American Subversive (7 page)

WE STARED AT THE SCREEN IN DUMB SILENCE. IT'S NOT THAT WE BELIEVED the woman in the photograph was involved in the bombing (we never
believed
in anything, which, as I write now, seems as good a generational epigraph as any); it's just that she was mesmerizing, even slightly out of focus. Hell, it was late: we were all out of focus.

“She looks like that actress with the great tits,” Touché said, from over my shoulder. “I met her once at a party in Silver Lake. I think she lives in Brooklyn now.”

“You can't even see her tits,” I said, squinting at the screen.

“But her face, her hair.”

“Are you guys looking at porn?” the DJ asked from across the room.

We weren't sure what we were looking at. Paige Roderick—or whoever she was—had been captured in transit, and the blurriness dulled her features, made them difficult to pin down, hidden as they were behind the sunglasses. Still, the image suggested real beauty; her jawline, her nose, these things came through. It could have been an outtake from a photo shoot.

“Who sends you this kind of shit?” Touché asked.

“Who doesn't? You should see my in-box. Every publicist in the city e-mails me about their clients—new restaurants, movies, books, bands, you name it. But fake photographs of glammed-up terrorists? That's something new.”

“Juuulian,” the DJ purred. She was lounging on the bed, flipping idly through an art book.

“Why don't I let you two—”

“Ah, Aidan, yes, perhaps . . .”

I signed out of my e-mail account, slapped Touché on the back, and made my exit. Out in the main room, the bar was being dismantled, and the last of the stragglers—including, apparently, Derrick Franklin and Cressida—had moved on to an after-hours club on Chrystie Street. I stepped across the room and through the front door.

It was after 3 a.m., and the Meatpacking District was tucking itself in for the night. I wandered south down narrow, tree-lined blocks, in no particular hurry to get home. A lifetime in New York and still I found myself happening upon streets I'd never heard of before. Downing. Dominick. Collister. King. There was even a Gay Street—crooked and colorful—right in the middle of all the action. I lived on one of these hidden estuaries myself, a dark, vice-filled alley named Weehawken Street. It existed for only a block, between Christopher and West Tenth, just off the West Side Highway. While gentrification threatened from all directions, it never quite reached little Weehawken Street. But everything else did: hookers from the Carousel Club; dealers from the piers; gangbangers from the PATH station; and beefy drunks from the nearby leather bars. I had three locks on my door. And they took forever to figure out when I was wasted.

I woke to a vibrating phone and the smell of stagnant river water. Outside, the sun was already high in the sky, and the thin slice of the Hudson visible from my fifth-floor window had been disconcertingly replaced by a white building, sparkling and enormous. And then it moved! It wasn't a building, but a
cruise ship,
sliding slowly out to sea.

The phone buzzed again. I knew it was Derrick without even looking, and I knew what he was calling about. It was midmorning, and I should have started posting almost two hours ago. Still, I let it go to voicemail and focused instead on ingesting Advil and coffee. I was in the shower when I remembered the girl on the screen. Now, in the daylight, in the cramped but familiar confines of my apartment, the episode hardly seemed real. I toweled off and walked over to my computer.
Two clicks and there she was, right where I'd left her. Who was she? I threw on a pair of boxers and sat down.
This is Paige Roderick
.
She's the one responsible
. Here was the Internet in all its worthless glory. A pretty face captured at the right—or wrong—time and place, then twisted to fit some idiot's idea of a sinister joke. Such is the currency of our voyeuristic age. The sender's address was [email protected]. A bit heavy-handed, but a nice touch. Whoever sent it must have figured a legitimate news organization wouldn't fall for a prank like this, but what about a hungover blogger looking to generate page-views to get his boss off his back? I could already see the headline:
BARNEYS INTRODUCES THE NEW FACE OF TERROR.

