by Dan Peres
But as with all drugs, the effects eventually fade and you’re left foolishly chasing a high that’s no longer attainable. That’s pretty much where I was the afternoon I sat down at Les Deux Magots with Claudio. It’s surprising, frankly, that I went out at all. I think the promise of getting stoned with him was the motivating factor. I had been spending more and more time alone in my apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The loneliness was only amplified by the fact that I couldn’t watch television—the perfect lonely man tonic. Not surprisingly, all programming was in French—episodes of ER, Friends, even old M.A.S.H. reruns—and despite living in the French capital for several years, I never managed to learn the language. It turned out that Ross’s whining to Joey and Chandler about his love for Rachel was just as annoying in French. I’d love to say I tried to master the language, but I never really did. I was a seeker of instant gratification, and the thought of intensive classes at Berlitz wasn’t appealing.
By the time I asked Claudio if he could recommend a doctor, I was staying up most nights till dawn, smoking and flipping through the dozens of instructional magic books that lined the white bookshelves I put together in my apartment. They were lopsided. The assembly instructions were in French. I had recently started taking Prozac, which was sent to me after a few phone sessions by a shrink in Baltimore, but all it seemed to do was make me dizzy.
Maybe a little Vicodin in my life could lift me out of my funk?
Despite Claudio’s ringing endorsement, I chose not to go to the Princess Diana hospital and instead went to the American Hospital just at the edge of Paris the week after our croque monsieur lunch at Le Deux Magots.
The emergency room smelled of burnt coffee and was empty when I arrived just after eleven a.m. I limped up to the front counter wincing with pain that wasn’t there. My “I’m in agony and can barely stand” routine would become Oscar-worthy in the coming years, but was still largely untested at this stage—more improv than rote. I dragged my left leg and grunted with each step as I followed the nurse to an examining room. It’s possible I was overselling it a bit, because when we were about ten feet away from the room she stopped, sighed deeply, and gave me what I could have sworn was an eye roll. Or maybe she was just being French. Either way, I dialed the grunting down a notch.
Its inconvenient location notwithstanding, the American Hospital had one tremendous upside—everyone spoke English. My doctor, a short, stocky man in his mid-thirties with several days growth of beard on his face and calm green eyes, spoke perfect English through a strong French accent. He had five pens poking out of his shirt pocket and wore a black Casio calculator watch on his left wrist. He was friendlier than I expected.
“Alors, let’s have a look,” he said, lifting my shirt and gently running his finger over the faded surgery scar on my lower back. This scar would serve as the perfect prop on future doctor visits—verifiable proof that I wasn’t entirely full of shit.
I explained how I’d moved to Paris a few months after having had two back surgeries and that my back had been fine for more than two years, but had started hurting recently after I slipped getting out of the bath. Surely this would be believable, as grown men actually took baths in France.
“The pain is almost unbearable,” I explained. “When I was in the United States, I took something called Vicodin, and that seemed to help.”
“Ah, yes, bien sur, Vicodin,” he said, nodding.
“I’m not looking to treat my back while I’m here in Paris,” I said. “I was just hoping to get enough pain relief until I fly back to New York in a couple of weeks.” I had no plans to travel home, but wanted to avoid what I figured might be coming—an MRI, physical therapy, or anything other than pills.
He gave me as thorough an exam as he could, but I didn’t make it easy. Every time he asked me to do something—sit, stand, walk across the room, lay flat and lift my legs to a 90-degree angle—I would stop midway and clutch my back.
“I know I can do it,” I said. “I just need a second to rest.”
“No. No. Please don’t hurt yourself,” the doctor said. “Let’s see what we can do for the pain.”
Wow. That was easy.
“Like I said, Vicodin was very helpful when I took it in New York,” I offered—again.
“We don’t have Vicodin here,” he replied.
“Of course,” I said, standing up and slowly tucking in my shirt. “I’m not sure what you call it here, but maybe something like that.”
“There is nothing like that in France,” he said.
