by Dan Peres
From the time I was a little boy, I always loved going to the doctor. I loved the smell of the doctor’s office—a potpourri of disinfectant, latex, and lollipops, with just a hint of urine. The vinyl furniture that exhaled a poof of air and dust whenever I sat. The well-worn copies of Highlights magazine with the address labels torn off that my mother forbade me to touch. “Daniel Peres, put that down this instant,” she’d scold. “Do you know how many snotty noses have dripped on that?”
I loved waiting in the examining room, too. The way the nurse would slip the manila folder with my name written across the front into a plastic file holder mounted to the outside of the door as she showed me inside. I made up magic tricks using the cotton balls and tongue depressors that sat in large glass jars on the counter next to a box of rubber gloves and—the most thrilling of all examining-room items—the knee hammer. Up on the table I’d go, a thin layer of white paper crinkling beneath me, fruitlessly hammering away at my own knees.
I felt at home at the doctor’s office. Comfortable. Happy, even.
My pediatrician, Dr. Layton, made me feel like a celebrity every time I was there, pointing out, not just to me but to his entire office staff, that I was his first newborn patient. “He talks about you like he gave birth to you,” my mother said once. Dr. Layton was a kind and gentle man with a soft voice and warm hands, but the most interesting thing about him—to a young boy like me, anyway—was the fact that his first name was Dick. This was a source of endless amusement for me and my brother, Jeff. “Are we going to see Dick today?” we’d ask our mother from the back seat of the car, trying to contain our laughter. “He’s such a nice man,” we’d say. “Does everyone like Dick?”
Going to the doctor also meant attention. It put me front and center. I used to secretly wish that the doctor would discover I had asthma or some other quasi-serious but non–life-threatening ailment that might get me some sympathy . . . or at least get me out of gym. Plus, I always thought inhalers were super cool. I loved a prop.
Between the ages of ten and fourteen, I spent summers at sleepaway camp in Maine, where I no doubt spent more time with the nurse, Katrina, in the infirmary than I did with my bunkmates in the lake. The infirmary was one of the few buildings—really just a wood cabin only slightly larger than the bunks that lined the dirt path next to the soccer field—that had air conditioning. Everyone called Katrina “Olive Oyl,” though not to her face, because she was unusually tall and rail-thin. She had shoulder-length black hair, which she wore in a ponytail, and she didn’t dress like the nurses in Dick’s office. She wore OP shorts, baggy T-shirts, and a red fanny pack where she kept Band-Aids, antiseptic wipes, Bacitracin, and a pair of medical scissors that were bent in the middle and rounded at the edges. Though I was never able to confirm it, she was widely rumored to have had hairy armpits. Poison ivy, headaches, a twisted ankle, even the occasional splinter—I’d find any reason I could to go see Katrina. Being in the infirmary is one of the most enduring memories I have of summer camp.
I made quite an entrance when I walked into Dr. Rosenbaum’s office the day I was late for my meeting with E-von. Patrick had arranged for me to get a discount at Giorgio Armani, where I’d gone a few days earlier to buy two new suits and a pair of black lace-up shoes. After all of my talk about elegance and sophistication, I figured I should walk the walk. What I didn’t realize was that the soles of my new Armani shoes were made of polished leather, which made walking any walk a challenge. I slid across Dr. Rosenbaum’s waiting room like I was trying to beat a tag at third base.
“Whoa,” said Dr. Rosenbaum, who was standing next to the receptionist, scribbling notes in a file. “The prodigal son returns,” he said. “All that time in France and you come home doing pratfalls better then Jerry Lewis. He’s like a god over there, right?”
I made two split-second decisions as I was getting up off of the waiting-room floor. The first was to go back to wearing my uniform of jeans and sneakers. I may have been pretending to be an editor in chief, but dressing the part had just taken a dangerous and embarrassing turn. My second decision was to pretend that I’d really hurt my back, which despite the Lewis-esque slip was fine. I don’t really even remember thinking about it. I just did it—as if it were an involuntary action, like blinking. I stood slowly, clutched my back, and let out a soft but audible groan.
