The Job (5 page)

“Ned Allen here.”

“Do you ever stop working?” the voice on the line said.

“Jack Drabble?”

“Perhaps.”

“As my father used to say, Only the winner goes to dinner. You still at the office, Jack?”

“Yep. Just stepped away from my desk when you called.”

“Eight-fifteen. You are a credit to InfoCom.”

“And you’re trying to lick my rectum.”

“No need, my man. I’m sitting here in the bar of the St. Regis, sipping a bone-dry martini, about to meet my very beautiful wife for dinner, and I have GreenAp ready to grab that multipage insert at ninp-ol-i-five tnmnrrnw mornine if we don’t get into bed before them. So-no offense, Jack-but who needs to even look at your rectum when life is so sweet?”

“One-seven-five.”

“Now you insult my intelligence. One-eighty is the deal… and we throw in the two bleeds as a door prize.”

“Plus the weekend at Vail, right?”

Got ‘em!

“Only at one-eighty.”

“What’s five grand?”

“The difference between you squinting at the Colorado sun or sitting on your can in beautiful downtown Worcester, Mass. One-eighty. Take it or leave it.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“No sale. You called tonight, you deal tonight. One-eighty. Going, going…”

“Okay, okay, okay. I’m in.”

“Smart move, Jack,” I said, taking a long swig of the martini. And as I put the glass down, I found myself thinking, You’re right, Dad. The math has worked for me.

And God, how I love to sell.

“Wsn’t that Ralph Lauren seated over there?” Lizzie asked.

“Good catch,” Geena said.

“And do you see those two guys in the comer?” Ian said, motioning all of us forward and nodding toward a pair of well-dressed men schmoozing at a discreetly prominent table.

“The substantial one in the chalk-stripe suit. That’s Graydon Carter.”

“The Graydon Carter?” Lizzie asked.

“The one and only,” Ian said.

“Have you ever written for Vanity Fair?” I asked Ian.

“I wish,” Ian said, then added, “And the guy with Graydon is the famous David Halberstam.”

Geena nodded knowingly, but Lizzie looked puzzled.

“Who’s David Halberstam?”

She instantly regretted her honesty, as Ian put on a mock-haughty voice.

“Lizzie, if you live in this city you’ve simply got to know who David Halberstam is.”

My wife tugged on a lock of her hair-a dead giveaway (but only to me) that she was feeling self-conscious.

“I’ve heard his name,” she said.

“He only happens to be one of the most important journalists of the last thirty years,” Ian said, continuing to tease her.

“Ex-A few York Times, author of The Best and the Brightest and The Fifties…”

“.. . and a fabulous guy,” I said, flashing lana big smile.

“Let me guess you met him at a party at Tina Brown’s weekend place in the Hamptons, where you were also talking foreign policy with Joan Didion….”

“Actually,” Ian said, “I was talking Middle East politics with Tony Robbins-who told me he was a very close personal friend of yours.”

Even I laughed.

“How’s life at the paper?” Lizzie asked.

“A bit like living through the French Revolution,” Ian said.

“Every day, the new editor sends someone else to the guillotine. Still, he doesn’t seem to want my head. Yet.”

“That’s because you’re one of their big stars,” Geena said.

“You’re biased,” Ian said.

“Anyone who can string a sentence together and schmooze celebs can write a gossip column.”

“You feeling all right?” I asked.

“I mean, these sudden attacks of modesty can be dangerous to your health….”

Ian threw his eyes heavenward.

“With friends like these…”

“Anyway, you’re not going to be a gossip columnist for much longer,” Geena said. Then turning to Lizzie and me, she added, “Did you hear that GQ offered Ian this amazing freelance contract?”

“How amazing?” I asked.

“It’s not bad,” Ian said.

“Not bad?” Geena said.

“It’s fifty thousand dollars for six profiles.”

“Wow,” Lizzie said.

“You humble bastard,” I said, raising my glass tolan

“That is fantastic news.”

“Well, it’s still not the New Yorker,” Ian said.

“In time,” Geena said, “in time.”

“Who’s your first subject?” Lizzie asked.

“The poet laureate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff-Tom Clancy.”

“Very popular guy, Mr. Clancy,” I said.

