I Wish I Was Like You Page 11

  In the center of the open reception area a solitary green metal desk served as nothing more than a caddy to a single-line telephone. One side of the desk was dented. Beyond the desk a tangerine sofa propped up a young woman with skin as pale as any I’d ever seen. If I had to guess her profession I would have said ‘Dust Fairy.’ Her frilled skirt was tossed up over silk panties, and one arm was crooked over her eyes.

  “Shelly!” someone yelled from deep within the labyrinth of cubicles. “Shelly! Wake the fuck up!”

  A head wearing 3D glasses popped up over a partition. A round cushion came hurtling out of the cubicles. It hit the prone young woman on the sofa and bounced to the floor.

  “No, no! Fuck this!” the young woman groaned. Standing, she wobbled on ridiculous wedge heels. She took a few steps and collapsed into a chair behind the metal desk. She gazed at me, her upswept hair askew. “Who are you?”

  “Greta Garver,” I said. “I have an appointment but if you’re too busy…”

  “Ha ha,” she intoned without mirth. She turned to her left and shouted while holding her abdomen, “Who has an appointment with Greta Carver?”

  “Garver,” I said. “No big deal.”

  “Answer me!” she screamed. “Who the fuck is seeing this woman? Greta! Carver!”

  I felt like a lost kid at the mall. Waiting to be remembered by an errant dad.

  “Send her to the coffee shop!” somebody yelled.

  “What?” she yelled back.

  “The interviewees are going to Rosebud. Send her there. Can you hear me?”

  “Yes!” She turned to me. She took a breath. “You know where Rosebud is?”

  “Yeah. West. The other side of Broadway.”

  “Go and talk to the editor. She’ll be sitting in the corner. She always sits in the corner, in the dark. Freak.” She shook her head. “I didn’t say that.” When I turned away she called after me, half-heartedly, “Good luck!”

  Outside, the autumn temperature finally registered. The sweat-sheen I’d acquired felt like underwear made of ice. My sheer, sleeveless smock practically whistled through the air as I walked. I clenched my teeth and tried not to shiver.

  I had a brief impulse to head for the nearest tavern to get shit-faced. Lie to Vaughn, say I aced the interview but they had twenty other candidates who were more qualified.

  Of course, as I said earlier, this would have been a lie. I was qualified enough to review theater, at least the amateur variety. I’d spent the worst summer of my teenage life stage-managing a series of high school productions. I had expected my one and only theater gig to be an easy Performing Arts credit. I learned there was a reason why the job came with a bullhorn and a first aid kit.

  A person with any self-respect would have quit. Someone whose family didn’t make a religion out of white-knuckled stoicism would have walked away. I gritted my teeth through ten weeks of Shakespeare-quoting, fatuous sixteen-year-olds in smelly costumes and gray wigs; drunk kids who had signed on as crew members before they’d seen the monolithic set pieces they had to move every night; and a middle-aged director who cried at rehearsals and threatened to kill himself when actors forgot their lines.

  My job was to break bad news, patch up minor injuries, say no whenever the director ran overtime, and take responsibility for anything odd or filthy—like the loaded diaper we found behind the risers on opening night. (“Ah, we need you over here, Greta, posthaste!”) That was the summer I learned to hate Shakespeare, the sound of snapping fingers, the odor of musk aftershave on decrepit costumes, parents, children, electrical equipment, paint, and men named Cyril.

  The cold drizzle of Pike Street gave way to the hobbity interior of the Rosebud. The fake-antique sled on the wall fit the café’s name but still managed to clash with the floral mauve décor. Sauntering through the door was like stepping inside a quilted tea cozy.

  When my eyes adjusted, and after I secured a loose bra strap, I spotted the editor in the shadows. She occupied a corner table between a fern and a philodendron, a mousy woman with horn-rimmed glasses, a brown pageboy, three intertwined scarves, and a dour expression, picking through a stack of pages with the disdain of a lifelong curmudgeon.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Greta Garver. I was told to meet you here for my interview.”