“Maybe you’re not understanding,” I suggested. “Vicodin is a painkiller.”
“Yes, I know what Vicodin is,” he said. “I was premed at Chapel Hill.”
Oh. Okay.
“We don’t have drugs like that here in France,” he explained. “The closest thing we have is Efferalgan Codeine, which is essentially the same thing as Tylenol with Codeine, which is not as powerful as Vicodin. That’s the strongest analgesic pain reliever you can get outside of a hospital. I can give you a prescription for it.”
There are pharmacies on every corner in this country and the strongest painkiller they have is Tylenol with Codeine? What a tease. I didn’t want something weaker than I had already taken in the past. That wasn’t going to get me where I desperately needed to go.
“Do you really think it’ll help?” I asked, making a particularly strong show of how hard I was trying to get my shoes back on.
“If you’d like, I can give you a shot of morphine today to see if we can quiet down some of the pain,” the doctor said. “You’d have to stay here for four hours, though. Are you driving?”
“No, I took a taxi,” I said. “Sure, I’ll try that.”
I barely felt the injection. The nurse shut the lights and told me she’d be by to check on me shortly. I could hear the whine of a euro-siren approaching the building and the squeak of sneakers coming and going in the hallway.
I waited.
“Was this a mistake?” I wondered.
I had my answer about ten minutes later.
And just like that, I was floating. Levitating over the creaky hospital bed like I was in one of David Copperfield’s grand illusions—soaring out over the crowd like a spellbound volunteer from the audience. No fear. I was warm and relaxed and—for the first time in months—comfortable in my own skin.
I was home.
Little did I know, I’d be home for real before the end of the month.
Patrick called and asked me to fly back to New York to discuss the possibility of taking over Details. I was offered the position and immediately tasked with rebuilding the magazine.
I was twenty-eight, back in New York with an exciting high-profile job, and about to begin my next powerful love affair—one that nearly killed me.
Unraveling, Part II
I liked that they knew me.
I’d been staying at the Morgans Hotel on Madison Avenue for several weeks already, and every time I walked inside, someone was saying my name.
Aspiring actor doormen, with their cleft chins and soap-star good looks, swung the doors open well before I even reached them.
“Welcome back, Mr. Peres.”
The fresh-faced men and women working the front desk, lean in fitted gray sweaters, smiled every time I passed through the small, fragrant lobby.
“There’s a fax for you, Mr. Peres.”
“Cold out there, isn’t it, Mr. Peres?”
“We ran a package up to your room, Mr. Peres.”
It may have been the first time—other than some self-important high school teacher or one of my mom’s drunken friends at my bar mitzvah—that anyone had ever called me Mr. Peres. I liked it. I never once told them to call me Dan.
My room was actually several rooms—a one-bedroom suite on the seventeenth floor that I’d been living in since moving back from Paris to take the Details job. There was a big living room with a powder room and a large separate bedroom. An upholstered banquette sat in fron
t of a bank of windows facing west. The room was bright with afternoon light. There was a polished wooden tray on the marble-topped minibar packed with snacks from Dean & DeLuca—savory cheese sticks, hickory-smoked almonds, the world’s softest gummy bears—wrapped in small crinkly plastic bags.
The room was decorated in soft neutral colors—light grays and cream. The only real contrast in the hotel suite came from a black-and-white-checked blanket folded neatly across the foot of the bed. I brought one bag with me from Paris—everything else was being shipped—and my clothes were neatly in place in a small wood-lined walk-in closet in the bedroom.
It was the most luxurious suite I’d ever stayed in, and in February of 2000 it became the site of my second hotel-room trashing.
I’d first heard of the Morgans Hotel during my freshman year of college. My girlfriend Rachel’s wealthy aunt Becca used to stay there when she visited from Beverly Hills. We picked her up there once on our way to a fondue place uptown. The paparazzi were gathered out front waiting for celebrities. I remember thinking that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. It was even cooler than seeing Matt Dillon and Sean Young right outside of my freshman dorm on lower Fifth Avenue one night while they were shooting a scene from some forgettable movie. (Dillon asked out one of the girls on my floor while she was outside watching them film, making her something of a celebrity at Rubin Hall.)
