by Jaime Lowe
I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a room: two things I needed to call this jigsaw city my home. When I first arrived my friends made me feel like a sponsored celebrity; Hana showed me the shortcuts and gave me a breakdown of where to get work clothes on the cheap (Joyce Leslie, Strawberry, Century 21); her cousin Sarah P. clued me into the free-drink bartenders, and her neighbors would meet us where the roofs were tarred together for ad hoc wine and cheese parties. Hana and I shared a bed, and each morning, as the week began, I would go to David’s Bagels on Second Avenue. I bought one bagel with cream cheese and one plain bagel; I redistributed the excessive cream cheese application to the two bagels and ate half of one while I stuffed résumés into envelopes and made calls from pay phones to HR departments. I saved the other half of the bagel for an afternoon snack to meet my food budget of $1.50 before five p.m. The second bagel was for the next day, a little stale but practically free. I could not believe people said New York was expensive! The bagels were huge, THERE WAS SO MUCH CREAM CHEESE!
SCRAPBOOK OF MY EARLY YEARS IN NEW YORK. PICTURED: HANA, SARAH P., AND EFFIE (BEHIND THE LEAVES).
It was easy to get a job as a twenty-one-year-old—entry-level work was largely meritocratic, as long as you didn’t care where you worked. My first preprofessional interview was with Condé Nast’s human resources department—they told me I might be a good fit for Women’s Sports and Fitness (which I later realized was code for “not fit for fashion” and “not Ivy League enough for the New Yorker or Vanity Fair” and “not a man, so not GQ”). I got a second interview, and, as foretold, the HR rep told me to prepare for a meeting with the managing editor of Women’s Sports and Fitness in two days. The pace of this was excellent since I was running out of money and David’s Bagels and hospitality karma. I had monologues about sports rolling through my brain. I would talk about the radio project I did about discrimination and female athletes in high school; I would discuss my love of the Lakers and the Dodgers. I wore a skirt and blazer and applied lip gloss. I arrived at the HR department and met managing editor Alice Siempelkamp—the managing editor of House & Garden. There was some HR mix-up, but I didn’t care and she didn’t seem to either. A job was a job was a job. I explained to Alice that I would be happy to talk about softball. She asked me a few basic questions, about my art degree and year of studying art history in Edinburgh. Can you order lunch and convince the taco guy to include margaritas? Can you file? Can you deliver things? Can you stomach a certain amount of absurdity? She sat me down to a familiar monologue: Are you sure you want to do this? I flashed back to the moment when Pam Klein, the editor who hired me to be an intern at the LA Weekly, ran down all the reasons I should want to run away from publishing, alternative publishing in particular.
Pam told me, “This newspaper is supported by sex phone lines and porn ads and you have to believe that that is okay.”
I told her, “That is fine with me, that is something I get.”
Pam explained that alternative media was the kind of publishing fighting against mainstream media; it was creative and energetic and it gave a voice to those who couldn’t be heard.
She stressed it again. “But the ads are how we make our money. That is part of alternative journalism.”
Siempelkamp wasn’t warning me of soft porn, but something else, something more corrupted in my mind—luxury goods and consumption, the gilded class. This magazine was a fantasy for the masses to look at on glossy pages but to never touch or live in. I think she sensed that House & Garden might not be the best fit for me. She saw through my preprofessional skirt suit and my awkward walk in low heels. She could probably see the bedazzled Silver Girl psycho underneath the layer of corpo gray flammable material. But she didn’t care. We talked antiques and rugs. She hired me for a position that was split between reception and as the second assistant to the editor in chief, Dominique Browning. I was a bargain at $21,000 a year plus overtime. The other assistants at House & Garden included the daughter of a Condé Nast executive and the daughter of someone else whose status was lofty but unknown—they both were towering creatures of elongated beauty and poise, carrying leather satchels that clearly did not come from sample sales or Joyce Leslie. I mostly avoided them. I did not seek what I did not understand.
Around the same time that the job came through, an apartment lead landed in my lap. The space was perfect, a sublet in a commercial loft over Mustang Sally’s on Seventh Avenue. It was a bed and room for $630 a month. The stairway leading up was lopsided and covered in stained gray commercial carpeting. The apartment itself was dark; there was one bathroom for many people and a black toilet in that bathroom. My future roommates told me that Timothy “Speed” Levitch, the tour guide, poet, speaker, philosopher, and New York character had crashed for weeks on the futon. Apparently, no one who actually lived there knew him and he was eventually asked to leave. A pharmaceutical consultant lived in the front half of the space; a startup company was using one room as a meeting space in the back. There were twice-weekly aerobics classes directly above my soon-to-be-bed. And one window with a limited view of outside life—the frosted glass led to a fire escape/roof landing that faced a Chinese manufacturing space, a hybrid oasis of Mad Max and West Side Story. I had been shown rooms with no windows; rooms in Williamsburg with tilted linoleum floors and small lions guarding their stoops; rooms in dance studios; rooms inside other rooms. This one was it—the fire escape was my balcony, the aerobics class was my alarm; the room was a twenty-four-minute walk away from the old Condé Nast building and so I never had to pay for subway fare (tokens at the time). I just walked everywhere. I walked the city until I saw something I had never seen before (which was in every direction).
