by Jill Kargman
But for all of my righteous rainbow flaggage there was one glaring hole (no pun intended): oddly, I never had one lesbo pal. Not by choice or anything; I just didn’t know any. So when I got to college and saw a group called Yalesbians, and subsequently an even more hard-core group, a Jewish faction of extreme religious box-chowers called OrthoDykes, I was surprised at my bizarrely unexplainable semihomophobia. It wasn’t a phobia per se—I wasn’t freaked or anything—it was more that I just . . . didn’t identify. Lady Gaga? Bien sûr! Indigo Girls? No, gracias. From the mullets to the shoe-boots, I couldn’t aesthetically absorb the culture the way I did with my boys, even though I wanted to. And I’m such a girl’s girl! And truly, it’s not that I’m freaked about carpet munchage (which, okay, maybe I am, I’ll admit), it’s more the look and feel. When I go to my favorite bar in New York, Marie’s Crisis, on Grove Street, I feel more at home among the singing gay guys than I would in a bar full of ladies at Henrietta Hudson or Rubyfruit (which is code for clit, I think). One night, I was early for a dinner on the Lower East Side. I spied Meow Mix, the lez bar, and decided I was intrigued and would get a drink there. I just wanted to spy the scene. Was it going to be the PowerLez clique like on Sex and the City? Lipstick wearers with stilettos? I was curious.
Apparently, so was Michael Imperioli, best known as “Christophuh” on The Sopranos. He walked in and sat on the stool next to me, looking me over, assuming that I was a muff diver. We made small talk about the weather and the music, chatting in the end for about a half an hour. The funny thing is I never could have struck up a conversation anywhere else, because he prolly would have assumed I was some stalkerazzi fame-fucker who would try to bang the eyebrows off him and Glenn Close some rabbits on his stove. But no, I was a nice downtown hip lesbian; how unthreatening! When I left he said it was so nice talking to me and rubbed my arm good-bye as I sauntered out, presumably for my dinner with k.d. lang.
My eldest child, who has gay godparents, blithely checks out the wedding announcements in the New York Times and asks me to read stories of how the pairs met. She has no idea that in (many) parts of the country—not to mention the world—the marriages are not legal. She sees two people in love. I’m not some kind of beaming psychomom whose sense of accomplishment is tied up in her chitlins, but I must confess I’m so proud my kids are color-blind and little unknowing rainbow-flag wavers. Moms are aghast when I say I’ll be fine if my son, Fletch, lives on Christopher Street and skips to work, but it’s the truth. Then I’ll always have a pal around the corner when I want a midnight croon session at Marie’s Crisis. Anyone who goes there, even people who are dragged in rolling their eyes, can’t help but feel a jolt of camaraderie and New York spirit gathered around the packed piano with perma, 365-days-a-year Christmas lights. Between the tiny twinkling bulbs and the improvised four-part harmonies, I feel more alive than I feel in any other place in the city. “I could have daaaaaanced all night” rings out as people cram under the wooden beams, singing and swaying. I feel merry and warm and part of a club. I feel gay. I know the art clique leader that Charlotte befriended on Sex and the City said, “If you don’t eat pussy, you’re not a dyke,” but I still feel that connection. More to the guys, but still. Maybe it’s an outsider thing. Maybe I just dig the same stuff. Maybe I see the world in the same way. Through a kaleidoscope, where the poppies are redder, Emerald City is greener, and Judy Garland’s voice is more magical than Oz.
8
I know, I know: I’m not the first gal who detested her boss and had nightmares for years about fetching coffee with just the right ratio of skim milk to java. But I am one of the proud few who’ve had a tape dispenser thrown at her head. No, people, not the clear plastic Scotch roll; I’m talking the office-supply-style, weighted, pull-’n’-rip desktop kind. During college, I’d had internships at Harper’s Bazaar and MTV and the now defunct Mademoiselle magazine, where I actually worked for Kate Spade, who was the nicest person I’d ever met, let alone worked for, so the bar had been raised pretty fucking high. Then came Richard Sinnott, accessories director at Bazaar under Liz Tilberis, who is a comic genius. Richard and I cackled the hours away, hit gay bars, and even experimented with online shenanigans when the Internet started. Holy shit, that makes me sound super old. “Back in ye olde days, before there was any Internet . . .”
