“I like ‘dinner whores,’ ” Steve says with a smile. “It may take a little selling on the ‘whore’ part, though.”
“Awesome,” I say.
I turn to Katherine, sitting behind me, and grin genuinely. “Rad.”
* * *
MY FIRST MAJOR celebrity piece for the Post is a profile of Star Jones. As she prattles on to me in the pristine confines of the Core club about how she is an inspiration to victims of Hurricane Katrina, I see a dead woman walking. As she talks, she has no clue she is hanging herself with her own words. That’s how tabloid journalism works.
There are a lot of sacrificial lambs—including one’s own life relationships.
At drinks with Steve a few nights earlier, I related to him, all swagger, three drinks of merlot in, how I’d once identified the exact second I realized I would definitely not have sex with a guy: when I saw him rocking out to a jam band, a glint coming from the gold chain on his chest.
“Every woman does that,” I explained. “Every woman has that moment.”
“I love it,” Steve said. “That’s a story. ‘How He Blew It.’ That’s the headline.”
In the back of my mind, while I’m supposed to be focused on Star, I keep thinking about how I will soon be subjecting this jam-band-loving man (an extremely sweet doctor whom I have grown close to over the last few months) to the exact same exercise that I am about to subject Star to: I am going to string him up by his words and actions. It fills me with dread and the feeling that everything is moving faster than I can control.
But “How He Blew It” is not right now. That is in the future. I need to triage my anxiety.
One foot in front of the next. I am writing tomorrow’s features cover.
Inside the gorgeously swanky club, as I listen to Star go on about her cult of success, my eyes dart around. I’m looking for the focus (the one big idea) Steve taught me about, a way to connect her seemingly scattered, grandiose, and humility-allergic quotes. I have until 5 p.m. to file the story. I glance at my watch as she talks, and I see that it is almost 3:40 p.m. Shit.
I turn off my voice recorder, thank Star, and sprint off the elevator to find a cab to bring me back to 1211 Avenue of the Americas.
“How was it?” Steve asks.
“Great,” I say. “She said she inspires victims of Hurricane Katrina.”
“Hilarious,” he says. “Go, write.”
Back at my desk, the clock turning 4:12 p.m., my voice recorder to my ear, with forty-eight minutes to write the next day’s cover story, I realize that the idea can be found in her book title itself.
Shine.
“Star Jones Reynolds is shining,” I write in between scarfing jelly beans and sucking down a triple espresso. “Her hair is shining. Her lips are shining. Her bling is shining.”
I play, rewind, and play again on my voice recorder any quotes that are usable, so terrified of even getting a single preposition wrong. I listen back to myself nervously asking about Howard Stern’s use of crack whores to reenact fights between her and Joy Behar.
Star’s voice plays in my ears: “They’re making their money. That’s their jig. Their job. That’s their gig. I don’t think they want to be helped.”
And then, as I type, I realize I can bring it all back around to the One Big Idea once more.
“Star lets it roll off her back,” I write. “They’re not shining.”
Of course, Star did not know, nor did her publicist, that I returned from my interview to write the story for the next day’s paper, a mocking layout already under way, peppered with preselected ridiculous quotes from her book (“As a Christian, I have to say, ‘There’s nothing anybody did to me any worse than they did to Christ.’ So, if he can forgive so can Star.”).
The next morning, I grab the paper and hold it to see if it is real. There it is. “Star Bursts: Star Jones Tells Fans How to Get Her Perfect Life.”
On my way to the train, I check my messages. The first one is from her angry publicist. I feel bad, but I push the emotion away.
When I arrive at the office finally, I grab a cup of corporate coffee from the kitchen and join Katherine in our shared office.
“Nice piece,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say.
Star knows the game, of course. It was hit piece lite. Nothing truly eviscerating beyond her own lack of self-awareness. Plenty of book promotion for her. Besides, critical press tends to get more pickup.
