## The Outsider

## A Sketch

### by Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe


I always wonder what happened to the homeschoolers who were raised,
like I was, without a religion to give them a place in life. For a
while New York City was full of them: children of artists, anarchists,
and other bohemians, children with odd names and interests. Many were
“unschooled”, given free rein to play in the park or to do whatever
else interested them. Even for the ones who were given some kind of
formal education the idea of spending eight hours a day confined with
hundreds of other kids to a massive brick building was horrifying.
It didn’t occur to them to respect authority, and they didn’t form
groups easily—they stuck to their families. Think of people like that
trying to find their way in a place like New York, a city of ruthless
competition whose honest slogan might be “if you can’t make it here,
there are plenty of other people who can”. Even the hungry young
people who flock to the city from all over the world knowing they’ll
have to be willing to do anything to succeed there, knowing how to
make connections, knowing to respect authority when it’s to their
advantage, find New York a tough nut to crack. What does a city-bred
kid without those advantages do?

At least a decade before me, Karl (as I’ll call him) was such a
kid. He didn’t move to New York with a dream and a gleam in the eye;
he had the misfortune to be born there and to find it closed to him.
He really lived it.

When I met Karl he was a tallish, 25-year-old man with big limbs
and a tendency toward chubbiness. He had a light olive complexion,
a round chin, broad forehead, and heavy, dark eyelids. He slicked
back his wavy black hair with scented castor oil and was fond of
Versace cologne, which he bought cheap in the wholesale district.
He had a proud, splay-footed walk, a loud, baritone voice, and a
broad smirk that suggested hidden laughter. His Italianate clothes
and swagger might put you in mind of a smart-alec real estate agent,
or maybe a small-time pizzeria owner with aspirations to Mafioso-hood.

Karl coached at his family’s fencing club in Chelsea. He had been
a successful fencer himself, though he never reached his brother’s
Olympian level of achievement. By the time I met him his competing days
were over and he was happier tinkering with fencing equipment or the
club’s arcade machines than he was giving lessons. He’d turned a small
office next to the fencing strips into his workshop, where he’d solder
broken body cords or attach wires and tips to electric fencing blades.
He’d inherited a distrust of authority and a self-reliant mindset
from his parents. They were flea-market entrepreneurial types who
had drifted around the Northeast, homeschooling Karl and his brother
through the 1980s when the practice wasn’t entirely legal. Truant
officers were fairy-tale bogeymen for homeschoolers of my generation,
but they were a real threat for Karl. His various homes had received
official visits, during which he’d hid in his parents’ van.

Just as trees in cold regions lose their branches to yearly snows, so
school-going children have their interests pared down by the weight
of popular opinion. Homeschooling had shielded Karl. He had been a
chubby teenager with solitary interests, including some—comics and
anime—that would’ve been rich sources of mockery in public school.
He also loved crafts, especially leather working and electronics. He
knew a lot about rock music and film, though nobody knew where he’d
got his knowledge; these were the pre-Wikipedia days, and Karl didn’t
read much anyway. He acted like he’d taught himself everything he knew.

His weaknesses were obvious. With young fencers like me he was
brash and endlessly sarcastic. He was determined that they look up
to him and would make an ass of himself seeing that they did. When a
group of middle-school kids were gathered around one of his favorite
arcade games, he’d barge in, commanding them to shove over so that he
could demonstrate his superior skill. He swore constantly, told lewd
stories, and was generally a bad influence on his young students.
(And young students were about all he had, being by no means the
club’s most popular coach.) The kids thought Karl outrageous. Some
of the teenagers, detecting weakness, treated him with mild contempt.

Karl’s opinions were dogmatic in the extreme when it came to music
and movies. As far as he was concerned my taste was terrible and
badly in need of remedy. One day I brought my binder of music CDs
to the club. It didn’t contain much beyond Paul Simon’s _Graceland_,
an Elvis Presley greatest-hits anthology which I’d received as a gift,
Leonard Bernstein’s 1964 recording of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and,
for some reason, most of the Gipsy Kings discography. Karl grabbed
the binder and ran through the pages quickly.

