Everything We Don't Know

by Aaron Gilbreath

  “Capacity,” it turned out, was code for “I’m clueless.”

  My immediate objectives were to study the market, see which occupations fit, and fatten a dangerously thin résumé. At that age, anything, even appearing as the balding, lost-in-life intern, seemed better than “Curriculum vitae: Bachelors in Philosophy; six years retail.” Other people confirmed my righteous path by explaining how connections from these gigs would foster further connections and generate job opportunities. How else to justify spending thousands of dollars of your savings and your girlfriend’s student loans to do free labor in one of the country’s most expensive cities? Two days a week I interned at a new literary magazine based in Brooklyn. There, in a gorgeously renovated one hundred sixty-year-old stable off the Atlantic Avenue stop, I read a few hundred fiction and nonfiction submissions, proofread pieces selected for publication, did copy-editing, fact-checking, and called numerous indie bookstores to encourage them to try a few copies. “We’re a new quarterly out of Brooklyn,” my sales pitch went. “Do you sell the Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s? It’s similar. I’ll send a sample PDF.” I loved it.

  The other three days a week, I interned in Katz’s Publicity Department. Initially I worked under the Senior Publicist. After a competing house lured her away, I worked under Meredith, the twenty-five year old assistant. She lived with three other recent college grads in a two-bedroom Brooklyn flat with a dog rarely attended to by its hungover owner. And while I suppressed my “likes” and “awesomes,” she said “like,” like, a lot, while laughing and reading media gossip sites during scattered sixty second breaks between phone calls, filing, and photocopying. But that didn’t bother me. If anything, I figured I was smarter, more cunning, and more worldly than her. Having the advantage of age carried wisdom. Retail experience imparted a desperate, life-or-death thirst for career improvement that bordered on monomaniacal, and I’ve-seen-the-alternative-and-it-sucks hunger that her upper class New England upbringing could not likely match. At least that’s what I told myself. She didn’t seem tough enough to handle all the hurdles and gin-swilling, sexist, pat-your-bum pigs I assumed a publishing life would hurl at her. She may have held the chair, but I was taking it from her.

  “Okay,” she’d say each morning as I approached her desk. It sat square in the middle of the office’s busy center, just out of view of the front door. “Today, I have a three hundred mailings for you for book-so-and-so. But first, if you could mail these review requests,”—she’d hand me a stack of month-old faxes she’d let pile up in lieu of more pressing tasks—“I’d love you forever.” Really, Meredith was fine. The tasks were just boring.

  To make Meredith seem like less formidable competition, I denigrated her in my mind. I frequently imagined her prepping for work each morning, how she might rouse her beleaguered consciousness with three cups of coffee, scoot a spent Cabernet bottle and cheap opener aside to make room for her yogurt-and-toast breakfast, an empty dog bowl by her sore slippered feet. I pictured four adults sharing two windowless bedrooms, Ylang-Ylang soap coated with hairs of varying colors, women breathing in each other’s morning breath before tossing a distant hello to the then-boyfriend/problem-of-the-moment, himself dressing in the only bathroom, all above some noisy bar where the music permeated the floor until 2:00 a.m. and the party continued on the street until 4:00. I needed to elevate my ego to feel like I had a chance in this profession. The fact was, Meredith was smart, ambitious, and well-read, and she wouldn’t have landed there otherwise.

  “I’ll get right on it,” I’d say, and bound off toward the mailroom. First, though, I’d hit the kitchen, brew a stiff cup of free black tea, pocket four or five teabags, then guzzle half a cup of the perpetually brewing coffee—secretly, since I still told everyone I “don’t really touch the stuff.” That was true back in Oregon, but I’d given in now that my calves ached and red eyes itched from my late night habit of sending short stories to literary magazines that inevitably rejected them, researching my first freelance articles until midnight, and alienating Abby who sat at home studying, alone and irritated.