Do I sound like I’m justifying? That’s because I am. I fucking hate writing hit pieces. You’re actually taught how to do them in journalism school. You’re taught to weigh short-term versus long-term access. Short-term you can burn. Long-term you have to weigh the restriction of access that might occur if you offend your source.
I replay the publicist’s message, “Mandy, I wish you would have told me the piece was coming out the next day . . .” and realize for the first time that I apply the same tactic to my personal life. If I realize that I can’t stand someone, I let loose with burn after burn. One time I told a man right after making out with him that he had bad breath. I informed another man that he was full of shit and a waste of my time. What did it matter? I was never going to see them again.
Ducking out of the office, I go to the hallway and dial the doctor who is the inspiration for the “How He Blew It” piece I will soon be writing. It is no longer just a barroom conversation. There is a scheduled run-date and everything. As much as possible, I resolve to be more transparent and not to skulk around the sidelines of modus operandi.
“Tom,” I say when my friend answers, “I need to tell you something.”
He laughs—and it sounds like music—when I relay the story.
“That’s why you didn’t sleep with me,” Dr. Tom says. “That’s hilarious. And I’m honored. How many people get to say that they’re the inspiration for a funny story in the Post?”
“Oh my God, you’re the best,” I say, a huge weight lifted off of me. “You’re a literal angel.”
“No, you’re the best, Mandy,” he says gently. “Now go write. I can’t wait to read it.”
A funny thing happens when you don’t hook up with a guy—and you don’t burn the connection. You can develop an actual relationship.
* * *
NOT TOO LONG after telling Dr. Tom that I am writing about him, he calls me.
“I’m coming to town,” he says. “No jam bands this time, I promise.”
We make plans to meet at a bar off St. Marks Place, and when he sees my thinner-still frame, he looks visibly taken aback.
“You’re too skinny,” he says. “I mean . . . you look great and all, but I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Ten months earlier, I had met Dr. Tom during one of the most important trips of my life: the one I decided to take without my then husband after we decided we were separating. My medical school PR job had a few notable perks, one of which was an annual conference gathering together university types around the country—always located in some fun vacation spot. In 2005, it was in New Orleans, months before Katrina. The city, always a hotbed of utter magic, felt like it was under an actual spell when I was down there—purple skies, strangers whispering secrets. Everything seemed to fall into place.
I had planned to go with James, until I realized that I was becoming the picture of a woman enabling her emotional abuser. Nothing physical, but the verbal abuse was beginning to take its toll. (Among his greatest hits: “You’re not smart, you’re not funny, you’re not a good writer, and you’re not pretty.” “You are pathetic.” “You’ll always be able to find a guy to slap his dick in your face and call you a whore.”) I told him I was going solo at the last minute, and it was the best decision I’d ever made in the course of our marriage.
It was the trip of a lifetime—a drunken one, albeit, but I woke up every morning and the coffee at Café Du Monde was sweeter, the breakfast at Le Croissant d’Or was tastier, and the nightlife at Jacques Imo’s was pure heaven. Tha
t’s where I met Dr. Tom, whom I sidled up next to at the bar, and we proceeded to spend the rest of the night together until I ditched him for a strip club DJ who lied to me and told me my stand-up was great.
In the months following, Dr. Tom became more than just a friend: He became a lifeline. As I grew skinnier and more alone in my life, my hypochondria, compounded by actual—but insignificantly small—physical anomalies, was magnified a zillion times by the fact that I was working at a medical school. No sooner had I checked my body for the hundredth time that day than I had emailed one of the medical school deans self-diagnosing myself with Crohn’s disease. I would get back an email reply, immediately.
“You’re fine, Mandy,” the dean would write. “Stop googling.”
Other times I would actually go up to his office and show him anything that seemed weird on my body.
“Still fine,” he would say.
Dr. Tom bore the brunt of my anxiety’s runoff, looking at picture after picture I snapped of my stomach and sent to him. Ever since my marriage had fallen apart, I had noticed tiny white spots that appeared there one day and were never medically explained (no, they were not tinea versicolor; believe me, I checked that out), and those, along with my insane period (marked by either constant spotting or long bouts of absence), consumed my every thought.