I pretended to know who Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell were when Becca explained that the legendary founders of Studio 54 were the ones who’d opened the hotel a few years earlier. I also pretended to know what Studio 54 was. Becca loved the Morgans because it was a small hotel, she said, but it offered all of the luxuries of one of the old-school five-star places that she hated on the Upper East Side. Celebrities loved it, too. It was quiet and indistinctive on a nondescript block on lower Madison Avenue. It was the first boutique hotel. And now it was my new address while I settled back into New York and into my new role as editor in chief of Details.
I didn’t expect to be staying there long. In fact, I didn’t expect to be given the Details job in the first place. What did I know about running a magazine?
While the W Paris job came with a great title, European Editor, I was essentially just a glorified features writer and schmoozer of designers and socialites. I was hardly responsible, and if I made it into the office before eleven a.m., it was a shock to those who’d already been there for hours. But I wasn’t complaining. I traveled wherever I wanted for stories—London, Geneva, Berlin, Gstaad. I flew on private planes with billionaires, hung out on yachts during the Monaco Grand Prix, and had long flirty lunches with ridiculously rich women I was trying to convince to showcase their opulent Parisian pieds-à-terre in the pages of W. It didn’t even matter that most of them were in their seventies. I once got drunk on 200-year-old cognac with an eccentric French baron—in the middle of the day. “You should have some, my young friend,” the baron said after I politely passed. “It’s from the French Revolution. You understand? Napoleon was alive when this was made.” I stumbled home.
It was the ideal job for me—high profile enough to make me feel important, but extremely light on responsibility.
I wasn’t ready for any real responsibility. I was, however, desperate to get out of Paris, and the idea of being the editor of Details had appealed to me long before I was ever even offered the job. About two years before I moved to Paris, I was having dinner one night at the tony Greenwich Village eatery Il Cantinori when the restaurant’s manager brought the chef over to meet the man dining at the next table. “This is the editor in chief of Details,” he said as he introduced the two men. The chef shook the editor’s hand enthusiastically and personally brought out three dishes for him and his raven-haired date to sample. With each visit to the table, the chef described the dish and its Tuscan inspiration and offered a warm “buon appetito!”
I wanted that. Not the food as much as the attention, though free carpaccio is always a bonus. I was hungry for validation. I had a long-simmering desire to be both noticed and invisible at the same time. This was my struggle—the bizarre by-product of a crippling insecurity and an inflated ego. Getting the Details job fed both.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Peres,” the woman behind the front desk at the Morgans chirped as I walked in. “There’s a gentleman waiting for you.” She pointed over to the brown leather club chair on the other side of the room where Ivan was sitting. There was a black-and-white-checked blanket draped over the back of the chair. Ivan was reading a copy of the quarterly literary journal the Paris Review. That, and the fact that he had a soul patch—a brittle tuft of rust-colored hair dangling from his bottom lip like a weather-beaten Christmas wreath still hanging on a front door in April—made me dislike him immediately.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” I said, hand outstretched as I crossed the small lobby to greet him. “I just moved back to New York and had forgotten that taking a taxi down Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day is a horrible idea.”
Ivan was there to see me about a job, just one in a wave of editors, writers, and art directors I’d been meeting since I became editor in chief of Details a few weeks earlier. Details was founded in the early eighties and was bought by Condé Nast in 1989. In the early to mid-nineties, the magazine had developed a strong cultural voice and a sizable audience. I even applied for a job there after graduating from NYU but was sent the standard rejection letter informing me that there were no positions available at that time but that they would keep my résumé on file. Details was cool and insidery and downtown. It was hardly the right fit for me anyway. So I took the job at DNR writing about cable-knit sweaters and covering the National Retail Federation—admittedly not the coolest or most stylish group of guys, but there were some pretty innovative takes on the comb-over within their ranks.
