by Meghan Daum
Some examples of my journalistic endeavors:
• Lucinda Trout on takeout sushi and how it has replaced the soup and sandwich for the midtown office worker’s lunch of choice.
• Lucinda Trout on thong underwear: can you learn to live with a permanent wedgie?
• Lucinda Trout on bridal registry etiquette: is it fair to expect your friend to spend eighty dollars on a single piece of flatware (especially when your friend has no marriage prospects!)?
• Lucinda Trout on adopted babies from China: the Upper West Side is overrun with them. What are the implications for the future mating patterns of this generation? In 2015, there will be seven teenage girls for every teenage boy on the Upper West Side. Are we not simply creating an equal and opposite paradigm of the unbalanced gender ratio in China? Will these girls have to move to Beijing to find a husband? Will Manhattan become a playground for men with Asian fetishes?
The Chinese baby story didn’t delve as deeply as I would have liked. It ended up essentially being a plug for a store on Columbus Avenue called Asian Infant Accessories, which sold teething rings and mobiles in Asian designs so that the children wouldn’t lose touch with their heritage. I almost quit over that. But I almost quit over half the stories I did. I had a degree in nineteenth-century American literature from Smith. My goal was to work for PBS or National Public Radio. And somehow I’d ended up holding a microphone in one hand and sliding a finger of the other hand under the thong underwear of a willing clerk at a SoHo underwear boutique to show “how roomy a thong can really be.”
The day I decided not to quit over the Chinese baby story was the day my landlord slipped a note under my door saying the building management was changing hands and that starting September 1, my rent would be raised to twenty-one hundred dollars a month. It was June 1. I needed to ask Faye for a raise, though it was unlikely I could get her to triple my salary, which is what would have been required to stay.
Faye wanted to see me in her office anyway. Though it was muggy and 87 degrees outside she was wearing her usual getup—skintight black leather pants, a sleeveless (apparently wool) turtleneck sweater, and Jimmy Choo mules with three-inch heels. Her black hair was tied in a severe French twist that appeared to be pulling back the skin on her temples (a do-it-yourself face-lift technique? This itself was a possible story idea . . . ). Faye’s background was in the art world—she was rumored to have been, in the 1960s, the lover of either Gerard Malanga or Cookie Mueller, depending upon who you asked. From there she had migrated into the fashion world and eventually into television and she was as out of place in the business as I was, though in the completely opposite way. While she looked like a fifty-year-old version of Lara Flynn Boyle (though every year that I’d worked for her she’d claimed to be thirty-seven) I looked like a graduate student who sprang for good haircuts but wouldn’t shell out for an iron. I was perpetually rumpled. Faye, for her part, was practically illiterate. She had been hired for her celebrity connections; I for my ability to write all of her memos and anticipate the fluctuations of her volatile brain chemistry.
Faye was looking particularly reptilian that day. Her eyes were reduced to mere slits underneath a puffiness that suggested her weekend at Donatella Versace’s South Beach villa had involved some kind of head-on collision that activated a set of air bags beneath the sockets. She leaned back in her chair and draped a lamp-postlike leg over her desk, knocking over an ashtray and a stack of videotapes and causing her shoe to fall off and reveal a set of contorted blackened toenails.
“Lucinda!” Faye screamed, though I was three feet away. “I have received a memo from upstairs.”
“Are they firing you?” I asked. We had this sort of relationship. Sparring, playful. Though there was always the possibility that she would lunge unexpectedly, like a big cat.
“They want to move the show in a new direction,” she said. “They think it’s too provincial, too New York centric. They want us to cover issues of concern to average Americans. Maybe even humanitarian issues. Of course, I find that profoundly uninteresting. But I have no doubt that you can tap into the psyches of fat housewives in trailer parks.”
“Actually I’ve always thought the show was too limited,” I said. “Are we going in a more, like, Frontline-ish direction?”
“Don’t get uppity,” Faye said.
I caught her noticing my shoes, which were scuffed and from Banana Republic and utterly beneath her standards.
“I’m sending you to the Midwest,” she said. “There’s a very dangerous drug there that women are doing to help them lose weight and clean the house. Basically it’s coke for the Payless shoes set. It sounds disgusting and I’m sure you can find a bunch of disgusting people who will talk on camera and give the show a dose of realness.”
She handed me a story memo.
To: Up Early Exeuctives
From: Faye Figaro, Senoir Producer
Re: Methanfettymean
Meth: Its Cheep, Its a Quick High, and Its Endangering
Womans Lives
Had lunch with Roseanne (Barr? Arnold? whatever) the other day to brainstorm about shows new direction and she told me about a new drug that is priminont in the mid-west United Stats. It’s called methenfetimyne and it is basicly a much, much more potant form of the “mothers little helper’ upper that was previlant in the 1960s. It is made in labs that are often in farm houses and then sold to averge, normal women who want to lose wieght or just have more engery to do housewrk or care for the kids. The main thing here is that it is very, very common and extremley dangerous and people die from it. I would like to send Lucinda Trout, who has been doing a good job as Lifstyle Correpsondent, to invesigate this alaming trend.
