They started fighting when I was in eighth grade. My mother was hoping I’d apply to Stuyvesant, that most famous of public high schools, nurturer of New York’s best and brightest. For a certain type of parent, Stuyvesant represented an educational ideal, proof of what was possible in the beleaguered souls of American cities. I doubt I’d have got in—I was an indifferent student—but we’d never know for sure because one morning, at our speckled breakfast table, my father announced I’d be attending Dalton, the rich boy’s school on the East Side. It was a place of patches and pledges and codes, a well-endowed testament to conformity of every kind. I remember vividly the look on my mother’s face that morning, a sad mix of defiance and inevitability. As if it were the very moment she’d been dreading. We were never the same after that.
I spent four years riding the crosstown bus, did an academically necessary PG year at St. Andrew’s in Scotland, then skied away another four at Middlebury. A decade of youthful exuberance pointed in the wrong direction, years that had their moments but never found a groove. A raison d’être. A thousand parties, five thousand, and the only one that mattered was the one I’d missed in New York. The one that had made everyone else rich. I graduated from college two months after the Internet bubble burst and arrived back to a city in flux. But the biggest changes had occurred closer to home. Or what was left of it.
The apartment on Riverside Drive was for sale. Or maybe it had already been sold, I can’t remember. My parents had separated and then divorced while I’d been in Vermont. My father—the guilty party—had packed up and relocated to Connecticut, where he’d commenced a series of short, inelegant relationships that eventually led to wedded bliss with Julie, a former cocktail waitress a year older than me (and with three kids of her own). My mother, meanwhile, had gamely soldiered on in New York, until the city became too much for her, the memories and all that. During my senior year she moved upstate. With no family apartment to crash-land in after graduation, I sublet a small room in a friend’s loft just west of McCarren Park, in a then desolate stretch of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. From there I began a cheerless trek through one failing dot-com after another. What I remember from the year 2000 is the paperwork: endless options grants and health-care plans, Cobra applications and unemployment forms. I gave up after the third company went under.
What to do? I’d majored in English—a fact I kept returning to as if it carried some secret inevitability—and had always been open to writing, in that I could string sentences together and didn’t feel terribly put out doing it. So I found a bartending job on Bedford Avenue and weighed my literary options. This was the great age of freelancing, outsourcing, contract work, and no profession lent itself to the time as much as journalism. But I knew people traveling that rutted road—pitching articles, sending out stories on spec, building clips. They’d show up at the bar, proudly waving around their latest piece—a D-list celebrity Q-and-A, a back-of-the-book band review, a restaurant profile in an airline magazine—and I’d pour them a drink on the house and try to muster some enthusiasm. But it was just so much work for so little reward. The cover letters, the rejections, the research, the writing, the editing, the mailbox-checking, the disappointment, the depression, the drinking. And I could drink just fine without the rest of it. I did my best to commiserate, but the unhappy endings took their toll. You can start with all the good intentions you want, but soon enough they’ll drown in a pool of other people’s failures. The idea of writing was losing its luster. Paying dues suddenly felt like an old-fashioned concept. Hadn’t the Internet promised to speed everything up, hustle us along to our true destinies?
I fell in with a dodgy crowd of young Brooklynites: art handlers, line cooks, waiters, and actresses—always actresses—everywhere I went. We became nocturnal creatures, midnight poseurs, thrift-shop dynamos: thin-waisted and scraggly. Oh, life was heavy out there in the borough, laden with all the irony of the age. We lived on the cheap, carping like victims, carrying on like addicts. In the aftermath of the tech bust, money, like Manhattan, became a tainted word. Yet we cared a great deal about appearances, how far we could take our various guises, the many versions of ourselves. The truth, of course, is that we could never get anywhere. We were too sneering and self-aware, too busy mocking the earnest, the successful, anyone we didn’t know. We all get lost in little worlds, but they usually have a point—money, maybe, or love. But not us. Never has absolutely nothing been done with more style and determination than in early twenty-first-century Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Then came 9/11. I was still half-asleep when I heard the news on the radio, but I jumped up, grabbed my roommate’s bike, and took off toward Brooklyn Heights. The streets were full of people hurrying every which way, some going home, some to the waterfront. TVs glowed urgently through ground-floor windows. All the taxis had disappeared. One of the bartenders I worked with lived in a tall building near the promenade. We’d partied on her roof before, a bunch of us gazing at the lights of Manhattan as we drank from bottles of wine we’d smuggled out at closing time. And that’s where I found her that Tuesday morning, up there with dozens of others, staring out across the East River at a scene we’d never fathomed. A few people were taking pictures, but there wasn’t much talking. That would come later, and last for months. At some point the wind stiffened, and with it came that awful burning smell. Most everyone went back downstairs, but some of us stayed. We stayed and watched the towers fall. We stayed and watched streams of men and women course across the Brooklyn Bridge. We stayed and picked through flying papers—business cards, tax forms, résumés—shreds of people’s lives, former lives. No longer strangers, we stayed on the roof and held each other, wondering how the world would change.
