To Be Honest Page 12

  On my first day, I hadn’t even settled into my freestanding cubicle outside Charlie’s office before he told me about a problem. A ghostwriter he represented who wrote best-selling thriller novels under another famous writer’s name wanted to sell a book under his own name; but the outline he’d turned in was sloppy. “He refuses to take notes,” Charlie said. “He’s having an ego freak-out. He’s gonna fire me if I don’t send out this outline as it is.” Charlie asked me to read it and tell him what I thought.

  The outline was sloppy, but I had suspicions as to why. The ghostwriter’s thriller was set in the 1970s in the town where he grew up. The parts describing this town and the teenagers who lived there had been written with more attention than the parts that sounded like a mainstream thriller. I stood in Charlie’s office doorway and proposed my theory.

  “I think he’s scared you’re gonna criticize the parts that mean something to him.” Charlie listened with a skeptical curiosity. “In his ghostwriting, he’s never been allowed to write anything personal or use his own voice. He wants to write about when he was a teenager, but he’s afraid no one will let him. He’s only sloppy with the parts he feels forced to include. If we only edit those parts and compliment the rest, I bet he’ll be moved that we appreciate him for who he really is.”

  Charlie grinned as if I’d offered a strange wager and said, “What if you talk to him?” Charlie mischievously hopped up from his seat. “I’ll say I just hired a new assistant, some kid I don’t even know. This kid liked the outline and wants to talk. I’ll tell him I have no idea what you want to say, that he can skip the conversation if he wants, hang up in the middle, I don’t care. See, I think he’ll be curious enough to take the call. And if he doesn’t like what you have to say, he won’t blame me.” Charlie sized me up. “Are you comfortable getting on the phone with him yourself?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”*

  Charlie held in his laughter with a close-lipped smile and nodded.

  My cubicle faced the glass wall of Charlie’s office; we could see each other from our desks, but we couldn’t hear each other. I watched Charlie call the ghostwriter, swiveling back and forth in his chair. He gave me a thumbs-up, transferred the call to my line, and remained in his office, grinning at me.

  I told the ghostwriter that I’d read the outline and that it struck me as more unique than the stuff he’d worked on over the last five years, more personal and inspired. I noted the spots where I could feel he wasn’t used to being allowed to express himself. I suggested cuts and revisions to every line that felt like he didn’t want to write it.

  As I went through the piece explaining each suggested edit, he stayed quiet on the line. I had no idea how he was responding. Charlie’s eyes stayed on me with anticipation. When I’d finished my comments, the ghostwriter thanked me and asked me to send the call back to Charlie.

  Charlie answered the phone and laugh-wrinkles blossomed around his eyes. Then his mouth fell open. He hung up and dashed to my desk.

  “I don’t know what you said to this guy,” Charlie told me, laughter in his voice. “But he wants to take all your notes. He said, ‘I don’t know where you found this kid, but he’s the best editor I’ve ever worked with.’”

  Charlie read my edit of the outline and burst from his office. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this is good.” He gave me the intrigued look I’d already come to love. “But I’ve gotta ask,” he said. “How did you know he’d listen to you?”

  “I didn’t,” I told him. “I just try to give everyone permission to be honest and hope they take me up on it.”

  I went out to lunch, high off this ridiculous triumph, and when I returned to the office, one of the other agents approached me. “Charlie told me about what you did today. You’ve got nerve! Your second day at work!” Each agent that passed my cubicle stopped to congratulate me. Unfortunately, my second day was the high point.

  In the weeks that followed, it became clear to all of us that I was an awful assistant. I needed every aspect of my job explained to me, and I missed typos in everything I wrote. Eventually, Charlie called me into his office to tell me I was making too many mistakes, that he couldn’t proofread everything for me, that he had to be able to trust me. I said something like, “I’ve already been trying my best. I think I’m just not good at this job.”

  At first, Charlie chuckled, amused by the oddness of my essentially firing myself. But then he quickly became stiff and anxious. “This isn’t working out here,” he said. “You’re not an assistant. And, really, you’re not cut out to be an agent, either. You’re not a salesman. You’re a creative person, a writer or editor. I remember what you did on the second day. You’re talented. If you can get an interview for a creative job, list me as your reference and I’ll tell them that story and talk them into hiring you. But I’m not gonna let you be an assistant. I’m gonna tell them the truth.”