“There’s only one CD in here that isn’t garbage,” he said, snapping
the binder shut.

“Yeah, I know, the Beethoven, right?” I hung my head and tried to come
up with some excuses. “I need to get more classical, but I don’t know
which CDs to buy.”

“No.” He flipped through the binder again, held it up, and pointed
at a disc. “The Elvis.”

If you shared Karl’s interests, though, he was generous with more than
just his opinions. When I began learning guitar, he brought me a stack
of guitar magazines and a library of his favorite albums, nearly 50 of
them, which I was to return to him only after I’d carefully studied
each one. He brought his own guitar to the club to play with me. It
was an Ibanez single-pickup electric with a beautiful teal sunburst
and a stingray-leather strap that Karl had made himself. He taught
me a lot about electric guitar, like how to use a flexible pick to
play the high-speed strumming solo from Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue”.
In his rare wistful moods he’d talk of getting away from his family
and the city to live on the road as a wandering trucker-guitarist.
The details were vague; it was clearly an old dream which he hadn’t
taken seriously in years.

In December 2003 his family was evicted from their fencing club.
They hadn’t paid their $26,000-a-month rent for over six months, a
fact which they’d characteristically kept secret. I got a notice to
show up and claim my stuff from the locked-up club, and waited almost
an hour in the rain with one of the coaches, a quiet Korean, for the
collection agents to let us in. The club, which had always been brightly
lit and noisy with shouts and clashing blades, was dark and silent.

It was a shock with elements of betrayal. Up until then I had been
working for Karl informally, repairing equipment in exchange for spare
parts. He’d been as tight-lipped to me as the rest of his family.
So much for friendship, or at least apprenticeship, I thought. From
what little I knew of people at that time, it didn’t seem likely
we’d have anything further to do with each other. But a month or so
after the club was shut down Karl called me up and suggested lunch.
Brash and jocular, he offered no explanation. I was short of friends
and needed something to do now that the fencing club was gone. Why
bring up a sore subject? I figured we’d get around to it at lunch.

We met at Great New York Noodletown, near Canal Street, on a damp day in
January. We talked about music and I began to get the awkward feeling
that I had, for example, waited too long to admit that I didn’t know
somebody’s name. From Karl’s unassailable, big-brotherly attitude, you
would’ve thought nothing had happened; he never mentioned the club,
let alone the eviction. I knew that he was smoothly dodging the
issue and was quite sure I considered this dodging ungentlemanly.
But again, my friend count was close to nil and there wasn’t much
for a homeschooled teenager to get up to during the school week. We
started getting lunch and wandering around Chinatown regularly.

Karl knew dozens of odd holes in the wall throughout lower Manhattan
and seemed absolutely confident in situations that I had as yet no
idea how to handle. He joked with street merchants who spoke only a few
words of English. Out of pure curiosity he would order mysterious items
at Vietnamese restaurants, dishes he could only order by pointing to
the menu listing. His street sense, that ability of city dwellers to
sense danger from the smallest hints, was impeccable. We were about to
board an uptown-bound 1 train one day when Karl put a hand on my
shoulder and steered me to a different car. Once we’d taken our seats,
I told him that of course I’d seen the shabby, tipsy-looking guy taking
up three seats in the other car, but hadn’t thought he looked dangerous.

Karl was a closer observer. “He had a glass bottle,” he said.

I shrugged. “So?”

“So nine times out of ten he sits there and drinks. The tenth time
he breaks the bottle and stabs somebody with the neck.”

But nothing impressed me more than his ease and purported ability with
women. (Or, as I called them before I started hanging out with Karl,
“girls”.) At the sedate age of 26, Karl had a steady girlfriend and
the air of a man who’d known every good-looking woman in New York
before settling down with the cream of the crop. He had stories
(many of which I now think were invented or picked up second-hand)
involving acts and situations I could only fantasize about.