“This is just what I need,” I said, limping up to the counter the same way I had down the marble hallway at the American Hospital in Paris weeks earlier. “I definitely just did something to my back.”
“Do you want to lie down in one of the exam rooms?” Dr. Rosenbaum asked. “I have one patient ahead of you. Shouldn’t be too long.”
“I probably should. My back is hurting,” I said, repeating the claim for maximum impact.
Despite stopping at three pharmacies the day before I left Paris, including one at Delta terminal in Charles de Gaulle, to stock up on the effervescent painkiller that I’d been given when I left the American Hospital, Efferalgan Codeine, I was down to my last package. It turned out that French pharmacies gave the doctor’s prescription back to you after filling it. I think they were supposed to stamp it with the date, but they never did—something I didn’t take issue with. This medicine was fairly common in France and was barely regulated—it had actually been sold over the counter up until a year or so earlier, making France an addict’s dream destination. I would later learn that you could also get it without a prescription in London, which would come in handy in the years to come.
I hadn’t been sleeping well since my return to New York. At first I chalked it up to jet lag, but I was beginning to feel the anxieties of the new job and the responsibilities that came with the business card. Who knew that working full days would be so stressful?
A day or two after I landed in New York, I ran into a colleague, Merle Ginsberg, who had been dividing her time between working for W and Los Angeles magazine, which had been recently acquired by Fairchild. The new editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine, Spencer Beck, was also a former W editor whom I’d known for years.
“Let me ask you a question,” I said while catching up with Merle in the massive newsroom at the Fairchild offices. “As an editor in chief, is Spencer there every day? Is he there all day?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “He’s running the magazine. He’s there around the clock.”
I was crestfallen.
The Efferalgan Codeine was helping me unwind at night. I’d drop two into the small bottle of Evian water the housekeeper at the Morgans would leave on the nightstand and chug it before climbing into bed. It helped. After being back in New York for about ten days, a week or so before my physical with Dr. Rosenbaum, I decided to take a couple in the middle of the day. It was a Saturday, with no meetings scheduled, so I figured the Efferalgan Codeine might help me nap. I didn’t. Instead, I felt a slight buzz and sat on the sofa in the living room of my suite smoking cigarettes and watching back-to-back episodes of Diff’rent Strokes. It was the most relaxed I’d been since moving back.
“I read about your new job in the Post,” Dr. Rosenbaum said as he settled on a stool across from me in the examining room. “You’re a star.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, “but it’s definitely exciting.”
After my checkup, I asked the doctor if he could give me something for my back. Dr. Rosenbaum had written me a prescription for a hundred Extra Strength Vicodin just before I moved to Paris—an “emergency supply” in case anything happened. I reminded him of this and asked for the same, making a point to groan in pain while lacing up my slippery new shoes.
“How about sixty?” he asked, pulling a prescription pad from the saggy side pocket of his white lab coat. I knew this wasn’t a negotiation, but said, “Make it eighty and we’ve got a deal.”
I took the prescription for sixty Extra Strength Vicodin and made my way back to the Morgans, where E-von and his soul patch were patiently waiting. I’d been given a de
sk at the Fairchild headquarters on 34th Street, but I did most of the interviews either in my suite at the Morgans or at the bar in Asia de Cuba, the hotel’s trendy restaurant just off the lobby and downstairs.
E-von and I made our way to Asia de Cuba, where he told me that his favorite writers were Saul Bellow and Thomas Pynchon—two men whose work I had attempted to read on several occasions but had given up on after a few pages. He was hoping to discover the next generation of literary giants and thought Details would be the perfect place to showcase their work, he explained.
Oh, boy.
“Well, E-von, I really appreciate you coming by today,” I told him after wearily listening to twenty minutes on literary theory. “I apologize again for being late, but unfortunately I have another meeting in a few minutes and need to run.”
