I Wish I Was Like You Read online

  “This kid is a genius! Look as his pub credits! Read his tear sheets!”

  “I read them. He’s no genius.”

  “He’s amazing. Why aren’t you, why aren’t you blown away?”

  “Maybe because of the breezy post-gonzo style without any real content, without even the awareness that content matters. It’s a style about style, about itself. The first page of every story is a chronicle of the author’s day. He’s only interested in himself and his opinions. Who writes this way?”

  “He does, and the best young writers do. It’s context.”

  “Lack of context.”

  “Perception, and, and point of view. POV changes. It alters the subject…”

  “Duh.”

  “Excuse me? Did you say, ‘duh’?”

  “If you wanted a new writer why didn’t you say so?”

  “I didn’t know this was the answer until I met the guy and we talked and then—boom—I knew it.”

  “Why make him news editor?”

  “Listen, no disrespect, you’ve done a good job but we have to keep growing. There’s an explosion of new media, and we’re not keeping up.”

  “He doesn’t have a byline printed on any of these samples.”

  “He was a contributing writer on those. Why are you being like this?”

  “I?”

  “All I’m doing is, I’m trying to help you.”

  “You’re trying to do the job you hired me to do.”

  “It’s my goddamn paper!”

  A silence passed. I guess this was the sound of Eve contemplating the depth of the mess she’d signed on for and Carl staring in disbelief at the middle-aged woman who hated the puppy he dragged home.

  “Okay, Eve, look, we’ve talked. I gave you a chance, I gave you every chance to bring in some topics people my age want to read about, and last week’s issue profiled a guy who makes bagels at the market.”

  “He’s twenty-one years old and he thinks ordinary working people should be respected for what they do…”

  “That’s not a story. It’s an opinion. It’s a quote. Not even a good pull quote. Do you know the difference between a story and an opinion? This kid, Nate, knows the difference. We talked about what’s going on, what’s really going on, Eve. We talked about stuff you and I never discuss because, because you’re not interested.”

  “How do you know what interests me?”

  “Because I read the paper you edit! You like poetry and metal sculpture and two operas and a boutique in Ballard that sells cheap overcoats. This kid, he fits the moment, he knows what’s going on. He’s hot, his work is hot, and we’re lucky he wants to work for us.”

  “What are you paying him?”

  “What? Excuse me?”

  “How did you get this wunderkind if so many other papers and magazines want him? How much did you offer him?”

  “I’ll pretend you didn’t ask because it’s none of your, this is none of your business, and I’ll pretend we didn’t have this conversation.”

  Everyone tried to act nonchalant when Carl strode out of the cubicle and bashed his way into the production room. We heard him roaring at Charlie for a minute. And he never re-emerged. Which meant he must have taken the smokers stairwell to avoid running into Eve on his way out.

  When Eve stomped out of her cubicle ten minutes later her arms were full of manuscripts. She stopped at Shelly’s desk.

  “I’ll be working from home today,” she said.

  “Uh, is that okay with Carl?” Shelly asked. “There’s no way for you to check in except if you email to say you’re working and nobody can check on you… Um. Not that anybody needs to check. I guess.”

  Eve didn’t return until the following day at noon. By then the new boy, dubbed ‘Carl’s Young Nate’ by Charlie, had been introduced to all of us and had made himself at home in Eve’s cubicle, at a slightly larger desk set up by Shelly and accommodated by shoving Eve’s desk, coat rack, and bookshelf to one side.

  I spent the morning leafing through press kits on the reception area sofa, waiting to see the expression on Eve’s face when she arrived. It was worth it. She must have summoned up the will of a Greek mythological hero to keep her face placid, not to break down and weep when shiny young Nate sprang up from his new ergonomic chair, stuck out his hand, and greeted her.

  “Yo! Boss lady! We’re cube mates!”

  At a clean, bright crepe restaurant in Wallingford, the windows are plastered with ‘Going Out of Business’ signs.

