The Trouble Boy, page 2
I wasn’t sure what to say. It was pathetic. “I’m sorry,” I offered.
“No, it was okay. I outed him the next day by writing anonymous emails to a few of his friends.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. This guy was the Joe McCarthy of Princeton. “How long had you been dating?”
“Quite a while, actually. Almost six weeks.” He sipped his martini. “How about you? Are you single?”
I nodded.
“This is so cool! You’re like the first person I’ve met in New York who really has my background, you know?” He grinned at me, a little drunk, as if certain I would say the same thing.
“I guess so.” I wasn’t interested in playing into his class-conscious act.
“So, do you want to go somewhere?” he asked me.
It was this easy, sometimes. But I didn’t think I wanted to do anything with Jamie. He wasn’t attractive enough to be a one-night stand, and he was too spastic to be a boyfriend. Though I hadn’t been with anyone in over a month, I thought Jamie could be a friend. Experience had always shown me the best way to meet cute guys was to get to know their less cute friends.
“I should be getting home,” I said.
He looked disappointed, but not surprised.
Jamie gave me his home, work, and cell numbers, along with his email. After considering it for a moment, I decided to risk it and give him my home number. He walked me out to the street and I hailed a cab. We hugged.
“Wow, it was really amazing meeting you,” he said. “I hope we can, you know, get together soon.” I was sure I saw the beginning of tears in his eyes.
“I’m sure,” I said, though I wasn’t. As I got into the cab, he stood there on the street watching me, forlorn, as if among New York’s entire twentysomething population, I was his only hope for a healthy relationship.
The next day, I checked out the CityStyle site. It was a hip online guide, the perfect next step in my career as a writer. I found the job listing for the position of nightlife editor and put together a package of clips, including several pieces from years past uncovering what I thought were major cultural trends, phenomena like drag kings and Japanese anime-inspired fashion.
At the end of the week, I was sitting in the office of Sonia Chang, editrix-in-chief of CityStyle.com. She wore a slim pants suit with a designer tank top and blue contact lenses that made her eyes appear unnaturally bright. She had on just enough eyeliner to look like she had stepped out of a Gucci ad. I had to admit, I was afraid of her.
“So you’re just out of college,” she said, her gaze cutting right through me. “What makes you think you’re right for this job?”
As she tapped her pen on the desk, my heart started racing.
“I’ve done my fair share of nightlife reporting.” There, that was good: confident, direct.
“But are you really in with the whole scene? I mean, the writers we have working for us live and breathe what they do. Fashion, food, nightlife, that’s their thing. I need to know what qualifies you above the other people I’ve got lined up here. Some of them have been doing this stuff for years.”
“I’ve been going out in the city since I was seventeen. Half the doormen in the city know me by name. Hell, I’ve even slept with some of them,” I said. I had actually only had a one-night stand with a club kid who occasionally promoted at Kurfew, but the doorman line seemed like it would get Sonia’s attention.
“That’s good. But you’ve got to be objective, you know. That’s the most important thing.” She lowered her voice. “We get a dozen press releases a day touting the hottest spot in town from these PR idiots, and they don’t know shit.” She waved her hand at the garbage heap of editorial samples that filled her office—gift bags, beauty products, party invitations, bulging press kits. “Like I’m going to let some bitch in a little black dress with a cell phone plastered to her ear tell me what’s cool.”
She paused to take a sip of her iced coffee. I smiled, and I was sure I caught the glimmer of a smile in her look back at me.
“I know editorial is pretty wary of the whole dot-com thing these days. Company doesn’t make it through its next round of financing and, poof! everyone’s laid off. I need to know that’s not a problem for you, that you can roll with the punches. I tell everyone, if you’re looking for security, this is the wrong business to be in.”
Sonia stood up and paced back and forth behind her desk. She was framed by an enormous poster from a book called The Illustrated Couple in America that featured a nude man and woman, both covered in tattoos. I was having trouble focusing on what she was saying. Was the man’s penis really tattooed or was that just a shadow?
“So what do you think?” Sonia said. “Oh, the poster gets everyone.”
I blushed. But wasn’t every writer a voyeur?
“You’re not afraid to look,” she continued. “That’s good if you’re going to be writing about nightlife.”
“What exactly is your revenue model for the site?” I asked. I could have a head for business, if I wanted to.
“We’ve got several potential buyers lined up. Large media conglomerates. We just need to make it through our next round of financing and then we’re golden. Most of our competition has already been wiped out. And we have some very high-profile investors that we can pull out as ammunition if we need to.” She paused to fix a strap on her Jimmy Choo heels. “Anyway, you would receive stock options, along with a benefits package. I would also need you to sign a confidentiality and noncompete agreement. If I pick you, I don’t want you moonlighting for Time Out or Paper.”
“What about on other topics?” Though the CityStyle offer was decent, I would still be able to use some supplementary income.
She pulled out a burgundy MAC lipstick and started applying it with the help of a small mirror. “Other topics are fine,” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Just nothing on nightlife, fashion, restaurants—you know, nothing on what we do.”
