by Karin Tanabe
On the drive in from northern Virginia, I pulled up the parking brake at a red light and began searching the car floor for my very serious media credentials. They identified me, Adrienne Brown, as a hard-boiled reporter for the Capitolist. I found them affixed with chewing gum to what looked like animal fur. Since I never locked my car, I figured it must have been taken for a joyride by taxidermists. I also found part of yesterday’s Chop’t salad, three empty cans of Diet Coke, a Canadian penny, tiny red underwear printed with the words “thong-tha-thong-thong-thong,” and enough Bobbi Brown bronzer to turn a family of Swedes into vacationing Brazilians.
Fascinated by the results of my excavation, at the next red light, I dug a little more. I still had to find my House of Representatives and Senate credentials, which should have been attached to each other but were more likely attached to a discarded sandwich.
Many years before I started my gig at the Capitolist, I read an article in the New York Post about a woman who had gotten arrested for smoking a cigarette, making a call, and shaving her bikini line while driving. I was hysterical. I folded myself into the fetal position and laughed until my appendix hurt. I mean, who in their right mind would shave their moneymaker while driving? But now that I was basically a serf, I knew better. She probably didn’t have time to schedule a Brazilian wax because her boss wanted her to work until her eyes popped out and shriveled up like raisins.
In Washington, fall meant Congress was still in session and a horrendous number of school groups arrived with their history classes in hyperactive packs on the Mall. It also meant there was a month left of crazy traffic before the holiday slowdown, but I appreciated it. It was my only downtime. I flipped through e-books, sat in on conference calls, spastically checked my BlackBerry, tweeted, and read the style sections of two newspapers as I waited for the mind-numbing rush hour traffic to carry me to the epicenter of the American wonk.
I mopped some sticky caffeinated substance off the laminated ID passes I finally found, popped them all around my neck, and looked for semilegal parking. It was time to head to one of the marble House offices and act important. Or at least not lost.
My first three interviews were taking place in Cannon, one of the seven almost identical House and Senate buildings flanking the Capitol. I sprayed my hair with hundred-dollar hair glue, threw on a practical yet stylish Louis Vuitton capelet, and galloped toward the building.
I put my bag through the X-ray machine, explained to the baby-faced security guards why I had three cucumbers in my purse (South Beach diet, not perversion), and headed down a hall lined by the heavy wooden doors that guard congressional offices. Girls wearing sensible shoes raced toward their sensible jobs, and young men with good heads of hair and a fondness for the missionary position looked at me as if I were a space alien who had just ambled in.
Once I was in the building’s dramatic two-story rotunda complete with Corinthian columns and a coffered dome, I waited around and watched the B-list celebs eagerly do Fox and MSNBC interviews. I saw two girls, both from our print competition, both with video crews, and closed my eyes. If they were here, it meant I had to file my articles immediately because they would be trying to beat my time stamp.
I took out my second BlackBerry and texted Isabelle, “Jaycee Burke is here with a fucking camera crew!!” My new BlackBerry was called the Torch and the tech department promised me it would outlast BlackBerry number one, which lost half the keyboard keys after two weeks of overuse.
“She has back hair,” Isabelle replied. “Not just fuzz, like genuine long fur.” Isabelle was the most talented smack talker on the Style team, and the girl you wanted around when spouting out insults about other Washington journalists. She was also the second newest on the section, having only been at the List for a year, and still seemed to have a grasp on the outside world. Julia was my guide at the paper, but Isabelle was my guide to the rest of the city.
“Did you know she’s leaving?” she added. “It sounds like you don’t. She got a job with the Wall Street Journal. She’s going to be part of their election team. Can you believe it?” Isabelle wrote.
I guess the Journal didn’t discriminate against back hair.
“Who else is there?” asked Isabelle.
“Some girl with really short hair. Like Justin Bieber,” I wrote.
