From the Steam Room

by Robert Nichols

New York City is on the verge of collapse, its fading hopes of a bailout linked to the fortunes of ConPol, the city's on-again, off-again electric company.
Enter Helix Glowlight, chairman of the Municipal Rescue Corporation. Equal parts cynic and romantic, Glowlight enlists the aid of longtime friend Roderick McBladder, president of the Global Bank, in engineering a loan to salvage the failing metropolis. Glowlight's lover, a saucy professional handball player named Carmencita, draws the two men into New York's lively Puerto Rican community even as their financial maneuvers bring them face to face with international banking scandals and gunboat diplomacy. Careening from the earthy to the esoteric, Glowlight and McBladder meanwhile lead double lives in poetry, seeking in verse the meaning and order that othewise elude them. "When the sharks get too close to the boat," Helix writes to Roderick, "...I beat them down with poems."
Stunningly surreal and yet touchingly real, From the Steam Room offers a hilarious look at the lunacy that fuels the world economy, both above and underground. "With the savvy of a New York cab driver," writes Bell Chevigny, "Robert Nichols crosses borders of passions, peoples, and genres."

232 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1993

About the author

American author, poet, playwright, and landscape architect. He was married to Grace Paley.