We all remember what happened next, the days of mourning, not only for the lost, but for our newly vulnerable selves. As the rest of America found solace in blind patriotism, we New Yorkers, momentarily sincere, gazed inward. It was time to revisit the past—old girlfriends, shelved plans. For me that meant journalism. The world, through loss, had suddenly become a fascinating place, acerbically intriguing, almost open-ended. Who wouldn’t want to play a role in the remodeling? That winter, I applied to Columbia and NYU. Uptown and down, I could have gone either way, but only NYU said yes. I took out a student loan (my father had retired from financing my education), picked up more shifts at the bar, and spent the months before grad school lost in a haze of hipster nights.
At NYU, I enrolled in classes with glamorous-sounding names—International Reporting, Politics and the Press, Investigative Techniques. It should have been a thrilling time. On the far side of the globe, reporters were camping out with rebels and embedding themselves in Humvees. The present—right then!—was teeming with journalistic opportunities, but the lectures and textbooks watered down any sense of adventure. Other people’s stories, other people’s wars. Terrorists, generals, presidents: they all blurred together in an endless time line of privileged impropriety. And the reporters, they were just middlemen, information runners, bending the news to their personal beliefs. I don’t know, I just wasn’t getting the bug. These, remember, were the days leading up to Iraq, and at NYU—and everywhere else in New York—you were either against the war or you were an idiot. There was never room for debate, and that bothered me. It’s not that I was a Republican. Far from it. The GOP, with its religious posturing and bullshit moral high-ground, was dangerously out of touch. At least they stood for something, though. The Democrats lived for polls. They ran scared, and voted that way, too.
Was I disillusioned with the system or just lazy? Sitting in the back of class one day, I listened to a former UN diplomat compare Guantánamo to the Gulag, and I realized I was a million miles from either place, from decisions that mattered, events of consequence. I’d grown up with parents who’d once believed change was possible, if only in increments, small measures and token gestures. But the increments never added up. The sixties drifted further into the past, its idealism became the material of memoi
r—this is what we did before we grew up. My father gave in. My mother became irrelevant. What was the lesson in all this? That you couldn’t shape the world in your image. And it was a waste of time to try. Life would roll along as scheduled, and all a journalist could do was shine a weak light on the passing trains. I guess my problem—or as I saw it then, my saving grace—was that I didn’t think American life in 2003 was so bad. Just look at us, I thought. We were still the most profitable nation in the world, our major cities thriving, our suburbs reaching out like tendrils across a shining landscape of middle-class satisfaction. Sure, there were problems, but I took a long view of history. American prosperity encouraged us to disengage, to stop caring. And so I did.
I dropped out of school before my second year started and, after several months back behind the bar, found a job in advertising. Grow up around an adman and you can’t help but read taglines, watch commercials, believe in brands. But the business had changed. Gone were the martini lunches and Madison Avenue addresses. Advertising had been hijacked by the Internet and all that came with it—e-commerce specialists, Web-marketing gurus, and inked-up graphic designers—an army of dot-com holdovers still speaking that confident language of the future. I wrote banner ads. During the boom they’d been a source of revenue on thousands of business plans, except no one ever clicked on them. But it all comes back around if you wait long enough, and when a leaner, smarter Internet emerged, banner ads found their place. Everything found its place. The boys at Google made us think again of possibilities. This time it wasn’t all about money. Sure, the staples were still there—e-mail, porn, shopping, stock-trading—but what had finally won the day was content, the scope and speed of available information. Online, people could write anything they wanted. And soon enough they did.
Derrick Franklin—the man on my answering machine, the voice in my head—was the first to make blogging a viable business. After taking a security-software company public in the midnineties, he moved from Redwood City to New York City and reinvented himself as a new-economy philosopher. He’d earned a cult following by getting out before anyone else had gotten in. I used to see him, bald and sharp-jawed, on CNN, casually explaining the future to those of us who couldn’t yet see it. Of course, it was impossible to be wrong during the boom, but even afterward, Derrick stuck to his vision of a converging world. One day, he mentioned blogs—their importance, their possibilities. Millions—no billions—of people would soon be reading these things, and not just occasionally, but continuously—people with specific interests, people who could be marketed to. He looked squarely into the camera and said the numbers were too good to ignore. And he meant it. A few months later, before anyone else knew what was happening, he’d convinced a dozen of New York’s best online writers to come work for him. It was a simple idea: they’d provide the content, he’d provide the site, the paycheck, the health care . . . and the ads, banner ads, the old business model given new life.
Wino, Drummergrrrl, Cindy from BodyPolitic, Rob from LESismore, Sophie from SophiesChoice. I’d read their posts all day, then see them out at night, clustered in corners, shy but secure in their status as the new arbiters of everything. People whispered about them the way our parents must have whispered about Warhol’s superstars—with the seething jealousy we save for those who’ve bucked the system. But had they bucked the system, or did they just understand it better? Derrick’s bloggers lived in an impending world, somewhere ahead of the rest of us, posting what we hadn’t yet heard, didn’t yet know. It was a tricky game, with the race to be first tempered by the risk of being wrong. But on the Internet, speed trumped truth, and sensation always won.
