All of this reminds me of another study I read for Think. A UK economist posits that within the next thousand years, humans will divide into two subspecies. As the result of superior interbreeding, the upper class will evolve into seven-foot-tall, supermodel geniuses with pneumaboobs for the ladies and rocketcocks for the gents. The underclass will downgrade to a class of dim-witted, mini-titted, raisin-dicked hobgoblins. It’s not just sci-fi, it’s really happening. I challenge you to spend fifteen minutes in Barneys followed by another fifteen at WalMart and still deny it.
“One hundred! See? I told you I could do it!”
“I never doubted you,” I said.
“Okay! I gotta go now! I love you! You’re the best aunt ever!”
“Maybe not the best,” I said. “But I do okay.”
“You’re the best because you’re miiiiiiiine,” she said before abruptly hanging up.
I can’t save the human race. But I wish I could protect Marin from harm. If only I were able to guarantee that Marin would thrive under my guidance, and that she would always be as self-confident and happy as she was this morning when she counted to one hundred by fives.
thirty-eight
So I’m a little jealous of a four-year-old. And she’s not the only one.
You’re at Princeton. Hope is doing her graduate work at Pratt. Len, MIT. Bridget and Percy are finishing up their hers ’n’ his B.A.’s in Metropolitan Studies (hers with a concentration in art and public policy, his in urban ethnography and economics). Manda is also going to NYU part-time for her M.S.W. at the School for Social Work. I’d even heard Shea rapping about enrolling in some sort of deejay-apprenticing program to “perfeck” her “mad turntable skillz,” not that it matters, since I’ll never be seeing her around these parts again.
Most of my friends from Columbia are going on to get advanced degrees. And why not? A Ph.D. is the new M.A., a master’s is the new bachelor’s, a B.A. is the new high school diploma, and a high school diploma is the new smiley-face sticker on your first-grade spelling test. You don’t know most of these people, but again, indulge me as I provide some cogent examples:
Former high school crush-to-end-all-crushes, obsessive object of horniness, and gay man of my dreams Paul Parlipiano is getting his Ph.D. in Sustainable Development at our alma mater’s School of International and Public Affairs. (I have only the vaguest idea of what that even means.) Tanu is at the University of Chicago Law School (“Where Fun Comes to Die!”), which I guess turned out to be an acceptable substitution for medical school in her parents’ estimation. Similarly, Kazuko’s parents both have multiple advanced degrees and will happily fund their only daughter’s efforts to match them diploma for diploma. She’s in the “rhetors” program at Berkeley, a totally esoteric discipline that will never lead to a real job, which I’m sure is just fine with her. ALF (because he—duh—looks like ALF) still has two glorious undergraduate years left at Columbia. As does my ex Kieran, who is still in sad, sad, so very, very sad emo love with the Barnard ’09 Regirlfriend he started sleeping with before he—oops!—stopped sleeping with me.
Just to prove that I’m not exaggerating, here is my complete list of friends/acquaintances my age who aren’t going back to school:
1–2. Scotty (Pineville ’02; nine credits short of Lehigh ’06) and Sara (Pineville ’02; ninety credits short of Harrington Country Club and Occasional University ’06)
Babymamadaddy are booked for the next eighteen years.
3. Dexy (two years at Columbia; six months at Bellevue; twenty-eight credits short of Columbia ’06)
She’s apparently in a state of permanent deferment since the bipolar breakdown she had the summer before our junior year. She works at Eros, an upscale sex shop in SoHo, and—surprise, surprise—she brought her work home with her. Or rather, her work bought her a home.
“I moved in with Daddy!” Dexy yelped the last time I saw her.
“You…what?”
Dexy pouted. “If you read my blog, you would know that. I thought you read my blog. You said you read my blog.”
I had stopped reading “Dex and the City” when I kept turning up as the priggish supporting character, the anonymous “girlfriend from Columbia,” scandalized by the leading lady’s reckless inhibition and bacchanalia. (It’s also when we stopped hanging out with any sort of regularity.) Dexy has always been hell-bent on grabbing Manhattan by the balls (both actual and metaphorical). I had always hoped that her blog was 99 percent Bushnell hyperbole, but never more than when she took up with “Daddy.”
