Therein lay the intellectual origin of your strange, reoccurring fantasy: You didn’t dream of being a pop star or a princess or of winning the lottery; you dreamed that you would be equipped with surveillance equipment—contacts you could put in your eyes with tiny cameras and a tiny microphone you could wear at all times—and somewhere, miles away, there would be an assembly of very cool people in a bunker designed for a covert military operation, and these people would watch everything you were experiencing and listen to everything happening, and they would tell you, via earpiece, what you should say and do—verbatim—if you wanted to be cool, for people to like you, for you to give off that inexplicable magnetism that some children have and some children don’t, even in elementary school. You didn’t even want to be the MOST popular, just part of a group of people who were comfortably established in the cool group, beyond reproach and deserving of the respect of their lessers.
The fantasy reemerged a few years later, on your first day of camp when, presented with the gift of a new social hierarchy in which no one knew you as someone whose status was middling at best, you could re-create yourself exactly as you wanted. With the maturity of a now eleven-year-old, you knew there would be no tiny cameras in contacts or microphones—you would have to operate as your own secret consultant, premeditating everything you said, and only vocalizing it if it passed your careful examination as to whether it was something a popular person would say.
You entered your cabin, buoyed with confidence in your new plan, and saw a girl, not the most popular, but popular-adjacent (how quickly these things are established with no discussion), eating her daily canteen (the afternoon treat of soda or candy), a Charleston Chew bar, while she sat on the floor. You scripted, deliberated, and then delivered your line.
“How’s your canteen treatin’ ya?”
She looks up at you. “What?”
It is too late to abort.
“Your canteen,” you say. “How’s it…how’s it treatin’ ya?”
“How’s it treating me?” She says those two words back to you dripping in something between pity and genuine befuddlement. You mumble an apology and pretend it never happened, although, more than a decade later, you can still replay every moment of the scene—the door you entered, where she was sitting on the floor, the sinking in your stomach when you realized you said something wrong—on command.
But you are twenty-two now. And you have been told so many times to “just be yourself!” that it’s more or less balanced the advice you have given yourself of “just do everything as if some spies were instructing you on how to be cool.” And you have an internship at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which is very cool! By all objective metrics, you could be in that group of spies advising on coolness!
You interns are all cautious animals, deferential among your superiors (the staffers) and inquisitive about your colleagues, the other bright-eyed college kids in clothes you all bought the night before at Ann Taylor so you’d look put together for your first day, perfect straight spines and fixed smiles. Who is going to be the champion intern? you all wonder. Who will be the one that’s promoted to full-time employee, presumably because they were the best at restocking paper towels to the sink on the third floor. But above all, the hesitation exists among the interns because there’s no social hierarchy yet. You’ve all come from different schools and share no social overlap. Who is the coolest? Can you tell by their clothes? Or the way they introduced themselves? “Oh, I’m studying film at Tisch.” Is that cool here? None of you have any way of telling, and so you’re all acting extra polite to one another just in case. Everyone wants to be friends before they get to know each other.
It’s nice to imagine working in television as a meritocracy, that a bright-eyed, earnest Midwesterner could make it if they were bright-eyed and earnest enough. Maybe that’s true somewhere. But not here, not after the question interns ask each other after names and schools: “So how did you get this job?”
The answers vary, but they tend to have a similar thematic thread. My mom is a chief of programming. My brother-in-law works in accounting. Jon Stewart owed my dad a favor. I have photographic evidence that proves a CBS executive hit a dog and drove away, and I handed it over in exchange for an internship. The usual. There are two of you who answer with mock incredulity. “Why, I just sent in a résumé? Isn’t that how everyone gets a job here?” In actuality, you were hoisted into the running by one of the two female writers who saw your jokes on the Internet and was kind enough to humor you for a few minutes while you begged her for career advice. And even then, you were likely only hired because of your previous internship on Conan, which you no doubt were hired for based on a fortuitous name-drop of a Brown alumnus who also happened to be the former executive producer. The game is connections, and enough money in your savings account from your bat mitzvah to make it through a few unpaid summers. You are one of a class of privileged elitists and you are alternately ashamed and wildly grateful.
“Dana, could you go up to see Amy?” the intern coordinator calls through the door of her office.
You spring to attention. “Who is Amy?” you ask one of the other interns.
“Stephen’s assistant,” she says, glancing back at the other interns to gauge whether making fun of your lack of knowledge is something that’s more likely to win or lose points.
And so you don’t ask which one is Amy’s office. You find it largely by trial and error (mainly error, and then politely asking one of the production assistants).
“Oh, good,” Amy says when she sees someone enter her office so bright-eyed and confused at the world that they could only be an intern. “I need you to buy Stephen a putter.” She thrusts a credit card into your hand.
“What kind of putter?” you say. You can be responsible. You will not come back with the wrong thing. “I was actually a golfer in high school.”
“Oh, thank God,” Amy sighs. “Because I have no idea what sort of clubs are out there. This is just for putting around in his office.”
“How…tall is he?” you ask. Now that you have established yourself as the golfing expert, you must protect your reputation.
“Five-eleven and just bring it back here when you have it. Thank you so much.”
