An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media (14 page)

That being said, after ten minutes of online perusing of the terrifying apartments that were in Manhattan and were actually in my price range, prostituting myself for lodging was looking like an increasingly attractive option. The only thing stopping me was that I was already basically whoring myself out in my day job, so it seemed ill advised to follow the same path on the domestic front.

For the second time in a few months, Rufus Banks came to the rescue. He e-mailed me with the news that he’d gotten the job with FoxNews.com and would be moving to New York within the week. He proposed that we become roommates.

Since Rufus had spent the previous summer in the city and knew the lay of the land better, he took the lead in our apartment search. I told him that my budget was eight hundred dollars a month for my half of the rent. So we agreed that we’d look for a two-bedroom apartment for no more than sixteen hundred dollars a month in a cool Manhattan neighborhood like the West Village or SoHo. The first real estate broker we talked to—once he had finished shrieking with laughter—told us that we’d either have to double our budget, find a third roommate willing to split a one-bedroom three ways, or look in another borough.

So that’s how we ended up in the northern part of Brooklyn, in a rapidly gentrifying former industrial neighborhood called Williamsburg. The area was one of the indirect beneficiaries of the aforementioned Giuliani-era cleanup of Manhattan. As crime and garbage diminished in the late 1990s and early 2000s, demand went up—along with rents—in all of Manhattan, including the East Village, a formerly affordable haven for artists and musicians. When the bohemian element of that neighborhood was priced out, they fled to the next most logical place: directly across the East River to “Billyburg.”
²⁵

Currently, in 2013, the gentrification is complete, and rents in Williamsburg rival and sometimes exceed those in Manhattan. However, when Rufus and I moved there in the summer of 2004, the neighborhood was still a little marginal, with new construction plunked uneasily into enclaves that hadn’t seen any serious development since the Eisenhower administration. We settled into a building that—judging from the wet paint and construction detritus that still littered the halls—the builders had finished working on roughly six hours before we moved in. It was a decent-size two-bedroom, and the rent was just slightly above our budget—nine hundred dollars apiece—which we found out later was actually cheap for the neighborhood, possibly because the block was, according to the broker, “a little ethnic.”
²⁶

The nonethnic denizens of the neighborhood were mostly skinny, artsy-looking white kids in their twenties. The men all had facial hair and wore skinny jeans, plaid shirts, and Fidel Castro–style green military caps. The women all had severe, straight bangs and wore vintagey-looking dresses paired with heavy boots. Tattoos and chunky-framed glasses were abundant among both sexes.

These, Rufus informed me, having encountered them himself the previous summer, were known as “hipsters.”

I hadn’t run into this particular subculture before. My college had skewed heavily toward the preppy/jock end of the spectrum. Hipsters at Notre Dame would have been regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

But now the tables were turned. I was the outsider. Walking to the subway in the morning in my work clothes, I suddenly felt like a corporate stooge in a way I never had while staying with Sloane. In Murray Hill, I was just another working stiff. In Williamsburg, I stuck out like a narc at a rock show.
²⁷

It’s generally against the hipster ethos to rise early, so while I was still on the early shift, I had the streets mostly to myself during my five-minute walk to the subway. But after I transitioned to the afternoon tape shift, I’d head toward the subway at two
P.M.
, passing three invariably packed coffee shops on my walk. I could sense the disdain of the customers as they gave me withering glances and eye rolls from behind the screens of their Apple PowerBooks. (If they had known who I actually worked for, they probably would have spilled into the street en masse and throttled me with their wallet chains in an angry rage.)

The weekends were a little less fraught with anxiety about fitting in. My college T-shirt collection served me well in this regard, giving me at least some faux-hipster cred. I wouldn’t fool anyone up close, but from a distance, at least, I didn’t immediately scream “Sellout.” I even briefly flirted with wearing an ironic trucker hat, shamefully giving in to a trend that in the summer/fall of 2004 still had about ten minutes of popularity left. I’m proud to say that I never did give in to the skinny jeans trend, though that probably had less to do with any aversion to being a fad chaser, and a lot more to do with my having chubby legs.