“I’m a kept woman.” The throwback expression fit both her appearance and our surroundings. She had insisted on meeting me for drinks at Bemelmans Bar, a sumptuous Art Deco watering hole located at the stately Carlyle hotel. As usual, she was in costume, a houndstooth suit with broad shoulders and a cinched waist that drew attention to her hourglass curves. As she posed at the black granite bar—the wave in her platinum wig dipping low over one knowing eye, crimson Cupid-bow lips sipping a champagne cocktail—she looked just like a troubled dame straight out of 1940s film noir. I looked like the anachronism, the chainstore clearance-rack naïf, which was exactly as she had orchestrated it.
“Please,” I begged, “please tell me you’re making this up.”
“I’m making this up.”
“You are?”
“No!” she cheered gleefully, face alight with the scandalousness of it all.
“I don’t want to hear about this,” I said, nursing a club soda because I couldn’t afford anything on the menu and wouldn’t allow her to use “Daddy’s” money to buy my booze. It was the principle of the thing.
“Yes you do,” she insisted.
“No I do not,” I said emphatically.
Of course, Dexy ignored my wishes and told me much more than I ever needed to know about her courtesan-keeper courtship, right down to the last gray hair on his desiccated testicles. I will spare you such specifics. (Only I just didn’t. Sorry.) All you need to know is that “Daddy” is (a) rich, (b) sixty years old, and (c) newly divorced with four kids all in Dexy’s age bracket, and (d) offered to let her move into his pied-à-terre with views of Gramercy Park after wooing her with the purchase of the two-thousand-dollar One-of-a-Kind Hand-Sculpted All-Natural Volcanic Glass Diletto.
“You’re sleeping with a sexagenarian for money!”
“He prefers sexygenarian!”
My mouth went sour with pregurgitive spit.
And then, as is her custom, Dexy broke into ear-shattering song. “‘Money makes the world go round, of that we can be sure…’” She blew a Bronx cheer. “‘Pfffffft! On being poor!’”
I covered my ears to protect both my hearing and my sanity.
“And it’s not just the money,” she said. “It’s also the apartment….”
So there you have it: Someone I consider a friend doesn’t need to go back to school because her living expenses are covered by a Viagra-popping geezer. While Dexy’s drama was kind of vicariously amusing in college, her post–bipolar breakdown behavior is scaring me. And yet I stay friends with her, in part because I feel obligated to serve as a normalizing if totally ineffectual influence in her life. I already regret inviting her to Thursday night’s Care. Okay? karaoke party thrown by…
4. Cinthia Wallace (too many private schools to list here; GED ’02, Harvard ’06)
Cinthia, aka Hyacinth Anastasia Wallace or Hy, is too busy being the most famous face behind the hipster philanthropic organization called the Social Activists, which has taken the old-money fund-raising model (i.e., black-tie balls, silent auctions) and given it an A-list new-money twist (i.e., stripping for charity, poker tournaments). This doesn’t require an advanced degree, just a grand inheritance from a father she commonly referred to as “that jagoff.”
I sound like one of the haters. Cinthia is routinely mocked for her charitable efforts—you know, trying to shelter the homeless, feed the hungry, and cure the sick, one celebrity-studded Care. Okay? karaoke par
ty at a time. In her defense, she could’ve started a line of “aspirational handbags” or opened a “lifestyle boutique” that sells denim for a grand and plastic rings for a nickel. She could have decided to what-the-fuck? it, drugging and whoring her way back to her roots and re-creating her reign as the underage ur-Hilton of her day. But she didn’t. And that’s admirable. Of course, if I had a fifty-million-dollar inheritance, I could do something pretty damn admirable, too.
But alas, I don’t have fifty million. I have negative sixty-five thousand dollars.
