’d go out on dates, have dinner and then go home. Separately.”
After a year, Mr. Burroughs moved into Mr. Pilsits’s Upper West Sideapartment. The rest is publishing history: Mr. Burroughs’s first, Dickensian memoir, “Running With Scissors,” spent four years on the best-seller lists. Five books followed, each more chaotic than the last, all best sellers.
“Running With Scissors,” the movie starring Annette Bening and Gwyneth Paltrow, was released in 2006. That same year, Mr. Burroughs and his publisher, St. Martin’s Press, were sued for libel by the Turcotte family, the real-life version of the family Mr. Burroughs memorialized in “Scissors” as the Finches, into whose gothic, Grey Gardens-esque home Mr. Burroughs moved as a teenager when his mentally ill mother went off the deep end. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum in 2007.
“I have been asked for years, ‘How do you know it’s true?’ And I just do,” he said. “I write from memory. And I have my dairies.”
He added that a psychiatrist had recently diagnosed his “sensory processing disorder,” a condition of heightened physical and mental sensitivity that Mr. Burroughs claimed causes him to retain experiences more vividly than the rest of us.
In 2008, his last book, a grim depiction of his alcoholic father called “A Wolf at the Table,” was published to wildly mixed reviews. “Determinedly unfunny, awkwardly histrionic and sometimes anything but credible, it repudiates everything that put Mr. Burroughs on the map,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. His publisher said it has been his best-selling hardcover to date.
And Mr. Pilsits, who had been running a graphic design firm, began taking on more and more of the financial side of “Augusten Burroughs, the business,” a thriving and complex commercial entity comprising not just the books but also television projects and a steady schedule of college speaking engagements.
“He didn’t suddenly walk in and take over,” Mr. Burroughs said. “But he had ideas about starting an LLC and having good lawyers, and when he saw my lack of, um, excitement when discussing this topic, he just assumed the role.”
In hindsight, Mr. Burroughs rues this development. “It allowed me to remain emotionally crippled,” he said, “and it allowed Dennis to not think about what it was he really wanted to do with his life and grow increasingly dissatisfied.”
But not immediately. In 2005, he and Mr. Pilsits built a house in Amherst, next door to Mr. Burroughs’s brother, John Elder Robison, author of his own memoir about living with Asperger syndrome. (Watch for a memoir from their mother, Margaret Robison, sometime in the next year or so.) And they sold Mr. Pilsits’s apartment to buy the Battery Park City place, which they signed a contract for nearly two years ago.
Mr. Burroughs described the brokers — the “sleek creatures in Prada” — the sleek office on the main floor of the building and the seductive floor plans. But by December of last year, it was clear that something was very wrong. The brokers and their fancy office had vanished, along with all the construction workers, leaving the building looking like a war zone, said the residents’ lawyer, Marc Held. In February, residents learned the building’s bank accounts were empty, the developer was broke and the building was just days away from losing not only its staff but also basic amenities like hot water and electricity.
Local politicians began to agitate on the residents’ behalf, and receivership followed. By last month, the lobby and common areas were very nearly finished, though the fate of the building — who will buy it and what sort of redress the residents may receive — is unknown.
Yet as the building moved toward normalcy, Mr. Pilsits and Mr. Burroughs grew apart, finally splitting over the summer. And Mr. Burroughs panicked; the apartment held only an air mattress and dog beds (Mr. Pilsits has the couple’s two French bulldogs). “I told Dennis, ‘I better do this place up right away because it’s me that’s going to be living in this bankrupt mess of a building,’ ” he said.
Yet in typical Burroughs fashion, grim reality was soon transformed. Whatever you think of his source material, Mr. Burroughs is a skilled survivor, still the architect of his own very good fortune.
The last story in “You Better Not Cry” tells of the days leading up to the first Christmas in Mr. Burroughs’s and Mr. Pilsits’s house: there is the flood, the wrecked house, a flotilla of dehumidifiers and a trashed Christmas tree. By Christmas Eve, however, Mr. Pilsits has salvaged the tree and silenced the dehumidifiers.
Now, Mr. Burroughs said: “I’m here and he’s there, and we still love each other. We are closer than we’ve ever been because we are talking. I don’t know what will happen, but I know it will be O.K.”
