Esquire on Mailer

Esquire: The Last Man Standing: There's no elevator. There's no elevator at Norman Mailer's apartment. I don't mean that the elevator isn't working. I mean that he lives in a walk-up in Brooklyn Heights. He's lived there since 1962, he says, but in 1962 he wasn't eighty-three years old, as he is now, and arthritis hadn't taken out his knees like a chop block. And when I say that he lives in a walk-up, I mean that he lives all the way up, on the fourth floor of a four-floor building. And yet here comes Mailer. He's been dragging himself along on two canes, and now he hands me one-"the good one," he says, because the two canes, they're sort of dichotomous, like Mailer himself: One's plain wood, like you see old ladies using, and the other has this baronial silver knob at the end, as if he stole it off Stanford White. Then he tells me that I can go upstairs and knock on the door, and if his wife isn't there, I can go look around, because she was supposed to leave the door open when she went out.

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