You could’ve asked a hundred more questions—does he need a cup to putt into? Does he need balls? How expensive should the putter be?—but Stephen’s assistant has already returned to her work and given the unmistakable body language signal for “get going already.”
You practically skip to the golf store fourteen blocks away. Your fingers never leave the edge of the credit card.
The store is closed when you arrive, two minutes away from opening. An employee is sweeping the area right in front of the door. You try to make eye contact. It’s two minutes. Can’t they just open up early? You have a job to do. “You don’t understand,” you fantasize about shouting through the glass. “This is very urgent. This is an errand for Stephen Colbert.”
You tap your foot. You check your phone. Leisurely, as if completely oblivious to the fact that someone is waiting outside to make a purchase for a celebrity, the employee turns his keys and peels open the door.
“I’m looking for a putter,” you declare. He gestures you upstairs.
“I’m looking for a putter,” you declare to the first employee you see upstairs. “It’s for my boss.” Now that you’re actually face-to-face with someone, it seems gauche to name-drop. “He’s about five-eleven.”
“Uh, okay,” the golf man says. “Do you know what he’s looking for in a putter?”
“Just for putting around his office.”
“Oh, just grab this one, then,” the golf man says, handing over a medium-sized club. “Easy.”
You return to the studio heroic, with the correct putter, even if it was the only putter that was suggested to you. You enter Amy’s office like a proud cat bearing a dead bird. “Oh, fantastic,” she says. “Hey, Stephen, we got the putter for your office. An
d turns out we sent the right intern—she golfed in high school.”
“No way,” says a voice from the connected room that sounds very, very familiar. “Come in, putt a few with me.”
This probably isn’t allowed. This must be some sort of trick scenario that all new interns are faced with to see who will show proper deference and humility. “Oh no, sir,” you’re supposed to say, “I would never besmirch Your Famousness’s putter with my putrid minimal-wage hands.”
“WELL DONE!” Stephen would bellow. “Now go back and restock all of the paper towels.”
But you don’t, and he doesn’t. You mumble something and he says, “Come on! Where are you from?”
“Chicago,” you say.
“Love Chicago. Spent a lot of time there,” Stephen Colbert says, setting up the ball retriever.
“I know,” you say before you realize how creepy it sounds. “I’m just from the suburbs, though.”
“I went to college in Evanston. Northwestern,” Stephen Colbert says to you, as if you didn’t already know.
“I know,” you say.
Tactfully, he doesn’t respond. Instead, Stephen Colbert unwraps the new putter that you didn’t really have to pick out and tries it out, putting a ball and watching it roll lazily into the cup. And then he hands you the putter. “Let’s see what you got.”
In four years of high school golfing (I know, I know), you’ve been faced with shots terrifying, frustrating, and high pressure. You’ve teed off on a hole with a massive water hazard while both teams of coaches and a horde of parents stared at you. You’ve had to hit, red-faced, when you were already three strokes behind everyone else and the rest of the foursome was getting impatient. You’ve putted on the ninth hole where sinking the shot is the difference between winning and losing.
This putt, on carpet from three yards away, is the hardest shot you’ve ever faced in your life. You pray to the patron saint of interns and former high school nerds and tap the ball. And it goes in the hole.
Immediately, you hand the putter back to Stephen Colbert. You are one for one, batting a thousand; it can only go downhill from there. Besides, there’s a fine line between a celebrity talk show host being polite to his intern and the intern not being able to take a hint on when they’re overstaying their welcome. “Nice shot!” Stephen Colbert says.
In your entire life, you will never have a better first day of work.
Continue reading.
So you made it to New York. You have a job; you have a place to stay (a friend of a friend on Facebook happened to be offering up an empty white room on the second floor of a building next door to a gas station and across the street from a gas station and a vape shop. The neighborhood could generously be called “East Williamsburg,” but more accurately would be described as “No Man’s Land East of Williamsburg and North of Bushwick.”). Now all you need is an adult, New York City romance with someone who understands you, someone you can have picnics with in the park and attend literary salons alongside. This city is too big and too lonely to attempt to go it alone. That’s what you’ve realized from your weeks of working as an intern, commuting back and forth on the L train, meeting friends for drinks sometimes, but in the end, returning to your now-less-empty white room, with your laptop open on your chest until ten o’clock at night, which somehow becomes two in the morning and you fall asleep to another auto-playing YouTube video of a comedian’s special you’ve already seen four times. You never sweep the floor, and you let your little sister’s powder-blue duffel gather clumps of dust under the bed. You begin buying full boxes of cereal and Twinkies and family-size bags of Popchips to bring back to your room at night to stave off boredom. Don’t be lonely. Find someone.
WHO WILL YOU FALL IN LOVE WITH?
1. Young or old?
A. Young. You are Mrs. Robinson and your taste is pool boys with puka necklaces and flip-flops who uptalk so that everything they say sounds like a question.
B. Old. Cognac old. Cracked-leather-chair old. Smokes-a-pipe old. Not like grandpa old, but I mean, if he happens to have a few superyoung grandkids because he accidentally had kids as a teenager or something, that’s cool.