She put down the lipstick and mirror. “But frankly, if I pick you for this job, you’re not going to have the time or the energy.”
After the interview, I headed back to the small one-bedroom on East Seventh Street that I was subletting from a German woman who had moved in down the block with her rocker boyfriend. It was a third-floor walkup, with enough room for a bed, my computer, and Gus, my overweight orange and white tabby. When I moved in, the walls of my apartment had been painted a sickly eggshell white that had seen too many years of dust, pets, cigarette smoke, and rough sex. My sublettor had given me permission to paint the living room an art gallery white and the bedroom a matte midnight blue.
That week, the entire apartment was covered in drop cloths, so every time the phone rang, I would bound over to it across the slippery plastic, leaping over sticky paint trays and cans, and check my caller ID. At least twice a day, it read “Pelham Robertson,” and at least twice a day, I let it go to voice mail. It was creepy the way Jamie kept calling and not leaving a message. I was grateful to him for suggesting the CityStyle job, but I was worried about how I was expected to return the favor. More specifically, I didn’t know what to say if he propositioned me again. I always had trouble saying no.
On Monday afternoon, I picked up the phone when it rang.
I heard someone crunching on what sounded like candy. “Hi,” he finally said.
“Why do you keep calling me and not leaving a message?”
“You’re never home.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“Look, I wanted to get you in person, okay? We’re going to B Bar tomorrow night. Do you want to meet up?”
“I could do that,” I said. I hated coming off like an asshole, but Jamie seemed to encourage that kind of behavior, like a person wearing the proverbial “kick me” sign. He was a cautionary tale about the perils of appearing too eager.
“David and Alejandro and a few other people will be there,” he said, as if to sweeten the deal. “We’ll be sitting in a booth in the back room.”
My call waiting beeped. “I have to go,” I said.
It was Sonia from CityStyle.
“I hope you’re still available,” she said. I heard her take a slurp of her iced coffee.
I said I was. I couldn’t have been any more available.
“Good,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but the other chick—you know, one of those types who has her own Web site and posts everything she’s ever written on it?—didn’t show, and the guy with all the experience turned out to be pushing fifty. So, Toby—”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t disappoint me.”
I knew working at CityStyle wasn’t what my parents had in mind when they said they would support my living in New York. Since writing and editing were not the most lucrative of careers, they had agreed to cover my rent for a year. If I could sustain myself after that, I could stay in the city. If not, I would have to move back to San Francisco, live with my parents, and join my dad’s firm or find other suitable work. After living under their roof for the first fourteen years of my life, I knew that moving to San Francisco would be an enormous step backwards. I had to make it in New York.
My ultimate goal was to finish one of the four screenplays I had in progress, but that was an avocation far too dark and embarrassing to admit to anyone. These days, everyone was working on a screenplay. I had briefly considered getting into the film industry full-time—my major had been film studies—but I didn’t want to spend my time reading other people’s screenplays. I wanted to write my own. And I wanted them to be New York stories, not Hollywood fantasies.
My mother and father had viewed my goal of screenwriting as if I had announced that I wanted to become a professional potter or sell organic vegetables in Union Square. My mother was a fashion designer who owned a small couture house in San Francisco that catered to the society crowd, and her dresses were sold at Saks and Bendel’s in New York. My father owned a venture capital firm that specialized in biotechnology.
My mother’s first boutique had been written up in the New York Times when she was twenty-five; my father had made his first million just one year out of business school, after he had invested in a few choice tech stocks. Since both of my parents had prospered in their twenties, I had always been expected to as well. Their success had ingrained in me a fear of growing old too quickly, a fear of not putting my mark on the world at an early age. I wanted them to be proud of me, to respect me for the path I was choosing. Instead, I feared that they considered me a dilettante. I recognized that they were hard acts to follow, but acknowledging that didn’t make it any easier knowing that I might never reach their level of success.
It wasn’t that they were infallible, either. Though my parents had enough money, it was never as much as people thought. My father had been floating the couture house for years with the revenue from his own company. My mother refused to expand her offerings to include ready-to-wear, fragrances, or a bridge collection, and so she was both blessed and cursed with a brand that was worth more than its bottom line. A certain kind of woman would kill to own an Isabella Griffin original, but selling dresses one by one would never put us among the ranks of the Very Rich. My mother once said that if she were paid every time her dresses appeared in Vogue or W, she’d be running a New York-based fashion house by now and we’d be living on Fifth Avenue. Sometimes I wished that had happened.
CityStyle rented its small suite of offices from Ariana Richards Public Relations, a firm that had experienced a meteoric rise in the past few years. The ARPR loft was located on the fifth floor of a former sewing machine factory in Chelsea; the space had a bank of windows that looked out on a sea of fire escapes and faded advertisements from the early 1900s. We were the new sweatshop workers, the remaining dot-commers who had come to the city in hopes of a few press clips and a steady paycheck.
