The only thing that was in our apartment when we moved in was a large old rolltop writing desk, which became my home.

I sat at that desk for weeks on end drawing and writing and vanishing into my own little world. It was left there by the deceased previous tenant who happened to be the poet laureate of the Lower East Side.

There’s something magical about the desk. I fixed it up with an inordinate number of screws and old nails that I’d found around the place just to hold the thing together long enough to survive the next deadline.

The floors in the apartment are warped and angle towards the middle of the room which meant I had to tether the desk to the wall with a bolt and some twine that I found on Avenue B. If that twine snapped, the whole desk would have tipped over and crushed me. A writer’s death.

This is an excerpt from NewYorkCartoons