In brief, this Rolling Stone striver at school was not exactly my ideal writer—think Charles Bukowski, but on paint thinner; he was utterly untainted by self-consciousness and had that special quality of implacable self-belief. This kid, who had long brown hair and wore Tevas (I can still picture his toes) had been playing some sort of vaudeville idea of a “writer” in the way that the girls never did: he had a sinister little hoop earring, was conspicuously dismissive of any story written by a woman, and would describe student stories that had no tone by their “tonalities.” It was from him that I first heard that dread label “gonzo journalism.”
We listened to every detail of this guy’s Rolling Stone internship application saga: the composition of the cover letter, the possible story pitches, the names of the RS editors he’d boldly cold-called (I’d never heard that expression, either—“cold-calling”), etc. He dropped the names of Rolling Stone editors past and present as if they were marquesses of France or what have you. A well-known right-wing-leaning RS columnist, P. J. O’Rourke, had gone to my school in the sixties, and you can bet that this boy kept making a big point of that in class, too; if all else failed, this would be his “in.”
My response in class to the guy’s terminal name-dropping and everything else: eye rolls and lip gloss reapplications.
The interview with the other two GQ editors, and also the operative from human resources, took place the day after my meeting at the bar in Grand Central, at the old Condé Nast building at 350 Madison Avenue. There was an annular solar eclipse that day. The sky above Madison was pristine, and eclipse watchers were gathered on sidewalks, gazing heavenward with special dark glasses, or else looking down at the projection of the sun in homemade camera obscuras. I didn’t experience the eclipse as a celestial phenomenon (hadn’t even known about it until I saw all those people), and I can’t tell you whether there was a slight breeze for those few moments when the moon passed overhead, or if everything felt a little bit colder, or if the sky grew slightly darker, because the eclipse was, to me, a human event.
That so many people had dropped whatever they were doing and had come outside for a few minutes to watch the sky seemed an expansive and noble thing to do. It also spoke to some profound need in the human soul: a desire for meaning, control, harmony. And for just that moment, when the sun went from disk to ring and everything was elegant and aligned, reality—that is, the world behind the illusion—opened its door and showed us what it was.
I found myself in a nearly exuberant mood when I entered the Condé Nast HQ: I was thinking about order and harmony; I was thinking about signs and symbols and omens—good ones. To expand on a metaphor I once heard, the Condé Nast building rose up like an avenging Valkyrie over the two humdrum men’s clothing stores down below: a Brooks Brothers and a Paul Stuart—two elves of an earthen realm. I took in the scene in the building lobby with wonder. First impression: this place is some kind of cult . . . and these cult members are so not the types to get derailed by the occurrence of a semi-rare annular eclipse.
As these women glided through the lobby, you noted the eerie confidence in the way they possessed their bodies, yet the overall effect was of stasis—they were static in the way that a photograph in a magazine is static. As I signed my name in the book at the front desk, I did a quick scan of the page and noted some names of individuals (public figures, you might even say) I’d actually heard of before—two fashion people and one literary one. Was this unutterably thrilling to me? Yes, it was. Indeed it was.
GQ editorial was on the sixth floor, and the atmosphere there was more low-key than whatever it was I had just experienced in the lobby. It was also much more “male.” I met the other two editors in their offices, which were as nondescript and antiseptic as could be. The editors were both kindly men; the ex–Rolling Stone guy said nothing about Rolling Stone, and neither did I. I nodded benignly along as each man spoke of various awards GQ and its writers had won. Had I ever heard of any of these awards? I had not. I possessed nothing to offer these editors, or the place, other than some somewhat unhinged enthusiasm.
I got the job, but getting it probably didn’t have all that much to do with me. It was absolutely a right-time-right-place-type situation. The fact: I was just wandering through life like everyone else. So far, I should say. The Robert Frost line “Yet knowing how way leads on to way” is the actual answer to how most human lives are led. (Mostly, you find that adult life largely comes down to a path of least resistance.) My purported career was handed to me on a platter, and that is the truth. But from here on out, everything would be up to me.
ON THURSDAY, MAY 19, 1994, THE DAY JACQUELINE ONASSIS DIED, MY parents drove my stuff and me from Ohio to New York, through the endlessness that is the state of Pennsylvania. I would begin my job the following Monday. We stayed at a hotel in Weehawken, New Jersey, not because the town was the site of Alexander Hamilton’s fatal duel with Aaron Burr or anything like that, but because my father is a thrifty man. Across the Hudson River, Manhattan looked glittering and heroic. I loved my parents, but I couldn’t get back to the city soon enough.
For the moment, there was an NYU dorm where I would be able to live throughout the summer. The clock was ticking, though, and I would have to find a real apartment of my own by the fall. My parents moved me in on Friday. Item: when you are a teenager or a very young adult, and when your parents are moving you into a new place, it will always be the hottest day in human history, and your dad will always be in the worst mood ever.
“Goddamn,” said my father through clenched teeth, lifting another heap of garment bags from the Oldsmobile trunk, “you have so much stuff. I think you should ask yourself why you believe you need all of this.”
I tried to convince my parents to take me to lunch at an upscale restaurant, but all I got out of them was a humble pizza, eaten in my room. Traffic concerns were on their minds; they hit the road for Ohio ASAP, and we didn’t have what you’d call a sentimental goodbye. I met my new roommate, a premed student from South Korea. She wasn’t confident with her English, but during our first chat it somehow got communicated that she was peculiarly fixated on finding a mysterious perfume. She had discovered the scent back home in Seoul but didn’t know the name of it; the perfume, which had haunted her for years, was now half remembered, as if in a dream.
Well, naturally, there was only one solution:
“We should go to Barneys tomorrow,” I said, “for research.”
The old original Barneys, on Seventh Avenue and Seventeenth Street, was the most fantastically wonderful place in the world, and my new roommate and I spent a memorable Saturday afternoon together there in the cosmetics department, grinning frantically as we sprayed perfume onto our pulse points and onto each other’s. After about an hour, the elusive scent actually was identified: Hanae Mori. Victorious, my roommate gave the bottle three wordless spritzes into the air. It was nice. She bought two. I bought one, because I’m always buying stuff. A couple of months later, when I had found my own place a few blocks away and was moving out of the dorm, I found a letter from my roommate on my pillow: “Dear Friend,” she wrote, in the most elegant, painstaking handwriting. That letter was a physical work of art.