Anyway, I was twenty-one and my first job out of college was as an assistant at a pop culture magazine; I’d be allowed to write certain blurbs and “front of book” articles now and again. At first it seemed like a dream job; in fact I was reminded by the head of HR that “thousands of kids would kill for this job” and that $18,000 was “really generous” considering that “quite frankly, people would pay us to work here.”
Lies. Give ’em a week and they’d have jumped out the fucking window. Did I mention there was no lunch hour? Oh no, that was too postal workery. “We all work through lunch and maybe take a ten-minute break,” I was told. So, wait, like, no hour to myself to get an eyebrow wax and proper meal? “This is a magazine. We could fill your job with any number of people who would kill to work through lunch.” The result was ten pounds gained. I’d starve all day and then get out at ten at night and sic myself on a huge dinner. Which I subsequently learned was how the Japanese make sumo wrestlers so fucking fat. They fast and then pound a massive buffet and crash, all those calories on their asses and in donut rolls. Great. That would be me. Without the black flappy diaper thing, but still. Not good. I had one friend, in another department, who was equally miserable, but the others around me were all my superiors.
Technically, I had three bosses. One woman, two guys. The woman would routinely call people retards and storm in enveloped in a beige cloud of cigarette smoke and farts. I went to work with my heart pounding every day. After only a few weeks, I started to cry in the bathroom. This was a soul-draining experience that went on for twenty months, generally in the afternoons after a verbal beating.
It all began with the cheese Danish. But not just any cheese Danish—the almighty, the mack daddy, the pooh-bah, the grandmommy of all cheese danii: a Danish from Dean & Deluca on Prince Street. Each morning I was sent to fetch Her Majesty a cheese Danish. And one at lunch. And one at four or five p.m. I swear, people, if she collapsed and dropped dead and the autopsy people sliced her open, cheese Danish stuffing would just ooze out. Too gross. Add two packs of cigarettes a day, nine espressos, and lack of hygiene, and you’ve got what I call B cubed: bad breath, bad BO, bad box.
Now, you know that the shit’s bad when I tell you that she wasn’t even the worst one. Her beeyotch butt boy looked like a Gaston-esque caricature of a ripped Chelsea queen, black turtleneck and black Helmut Lang pants daily, like Sprockets but without the Nazi accent. But make no mistake: he ran the joint Gestapo-style. There was a strict no-food policy. I wasn’t exactly sure why, until our gorgeous loft space had a visitor. From the order Rodentia. A small rat darted down the long hallway and I levitated onto my desk screaming. No doubt the critter was lured by the aroma of fresh-baked piping-hot cheese Danish, and he strutted down the gray carpet by my desk. Chaos ensued. Shrieks were heard around the office and a photo editor dropped a pile of folders and bolted, papering the floor with outtakes of Bruce Weber shot next to half-naked boys with water spritzed on their chests.
Exterminators were called and that was the end of Ratatouille. It was around this time that, realizing my thigh circumference was approaching hula hoop girth, I decided I needed to start sneaking in a healthy small lunch or snack. I couldn’t slave for twelve hours working up the appetite of a T. rex and then stuff face avec two bread baskets before the apps were even served.
I had a bag of baby carrots in my top drawer, next to the paper clips and stapler. When no one was looking, I’d crunch one with super-slow chews and silently swallow. This worked for a few weeks. Then one day, holding a telltale carrot stump, I was caught red-handed. Or I guess orange-handed.
My boss�
�s shadow loomed over me. When I looked up, his face was contorted as if the rage boiling inside him would blast through his nostrils, ears, and eye sockets, sending his eyeballs flying all around the room like those bright rubber ones in the twenty-five-cent supermarket dispensers. He then walked off.
Later in the day, I went to pee and came back to my desk to find a note. It was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of standard white paper crisply folded in half with a crease that was obviously pressed with some sort of object like a CD case or a knife handle. It was then stapled around the entire border, with the little silver staples making a thin metal line around the three sides.
I pried open the Fort Knox memo and found the following.