  The coffee hit my brain while I was in the mailroom packaging review copies for National Book Critics Circle members and freelancers. With over fifty new books released each season, the gears of Katz & Strayhorn Inc.’s publicity machine never stop turning. In addition to their voluminous roster of regular reviewers, freeloaders, and special interest groups who inundated Meg the Department Head with requests. Like most publishing houses, Katz mailed so many books for potential coverage and jacket blurbs that they had their own FedEx and UPS machines to generate postage. Boxes of galleys, advance reading copies, and finished books lined the halls, often stacked four high. Evan, the twenty-three-year-old temp, and I emptied, moved, and consolidated the boxes constantly. We sent review copies and their glossy press releases one hundred to five hundred at a time during “push.” Then we dragged thirty-plus pound mailbag after thirty-plus pound mailbag to the loading bay. The bay—a garbage can dressed as an alcove attached to a freight elevator—contained the kind of mysterious oily stains that stained well-dressed execs’ shirts. It was where crushed cardboard awaited recycling.

  After the first mailing, I’d return to Meredith’s desk for new marching orders. She’d be hunched over stacks of paper, taking calls, or in Meg’s office planning author tour itineraries (“First, San Francisco, then off to the conference . . .”). Other times she’d be eating a quick lunch while laughing at Katz’s office manager Blake (“He is such a weirdo.”) with another assistant.

  Often, Meredith would ask, “Ready to do another mailing?”

  I felt goofy walking the streets near youthful NYU in my office clothes. My parents had kindly equipped me with a new professional look—collared shirts tucked into slacks, leather dress-ups instead of skate shoes. In place of my well-traveled blue North Face daypack, I carried an oxblood leather attaché, the ultimate badge of successful execu-yuppieism. It was a look I’d long loathed on all but my favorite professors, but it now lent a confident, marketable, urban intellectualism, something my flannels and Levi’s had long concealed.

  The work may have been tedious, but I felt it was an investment. Even Chief Executive Officer Jesse Albright started somewhere at the bottom. If a job opened up, I wanted Meredith and Meg to think immediately of me.

  While hosting a reading back at Powell’s the previous year, a friendly young woman with bright, intense eyes and a down-to-earth potty humor gave me her card. Rene Welsh, it said, Katz Senior Publicist. “I’m on tour with the author,” she said, motioning to the debut novelist at the lectern. She invited me to call if I ever needed anything. I called first thing upon landing in New York.

  By late August, publications like Slate and Time Out New York had all declined my internship applications, and Rene, over lunch, repeatedly warned how there was “no glory” in the Katz gig. “It’s a lot of physical labor, a lot of grunt work,” she said, likely figuring it was better to scare me off now than have me suddenly quit showing up.

  “My ego is not involved in this,” I told her. “And I’m used to grunt work.”

  “Great,” she said. “You’ll be fine.”

  Strutting down 12th and University that day after lunch, Rene stepped to the end of the soiled sidewalk and said, “It sounds clichéd, but it’s true: if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” She gripped her cell phone. “I’ll call you soon.”

  I watched her disappear into the throng of people on the sidewalk.

  For years I claimed I didn’t care if I never set foot in New York City. As a lifelong outdoorsman, it simply didn’t interest me. Camping, hiking, exploring old-growth forests and sleeping in my truck on road trips—those, like writing, were unwavering passions. Any place where people can say “if you’re not in New York, you’re camping out,” (New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey), call a pigeon wildlife (writer Nina Malkin) and the outdoors “what you have to pass through to get from your apartment to a taxicab” (
writer Fran Lebowitz) wasn’t for me. Plus, to my progressive environmental mindset, it seemed the ultimate blight, a polluted urban eyesore smothered in steel, garbage, and an unbearably compressed eight million people. Residents of Manhattan Island went from foraging thick hardwood forests and wild herring to living amid trash bags and miles of rusted security gates in some four hundred years. I didn’t care to set foot there.

  My Grandma Silvia always hocked me in chinik about New York. “You have to go,” she’d say, smacking her palm on the closest surface. “Everybody has to experience it at least once.”

  When I did occasionally experience a desire to seek out high literary culture, it was never strong enough to lead me east. Western North America contained countless compelling destinations that all sat higher on my next-to-see list. I’d explored the Yukon, Alberta, Alaska, British Columbia, and nearly every state west of the Rockies intimately, with tent, truck, boots, and backpack. But necessity often overrides preference. New York City was where writers worked, the nerve center of American book and magazine publishing. If I wanted to write, I could no longer ignore it.

