I’m Special (7 page)

But maybe she actually did! The recession hit when I was a junior, and we all scrambled to get any job experience we could before graduating. Since most of my classmates were wealthy to begin with, they could afford to work for no pay for six months. Internships were designed for people like them. They come with an entry fee that rewards the rich and penalizes those who don't have the luxury to work twenty-five hours a week for free while going to school full-time. To work for no money, you must have money to begin with.

Which brings me to my scarlet letter:
m
for malpractice! When I was born a gimp instead of an able-bodied princess, my parents sued my delivery doctor and won me a settlement of money I would receive when I was eighteen. Without this little nest egg, I could have never afforded to live in a city like New York or even intern. Are you kidding? People whose parents file for bankruptcy don't get to intern. That lawsuit was a damn miracle, and I had to take advantage of it. If I just did nothing and got mediocre grades and sat around, I would officially be the worst person ever. (I would also be broke in a few years, because I didn't get
that
much money.)

I ended up working at
Popsense
for a month and a half before I left to have another surgery on my arm. By the time the fall rolled around, I was fully recovered and landed a part-time gig at a more legitimate website,
Flavorwire
. This time I was actually paid ten dollars a post, sometimes twenty if it got a lot of traffic. I was in heaven getting paid to write! I felt so much pride cashing those checks for ten dollars—never mind that each post took me two to three hours to write and format, making the payment less than minimum wage. It felt like I was on the path to success.

In December of 2009, I graduated from college and quit
Flavorwire
to look for a full-time paid writing position, but of course, that didn't work out. New York was still deep-throating the recession and squeezing its balls. There were no jobs for anyone. I was secretly relieved to be unemployed for a little while, though. The prospect of finding work left me paralyzed with fear because I wasn't sure I could even physically survive in the workplace. Wherever I ended up I would have to start from the bottom and do lots of administrative tasks—and with my bum hand and brain, accomplishing something as simple as opening an envelope could take me ten minutes. Trust me, babe. You don't want me to open your mail. Bad things will happen.

To mask my disability to employers, I applied for internships that gave you the option to work remotely. I never once stepped into an office. (Though, to be fair, I think
Popsense
was operated out of someone's dorm room.) I knew I couldn't do this forever, though. If I ever wanted to work in print, or at a legitimate blog, I would need to go into an office and sit side by side with someone. I would have to do simple tasks, tasks that could take an able-bodied person five seconds but possibly hours for me.

I would have to find an internship at a prestigious print magazine.

A few months after I graduated, I was sitting at home watching YouTube videos of Mary-Kate Olsen trying to speak when I saw that one of my favorite magazines,
Interview
, was looking for summer interns. “This is your moment, Ryan!” I thought. “Pick up your confidence that you keep locked in that storage unit in Queens and apply, dammit!” So I did it—I drove to Queens, got my confidence out of storage (it had grown considerably since I'd seen it last, thank God), and applied for the internship. A few days after submitting my résumé, I got a response back asking me to come in for an interview at their intimidating office in SoHo.

Vibrating with excitement, I picked out my best “I am not disabled; I am NEW YORK MEDIA!” outfit and hightailed it downtown to meet with Grace, one of the editors, for a sit-down chat. Grace seemed nice enough, but she did look a bit worn down. It seemed like this job had stolen her spirit and was keeping it hostage in the cat food aisle at Rite Aid. The way she carried herself and the cadence in her voice gave me the impression that the world was perpetually taking a giant dump on her face—a glamorous, couture dump, but a dump nonetheless. Despite her sad vibes, the two of us got along nicely and I felt confident that I had aced the interview.

When Grace called me a few days later and said that I had gotten the internship, I was overjoyed and then immediately terrified. This wasn't a touchy-feely “We understand your brain damage!” magazine. It was an avant-garde New York FASHUN publication that represented physical perfection, and here I was, ready to limp all over it.

It only took thirty minutes into my first day at work to realize that, disabled or not, it was going to be nearly impossible to get a real job at the magazine. Grace was giving me a tour of the office (“This is where you cry after a long day,” “This is where you get told you're a retard by your chic power lesbian boss”) when, all of a sudden, a flustered assistant came rushing up to her.

“Grace, we need a new magazine rack. The ones we have are falling apart!”

“Are you kidding me?” Grace scoffed. “We can't afford that.”

“Um, they're, like, five dollars. I'll just pay for it.”

“Okay, fine. You pay.”

The assistant slumped away, and Grace continued on with her tour. “This is the Ping-Pong table that no one ever uses because we're not allowed to have fun here . . .” (She wasn't actually saying these things but she might as well have with the way she was delivering the information.) I was shocked. How could this magazine ever afford to hire me if they couldn't even afford a five-dollar magazine rack? Weren't magazines supposed to have money? The office might've been glamorous and the editor in chief was some globe-trotting Anna Wintour–type, but apparently everyone else who worked there was hanging on by a thread—emotionally, spiritually, and financially.

One such person was Hannah, a twenty-four-year-old assistant to the entertainment editor, with whom I worked closely. Since Grace was often crying in a broom closet somewhere, I relied on Hannah to give me things to do. The second I met her, I went into overdrive by sending her pitch after pitch—one of which was a fashion editorial inspired by the Manson family that I don't think went over well. Hannah was sweet, though. She listened to my ideas and encouraged me to scout new music they could possibly feature in the magazine. I did as I was told, flooding her in-box with weird bands that I thought were going to hit it big and creating mini-bios for each group. Hannah took all of these into consideration and immediately got the vibe that I was a hungry tiger. She was calling me by my nickname “Rye” the second day.