“Krista Gabriel. She’s with Roll Call,” Isabelle wrote back. “You don’t know her because no one pays attention to them. They have a pay wall. Can you imagine? She once came up to me, kissed me on each check, and said, ‘Oh, the competition’s here.’ I mean really? We’re national, she’s local, and that’s really all that needs to be said. Don’t bother talking to her.”
“That nice guy from the Daily Caller is here, too,” I wrote. “The one with the shaved head.”
“Did you hear that the Daily Caller has a keg? Can you imagine Upton ever letting us have a keg? He would fill it with liquid speed,” Isabelle wrote back. I liked Isabelle. And not just because she was friends with Apolo Ohno. She was one of the only ones at the paper who dared to have a life. Everyone else just sacrificed their friends and family to live permanently in a Capitolist world.
Isabelle excused herself from BBM to go file an article, and I started eavesdropping on two reporters I didn’t know.
“I heard you can’t even expense coffee with a source at the Post anymore,” said one of them, looking down at her hot Starbucks. “Can you imagine? Who wants to talk to you if you can’t even buy them a latte?”
“It’s true,” said her friend. “An all-staff memo went out about it. It was forwarded to me within five minutes. Why does anyone ever send out all-staff emails anymore? They are made public immediately. It’s so stupid. Old people really don’t understand how this world works. Nothing is private, especially not a staff-wide email that basically reads, ‘we’re bleeding money, get out while you can.’”
I was very caught up in their conversation when the first almost-famous person approached me. I shook her hand, grabbed a pen, and lobbed a handful of softballs at her. “If you could dine with the president or John Boehner, who would you choose? Which dog would you rather own—Champ Biden, a well-bred German shepherd, or Bo Obama, a Portuguese water dog descended from the Kennedy family canine? And do you think Michele Bachmann would rather guest star on Teen Mom, Glee, or MTV Cribs?”
Next up, Chevy Chase. He was in town because his wife was getting some sort of green hippie award for eating only cardboard. Her actions were certainly noble, but of course everyone wanted to interview her much more famous, much funnier husband.
I asked him about the delicate dance between comedy and politics, and he said the words fuck and George Bush a lot. His affable wife chided him for speaking to a reporter that way. “He meant all that off the record,” she offered, a last-ditch attempt to scrub my story of Republican bashing and f-bombs.
By the time I wrapped with Chevy, I had eight minutes to get to the Dirksen Senate Office Building to interview January Jones. I would no doubt have to fight my way through a pack of male staffers with dreams of dry-humping her, but that was not my biggest problem. Eight minutes: I had eight minutes to go a mile.
I hustled to the underground train that runs between the House and Senate buildings. It’s a little like Epcot Center, but instead of sitting next to chubby children wearing mouse ears, you sit behind our country’s anointed ones. I say behind, because they have reserved seating and you get to stare at the backs of their heads from steerage.
Darting around like a Senate page, I finally made it to Dirksen and to the front of the line for press interviews with the blond actress.
“Oh, the Capitolist,” an eager PR gal in lots of J. Crew knitwear said after eyeing the pack of shiny credentials hanging around my neck. “You’re Adrienne Brown, and I’m Kate Bonneville,” she said, offering her hand.
We walked around a mess of TV crew wires. Kate gripped my elbow. “We don’t have the press packets ready yet as my idiot intern printed them in red ink.
Don’t worry, I fired her, but you read the release I sent yesterday, right?” she asked. “It had all the information you need. Info about Miss Jones’s current work with the group, her recent PSAs, even a lengthy piece about the historical significance of her current hairdo.”
“Of course,” I replied unconvincingly. In truth, I had glanced at it while robotically reciting my morning Starbucks order. I took some shoddy notes, but January Jones could be in town to promote atomic bombs for all I knew.