And yet this swaggering, street-wise, self-reliant ladies’ man lived
with his mother and father in a basement apartment in south Chelsea.
For spending money he sold collectible toys on eBay. He was cagey in
the extreme about his finances, telling people he “worked at a bank”
to put off uncomfortable questions. Once, fretting about ways to
make a living, I asked him seriously how much he made off eBay. He
delivered the preposterous figure of $90,000 a year, smirking so as to
make it clear he’d made it up on the spot. “You don’t need to know my
business.” He seemed to suspect everyone, friend and stranger alike,
of laughing at him behind his back.

Karl loved to be copied, just as he hated to be criticized. It
was a fine thing when I got into blues and country music, but he
was less than pleased when I failed to appreciate his beloved ’80s
rock. “Blues is fine, but at some point you want something more.” I
acquiesced but mumbled something about not being sure it was Sammy
Hagar I wanted. Karl never stopped bringing me albums, though, and
he did pay attention to my opinions before shooting them down. (He
was, for example, distinctly hurt when I suggested George Harrison
wasn’t much of a lead guitarist.) At some point he learned how to copy
laserdiscs (his favorite video format) to DVD, and began bringing me
movies to watch as well. He had a special fondness for Toho monster
movies, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, Sergio Leone’s westerns, and
anything with Lee Marvin. One movie that bothered him was _Easy Rider_.
After I watched the copy he’d made me, we had a talk about the ending,
in which the main characters played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper
are gunned down by rednecks. He seemed really shaken by it. “I don’t
understand that hatred, you know?” he said, shaking his head. His
parents had been hippies, of a sort. “They weren’t hurting anybody.
They just wanted to live differently.”

This was the Bloomberg era and the city was changing quickly even by New
York standards. Karl couldn’t stand it or the people who flocked into
town to see the worst of the place. One afternoon I met up with him
after he’d been standing around waiting on some corner for a while.
“Death and destruction!” he sang as I walked up. He mimed playing a
guitar solo. “Death and destruct-tion!”

“What’s this?” I said. “You’re writing songs now?”

He played some more guitar and repeated the chorus. “All the people
wanna see is—death and destruction!”

Later it came out that, while waiting, he’d been asked by several
tourists how to get to Ground Zero. “There’s all this stuff to do
in the city and they come here to see a hole. Death and destruction.
What the fuck is wrong with people?”

New York was hell; the country—that vague, enormous place that exists
outside the pocket universe of the city—was Karl’s utopia. “I need to
get out of this city,” he said again and again. “Away from these fucking
people. Country people aren’t like this. They’re simpler people.”

After a year and a half I’d nearly forgotten about the eviction.
Certainly Karl never brought it up, and the one time I’d asked him
about it he’d called it “a weird part of my life”, without elaborating.
Then, on a hot Saturday at the end of summer 2005, crisis hit.

We had made a general agreement to meet up for lunch, but Karl
wasn’t answering his phone. To kill time I watched one of the movies
he’d burned for me: another Japanese monster film, this one without
subtitles. It was nearly over when Karl finally called. I eagerly told
him I’d seen _Yog, Monster from Space_ and that I had indeed caught
the scene in which the light bulbs in Yog’s eyes were out. Karl’s
voice conveyed none of the gratification I’d expected for praising
one of his gift discs. I couldn’t get a straight answer when I asked
him what he’d been doing all morning, so I asked him about lunch.
He said he had work to do and couldn’t do much hanging out. If there
was an Internet café in my neighborhood, though, I could meet him there.

“It turns out I’m going to be moving,” he added.

This was a surprise. He didn’t sound at all happy about it, which,
something told me, meant it was more likely to be factual than Karl’s
usual napkin sketches for getting out of his parents’ apartment. I
knew prodding him on the details would get me nowhere, so I decided
to be strategically blithe. I said: “Wow, that’s good news, man!”

Half an hour later I met him at a news shop on Third and 12th that
doubled as a tiny Internet café. Karl shook hands tensely and didn’t
enlighten me as to why he needed a rental computer. It was a sweltering
afternoon and the store was cool and quiet. The computer desks were
set up in rows and, to the detriment of user privacy, surrounded on
all sides by magazine racks.

Karl signed in at the counter and picked out a computer. He sat down
and motioned me over.