  I imagined she was checking the air between us for my scent, so she could decide whether or not to bite me. Then her lips parted drily. She frowned and said in a voice a woman can only achieve with two decades of whiskey and cigarettes, “All right. Let’s see your resume and writing sample.”

  “Sure.” On the way over I’d stopped by a copy center (not the one where I worked), for a fresh edition of the essay. I couldn’t present her with the wine-stained original.

  “Your resume says you have experience stage managing.”

  “Right,” I explained. “Just a summer in high school. One summer.”

  “Do you like theater?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Uh. Well, the intensity of live performance,” I began. “The intensity is unique…” Pomposity bubbled from every word and drifted upward to pop against the ceiling. “The physicality of the encounter and the performer’s vulnerability call for a higher commitment than TV or film actors—and audiences—are willing to make.” Absolutely treading water. If Lee Todd could have seen me he would have laughed until his sweatpants fell off. “Because we invest more, we expect more, or we have a right to expect more from a theatrical experience…”

  “Okay,” the editor said in the middle of my speech.

  “Well,” I said, reaching for the pages of the writing sample she’d been perusing between slurps of coffee. “Thanks for seeing me. It was good to meet you.”

  She shook my hand, held onto the pages and said, “You’re hired. You understand this is a staff position, not freelance. I hoped the ad would provide a filter. The weekly pay is lousy but you’re young so you can probably put it together with the two-cents-a-word you’ll get for the copy you write and scrape by somehow. You’ll be required to submit at least three reviews every week, no less than five hundred words each, and you’ll be on probation for the first three months. If you can write and meet deadlines you should be fine. Judging by this essay I’d say you don’t have to worry about the first requirement. If you’re not a junkie you have an advantage over the last person who held the job.”

  My give-me-a-fucking-break expression must have appeared to be pleasant shock because she began congratulating me. Somewhere between the fumbled thanks and the muttered information about pay scale and schedules, she blurted out an introduction for the first time.

  “You report to the arts and entertainment editor, Steve Billings, who reports to me. Under better circumstances Billings would have been here for the interviews but he’s the one who hired a junkie. So. He’s on probation now as well. Nevertheless, you’ll turn in all of your copy to him for approval. And I will decide who stays and who goes. I’m the editor-in-chief at Boom City. Eve Wallace.”

  Chapter Eleven

  In my lazy fashion I used to thumb through the Stranger almost every week and the Seattle Times on the weekend, plus a couple of arty magazines. The Weekly—or Weakly, as some spelled it—was the journal of choice for baby boomers, the real estate-invested, art-loving, politically correct readers in their 40s and 50s who kept crystals in meditation nooks and flap-jacked around town in Birkenstock sandals and winter socks, reminding people to conserve water and dispose of outdated electronics responsibly. You could spot their ramshackle mansions along 10th Avenue, where the street shed its Broadway moniker, at the point where the rent doubled and occupancy decreased to two adults half of the year.

  You could identify the local boomers by a stone Buddha or a painted Ganesha peeking through their weedy gardens, and by the tinkling of wind chimes on hand-carved porticos. Often inside the brick fences surrounding their property you could hear them chuckling a
t Garrison Keillor broadcasts, or you might glimpse them awkwardly dancing to reggae music in the drizzle. You could detect them when you entered a bathroom after they left, a mild and not unpleasant pastoral aroma of green tea and wheat grass that reminded me of cow pastures in springtime.

  The Weekly was for stoners who were deciding to smoke less, cash in some of their Microsoft money to buy Adobe stock, and adopt babies from Romania. The Weekly told them where the next jazz festival would take place, and offered discounts on tours of the winery at Chateau St. Michelle, which was only a picturesque train ride away.