And I not only long for the higher degree that I will never have, but the final semester that never was. Keep in mind that I actually piled on the credits and graduated one semester early to minimize my loans by another fifteen thousand dollars or so. This is unheard of in an age when the typical student completes four years in five and a half. (My sister was part of that vanguard.) Seriously, it was wise of you to choose a school that has altogether eliminated student loans in favor of grants and work study. Perhaps that’s one advantage of entering college at twenty-three instead of eighteen. You will never know how it feels to owe various lenders approximately sixty-five thousand dollars for your Ivy League diploma, or what it’s like to pay them off in increasingly expensive installments for the next 360 months of your life. One doesn’t have to be a multimillionaire, but it’s a lot easier to be an idealist when you aren’t so deeply entrenched in a hellhole of debt. Because no matter how I consolidate or reconsolidate my loans, I feel like I’m digging out the entire New York City subway system with my Phi Beta Kappa pin.
What I envy most about you and everyone else heading back to school is the certainty of it all. You’ve got a prescribed set of requirements to guide you through the next few years. Focus your energy on the completion of those assignments and you will succeed. Guaranteed. Where’s my syllabus to guide me through life?
But there is hope in the air. Early September is the season for fresh starts, complete with turning-a-new-leaf metaphors and all that. And I’ve got my most promising job interview in months. I’m wearing a featherweight cashmere shell, an impeccably tailored gabardine pencil skirt, and the most sumptuous boots that have ever graced my calloused feet (all on permanent loan from Bethany because I didn’t have the fortitude to fight the crowds of back-to-school shoppers nor the patience to piece together a proper interview outfit from H&M). I’ve got my résumé and sample issues of Think stored inside the buttery leather messenger bag my parents bought as a graduation gift. I’ve rehearsed my anecdotes about what it was like to work for the CU Storytellers Project collecting “oral narratives” from total strangers on the streets of New York City. Yes, preparing myself for this interview was almost an adequate simulacrum for the back-to-school rituals of years gone by, when I still naively believed that with the perfect outfit, the perfect backpack, the perfect how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation story, with the perfect reinvention of my former self, my less-than-perfect life could be changed for the better, forever.
(FOREVER didn’t arrive in this morning’s mail. Perhaps tomorrow?)
thirty-nine
She casts a lusty gaze upon Times Square from five stories above Forty-eighth and Broadway. She’s bent over at the waist, and her pendulous breasts peek out from behind her brassy hair extensions. Her mouth is pink, wet, open, and waiting. Her eyes are dead. A French-manicured talon beckons: Hey there, big man. Buy my latest DVD release from Vivid Entertainment Group.
JESSICA DARLING GOES DOWN…CUMMING SEPTEMBER 2006!
Whenever I pass this billboard, I am reminded that my namesake sucks and fucks for a paycheck. I would not want to be her. But one advantage the Other Jessica Darling has over me is that her skills are always in demand. The job title “Porn Star” contains multitudes. There are as many specialties as there are perversities. (For purely educational purposes—right? right?—I’ll take you on a quick alphabetical tour of contemporary porn categories: Anal Queens, Big Boob Babes, Cat Fighting, Deep Throating, European, Foot Fetish, Gang Bangs, Hairy Humpers, Interracial, Jack Off, Kinky, Lesbians, Midgets, Nasty Girls, Orgies, Playmates vs. Pets, Queer, Rock ’n’ Roll, Satanic, Threesomes, Uglies, Voyeurs, Wet and Messy, X-Tremely Dangerous, Yellow Love, and—ick—Zoological.) When asked what she does for a living, the Other Jessica Darling might try to hide behind the polite euphemisms “actress” or “dancer.” But when it comes down to it, the job description “Porn Star” means that the Other Jessica Darling performs sex acts on camera. Her skills are recession-proof.
Mine, not so much.
I first began my job search late last January, three weeks after graduation, during what should have been my crisscross country road trip if Hope and I hadn’t been jacked by the tweakers. Before I even had a chance to report the loss, Ms. Daisy Schlemmer and Mr. Harlan Oakes had already used my ATM card to buy propane cylinders, hot plates, and battery acid at the local ACE Hardware, which should really consider changing its motto to “The Source for All Your Meth Lab Needs.” Ms. Oakes and Mr. Schlemmer must have been disappointed to discover that a single $153.26 transaction drained me of my life savings, not to mention the negative twenty dollars I then owed for “overdraft protection.”