My next meeting wasn’t for another few hours, but I wanted to change out of my suit and the Armani roller skates and get to the Duane Reade on the corner of 34th and Fifth to have my prescription filled. I was looking forward to how the Vicodin were going to make me feel. I wove my way through the throngs of tourists clogging the sidewalks with the nervous excitement of a six-year-old kid pushing through a crowded mall to sit on Santa’s lap for the first time.
The opaque orange prescription bottle was larger than I expected. I could feel it through the small white bag that the pharmacist had stapled shut. Maybe he accidently gave me more pills, I thought hopefully. Once in the privacy of my hotel suite, I tore the bag open and placed the bottle on the coffee table next to a pile of résumés and some back issues of Details. Take 1–2 tablets by mouth every 4–6 hours as needed for pain. Qty: 60. No refills. I gazed at the label for a moment before removing the cap and spilling three or four chalky white oval pills into the palm of my hand. Each had Watson 3203 imprinted in it. I stared at them like a fortune-teller studying a handful of crystals.
Should I?
My final meeting of the day wasn’t with a job candidate, but instead with a publicist, Kelsey Brown, who had asked me out for a drink to hear my plans for the magazine and tell me about some of her celebrity clients.
Should I? I thought as I contemplated the pills. This is a casual meeting, right? A publicist looking to suck up to me for coverage in a magazine that doesn’t even exist yet. What’s the big deal?
I popped three in my mouth and swallowed them with a large gulp of Diet Coke. I grabbed a bag of Dean & DeLuca cheese sticks from the minibar and headed off to meet Kelsey for a drink at Keens Steakhouse on 36th Street, which was about a ten-minute walk from the Morgans.
I first met Kelsey when I was working as a reporter for WWD’s Eye page and she was a junior publicist for PMK, the powerhouse celebrity PR firm that had an impressive roster of movie stars, many of whom I was hoping to land for the cover of Details. I had recently decided that the magazine would feature only men on its covers as a way to distinguish Details from the pack, and Kelsey, who had climbed the ranks at PMK, now represented some of the top leading men in Hollywood.
Keens was a carnivore’s delight—an over hundred-year-old Manhattan landmark known as much for its Flintstone-sized steaks and mutton chops as for its collection of tens of thousands of long, skinny wooden pipes that lined the ceiling. Kelsey was sitting in the dark, wood-paneled bar drinking a white wine spritzer and talking on her cell phone when I showed up. She had long, wavy strawberry-blond hair and a round, full baby face punctuated with faded brownish-red freckles. Though she was in her early thirties, it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the bartender asked for ID before serving her.
“I always knew you were going to be an editor in chief,” she said as she hopped off her stool to give me a hug. She was still on the phone. “Just wrapping up a call to the coast,” she said.
I always hated the way that people in entertainment referred to Los Angeles as “the coast,” as if it was the only place in the country that bordered an ocean.
As we were catching up, I felt the familiar sensation of the Vicodin taking effect—like slowly being lowered into a warm bath. Only more enveloping. More buoyant. Like a bath of warm milk, maybe. I didn’t realize how much I had missed this feeling.
I drifted away from the conversation for a moment while Kelsey was rattling off a list of client names she was reading from a small laminated card she had produced from her purse. I was floating. Tingling. I had to force myself back into reality and regain my focus. I wasn’t sure I’d heard what she’d said and asked her to repeat the name she just read.
“David Copperfield,” she said.
I was back.
“Really?” I said. “I’m a huge fan. I actually interviewed him once about five years ago.”
“That’s great,” said Kelsey. “I’m sure he’d love to do the cover.”
I could only imagine how that conversation with Patrick would go.
“I don’t see him as a cover subject, if I’m being honest, but I do think he’s amazing,” I said.
“I should get you guys together,” she said excitedly. “He’s back in New York at the beginning of next week.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “One hundred percent.”
“Oh my god, you have to go to his apartment,” Kelsey said. “You won’t believe the apartment.”