  The Stranger was designed as an antidote and an addiction. Raunchy yet smart, loaded with comics, snarky reviews, insults aimed at politicians and middle aged parents and anyone else who seemed target-worthy, coupons for sex toys, massages, and bathhouses, personal ads, and of course the letters column, ‘Savage Love.’ It was the shit, to people who liked to call things ‘the shit,’ and it was growing exponentially, from a four-page inside joke to a business on the verge of rendering both of the city’s venerable music reporters, the Rocket and the Weekly, obsolete.

  Before the Stranger arrived, no one threatened the authority of those patchouli-scented papers. In its wake a dozen tiny publications sprang up. Most were DIY newspapers and art journals put out by heiresses and heroin dabblers. Kids deciding, “If someone else can do this, so can we!” Naïve pretending to be cynical, earnestly ignoring the fact that a trust fund child who can’t balance a checkbook probably can’t keep a business going.

  As far as I could tell Boom City was one of these doomed, shitty little papers. They had nothing special to offer. They even lacked the rowdy charisma of the Urban Spelunker. The Weekly tried to cash in on said charisma by hiring away the Spelunker’s main attraction, a columnist who wrote under the pseudonym Babs Babylon. None of the columnists or reviewers for Boom City had become such a household name. Every aspect of the paper was mediocre, Eve Fucking Wallace was its editor, and she was my boss.

  If I’d only had a brain I would have run screaming from Rosebud and never looked back. Instead, I shook Eve’s hand and promised to report for duty the following Monday. I told her I was between jobs and didn’t need to give two weeks’ notice. Knowing I could call Desiree and simply tell her to fuck off was the one giant bonus to my situation.

  All along I’d treated the interview as a lark, a joke, knowing they would never hire me. Then I actually met Eve. Suddenly I couldn’t resist the chance to get a closer look at the bitch that snuffed out my writing ambition. I had no idea what I would do next but I found her ignorance of our secret relationship thrilling. I was enraptured by the thought of knowing what she didn’t know, staring at her weasel face during our conversations and realizing if I stabbed her with a pen, just took one out of my bag and thrust it through her windpipe, she would have no idea why. I couldn’t walk away.

  I avoided telling Vaughn about the new job. All weekend he kept stopping by, pestering me for details. I told him there were dozens of applicants, hot young wannabes lined up around the block. I told him it might be weeks before I heard back. I said I’d let him know if anything happened.

  Here’s what happened.

  On Monday I met the narcoleptic receptionist again. She said her name was Shelly and not to ask her last name. She said she had to take medication to stay awake. She was draped from neck to ankles in plastic when I arrived, and a taut, sunburned teenager was cutting her hair. Shelly told me to go and wait in the production room, where I found a guy crawling on the floor connecting cables and checking outlets.

  Sly gray eyes, black hair to his shoulders, slender, androgynous, both gawky and graceful, he dusted off his jeans and faded Soundgarden T-shirt. Then he sat next to me and began to sketch in a notebook.

  “I’m Charlie,” he said without looking at me. “I’m not an extrovert and I’m not coming on to you. No one here has good manners, so I have to introduce myself.”

  “Greta. I’m the new…”

  “Grunt,” he said.

  “Reviewer.”

  “Not to hurt your feelings. Theater reviewing’s a back alley. You know that, right? Nobody cares about it. You plan to write features, later on, right, like a grownup? Sure you do, it’s okay to admit it. Anybody can review theater. That’s the opinion around here. If you make a wrong move they’ll replace you the same day just to prove how easy it is.”

  His words crackled in the air between us like static, like a remote radio broadcast. He stood, crossed his arms loosely, and rubbed the center of his back against the corner of a filing cabinet.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good to know.”

  “Please don’t be sad.” He stopped scratching his back and managed to pull a sad face without pissing me off. “I’m not messing with your head. These people can be assholes, some of them. Most of the time they’re assholes. It isn’t their fault. They’re overcompensating little shits.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “I’m being snotty. Boom City’s a nest of adventurous babies all trying to outdo their parents’ success so they can say, ‘See, mommy? I did good.’”

  “You are snotty.”

