When you walk in, standing behind the counter on your left is Shahid, a very sunny and trim Pakistani man in his 50s with a thinning salt-and-pepper comb-over and a wardrobe of fresh-pressed button-down shirts in various shades of sherbet, which Shahid ate a lot of growing up in Lahore. He came here in the 1960’s as a trained accountant, but back then native New Yorkers didn’t want an enterprising Pakistani doing their taxes. So he bought the shirts, then started buying and selling businesses, and this is his latest.

It’s a narrow store, basically an aisle with merchandise on either side: everything from dog food to scented candles, cookies, handballs, cigarettes, micro cassettes, even bananas; along with hard-core pornographic magazines, Lotto tickets, a refrigerator case full of beer and another refrigerator with fresh ham, for making sandwiches. None of which Shahid can afford to enjoy, even with a substantial wholesale discount.

Because Shahid, like most Pakistanis, is a practicing Muslim: he prays five times a day–at home, before and after work, and sometimes during work, at the mosque on 96th street, which he drives to when business is slow, leaving his partner to mind the store alone. And as Shahid will tell you, Muslims are forbidden to look at pornography, and to gamble and to drink alcohol and to eat pork. Which together, according to Shahid, represent about 25% of his business at the Columbus Avenue Food Corp. & Convenience Store. Adding up, in my secular mind, to a spiritual conundrum.

So one day, while buying my newspaper, I ask Shahid, very matter-of-factly, “Shahid, how can you be a Muslim and sell these things?”

Shahid smiles his wily smile, and says, “Who wants to be an extremist? We all know what they do.” And he looks over at a stack of New York dailies sitting on the floor, with pictures of the latest turmoil in the Middle East, which sit alongside racks of pornographic magazines covered in stickers that cover the open mouths and genitals of the cover girls, and in a few cases, aroused cover guys. “Show me a passage in the Bible where it’s okay to take your clothes off in front of a camera,” says Shahid. “All the religions are the same.”

Everyone, in other words, bends the rules. And those who don’t…well, they end up as suicide bombers or with stickers on their privates. While the rest of us try to make a living in the space between; this, evidently, is how Barely Legal, Boar’s Head, Budweiser, Powerball, and the Koran go together.

“So you don’t feel a split,” I ask Shahid, “between what you believe in and what you do for a living?”

This is a question I’ve struggled with for many years in my own life. I write speeches for pharmaceutical executives who work for corporations that make products I would never buy, and in many cases, think others shouldn’t buy either. Things like antihistamines and erectile dysfunction pills that often are only marginally better than placebos, or worse: they can mask underlying causes like a bad diet or a sedentary lifestyle that should probably not be masked, and require the often-painful deaths of thousands of laboratory animals to make it into the mouths of humans. Who give me the means to, among other things, buy my paper from Shahid. Hence, my secular spiritual conundrum: I don’t believe in what I do. Yet, I do it. It seems like a very vicious circle sometimes, and I want to know how Shahid has resolved it.

“This is America,” says Shahid. “The land of many people getting along.” The same observation, perhaps, that a Lexus dealer makes when he sees a 16-year-old boy walk in the showroom holding $50,000 in cash, looking to buy a new set of wheels.

“But what goes through your mind, Shahid, when you’re looking at those magazines?” I say. “Don’t you ever just want to sneak a peek?”

“It’s like an evil person,” says Shahid. “When you see them, you can’t let them in.” Not unlike what I say to myself every time I take input for a speech. “Now please excuse me,” he says. “I have to get back to work.”

Meaning, among other things, that as far as Shahid is concerned, perhaps I am evil. I am, after all, introducing thoughts that, were Shahid to let them influence his behavior, would shrink his business in a stroke by 25%—which is, in a word, Un-American. As President Wilson (or his speechwriter) remarked many years ago, the business of America is business, and you’ll go out of business the moment you think it isn’t. Which is why often times it pays not to think. Or maybe, you just need to be an immigrant to feel at home.

The problem is, I can’t afford not to. Because I am my lifestyle, the most important, most expensive part being my coop on Central Park West; movie stars, moguls, and hyperventilating me.