The crime occurred on Day One of our trip, and it seemed like a baaaaaad omen, payback for my attempt at youthful irresponsibility and frivolity in the face of unemployment. Hope tried to convince me otherwise, and promised that we’d get another chance to travel someday, but those thieves stole all my enthusiasm for adventure on the open road. I felt like I had no choice but to skip the trip, crash with my sister in Brooklyn, and find gainful employment in the city.
So I keystroked my way to Columbia’s Career Education Services website, figuring that one of the advantages of graduating in January was that I’d get a head start on the seniors getting diplomas in May. I soon realized that a head start on nothing is not a head start at all. Psychology didn’t even justify its own job heading. Any career opportunities in my field were relegated to the minimum-wage smorgasbord category of “Other.”
This was not a promising sign.
As I clicked through the listings, several keywords kept coming up over and over again. “Wall Street.” “Financial Services Industry.” “Sales and Trading Division.” “Funds Management.”
To make money, you gotta make money. Well, no shit.
My whole idealistic approach to college had been one colossal error in judgment. Learning for the sake of learning? Pursuing my passion for psychology over a more practical, employable major? What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I major in economics? I could have just as easily majored in economics. My brother-in-law majored in economics at Rutgers, and he’s a goddamn troglodyte. A troglodyte pulling down seven, maybe eight figures. I’m certainly smart enough to have majored in economics…only I was too fucking stupid to major in economics.
I probably would have signed up for a temp agency if Professor Mac hadn’t put me in touch with his former colleague Robert Stevens, editor in chief of Think. I got the (quasi) job based on Mac’s recommendation alone, and I remember feeling guilty about it. Not everyone was lucky enough to have taken a summer writing course with a future National Book Award nominee. I felt like I had somehow cheated my way into this position, that there were other unconnected applicants who might have been more qualified. I said as much to Mac, who rebuffed my worries.
“Most people get ahead through the connections they make along the way,” he said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“It doesn’t seem fair,” I said.
“Do I need to quote a better writer than I am on the subject of equanimity?”
I told him he need not bother. And I got over it, mostly because I counted on Think as a temporary thing, until I got my “real” job, which I hoped would happen before Think’s funding ran out.
Finding more lucrative employment seemed highly unlikely until last week, a day or two before you arrived in Brooklyn, when I received Dr. Katherine Seamon’s divine e-mail in my inbox. And by
divine, I mean it in the miraculous, near-religious sense, and not in the way insincere fashionistas use to gush over overpriced stilettos.
* * *
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: New Media Job for Psychology Majors
Date: 8/28/2006
* * *
I almost hit Delete without opening it. First of all, the words “New Media” implied that this e-mail had been bottlenecked on the information superhighway since 1999. Furthermore, the employment promise of that subject heading seemed about as legit as the guaranteed 100 percent herbal way to add six inches to my penis. Finally, the sender’s surname, with its ejaculatory connotations, certainly didn’t help boost credibility. But I’d been looking for a permanent position for eight months, and I was starting to feel desperate. I clicked the message and read on.
I found out about your work with the CU Storytellers Project in the most recent issue of Columbia College Today. As you may have heard in recent weeks, I’ve just launched iLoveULab, a new research-based interpersonal networking provider that is the first to blend new media and neuroscience.
I’m hiring graduates who have a background in psychology as well as strong writing and interviewing skills. All positions with iLoveULab provide a competitive starting salary and benefits. I prefer meeting job candidates in person, and will be conducting business in New York City during the first week of September. Please contact me if you’re interested in learning more.
Sincerely, Dr. Katherine Seamon, CC ’95
The doctor’s name sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it. And I was certain that I had never heard of iLoveULab, a name that connotes heart-shaped boxes of chocolate wrapped in shiny cellophane and tied up with a big red bow. I was in the middle of fact-checking a Think piece titled “Mom and Pop Psychology” about the return of Freudian psychoanalysis, so I made a mental note to Google Dr. Katherine Seamon and iLoveULab when I had the chance.
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