I checked my competitors, but there were no posts about a Paige Roderick. Google revealed a handful of women who shared the name—a librarian in Barstow, a city-records clerk in Cedar Rapids, and a girls' summer-camp archery champion in Boone, North Carolina—but none appeared to be moonlighting anarchists. I kept going—Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, a few online directories—but the woman in the photo, whoever she was, didn't materialize. So I decided to post the thing. Why not? I'd put it in context, give my readers a taste of the absurdity I dealt with daily. She'd certainly arouse commenter interest. But what if she aroused other interest, from people not known for their taste in irony—the cops, say, or the FBI? That's the last thing I needed. And so I reconsidered. Here's another generational epigraph:
The potential hassle outweighed the benefits
. Paige remained where I'd found her. In my in-box.

Where was I? I wasn't anywhere. No ideas, nothing to follow up on. I scanned the online news sites, but I was hours too late. They'd all been read and digested, considered and critiqued, then vomited back up by people like me. Desperate, I turned to the gossip blogs. They were always good in a pinch. I drummed up a few snide headlines, some pithy one-liners, then linked to the more outrageous items. Nonoriginal original content: the secret to blogging longevity. Unfortunately, the secret was not lost on Derrick Franklin. Which reminded me. I checked my voice mail and there he was, launching into his familiar diatribe about audience retention, click-through rates, expectancy levels—all that technical crap that had made him rich. I pressed
ERASE
when he started in on my nocturnal habits—the hypocrite—and sat down to work.

Blogging was like any other addiction: I couldn't get away from it, and I couldn't get enough. I talked in paragraphs; I thought in punch lines. I was always
on,
playing the person in life that I was on-screen, and it was tiring and draining and I never wanted it to end. Luckily, it never did. Five days a week I ticked off my dozen posts—rain or shine, drunk or sober—with notebook hash marks, a latter-day Edmond Dantès passing the time before his escape from prison. Except I had nowhere to go. I'd been institutionalized, and the real world was now a far scarier place than the blogosphere. Out there, I was like everyone else. Online, I was royalty, and Roorback, a never-ending roast—a grand exercise in mocking what we love. At least that was the party line. And people did ask at parties. They asked how I lived with myself, smiling as they did so, lest I take offense.

Thank God for the reliable fallbacks, the ongoing train wrecks that saved the slow news days. Chief among these was the oft-rumored demise of the
New York Times
. Print media had been ailing for years, of course, but the recession was threatening to finish the job, leaving midsize cities without newspapers, and Middle America without beauty magazines. Now the
Times
was in real trouble. How much, no one knew exactly, but it sure was fun to speculate. And it pissed the hell out of Cressida, who saw my posts about her employer as retaliation for her monthly dating columns. But that was just it! What the hell was the
Times
doing with a dating columnist? This was the paper of record, not the paper of romance, and yet there they were, like everyone else, dumbing down their content for some focus-grouped, survey-driven, perfectly average American reader who didn't exist. To Cressida's credit, the column was just a sideline. She'd been reporting hard news all along and had recently asked the editors if she could give up her columnist duties altogether. They had begged her not to, then offered her a raise.

I wrote a paragraph detailing a rumor I'd heard (at the party) about a fresh round of editorial layoffs. The newsroom was getting smaller, foreign bureaus were closing. Journalism as we knew it was done. Let someone else argue that we needed reporters now more than ever. As markets swooned and countries bled. That wasn't my job. I kept the political and economic commentary to a bare minimum. I kept everything to a bare minimum.

I posted the item and tried to build on the momentum. But inspiration was tough to come by. I'd like to blame the hangover, but I'd functioned fine on worse. The truth is I couldn't stop thinking about Paige Roderick. Was it the photograph itself? Or the bizarre context surrounding it? I worked into the late afternoon, and then, my quota almost met, wrote the e-mail that had been forming in my head for the last several hours:

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Barneys
Thanks for the photo. How was the shopping?

I pressed
SEND
and moved on. Another hour of work. A drink or two. Then a party in Alphabet City.

Days in the country move slowly. I watch sunsets, notice subtle changes, the cycles that become seasons. And I take things a step further, because there's time now. I guess I'm learning to be alone. Perhaps the writing helps, reassembling my life a chapter at a time. I'd planned to fully introduce myself by including a few of the more intriguing items I've posted over the years (my handlers even printed them out for me), but Roorback seems so sadly pointless now. I think I better give you the story straight.

