Now, I’d known plenty of kids in college who’d worshipped at the altar of the glossy magazine, but I was not quite one of those. I considered myself too high-minded for the mainstream commercial magazine, and I wouldn’t have been caught dead in high school with any periodicals other than my father’s Foreign Affairses and, of late, his New Republics. But there was a catch. I was obsessed with, just completely infatuated by, fashion, and most of what I knew about fashion I had learned by reading fashion magazines—alone in my room at home. I actually hated that I cared so much about clothing and considered it a potentially soul-deforming weakness. I also knew that I was quite dangerously enticed by fashion magazines’ conspicuous consumption angle. So maybe my relationship with the glossy magazine might have been more accurately called “love-hate.”
I did make that call. Turned out the GQ editor’s assistant had just quit. Would I like to be considered for the job? The interview date the editor gave me conflicted with my graduation, but I knew this was my one shot, and I took it.
SO NOW HERE I WAS, A MONTH LATER, IN NEW YORK CITY, MEETING WITH the editor, David Granger, at a bar in a restaurant at Grand Central Station.
He gave the bartender a wave. “My daughter here will have a chardonnay,” he said.
Of course it probably would have been a more professional move for me to ask for a sparkling water, but no one had ever told me what was appropriate and what was not; no one had ever told me anything, really.
“Are you even old enough to drink?” Granger asked skeptically.
I assured him I was.
He asked where I was staying. I told him.
“Why there?” he asked, clearly of the mind that this very touristy theater district hotel was just about as uncool as it got and doubtlessly drawing all sorts of unwelcome conclusions about my class, sophistication level, gaucherie tolerance, etc.
“Because it has a revolving restaurant?” I said experimentally.
Granger was a soft-spoken, thoughtful guy in his late thirties with light brown hair and glasses. He had on a baggy suit and a tie with horizontal stripes. He asked why I liked GQ. Helpfully, it turned out that the stories I enjoyed most were the ones he had edited. Back at school, when I should have been studying for finals, I had instead crammed back issues of GQ. In those pre-Internet days, there was only one way to get a back issue of a magazine: go to the library. The periodicals at my college, it turned out, were kept in the chemistry library (I had not even known there was a chemistry library), and for the better part of a week, I’d sat with the chemistry nerds and studied old issues of GQ with the devotion of a Quranic scholar. The stories I liked best in the magazine were weird and had mystery and a beating heart. I ran little reading comprehension tests of them on myself and tried to remember everything I read.
As Granger and I spoke, it became apparent that I did have one thing going for me: I was able to talk about past issues of GQ. Later, he said that I got the job because I was the only person he’d interviewed who’d actually even bothered to open the magazine.
“Never underestimate how unprepared most people are,” he would later observe, correctly.
But back in the chemistry library at school, I’d also noted that the magazine’s representation of women was problematic at best. GQ barely published any female writers, and the only women it seemed to have space for were starlets, preferably in stages of dishabille, which is a more attractive way of saying that they were photographed seminude: nearly every time a woman showed up, the otherwise respectable joint became a strip club (although no nipples—leave that business to Playboy). I’d also come across an inane recent special issue about women, which had this exceptionally sexist (and remarkably type-heavy) cover line:
“Ah, Women. What do they want? What do they want from us? What do they fear? What makes them tick, makes them crazy, rocks their world—and why are they so damned angry? Here in the paranoid, PC Nineties, loving women has never been dicier. With this special issue, we search for some answers, and signs of hope that we can all get along.”
Speaking of “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” Little did I know then that this would become the central concern of my career: dealing with men’s magazines’ judgments of women.
The job was to be not only Granger’s assistant but also assistant to the literary editor and to an assistant managing editor. Before my GQ deep-dive, I will admit I hadn’t known that the magazine even published fiction, so this was a surprising and welcome feature of the job. I also learned that the assistant managing editor at GQ had been a hallowed early editor at Rolling Stone, a detail also of particular interest to me. In one of my creative writing classes back at school, there’d been this one student who’d been scheming to get an internship at Rolling Stone, and I swear, Rolling Stone was all I heard about that semester.
