To Be Honest Page 11

  “There’s a show tonight,” she told me, her eyes practically twinkling. “You should buy this stuff and go with me and wear it and see the difference.”

  Despite the ridiculousness of this whole experience, I was flattered she would invite me somewhere, and the experiment sounded more interesting than staying home. So I bought this plaid shirt and pair of jeans and jean jacket and went with her to the show.

  There were lots of people I knew there, some kids I hadn’t seen since high school, some I’d seen around other times when home from college. The moment I walked in, an acquaintance ran up to me, glowing. “Michael! You look so good! I’ve never seen you dressed like this.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s an experiment. Shira told me to wear it. She says dressing differently will make people like me.”

  “It will!” the acquaintance said. She thought she was being positive.

  Each person I ran into told me how good I looked. Friends of friends introduced themselves warmly. Acquaintances who usually avoided me in public acknowledged that they knew me and said hello. Dressed this way, if I stood alone, strangers made eye contact. The difference was staggering. I knew people were easily tricked, but this went beyond my lowest expectations for humanity.

  Everyone I spoke to encouraged me to keep dressing like this, so I gave it a try. I bought some smaller T-shirts and pants and some more jeans and vintage button-up shirts. The first time Dad saw me in tight jeans, he said, “You look … odd.”

  “I know,” I replied. “This girl convinced me to dress like this and it turns out everyone likes me more. It feels like wearing a costume, and it’s insane to me that it makes a difference, but I think I’m gonna try it on occasion. It’s the first thing I’ve ever done to get people to like me.”

  Dad scratched his beard. “Doesn’t sound like the thing to do,” he said. “What if you meet someone who actually would understand you and they discount you as a trend-follower because you’re dressed like everybody else? Imagine if you met yourself when you were dressed like that. What would you think?”

  “I’d think I looked embarrassing,” I said. “Like a cowboy.”

  “That’s not good,” Dad said.

  “But what if we’re the only ones who think like that?” I asked.

  “Why would that matter?” Dad asked. “Who wants to hang out with superficial, trendy idiots?”

  I didn’t have a good answer. But I kept dressing this way. When I returned to college that fall, everyone told me again how much better I looked.

  “I guess if other people like it, that’s worth something?” I replied to one friend who brought it up. “I don’t know. It’s a crazy decision to be forced to make.”

  “How to dress?” she asked.

  “No, whether to pursue the approval of fools or to resign myself to being alone.”

  Eventually, on one of my vintage shopping trips, I bought some clothes that felt more connected to a style I actually liked. I watched so many film noir movies and admired so much jazz photography, it occurred to me that I could wear suits. After some junk store searching near my college, I found a few fraying suits and an overcoat that fit me and bought some plain white button-up shirts and thin black ties. I didn’t fit in anymore, but I was happy to go back to looking like myself.

  This was how I dressed when I graduated, went to family therapy camp once more, and then set off for New York, where I’d decided to move.

  I’d heard New York had good concerts and jobs in writing and publishing. Some I knew from college were moving there or were originally from there, so I had couches to stay on while I found a job and an apartment. I liked the old buildings and characters and chaos. Los Angeles was famous for being fake and homogenous, but New York was famous for being blunt and eccentric. It seemed my best option.

  But I wasn’t optimistic about my future. The further from childhood people got, the more frequently they lied, and for pettier and pettier reasons. According to my observations, maturity meant more compromising, less confrontation, more mind-reading, less directness, more conformity, less uniqueness. What I liked about myself would surely be even less appreciated with age.

  So, while most kids moved to New York with big dreams, I arrived prepared to be hated.

  * Of all the questions to ask, that was the one that came to mind.

  * It didn’t occur to us that we should talk about something that would appeal to everyone present.

  * In retrospect, I wonder if family camp’s unique language might have also served some legal purpose. Camp’s facilitators were all certified therapists, but it still strikes me as suspicious.

  * I suspect the trouble was that he’d slept with a couple girls in the game and that everyone there knew his current girlfriend, who wasn’t present.

  * I was so flattered that it didn’t occur to me that it was odd for this woman in her fifties to pick an eighteen-year-old for this part.