  Look at the entrepreneur in tears! My first thought is how strange failure must feel to you.

  A person your age wouldn’t expect to be snuffed out by a rival. You deserve a worthy and important narrative, a test of will spanning years, the struggle to get a brand new restaurant off the ground, followed by astonishing success, piles of money, legendary status in the community. Gosh. How romantic.

  Your rival wasn’t a dashing, mysterious man who opened a brunch-dedicated café next door. A man you could woo and win over. Silly old you, I think you would have tried. No, your rival is a faceless east coast chain with corporate headquarters in Minneapolis. Your precious crepes can’t compete with five different omelets and a signature egg-and-bacon-stuffed baked potato.

  When you arrived you expected to take over the city. You anticipated being wealthy one day. You had your eye on a splendid Victorian house in Magnolia, where you would retire at age fifty.

  Did you know Europeans have journeyed to this picturesque haven since the 18th century, claiming its discovery and shoving aside whatever was already here? Of course you know but do you consider what this means in such a geographically small city? The effort to make Seattle surmountable and navigable, it took time and money.

  Let me share a little history with you.

  The hills downtown and leading to Broadway and Queen Anne were carved out, sculpted from the remains of larger hills. For years dirt was pushed away from desirable parts of town to make them accessible; piles of earth and Duwamish bones and buried longhouses, all scaled back from steeper hills no one could climb.

  A few mavericks wouldn’t go along. Know what the city engineers did? They etched a path right around anyone who refused to sell their home and make way for the re-grades. These spindly peaks of earth topped with stranded houses were known as ‘spite mounds.’

  What made Seattle seem like an easy conquest to you? Was it the lack of sophistication? It’s a ruse. Or was it the price, so affordable compared to the city you left behind? You see, every wave of new residents creates a boom followed by a bust, leaving cheap ruins for new arrivals to pick through. You bought the detritus left by another failed business.

  You marveled at the ease with which a smart young person might buy a license, post a sign, and take out an ad in the paper. You ignored the faces of the middle-aged previous tenants. You saw them everywhere, cashing in their discount coupons and buying toilet paper in bulk, and you turned away.

  They failed at what seemed simple (the same things you expected to achieve). Now they’re drowning in toxic bitterness and pretending all they ever wanted was a nice apartment and a secure job.

  You still see them on the bus. If they smile at all it’s a mean grin, like a hateful jack-o-lantern watching, waiting for all the newbies to fail.

  You failed. Your restaurant failed. Your ‘big idea’ to offer the best crepes in the city was no match for bacon-stuffed potatoes. And here you are, broke, humiliated, and unable to pay the bank loan.

  Open a drawer. The paring knife is best, a delicate instrument. Remember to cut vertically and don’t worry about spilling blood in the traces of flour. No one is coming. No one came to your grand opening, or your second, or the third. No one wants the one thing you do better than anyone you’ve ever known.

  Let go. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A month later Nate’s first feature appeared. It was a profile of a secretiv
e entrepreneur named Robbie Knudsen who had earned a fortune in five years. His software investments had made him a millionaire. He was about to launch a company he expected to rival Wizards of the Coast, its central product a collectible card game called Saga of the Titans.

  Knudsen was a quirky guy prone to react to good news by shouting, “Cool beans!” He was proud of having been kicked out of the best prep schools and universities in the country, and he advised bright young people to skip college altogether.

  The article was a hit. Readers loved this recluse, Robbie Knudsen, storming around his domestic sanctuary shouting out brilliant ideas.

  Three weeks later Nate completed a profile of two anonymous hikers whose weekend exploits involved defacing billboards. The saboteurs claimed they were fighting the corporate advertising that had blighted their hometown of Kirkland with cigarette marketing (until forced by a new ordinance to remove their billboards in 1990). Asked why they continued to rail against a compliant company after the Kirkland ads came down, the adventurous duo replied, “For the thrill, because we can, and because they’re all corporate fucks!”