In brief, this Rolling Stone striver at school was not exactly my ideal writer—think Charles Bukowski, but on paint thinner; he was utterly untainted by self-consciousness and had that special quality of implacable self-belief. This kid, who had long brown hair and wore Tevas (I can still picture his toes) had been playing some sort of vaudeville idea of a “writer” in the way that the girls never did: he had a sinister little hoop earring, was conspicuously dismissive of any story written by a woman, and would describe student stories that had no tone by their “tonalities.” It was from him that I first heard that dread label “gonzo journalism.”
We listened to every detail of this guy’s Rolling Stone internship application saga: the composition of the cover letter, the possible story pitches, the names of the RS editors he’d boldly cold-called (I’d never heard that expression, either—“cold-calling”), etc. He dropped the names of Rolling Stone editors past and present as if they were marquesses of France or what have you. A well-known right-wing-leaning RS columnist, P. J. O’Rourke, had gone to my school in the sixties, and you can bet that this boy kept making a big point of that in class, too; if all else failed, this would be his “in.”
My response in class to the guy’s terminal name-dropping and everything else: eye rolls and lip gloss reapplications.
The interview with the other two GQ editors, and also the operative from human resources, took place the day after my meeting at the bar in Grand Central, at the old Condé Nast building at 350 Madison Avenue. There was an annular solar eclipse that day. The sky above Madison was pristine, and eclipse watchers were gathered on sidewalks, gazing heavenward with special dark glasses, or else looking down at the projection of the sun in homemade camera obscuras. I didn’t experience the eclipse as a celestial phenomenon (hadn’t even known about it until I saw all those people), and I can’t tell you whether there was a slight breeze for those few moments when the moon passed overhead, or if everything felt a little bit colder, or if the sky grew slightly darker, because the eclipse was, to me, a human event.
That so many people had dropped whatever they were doing and had come outside for a few minutes to watch the sky seemed an expansive and noble thing to do. It also spoke to some profound need in the human soul: a desire for meaning, control, harmony. And for just that moment, when the sun went from disk to ring and everything was elegant and aligned, reality—that is, the world behind the illusion—opened its door and showed us what it was.
I found myself in a nearly exuberant mood when I entered the Condé Nast HQ: I was thinking about order and harmony; I was thinking about signs and symbols and omens—good ones. To expand on a metaphor I once heard, the Condé Nast building rose up like an avenging Valkyrie over the two humdrum men’s clothing stores down below: a Brooks Brothers and a Paul Stuart—two elves of an earthen realm. I took in the scene in the building lobby with wonder. First impression: this place is some kind of cult . . . and these cult members are so not the types to get derailed by the occurrence of a semi-rare annular eclipse.
As these women glided through the lobby, you noted the eerie confidence in the way they possessed their bodies, yet the overall effect was of sta
sis—they were static in the way that a photograph in a magazine is static. As I signed my name in the book at the front desk, I did a quick scan of the page and noted some names of individuals (public figures, you might even say) I’d actually heard of before—two fashion people and one literary one. Was this unutterably thrilling to me? Yes, it was. Indeed it was.
GQ editorial was on the sixth floor, and the atmosphere there was more low-key than whatever it was I had just experienced in the lobby. It was also much more “male.” I met the other two editors in their offices, which were as nondescript and antiseptic as could be. The editors were both kindly men; the ex–Rolling Stone guy said nothing about Rolling Stone, and neither did I. I nodded benignly along as each man spoke of various awards GQ and its writers had won. Had I ever heard of any of these awards? I had not. I possessed nothing to offer these editors, or the place, other than some somewhat unhinged enthusiasm.