Brooklyn wasn’t quite where I had envisioned myself, and there was nary a ghostbuster in sight, but none of that could detract from the fact that I’d made it: I was a New Yorker.

—

It’s a cruel twist of fate for the employees of Fox News to be headquartered in New York City, the East Coast capital of smug liberalism—and I say that as a proud, out-of-the-closet smug liberal. It’s terribly damaging to the psyche to have to live and socialize in a city where the vast majority of residents absolutely despise your livelihood. Strangers I met at parties or dinners were surprisingly quick to criticize my employer. Innocent, polite inquiries about my profession could suddenly turn on a dime and become angry, haranguing sermons on the evils of Fox News.

“Ugh, how can you work for those people?” someone I’d met only minutes before would ask, scowling into her wineglass. “They’re, like,
practically
fascists.”

The above exchange falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of reactions that I’ve gotten. The worst response I ever had was from a girl who just stared at me, horrified, then shook her head and wordlessly turned and walked away. Usually, the best I could hope for was a startled “Oh!” followed by a cautious “That’s so . . .
interesting
 . . . Do you
like
working there?”

The honest answer to that question was, for most of my tenure at Fox, “You know what—it’s not so bad! And screw you for judging me.” But try telling that to an angry liberal wielding a champagne flute just one bash on a countertop away from becoming a deadly weapon. So over the years, I practiced a variety of deflections:

• Apologetic (“Don’t worry, I’m not one of them.”)
  
• Cynical (“Hey, I’m just doing my part to make sure the misinformed people stay misinformed.”)
  
• Jokey/conspiratorial (“Don’t tell anyone, but I’m secretly bringing the place down from the inside.”)
  
• Resigned to my fate (“Ehh, it’s a living!”)
  ²⁸
  

Finally, I figured out that my best strategy was simply vagueness from the very beginning. “I work in TV news,” I’d say to anyone asking about my livelihood, hoping there weren’t any follow-up questions.

Rufus, in the years that he worked for Fox, was much more confrontational whenever he got a hostile questioner. Argumentative by nature, he loved when people dared to question his employment.

“Oh, yeah?” he’d say. “Where do
you
work?”

When the person answered, invariably with some inoffensive but soulless corporate job, Rufus would grin and hit them with the kicker: “So you’re not exactly saving the whales either,
are you
?” he’d say, cackling devilishly as the unwitting victim sputtered with indignation.

I found Rufus’s strategy more satisfying than my own, but I usually tried too hard to be affable to follow his lead. I did love watching him execute it, though. I would smile and watch in silence as he reeled the victim in and then sprang the trap with relish.

I was unspeakably disappointed when Rufus eventually left Fox before I’d had the pleasure of seeing him get confronted by someone who
actually
worked for Greenpeace.

—

Rufus and I lived together, worked for the same company, went to the same bars on the weekends, had the same taste in movies and television and food; our bromance was almost perfect. But one thing got in the way: my girlfriend.

Jillian and I had been dating since junior year. She was a student at Saint Mary’s College, the small all-women’s school across the street from Notre Dame. SMC girls—often shorthanded as Smick Chicks, or Smickers—had a partially deserved reputation for being faster and looser than their ND counterparts (the shuttle bus that ran back and forth between the two campuses had been derisively christened the “Sluttle”), but Jillian wasn’t like that. She was sweet, from a good family in rural Illinois.

Jillian wanted us to stay together after graduation, but New York City held no appeal for her. She argued that Chicago had some of the same big-city feel but was closer to home for both of us, cheaper, more livable, and just generally more within our respective wheelhouses.

But I didn’t want to hear it. The Windy City left me cold. Yes, it shared certain characteristics with New York, but for me it would always be
less than
. It felt like a cop-out, a compromise. Plus, I argued (not
completely
inaccurately) that almost any media gig worth having was in New York. In the end, I didn’t bother applying to a single Chicago job. Jillian, who’d studied to be a grade school teacher, reluctantly found a position at a charter school in the Bronx. With all four Catholic parents frowning at the idea of our cohabiting, she rented an apartment in Greenpoint, a neighborhood just to the north of Williamsburg.

