Authors: Meghan Daum
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Essays, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Like all legends, the glamour of publishing that we read about in McCarthy’s
Intellectual Memoirs
or Mary Cantwell’s
Manhattan, When I Was Young
is likely to be shattered somewhere around the first anniversary of assistantship. Though our heroines were no doubt just as burdened by this age-old indentured servitude as we are, there’s something in the retelling, in the breezy we-can-laugh-about-it-now quality of such memoirs that today’s editorial slaves find confusing. It’s as if a sepia tint has been imposed onto a thoroughly fluorescent-lit world. Unlike our predecessors, we find ourselves spending considerably more lunch hours waiting in line at Ess-a-Bagel than sitting at the counter at the Oyster Bar. We realize that we’re spending a significant amount of office time changing the fax paper, chasing down botched contracts, and writing flap copy for
Thin Thighs in Three Seconds
rather than inhabiting a publishing world like the one Dan Wakefield evoked in his memoir
New York in the Fifties,
where “the booze ran freely and the talk was always funny, sharp, knowing, dealing with what we cared about most—books, magazines, stories, the words and the people who wrote them.”
To the dewy eye of the editorial assistant, there is something about this mythos—the stiff patent leathers tromping around Madison Square, the particular literary drunkenness that seemed obtainable only from the taps of the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas met the shot glass that killed him—that feels lost, abandoned in nostalgia’s inevitable recycling bin. Instead, there are lunches eaten while hunched over a plastic container of tri-colored pasta salad from the Korean deli. There are hundreds of hours spent at the copy machine duplicating manuscripts, thousands of phone messages scrawled on carbon message pads, and a few attempts to raise our salaries to something resembling at least the annual tuition fee of the college we attended (not including the cost of books). Nonetheless we persevere, dreaming of the day when we’ll become an assistant editor, and wondering how we’ll survive the ensuing years until that fabled associate editor position is dangled before our eyes. If we make it this far without ditching the whole thing and going back to school for yet another graduate degree, we, too, could be the star editor responsible for the true story of Howard Stern’s near-death experience. A savory thought, yet one that, like the devil, threatens to drag us down by the sharp lapels of our Burberry raincoats. It’s a good thing we don’t own any. We can’t afford them. Besides, they’re not as timeless as they once were.
Earlier this summer I was walking down West End Avenue in Manhattan and remembered, with a sadness that nearly knocked me off my feet, just why I came to New York seven years ago and just why I am now about to leave. Certain kinds of buildings seem almost too gorgeous to belong to the actual world, or at least the present-day world. Given the aluminum siding and brickface that proliferates throughout most of the United States, I’m always amazed that massive, ornate residences like 838 West End Avenue, with its yellow façade and black hieroglyphics, or 310 Riverside Drive, with its gargoyles and cornices, are still standing and receiving mail delivery and depositing kids in and out of the front doors like pretty much any domicile anywhere. When I was growing up in northern New Jersey, just twenty-five miles away from Manhattan, I had no concept that actual people could live in such places. My first inkling came when I was seventeen. I walked into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and decided, within two minutes, what the controlling force of my life would be.
It was the summer of 1987, and I was in the process of learning how to drive a stick shift. My father is a composer and he allowed me to drive him to Manhattan in our Plymouth Horizon in order to drop off some lead sheets to a music copyist he worked with. The music copyist lived on West End Avenue and 104th Street, in a modest four-room apartment in a 1920s-era building. The moment the rickety elevator lurched onto the sixth floor and the copyist opened the door, life for me was never the same.
There was nothing particularly fancy about the place. It was a standard prewar with moldings around the ceilings and, most likely, porcelain hexagonal bathroom tiles that were coming loose. Although I’m not sure if there were faded Persian rugs on the floors and NPR humming from the speakers, it was just the sort of place for that. The music copyist and his wife had lived there for almost twenty years and although rent was the furthest thing from my mind at the time, I can now surmise, based on what they probably earned, that the apartment was rent controlled, perhaps $300 per month. It’s now difficult to imagine a time when I didn’t walk into someone’s apartment and immediately start the income-to-rent ratio calculations. But on that summer night, standing in the living room of this apartment, looking down on the streets whose voluptuous, stony buildings formed the shore to the river that so famously keeps
here
safely away from
there,
my life was changed forever. I mean no melodrama in this. From that moment on, everything I did, every decision I made, every college applied to or not applied to, every job taken or not taken, was based on an unwavering determination to live in a prewar, oak-floored apartment, on or at least in the immediate vicinity of 104th Street and West End Avenue.
