Stand Together, Fall Apart

Set in New York City just before and after 9/11, “Stand Together, Fall Apart” tells the story of the ill-fated friendship between John Marion, a teenage drug dealer, and Horace “Ace” Mejeur, the Wall Street professional who believes he can reform John.

The book description above only mentions 9/11 in passing. That’s because this is not a 9/11 novel per se. Except that it is.

I worked in the Financial District in 2001 and had just arrived at my office when the plane struck the South Tower. For weeks and months afterward, I encountered the rubble of the Trade Center each day on my commute. Like so many others I have not forgotten the terrible smell—the acrid mix of burnt feldspar, concrete, rubber, and God knows what else that pervaded everywhere south of Canal Street.

Most vividly however I recall the vendors who appeared: they set up folding tables and covered them with Trade Center coffee-mugs and Twin Towers replicas and Osama: Wanted Dead or Alive t-shirts. One day a vendor approached me with a set of 3x5 color photos of the ruins all in plastic flip book. He didn’t speak at all at first—didn’t need to. His pictures said everything. He offered to sell them to me. I walked away without saying what I really thought of him.

I didn’t begin this novel till long after the ruins were cleared and the more ghoulish vendors disappeared. Writing this felt necessary as an artistic purge. But I wasn’t sure whether or not I was just another goddamn vendor using catastrophe for my own gain. However, with revision the events of 9/11 fell into the background and this became a story about friendship and trust and what you owe to the people you care about.

So why am I serializing this material now? For all the work I gave to it over the years, “Stand Together” is a mere bantam weight. It’s just under 120 pages in manuscript form. Consequently, it’s got little appeal to publishers who want a novel to be a certain length. My own agent has encouraged me to concentrate on other, longer projects.

Yet I am tired of having the manuscript on my desk, figuratively speaking; almost a decade has passed since the rubble settled, and it feels like the right time to push this story out once and for all, too. And so, here it is—or will be soon.

In closing, I want to mention that while writing this I benefited greatly from the insight and suggestions of friends and fellow writers from Columbia’s MFA program. To all of you — and there are quite a few — I want to issue a heartfelt thanks. The final text bears the fingerprints of all the help you have given.

Come back shortly for the first chapter.

—BV

P.S., if you really can’t wait—yeah, right—you can download a copy of the complete novel from Lulu.com right now.