  In addition to first dates and running out of weed, one of my greatest fears during college was spending my adult working life in a bleak, halogen-lit cubicle, pushing paper. It terrified me because it meant spending my life repressing rather than utilizing my creativity. Having abandoned drugs and everything mind-altering, I had entrenched myself in the noble grind of making an honest living selling books, but a new fear replaced the old one: neglecting my artistic abilities. Label books, shelve books, label books, day in and day out; surely there was more to life than retail. I needed some place that fed my mind, and New York had long offered refuge and employment for creative types. Maybe I’d been wrong about New York. A newer, countercultural Ellis Island seemed to await people like me, where Lady Liberty’s silent lips cry: “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The refuse of your MFA programs./Send the couch-surfers and self-described artists to me.” Or at least to Brooklyn.

  Abby was leaving Portland for school whether I came or not. Through the fog of prejudicial dismissals, her impending departure forced me see this city for what it was: publishing’s proverbial hub. Home to hundreds of glossies, four of the nation’s ten largest dailies, and publishing houses from HarperCollins to Harcourt, never mind the storied history (Willie Morris’ Harper’s, George Plimpton’s Paris Review, Dylan Thomas’s White Horse Tavern, Joseph Mitchell’s Bowery) and the litany of lit mags headquartered at its universities. The more I considered moving, the more New York resembled a creative’s paradise, a restless cauldron of fellow artists and intellectuals paid for their wits, efforts, and imaginations. Now I needed to see if I fit into it.

  My first subway rides to work seemed to confirm my decision. Perched behind novels, magazines, and the Times, New York’s general commuter appeared more literate than even the Pacific Northwest’s legendary bibliophiles. I’m home, I thought. Scowling or not, indifferent or not, these baggy-eyed New Yorkers felt like kin, united by our shared love of the written word.

  Which is what I told friends in Portland when they asked how I was adjusting. “Is it what you expected?” they asked. “Do you love it?” Love was too strong a word. It was stressful, expensive, cold, and competitive. With a pricey apartment in Bronxville, a thirty-minute train ride to Grand Central, two internships, less than five nightly hours sleep, fifteen to twenty smokes a day, the deal was done. Yet I only needed to endure one year. Abby would be finished with school in May, and we could leave by August at the latest. I figured that, like a lot of things, maybe love grows on you. So when, two months in, the little voice in the back of my head began saying, “This is not my scene,” I ignored it. I went on with my business.

  So when news of the Junior Publicist’s departure trickled down to me and Evan The Temp, I started sniffing around. Of course I phrased these inquiries in ways that buried my bloodhound motives in the sugary banter of water-cooler conversation. I’d start with, “Great news for Kay,” followed days later by, “I bet you are inundated with applications.” Then, “Any news on the job front?”

  Meredith’s poker face revealed nothing. “We’ve definitely received some interest,” she said.

  I never filled out an application. No one offered me one, though why would they? A thirty-one year old intern didn’t seem like such a great prospect compared to a seasoned applicant they knew.

  Evan The Temp slid a galley across Kay’s old desk. “You read any of this stuff?”

  He’d just finished undergrad at Duke and was ostensibly seeking paralegal work to get a feel for the profession before pursuing law school. When we met, he wore a ball cap and white Frank Zappa t-shirt. His voice carried the slow syrup of his native Virginia, and his exasperated comments evidenced all the impatience of an inexperienced teen. “No one reads this shit,” he’d say while we did mailings. He’d toss one of the hundreds of folded publicity packets across our tabletop and shake his head. “You know this goes straight in the trash.” More than once I’d told him how, while cobbling together introductory statements for those Powell’s events, I’d mined these materials for lines like, “Lush with passion, humor, and ultimately hope,” an “unforgettable collection by one of America’s foremost fiction writers,” “Gorgeous, vivid, and rife with ringing epiphany . . .” I’d also agreed that publicity materials were, by necessity, sales-pitches disguised as descriptions, but they were as vital to the literary arts as publishers and agents.