Jill:
It was very curious to see you eating food at your desk. Especially because when we had the rodent problem, you were the one who screamed the loudest. How interesting, then, that you choose to eat in the office . . .
B.
I mean . . . insane! Yeah, I’m so sure it was my fault. Gee, I’m just certain it had nothing whatsoever to do with the CHEESE DANISH CRUMBS ALL OVER THE FUCKING FLOOR.
A couple months later, I was fact-checking a David Bowie article and found an error on the final final pass at the eleventh hour. Seriously, it was eleven p.m. and we were all exhausted and wanted to ship the damn issue. I went into a senior staff meeting and said we had to make a last-minute change, which meant we’d be late to newsstand. My boss picked up her tape dispenser and threw it. At me. It hit my head, and while I had a Snoopy moment where I thought I saw flying Woodstocks tweeting in a circle around my wounded noggin, I was fine. No lawsuits, though I probably could have sued for any number of things, including mental torture.
I decided I needed to pick a date. A distant magical endpoint, a dot of light far away I could reach out toward and use to pull myself through the muck, like Andy Dufresne escaping Shawshank through a river of doody, but it’s worth it to get to the rain and crane shot on the other side. I needed to figure out what my three football fields would be—another year? No, fuck no. Nine months? Okay, nine months.
Christmas was approaching and the whole office was invited out to a sit-down holiday lunch. We arrived at a nearby restaurant to find that the editor and publisher were only “stopping by” for a total of fifteen minutes—they didn’t drink or eat and bolted when we had our appetizers cleared. When we came back to our desks each of us had a red rectangular envelope stuck into our keyboards with gold script that read: “Thank You!”
In between the “thank” and the “you” was an oval. In the oval was Benjamin Franklin’s face. Wait . . . WTF? Was this . . . a doorman’s envelope? It was.
“What the hell is this?” I said, opening it to find a $100 bill.
“Oh, it’s our tip. It’s not really enough to be a bonus,” replied my coworker, whose name was Jil but with one l.
She looked at my blank face.
“Yeah, I know, weak.” She shrugged. “We can go buy ourselves a sweater at Banana Republic.”
I decided nine months would become six. Six months I could do. I gave my notice on my birthday and never looked back. I was free! I was leaving for a job as a copywriter at Bertelsmann Music Group and couldn’t have been happier to bail. I think I left Road Runner skid marks on the way out.
When I got to my gleaming new offices and nice boss, I was in shock. At 4:59 p.m. everyone’s coats were on and the elevators were jammed with a mass exodus. My second day, I hovered in my boss’s door.
“Um, h-hi,” I stammered after he’d hung up his phone. “Um, I wanted to see if I could um quickly pop out for a few minutes to grab something to eat?”
He looked at me like I had just parked my spaceship in Times Square. “Why don’t you take your lunch hour?”
I looked at him in a daze . . . hour . . . Hour? Hour! I had a lunch hour! Yee-haw! I was in heaven. No matter what I had to endure—including one schmuck who always had me redo things when he’d originally said he wanted the opposite (and also he wore a bolo tie; not sure which was worse)—I always knew I had an hour that was mine to recharge my batteries. In the end, though, it turned out that office life was not for moi. I bailed for the greener pastures of writing solo, and while lonely sometimes, it’s sure better than fetching cheese Danishes and being called retarded. Life’s just too damn short.
9
Obsessed
Dannon coffee yogurt
Woody Allen movies
Nine Inch Nails
Edward Gorey books
Tim Burton’s drawings
The sound of billiard balls clacking
The half-opened popcorn kernels at the bottom of the bucket
Fat toddler feet
Stories from doctor friends about nasty-ass ER people (à la the four-hundred-pound woman who had half a tuna sandwich in one of her fat folds, et al.) and teratomas (Google it, if you dare)
Nerds
Baked goods
Machine hot chocolate
Texting
Trendy Japanese kids
Detest
Thumb rings
Ventriloquists
People posting pix of themselves on private jets on Facebook
canada
People who have made-up, trying-to-be-cool titles on their start-up business cards, like “Dreamer-in-Chief” or “Head Ninja”
Images of animals in human clothing
Morphing babies so they can talk in movies and commercials
Toe rings
Ventriloquists’ dummies
The Eagles (see Don Henley = asshole anecdote on page 41)
Cirque du So Lame
Crocs on grown-ups who aren’t surgeons
Hard-candy plastic being unwrapped during a show or movie
(sk)Anklets smashed under nude hose (double whammy)
Loud gum chewers
People who use “summer” as a verb
10
Dearest Apartment No. 5,
Some girls chart the chapters of their lives by jobs or guys or haircuts; I do it by real estate. You, no. 5, are inextricably linked to every memory I have from the mostly heinous fucking four years we spent together, but in the end, you were the one that built me back up from lonely twenty-four-year-old whimpering kvetch subsumed with worries about the Future. I arrived scarred and feeble and left you happy, relieved, and not roping up a noose. But we both know it wasn’t easy.
