But Enough About Me (7 page)

I leaned forward and asked her something that I had always wondered about: Did she ever feel insecure? She rarely exposed any sort of vulnerability. “I feel insecure every five minutes,” she shot back. “What are you talking about?” She said that being as pregnant as she was, she panicked when she looked in the mirror.

I pressed her, because I wanted to know how she felt when she wasn't pregnant. Say she came across a picture of a boyfriend's ex. Does she make mean comments? She said that there was a whole process that happens. “First I go, ‘Oh, she's skinny and pretty.'” She grinned. “Then I think, ‘Oh, but I'm
me
.'”

God love her! There was a soft knock at the door. The publicist. I remembered that there was something else I was supposed to do. My friend Susan, a fashion marketer, wanted me to inventory Madonna's bathroom and report back. I couldn't let her down. Plus, I wanted to know what was in there, too. I scanned her office. No bathroom. It must be right outside.

A knock, again. I took my leave. “Thank-you-so-much,” I said, swiftly gathering my things and returning Madonna's firm handshake. Keep it brief. Don't smile, don't babble. And no pictures or autographs—as a professional courtesy, you're never supposed to ask. You want to at least fake that you're contemporaries.

“May I use the facilities?” I asked the assistant, pointing to the door near the star's office that said “WC.” I raced in and started running the water, while taking inventory of the bathroom. A bottle of Fracas perfume, I scribbled down. Some sort of face spray that you get at the health food store, water with a geranium scent by Tree of Life. Bathroom reading?
The Hypochondriac's Handbook.
Hmm. Interesting. La Mer face lotion. Done, done, and done.

The assistant awaited to walk me to reception. I strode through the halls, triumphant. “How was she? Isn't she amazing?” she said.

“How was she?” said the receptionist. “Totally great, right?”

“She was,” I said, trying and failing not to sound like a deranged fan. “She was funny, but she had a softer side, too. And she never gave canned answers, she really thought about things.” Then my knees started to buckle. “Can I sit for a second?” I said. “I feel a little faint.”

The receptionist nodded. “That happens sometimes,” he said. “I think I'm going to get some smelling salts and put them behind the desk.”

As I stumbled to the car, the cycle was complete. It always ended with me in a victory march, thinking,
I have the world's best job.
This euphoria lasted precisely as long as it took to write the story. And it was alarming to know that the Calms worked perfectly well on most stars, but not the triple-A list.

The driver eyed me in the rearview mirror. “You want to take monan, or fleen?” he said.

I pretended to deliberate for a moment. “I guess let's try fleen,” I said.

On the night before my job interview at
Rolling Stone,
I read up on music as much as I could, and studied the backs of my album covers. I always figured that in dealing with the unknown, I couldn't be too prepared. I already knew the magazine's history: founded by Jann Wenner, his future wife, Jane, and critic Ralph S. Gleason in October of 1967 in San Francisco, it was to be the
Paris Review
of music magazines, with lengthy, intelligent articles on musicians and the music they made. I always noticed the magazine's bylines, and all of the authors were like old friends to me: Ben Fong-Torres, Charles M. Young, David Fricke.

I gave Heather some back issues and had her quiz me on music trivia. Somehow, in our naïveté, we presumed that the editors would grill me on my musical knowledge. Maybe there would be a pop quiz of some kind. Best be prepared. “Who produced the new Pixies album?” she asked, studying my
Doolittle
record.

“Gil Norton.”

“Good,” she said. “They're going to hire you on the spot.” If everyone had a Heather, there would be no wars. Shy at school and cheerfully, relentlessly talkative at home, Heather was so unfailingly upbeat that many a
night after I rolled home from a high school keg party, I felt perfectly comfortable rousing her out of a sound sleep to make my friends and me some food.

“Heath,” I would say beerily, clumsily shaking her awake. “Can you cook us some of your famous French fries?” (They weren't “famous,” she just dropped them in oil.)

She'd blink dazedly, and then smile. “Sure,” she'd rasp, reaching for a robe.

Before we were able to drive, Dinah and I would coerce her into riding her bike for two miles on the highway to Shop Rite to buy us snacks. “What if a guy from school sees me?” she fretted. “It's embarrassing to be seen with two shopping bags stuffed with Entenmann's chocolate chip cookies hanging off your handlebars.”

“Time's a-wasting,” said Dinah, handing her ten dollars. “You can keep the change.”

Heather was fiercely sentimental but would skitter away from any overt displays of actual emotion, preferring, instead, to write it in a card.
I love you more than anything
was a typical message, but if you looked up in happy surprise, she was stone-faced, as if it were some sort of hoax. She was less gullible and more conniving than Dinah, and often got her way by quietly, sweetly steamrolling over you, and you wouldn't know it until you were flattened.