It was important to make my presence known at
Interview
so I could set myself apart from the other interns—one of whom I swear to God was South African royalty. That happens a lot at internships. You're always working with someone who's an heiress or whose parents are famous. I have no idea why the wealthy even bother interning in the first place. Maybe they're just looking for ways to kill time before they can marry a wealthy guy named Tad who works in finance and wants to do anal on his birthday.

I was never going to get noticed at
Interview
for my photocopying abilities, so the only other way to make an impression was to showcase my story ideas. This worked in my favor most of the time, until Hannah snapped at me one day and said, “You need to focus less on pitches and fulfill more of your intern duties!” She was absolutely right. I wasn't really doing any of the typical intern work, but that's because I was laughably bad at it. She quickly realized this when, after she ordered me to do the thing I feared most—open mail—I spent thirty minutes trying to work the letter opener and ended up ripping the contents of the envelope. Sheepishly, I walked up to Hannah, torn envelope in my hand, and apologized for the mistake. She looked annoyed but, sensing the humiliation that was practically radiating from my pores, she took pity on me. “It's okay, Rye,” she smiled. “Why don't you go uptown to Bret Easton Ellis's hotel and drop off this manuscript for me?”

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I thought that if Hannah called me by my nickname and gave me positive affirmations, I would somehow get a job. But
nothing
could've gotten me a job at
Interview
. I could've been braiding my boss's hair and married into the family and it still wouldn't have translated to a paycheck. It wasn't anything personal against me. There was just no money to go around. The people who were actually salaried usually ended up doing two jobs for little money. In fact, for the three months I was there, the editorial assistant left to go work at another magazine and instead of immediately hiring someone to fill the position, they had an intern do the job for free. At first, the intern was overjoyed. “Yes!” they thought. “This could be my ticket to getting a real job here.” But after months of hard work for no pay, they fired the intern and had someone outside the company fill the position.

As much as I wanted to be offered a job, I left
Interview
disillusioned with the magazine world. Everyone came here to be a part of something they saw on TV, but the reality didn't come close to matching up with the fantasy. The fashion department was especially keen on making their job feel very tortured and glamorous. One day I came into work and an intern rushed up to tell me some “delicious drama.”

“Oh my God, you won't believe what happened yesterday!”

“What?”

“A big fashion stylist stopped by the office and went on a rampage. He threw a shoe at an intern's head!” This person seemed positively delighted by this news.

“That's fucked-up.”

“I know, right? So nuts!” the intern gushed, smiling.

“No, really. You shouldn't be allowed to treat people that way. I don't care how important you are. That's unacceptable.”

“I mean, yeah, I guess. I think it's kind of major, though, to get a shoe thrown at your head by someone that famous.”

Excuse me, hon? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH MY GENERATION?

On my last day at
Interview
, I had an awkward conversation with Grace and Hannah about my overall job performance that summer. I had finally wised up and was not expecting anything from them. I just wanted to get out of there with my dignity intact. Before I could do that, though, I needed to sit through this conversation of how I was an invaluable part of the team and should really keep in touch. It seemed to me like there was an elephant in the room and that elephant was the fact that I wasn't getting a job. Maybe I was expecting too much, but it did seem strange that it wasn't even being addressed. Finally, I just asked them.

“So, what would I need to do to, like, get a job here?”

Their necks stiffened. It felt like I had just said a curse word: j*b.

“Oh, um . . .” Hannah shuffled uncomfortably in her Free People peasant top. “You know, we're not really hiring anyone right now, but you should definitely keep in touch with our online editor. You could write more stuff for the site!”

Yeah.
For free.
Everything is for free. With writing, it's an achievement just to be published, which is something I've never understood. Why can't writers expect to get paid, and why is it considered taboo to even bring up the issue of money? In every other industry, you expect payment for your work. You don't have plumbers being like, “YES, I'll unclog your pipes! Thank you for this blessed opportunity. No payment necessary!” Perhaps writers are so willing to work for no money because there's an inherent shame about doing something creative, especially during a time when people are lucky to be working at all. Or maybe we're all just masochists who don't know our own worth.

I had already written for
Interview
's website and didn't see any point in continuing to work for free. If anything, I would try to diversify as much as possible and try to write somewhere else for no money. I didn't tell Hannah and Grace that, though. I just thanked them for the opportunity and said my good-byes. Before I could leave, Grace told me she had a present for me and led me to her office. She then went underneath her desk and took out a box that was loaded to the brim with children's toys.

“Every intern gets a toy when they leave, and I think I have the perfect one for you!” Grace started rummaging through the box, bypassing Magic Markers and coloring books.

“Oh, here it is!” Grace's face was beaming. She had found the appropriate gift for me: a bright pink Etch A Sketch.

“Wow,” I said, genuinely shocked. “I haven't seen one of those in years.”

“I know; isn't it funny?”

When I got home, I threw the Etch A Sketch in my closet next to my college diploma, where it belonged. Then I began my months-long stretch of not having a job. Whoever coined the word “funemployment” really needs to lose their job. You don't spend all your time with your friends drinking boxed wine and watching
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
. Your existence is solitary and joyless. You wake up every day feeling immediate dread that you haven't landed something yet. Then you spend hours looking for jobs on the computer. You find yourself applying to anything, things you don't know the first thing about and certainly aren't qualified for, because you're desperate, because you're panicked, because you don't know what else to do. All the while, you have to contend with the fact that just last year, you were living life like it was golden. You were set up for a good future. You did everything right. (If this all sounds naïve and lacking perspective, maybe it's because when you graduate from college, you're naïve and lack perspective.)

Being unemployed is its own full-time job. There's never any true relief. You're always looking for a gig or some unseen opportunity. Meanwhile, there's no escaping the fact that you have no job. It follows you wherever you go. You can't even go on the Internet for a nice distraction, because you'll most likely stumble on some trend piece about how fucked our generation is. The Internet is an overbearing dad wagging his finger in disapproval.