Greenpoint had a bit of the same hipster cred as its southern neighbor but was slightly less gentrified, quite a bit cheaper, and overwhelmingly Polish. Jillian found a large one-bedroom for twelve hundred dollars a month, with a landlord who spoke broken English, and a grueling hour-and-a-half subway commute to her job in the Bronx.

She was miserable at first, a fact that I was totally, stupidly oblivious to. How could she not love the greatest city in the world? Didn’t she know how lucky she was that I had dragged her kicking and screaming out of the Midwest?

“For what I’m paying here, we could rent a huge two-bedroom in Chicago,” she pointed out one day when we were waiting for the subway. “Joe, we could rent
a house
in my hometown for this kind of money.”

“Oh, please. You know that Streator, Illinois, doesn’t have the same
cultural
advantages that we have here,” I said, gesturing to the subway platform, which was empty aside from us and a middle-aged wino passed out on a bench.

Compounding Jillian’s misery, I was barely around. I worked until eleven
P.M.
every night. She was in bed well before that, preparing to wake at five
A.M.
to start her lengthy trek to the Bronx. But since she “didn’t move to goddamn New York freaking City just to see [me] on the goddamn weekends,” I agreed to at least sleep over occasionally on weeknights. So a few nights a week, I’d take the train from the office to her place instead of mine, squeeze past the old Polish men in ribbed white tank tops, smoking pungent Marlboro Reds while sitting on her building’s front stoop, and let myself into the apartment with the copy of the keys she’d made for me.

It would sometimes be after midnight, if the Subway Gods were working against me, so I’d creep into her apartment as quietly as I could, not turning on any lights, attempting to pull off my shoes and clothing in the dark of her bedroom.

My efforts were usually for naught, of course, as she’d stir awake when I slid under the covers next to her. We’d talk in whispers for five or ten or fifteen minutes, exchanging battle stories about our workdays, before she drifted off to sleep again. I’d lie awake, still too keyed up to end my day but grateful to be in a city I loved with a woman I loved and a job that, thankfully, hadn’t yet asked me to turn into a storm trooper for the right or to swear allegiance to a portrait of Ronald Reagan in an occult ritual involving robes, masks, and a ceremonial chalice of pig’s blood.

I was counting my chickens before they were hatched, in more ways than I realized.

April 11, 2012—12:01
P.M.

“Come on, Rufus, pick up, pick up,” I said, holding the phone to one ear and plugging the other with a finger, struggling to hear over the tumult of Times Square.

His voice mail picked up for the third time in a row.

I cursed, filthily and loudly enough to draw a sharp look from a nearby mother who was otherwise engaged with ushering her two young kids away from a street performer in a ragged-looking knockoff SpongeBob SquarePants costume.

I’d decided that Rufus—whom I had belatedly remembered worked nearby at his Web developer job—was my one option for ditching the iPad. I figured I only had about fifteen minutes left before someone noticed that my “lunch break” more closely resembled a prison break. If I couldn’t get in touch with Rufus, my only other choice was to abandon my gym bag on the street. I sure as shit couldn’t go back into the News Corp. building with it. Who knew what kind of mole-sniffing forces had been marshaled in my absence? There was a good chance a corporate security team was going through my work computer at that exact moment.

I was mentally kicking around my previous idea of bribing a newsstand guy or a hot dog vendor to hold my stuff, when my phone buzzed in my hand.

It was a text from Rufus:
What’s up?

I texted back, pecking out my response with shaking thumbs:
I need your help.

   CHAPTER 6   

Red Bull and Kool-Aid

I
could tell right away when Jim Siegendorf called me over to his desk in the newsroom that it was going to be bad news. He had a sheepish, almost apologetic look on his face. After four months on the job, I had figured out that Siegendorf, though he meant well, was a bad manager. Almost every other figure in the newsroom with any authority was brash, curt, matter-of-fact—not because they were jerks, but out of necessity. It was a matter of efficiency; they just didn’t have the luxury to beat around the bush. Time was always of the essence, and we were on constant deadline, so it was expected that when orders came, they’d be barked at you, and that you wouldn’t have a problem with it because that’s just how things were done.
Pleases
and
thank-yous
were for people with boring jobs.