I’ve always been somebody who exerts a great deal of energy trying to get my realities to match my fantasies, even if the fantasies are made from materials that are no longer manufactured, even if some governmental agency has assessed my aspirations and pronounced them a health hazard. Lately, my New York fantasy has proven a little too retro for my own good. Though I did come to New York immediately after college and lived, believe it or not, within four blocks of 104th Street and West End Avenue, it wasn’t until recently that I began to realize that I wasn’t having quite as good a time here as I once did. I say this as someone who has had a very, very good time in New York. I say this also as someone who has enjoyed a good deal of professional success here, particularly considering that I am young and committed to a field that is notoriously low paying and unsteady. But low pay and unsteadiness never really bothered me all that much. I’ve historically been pretty good at getting by on what I have, especially if you apply the increasingly common definition of “getting by,” which has more to do with keeping up appearances than keeping things under control. Like a social smoker whose supposedly endearing desire to emulate Marlene Dietrich has landed her in a cancer ward, I have recently woken up to the frightening fallout of my own romantic notions of life in the big city: I am completely over my head in debt. I have not made a life for myself in New York City. I have purchased a life for myself.
As I write this, I owe $7,791 to my Visa card. To be fair (to whom? Myself? Does fairness even come into play when one is trying to live a dream life?), much of those charges are from medical expenses, particularly bills from a series of dental procedures I needed last year. As a freelance person, I’m responsible for buying my own health insurance, which is $300 per month for basic coverage in New York State. That’s far more than I can afford, so I don’t have any. Although I try to pay the $339 per quarter charge to keep a hospitalization insurance policy that will cover me if some major disaster befalls, I am often late in paying it and it gets canceled. But lest this begin to sound like a rant about health care, I will say that medical expenses represent only a fraction of my troubles. I need to make an estimated quarterly tax payment next month of $5,400, which is going to be tough because I just recently paid back $3,000 to my boyfriend (now ex) who lent me money to pay last year’s taxes, and I still owe $300 to the accountant who prepared the return. My checking account is overdrawn by $1,784. I have no savings, no investments, no pension fund, and no inheritance on the horizon. I have student loans from graduate school amounting to $60,000. I pay $448.83 per month on these loans, installments which cover less than the interest that’s accruing on the loan; despite my payments, the $60,000 debt seems to actually be growing with each passing month.
It’s tempting to go into a litany of all the things on which I do not spend money. I have no dependents, not even a cat or a fish. I do not have a car. I’ve owned the same four pairs of shoes for the past three years. Much of the clothing in my closet has been there since the early 1990s, the rare additions usually taking the form of a $16 shirt from Old Navy, a discounted dress from Loehmann’s, or a Christmas sweater from my mother. At twenty-nine, it’s only been for the last two years that I’ve lived without roommates. My rent, $1,055 a month for a four-hundredsquare-foot apartment, is, as we say in New York City when describing the Holy Grail, below market. I do not own expensive stereo equipment, and even though I own a television I cannot bring myself to spend the $30 a month on cable, which, curiously, I’ve deemed an indulgence. With one exception, I have not spent money on overseas travel. All of this is true, just as it is true to say that there have been times when I haven’t hesitated to buy things for my home—some rugs, a fax machine, a $200 antique lamp. There are even more times—every week, for instance—that I don’t hesitate to spend money in a social capacity, $45 on dinner, $20 on drinks. I make long-distance phone calls almost daily with no thought to peak calling hours or dime-a-minute-rates. I have a compulsive need to have fresh-cut flowers in my apartment at all times, and I’ll spend eight or ten dollars once or twice a week at the Korean market to keep that routine going. This behavior may be careless, but it is also somewhat beside the point. In the grand scheme of things, the consumer items themselves do not factor heavily; it’s easier to feel guilt over spending $60 on a blender, as I did last month, than to examine the more elaborate reasons why I reached a point where I found it impossible to live within my means.