Details had had a handful of editors in chief since the mid-nineties, and by the time I was given the job in 2000, its once untouchable cool factor had faded thanks to a colossal shift in the men’s magazine market toward babes and bathroom humor that came sweeping in from England with the popularity of magazines like Maxim and FHM. Beneath their perfectly fitted bespoke suits and shiny oxfords, the Brits were really giant pervs. Edginess and cool had given way to T&A and bosomy midriff-baring cover models. Fighting to compete, most traditional men’s magazines, including Details, followed suit, and their covers became virtually indistinguishable from the Playboys I used to try to peek at as a kid while pretending to look for comic books when I was at the Rite Aid in the Greenspring Shopping Center with my mom. In the end, though, that type of magazine just didn’t fit in with the overall Condé Nast brand ethos of luxury and sophistication. Shortly before I moved back from Paris, the powers that be at Condé Nast decided to shut Details down, turn it over to Fairchild, which the company had recently acquired, and relaunch it.
“They tried taking the Maxim route, but it didn’t work,” Patrick explained when we were talking about what to do with Details. “It needs to be different. Sophisticated. Smarter than the rest.”
I thought there might be some opportunity for me to take a senior role when Patrick called me at my office in Paris and told me he’d like for me to fly to New York to discuss Details, but I never expected to be given the job. In the end, I think it came down to the fact that Patrick knew and trusted me and recognized that I shared his flair for colorful storytelling. It certainly wasn’t my leadership experience. I had never managed more than a small handful of people and had never hired—or fired—anyone. I was underqualified, for sure, but I did have some ideas of what a modern men’s magazine should look like.
“There’s nothing out there for men who are smart and stylish but aren’t interested in having a magazine sitting on their coffee table that has a woman in a wet T-shirt on the cover,” I told Patrick. “That feels like such a lowest-common-denominator approach to speaking to men. Let’s face it . . . not all guys come to a magazine to read about beer, barbecue, and babes. I know plenty of men who a
re interested in design and architecture and art and fashion.”
I had been living in Paris for the last three years surrounded by men in the fashion business—men who didn’t need wives or girlfriends or mothers to tell them what clothes to buy and how they should decorate their homes. They were elegant and confident. They cooked and collected art. They wore cashmere scarves looped coolly around their necks on chilly days instead of wearing coats. And they most definitely wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pair of corduroys embroidered with tiny whales.
“Details needs to defy stereotypes,” I told Patrick. “It can’t be too straight or too gay. It needs to walk that fine line in between.”
“Let’s do it,” said Patrick.
When Condé Nast closed Details about a month earlier, the entire staff had been let go. I had to hire thirty people as quickly as I could, and I had never conducted a job interview in my life. Now I had a stack of résumés in my suite at the Morgans and had been meeting people, sometimes three or four a day, for several weeks. This had been an ego-fueling process, but it had also been incredibly stressful. Most of the people I met with were older than me, and they were all far more experienced. I did my best to hide my insecurity behind a veil of cooked-up confidence.
I did what I’d always done. I pretended.
It wasn’t traffic that made me late for Ivan, who, as it turned out in what would be the final blow for his prospects as a future Details editor, pronounced his name E-von. I was coming from a doctor’s appointment.
I’d been seeing Dr. Irwin Rosenbaum for an annual physical since my days at NYU. He was a heavyset man in his late fifties with a constellation of skin tags on his neck and hands the size of baseball mitts. He was the doctor who discovered I had only one kidney after questioning why lab results indicated that I had a higher than average red blood cell count. Dr. Rosenbaum was a Modern Orthodox Jew with offices on Fifth Avenue and 84th Street and in Great Neck, Long Island, where he lived with his wife and three sons. Pictures of his kids dressed in matching navy polo shirts, khakis, and blue yarmulkes—one with the Yankees logo stitched in white on the front—hung on one of the waiting-room walls. The photos had to have been more than ten years old, as they showed young boys who I now knew to be college age or older. I’d called to schedule a physical the day before, but was given a next-day appointment due to a cancellation.