But Enough About Me (5 page)

If you were to look at my past jobs, you'd see there is scant evidence that my life's work would involve running from photographers. You certainly can't find any in the series of “character-building” jobs I was forced to get by my folks when I was a teenager. I was, of course, too timid to get a cool job—working at a record store or being the camp counselor all the kids looked up to. My sister Heather was far savvier, landing a coveted job at an English chocolate shop in the Short Hills Mall. “We can't sell them if they're damaged,” she would say when I would come to visit. Then, with a quick blow, she'd crush some cream-filleds. “Oops,” she'd say coolly, pushing the flattened blobs toward me. Heather, a sugar fiend, often got high on her own supply, and eventually the place went out of business. Coincidence? She also worked at the local cinema. The owner was some shadowy, little-seen figure from Newark, and the teenage manager was her best friend, Kerry. Heather recycled tickets to sell and pocketed the profits, and, as she did at the chocolate shop, hauled home bulging bags of candy, Sno-Caps and Reese's peanut butter cups and Junior mints.

Job interviews gave me crippling performance anxiety, so I took the kind of gigs for which you basically just have to show up. My hellish trifecta of summer posts began with Morey LaRue dry cleaners. While other kids
were out mowing lawns in the sunshine, I retreated into the airless chill of Morey LaRue, with its noxious odor of industrial chemicals and b.o.-scented oxford shirts. A small bonus was that in the summer, there were fewer customers, so I mostly sat in the back of the store and read Sidney Sheldon novels, sighing loudly and throwing my book down whenever a customer ventured in. As the summer wore on, I gradually turned as gray as Morey LaRue's exhausted carpeting.

Then there was my stint at Burger King, which lasted two weeks. The manager handed me an unwashed polyester uniform that smelled like it had been deep-fried and had me start at the bottom rung, at the drink-filling station. The floor of the place was thickly coated with a layer of grease and sesame seeds. “You can't really walk,” said the manager, Randy. “You, ah, have to—I would call it skating.” Humiliatingly, my family came to visit me one night on the job. I had just graduated to specialty sandwiches, so they all dutifully ordered the fish fillet while I waved from the back.

Far worse was my waitressing gig at the local nursing home, which had the bonus uniform of a hairnet and white elasticized polyester pants. Three options were offered up in the joyless dining room: low salt, low sugar, and puree. At least the dining room patrons still retained their mobility, and their marbles. The next part of the job was loading up the trays on a wheeled device and heading to the Shut-In Wing, passing whatever “cheerful” holiday display was situated on a table in the hallway, such as a dusty haunted house that the administrators hauled out well before Halloween. They loved to play up holidays. Hang in there! Christmas is comin', and we'll have butter cookies from a tin that have green and red sprinkles on them!

Two shut-ins in particular liked to have a little fun with me. One cod-eyed old gent had a prosthetic arm, and when he dimly heard the squeaky wheels of my cart, he would gleefully unhinge his fake limb and let it crash to the floor. “Dropped my arm,” he would wheeze, and I'd have to pick it up and fumblingly reattach it. Then there was the ancient mariner who would regularly unveil his penis with a phlegmy cackle. His slack, bluish member recalled those Discovery Channel shows in which a camera travels to the
bottom of the sea to film the milky, translucent creatures waving back and forth on the ocean floor.

When I am interviewing a band and I reach a silent patch, I always ask about bad summer jobs, because the answers are usually funny—pulling the tassels off of corncobs while doing bong hits, working at a doughnut shop while doing bong hits. Recalling a summer job, as well as the name of a person's first band, will always liven up the proceedings. My favorite first-band name was supplied by Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum. As a midwestern teen, he was part of the Shitz. This is great in so many ways—the spelling, the swaggering swear word. A proper first-band name must ideally be a hideous mix of pretension, hormones, and bravado: Transcendence, Are Those Real, Odyssey of the Sheep, the Crotch. Even better is a vague sociopolitical veneer—Fecal Matter becomes Fecal Matter of the Mind, for example.