  “I like the truth,” I said.

  As hard-boiled as I could be about rejection, Charlie firing me shook me up. First, I was sad that I wouldn’t be able to hang out with him anymore. Second, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get another job. It had been virtually impossible to get this one, and even an eccentric boss I loved and respected didn’t want me working for him.

  When I told a friend from college that I’d been fired after only three months at the job, she wasn’t shocked; she said she’d been doubtful from the start about whether I could hold a job. She advised me to stay quiet about getting fired, to keep it secret. “You have to portray yourself as competent,” she said, “Even if you aren’t.” She suggested that, when I searched for future jobs, I should omit this one from my resume and act as if it never happened. I told her what Charlie had said about being my reference, about how he’d help me become a writer. “You believed that?” she said. “He was trying to get you out of the room! Definitely don’t list the person who fired you as a reference. That would be crazy.” At the thought that even Charlie might have lied to me, I was fully depressed.

  I’d been fired on a Monday, so I dragged myself to the open mic for some cheering up.

  The Clubhouse stood on a filthy, frenzied East Village corner; out front, I always encountered something interesting. Once, an elderly beatnik approached me, announced himself as a “card-carrying homosexual” who usually was in bed by “jazz noon.” He said he’d gotten “wise” by “interviewing his brain” and suggested that I follow him into the park “like back in the ’60s”. Another time, I saw a well-dressed young woman curled inside a much older homeless man’s shopping cart. He leaned over the cart’s side so she could do his makeup. I watched her gingerly apply his eyeliner, holding still to keep the cart from rolling and ruining his cat-eye. I loved that corner.

  On the day of my firing, I showed up to find a bunch of my favorite open-mic musicians smoking out front. I was greeted by my favorite of all, a magnetic girl my age in a camouflage T-shirt.

  “Hey Michael,” she said. “How’s it going?” Each time she acknowledged me, I’d blush, overwhelmed with gratitude.*

  “Well,” I told the group, “this morning I got fired.”

  There wasn’t a beat before they all broke out in applause. “Congratulations!” she said.

  “It happens to the best of us,” someone said. “… and the worst of us.” Everyone laughed.

  “Man,” said the kid who recorded everybody in his parents’ Harlem basement. “Getting fired is so great. I only started playing music because I had free time when I got fired.”

  “I got fired from every job I ever had,” my favorite, the most brilliant person I knew, told me. “I even got fired from my best job working for a private detective. I was supposed to be following somebody and I spaced out and lost him.”

  We stood on that corner for a while, telling stories of failure. Then we went inside and I watched them play their songs, their lyrics full of sentiments others wouldn’t dare admit.

  Having exhausted all my
connections, I applied to every writing-adjacent job I could find that didn’t have “assistant” in the title. I sent out dozens of resumes that listed my three months as an assistant as my only office work experience and received only one response: from a writing and editing job at a literacy program. I interviewed with a woman in a suit who struck me as an incognito oddball passing as a professional. The whole interview, she stifled charmed laughter. I asked her about the job and she said it involved producing books for schools to help below-level readers. Everything had to be written simply, at the lowest reading levels, but with subject matter appropriate to kids older than ten, sometimes for teenagers. I found this fascinating and asked a lot of questions about the program’s teaching techniques; I was impressed by everything she told me. She remarked that I was the most curious and enthusiastic job applicant she’d ever had.

  Eventually, the interviewer told me she’d noticed my previous job had only lasted three months and ended a few weeks ago. “It’s actually an amazing story,” I said. I launched into telling her about my past trouble with interviews and how Charlie had been idiosyncratic enough to hire me, and then about being an awful assistant. “Charlie said he’d recommend me for a creative job like this but he won’t let me be an assistant.”

  My interviewer finally let herself freely laugh. “I’m definitely calling him,” she said.

  I was hired, and my first day she told me about her phone call with Charlie. “His side of the story was even funnier than yours! He said you’re a nut but that I’d be crazy not to hire you.”

  “I think that’s fair,” I told her.

  * It’s easy to understand now that she didn’t see a job interview as a place for great conversation or self-expression. I was the only one who cared if our meeting involved something authentic.

  * If you can believe it, this atrocity of a question was sincere.

  † As crazy as that interpretation may sound, I found it more believable than her claim that getting a job required that I say perfectionism was my biggest flaw.