I grew up on the Upper West Side. It was still a liberal neighborhood then, and my parents fit the stereotype. They met the day Armstrong walked on the moon, at a “landing party” in New Haven (where they were both spending the summer before their junior year at Yale). Susan Hamlin was a young activist, involved with antiwar groups; William Cole was open-minded. They spent the next two years together, thoroughly immersed in the issues of the age (and with the pictures to prove it). They were liberal but they weren't lost, and when graduation came, they did the practical thing—got married and moved to New York. My mother went to work for various homeless and affordable-housing groups. My father, squirmish in suits but not lacking ambition, fell into advertising (does anyone ever
choose
it?). It
was a compromise, a steady paycheck in a creative field. As it turned out, his timing was perfect. The seventies were the golden age of brand building, when a single catchy tagline—Bounty's
The Quicker Picker-Upper;
AmEx's
Don't Leave Home Without It;
Volkswagen's
Think Small
—could build a company and make a career. My father helped come up with all of those or, as my mother explained when I asked her years later, was at least present at their creations.

“They'd go to the ‘21' Club for three-hour lunches,” she said, “and then stumble back to the office hopelessly drunk but with America's next great jingle scribbled on a wet cocktail napkin stuffed in someone's pocket. The Absolut vodka concept—you know, the one with the bottle—well, your father made me run to the dry cleaner one morning to save those sketches. He'd forgotten about them. I got there just in time.”

Absolut was his crowning achievement. One afternoon, in 1980, an art director at his agency drew a bottle backlit with a halo. Below it he wrote,
Absolut: The Perfect Vodka
. He showed it to my father, who nonchalantly crossed out the tagline and replaced it with
Absolut Perfection
. And that was that. Thirty years and eight hundred ads later, it's become the most successful alcohol campaign in history.

I was three when he wrote those words, and they came to define my urban childhood. My parents believed in the city, even then,
especially
then, when so many didn't. I went to public schools, had friends who lived in Harlem, Brooklyn, Queens. I spent untold hours with my mother in church basements and community centers, listening as she preached and pleaded and organized. Occasionally, she'd run into people from her past, college activists who'd stayed involved. Then there'd be hugs and coffee, maybe dinner if my father was working late. He'd been hired by one of his clients by then, the renegade creative director turned corporate branding executive. This was Reagan's America now, clean and sober, rounded at the jagged edges. The bums in the park outside our apartment on Seventy-third Street and Riverside began disappearing. And so did what was inside. The overstuffed couches of my youth gave way to chairs no one could sit in. The once homey kitchen was redone with marble countertops and track lighting. The bookshelves were jettisoned for a Basquiat that later turned out to be fake.

They started fighting when I was in eighth grade. My mother was hoping I'd apply to Stuyvesant, that most famous of public high schools, nurturer of New York's best and brightest. For a certain type of parent, Stuyvesant represented an educational ideal, proof of what was possible in the beleaguered souls of American cities. I doubt I'd have got in—I was an indifferent student—but we'd never know for sure because one morning, at our speckled breakfast table, my father announced I'd be attending Dalton, the rich boy's school on the East Side. It was a place of patches and pledges and codes, a well-endowed testament to conformity of every kind. I remember vividly the look on my mother's face that morning, a sad mix of defiance and inevitability. As if it were the very moment she'd been dreading. We were never the same after that.

I spent four years riding the crosstown bus, did an academically necessary PG year at St. Andrew's in Scotland, then skied away another four at Middlebury. A decade of youthful exuberance pointed in the wrong direction, years that had their moments but never found a groove. A raison d'être. A thousand parties, five thousand, and the only one that mattered was the one I'd missed in New York. The one that had made everyone else rich. I graduated from college two months after the Internet bubble burst and arrived back to a city in flux. But the biggest changes had occurred closer to home. Or what was left of it.