  * I don’t think my parents or I were aware of how insane this essay made me look. But even if it had occurred to us, we’d have likely applied our classic line: “I’d only want to attend a school that appreciated an essay about family therapy camp.”

  † This was 1998. Social media wouldn’t exist for another few years.

  * This was how a lot of the divorce went: Miriam would make a valid argument and we’d take turns shrugging.

  † I’m not the expert on my own repression, but I speculate that I wasn’t crying for the same reason I didn’t cry about my nursery school vaccination: I’d been emotionally prepared. I wasn’t raised with a belief that my parents would stay together forever, so I was ready.

  † This inspirational quote was intended to comfort the neurotic too stuck on what everyone felt about him, not to encourage me to ignore my sister’s devastation about my parents’ divorce.

  * Her description wasn’t exactly wrong.

  Part 2

  An Honest Living

  Chapter 5

  Open Mic

  On my second day in New York, the roommate of the friend whose couch I was occupying recommended that I go to an open mic in the East Village to perform my bitter ukulele songs. I’d never been to an open mic. I’d only seen them in movies, always portrayed negatively, so I went with low expectations.

  The Clubhouse was a crowded dive with chipped-painted black tables and a cheesy neon sign behind the stage advertising the place’s name. As I hung around waiting for the open mic to start, my attention landed on a couple in the corner, cuddling, making out, and eye-gazing. She wore a black skirt, a white button-up shirt, and a thin black tie. His brown suit seemed much fancier. His reddish blond hair swept wildly about his head, and his dimpled chin was one of the finest I’d seen. Guitar cases leaned beside them. New York didn’t wait to show off its fantasies. I wanted to look like him, to feel that girl looking at me like that. I’d accepted long ago those things would never happen to me, that they were the culture’s rewards for dishonesty, but I’d trained myself to enjoy marveling at it from afar. After all, I could enjoy a painting without having to own it.

  The open mic started with the host, a much older angry nerd that I feared could be my future, playing a set of his own songs for his captive audience of open mic musicians. Then, the next forty-five minutes or so featured various East Village archetypes: a teenager who could barely play, an abrasive elderly punk rocker, a psychedelic poet, an inadequate rapper, a fame-hungry pop duo, but I found even the bad acts enthralling. And whenever I got bored, I spied on the couple in the corner.

  About an hour in, a scruffy-haired, Jewish-looking boy my age played guitar and sang in an exquisite low vibrato a song I adored so much it seemed impossible that I’d ended up in the same room as the one who wrote it. He mentioned he was playing a full-length show at the Clubhouse in a few days so I wrote down his name on a napkin to look him up later and see him play again. More bad acts followed, but then a woman with her hair in elaborate curls that must’ve taken hours to construct played piano and
sang a jazz tune she’d written that sounded like a brilliant classic, another one of the best performances I’d ever seen. The open mic went on in this pattern, a few crummy acts followed by something stunning. I felt like I was seeing Woodstock, but from a few feet away in a grungy room with random amateurs playing between the geniuses. My napkin filled with names.

  I noticed that the musicians I’d loved were all hanging out with one another, that anyone could walk up and ask to be on their email list or take a show flier or buy a burnt CD of their recordings. I introduced myself to each musician I liked. I told them how much I loved their songs, often complimenting them on specific lyrics or musical moments. People usually fled from my compliments, but these musicians responded with curiosity. I told them this was my second day in New York and they said variations of “You came to the right place!” and “Get ready. You’re in for it.”

  Around midnight, the suited couple in the corner was called to perform. They played raw folk songs, harmonizing in voices that didn’t match their put-together exteriors, his nasal and hers hoarse. She sang in the highest part of her range so her voice would crack. The suited couple made vulnerability and imperfection look so cool that I suspected even “most people” could appreciate it.

  By the time my name came up to perform, it was 3 am and almost everyone had gone home. I played my two songs and the host liked them enough that he invited me to play a show there sometime. Before I left, I searched for all my napkin names on the club schedule and wrote their show dates down in my own pocket calendar. My calendar had never been so full.