“Yeah, salesmen love him,” lanadded with a wink.

“Not to mention tabloid journalists,” I countered with a smile.

Geena looked at Lizzie and said, “Do you ever feel as if we’re kind of superfluous here?”

“Boys will be boys,” Lizzie said drily.

“Salesmen are never competitive,” I said.

“Until you face them across a tennis court,” Ian said.

“I tell you, Lizzie, your husband’s got a killer instinct.”

“I guess that’s because I honed my game on public courts, not Daddy’s country club.”

I instantly regretted the wisecrack. Lizzie shot me a look that said, “Apologize fast.” Which is exactly what I did.

“Just joking, pal,” I said.

But, of course, I wasn’t totally joking. Because there was a part of me that did envy Ian’s rich-kid credentials. Like his wife, he exuded an aura of supreme confidence-the sort of self-assurance that, at times, was borderline arrogance. Then again, la nand Geena had both been raised in an elite Manhattan world. They went to schools like Chapin and Collegiate. They grew up using Mommy’s charge card at Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. They were sent off to summer camps in Vermont and New Hampshire. They had daddies who were senior partners at white-shoe law firms or Wall Street brokerage houses, and could easily pay their tuition to Brown and Smith. They spent their junior years in Dublin and Florence. They returned to the city after college, fully secure in the knowledge that they would have a relatively easy entree into any professional field they chose. Because not only did they have all the right connections, they also had that most prized of native Manhattanite possessions: an entitlement complex-the belief that they had been anointed as two of life’s winners, and that success was their natural domain.

Let’s face it: As much as Ian derided his status as a Daily News gossip hack, he landed that highly visible job at the precocious age of twenty-six. Now, at thirty, he was effortlessly making the move into magazine journalism. No doubt, he’d crack Vanity Fair and the New Yorker within a few years. Book deals would follow. He’d become a celebrated writer-a member of the literary establishment, profiled in the New York Times, interviewed by Charlie Rose, sharing that corner table with David Halberstam and Graydon Carter. Because, naturally, Ian saw such success as his due, his inalienable right-whereas I always felt as if the corner table, like success, had to be fought for. Just as I also found myself wondering: Once I finally made it to the table, would I ever feel secure enough to sit

That’s the problem with being a small-town kid in New York: No matter how well you do in Gotham, deep down you always consider yourself a fraud. Still looking up in amazement at “all them tall buildings,” desperately trying to exude high-gloss sophistication, constantly wondering if your urbane act is as transparent as Plexiglas.

“Look who’s sitting in the left-hand corner,” Geena said, in an attempt to move the conversation on after my impolitic comment.

Ian glanced over in that direction, then said, “Oh yeah. Him.” Then shooting me an ironic grin, he added, “Now there’s a guy who owns his own tennis court.”

“Edgar Bronfman, Jr.?” Lizzie asked.

“You are good at this,” Geena said.

“She’s the best,” I said.

Lizzie shrugged.

“I just read the gossip columns, like everyone else.”

I smiled-because that comment was pure Lizzie. Though she was an adept player of the Manhattan “in-the-know” game, it really didn’t define her. She saw the game for what it was: nothing more than a basic component of her work. Information was the central currency she traded in.

Shortly after we first met, she explained her job to me.

“In public relations, only two things count: who you know… and who you know.”

“Don’t you have to land the deals as well?”

She ran her finger across the top of my hand and gave me a sly smile.

“You close,” she said.

“I influence.”

Talk about a seductive sales pitch. No wonder I was instantly bewitched. And looking back on it now, meeting Lizzie came around the same time (spring of ‘93) when my New York luck finally began to change. Up until that point I was scratching out a living as a “recruitment executive” at a big commercial employment agency in midtown. It was one of a string of dead-end jobs I’d landed since first hitting the city six years earlier. Professionally speaking, I was starting to feel like a loser-unable to graduate beyond the sort of dreary career prospects offered in the back employment pages of the New York Times. At first, just getting myself established in the city seemed like a real triumph. I found a shabby, railroad-style one-bedroom apartment for $850 a month on Seventy-fifth between First and York (complete with that ultimate low-rent touch: a bathtub in the kitchen). Then I grabbed the first job I could land (“telephone sales associate” for Brooks Brothers-i.e.” the guy who takes your chinos order on the phone). I didn’t exactly have defined career objectives. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. All I did know was: New York was the center of the cosmos. A place that anyone like me (armed with both boundless ambition and boundless workaholism) could eventually conquer.