“No, you go ahead,” I said. “Send your emails. I’ll wait.”

“Come on, dude. I want to show you something.”

Even with the place deserted I was nervous about sitting down in
front of an unpaid-for computer, so I stood awkwardly behind Karl.
He opened a Web browser and, to my horror, navigated to a porn site.

“Karl,” I whispered, “come on, not here.” I fidgeted and looked around
to see if the clerk behind the counter was watching. Karl clicked
and scrolled through pages of explicit thumbnails with contemptuous
casualness.

“Here it is. Stand still and watch this.”

He clicked a link and a small video window opened. A man, or rather
the lower half of one, was helping an East Asian woman keep track of
some money—namely, a dollar bill that he skillfully packed into her
vagina without the use of his hands. Karl watched intently, chuckling.

I was sweating and my eyes flicked back and forth between the video—it
wasn’t exactly easy to ignore—and the rest of the shop. At any moment
I expected a customer to come in and make a beeline for the magazines
behind us, or, worse, an employee to cut off Karl’s computer and kick
us out. Did they have a way to know when somebody was watching porn
on their computers?

The video was mercifully short. “Alright, enough,” I said. “I thought
you had work to do.”

Karl laughed. “Stop worrying, man. It’s not going to warp your fragile
little mind. You’ve got to understand the kind of shit that happens in
the real world.” He nodded toward the screen, where the video’s final
frame was still visible. “That’s what’s happening to me,” he said.
“I’m getting fucked the same way.”

He closed the porn site after that and opened his email. For the
next hour and a half he looked sour and said approximately nothing.
I wandered around the shop, bored, worried, and annoyed, glancing at
the magazines. Hanging around a newsstand with a taciturn Karl was
not what I’d expected to do with my afternoon. “I’ll give him five
minutes,” I grumbled to myself several times. Each time I hung around.

Finally he got up and paid for his time, then asked if I wanted to
get some lunch. Karl was still short of time, apparently, so we went
to a White Castle a block away from the news shop. It was the worst
lunch I’d ever known Karl to eat. He was nearly silent until we’d
finished our food. Finally I asked him what was bothering him.

“They might take everything I own,” he said bluntly. “Any time in
the next six months.”

I didn’t ask who “they” were. By now I’d guessed: the collection
agency had caught up with him. “What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to move in with Joan,” he said. (Joan was his girlfriend.)
“For now.”

“You OK, man?”

“Maybe.”

As we left the grimy restaurant I said something about being ready
to help.

He nodded absently and shook my hand. “See you, man.” He started to
walk away, then paused and added vehemently: “Don’t put off getting
out of your parents’ place, dude. When you turn 18, just get your
shit together and go.”

I had the distinct feeling he wasn’t talking to me.

So Karl moved out and crammed his laserdiscs, guitars, and stock of
collectibles into his girlfriend’s small, shared apartment in SoHo.
Joan didn’t seem to mind. She was an odd character who designed
clothes and occasionally sang country. She had wandered around the
US during a nomadic earlier period and was quite an individualist.
She had hard-edged opinions about poverty and would sometimes tell me
to read Ayn Rand. Karl, who had not exactly lived on his own means up
to that point, somehow escaped her censure. Since Joan was at least
15 years his senior and too intelligent to fall for his bluster, I
figured she had a genuine liking for him.

After a few months of apartment hunting they found a place in Astoria.
To get there you took the N or W train all the way to the end of
the line, then walked a few blocks past houses decorated with Greek
flags and plaster statues. It was a decent-sized apartment by New
York standards, although it was a bit shabby and shared a wall with
the landlord’s family.

Karl quickly ran into trouble with the landlord, over the usual quirks
of apartment life. Things didn’t work, those things frequently being
the radiators and hot water boiler—hardly minor matters in what was
shaping up to be a cold winter. The landlord, a stout, middle-aged
Greek, rhapsodized about the quality and expense of the work he’d
already done on the apartment. A few easy issues got fixed, but the
heating problems continued.