Once I defied the impossible—finding a cheap room and a job before I ran out of my seven hundred dollars—New York became real. The first three months included a serious adjustment to uncomfortable work clothing, a near-pathological need to drink at the Eleventh Street Pub and the Village Idiot, and a scrambled brain constantly packing and unpacking this idea of working poverty and working on a magazine that celebrated an opulent lifestyle. I tried to understand why anyone went to college to do this: Every morning, I was instructed to clip the horoscopes from the Daily News and the New York Post for Browning (something that at the time felt like a badass request made simply as a show of power, it turned out she was considering hiring the legendary Sally Brompton and needed a crash course in astrology), and then I would sit behind a desk and wait to interact with whoever and whatever showed up—Condé Nast executives, messengers, food deliveries, photo books, free samples, flowers. I killed time by making art projects on the color Xerox machine and by abusing the Sharpies.
CONDÉ NAST ART PROJECT, OR WHAT I REALLY DID AS A RECEPTIONIST FOR HOUSE & GARDEN.
Sometimes I would walk Condé Nast’s editorial director, James Truman, into Dominique’s office, and sometimes it was Si Newhouse himself; the latter never made eye contact, but both of them were nice enough to me. By Christmas, I was realizing that my absolute drive to get a job—any job—in publishing was potentially misguided. I was outraged by the amount of drudge work I had to do. I sent out issues and clips to every person who contributed to the magazine. I opened and sorted mail. In college, I had been writing and getting published and all of a sudden all I was doing was managing daily astrological forecasts. Then Christmas came. My family—so shocked and impressed that I had gotten a job and an apartment—came to visit. We were intending to spend Christmas Eve together. Instead, I was asked to hand deliver a Christmas present to every contributing writer and contributing editor who lived in New York.
Snow was coming; the air was crisp and the winter sky was gray. Just as I was loading the dozens of ceramic candles wrapped in iridescent paper into the backseat, flurries twinkled down. The start of a blizzard. I mapped out a course with the help of my driver and by ten p.m. we delivered as many as we could—there was no Goo
gle Maps or GPS. I missed Christmas Eve dinner with my dad and Marilyn and David but they understood; editorial assistant duties called and this was the reality of Condé Nast assistanting. One photographer opened the door to his apartment, looked at me dusted in snowflakes, and shook his head. He apologized, thanked me, took the candle, and sent me back to the car.
CHAPTER 12
SEX ’N’ EGG ’N’ CHEESE
BY MARCH 1999, I had stolen a lot of office supplies; dragged home all the free paint, lampshades, and wallpaper samples I could; and doodled as many creative Post-it collages as humanly possible. Alice asked if I would be interested in working with the photo department; their assistant had given notice. Yes, without hesitation.
Matt was not wrong about the downside of moving quickly and without a plan. I mourned Davis like a death in the family; college felt like a phantom limb. My friends had dispersed, the town wasn’t mine, and I didn’t have a weekly column or music to go to or an art studio to spend all night in, wrapped up with blank canvases. No one cared if I was Silver Girl in New York; that was just a regular Tuesday near the Liberty Inn. This new city was more about day-to-day survival: achieving a delicate balance of not hitting the overdraft charge, ordering enough lunch for the editors so that there were weekend leftovers for me to take home, and saving enough cigarettes to smoke on the roof when it all felt like hell. My home on Seventh Avenue was a dirty cesspool surrounded by rag shops, furriers, Irish bars, and Madison Square Garden. The occasional homeless person slept in our vestibule and I made rent, I ran at the McBurney YMCA (which is now a seven-thousand-square-foot duplex valued at $14 million), I went to art openings, and I pined for a painter who was in the Yale graduate program.
MOOD BOARD, CIRCA 1999.
He had been a graduate student when I was an undergraduate at Davis and transferred when I moved. He was not interested in me, but we would talk on the phone about artists, emerging and otherwise. I wanted to impress him with small drawings made with taped-off lines. He was distant, like his paintings.
My twin desires were to be a working writer and a functional dater, neither of which seemed likely or even remotely possible at the time. I worked very late nights; overtime was the only possible way to afford my deluxe lifestyle, which I considered to be raucous and rich despite no cents to my name. In late January 1999, after the candle-delivering blizzard of ’98, I went, at the suggestion of Dr. DeAntonio, to meet with Dr. Schwartz, a psychiatrist on the Upper West Side. This cemented my move to New York. (I believe his recommendation was so emphatic that Dr. DeAntonio said, “He’s treated my family members, he’s very good.”) I arrived late and we went over basics. Schwartz’s office was a study in what I assume is stereotypical analyst decoration replete with oddly shaped vases, a tissue box near the soft mid-century sofa, Asian rugs, and modern art photography. One photo—a black-and-white shot of the interior of a movie theater—was of a blank, bright white screen, illuminated seats, and an empty audience. The brain, I thought, with an audience of no one. He had a window in the center of the east-facing wall; it overlooked the Central Park Reservoir. It was a beautiful space. Not a womb like Dr. G’s, more like the next level, like Freud could have analyzed Dora here.
