“But now you can’t use them.”
Justin turned and ran his eyes over me quickly.
“You should have gotten a Wite-Out pen,” I continued, “and asked them to sign some pennies.”
No one but Lex said anything to me for the rest of the night.
6
If an internship is a way of getting one’s foot in the door, I used mine to wedge my whole body in before passing out drunk inside.
Often, after discovering I’d locked myself out of my apartment, I went to the new Condé Nast building in Times Square, where The New Yorker’s offices had just moved, and where I’d been given my very own electronic key. I knew better than to waste another half hour knocking on my apartment door. My roommate May was inside, but in her deep, pill-induced sleep (her father, a doctor, mailed her a pharmaceutical care package every month), she never heard my knocks.
The first time this happened, I tried crashing in the lobby of the nearby Holiday Inn. I had just begun to fall asleep when a security guard, rousing me, informed me I had to leave. I explained that I lived next door, that I’d locked myself out, but he gave me the boot anyway, confusing my winter jacket with its fashion-statement safety pins for the shabby coverings of a teenage-runaway-hooker.
I went next into a nearby twenty-four-hour diner, where I slept upright with a chicken finger in my hand. The waiters said I could stay only so long as I was eating, which is why at 5:00 AM, having accidentally loosened my grip on the chicken finger—it fell to the floor; the waiters served me the bill—I was forced to make my way to 4 Times Square.
Wandering into the cartoon lounge—where Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, met with the magazine’s regular contributors every Tuesday—I slipped off my shoes, stretched out on the sofa, and settled in for a brief nap.
Responsible to a fault, I first left a note on Jed’s desk (he was editorial assistant to the photo editor), requesting he wake me in time for work. And in case Jed came in late, I also left a note for Emily.
Emily was the assistant to Bob Mankoff, and I was the assistant to Emily, who seemed to like me despite my poor work performance. I was no good as an assistant but made a wonderful office-friend, I decided. “I’m trying to make taffeta work-appropriate,” I told her, smoothing the ruffles on my dress—it was the morning after Lex’s Bar Mitzvah theme party. “I’m exhausted,” I confessed. “I was up all night doing the Horah.”
Taking my cues from Charles Bukowski and various romantic comedies in which career girls discuss their love lives at the watercooler, I spent most of the workday nursing a hangover and regaling Emily of my adventures with the men in the office, specifically Jed before he became my boyfriend.
I first met Jed in the copy room. He said, “Hi,” and I jumped nervously because I’d been busy copying my own cartoons for my Naked Woman zine instead of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing. I shook his hand and scuttled away. Then I ran into him again in the magazine’s archives while I was retrieving old cartoons to photocopy for my personal scrapbook. His hello startled me just as it had the first time, and I raced back to my cubicle. The next time he caught up with me was in the kitchen; I was wedged between the refrigerator and the coffee machine, trying inconspicuously to transfer the contents of a Colt 45 into a paper cup. He said, “Hi,” and I began to sweat profusely, terrified the jig was up, when he asked me out. I said okay just to get him off my back, finished pouring my “coffee,” and left to hand out the faxes.
Later that day, Emily charged me with the difficult task of handwriting the addresses on a whole pile of outgoing mail. As I drank more “coffee,” my voice grew louder and my handwriting larger and loopier. After laughing at my description of Jed’s “proposal” in the kitchen earlier, she gently suggested that I write a little smaller.
“Perhaps you could write the address on only the middle of the envelope,” she said sweetly, “rather than using all 8 x 11 inches.”
“No problem!” I said, scrutinizing her envelope, the one she’d just addressed to serve as a model. It looked much different then my previous twenty-five, which, when I looked again, well resembled the crumpled bar napkins ruined with poems that always turned up in purse and pocket after a night out. “If that’s how you like it,” I said, as if it were a discrepancy in taste and not sanity.
7
Most students take on internships as a means of gaining professional experience while making a good impression on a prospective boss, hoping to leave with the promise of a future job, if not a recommendation for a comparable job elsewhere. During my brief time at The New Yorker, I was careful to aquire no new skills and stealthily avoided all of my superiors, behaving instead as if I were crashing a party.
Though I’d worked really hard to get my internship at The New Yorker, I’m not sure what my purpose was once I actually got there. I had no interest in publishing, really. It just seemed like a cool place to hang out for a semester, an interesting alternative to another literature or philosophy class, maybe a new spot to meet guys.
Though I thought often about the future—spinning fantasies, my favorite pastime—it was never something I planned. I would be a great writer, a famous actress, a cartoonist on the side.... I didn’t need to worry about how, because destiny would take care of that for me. “Fate is character,” the ancient Greeks said, and people were always remarking on what a character I was.
In the meantime, I enjoyed drawing cartoons—what I did in class while everyone else took notes—so I figured the cartoon department would be a fun place to kill time. I did not try to get the attention of Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor who, had he liked me, might have offered me a job upon graduation, or at least offered to glance at my cartoons. Instead, I avoided him.
Though he seemed a genial man, he was solid while I was all shadow. And when he entered the room, it was as if someone had cut in front of the light or removed the screen on which I had been casting my fabulous sillhouette. He’d come in, and my illusions would vanish, my useless hands curling into knots at my sides. Reduced to who I was, I was nothing like who I would be. I was not great, not noteworthy. I was just Iris, the shy intern, sneaking around the office in gold lamé.
When not drinking or cavorting in nightclubs and at parties, my self-esteem—so prodigious, so grand—all but evaporated. Indeed, my daytime self—the one who’d made it home the night before, got dressed in the morning, and was not still drunk—stood in such stark contrast to my nightlife persona that one afternoon, going up the elevator at 4 Times Square, an employee from one of the women’s magazines could not stop staring. “Excuse me,” she said at last, “but do you know you have an evil twin running around Manhattan singing karaoke?”
I blushed violently before I managed to get out, “Actually, that’s me. I’m my evil twin.”
III
1
All of this is why, freshly graduated from college a year later, applying to The New Yorker was not even a consideration. What should I do? I asked myself, during my long walk following the disastrous job fair. I wanted to be a writer. Of that I was certain. But in the meantime, I needed a job.
I did briefly consider becoming a movie star to support myself. I had met enough of them to know it couldn’t be that hard. And I still had the five hundred headshots I’d had printed in my sophomore year of college just before I dropped out of acting school. But ultimately, I decided against it. First, I liked my privacy too much to put it on sale the way an actor must. Projecting myself into a future filled with