An experienced apartment dweller would find this neither surprising
nor particularly nefarious. But Karl was not an experienced apartment
dweller. His father, a super himself, had never taught him the art of
janitorial diplomacy. So he raged at the landlord, at the landlord’s
family, and at the (Greek) broker who had found the apartment in the
first place. But mostly he just raged. He was furious when, coming
back to the apartment from a shopping trip, he found the landlord’s
wife poking around inside. He immediately bought a door chain and
installed it, quietly, in the dead of night. The landlord saw it on
the door the next morning and demanded he remove it. Karl refused
and said he’d call the police if there were any more intrusions.
Offended, the landlord said something about not being able to repair
anything if he couldn’t get into the apartment, and that was the end
of civil communication. Like many New Yorkers Karl resorted to making
loud noises to express his feelings: he’d slam the closet door along
the shared wall four or five times, as hard as possible. He got to
be quite punctual about doing this at times when it was most likely
to be annoying. “Wake up, you Greek bastards!” he would yell.

The morning of New Year’s Day, 2006, when Karl and Joan broke their
lease and moved out, was a splendid fiasco. There was no way for us
to avoid the landlord’s family as we took things out to the moving
truck. The landlord and his wife ran out of their part of the house,
alerted by Karl’s wall-rattling wake-up call, to hurl invective at
their soon-to-be ex-tenants. I lugged boxes in silence as Karl, Joan,
and the Greeks exchanged insults. It was a crisp, freezing, holiday
morning, and the street was silent except for the shouting match. At
one point a dismayed garbage man jumped down from his truck to try
and break it up. “Whoa, whoa, people! Calm down! It’s a new year!”

So Karl and Joan settled in a quiet red-brick apartment building
in Forest Hills, where they were lucky enough to have working heat
and plumbing. The owner was a faceless management company that left
Karl in peace to set up his toys and laserdiscs. There was a roomy
bedroom in which Joan hung up a photo of Karl playing at his first
guitar recital: a scared-looking, pudgy 12-year-old bent over the
same teal Ibanez, which looked enormous in his hands.

That was about where I left Karl. By the time I turned 18 we had few
interests in common: I was listening to Bach and Schoenberg, while Karl
had developed a love of psychobilly, possibly the most obnoxious music
invented by the human species. He still brought me things to listen
to, but the “you need to listen to better music” routine was getting
old and sour. The conditions of friendship with Karl never changed:
you were supposed to (1) emulate him, and (2) never criticize him. I
finally violated the second condition one summer afternoon when Karl
threw a minor tantrum. “If you don’t want to hang out, man, we can get
together another time,” I said. He stalked off toward the F station,
heading back to Forest Hills. That was the last time I saw him.

I looked him up on the Web from time to time. He eventually moved to
Pennsylvania, presumably burning his bridges to the hated city on the
way out. On his Myspace profile he called himself a “supreme outsider”
who had never gone to school, never held a job, etc. What *had* he
done? It was impossible to tell, since he carefully obscured his
past. Eventually his social media profiles disappeared and he became
nearly lost to the Internet as well. Then, in the 2020s, he showed
up in a theatrical production somewhere in Delaware, calling himself
“a jackass of all trades.” There was a photo. The smart clothes,
thrust-out chest, and know-it-all smirk had barely changed. To all
appearances he still had the same persona: the swaggering smart-ass,
the canny, unsentimental man of the world.

But long ago, on a cold, late fall day in New York City, with rain
beginning to fall, I’d met Karl on a corner near his parents’ place
in Chelsea. He wore his plain, navy-blue, woolen watch cap (he hated
umbrellas), and gray raincoat, with plain jeans and loafers. Under
his arm he held a plain plastic bag full of discs he’d burned for me.
In true New York style he was trying to look like a businessman waiting
for a colleague, indifferent to the young denizens of New New
York who passed him by, many of them astoundingly good-looking and in
their first few years of city life. They were school kids, at heart,
effortlessly fashionable, effortlessly cynical, strutting uptown to
a wine bar, business lounge, or some other amenity provided for them
by their city—for their city it was.

Karl waited, outside, in the rain. He was not one of them.


* * *

© 2025 Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe. Released under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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