We talked about my family, my episode in high school, my sexual history, my current anxiety over dating (more precisely, not dating), my terrible job, how much I could pay per session, how much insurance covered—all this according to his session notes, which he shared with me for this book—I’ll call them The Notes. The first mention of lithium in our sessions came a month later on February 19, 1999, when we discussed whether I wanted to decrease my dosage or stop taking lithium altogether. My first reaction was anxiety, according to him. I wasn’t ready but it was something that I wanted to consider, since I had been fine through college. Here I was in New York delivering packages for fancy editors and worrying about my inability to date. These were not bipolar concerns. This was life.
By June 1999, I decided I wanted to get off the lithium. Dr. Schwartz said in his notes that he called Dr. DeAntonio, who “described her as floridly psychotic during her episode in 9/93 but no repeat episodes or even instability. He feels she has done well enough for long enough to be tried off lithium.” In my early days of seeing Dr. Schwartz, his notes most often describe me as “damn assertive,” “late,” “aggressive,” “controlling,” “angry,” or “frustrated.” It’s unclear to me if this was a hallmark of the disease or just my personality but I was unwilling and unable to conform, in general. We would talk about my work frustrations in sessions and my unrequited loves—I preferred wild crushes to reality. We never addressed how the attack effected my dating, how my parents’ divorce may have influenced me and my dating habits, how my hospitalization may have affected me—I wouldn’t have passed a Bechdel test; all I talked about were boys. I wasn’t very deep. In reviewing The Notes, I am embarrassed. I deserved better than session upon session devoted to boy drama. But I never learned boy drama; I went from babysitting and obsessive phone calls to collegiate avoidance to New York drunk.
When I moved to New York, adolescence was thought to be over in the teens; scientists found that the brain was done (or close to done) developing. I was expected to be an adult, to process information as an adult and to be responsible, as an adult. In 2016, however, a study by Dartmouth found that “adolescent-specific behavior may be driven by an imbalance in activity between the prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area of the brain involved in cognitive control and inhibition, which does not fully develop until the late teens/early 20s,” which could explain why most early-twenties individuals lack the self-control of adults. I’m not sure why science had to prove that being in your twenties is an extension of adolescence—it seems anecdotally self-evident.
My early years in New York included some wild behavior. I slept with some random-ass people, mostly colleagues or late-night drinkers at the Village Idiot, a bar that used to stink up the meatpacking district back when there were actual bovine carcasses hanging from racks. I slept with an art school model who had to shave his entire body but when we had sex it was growing back and was prickly (I almost kicked him out of bed for fear of full-body rash); someone who urinated on my rug; someone who was so drunk after a magazine party, he thought I was his coworker (I was not); someone who was married with kids; someone who was a photographer who could spot-check that I was wearing H&M panties (which seemed weird, too much time spent styling photo shoots); men with bad pickup lines (“I like your dress, but I’d like it crumpled on my floor”); many people I do not remember. The ghosts of my vagina past.
My main problem was that while I kept this going, I pined for suitors far away and unavailable, and I was completely repulsed by anyone who liked me. I was twenty-two and my physical life in college was limited to skateboarding and living inside a Silver Girl suit. Perhaps this early New York life was a delayed adolescence?
If this was adolescence and the experience that I missed while I was in my sad Subway sandwich high school phase, that was fine. It was a time in publishing when there were still parties. The Lad mags had especially lavish budgets and expansive guest lists—Madonna was at a Stuff party! Maxim, Stuff, Details all outselling each other in ads and spending it down on lowly paid assistants and their friends (me). Their parties were almost all the same—free booze and a room full of dudes. I was fixated on a fantasy and stunted by reality—in therapy we talked repeatedly about why I slept with people who offered no second-date future. A lot of the notes from those years circle around coupling as a goal, but in retrospect I wonder why having a relationship had to be the goal at all. I was exercising. It was practice.
I think the most frustrating thing for Dr. Schwartz was the very clear pattern of who I didn’t sleep with—those who might return, those who might care, those who might leave after caring. It sounds so reductive and hooey, but that was that. The first example of this trope was Jeremy, one of my best friends in
college who I kissed once and told him, “I think you are kissing me wrong,” and we never kissed again. He was now living in the loft and still one of my best friends. He took out the dead mouse carcasses and collected vinyl and worked at Sony Records and was a calm counter to my frenzy. Jeremy made elaborate creatures out of Fimo modeling clay and had the ability to quietly and comically riot. (I was always on the floor laughing when I was around him.) Another example of the too-nice guy was an editorial assistant, who worked at Details, a men’s magazine located on the same floor as House & Garden. I described him in a personal essay in the Village Voice in September 2004:
Dave was one of my first New York friends—one that I met post-college. He was the only person at Condé Nast who wasn’t intimidating, largely because he didn’t wear stilettos. . . . I’d call him on Sundays while he was watching cartoons; we’d meet at delis and eat fatty pastrami and drink Cel-Ray sodas, go to Blockbusters, stand next to each other at concerts, drink through our respective office parties. We were surrogate dates.