I nodded to the cameramen, photographers, and other gossipy writers—all the people I was used to seeing in Hill rooms—and scanned January’s Wikipedia entry and some Google news hits on my phone before I entered her holding room. I wasn’t prepping for Celebrity Jeopardy against Stephen Hawking. I was sure I could gather enough from IMDb to do a decent job with my quick-hit interview of a doe-eyed actress. January’s hair was glossy, her hemline long, her neckline high. She looked like a very attractive person playing the part of an erudite Washingtonian. I sat down next to her at a slick mahogany conference table, pushed my bangs out of my face, got out my Capitolist-stamped pen and notepad, and gave my notes a glance. It seemed, according to the nonsense I had jotted down this morning, that the actress had descended on our city to lend her voice to the plight of the snail. I looked at my scrawl again. It was written in a kind of exhausted hieroglyphics, but it definitely said “Jan Jones. Snails.” Weird, but I had seen far stranger. Like those PETA girls who stand in public parks, slather their bodies in egg-free mayonnaise, throw some iceberg lettuce on their privates, and scream the day away about animal rights.
After shaking January’s slender, scented hand, I said, with far too much excitement, “How wonderful that you’re in Washington advocating on behalf of the endangered snail. Ah, the woe of a snail!” I flashed a smile in response to hers, feeling sure that my teeth were the color of mud compared to her snow-white chompers. I quickly wrote “Schedule Zoom! whitening” on my reporter’s pad right under the scrawl about snails.
Her press flack, sitting to her left, glared and mouthed something at me, which I ignored.
“Tell me then, how did your passion for protecting snails come about?” I asked January. “Years spent in the region around Burgundy perhaps? Les escargots de Bourgogne are my absolute favorite . . . to save, that is! My favorite snails to protect in the wild.”
Phew! Brilliant recovery on my part.
Snapping her fingers and then rapping the table with her nails, January’s assistant mouthed something at me again. She looked very much like a monkey eating chewing gum. What was she saying . . . inhale? Curtail? No . . . no . . . what was it. Whale? Oh! Of course. Whales. Shit. “I mean whales!” I blurted out. “The endangered whales. Right! Who cares about saving snails. They’re delicious!”
January didn’t seem to notice that I thought she was on the Hill to defend a slug with a house on its back. We talked about whales. It was beautiful. She really seemed to care about the huge, frightening things. She even showed me a public service announcement on her iPad: there she was in a wet suit, swimming with whales and only kind of showing off her famous rack. She then deflected all my personal questions, but considering she also ignored my snail gaffe, I let it go and we went our separate ways. She, to do the things famous people do, and me to file the story and then trudge back to the newsroom so I could try to wrap up my fourteen-hour day.
The article filing process at the List was very simple. As soon as you finished your interviews, you typed them up on whatever writing device was readily accessible. This usually meant your BlackBerry. You could walk a few feet, maybe move to a pressroom or an empty hallway, but you never moved much because that was just a waste of time. You tried to avoid all factual errors and typos but what really mattered was speed. Much better to break the news that Cher was yelling at Michele Bachmann over Twitter than to spell the name Bachmann correctly. As soon as you sent your piece to your editor, he or she wrote you an email that said, “Got it, hold for edits.” You then sat there and pinched a stress ball or started your next article and then five minutes later, your article was back to you and ready for your approval. You were allowed to go back and forth on breaking news pieces twice and no more. If you didn’t like the edits, it was not worth your time to speak up because there was no time. And five minutes after you wrote the words, “Okay, let’s go live,” to your editor, your piece was on the site and in design for the next day’s paper.
At Town & Country, we filed three months in advance.
After exiting the conference room, and in the hope of staving off arthritis for a few more months, I took two small rubber stress balls out of my suitcase-sized purse and began trying to turn my extremities back into hands. Since I had gotten the stress balls at some Sally Field event for Boniva, they were stamped with inspirational phrases about bone health.
Four minutes had gone by and I was just starting to regain feeling in my thumbs when my BlackBerry started buzzing. It was an email from Rachel. “Where are you? Are you done? How were the interviews? Did they talk about Boehner? Did they talk about who they’re voting for in the primaries and can you file the stories from your phone or do you absolutely have to take the extra time to come in?”
I dropped the stress balls into the nearest trash can. “Yes on Boehner, no on primaries, Chase was funny, Jones was less funny but prettier. And yes. I can definitely file from my phone,” I wrote back.