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a coop. I was raised by my mom to believe I could be anything in life—as long as it paid well. So I thought I’d be the president of the United States. Or an NFL quarterback. Or a rock star. Then when I got to college, a Nobel Prize- winning writer—who I read somewhere got a prize of $500,000. I’d been writing lots of papers at the time and this seemed like a logical career path.

So when I graduated from college, I rented a little apartment with my girlfriend on the Upper West Side and started writing marketing speeches for pharmaceutical executives who were selling drugs for things like seasonal allergies, and then a few years later as drugs got more sophisticated and I moved up the speechwriting food chain, erectile dysfunction and schizophrenia—to subsidize me writing Nobel Prize-winning stories at night about, well, nothing—because I was too tired at night to write about anything much but erectile dysfunction and schizophrenia.

Until after years of sporadic struggling, and listening to my mom advise me every Sunday night on long-distance life planning chats that “Dreams are important. But renting is for nothings,” I decided I wanted to be a something, and I bought a one-bedroom coop in a fancy building on Central Park West.

When mom visited it, she proclaimed, “This is something. But isn’t it a little small, honey?”

I said, “Space is money, mom.”

She said, “I see no reason why a bright boy like you can’t double your income every year.” Never having worked a paying job in her life.

This sounded like an excellent financial plan to me, so to get a jump on my future of infinitely-doubling wealth, I got straight to work doubling my monthly nut. I bought the studio next door to my one-bedroom, then combined the two spaces and renovated everything. Then subtracted my wife’s salary when she stopped working to have a baby. Then added the baby, and then added another. Then sent the first one to private school. Until I found that I had stopped even trying to write stories, in order to write speeches to write checks in a coop where I worked, ate, slept and, on occasion, asked myself: Who are you?

The answer was, the coop. In the same building as Keanu Reeves’s. Neo is my neighbor. And I am his. For another 90 days, at least—at which point eviction proceedings begin for non-payment of maintenance.

Which is why I’m sitting at my desk, hyperventilating. So I get up and walk to the lobby to get some air and get my mail, which today includes a letter marked “Personal” and addressed to “Resident” from a neighborhood real estate broker; when you are your coop, brokers are your friends. I open the letter, and it begins, “Dear Resident: Do you know what you’re worth?” going on to describe how the rise in real estate values has quite possibly made me worth more than I realize—a value that she, my friendly neighborhood real estate broker, would be glad to determine with a no-cost appraisal of my apartment.

And that very Sunday, as I’m reading the New York Times real estate ads—comparing my worth to everybody else’s on the Upper West Side—I see an ad for our apartment. The broker had come over, talked to my wife, and listed it without ever asking us: a bold ploy to win our business that evidently is successful with the bold residents moving in to fancy buildings like mine.

Which reminds me of another reason I want to sell my apartment: I loathe my fellow residents.

Which is also a reason to stay: to make them see how loathsome they are.

Where I come from, the whole point of being alive is to win—money and arguments, the more dysfunctional, the better. For example, last Christmas, my next door neighbor—a 42-year-old female dot-com tycoon–submitted a formal complaint against me for storing my personal property in a public space: Exhibit A, a time-stamped digital photograph of my Christmas tree leaning against my front door while I filled up the Christmas tree stand in my living room with water. Now, some people might ignore such a complaint, or knock on the neighbor’s door and offer her eggnog. I on the other hand decided that the proper response was to run for the board of directors of the coop, on a platform of exposing neighbors like the dot-com tycoon as loathsome—notwithstanding that everyone moving into the building is just like her, and I have neither the time nor the interest to serve on the board of directors, and moreover if I sell my apartment I won’t even be here.

So I’m sitting in my home, reading the ad in the Sunday Times and seeing my coop—my self—for sale, for the first time, daydreaming: what would it feel like to let go…and be someone else? To care about things other than winning arguments and contests for money and approval that make me hyperventilate?

Which leads me to call up another real estate broker: a low-key guy who is aggressively anti-aggressive and who tells my wife and I that he hates people like the dot-com tycoon next-door more than we do; he understands us completely as customers. And he comes over with a photographer, and the next Sunday our apartment is for sale again, with pictures.