Though we shared the same vantage point, the employees of ARPR had different goals than we did. They lived in a world of movie premieres, nightclub openings, and dinners held in honor of bold-faced names who had been flown in for the occasion. Their leader, Ariana Richards, arrived at the office no earlier than eleven each morning, fresh from her personal trainer and blow-out, though she demanded that her employees show up promptly at nine. Our workday didn’t start until ten, but under the steely gaze of Sunny Diebenstahl, Ariana’s Teutonic office manager, we always felt late.
Though the offices made our operation look slick, the truth was that we were second-class citizens. Visitors to the CityStyle offices were directed by Ariana’s receptionist with a weary “They’re back there,” and a wave of her manicured nails. Since Ariana didn’t allow us any signage of our own, the writers, photographers, and illustrators who passed through our offices often assumed we were simply a division of the ARPR empire, a thought that would have horrified her and her legions of Manolo Blahnik-heeled minions.
When I arrived on Tuesday morning, Sonia set me up at a terminal next to Donovan Tripp, the site’s restaurant editor. Though Donovan was my age and had only been working at the site for three months, he already gave off the appearance of having Made It. Next to his monitor was a Rolodex overflowing with business cards and scribbled phone numbers; his file trays were carefully organized with notes on upcoming pieces. Over his desk, he had tacked up a paraphrase of that old Woody Allen joke about the food being terrible and the portions too small. His sandy blond hair was styled with insouciance, while his tanned and freckled skin made me imagine weekends spent in the Hamptons.
There was nothing sexier than someone who was attractive and had it all together.
“So you’re Toby Griffin,” he said to me, turning away from his monitor and removing his chunky glasses.
I grinned shyly. “It’s great to meet you. You did that Morning-After Hangover Food piece, right? I really liked it.”
“Yeah? I thought it stank.”
I reddened as he handed me a photocopied packet. “Here’s the instructions for the site’s publishing system. Should be self-explanatory, but let me know if you have any questions. I’m usually not this crazed, but Sonia gave me several short deadlines, so I’m swamped today.”
I nodded, and started organizing my work area as I tried to avoid amorous thoughts about my co-worker. As I busied myself with learning the intricacies of the site’s online publishing system, I found it difficult to concentrate. Donovan had the potential to be an occupational hazard.
Sonia gave me a dozen clubs to review in the coming week, in addition to the task of rewriting almost two hundred old reviews in light of new developments in the nightlife world. It was just the three of us in editorial, not including interns, plus a few marketing and finance people who worked in the other offices. Most of the site’s writers worked from home and then emailed in their work. To the outsider, the site gave off the appearance of being a much larger operation, but such was the man-behind-the-curtain quality of Web publishing.
Later that afternoon, I was treated to my first glimpse of Lola Copacabana, one of CityStyle’s nightlife reporters. I would be editing her column, “Whatever Lola Wants.” I knew Lola wrote for the site, but I didn’t know that, unlike the site’s other writers, she would be coming in once a week to compose her piece.
“Lola doesn’t have a computer at home,” Donovan explained, rolling his eyes.
Lola was known around the city as a post-op transsexual nightclub performer who had come to New York from Miami eleven years ago. While in Miami, she had peddled an act in which she impersonated Marilyn Monroe, smearing herself with birthday cake during her “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” number and then shooting herself in the head with a squirt gun filled with pig’s blood. A nightclub in New York had flown her up for the weekend to perform and she ended up staying in the city permanently. In order to offset her act’s significant investment in dry cleaning, Lola quickly found work go-go dancing or performing nearly every night of the week.
Donovan told me it had taken Ariana’s office—especially Sunny, who had strict ideas about appropriate office attire—a few weeks to become accustomed to this milky skinned, collagen-enhanced, silicone-breasted wonder of the world. When Ariana’s account reps discovered that Lola in a photo with any celebrity made instant gossip column fodder, Lola became a regular fixture at ARPR events, and everyone in the office now welcomed her presence.
Today, Lola sashayed into the office wearing a yellow sundress with bamboo platform sandals and carrying a Japanese paper umbrella. Her hair was dyed jet black; combined with her outfit and pale skin, it made her look like a Japanese woodcut come to life.
I introduced myself to her when she sat down at a nearby terminal.
“Oh, hi,” she said, looking at me as if I were the one who had undergone sex reassignment surgery. “I heard about you.” Her voice rattled slightly, as if she were a heavy smoker; though she was more delicate and beautiful than many women, she could never shake that slight hint of testosterone. Her lips were as hornet-stung as they seemed at night, and her skin was poreless, like a Barbie doll’s.
I spoke to her as if talking to a small child who was sure not to understand. “I’ll be editing your work from now on. I’ve read most of your columns and I was wondering why you switch from first to third person.” Lola’s columns, while not unoriginal in their observations, were the grammatical and narrative equivalent of a train wreck.
“I use first person when I want to express my deepest self, how I really am inside. I use third person when I write about myself the way others see me.”
“We may have to talk about that, because I’m not sure if it’s working.”
“Okay,” she said, pausing to examine a nail. “Oh, I’m performing at B Bar tonight. I’ll be on a platform in the back room with a few of the other girls.”
“What will you be doing?” I asked.
“Absolutely nothing,” she said, a blank look on her face. “It’s a conceptual piece.”
