“Okay,” I said.
“Now, the success of this product is contingent on the UBI bill dying on the Senate floor. This is where you—your campaign—comes in.”
“Okay,” I said again.
The food arrived. I had a salad. Lucas had a rare cow steak, which cost six dollars more than the stem-cell filet also offered on the menu. He said he always ate real meat, that the kind grown on trees lacked the necessary iron.
We ate quickly. Lucas’s knife scraped loudly across his plate. When the steak was no more, he dabbed the small puddles of blood and grease with his big thumb. He sprinkled salt on his wet thumb. He licked. I put my napkin in my salad and signaled to the service bot. Lucas caught me looking again at his drawing.
“Are you getting it?”
“Everyone’s fucking everyone. That I understand.”
“Good. Because that’s part one of the agenda. Understanding the problem is part one.”
“What’s part two?”
“Part two is complicated.”
“Why is it complicated?”
“Part two is what you’re gonna do about it.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
Lucas reached back into his bag and removed a rolled-up poster. He watched as I unrolled it. The poster featured a black-and-white photo of steel gates beneath a German sign. I’d seen this image before, in person, on a visit to Poland to see where my grandparents’ cousins had been murdered. Over the image, lay an English translation. Whoever designed it had added a hashtag:
#WORKWILLSETYOUFREE
“This,” Lucas said, “is our campaign.”
Michael
The atmosphere in the office was too glum to be productive, so I rode the F to 14th, then switched to the uptown 1. At Columbia, school was in sesh. Skinny freshmen weighed down by backpacks, skinny hipsters weighed down by existential despair, everyone weighed down by debt.
I admired these kids and coveted their freedom. It would end eventually, but for now they could read Judith Butler and Edward Said, pursue an ethnographically diverse array of friends with benefits, friends with benzodiazepine prescriptions, friends with parental benefactors. College is the last bastion of free love and dining dollars, the best aspects of hippie sixties mixed with seventies excess, eighties dad-funded decadence, and nineties wide-leg denim. With the millennium came drugs like 2C-I and Molly, the spread of flash-frozen sushi to landlocked areas.
Despite these amusements, the library was jam-packed with students. I had access via a not-yet expired Columbia ID purchased from a recently graduated C&S rookie. I bore little resemblance to the ID photo, but campus security was surprisingly lax, especially considering the scourge of school shootings. Or maybe, as a white man with clipped fingernails and no facial tattoos, I’d slipped from the profiler’s purview.
I was a regular by now, arriving most evenings under the delusion that I’d hack out a couple chapters. In reality, I’d written nothing. Or rather, I wrote things—page-long sentences replete with semicolons, remixed nineteenth-century pantoums, an allegorical flash fiction in which Eminem is reimagined as the charismatic leader of a colony on Mars—and then deleted them. I was still finding my form. There were ideas I wanted to touch on: the way hip-hop had misogynized the male psyche; the music industry as a microcosm of the global economy; the health risks of hair bleach. But I was missing something major, the binding agent that would cohere these ideas into a thesis.
Mostly, I spent my library time embarked on a kind of vague research. One evening I might make headway in volume two of Marx’s Capital, but the next I’d read only back issues of glossy women’s mags, or online consumer reports, or Insta feeds chronicling the daily deeds of certain superlative LOLcats. I read and reread Em’s lyrics, spending hours self-debating semantics and attempting to justify his scrim of sociopathy. The project was hopeless.
I chose a seat in the second floor reading room, sniffed the varnished desk wood, lit my desk lamp, sucked on a cough drop, put on my nicotine patch, bit the cough drop, swallowed it, nibbled my sticky inner cheek, blew my nose, chewed two Tums which were chalky and awful with a weak citrus undertaste, so I opened my laptop and called up a blank document which I renamed Chapter 1.
I typed:
Before coming to prominence in the field of hip-hop, Marshall Mathers worked as a pizza chef at the Little Caesars Family Fun Center in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan.
The sentence was slightly misleading. For most of his twenties, Em was a busboy and fry cook at Gilbert’s Lodge, a sports bar decorated in moose-head taxidermy. Gilbert’s was his self-proclaimed second home, and any true scholar knew of Em’s on-the-job freestyling, an incessant stream of invective that amused his fellow busboys, creeped the female servers, irked the shit out of management, and may have led to his firing days before Christmas, 1996.
Em worked at Little Caesars for six months before being rehired at Gilbert’s. Gilbert’s had played a much larger role in the saga of Marshall Mathers, and yet, mentioning Gilbert’s, out of context, in the first sentence of my book, would not pack the same punch as mentioning Little Caesars. With its charming logo and inoffensive pizza, Little Caesars was a universally recognized symbol of mediocrity, and there was no more efficient way of indicating Em’s humble beginnings than by revealing his stint at the chain.
What’s more, Em hadn’t worked at any Little Caesars, but a Little Caesars “Family Fun Center.” For a reader schooled in the vulgarity of Em’s lyrics, the fact that he’d worked at such a venue would be
