“Goodbye and Good Luck” was originally published in The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) and is currently most readily available in The Collected Stories of Grace Paley (Virago).

In my twenties, I had a secret friend. We'll give him a quick name, say Jack. This was a lot of years ago, back in the early 1960s. Those days, the radio was full of Petula Clark singing “Downtown,” where, the song promised, “Everything's waiting for you.” I don't know if everything was what I expected when I took the D-train south to Greenwich Village to visit Jack, but I know this, he gave me a lot. Taught me things—new language, other foods—told me stories. Once I started making the trip to see him, I never wanted to stop.

He was somewhat older than me but not much. He seemed older … partly, I think, because he was Jewish, born and raised in Brooklyn. These things gave him—to my conflicted Southern mind—an exotic kind of authority and a high level of culturally earned wisdom. I was the one with the formal education. I'd graduated from college; he'd barely gone. But he'd read more, had firmer opinions. He couldn't believe I'd grown up in Mississippi and hadn't read Faulkner, even though I went to college in the very town where, at that time, the great man yet lived.

Those days, being a writer wasn't on my mind the way it had been in high school. Now that I was grown up, I wanted to be an actor. (I had some splashy ideas.) Jack was an actor. Mondays—his night off from a bartending job—he taught a late-night class upstairs in a rehearsal studio in the theater district. I attended a few classes, did some scenes, and so in the beginning Jack was my teacher and in a lot of ways I remained in the learner's position—like a hopeful first-grader with a new lunch pail—from then on.

Because he worked at night and I was free afternoons, our schedules gave us the opportunity to be together, and once or twice a week for a long time we were.