Once you’re in this kind of debt, and by “kind” I’m talking less about numbers than about something having to do with form, with the brand of the debt, all those bills start not to matter anymore. If I allowed them to matter I would become so panicked that I wouldn’t be able to work, which would only set me back further. I’ve also noticed that my kind of debt takes a form that many people find easier to swallow than, say, the kind of debt that reflects overt recklessness. I spent money on my education and my career. These are broad categories. There’s room here for copious rationalizations and I’ll make full use of them. I live in the most expensive city in the country because I have long believed, and had many people convinced, that my career was dependent upon it. I spend money on martinis and expensive dinners because, as is typical among my species of debtor, I tell myself that martinis and expensive dinners are the entire
point
—the point of being young, the point of living in New York City, the point of
living.
In this mind-set, the dollars spent, like the mechanics of a machine no one bothers to understand, become an abstraction, an intangible avenue toward self-expression, a mere vehicle of style.
I grew up in the kind of town that probably comes as close to defining a generalized notion of the American Dream as any. It’s an affluent, New Jersey suburb whose main draw is its good public school system. As in many well-to-do suburbs, if you’re not in need of K-12 services, there’s not much in it for you, and so virtually no one between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five can afford or has reason to live there. The result is that the teenager is king. He sets the cultural and intellectual standard for the community. Moreover, he does so without the benefit of any adult influence other than his parents.
As I try to sort out the origins of my present financial situation, I always come back to the feelings I had as a teenager in the suburbs and the ineffable hankering I felt to access some kind of earthier, more “intellectual” lifestyle. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the cultural hegemony of my world was mired in a 1950s sensibility that came directly out of the parents’ nostalgia about their youths. I went to parties in junior high school where we actually danced to
The Big Chill
soundtrack. Kids wore Bermuda shorts and seersucker shirts. Unlike the self-conscious vibe of the world I entered later in college, there was nothing ironic in any of this. We knew no one older than ourselves or younger than our parents—no college or graduate students, no single professionals, barely anyone who worked outside of a corporate structure. Therefore the teen agenda looked a lot like the parental agenda, which was, even though it was the late 1980s, pretty much an Eisenhower-era paradigm: college, work, marriage, return to suburbs. As adolescents we were, for better or worse, the staple crop and chief export of the place. Realtors have been known to drive prospective home buyers throughout the town and point out houses in which kids have gone to Ivy League colleges.
My family was in a unique situation because we lived off of my father’s income as a freelance composer. Although I never had the sense that we were poor, I now realize that we must have, at certain times anyway, come pretty close to it. The main reason I never felt poor was that my parents, who had experienced their own kind of lifestyle epiphany when they were first exposed to academic settings, had an aesthetic value system that was less a reflection of having or not having money than with, in our opinion anyway, good taste. Unlike the neighbors, who had expensive wall-to-wall carpet and furniture sets from Seaman’s, we had wood floors and oriental rugs, and I grew up believing that we were superior because of it. Even when I got older and began to run into my financial problems, I never had a conscious desire for a lot of money. I was never interested in being rich. I just wanted to live in a place with oak floors.
In what emerged as the major misconception of the subsequent twelve years, I somehow got the idea that oak floors were located exclusively in New York City. This came chiefly from watching Woody Allen movies. I wanted to live someplace that looked like Mia Farrow’s apartment in
Hannah and Her Sisters
(little did I know that it
was
Mia Farrow’s apartment). To me, this kind of space did not connote wealth. These were places where the paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an
authentic
way. As far as I was aware at seventeen, rich was something else entirely. Rich meant monstrous Tudor-style houses in the ritzy section of my town. Rich were the handful of kids who drove BMWs to school. I had the distinct feeling that my orthodontist, whose sprawling ranch house had front steps that were polished in such a way that they looked like they were made of ice, was rich. None of these particular trappings of wealth held my attention. In fact, nothing outside of the movies really held my attention until that night in 1987 when I saw the apartment on 104th Street.