A few weeks later, sitting on my desk is a signed Contract of Sale from a would-be buyer, waiting only for me to counter-sign and send it back. It’s my birthday. So I take the day off and mull it over—staring out the window at a view that I may never again be able to afford and that I can’t afford now—unless, once and for all, I abandon any hope of doing work that I care about, and instead commit the rest of my life to trying to double my income. Like I was raised to do.

That night, my wife throws me a little birthday party with a few friends on the roof deck of our building. It looks out over Central Park and Fifth Avenue and midtown, so just standing there makes you feel like a movie star. Across the street, you can see a terrace filled with pink bougainvillea–a terrace that used to belong to my friend Ted, who sold it so he could do more in life than simply work to live there. It’s a beautiful summer night, so everyone lines up at the edge of the roof to watch the sunset.

Then my friend Andy jokes, “What DO you do for a living?” Not knowing that I bought my coop at the bottom of the market, and that I’m about to declare personal bankruptcy. Why spoil the party?

My friend John says, “This place is incredible.” Which feels like he’s saying, “You are incredible.”

I say, “I’m thinking of selling it, and living someplace cheaper.” Then I tell my friend Ted, who’s staring at his old bougainvillea, “Please say you’re happier now than when you were living there, above your means.”

“Absolutely,” says Ted. “When I don’t think about that terrace.”

A few hours later, for the first time in memory—which is usually squeezed blank by the crushing weight of my overhead–I have a dream. I’m sitting on the face of a dark mountain—about halfway up, which is where I live in my building—holding on to a ledge, frozen in terror, trying to slide down without falling. Pebbles are rolling out from under my shoes, into the abyss. When suddenly, from behind me, it’s Puff Daddy: white warm-up suit, sunglasses, bling. He was up at Keanu’s place. “This the way down?” says Puff. I say, “Yes.” And off he goes—like a blingy mountain goat; this is his territory. Then I see a cave in the side of the mountain with a young boy in it, who is also afraid to move. I say, “I can help you,” lying—I need help myself. When bougainvillea-Ted appears and says, “There’s an easy way down…over here.” And he takes one boy’s hand and I take the other, and the three of us start walking to Lincoln, the president I wanted to be growing up, who was shot for taking the road less traveled, before giving his name to a street in Brooklyn where my wife and I have been looking at affordable rentals filled with people my mom might call nothings, which in my dream feels like something much, much closer to home.

Which, like lipstick and loveliness at McDonald’s, is rare. I don’t ogle women for breakfast generally, or for lunch or dinner. Ogling just makes me hungry for yet another vice–one not on the menu; I’m married. And even if I weren’t, the way I look at women–through married, cigarette-smoking, Sausage-McMuffin-eating eyes—does not make women look back. It makes them look away. Which makes me feel bad about myself. Leading to even more cigarettes and Sausage McMuffins to numb my sorrow and shame. Which makes me feel—and look—even worse, with phlegm-filled coughs, smoke-dried skin and Sausage McMuffin love handles. Making it even less likely I’ll attract a woman who wants to be ogled. And around and down I go, one vice descending into another, on a death-spiraling cycle of desire, rejection, tobacco, pork, decay and self-loathing, all beginning with looking at what I shouldn’t have for breakfast.

So I turn from the lips in the mirror and actually look at the menu, as though I might order something other than a Sausage McMuffin with Egg. Like today is the day I change my personality. Like I’m not me and this isn’t McDonald’s. Each breakfast item has its own number: 1. Egg McMuffin; 2. Sausage McMuffin with Egg; 3. Sausage Biscuit; and so on, through 8–variations on an unhealthy theme. No chance for change here, it would seem. Even worse, when I do the breakfast math–eight breakfast items minus one breakfast order equals seven things I won’t be eating for breakfast—I’m left disappointed, and angry, and most of all, paralyzed. I want all eight, and I can’t decide which one to order. The story of my life, in a meal.

Ordinarily, when I can’t make up my mind, I light a cigarette to fill the time I spend making up my mind so that once I’ve made my mind up it seems to me I went with my gut—that I didn’t waste the last five minutes simmering in an agonizing stew of smoking and thinking. Otherwise, how could I live with myself? But I can’t smoke at McDonald’s. So I can’t think. If this breakfast is going to be the first meal of my new life, I’ll have to give in to thoughtless appetite, and act.