  Evan loved novels, particularly lavish historical ones, but he was here for the money. Couch-surfing at his brother’s place while seeking more steady work, he drank late into the night, smoked weed, and “jammed,” by his own description, to Phish and Zappa. Working long days at Katz, he assembled wall units and moved boxes on dollies to make room for more boxes, and he snuck outside to smoke cigs under the scaffolding on the street. It was the same spot where one of the editors smoked. And a payroll lady. And previously the Junior Publicist. I chewed nicotine gum so my habit didn’t diminish the appearance of a tireless work ethic. When Rene, Meredith, or Meg came looking, they always found me working in the office.

  With Kay the Junior Publicist gone, Meredith allotted the vacant room to us. This arrangement made it easier for her to delegate projects and afforded us a shorter trip when dragging mailbags to the elevator. Evan and I frequently tackled large mailings together, and while I was officially an ‘intern,’ and he a ‘temp,’ we were both drifters here doing menial tasks. But this new setting, intimate and nestled inside the office’s busy center, afforded an alternate glimpse into the publicist’s daily life.

  Meg, of course, walked by frequently, peering in to make sure we were working. When she went to lunch, and the sound of Meredith’s soft phone-voice guaranteed she wouldn’t be looking, I searched the computer’s document folders, rummaged through the desk, and scanned shelves for anything interesting. One day Evan strolled into Kay’s office bearing a mischievous grin. “Think it’s time to do some Christmas shopping,” he said, and started stuffing books into his coat. He winked. “Glad my family are big readers.”

  During that final month I wised up, too. Seeing my time at Katz diminishing, the idea that someone would invite me into the fold became an increasingly ridiculous hope. Slate, TONY, and New York magazine all declined my second round of internship applications, and instead of mailing applications to Harper’s and Audubon, I decided to abandon interning altogether. Instead of menial labor, I spent the next six months writing. Sitting there at Kay’s desk that day, watching Evan Christmas shop in the office that would soon belong to Meredith, I finally accepted myself for the cheap servant I was, and started collecting the practical information I assumed vital to the writing game.

  I pocketed the business cards I found in Kay’s desk drawer for a Men’s Journal’s deputy editor, a page editor at the Los Angeles Times, a senior publicist at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I asked Meredith for coun
tless ARCs and finished books, which I stuffed into my blue backpack that I’d resumed wearing the previous week along with my skate shoes. I photocopied fifty pages of contacts from the Bacon’s media guide: names of editors, email addresses, preferred methods of contact for pubs like The Nation and Village Voice, places I planned to pitch, and did, in the coming months. I’d long wanted to write reviews, and during my morning galley stuffing, I looked with envy at those freelancers on the postage labels, imagining a life spent in a Brooklyn brownstone reading books that simply arrived in the mail. I figured envy without ambition was as damning as complacency, so I filled a folder with the stuff I’d plundered.

  It was there, in Kay’s office on my last day interning, that I snuck onto Gmail while stuffing envelopes and found my first freelance assignment: two hundred dollars for a sixteen hundred-word profile of an obscure California author for Sacramento’s alt-weekly. I was thrilled.

  And when Blake asked me to bartend the Christmas party, I agreed.

  “If you need some extra money,” he said. He also promised free wine to drink and take home. “Albright orders lots of the good stuff.”

  Meredith overhead and leaned into the office. “You don’t have to work that if you don’t want to,” she said. It was thoughtful, a compassionate gesture, but it wasn’t about want anymore so much as need.

  At that moment, I recognized myself for the conniving, career-obsessed hatchling I’d become. Looking at Meredith, I felt guilty for always micro-analyzing her. I was always wondering if her folks in Connecticut sent checks to help cover costs, wondering how, with sky-high Manhattan rent, she could afford plane tickets home, new clothes, good groceries, and pricey mixed drinks, let alone those expensive salads. She deserved credit for her efforts, not scrutiny. The ten-hour days, room-sharing, all the assistant’s low-totemic struggle, I felt awful for belittling her in order to convince myself that I was a viable applicant. I just felt old and unemployable. It wasn’t her fault that I wanted what she had. Pitted against her and plotting my ascent, I’d also failed to acknowledge her humanity. Maybe assisting Meg was her preferred route to financial stability. Maybe she was homesick, too, and still searching for her own career calling, or she only wanted the chance to work with books and have a cultured life in America’s densest city, just as I did. People probably wondered about me, this thirty-something dude, and why I was there. I certainly asked myself everyday.