IN THE EARLY 80s, New York City's Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgender sex workers, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. Michael Backus was newly arrived to the city when he began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man fresh out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. But he was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might actually entail, understood that writers lived in New York.