I was like the anti-sexter with Dr. Tom.
“What about this lesion? Hot or not?” I texted him.
My insurance was incredible, so I talked my way into test after test: a $1,000 allergy battery, an endometrial biopsy that almost made me pass out, and a sonohysterography that was so excruciatingly painful it inspired me to call my mom sobbing, thanking her for suffering through the hell of childbirth.
In the midst of my hysteria, Dr. Tom never made me feel stupid or annoying (which I most definitely was), and in one hilarious exchange, he assured me that I had passed one of the more important informal tests of all. The fuckability one. The laughter he provided in saying that gave me honestly the biggest relief of all.
Now, standing face-to-face with Dr. Tom once again, I am bombastic as I assure him that my stick-thin body is totally healthy as I do shot after shot of Maker’s.
“Well, thanks for saying I look great,” I say. “But don’t worry. I’m fine.”
Dr. Tom is handsome, but we have the chemistry of brother and sister. I love him in a way that you love the guardian angel who slips into your life at a time when you need one most.
I sit down at the bar to meet his friends.
One of them, Adam Strauss, has recently started doing stand-up comedy, so we agree to watch him do his set. He’s fairly new to performing, and as we sit at the table, it is clear he is warming up on us.
“So how soon did Tom drop the D-bomb on you after you two met?” Adam asks. “First ten minutes?”
I laugh. Not only does Tom have the D-bomb, for doctor; he also has the H-bomb, for Harvard.
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” I say. “Unfortunately, he had a penchant for jam bands.”
“You’re killing me,” Dr. Tom says.
Because I am eating very little during the day now, the shots I am downing go straight to my head, which always makes me want to drink even more. By the time Adam goes onstage, I feel nothing but pure liquid confidence.
“I wasn’t going to do stand-up in New York, because I just wanted to concentrate on the Post,” I whisper to Dr. Tom. “But fuck it, I think I’m going to do it tonight.”
Placing my name in line to do a set, I try to sober up a little bit with a water.
I have been performing at open mics in Chicago for the past year since starting my blog, and I think about all my past shows. The very first mic I did in Chicago was run by a then unknown T. J. Miller, who introduced me and, after I did my set, told the audience and me, “My only advice for you is to try to be less attractive.”
Yes, that I could definitely do.
I had also developed a pen-pal relationship with a young Kyle Kinane after joining a Yahoo! group dedicated to Chicago comedians. Kyle and I would email back and forth nearly every day for months (subject lines: “glad to hear you’re not reproducing,” “thursday morning coming down,” and “am I retarded?”), and he gave me something I wasn’t receiving from my ex-husband. Encouragement.
His lowercase stream-of-consciousness notes about the jokes I posted online and the status of his own life were like manna from heaven: “your blog is getting quite heelarious lately. well done. i’ve made a pact with myself that i’m not shaving until i’m not ashamed of myself anymore. last monday i got a citation for trying to sneak onto the train without having a ticket. this will be an amazing beard.”
I try to summon up every tiny encouragement in my mind right now and cling to it like a life raft. But I haven’t performed-performed in weeks since joining the Post.
“Up next . . . Mandy!”
Electricity shoots through my body.
I strut to the front of the tiny bar and survey the room. I feel a sense of nonchalance and attitude. I am just the right amount of drunk. Whenever I’ve performed before, I always overthought everything. I talked and delivered lines as if I was doing material. This time I delivered the whole set without thinking.
“I opened a fortune cookie the other day. It said, ‘Give up.’ ”
Laughter.
“I was going to wash my hair with L’Oréal . . . but I realized I wasn’t worth it.”
More laughter.
“I’m writing a point-by-point response to He’s Just Not That into You. So far all I have is, ‘That’s not what he said last night . . . when he was inside me.’ ”
The bar goes wild.