2. Comedic or literary?
A. Comedic. Dating a funny guy is like a gypsy’s curse: You will suffer through 1,000 terrible improv shows.
B. Literary. Dating a literary guy is like another gypsy’s curse: You will suffer through 1,000 mediocre readings.
3. Emotional or withdrawn?
A. Emotional. Drunk girl crying in a bar bathroom and telling everyone she loves them.
B. Withdrawn. Under a Snuggie and holding a cat that is desperately trying to escape your grasp.
4. Charles Dickens or Thomas Pynchon?
A. Charles Dickens, populist hero.
B. Thomas Pynchon, recluse hero. I mean, Charles Dickens never got to be on The Simpsons.
5. Twitter or email?
A. Twitter. Microfiction is the new frontier.
B. Email. Did you know that the New Yorker only takes submissions via email now?
If you chose mostly As
Turn here.
If you chose mostly Bs
Turn here.
Here, you think to yourself, is a boy you could definitely fall in love with. He wears the same stained white T-shirt every day, switching it out only for his lucky West Ham jersey when his favorite team is playing (an event he’ll commemorate with fellow Brits and a few committed anglophiles at a bar in Midtown at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning). His hair is perpetually greasy but it falls in his face like Hugh Grant’s hair does. You’ll wonder, later, whether you only came up with the Hugh Grant comparison because he was British and conclude: maybe. He is the opposite of the douchey Wall Street investment banker bro you’ve declared yourself immune to. He is friends with everyone; everyone wants him; everyone knows him; everybody has a story about him.
You’ll wonder why a British accent affords so much social and sexual currency in the United States. Perhaps it’s because in America we become exposed to Englishmen through their princes and their bumblingly adorable classically trained actors who seemingly all went to Oxford. You meet an English boy in America, and even though your brain says, Underemployed, undershowered comedy writer, your ears hear, Secretly a prince who will fall in love with you and bring you on horseback to a fairy tale of castles and ball gowns. And because an accent is so desirable, dating a boy with an accent will make all of your friends jealous; a by-product that makes the accent even more desirable.
One night, after watching an episode of The Leftovers in his bed (or rather, a mattress on the floor), you realize something: When you’re with him, you forget to cover your mouth when you laugh. With everyone else you’re embarrassed about your extra inch of gum and the way your smile makes you look like an angler fish. But with him, you don’t seem to care. He doesn’t seem to mind how you look. He says you’re hot and you almost believe him. When you’re spending time with him, you feel as though you two are the only ones in Brooklyn who can see through the bullshit—you are mini-Holden Caulfields, but self-aware, like if Holden Caulfield had been able to read Catcher in the Rye when he turned eighteen. It’s you against all the phonies. Sometimes, when you watch TV in bed together, he’ll wrap his arm around you and you’ll think, This is how it’s supposed to be.
You’re not dating—you’ve never been dating, not really. He calls you “man” and “mate” and punches your shoulder playfully and talks to you mostly about The Leftovers and not his hopes and dreams. But it’s going to happen—you can feel it. The two of you will go to readings and open mics together. You’ll binge-watch TV in bed from your laptop, making coffee in a French press, nestling in the crook of his arm that smells like him.
You’ll be the kind of girl who has an Instagram with a consistent aesthetic, each picture merging seamlessly into the next like they were designed by a magazine’s creative director. The pictures all feature a version of you who’s bone-thin with long, natura
lly straight hair and a jawline as sharp as a hand razor (unlike your jawline, which sort of muffin-tops into your chin). There you are facing away from the camera, gazing out the window. There you are in round sunglasses, at a rooftop party. There you are drinking matcha tea and showing off your stick-and-poke tattoos. The version of yourself you are with him is daring and fearless and reckless and probably does drugs. She is irresistible.
But then, why does he never lean in to kiss you? Why does he only return your texts sometimes, and even then, two, three hours after you sent them?
You know the truth in the back of your mind. Those awful six words ricochet between your hemispheres like a current in an electrical storm when you open your phone again and again and see that he hasn’t responded to you (or that he has responded to your lengthy diatribe about the meaningful differences between friendships and relationships with a “haha”): He’s just not that into you.
And then, one night at the end of November, he comes to your place (or rather, the room you’re renting in an apartment that claims it’s in East Williamsburg but that everyone really knows is just North Bushwick) and tells you about the sort-of relationship he’s in with another writer in Brooklyn, scratching at the plasticky floral cover on your apartment’s communal kitchen table and looking up at you apologetically.
You look her up on Facebook and Twitter, and she’s gorgeous—long freckled limbs and shaggy blond hair and white smile with a job more interesting and more impressive than yours. Of course he’s with her, you think. But then why is he always hanging out with you?
You once read an article that said, contrary to what people might expect, those with high IQs are far more likely to be seduced by a cult than those with lower IQs. The reason being that people who are more intelligent are also more creative: They might be faced with a dossier of evidence telling them that the cult beliefs are nonsense, but a clever person who wants to believe something will be able to come up with imaginative justifications for themselves. A person with a high IQ can create entire reasoning systems designed to justify something that they want to believe is true. Do you understand where this is going?
Choose Your Own Disaster Page 11