After Heather helped me prepare for the interview, I lay in bed all night, staring unblinkingly at the ceiling, until it was time to tremblingly get dressed in my mom's trusty plaid Ann Taylor suit, fighting back nausea. I took a bus to the city and, afraid I would be late, hailed my first cab. As I was stepping out of the taxi in Midtown, unaware of the city custom of checking to see if anyone was around before opening the door, I heard a thud and a crash. I had rammed the door right into a speeding bike messenger, and his nose was gushing blood. “You fucking bitch,” he spat, clutching his nose.

I stared at him, numbly. “I'm so sorry,” I faltered.

“I'm so sorry,” he squeaked back, imitating me. I stood, rooted, as he climbed back on his bike, wiping the blood with the back of his hand.

“Sorry,” I burbled again, and then turned toward the office.

To my horror, he followed me, pedaling furiously on his bike. “You ugly bitch,” he shouted as a passerby turned and gawked. “You ugly, fucking bitch.” “Bitch” rolled off my back, but “ugly”? He knew how to hurt a gal. As my face burned, he followed me for three blocks, swearing at me all the way, until I fled into the office lobby.

I was still an hour early. “Sorry, man, no one's in yet,” said the receptionist, a gaunt guy with scraggly long hair and chunky black glasses. “Waaay too early.” I took a seat and discreetly watched as the employees straggled in.

They were the hippest people my suburban eyes had ever beheld. Most of the males cultivated a slightly grubby look. One stubbly guy in a Clash T-shirt and army pants slumped by with a cup of coffee, trailing the odor of stale cigarette smoke, probably from some show he had been to the night before. My eyes hungrily crawled over everyone. The girls, I noted with dismay, all had sleek, shiny hair. No perms? And they barely wore any makeup. No brown eye shadow? I had applied it with a trowel that morning in order to look “professional.” Another girl wafted in and I studied her look: Levi's, a T-shirt, some sort of rugged brown hand-tooled belt from India, and expensive cowboy boots. Where do you buy a belt like that? Do you go to India?

Everyone on staff was probably well traveled, while I had left the country exactly once. Dinah had gutsily spent a semester in London, and my mother and I went to visit her. On the plane ride over—my first transatlantic journey—a harried flight attendant made an announcement. “Is there a doctor on the aircraft?” she asked. “If so, please press the call button.” A long silence followed, and then a hasty conference with another flight attendant. “Is there a nurse on the aircraft? A nurse?” Nothing. Right about the time that it devolved into a plea for a veterinarian, my mother jabbed her call button.

“Excuse me, miss,” she said crisply. She was always scrupulously polite. “What seems to be the problem here?”

The stewardess looked abashed. “I'm afraid someone has had a heart
attack in first class,” she said.

My mother raised an eyebrow. “Well, is he…is he…” I thought,
Oh, please don't say a goner. That's what you're going to say.

“It looks that way,” the stewardess said.

“Well, then what happens?” she demanded.

The stewardess lowered her voice. “I don't want to alarm the other passengers,” she said. “In this type of, ah, unfortunate incident, our policy is to put a blanket over the person to make it seem like he is sleeping. Then the body is removed after the flight.” My mother nodded. It made sense. What are you supposed to do, stuff him in the overhead bin?

Another sophisticate glided in, the height of eighties chic: white T-shirt with a gray men's vest over it, black leggings, a short black skirt over the black leggings, and Doc Martens. How did she know how to wear the skirt over the leggings? Was there some sort of demonstration at a store, or perhaps a seminar in the East Village that you could attend? And why wasn't she wearing any color? According to my mother's
Color Me Beautiful
book, I was a Winter, which meant that I should dress in “strong, vivid shades such as red, royal blue, and teal,” so I duly put on a royal blue blouse underneath my plaid suit. Another girl wore combat boots and a loose dress, her hair pinned up artfully. No scrunchy? I looked down at my gloves, which I'd bought at a local store when I landed the interview. They were black, with long black fringe circling the wrist. I thought they would be hip. I fingered my giant Salt-N-Pepa gold earrings, which had been a big hit at the ad agency. All of the girls' earrings were tiny and silver and looked exotically ethnic, like they had been picked up on a backpacking trip through Guatemala.

I was trying to scrub off some of my makeup with the tissues that my mother had tucked into my purse when the door opened and a smiling woman in jeans called me in. Self-consciously, I wobbled over in my high heels. Next to her, I looked like a Mary Kay representative. Walking into the chaotic office wreaked havoc on my few remaining nerves. It resembled a college dorm, with a rabbit warren of offices, all of which had a stereo, with different music blaring from each one—My Bloody Valentine, Fine Young
Cannibals, Living Color. “I'm the Cult of Personal-i-teee,” roared out of someone's speakers as a couple of people stood around. Apparently it took everyone a while to get rolling, despite the fact that the office opened at the reasonable hour of ten a.m.

“These lyrics are stupid,” said one guy, with a diffident wave. “‘Like Mussolini and Kennedy, I'm the cult of personality'?” He rolled his eyes. “‘Like Joseph Stalin, and Gandhi.' I don't think even he knows what he's saying.”