I got the job, but getting it probably didn’t have all that much to do with me. It was absolutely a right-time-right-place-type situation. The fact: I was just wandering through life like everyone else. So far, I should say. The Robert Frost line “Yet knowing how way leads on to way” is the actual answer to how most human lives are led. (Mostly, you find that adult life largely comes down to a path of least resistance.) My purported career was handed to me on a platter, and that is the truth. But from here on out, everything would be up to me.
ON THURSDAY, MAY 19, 1994, THE DAY JACQUELINE ONASSIS DIED, MY parents drove my stuff and me from Ohio to New York, through the endlessness that is the state of Pennsylvania. I would begin my job the following Monday. We stayed at a hotel in Weehawken, New Jersey, not because the town was the site of Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr or anything like that, but because my father is a thrifty man. Across the Hudson River, Manhattan looked glittering and heroic. I loved my parents, but I couldn’t get back to the city soon enough.
For the moment, there was an NYU dorm where I would be able to live throughout the summer. The clock was ticking, though, and I would have to find a real apartment of my own by the fall. My parents moved me in on Friday. Item: when you are a teenager or a very young adult, and when your parents are moving you into a new place, it will always be the hottest day in human history, and your dad will always be in the worst mood ever.
“Goddamn,” said my father through clenched teeth, lifting another heap of garment bags from the Oldsmobile trunk, “you have so much stuff. I think you should ask yourself why you believe you need all of this.”
I tried to convince my parents to take me to lunch at an upscale restaurant, but all I got out of them was a humble pizza, eaten in my room. Traffic concerns were on their minds; they hit the road for Ohio ASAP, and we didn’t have what you’d call a sentimental goodbye. I met my new roommate, a premed student from South Korea. She wasn’t confident with her English, but during our first chat it somehow got communicated that she was peculiarly fixated on finding a mysterious perfume. She had discovered the scent back home in Seoul but didn’t know the name of it; the perfume, which had haunted her for years, was now half remembered, as if in a dream.
Well, naturally, there was only one solution:
“We should go to Barneys tomorrow,” I said, “for research.”
The old original Barneys, on Seventh Avenue and Seventeenth Street, was the most fantastically wonderful place in the world, and my new roommate and I spent a memorable Saturday afternoon together there in the cosmetics department, grinning frantically as we sprayed perfume onto our pulse points and onto each other’s. After about an hour, the elusive scent actually was identified: Hanae Mori. Victorious, my roommate gave the bottle three wordless spritzes into the air. It was nice. She bought two. I bought one, because I’m always buying stuff. A couple of months later, when I had found my own place a few blocks away and was moving out of the dorm, I found a letter from my roommate on my pillow: “Dear Friend,” she wrote, in the most elegant, painstaking handwriting. That letter was a physical work of art.
The following day, Sunday, the day before I started my job at GQ, I drifted around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Somehow, I had never been to the Met before. During the last two summers in New York, when I wasn’t operating the microfiche reader at work (I had an internship that involved copying grant information from microfiche files of philanthropic foundations’ tax returns), my free time had been occupied with a guy whom I’ll call Kevin. Kevin was older than I by nearly a decade, and he lived in deepest Brooklyn. He was a writer of sorts, an unwavering Harold Brodkey fan, a gifted visual artist, an outstanding impromptu chef (give him leftover chicken, some heavy cream, and a humble spice you’d never thought of before like paprika, and Kevin could produce a masterpiece), and the person who explained to me the provenance of the name Steely Dan. We all have that person in our lives.
But I hadn’t spoken with Kevin in nearly a year, since I’d had what I’d briefly believed to be a medical emergency. In summary, I had fallen off a table at a nightclub, the Roxy, and thought I’d broken a rib. It’s an embarrassing story, and there’s not much else to it (and know that I had been, as usual, substance-free that night): I had gone out dancing with a friend from college; the theme song to The Jeffersons came on; to express my enthusiasm, I climbed up onto a high cocktail table, lost my footing, and fell on something bad (bench? boulder?). Whatever had happened, it hurt.
When I got back to my dorm early that morning, still in tears—or a new set in the same series—I called Kevin for advice.