“I’ll have the Number 8!” I say, over the din of hungry customers. “To stay!” The Deluxe Big Breakfast, which essentially is numbers 1 through 7 combined, for the man who wants to eat everything and give up nothing: sausage, eggs, a biscuit instead of an English muffin, hash browns, pancakes, butter, syrup, jelly, cream, sugar, coffee and orange juice. About 5000 calories. Two and half day’s worth of food, based on the FDA’s recommended intake for an active man, much less a sedentary smoker sitting in a molded plastic seat eating 5000 calories in 10 minutes. Which is maybe more food than I need. But I figure I can smoke it off on the sidewalk after breakfast.

I pick up my tray and start looking around for an empty seat. When, brimming with confidence, I decide to sit near the lipstick girl. I had the courage to step outside my breakfast box and say no to the Sausage McMuffin and order the Deluxe Big Breakfast. Why stop there? Maybe she’ll see that guts and a gut can go together.

So I take the table facing her profile and, tactfully, begin eying her like a desperate married man aching for a stranger’s attention. She’s staring straight ahead, still looking in her compact, allowing me to see for the first time that her nose is a little big. Actually it’s really big. But so is mine, and love–even between strangers–must contain some form of acceptance. I forgive her, and begin lifting the Styrofoam top insulating my pancakes. When I realize–just in time!–that eating a Deluxe Big Breakfast is not seductive. Who wants to flirt with a man who smells like fake maple syrup? With a man who eats anything at McDonald’s? I need to stop this cycle of self-loathing now and give myself a fighting chance to attract a woman’s interest.

So I slide my tray away and put the cream in my coffee and open up my New York Times, like I’m an intellectual and McDonald’s is a café—notwithstanding the “No Loitering” sign on the wall and the uniformed security guard monitoring the customers, especially the homeless guy sitting in the corner with a tabletop full of empty sugar packets. Everyone else here has a New York Post or coupon circulars or a paper tray insert. They’re reading about which horse won at Belmont or what cell phone’s on sale or how the new McGriddle is available for a limited time only. For all I know, they may not even be able to read. Versus me: a guy who doesn’t need pictures with his food, who for that matter doesn’t need food, and at a restaurant no less. How many guys at McDonald’s can say that? Talk about will power! Surely she’ll be able to see I’m at the top of the fast food chain.

Finally, ready to present my best self, I take a sip of coffee and look up from the Arts & Leisure section.

The lipstick girl folds her compact and turns her head to look at me.

Our eyes meet.

A whiff of breakfast meat unfurls in the air.

And I see the same haunted, Sausage McMuffin-eating eyes that are in my head, or in Ronald McDonald’s: she is a he. Only with long hair, great legs and a short spring skirt on—and a lipstick in his hand instead of a Sausage McMuffin with Egg. And unlike most men, and most women, he wants me.

Which turns me into a she: into someone who does not want him. Whereupon I set down Arts & Leisure, grab my Deluxe Big Breakfast and start shoveling pancakes into my mouth, to look as unattractive as possible. Just like a woman, I make believe he doesn’t exist.

Until I get a few pancakes under my belt and it occurs to me, just like a woman–a low self-esteem woman—there’s no such thing as bad attention. As long as it’s in public, and there’s a uniformed security guard around in case someone gets the wrong idea—a McMuffin-eating transvestite, for example—it’s okay to flirt. So I look up from my stack. And down. And up and down. Coyly darting back and forth between my lipstick guy and my Deluxe Big Breakfast–which at this point I’m picking at, just like a woman. Not wanting to lead him on. But also not wanting to turn him off. Just wanting him to want me. Without having to want him back.

And it seems to me, a guy could get used to this.

Until I start to feel a little guilty and a little sorry for the other guy. Because I’m a guy, and I know exactly how he feels—apart from what it’s like to wear lipstick and a skirt.

So I look up one more time, to give him a friendly, manly “I’m okay, you’re okay” smile; to end the Deluxe Big Breakfast on a human, humane note. But I should have known, knowing myself, it was too late. I’d toyed with him long enough.

He stands up and straightens his skirt. Then he walks out the door, one hand reaching for his cigarettes—basically what I do after someone rejects me, except he keeps them in his purse.