I nod. Once we land at JFK, I cast my eyes downward as I walk, trying to avoid people’s gazes but several jovial strangers take my clownish red Ohio State sweatshirt as an invitation for small talk.
“Are you going to go back and celebrate?” an older man asks.
“Good job yesterday,” a man in a suit says, patting me on the back.
“We are looking at one very happy girl right here,” another says, pointing to me. “I can’t wait to hear what Regis has to say about this.”
I realize something: Never has the world so lovingly embraced my six-foot-two body as when I am wearing a sports team sweatshirt. Everyone finally gets it. Oh, the giant girl—she’s a jock. Yeah, that makes sense. I can understand that. I think of the spelling bee girl they all laughed at on the trip, and I’m suddenly unable to stop crying.
Walking off the plane, I hurry to the first concession stand I see and order a green tea and a seltzer water. I collapse into a plastic booth, trying to hide from the eyes around me. I stare at my phone. I turn it on and off, on again.
Fuck it. I dial my ex-husband. I couldn’t feel much worse.
“Happy New Year,” James says.
“Happy . . .” I say, bursting into tears.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“Oh, it’s just funny,” I say, voice uneven, bobbing my tea bag furiously, “because I went to the Fiesta Bowl and I’m wearing this big Ohio State sweatshirt and I feel so completely sad but everyone keeps congratulating me.”
He pauses.
“That is pretty funny.”
“And . . . and,” I sputter, “the guys I was with, when we were in the hotel, you know, on this trip, they turned on ESPN, and they were making fun of the spelling bee girl on TV. And . . . like . . . I didn’t say anything, but James . . . they couldn’t see that . . . I’m that spelling bee girl, you know?”
He is silent.
“I know you are,” he says.
I hang up the phone, softened but shattered.
Images flash through my mind, as they do every time I speak to James. The gold card he gave me for our anniversary that said, “To Mandy . . . who gave me a life.” Our wedding vows written as we drove on the winding roads from the Grand Canyon past the Hoover Dam on the way to Sin City: “My love for you grows stronger every day.” And then five years later, the VHS cassette of our wedding in Vegas thrown in the trash, on top of a greasy pile of chicken entrails.
That shakes me out of it. There is no going back.
I rip the sweatshirt off, throw it in the trash, and resolve that I need to find people in my life who can see me. People who can see through my own bullshit even when I can’t see it myself.
chapter three
The New Normal
2006
Men are a waste of time. My career is not. This is my new mantra.
In journalism, there are the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Where, Why. Before applying that basic premise to my stories, however, I first apply it to the animal of the newsroom around me.
I notice quickly something that smart reporters do. You fake it until you make it. Big-time. This means that even when you don’t have a definitive lead, you kind of swagger like you do. During the first phone call I make to an A-list publicist to inquire about a boldface-name client, I say semi-apologetically by way of introduction in whispery upspeak, “I’m calling from the New York Post?”
“You’re who calling from what? Who? What do you need?”
This is not how things get done. Everything must be a statement. I am calling from the New York Post. You will give me the story. I am on deadline. Help me help you. I am a player. I deserve to be here.
Different stories I am assigned dribble in—lots of last-minute celeb feud roundups (Lohan vs. Johansson! Letterman vs. O’Reilly!) and then there is what is known in the field, or at any J-school worth its salt, as the “enterprise” story.
During my fateful Mexican restaurant brunch turned job interview with Steve a few months back, one story stuck out in my mind as the Post staple. Steve mentioned “huge Hummer strollers” as sweeping the city and this being a great get.
It has everything: rich, entitled parents; something absurd in proportion to its usual size; newness; and, most important, a photographic element that pops. The Post runs on pictures and “high concept” ideas. This is what publicists always get wrong. If you can’t pitch a story in just a few words, your pitch is going to fail. You don’t go with “new eco-friendly strollers that help busy moms on the go.” You go with cognitive dissonance that grabs you by the eyeballs—or, even better, by the throat.
“Hummer strollers!!!”
You get it. Immediately. You can’t not get it. So I begin the hunt for my own enterprise masterpiece. Since I am such an avid dater, I try to think of the most salacious story I can—either from my own experience or based on anything else I dig up online. I keep finding one phrase that jumps out as the ultimate outrageous you-immediately-get-it concept in the Rants and Raves section on Craigslist. It strikes me as the perfect Post piece: a phenomenon called, classily enough, “dinner whores.”
One poster bitches about a woman ordering drink after drink on his dime, all the while exhibiting no desire to ever see him again: “What the fuck? Did she think I was some asshole?”
Yeah, this is my Post story, for sure. Now I just need to find women who will admit they are searching for guys whom they have no interest in dating—beyond the prospect of a gourmet meal and plenty of cocktails. While Katherine aids me in maneuvering assignments with everything from “you got this”–style encouragement to the much more practical brand of help like,