But I digress. If my summer jobs were less than ambitious, I applied the same gutless approach to my first real job. New York City being a far-off fantasy, I devised a plan in which I would work my way up the ladder with the myriad publishing opportunities available in New Jersey, and then, when I was less intimidated, try New York. So I confined my job search to the pages of the
Star-Ledger.
It was there that I found the gateway to my future. “Small but growing ad agency in Cranford, New Jersey, seeks proofreader for medical advertisements. Fast-paced, friendly work environment.”

Briskly, I circled the ad. Who knew where this could lead? It offered promise (growing!) and intrigue (fast-paced!). Most important, Cranford was right next to the town where my boyfriend, Ritchie, lived, so he could meet me for lunch. He waited tables at a restaurant at the mall, but he wrote poetry, too, and it was clearly a matter of time before his talent was recognized. Then we could be a media power couple.

I aced the interview and promptly landed the job. I was an adult, in a real office! My mother helped me dress for my first day as a member of the work force. She had recently gone back to work as an account executive at a furniture supply firm, so she had all of the late-eighties working-lady gear at the ready: string ties, nude pantyhose, a plaid suit from Ann Taylor yoked
with gargantuan shoulder pads, and huge gold door-knocker earrings. “You have to look polished,” she said as she vigorously applied brown shadow to my eyelids. For the final touch, I “scrunched” my perm with L.A. LOOKS mousse, then bent over and sprayed my entire head with Aqua Net, then flipped my hair back up for maximum volume. With a final coating of hair gloss so that my perm achieved a Jheri-curl effect, my transformation into Rick James was complete.

Unsurprisingly, I fit right in among the employees. Our outfits were the most colorful thing about the company, which had all the hallmarks of a dystopian New Jersey office: the bag lunches in the fridge labeled “Do not take,” the communal couch with greasy head marks that floated over the backrest, lacquered over the years with various hair products. I was shown my oatmeal-colored, windowless office by my boss, who, to my horror and the snickering delight of the staff, had woken up that morning with Bell's palsy, so one side of her face sagged. “It's okay,” she said. “It doesn't hurt. Here's…ah…here's your desk,” she said, opening up a drawer for my inspection. “This is your phone, here. And, ah, here is some copy to proofread.” She handed me some mock-up ads for some sort of heart medicine that kept your valves open.

Work swiftly became unbearable. When I shuffled through the doors in the morning and beheld the cheerless industrial carpeting and fluorescent lighting, my brain congealed and my private parts dropped off. Spending eight hours in my drab veal pen plunged me into despondency. “Maybe you just need to make your office more colorful,” my mother suggested at dinner. The next day, I went to the local Hallmark store on my break and bought a bright poster of some large crayons in a vivid row and hung it behind my desk. Crayons. That's how far gone I was.

A new poster,
my coworkers would remark, lingering endlessly in my doorway.
Wow. Looks good. Colorful! Where did you get it? Oh, the Hallmark store? Wow. Yeah. Looks really good.

My only solace was my lunchtime visit from my boyfriend, Ritchie, who would pull up to the office entrance in his dilapidated poet-mobile.

He was the requisite bad boy one dates immediately after college—a jaunty, chronically late ladies' man who only confessed his feelings when he was blind drunk and was, thrillingly, from a blue-collar town. Ritchie was in his midtwenties and still unapologetically lived at home—next door to his sister, who left the nest to live there with her husband. Unlike the local strivers in my town who wanted to work on Wall Street, Ritchie had a gold chain nestled in his thick pelt of chest hair. Why had I not noticed how alluring a gold chain was?

In high school, my dating record had been spotty. Being in a family of three sisters was not unlike attending an all-girls' school, so I was never entirely comfortable around boys. Every victory was tinged with pathos, starting with my first kiss. A group of my middle school friends and I were bunched in a circle on May Drive on a balmy summer night, playing Truth or Dare. This gangly gang included Spencer, the cutest guy in school, the one who resembled every dreamy guy in every early-eighties movie: sleepy blue eyes, shiny brown hair that's slightly shaggy, a deep tan, perfect-fitting dark blue Levi's corduroys. He was Matt Dillon in
Little Darlings,
Jake in
Sixteen Candles.
As a bonus, he was just a little bit obnoxious. When it was Spencer's turn to play, he was told by one of my well-meaning friends that he had a choice.

