“You should start keeping a journal,” she said. “You don’t want to forget any of this.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t forget.”
It always seemed to me that my parents existed mostly in the present tense: they didn’t reminisce, they didn’t “tell stories” (it was impolite to talk about oneself, yet they never told any stories about my childhood, either), and so it had always been up to me to remember everything. That was my job; I was always the family rememberer, the one who would watch, who would pay attention, who would try to put everything together. If I weren’t watching watchfully—trying to be a reliable witness, trying to get to the bottom of things, trying to understand the story behind the story—then everything about us, and about me, would be lost.
Remember this, I’ve always said to myself. Remember this, remember this, remember this.
The prospect of my new job at GQ was so thrilling to me, but I also knew that my future was already narrowing: magazines. Magazines, magazines, magazines. Did doing one thing in the world mean a life of endless repetition? I didn’t sleep that night before I started my job. How could I have? I had the world before me, but I was scared to death. I already knew that there was a problem with saying yes to a certain path: It meant a denial of everything else. It said that the life I’ve chosen is bigger than my imagination for what my life could be.
4
My morning began in a human resources conference room at the company. There were maybe four or five other people seated at a long table with me, also starting their jobs at Condé Nast this very day. Before us loomed an HR woman, asking if anyone had worked at the company before. One hand went up. That hand belonged to an older (in my perspective) woman in a smart blue pantsuit. She went through her professional history: she had worked at one magazine at the company; she had left the company for another magazine; she was now back at the company, working at a third magazine.
If she’d been a writer and if I’d been an editor, I might have suggested she try to jazz up her narrative a bit.
Yet what an interestingly equalizing experience it was, being at this table—magazine veterans such as this woman (the next time I saw her, she was struggling through the lobby on crutches) and newcomers such as myself, democratically coexisting. For all I knew, the woman in the pantsuit could have been starting a job as an editor in chief somewhere. As the HR lady went into her little recited speech about company policies and procedures, I thought: Am I the youngest person here? Had to be, right?
The HR meeting lasted an hour, and I was released to GQ editorial on the sixth floor. The GQ assistants had long white laminate desks in the hallways outside their editors’ offices. My desk was outside two of my three bosses’ offices and was likewise mere feet from the editor in chief’s corner office. All three of my bosses stood before my desk as I got settled into my black swivel chair. I twirled around in a three-sixty.
“It’s so big,” I said, meaning my workspace.
“It’ll get smaller,” replied all three in sober unison.
Helpfully, my predecessor had left a printed list of job duties at my desk. As I read through the pages, it occurred to me that I had no idea what my new job actually involved. It was with a sense of real discovery that I learned I would answer phones, sort and open mail, draw up contracts, help manage editors’ and writers’ schedules, make writers’ travel arrangements, communicate with writers (whatever that meant), help writers research and report stories, process expense reports, make photocopies of the gossip pages in the mornings, and make photocopies in general. At the bottom of the memo was a note about how to handle the short-story submissions described by the grave, ugly word “unsolicited.”
Then came an even graver and uglier term for those manuscripts: the “slush pile.”
The slush pile was to be tackled if and only if there was nothing else left to do. In general, the slush stories were to be responded to with a form rejection letter. Maybe one slush story out of a hundred could be passed on to the literary editor, and probably not even that many.
Granger took me on a tour of the office, offering a log line about each group. First was the art department. The room was dark, illuminated by desk lamps and the ambient glow from desktop computers. Many of the art department people had headphones on; most wore jeans; none bothered to look up as we did our walkthrough. On their computer screens were prototypes of pages in the magazine, and no matter what stage of my career I was in, no matter how much I liked or disliked the content of the magazines I worked for, watching these pages materialize on-screen always seemed a feat of alchemy.
Pinned onto a bulletin board on a wall by the entrance were more mock-ups of pages in later design stages. The real text of these stories hadn’t been input yet and dummy copy was used as a placeholder. One page was filled with wild Dadaesque poetry; another with Edward Lear–type nonsense rhymes. Some clever unknown art department functionary had really spent some time on these.
“Pretty funny,” I said to Granger.
“Yes,” he replied grimly. “Unfortunately, the dummy copy is often better than many of the actual stories we run.”
Back to the office tour. Had I ever used a fax machine before? I had not. Had I ever seen a fax machine before? I had not. We popped into the fashion closet, which was, quite literally, a closet. But what were these people in there actually doing? It was explained. They sorted and organized clothing samples for photo shoots, they removed clothes from hangers, they put clothes back onto hangers, they steamed, ironed, and lint-rolled clothes, they packed up clothes and had them returned via messenger to designers’ showrooms.
ME: “That’s a job?”
HIM: “Those jobs are very hard to get.”
On to the copy and fact-checking departments now. The copy editors (the unsung heroes of every media outlet) were going about the very serious business of making the writers sound better than they actually were; the fact-checking department seemed a little more fun. Fact-checkers are the ensurers of editorial standards and are always the smartest and most hilarious people at every magazine (they’re also always great about helping when you have a question you’re too mortified to ask anyone else). Hanging out in research departments, I would also discover, was a great way to kill time when that well-known phenomenon of afternoon editorial torpor (in Joyce Johnson’s nice formulation from her Beat-era memoir, Minor Characters) had set in.
Question: If the fact-checkers did the reporting, and the copy department did the rewriting, what did the writers do?
Unclear.
Now I would be introduced to the editor in chief of the magazine, Art Cooper, the man who had single-handedly created the brand we know, for better or worse, as GQ. He had been at the magazine for eleven years when I went to work there. This was already a great run for any editor in chief. This was also a problem.
There never was anyone else like Art. He wouldn’t exist today. He couldn’t. A midcentury boulevardier with sensibilities entirely unbuttressed by irony, Art adored Frank, Dean, Sammy, and the Great American Songbook; in his office, he smoked miraculous quantities of cigarettes; he enjoyed multiple lunchtime and non-lunchtime martinis; he had an actual catchphrase: “Heads are gonna roll!” He was a king. Like all kings, he was terrifying.