  Standard Questions

  My first days in New York were characterized by humidity and fantasy. My college acquaintance’s apartment wasn’t air-conditioned. On the way to my first job interview—to be an assistant at an entertainment agency—I descended from his fourth-floor walkup, waited shoulder-to-shoulder on the sweltering subway platform, and slogged a dozen trash-scented blocks. On the way, I anxiously envisioned what would happen if I couldn’t get a job. It seemed quite plausible that I was unhireable. I tried to distract myself with the beauty of the Flatiron district, and the elevator ride to a floor that felt awe-inspiringly high. But the fantasy was soiled by the certainty that I’d be rejected here like everywhere else, and the fact that I’d sweat through my suit.

  My interviewer, a woman from human resources, likely in her late thirties or early forties, wore her hair in a platinum blonde crew cut. The roundness of her face matched her round-framed glasses and contrasted with the lines of her pinstripe suit. She smiled with her mouth closed and only the left corner of her lips lifting, the smile equivalent of a single raised eyebrow. The phrase “human resources” struck me as refreshingly harsh, an admission that they defined humans as mere cogs in a capitalist scheme. But it was hard to imagine this cool woman in front of me viewing humans as resources. I thought this talent agency should rename their hiring department with something more creative and personalized.

  “Okay,” my interviewer said, leaning back in her chair. It felt like she might put her feet up on the desk. “Let’s see what you’ve got.” I didn’t know anything about the protocols of professionalism in corporate life, but I felt certain she was ignoring them and doing as she pleased. I liked that.

  “This is my first real job interview,” I told her.

  Dimples appeared in her forehead and she gave me a side-eyed smile, unsure if I was kidding. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said, waving her hand in the air, a response that would smooth the moment regardless of whether I was joking. Despite her social grace, I could tell my comment about this being my first interview had thrown her off.

  She started asking questions, her voice dry and joyless: why had I chosen to apply there, why did I want to work in entertainment, and so on. After a flurry of questions she’d clearly asked many times a day and abhorred asking, I found a pause and said, “They should let you choose your own interview questions.” At that, she perked up. I told her, “I bet we could have a great conversation if you chose the questions.” She laughed, which emboldened me. I asked, “Do most people give pretty similar answers?”

  She laughed again and said, “Yeah.”

  “That would drive me crazy,” I told her. “It’s like water torture, but with interview answers instead of water.”

  She seemed to enjoy that line, replied with a smile and a shrug, “Sometimes it’s pretty boring.”

  “Do you have a question you’d like to ask everybody, but that you don’t? Something you’d personally like to know?”

  She grinned one-sidedly again and bounced her fingertip against her forehead. “I’d have to think about that.” She sighed to herself, still smiling. Then she looked down at her desk as if to read something written there. “So, where do you see yourself in ten years?”

  Given the real conversation we’d just had, I assumed she was joking. But she bristled, all camaraderie instantly gone, believing I’d laughed at her. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect to continue immediately with the questions they make you ask.”

  She sat at attention. “No one makes me—these are standard questions.”* She asked me again where I saw myself in ten years and I told her I couldn’t speculate because life is chaotic and uncertain. She appeared to find that reply surprising. She moved on to another question and I suffered through watching her unhappily doing her job. But then, out of nowhere, she asked a question I loved: “What’s your biggest flaw?” This was something I wanted to know about everyone. The question invited introspection and confession and gave me a chance to show off my honesty.

  My thoughts jumped to what Dad told me when I was a child about his hiring methods. When a job applicant came in for an interview, Dad would ask them to write a short essay using a provided list of ten vocabulary words. But Dad had invented three of the ten words; they had no meaning. He gave extra points to applicants who admitted they didn’t know the fake words and minus points for those who attempted to use them.

  I asked my interviewer, “Do you mean my worst flaws according to other people or according to myself? If you asked someone else my worst flaws, they’d list some things I consider my best qualities.” The interviewer sat up, engaged again. “Most people say I’m judgmental about perfectly normal behavior, that I think too much, that I’m unnecessarily confrontational, always making a scene …” Laugh lines appeared around her eyes, which I interpreted to mean she liked my truthfulness, so I kept riffing. “As far as what I consider my worst flaw, I wish I could be more tolerant of other people’s cowardice, immorality, and weakness. After all,” I said, “we’re just the products of our upbringings and genetics, so it’s irrational for me to resent people for what they’ve inherited.”