“Go to the emergency room at Saint Vincent’s,” he said, and paused.
Saint Vincent’s was the only hospital in the Village; throughout the years, it ministered to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, homeless people, AIDS patients, and 9/11 victims. Dylan Thomas died there. The hospital is gone now, lost to history and luxury condos.
“I have to get off the phone now,” Kevin said. “I’m eating a muffin.”
So that was Kevin. But so was this: before the Roxy incident, I had been thinking about taking a class in college on Vladimir Nabokov. I wanted Kevin’s opinion about this intriguing Russian. If Kevin had said, Nabokov sucks, or Nabokov? Never heard of him, it is very possible that I would not have taken the class. But instead Kevin said, “If you like well-written prose, which you do, you will love Nabokov.”
It seems important to keep reminding yourself that everything you say, no matter how minor the utterance seems to you, has the power to change someone’s life. Some little throwaway comment, even one from sour old you, can have consequences that reverberate, for better or for worse, throughout a lifetime.
And so here I was, returning now to New York in mini-triumph, to begin a coveted job at this men’s magazine I’d known nothing about until a month ago. And I was contentedly alone. Without a guy around, you could do great things that you’d always wanted to do, like go to the Met for an afternoon in lush late spring. Guys, I was starting to understand, took up a lot of time. There’d been Kevin, and there’d been some guys in college, but what was the point, really? The most important thing in the world is for the mind to be free. When the mind is allowed to investigate for itself, other freedoms follow—or at least they should.
I spent a couple of hours wandering around the eighteenth-century European galleries. I stood before paintings by François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, wishing I could step into the pictures and idle with their frivolous youths and rosy cherubim, swing with them on their fabulous swings. The translation of myself into different mental states and worlds always came so easily for me. I loved the eighteenth century and revered everything about the period—the sumptuousness and the social theater of it, the dream of the Enlightenment and its goal of understanding the world through reason (there is a truth, said the Enlightenment, and an untruth)—and I’d always felt that in some weird, deep way I got this time already. George Orwell, who was otherwise right about pretty much everything, said while the past is always with
you, it has no reality. I’m not so sure about that. It’s hard to explain, but the past has always been so very present for me—it doesn’t take too much for me to actually be there.
I had lunch alone at the marvelous old first-floor cafeteria in the Met, designed in the fifties by Dorothy Draper. There were dramatic columns and enormous golden birdcage chandeliers big enough to crawl inside. But why was I thinking of enclosures? Of my mental landscape then, it certainly must be true that I imagined that the self was a fundamentally private one, shaped in isolation, and maybe it was.
After lunch, I took myself on a walk north along Fifth Avenue and Central Park. Something was happening across the street, some sort of human commotion, at Eighty-Fifth Street. Although my usual instinct whenever I see a crowd is to get as far from it as possible, I found myself going toward this particular herd.
This, it turned out, was Jacqueline Onassis’s building. When I was back in Ohio, packing, preparing myself for whatever this new life of mine in New York would be, cable news had been ghoulishly consumed with a 24/7 Jackie deathwatch. Now here I was with these formations of people, united in one brow of woe, and milling around on the sidewalk outside her apartment building. Placed around the long flower beds were tributes of the floral and Hallmark variety, cellophane offerings, the odd homemade trinket, stuffed animals. There were overheard comments (“she was my mother’s favorite,” as if Mrs. Onassis were a thing to be owned); there were midwestern-looking folks with, yes, fanny packs, standing with arms crossed in solemn consideration of those deli flowers.
The whole scene felt very creepy to me, but I couldn’t have told you why that was then; it’s hard to make these sorts of value judgments (one person’s pathos is another person’s crude sentimentality), but such public lamentations really did feel excessive. Did any of these sidewalk comminglers actually know the great woman? Well, no, of course not, so this communal distress must surely have contained a theatrical dimension—how can public grief over a celebrity death be about anything else other than yourself?
In the Land of Men Page 3