  Eve was barely allowed to skim these articles before they went to press. Carl instructed Nate to report to him directly. They spent hours in coffee shops scheming and outlining. Nate came up with one idea after another and Carl signed off on all of it. Pretty soon they were inseparable.

  Eve was left alone to read the slush pile. She did this with the grim fatalism of a doomed aristocrat awaiting the guillotine.

  Nate proceeded to interview the most obscure, young, eccentric, wildly successful people he could dig up. They were sometimes inspiring, sometimes ridiculous, and always colorful. His writing style was like a teenage Hunter S. Thompson, a speed junkie typing while being sucked off by a groupie. He crammed more adjectives and adverbs into one sentence than most of us could get away with in a whole essay. He raced from one location to another with his yammering subjects, and the background was littered with incidental celebrities. Paul Allen, Courtney Love, Stone Gossard, William Burroughs, and Kathy Acker flew by like stray objects caught in the whirlwind of Nate’s expeditions.

  Eve complained about Nate’s prose style to anyone who would listen. As the circulation numbers climbed steadily and Nate gained a reputation for being the most badass kid in a city of badass kids, fewer and fewer people cared what the editor had to say. For the first time it seemed possible for Boom City to succeed, and every one of us felt the rush.

  Inevitably, this is when Lee Todd’s advice returned to haunt me.

  “Take my word for it, Greta. The worst thing you can do is to believe your own hype. If I hadn’t been such a fuckwad while I was selling books and getting reviewed in the Times, I wouldn’t have had so many enemies when I hit the ground.”

  Of course I cast aside the memory of these fateful words. If Nate (who never acknowledged our previous relationship even in brief, private moments) aimed to make Boom City successful, I was going to be included in that success.

  In my own fiefdom I was giddy with newfound power and popularity. I would call theaters and demand the best seats in the house, and then skip the show. I rejected production photos I found amateurish or mawkish, and I frequently treated other reviewers to samples of the critique forming in my head during intermission. I advised actors to have cosmetic surgery to correct the tiniest physical idiosyncrasies. I told directors not to quit their day jobs. I was, in short, an asshole. Exactly the kind of pompous boor Lee Todd had been during the good years of his brief career.

  “Like I said, Greta, nobody learns anything by example or by warning. Every one of us has to slide down the drainpipe into the same filthy gutter and suck up the shit floating down there before we get a clue about empathy. We’re not born giving a fuck about other people. It’s when we get our ass kicked by the world that we finally wonder if things could be better, if maybe we could be better. By then it’s too late. Because once you hit that gutter, my friend, nobody gives a rat’s ass about your opinion.”

  In the early spring of 1994 I could walk into any fringe theater in town and two or three people would be all over me, fawning and complimenting and begging favor. One person offered a light and another offered a glass of wine, plus a cushion to make my chair more comfy. If I showed up five minutes late, they held the fucking curtain for me.

  Some people would have rejected these sycophants. Others would have maintained a friendly yet cool distance. Here’s what I did. I accepted all of it. I let a sixty-year-old woman who managed a tiny performance space and did all of her own cleaning, painting, and set-building buy me a one-hour massage at a day spa in Pioneer Square. I smoked the cartons of American Spirits that appeared in my office mailbox, and ate the free meals paid for by actors who waited tables for less money than I made. I was star-fucked by too many people to remember. Okay, seven people. But they were astonishingly able, attractive men and women who satisfied me without reservation, and thanked me for the pleasure. I was not just an asshole. I was a first rate asshole.

  All of these perks came my way despite my now habitual trashing of one show after another. Not every aspect of every show. And in my defense, awful as I was, I didn’t really lie. Not all the time. Most of the shows were uneven affairs and quite a few of them were horrible things no one should have to see. I watched a 400-pound naked man deliver a one-hour sermon on gluttony while he ate a continuous supply of Oreo cookies. I saw two productions of The Seagull and two of Miss Julie, and every one of them sucked donkey ass. Now and then I was treated to a glimpse of intelligence and wit, and when this happened I noted it with a relief bordering on hysteria. These rare, positive reviews were the reason I was courted and waited upon.