  The interviewer bobbled her head, suppressing laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just …” She rested her palms flat on the desk and pulled herself together. “I don’t feel right letting you go on like this. When someone asks your biggest flaw, you’re not supposed to really list your flaws. I thought you were joking.”

  “People often think I’m joking,” I replied. “I’m rarely joking.”

  The interviewer regarded me with pity. “You should say something good about yourself that sounds like a flaw, but isn’t really, like that you’re a workaholic.”

  “But if the only acceptable answer is a lie, why ask?” I was genuinely curious about her hiring methods but, from my mouth, “why” lashed like a whip. Horses would hurry. Lions would straighten.

  “It’s just how you’re supposed to answer,” she said.

  I pulled a cloth from my suit pocket and cleaned my glasses while I continued. “But what are you trying to find out? Are you testing how convincingly I can recite a predetermined cultural script?”*

  She softened, feeling sorry for me again. “None of this stuff you’re saying matters,” she said. “I’m trying to help you. Lots of interviewers ask these questions. If you react like this, no one will hire you.”

  It then dawned on me
that this exchange might be the real test. Perhaps she was challenging my integrity, seeing if I’d stand by my position.† “I have faith that some employers value honesty,” I told her. “But if it turns out you’re right, that I’m truly unhireable, I’ll have to find another way to make a living that better suits who I am.”

  The interviewer’s concern curdled into bitterness. “Okay,” she said, giving up on me. She rose from her seat, forced a broad smile, held out her hand for me to shake, and rattled off things she didn’t mean. “In a few days, we’ll let you know our decision,” she said, already knowing her decision. “It was nice meeting you,” she told me, excited to never meet me again.

  A Fake Horn on a Real Unicorn

  Each job interview ended the same way: I’d straightforwardly answer a question and my interviewer would respond as if I was joking, rude, crazy, or stupid. Temp agencies considered me insane because I admitted I didn’t possess any of the skills on their lists.

  During my job search, I spent most evenings at the Clubhouse. I befriended many of the musicians I liked and hung out with them as much as I could, often all night. They didn’t have to wake up early because most either lived with parents or crashed on couches or worked at coffee shops, clothing stores, or bookstores. One was an art mover. One constructed window arrangements for a department store. Everyone I’d known in college worked in an office. When I spoke to my new musician friends about my failing job search, they’d say something like, “You’re really gonna be somebody’s assistant? That doesn’t sound good.”

  A few months after my arrival in New York, I ended up getting another interview to be an assistant to a literary agent. Charlie was around my dad’s age, wore a tailored suit and tortoiseshell glasses and spoke in old slang with a cool Rat Pack cadence. I found him very handsome; I liked his rakish smile and freewheeling demeanor. Charlie was always in enthusiastic motion, his arms swinging or his hand dabbing the bald front of his head with a handkerchief. He interviewed me in his hip mid-century modern office, asking me only what he wanted to know. I showed him the literary magazine I’d edited in college and he asked how I worked with writers, how I decided on the cover. He asked how long I’d been in New York and what I thought of it. I told him about the open mic, about how no one this cool had ever liked me before. My story of randomly meeting artists I admired reminded him of how he’d become an agent. A few decades before, Charlie had asked his best friend, an unpublished poet, if he could send his poems around to publishers. This friend ended up the best-selling modern poet in the United States. I confessed to Charlie I’d never heard of his famous poet best friend and he laughed, charmed by the admission. He went on, saying that confidence in one’s ability to recognize beauty and talent defined a good agent. I told him I was surprised at how many took opinions from other people, afraid to trust their own observations. I brought up my favorite part of the children’s novel and cartoon The Last Unicorn. “The unicorn’s horn is invisible to most people,” I told him. “Only magical people have the vision to tell the difference between a unicorn and a regular horse. At one point, a witch recognizes the unicorn and cages her in a traveling zoo. But the zoo’s audience isn’t made up of magical people; they only see a regular horse. So the witch attaches a fake horn next to the unicorn’s real horn. The crowds are awestruck by this fake horn, which could have been fastened onto any old horse. The fake horn impresses them more than a real unicorn.” Charlie said he’d heard all he needed, that I was hired.