“Holy shit, that was great,” Dr. Tom says, giving me a high five.
The booker comes up and gets my email. Maybe I’m not done performing quite yet.
I kiss Dr. Tom on the cheek, grab a cab home, and, before passing out, realize I need to work out all the nervous energy wracking my body. I do something I haven’t thought about in years. Pulling out my cell, I dial a number I still know by heart. A phone sex party line that is free for women in Chicago. I discovered it the summer I interned at the Village Voice in New York in 1996, when I needed someplace to engage with those demons that have plagued me since I was fifteen.
Using a fake identity to self-flagellate sexually was my way to wrestle with the darkness. All those feelings of badness.
I record my intro message as I play with myself on my awful air mattress, sliding off it and falling onto the floor. “Hi . . . this is . . . Crystal . . . and I’m feeling kind of drunk . . . and wondering if anyone wants to chat . . .”
Bing! Bing! Bing! Seven new requests to chat one-on-one.
“Hey, this is Bob, a fifty-six-year-old married man in Arkansas, have you been a bad girl?”
The pain inside me has found its flogger for the night.
“Yes,” I say. “I am bad.”
* * *
ON THE SUBWAY the next morning, severely hungover from not just the alcohol but also the steep cliff-drop from stand-up to degrading phone sex, I check my email and see one new message from the guy who ran the open mic. He is putting together a show and wants to know if I’ll be on the bill.
“Definitely,” I write back.
I can’t believe it. Just like that, in the span of one second, I have something to cling to: Hope. Excitement. A dream, even.
That day, at our Tuesday 11 a.m. pitch meeting I decide to suggest a story on the best comedy spots around the city—and I make up my mind to hyper-sell it.
Our pitch meetings are always a nerve-wracking process, with the possibility of having something shot down in a span of two seconds as seeming too weak, already done, unfocused, boring, or, in the most delicious smackdown of all (and a favorite of editor in chief Col Allan’s): “Great idea. Tell them to buy an ad.”
The ultimate symbol of approval from Steve, though, is “It’s a talker,” meaning, well, you know. People will talk.
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One by one, every reporter sitting around the long conference room table takes turns pitching. Now it is mine.
I suggest a bunch of things scribbled in my notebook. “Haircut that changes your life?” Pass. “The reconciliation vacation—a last-ditch attempt to save a relationship.” Maybe—find a news peg. “Replacement hotties—the next generation of young Hollywood set to upstage their older sibling stars?” Hard pass. “The detox-retox diet—the way pretty much every New Yorker lives.” Approved. “The emerging ‘fempire’ of women in Hollywood?” Pass. (“All you have is the word ‘fempire.’ ”) “The blog girls primed for Hollywood, from Stephanie Klein to the Washingtonienne herself, Jessica Cutler.” More reporting—and we’ll see.
Then it came time for my big pitch—the only one that really mattered. “One more idea that I’m, uh, really excited about,” I begin. “So I think the New York comedy scene is really having a moment right now.”
Tip: If you are ever pitching a story to any publication on the planet, be sure to use the phrase “having a moment.” Anorexia? Having a moment. Morbid obesity? Having a moment. Moments? Having a moment.
I continue: “There’s a bunch of comics set to break out in a big way, like Aziz Ansari. Kristen Schaal. Nick Kroll. Baron Vaughn . . . I was thinking I could do a story roundup of where to check out tomorrow’s biggest stars . . .”
Steve pauses. He knows I did comedy back in Chicago. He knows comedy is my big love.
“I could see that . . . for a Saturday cover,” he says. “Talk to Katherine.”
And just like that, my life changes again.
I now have a reason to contact every single emerging comedian who is breaking out and also an excuse to discover the best underground clubs. The most helpful person in all this proves to be a young comic named Liam McEneaney, who knows every single person in the scene.
“Talk to Aziz. Here’s his number. Kristen Schaal? Sure, here you go.”