When we met, I was as maudlin as tattered Cosette in the Les Miz poster. I may as well’ve had a mop and actual shredded clothes, I was so down. Or, as Kit De Luca, the whore best friend in Pretty Woman, said, “Cinderfuckinrella.” I hoped in a new space I could turn my life around. You were way more charming than the other shitboxes I’d seen on my Tasmanian Devil whirlwind tour of way-too-expensive hovels that looked like Czech rat holes you’d crawl in to die. Your exposed brick and dreamy location near Central Park didn’t soothe my weary bones and battered emotions, though. That would take some time.
The hot Israeli movers came to pack me up from my downtown abode, which was a hipster gigantor luminous loft compared to you, my dark third-floor walk-up. Let’s admit it, my sweet, you were definitely a downgrade. The movers found me tearstained and sitting on a cardboard box, refugee-style.
“Breakup move?” one asked with a sympathetic look.
Whoa. ESP? “Mm-hmm,” I sniffled, wiping a hot errant tear.
“Don’t worry, honey, we do this all the time. You’re gonna be just fine.”
When I was fully moved in, my sitcom-style reverie of hot-neighbor sexual tension was dashed instantly: of the ten apartments, eight were occupied by single women. Grrrreat. Of the remaining two tenants, one was a family with three kids and the other lived behind a buzzer reading “Erlichman.” I held out hope for an NJB (Nice Jewish Boy), but he tur
ned out to be an AARP-card carrier who told me his rent control had him paying $300 a month, compared to my nightmarish monthly ka-ching that was more than six times that.
“The landlord would love to see me go, but I got news for him,” he told me in the stairwell, which was adorned with horrifying pheasant-covered wallpaper. “They’ll be taking me outta here in my coffin.”
Good times!
Then the gal directly upstairs moved out (got married, migrated to the ’burbs) and in came cocaine-snorting, Moby-blaring Melanie, the town bicycle—and I mean every guy in New York had a ride. I didn’t know which was worse—the song “Bodyrock” playing on a loop, like seriously eleventy times in a row, or the bumping of her iron bed from the dick du jour pounding her.
Meanwhile, for normal non-druggie moi, there was pas d’action for a while. While I loved being out of a high-rise and into your intimate, cozier perch, the views of hand-holding couples squoze lemon juice on the wound of my singledom. The nights with you were very lonely sitting on an explosion of Pottery Barn, stuck with racing thoughts that stomped on top of each other, collage-like, inside my head. Would I die in this apartment alone? Like the dude upstairs, would they carry my lifeless bod down the walk-up steps?
If being alone with my thoughts got to be too unbearable, I would turn on my el cheapo crappy TV that was so small I might as well have been watching the rich yuppie across the street’s giant plasma flat-screen. That’s when I learned that four a.m. is the loneliest hour. Why do they show so many upsetting movies in the middle of the night? I remember watching Jagged Edge and Single White Female alone, and somewhere around the time Jennifer Jason Leigh jams her stiletto through the guy’s eyeball socket into his brain and kills him, I thought to myself, This might not be the best thing to watch all alone in the middle of the night. I think deep down I wanted to take the plunge into my despair over my breakup and really feel the pain. And I did. I woke up with what Humbert Humbert called pavor nocturnus—complete and total, all-enveloping night panic. You know, heart pounding for no reason, cold sweats, racing brain, thoughts of spinsterhood.