Soon Derrick’s bloggers were being read by tens of thousands each day. They stepped out from their dark corners and began hosting readings, appearing on gossip shows, lunching at Michael’s. They got book deals and started rock labels. They sat down with Charlie Rose. By 2005, blogs were breaking more hard news than the networks and serving up more cultural commentary than the print magazines. They’d become commodities. They’d become legitimate. Derrick had been proven right faster than even he’d foreseen.
One hungover morning at the agency, I saw an ad I’d written (promoting an animated-fish movie) cycling through the top of the restaurant blog, SophiesChoice. I sat there staring at my lame sea-pun tagline and suddenly had an epiphany. A media blog. Derrick Franklin didn’t have one. He had the gossip hound, the arts critic, the nightlife guide, the technology guru, the political hack, the porn purveyor, but nothing dedicated to journalism. Or the lack of it. So why not me? I was as unqualified and disillusioned as anyone else. I’d take on the vaunted press, all those bombastic newspapers and formulaic magazines, the whimpering network newscasts and deafening cable shout-fests. The pomposity, hypocrisy, and self-aggrandizement: I’d call it all for what it was.
I practiced for months, regurgitating the news of the day in a series of thoughtful diatribes and funny manifestos. I honed a voice over endless hours of agency time, but my bosses never noticed. I’d been working there three years by then, a lifetime in the ad world, and people left me alone. I was a “creative,” after all.
And then it all came together, like nothing else in my life ever had. I found Derrick Franklin’s e-mail and sent him my blog in beta. Two days later we met at a coffee shop in Tribeca. We shook hands and sat down with our lattes. He spoke slowly. Precision, I thought. Then: money. That was it: money must be soothing.
He asked about journalism school, why I never finished.
“I’m not that earnest,” I said.
“A real New Yorker.”
“Born and raised.”
“Well, there is a certain swagger to your bitching,” he continued. “And it’s something I’ve been thinking about, this whole New York Observer, meta-media thing—reporting on reporters, creating news from news . . .”
On and on he went, this modern-day seer, until he arrived at what I’d been hoping for: an offer. It wasn’t much—$3,500 a month to start—but I’d be operating under his corporate umbrella, which meant free publicity and libel protection—two things a blogger should never take lightly. We stood up and shook hands. I’d been out of college almost six years. Maybe the Internet would save me after all.
The e-mail arrived at 5:42 p.m., just as I was posting my last item of the day.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Barneys
The shopping wasn’t so good. The blowout sale was on the wrong floor.
P.S. This is your chance.
Who was this? Some kind of practical joker, obviously. But what was the joke? This is your chance. To do what? Post Paige Roderick’s photograph? Why not just do it themselves? Why choose me?
But the other part is what got my attention. The shopping wasn’t so good. The blowout sale was on the wrong floor. The intended target of the attack had become a subject of increasingly wild speculation in the four days since the explosion. With the exception of Barneys, 660 Madison Avenue was a typical Midtown office tower populated by dozens of companies, from financial firms to fashion designers. The northeast side of the fifteenth floor, where the bomb actually went off, was the New York headquarters of the dressmaker Claudio Valencia, and for most of that first hectic day the scorched fabrics and blown-apart mannequins that littered the surrounding blocks had everyone thinking his atelier was part of Barneys (which, in fact, topped off on ten). When the smoke subsided and the police and press finally got their facts straight, Valencia became a wanted man. Two days passed before he emerged, on Ibiza, teary-eyed and spaced-out on pills. Turns out he and his all-male entourage had been there for weeks, “seeking inspiration” for his next clothing line. Ah, worlds colliding. The ensuing press conference made for riveting television as Valencia, dressed all in white, broke down completely in front of cameras while U.S. Special Forces stood in the background, bewildered expressions on their hard faces. Clearly, the man knew nothing.
S
o the trail went cold. No one claimed responsibility, though several Muslim groups were immediately suspected. Local imams were rounded up and questioned. Pundits appeared on TV, blaming various Al Qaeda–trained offshoots. But even the experts weren’t particularly impassioned. Something didn’t feel right. Bin Laden’s boys didn’t usually bother with haute couture.
The day of Cressida’s party, a Times editorial raised the possibility of a botched job; the bomb, they posited, might have been meant for someone or somewhere else. But that’s as far as it went. The argument was rooted more in frustration than fact.
The blowout sale was on the wrong floor.
I stared at the e-mail, remembering something a techie friend had told me when I first started Roorback: Be careful what you write, because a record of every word you type and every site you visit is being stored not only on your laptop hard drive, but in a massive mail server somewhere in Virginia. He also said there were ways to trace e-mails to their sources. A second language existed behind the first—IP addresses and proxy servers, subnetworks and geocoded metadata. It all sounded complicated. And frightening. Anyway, I’d never sought out someone’s online identity, and I wasn’t going to now.
American Subversive Page 6