  “Shut up,” he said lightly. “You should know this. The publisher only hires two types. There are the people who can afford to work without pay, if it ever comes to that; and the ones who are broke but too vain or proud to admit how much they need the lousy paycheck. He hates to pay people. And he hates to say no. It makes him nervous.”

  “Which category are you? The type who can afford not to work, or the type who’s too proud to beg for your paycheck?”

  “Guess!” Charlie’s grin had its own style, insouciant as an unexpected kiss. He held his dark hair back with one hand, inviting me to study his angular face.

  “You come from money but your dad’s cheap,” I said. Taking a stab was a habit I learned from my mom. “He won’t cut you in on the family inheritance until you prove you can make it on your own. He wants you to be a man.”

  His eyelids fluttered almost imperceptibly. He laughed at the melodrama.

  “And you’re broke,” he said, quietly evening the score. “Your parents are paying off a third mortgage, or they’ve divorced and left no forwarding address.”

  It was my turn to wince. I smiled to cover my embarrassment.

  “Anybody can see that,” I told him. “I win.”

  “Why do you want to write reviews for a subhuman weekly salary plus two cents a word?”

  “Who says I want to? How do you know how much I make?”

  “You took the job,” he said, maybe annoyed, maybe teasing. “I know everything about this dump.” He lit a cigarette. I waited for him to head for the stairwell, the designated smoking area. He stayed where he was, leaning against the file cabinet with one leg propped against a plastic chair. “What are you doing at Boom City?”

  “Fine. You’re right. I want be a journalist. Might as well start here,” I said. “Eve says I have the right background…”

  “Okay. Whatever you want to tell people, or yourself, it’s all right with me. Watch your back, though,” he said. “Your spot was filled by three other people in the past year and a half.”

  “Eve told me to focus on…”

  “Ignore what Eve tells you. She’s an okay lady but she’s out of her depth. Just between you and me, if the publisher ever finds the kind of editor he wants, he’ll fire Eve over the phone.”

  “What are you, stalking everybody?” I wondered briefly how I could ever study Eve while this guy studied both of us.

  “Listen. Your fellow reviewers, the music and film people, are douchebags and dummies. I’m the only person you need to listen to if you want to keep your stupid job. Okay?”

  “What about Steve Billings?” I asked. “You know, the arts and entertainment editor, the guy I report to?”

  “He’s the biggest dummy in a store window full of dummies. Eve doesn’t let him hire people any more. She’s taken ove
r part of his job. It’s humiliating but he hasn’t said a word. By the way, if you want his job you can probably steal it as soon as your probation’s up. The guy hates being an editor.”

  “I see,” I said. “Why do you think the publisher wants to replace Eve?”

  Charlie sighed. “Last year he wanted the paper to be more professional. Eve got the layout, the cut and paste, off the floor of the reception area. She made the publisher hire Shelly—well, not Shelly per se, just a person to answer the phone, type personal ads, and sort mail. Not exaggerating. This year, he’s more ambitious. He wants better features, bigger targets, more news.”

  “What kind of editor does he want?” I asked.

  “My guess? He’ll know the beast when he sees it. But I’ll be surprised if it isn’t a guy, a kid, a hotshot like the ones he reads in Harper’s and The New Republic. He’s always talking about these post-gonzo little jerks he admires. Anyway, here’s a workflow chart.” He handed me the page on which he’d been sketching. “Because no one else will tell you when or how your reviews get published in the paper. I’ve included the standard word count for your section. But that can change with any issue. If I say you’re over the limit, I’ll tell you by how much.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “You cut,” he said. A strand of dark hair slipped over his shoulder and he flipped it back. “However many times I say you’re over, you cut. Then I go back to work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Stuffing ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag,” he said. “I’m the Production Manager.”

  Both double doors to the room shot open. The guy who strode through them was no more than twenty-five, built like a surfer under a hoodie and black jeans, with a shock of wheat blond hair that rode slightly ahead of him, like a bank of rolling sea foam.