“You had lunch with Roseanne?” I asked.
“They set it up,” Faye said, lighting a cigarette and snaking her foot around under her desk in search of her lost mule. “She’s actually quite brilliant in her way, given her cultural context.”
“Where would I have to go?”
“Hello?” Faye yelled. “That’s your job. Figure it out! You’re going on Friday.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know, a week. Make it in depth. They’re serious about this getting serious thing. But no fat people, please. I’m not throwing all our standards out the window.”
Faye softened as the nicotine worked its way through her nervous system. She slid her foot into her shoe and returned her leg to the desk.
“So how are you, Lucinda?” she asked, turning suddenly empathic. “Are you well?”
“My rent is being raised to twenty-one hundred a month,” I said.
“Can’t you ask your parents for money?”
“Faye, you know my parents are retired schoolteachers.”
“Well, then I guess you’ll have to move to Queens,” she said. “Can you redo this memo for me?”
I took the memo and got up to leave.
“Can you pick up my ashtray?” Faye asked.
“Faye, I’m not your assistant anymore.”
Faye was on her fifth temp in fourteen months, a sweet woman who had made the mistake of wearing a plastic tortoise-shell headband to her first day of work.
“I don’t want that girl coming in here,” Faye whispered, an inch-long ash breaking off her cigarette and landing on her Palm Pilot. “I’m serious. It messes up the feng shui thing in here.”
THE PROSPECT OF THE SHOW’S moving in a serious, more humanitarian direction slightly abated my dismay over the hopelessness of getting a raise. I went to my desk and did an Internet search on drug rehab facilities in the Midwest. I then left messages with twelve clinic receptionists in places like Missouri, South Dakota, and Kansas, seven of whom were themselves in recovery and wanted to discuss their drug abuse at length. These discussions effectively completed my preliminary research. I rewrote Faye’s memo and then typed up my own.
To: Up Early staff
From: Lucinda Trout
Re: Methamphetamine: It’s
Cheap, It’s a Quick High, and
It’s Endangering Women’s Lives
Methamphetamine, also known as crank, speed, ice, amp, blue belly, white cross, white crunch, albino poo, al tweak-ened long, beegokes, and bikerdope, among other slang terms, is a powerful psychostimulant that causes increased energy, appetite suppression, insomnia, and, when used over a long period of time, permanent brain damage and possibly death. Once associated with railroad construction and factory workers, meth is now the only drug in the United States that is abused more readily by women than by men. Today it has reached a purity level that makes it up to 80 times more powerful than the crystal meth of the 1960s and 70s. Labs are often set up in abandoned farmhouses, where the putrid odor of the chemicals (which include common household products and agricultural fertilizers) can go undetected. This story will contain in-depth interviews with articulate, wholesome-looking women who found themselves sucked into the vortex of drug abuse and despair. I also envision long shots of cornfields and big sky (evocative of the paintings of Andrew Wyeth) with slow pans (underscored by Aaron Coplandesque music) across rustic farmhouses that belie the illicit debauchery festering inside.
The first person to call me back was Sue Lugenbeel. She was from some place called Prairie City and ran something called the Prairie City Recovery Center for Women. She said she had subjects for me. They would talk and appear on camera. She really wanted to help get the message out.
If only I had been away from my desk when Sue Lugenbeel called. If only the first clinic director to return my call had been some no-personality lout from some shabby town that I’d actually heard of and was therefore less exotic. But no. It was Sue. In Prairie City. I was on a plane with a cameraman the next morning. And from there began the end of my life as I’d known it.
Alternative Lifestyle Alert
My first impression of Prairie City was that it seemed not to be there at all. The “city,” which, as Sue Lugenbeel had assured me, truly was a city with crime and drugs and “plenty of night life,” wasn’t visible from the air. We descended into wide patches of brown and green fields. Only two airlines served the place and despite the smallness of the airport and the relatively few number of people getting off the plane, I had never seen so many friends and family members waiting at the gate. At least half of the women had babies on their hips. They gave us curious looks as we pulled the video equipment off the carousel, or maybe it was just that I was wearing a leather jacket even though it was close to 100 degrees. Everyone else had on shorts and tank tops. The cameraman, Ray (Faye frequently called him Roy, and sometimes even Raoul, which incensed him), was close to retirement and considerably put out at having to make the road trip. “I’d like to see some of these chicks in thongs,” he mumbled.
We rented a car and drove into town. Nearly every radio station played classic rock exclusively. Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” came on twice. We passed the welcome sign that said OPEN ARMS, OPEN MINDS and pictured a group of racially diverse individuals holding hands. Along the highway, stretches of land gave way to factories and big concrete silos with train tracks running alongside them. Billboards seemed to stand in for trees and the vehicles on the street, most of them mammoth pickup trucks or SUVs, rolled to careful stops at intersections, even when the lights were yellow. Ray, who was driving, barreled through all the yellow lights until we reached the Ramada Inn, a slablike building in downtown Prairie City. At fifteen stories, it looked to be the tallest structure in town. We checked into our rooms and I called Sue Lugenbeel. Outside my ninth-floor window, the town looked so lifeless and depressing I wanted nothing more than to do the interviews in under two days and go home.