Early the following week, I’m standing in an elevator on my way to the penthouse of an exclusive midtown high-rise. My ears pop as the car climbs to the fifty-seventh floor, where the doors open to a spacious lobby. To the left are a set of glass doors leading to a roof deck for the residents of the tony condo. To the right is a large wooden door—the only apartment on the floor. I take a deep breath to calm my nerves and ring the bell.
The door swings open and David Copperfield is standing there in a pair of dark jeans, a black button-down shirt, and black socks. He’s not wearing shoes. He looks exactly the same as he did five years earlier when I met him in Hartford, except for his hair. It’s still big on top—volume, my mother would say—but it’s shorter in the back. Poof . . . the Jewish mullet had magically disappeared.
“Hey, Dan. Good to see you,” he said softly. “Come on in.”
Kelsey was right. The apartment was like nothing I’d ever seen before—an almost indescribable combination of elegance and luxury and taste mixed with bizarre curios and games and one-of-a-kind collectibles spread out across four levels. P. T. Barnum meets Jean-Michel Frank. A sprawling apartment that would be equally at home in the pages of both Architectural Digest and Mad magazine. And all with 360-degree views of New York City.
“I doubt you remember,” I said as we climbed a sweeping staircase to the two-story living room, which had a life-size artist’s mannequin dangling from the thick chain holding the chandelier. “But I interviewed you a few years ago for a story I wrote in W.”
“Of course I remember,” he said. He was being polite. “Do you want to see something cool?” As if being in David Copperfield’s apartment wasn’t already cool enough.
“Sure,” I said.
He told me to sit in what looked to be a wooden chair. A dozen or so wooden figures—antique marionette forms, David explained—were attached to the wall of the fireplace. Several large Klieg lights, no doubt salvaged and restored from the golden age of Hollywood, stood on tripods on either side of two cream-colored sofas. The room was light and airy.
“You don’t by any chance have a bad back, do you?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. Despite the performance I put on for Dr. Rosenbaum the previous week, my back had never felt better. There was no point in lying to Copperfield, I figured. It’s not like he could write me a prescription.
“Good,” he said.
A second later, I was flat on my back, the antique chair broken beneath me. I looked up to see David standing over me, smiling, holding the string he had pulled to collapse the chair. “Cool, right?” It was.
We settled in his rich, mahogany-paneled study on the mezzanine of the apartment. Paintings of dogs dressed as humans—one in a nun’s
habit—hung above the fireplace.
“Kelsey told me that you just moved back from Paris,” he said. “Are you excited about the new job?”
“I am,” I said. “But I’m nervous. It’s a big job. It’s keeping me up at night.” I was becoming a seasoned liar, yet here I was telling the truth to David Copperfield. I felt safe—as safe as I had as a young boy performing magic tricks to an imaginary audience next to the pool table in my basement, VHS tapes of his television specials playing in the background.
An antique ventriloquist’s dummy was leaning against the wall on the other side of the room, looking right at me. I shifted on the sofa.
“I get it,” he said. “People are paying attention now. You’re in the spotlight.”
“I’ve always wanted to be in the spotlight, I guess,” I told him. “But then again, not really. Does that make sense? Now that I’m there, I’m not so sure it’s for me.”
“Tell me about it,” he said with a laugh.
“Were you ever scared that you wouldn’t be able to do what you set out to do?” I asked.
“Fear of failure is normal,” he said. “We all deal with fear.”
I felt the blood rushing to my head, my face getting flushed. For some reason I wanted to cry, though I wasn’t sure why. David Copperfield had always been my escape. My disconnect from reality. Watching those videos of his TV specials in my basement had always made me feel comfortable and at ease. They made me feel like myself. I suppose all of the pretending I’d been doing was somehow taking its toll on me. I had figured David might be able to make me feel better as he had so many times before. I looked over at an antique wooden mask resting on the mantel. I wanted to hide behind it. I exhaled deeply and casually wiped my sweaty palms on my pants.