I found an empty marble bench in a quiet Dirksen hallway. With my purse strapped to me like an Eagle Scout’s day pack, I hunkered down and started punching out back-to-back six-hundred-word pieces on a phone keyboard, Hill staffers darting past me all the while. During those twenty minutes, I shared my bench first with Senator Al Franken, then a painfully smelly woman, and then a young Hill intern screaming on the phone in a Gone with the Wind drawl. (I also checked the word whale every time I typed it, worried I would name the garlic-friendly mollusk instead of the mammal the size of a submarine.) It was nice to have a brush with senators, malodorous people, Scarlett O’Hara’s offspring, and January Jones in the same day. But what I was really savoring was a rare moment in the sun. I had almost forgotten what heat generated by something other than stress felt like.
I paused for the first time on my “Celebs who love promoting causes” pieces, walked out the heavy bronze doors into the cold November air, and typed out my kicker. As I pushed send, I looked at the long list of messages I had missed during my type-fest: fifty-five emails, including one from Rachel that just read, “No rush, but when do you think you’ll file? The next two minutes would be best.”
I had missed her deadline by a minute and a half.
I couldn’t get to sleep that night. I was so wired that even the thought of changing into my pajamas and lying down gave me anxiety. I had reached the point that Isabelle described as Listintoxication. It’s when the paper got so deep in your brain that every part of your life overlapped with work.
Still mad at myself for filing my Jones story late, I turned off my “sounds of the Amazon” noise machine and walked to my closet. I put on a coat and old riding boots and headed outside. The downsides of living out in the country were plenty, but sometimes when I stood on the neatly mown lawn in the silence and moonlight, looking out at the horse fields and their white fences, it seemed worth it. Especially since I was paying for none of it.
From the barn, I strolled out into a long meadow and sat on the top slat of one of the fences. It was made for girls to sit serenely on while their Palomino horse grazed in front of them. I had used the same exact slab of fence as a balance beam once when I was ten; I fell off and basically broke my face. For two years afterward, my sister had me convinced that they had replaced the cartilage in my broken nose with wood. She called me Pinocchio and threatened me with matches.
I really don’t miss her very much.
It was incredibly quiet, after-midnight quiet. I was happy to pick silence over sleep for a few hours, if it meant time without my BlackBer
ry or a screen covered in Twitter babble.
I always left the keys in my Volvo, just in case I had to drive into the city with my taillights on fire, but this time, I got in slowly. I knew my hours of sleep were ticking away, but I couldn’t help it. I just wanted to drive without feeling like I had to get anywhere—no traffic, no deadline.
A repeat of that day’s Diane Rehm show was crackling on NPR, but I turned it off in favor of a little Waylon Jennings. Being an outlaw country star with a guitar and a drinking problem sounded like a really good job right now. Maybe I could start guzzling Kentucky bourbon in the morning and carry a banjo everywhere I went. I would certainly get fired then. Sometimes I wanted to get fired. But then I remembered how hard I had worked in New York to get to the List, and I decided against it. I was at one of the best publications in the country and I shouldn’t take that lightly. Yes, the pace was ridiculous, but I had great access, interviewed interesting people, and liked all the Style girls. I knew I was going to do something amazing with my journalism serfdom; I just wasn’t sure what yet.
I drove down my parents’ winding drive. There were no lights, but there were lots of trees trimmed to look miniature and a broad iron gate that opened as you approached it. I crept out of our patch of land and headed to East Washington Street.
There weren’t many places to go in the sleepy town at such a late hour, but there was one store open round the clock in Middleburg and that’s where I was headed. I didn’t need anything, I just felt like seeing the inside of a building that wasn’t my office or my house. The small twenty-four-hour store probably grossed about thirty dollars from midnight to 6 A.M., but it stayed open anyway. I figured they got a few extra bucks from the tourism board to do it, just to prove that Middleburg was more than a haven for moneyed geriatrics.