Boy, was I in for a kick up my Horatio Alger ass. As I quickly discovered, a kid from Maine with a degree from a third-rate state university and no connections didn’t exactly take Manhattan overnight. Sure, I tried to make inroads on Wall Street-but the competition for jobs was brutal, and those “in the loop,” or from the good schools, always won out. Guys like me, on the other hand, were trapped in mid-level employment hell.

Though I was desperate to find something “executive,” I kept bouncing from lowly position to lowly position, always hoping that it might lead to a promotion. Even when I was taking phone orders for Brooks Brothers, I kept trying to find a way into the management division of the organization-only to be told that, given my piss-poor entry-level status, I would have to put in several years’ service before being considered for advancement.

But I didn’t want to spend three years wired to a headset, asking customers questions like, “And do you want the crew or the V-neck cream Shetland?” I knew I had a skill, a talent-something that would eventually allow me to flourish in New York. The problem was, I still hadn’t figured out what that talent might be.

So I continued to drift, exchanging that mind-numbing job for a series of others, including a lackluster post in the Saks Fifth Avenue publications department. After seven dull months writing lingerie copy, I moved on, becoming a “placement officer” at a midtown employment agency. About three months into this electrifying job, I met Chuck Zanussi. He’d asked the agency to find him a new secretary, I was assigned the task, and we spent about a week talking regularly on the phone as he vetted assorted candidates.

I must have imnressed him with my so-getting style-because,

during our last call, he said, “What’s a sharp guy like you doing working in such a no-hope job?”

“Looking for a way out. Fast.”

“Do you think you could sell?”

“Believe me,” I lied, “I can sell.”

“Then come in and see me.”

Within a week of joining CompuWorld, however, I came to realize that that absurdly cocky assertion was actually true. From the moment I tied up my first deal (an eighth-of-a-pager from a software privacy prevention company called Lock-It-Up), I knew I had found my “calling.” Every sale, I discovered, was a small victory, an accomplishment (not to mention another couple of dollars in my pocket). The more space I peddled, the more I began to learn the nuances of salesmanship: how to schmooze, sweet-talk, snare.

“Think of every sale as a seduction,” Chuck Zanussi advised me shortly after I joined CompuWorld.

“The goal is to get the client into bed-but to do it in such a way that they don’t realize they’re having their clothes torn off. You get too heavy-handed, you start slobbering on their neck, they’re gonna tell you to buzz off. Remember: The operative word in seduction is finesse.”

I recalled that advice two weeks later when I was wandering around the Javits Convention Center. I was attending my first industry trade show-SOFT US-the national schmoozeathon for the software industry. Cruising through the thousand or so stalls spread around the main convention floor, I noticed a stand for a company called MicroManage-which had been high on a hit list of companies that Chuck Zanussi assigned me shortly after I joined the company.

“These MicroManage guys have got a great product called the Disc Liberator,” Chuck had said.

“But they’ve also got a hesitancy problem when it comes to advertising with us. Read up as much as you can on the Disc Liberator and land the fuckers.”

To date, MicroManage had refused to return my calls. Which is I was so pleased to stumble upon their sales stand-and to notice that their representative was a knockout. Mid-twenties. Long legs. High cheekbones. Jet-black hair cut fashionably short. Decked cut in a smart black suit. Very preoccupied with the phone as I approached her stand.

“Hi there,” she said, ending the call and proffering her hand.

“Lizzie Howard. How can I help?”

The handshake was firm, no-nonsense, the voice suggesting a slight hint of upstate New York behind the sophisticated veneer.

“Ned Allen, CompuWorld,” I said.

“You know our magazine?”

“Maybe,” she said with a teasing glint in her eye.

“If you’re in software, you’ve got to know us. We’re one of the biggest computer magazines in America.”

“The third biggest,” she said.

“So you do know us?”

Another of her sharp, impish smiles.