“Lucinda!” Sue Lugenbeel chirped. “Welcome to P.C.! I have seventeen fabulous women who are dying to be interviewed.”
Prairie City, it seemed, was one of those towns that went by its initials, like D.C. or L.A.
AFTER SURVEYING THE WOMEN, I selected the five thinnest ones and conducted on-camera interviews with them for the next two days. During this time, an odd sensation crept up on me. Though “fabulous” may have been an overstatement, the women proved themselves far worthier interview subjects than any of the boutique owners, dietitians, Pilates trainers, bagel makers, and relationship experts on whom I had cut my teeth as a journalist. Despite my plan to talk to them for no more than ten minutes each (and despite Up Early’s unofficial interview edict: “make ’em cry, say good-bye”) I let the women talk for hours and hours. I loved them. I couldn’t get enough of them. When Ray went back to New York I called Faye from my room at the Ramada Inn and told her I needed to stay and do additional research. Then I got out my microcassette recorder and passed another three days interviewing the remaining twelve women by myself. Something almost mystical had happened to me. Even though Prairie City was hot and dreary and the food, at least at the restaurants near the Ramada, tasted like lunch at a school cafeteria, something about the blandness of the town and the flat land that surrounded it were making me feel alive and exotic. Almost like another person.
This was, after all, serious country. The real heartland, the plains. Not necessarily Prairie City itself, which, at most intersections, could have passed for Long Island, but the land surrounding it, that was serious country. It was Willa Cather–novel serious. It was Sissy Spacek–movie serious and documentary-film-about-poor-conditions-in-meat-packing-plants serious. It was a place where, according to my early observations, not only did substance trump style but a very nuanced and therefore quietly sophisticated style was born out of the substance itself. What I meant by this I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that observing the people of Prairie City, particularly the beleaguered women at the recovery center and the careworn case workers who pressed empowering novels by women writers into their hands and encouraged them to eat soy products, made me feel for the first time like it might be possible to become a good person. Not that there weren’t plenty of opportunities to be a good person in New York. I’d just never bothered to take them. I had never worked with homeless kids, never adopted a stray animal, never volunteered to rake leaves in the park, never even, come to think of it, attended a church service. No one I knew had ever done any of these things, either. Was it laziness, busyness, distress over not having the right outfit for such activities? What did it matter? It was shameful. Not that adopting animals or going to church automatically makes you a good person, of course. And not that I was necessarily a bad person. It was just that I had come to view my moral status as a quantifiable entity that was measured solely against one person. That person was Faye. And the fact that I did not start fires and throw things at people had always firmly positioned me, if not in the “good” zone, at least in the “not remotely as bad as Faye” zone. But now, as I drove past the cornfields along the outer stretches of Highway 36, fresh from an interview with a woman who worked on an assembly line at the Firestone tire plant, an interview during which we’d really bonded, during which she’d told me her troubles, and I, treating her as an equal, had told her some of mine, like the rent increase (“you poor thing,” she’d said) I felt I was more than just not remotely as bad as Faye but actually good, at least potentially. And goodness, I realized, not only felt good, it felt cool. It was cool. The substance became style, the kind you can’t fake. Any truly stylish person will tell you that’s the only way it works.
It’s possible, however (and looking back, it’s not only possible but true, and it makes me wince), that I just felt superior. As I interviewed the methamphetamine-addicted women, listening to stories of bad boyfriends and accidental pregnancies and cars repossessed by the bank, smugness coursed through my veins like a narcotic. Of course, I didn’t see it as smugness. I was merely interested. I was engrossed by the stories of other people’s screwups, mostly because, though I didn’t realize it at the time, they made my own screwups seem minor in comparison. After years covering the toe ring craze and announcing to New Yorkers that “scones are the new muffin,” I felt that I’
d finally found my niche. I was a socially conscious reporter passionately committed to the true-life health crises that affect thousands of women nationwide. With every press of my record button, feelings of righteousness released themselves in me like an Alka-Seltzer tab in water. And when it came to feeling not only righteous but heroic, there was nothing like ordering a room-service breakfast at the Ramada and then navigating the rental car to a trailer park with a name like Shadowland Estates for hours of heart to heart with some woman whose misfortune—husband got her hooked on methamphetamine and left her destitute with three kids and two minimum-wage retail jobs—was about to be rectified by what this woman believed would be a heartwarming, nonexploitive segment on New York Up Early.
Besides, methamphetamine was an easy story. Given the constraints of your average Up Early segment, there wasn’t much more to say about the drug other than that it was a very bad thing and that even though it might help you lose weight (a fundamental concern of the show) it might also rot your teeth and/or land you in jail. Later, the promos for the segment would scream “The party may never end, but your life just might. Find out about the dangerous drug that’s sweeping the not-so-innocent heartland and heading straight for New York!”