  Inevitably a day came when an invitation to one of Vaughn’s shows turned up in the mail. For a shameful five minutes I stared at the envelope and considered throwing it away, claiming it never arrived. But when I got home Vaughn was waiting with a bottle of Chardonnay and that face I couldn’t bear, all sweetness in his expectation that I would do the right thing. It was pitiable, the extent to which he didn’t know me.

  This was a departure for the company, he explained. Yes, they had chosen to adapt an often produced classic, Hedda Gabler, but Vaughn had worked closely with a choreographer who designed movement interludes, the story was set in a posh suburb in 1970s America, there was no cross-dressing, and the staging had some touches he referred to as ‘radical’ and ‘maybe a little bit brave.’

  “My fear is that I won’t do it justice,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “I’ve read every one of your reviews and you get better every week. The flaws you point out are genuine, not pet peeves. You have to take more credit.”

  There was no way out. After months of training myself to zero in on the weaknesses of everything I examined, I would have to write a fake rave. Or tell the truth and break Vaughn’s heart. I agreed to attend opening night and went to bed praying for an earthquake and tsunami to cancel all events for an indefinite period of time.

  On opening night I sat in the fourth row, center, my preferred spot. Vaughn took his seat in the back row where he could watch the cast and the audience’s reaction. There was no curtain, and no change of scenery during the performance.

  All of the action took place on the back yard patio of the Tesman home. The interludes were ghostly movement pieces accompanied by subtle shifts in lighting, alluding to past and future events in the lives of the characters.

  During these interludes the windows of the house were lit like TV screens, framed with white curtains billowing. Shared scenes took place around a picnic table with pop music playing softly at half speed. Some of the dialogue was mouthed silently in slow motion. When Lovborg died he entered and sat down at the table, and gently rested his head upon it for the remainder of the action. Most startling of all the choices Vaughn had made, Hedda’s suicide took place center stage in full view of the audience while her husband, Tesman, and the judge obsessed
over the barbecue pit nearby.

  When the house lights rose I felt something I’d never experienced in a theater before. I had goose bumps. I wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. I sat in stunned silence with the rest of the audience for one shocking moment, and then we all jumped to our feet spontaneously, applauding like crazy, some of us weeping, some shouting, “Bravo!”

  I didn’t know what to say to Vaughn after the show, so I gave him a hug then I left in tears. As I walked down the street in the crisp night air my footsteps kept gaining momentum until I was running with my arms out. In the middle of the sidewalk halfway down the block I leapt into the air and let out a wild scream. It was an animal sound of release and joy and passionate comprehension of mortality itself. I had just witnessed a sublime work of art. And nothing would ever take that moment away from me.

  Chapter Twenty

  I wasn’t sleeping well during those days. I would begin to drift, to give in to dullness and emptiness. Then my eyes would snap open and I would sit up in bed, staring at shadows and the black silhouette of clouds.

  This wasn’t my conscience bothering me. I’d never been terribly worried about being a good person. I tried not to speculate or examine too closely. Yet every time I had a nightmare about climbing a wall or running across a bridge pursued by shadows, my first thought on awakening was, Lee Todd is dead.

  It wasn’t as if I’d been in love with the guy. He was old. His ancient rules for crime writing and his lazy acceptance of whatever circumstances or women came along irritated me. It took a long time for me to recognize why.

  Only after I’d scraped by on my lousy pay at the copy center for a couple of years, never even reading the classifieds to see what else was available, and stumbled into reviewing at Boom City, and allowed complete strangers to kowtow to me and fuck me in hopes of earning a favor I had no intention of granting, only then did I see how much alike Lee Todd and I might be. I’d mistaken him for a committed writer thanks to his endless aphorisms and advice. In truth he had probably stumbled into writing, got lucky, squandered his opportunity, and fell back to earth where he belonged. Also where I belonged, thanks to my lack of ambition and my inability to get my shit together.