A pang of pungent envy pierced my gut with an almost physical force. I desperately wanted to stand around with those people and dismiss bands. I, too, wanted to slurp coffee from a blue paper cup from a Greek diner that said We Are Happy to Serve You and wear jeans to work and go right from the office to dinner and drinks, then a show, then another show. Oh, how I longed for someone to ask me where I worked, so I could answer
Rolling Stone
with a falsely modest questioning intonation, as if it were some obscure trade magazine.

We passed an office that was jammed full of editors who were having some sort of ideas meeting. Some of them were shouting with laughter and clapping. Those quips were zinging back and forth! Prior to this, the closest I had ever come to a “creative” office was seeing episodes of
thirtysomething,
in which Michael and Elliot shot Nerf hoops in their ad agency office to start the flow of ideas. I stared, hungrily.

With a kind of mute hopelessness, I knew that I didn't have the barest chance of getting this job. Before I walked into the office, I actually thought I had a fix on New York life because I read
Spy
and the
Village Voice.

As I followed the woman to an office, I saw that every desk was piled high with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of advance cassette tapes (remember, it was 1989) and all manner of intriguing packages from record companies.

An assistant, self-assured but offering a friendly smile, waited at a table with a notebook. She had four earrings on the top of her left ear and a long braid down her back. “Hey,” she said. I started to stick out my moist hand but retracted it when I saw that she wasn't going to stand up. “Don't be ner
vous,” she said. “I just have a few general questions about what you like to do.” She laughed. “It's better than talking about your grade-point average, right?” Lifestyle questions? Was she asking me lifestyle questions? Dread bubbled up in me like a geyser.

 

“So, uh…” She consulted her notebook. “Hm. What do you like to do on weekends?”

I ran through all of my recent activities: a party at my high school friend Frank's house “down the shore,” a trip to the mall, a party at Ritchie's cousin's place where they gave the dog beer. That was my life. I trawled my brain for something that was even vaguely cool. “I go to Maxwell's a lot,” I said. “I guess the most recent show was Robyn Hitchcock.” Maxwell's was a tiny club in Hoboken that I used to frequent. Hoboken, a commuter town that was teeming with twentyish Jerseyites, was as far as I ventured from home.

She looked up from her notebook and brightened. “I was there, too!” she said. “Good show, right?” Thank you, Jesus. I rummaged my brain for more hip activities. I thought of my sole trip to London, two years ago.

“I love to travel,” I blurted.

“Oh?” She scribbled something down. “Where have you been lately?”

“Lately?” I pretended to reflect. “Well, probably my most recent trip was to London.”

“Cool,” she said. “What did you do?” Well, let's see. I saw Big Ben. I rode around in a red double-decker bus with my mom alongside some nice people from Pittsburgh. I had high tea at Harrods. I watched the changing of the guard. (“Mom! Take my picture in front of this guy with the red coat! Get this, he's not supposed to change expression!”) Oh, my God.

I shrugged. “Oh, you know, the usual. Went to clubs.” Please don't ask where.

She nodded, smiling. “What were the last five records you listened to?” Time to lie! I fancied myself something of a music connoisseur, but the bald truth was that my record collection abounded with clunkers, mostly Jer
sey dirt-ball rock such as Van Halen and, thanks to Ritchie, an inordinate amount of bad late-eighties R & B. Oran “Juice” Jones in the house! Thinking quickly, I selected one record from each category, starting with Venerated Jazz: Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue.
Rock? The Clash's
Combat Rock,
and that was actually true. Maybe something a little trendy. Neneh Cherry,
Raw Like Sushi.
She nodded again. Good. And, because I was going through the requisite reggae phase endemic to suburban white kids in the eighties, how about we throw in Bob Marley's
Babylon by Bus,
the live double album. A live album would nicely convey my love of music. Sweat was pooling in my bra as I contemplated the last selection. I needed something that sounded authentically random, so she wouldn't think I was filling quotas.
Cypress/ Afoot
by Let's Active, which I'd played that morning, until my father told me to turn it down.

She scribbled away. “Okay. Is there anything else that you do for fun?” Carefully avoiding the actual answer, I invented a sophisticated schedule—concerts, museums, and, most egregiously, “jogging.”

She stood up. That was it? “Time for you to meet Bob Love, the editor,” she announced. I was ushered on weak legs into his office. Bob was crisply courteous and nattily dressed in a beautifully cut dark suit. I settled stiffly into a chair and gave his bookshelves a covert scan for clues on how to behave. Harold Brodkey, John O'Hara, Sigmund Freud: brawnier fare than the Victorian drawing-room novels that I went for, so a chat about literature was out. A guitar was propped in the corner. “Oh,” I could say. “You play?” Then he would say yes. Then I would have no follow-up question because I do not play, and we would sit in silence. As he sat down at his desk, I eyed his colorful socks, which were yellow and red and blue in some sort of dot pattern. Aha. A clue.
Gay,
I thought knowingly.

“I see you looking at my bookshelf,” he said. “Who is your favorite author?”

“I'd have to say Truman Capote,” I said, figuring I'd score some gay pandering points with Bob, who was in reality vigorously hetero and dating a string of women.