“You can either kiss her”—she pointed to me—“or you can go kiss that tree over there.” He wrinkled his brow. Was he really having an internal debate? Then he
looked over at the tree.
Jesus Christ. Was he checking it out? I did a quick inventory as the seconds ticked by. My hair was feathered perfectly. Yes, I had braces, but I had carefully Water Pik–ed them before leaving the house. Calvin Klein jeans, my “good” plaid shirt (it had silver threads in it), and a generous spritz of Love's Baby Soft. After what seemed like an hour and forty-five minutes, he grudgingly picked me. That was my first kiss. I can only be grateful that he didn't think the tree was foxy.

As I went on to high school, I was the funny girl, so my only real victory was my senior year boyfriend and prom date, Mark, who had a dream résumé: impeccable musical taste, dimples, a soccer player, and he worked
at the Ralph Lauren store at the mall, so he had great clothes. Being the Phyllis Diller of any group when I yearned to be the Ava Gardner, I was always a sucker for a carelessly handsome rake, and when Mark cheated on me with a junior girl, it was horribly thrilling. The drama of his transgression made my senior year one of the happiest of my life. But there was that lingering feeling that he was ever so slightly doing me a favor, so I was always on my best behavior. This would eventually serve me well when it came to celebrities, because I became adept at snappy material, anecdotes with never-fail punch lines, choosing the perfect outfit. Because I was constantly performing, Mark certainly didn't get a glimpse of the real me, which I assumed would bore him, anyway. But I did the same thing back to Mark: I didn't necessarily go out with him because of who he was, but rather what he represented.

It was the same thing with Ritchie. He was naughty, and unpredictable, and would sometimes show up three hours late, or not at all. His life had no structure, while mine was carefully regimented. From birth, my folks had imposed upon us a rigid schedule of chores, lessons, and homework. Our house was always in perfect order, and I had absorbed their compulsively neat ways so thoroughly that I took great satisfaction in putting the groceries away with the can labels carefully facing forward. I was dazzled by the fact that Ritchie simply didn't care that he had no Life Plan, or even a weekend plan.

After I spent a few months with Ritchie, his big, hard-drinking Irish family took me in, and I proudly joined in on their yearly pilgrimage to the St. Patrick's Day parade in New York, where we would descend on the Midtown Irish bars, all of us wearin' o' the green sweatshirts (his mom with a green Tam o' Shanter), and get boisterously drunk by lunchtime. On more than one occasion, I contributed my own tributary to the emerald rivers of barf that flowed through the streets like the Shannon.

Nothing gave me more of a charge than to watch Ritchie's three brothers on a Saturday as they tinkered with a car engine for hours. My dad, meanwhile, had “a guy” for automobile mishaps.

“Jesus H.,” said my mother, who got especially southern when she was worked up. “How can y'all not see what a loser Ritchie is?”

“You're just a snob,” I would shrill back. “It just bothers you that his family parties together.”

“It has nothing to do with money,” she said sourly, with a firm jut of her lower lip. “A loser is a loser.”

Well, he was the small-town king of his high school friends, all of whom admiringly talked about Ritchie's likeness to Jim Morrison. “And he's a poet, just like Morrison was,” they'd point out, watching Ritchie moodily sip his tenth Molson of the evening. Ritchie would take me to noisy parties, where his freewheeling pals seemed to have more fun than my more conservative friends. Everyone at my school was too uptight to have costume parties, or softball games sponsored by Dick's Auto, or go camping in the Pocono Mountains with five cases of beer, or dance to bad R & B like Klymaxx or L'Trimm.
I can fit in anywhere,
I would think as we formed a cheering ring around Matt's brother-in-law's beer bong. “Smell ya later!” I would cry after a night of revelry.

“Take ceh!” they would chorus back.

At one of these shindigs—it might have been a Halloween party where, inevitably, there would be one white guy who would dress up as a black man with an Afro wig—I met a girl named Amy who worked in the marketing department of
Rolling Stone.
She was doing the usual post-college activity—hanging on to high school buddies whom you will eventually stop calling. As the celebrants around us started up a game of Beer Pong, I quizzed her about her job, which seemed unimaginably glamorous. I'd subscribed to
Rolling Stone
for years, and indulged in a ritual when I read each new issue: start with the Charts page in the back, then read “Random Notes,” the gossipy column in the front. Then move to the reviews and, finally, to the cover story.