  * I can understand why I might sound arrogant or cocky here, but I meant this literally: I genuinely couldn’t understand why someone would be uncomfortable getting on the phone in this situation.

  * There were times when I even thanked her for including me, which made everybody present uncomfortable.

  Chapter 6

  This Is Not Normal

  That first night at the Clubhouse, I’d written down the name of the woman in the suit: Eve. When she played again, I was sure to be there. She got onstage wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, gray torn jeans, and black cowboy boots. I gathered that this was her usual look, that she’d only worn a suit that first night to match the suited man. I searched the room for the suited man, but didn’t see him; I wondered if they’d broken up. I assumed that a boyfriend would attend all his genius girlfriend’s performances.

  She played a thin three-stringed wooden instrument I’d never seen before, a thinner dulcimer she hung from a shoulder strap and strummed like a guitar. We both played small instruments. Onstage, Eve was controlled and serious, her eyes aimed above the crowd. She didn’t speak between songs.

  I saw Eve play often at the weekly open mic and showed up at all her shows. She never noticed me. Though I’d usually approach anyone I wanted to meet, Eve made me too nervous. I hoped eventually we’d be introduced through one of our mutual friends.

  In my first six months in New York, I played some shows of my own at the Clubhouse, and some new friends invited me to play shows with them at other venues too. I was soon performing a couple times a month on lineups with musicians I loved. But I still hadn’t met Eve.

  Eventually, I noticed her in the audience at one of my shows, probably there to see the mutual friend I was opening for. Onstage, when I was supposed to be concentrating on my performance, I could only think of Eve’s presence. I kept forgetting lyrics and hitting incorrect chords because I was distracted by my sweating under the lights, imagining how repellant I looked.

  When I got off the stage and sat down, Eve took the empty seat beside me, which nearly made me spontaneously burst into tears. “Hey, I like your songs,” she said. “I’m Eve.”

  “I know who you are,” I told her. “I like your songs too. I go to all your shows.” Her brow knitted and I realized she thought I was mocking her. “I’m not being sarcastic,” I said. “A lot of people think I’m joking when I’m not.” She eyed me, unsure what to make of this reply. “I really do go to all of your shows,” I told her. “I just never introduced myself.”

  She settled into my earnestness but postponed committing to an opinion on it. She quickly suggested that we play music together sometime, gave me her number, said it was nice to meet me, and returned to her table and the friends she’d arrived with.

  The next day, I called her and left a short message with my name and number. Then I spent the whole day worrying that she might not remember me by name, that I should have reminded her who I was. That night, I was playing music alone in my apartment when she called me back and asked me to meet her for a drink at a bar in Brooklyn in thirty minutes. “Weren’t we gonna play music?” I asked, immediately regretting the question. Before she could answer, I said, “Never mind. Yes, I’ll meet you.”

  She’d chosen a bar with wrought iron crisscrossing and circling the windows, chairs, and walls; it felt like having a drink inside a birdcage. We looked funny together, Eve in her ripped jeans and black hoodie with the hood up and me in my dark grey fraying junk-shop suit and thick-rimmed black glasses.

  Eve started asking me standard questions: where was I from, how long had I lived in New York, how many siblings did I have. Then she asked me what my parents were like, which struck me as an odd thing to ask upon first meeting someone. But it was an easy question to answer. “My parents are really honest,” I told her. “My whole family is. My dad, especially, sees through everything. He’s really good at spotting fraudulence and hypocrisy.”

  “Hmmm,” Eve said, thrown off by this strange answer but also curious. “Are your parents still together?”

  “Actually, it’s a crazy story!” I said, excited to tell her about my parents’ divorce, which I considered funny and interesting. “My family goes every summer to this place I call family therapy camp …” Eve listened to my explanation of family camp, her brow thoroughly furrowed. When I told her that Mom left Dad for someone else from camp, her mouth twisted. “Then we all kept going to camp together anyway: my mom and dad and my mom’s boyfriend!”

  “Wait,” Eve said, switching from revulsion to urgent interest. “Your parents got divorced and still spend time together?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Eve reached into her hoodie’s pocket with her small fidgety hands and produced a ballpoint pen. She bent over her napkin and began to draw, an excuse to look down so her hood would hide her face. “My parents won’t be in the same room,” she said. “They can’t even bear to hear each other’s names.”

  “Because they still love each other or because they hate each other?” I asked.

  “They’re still in love,” Eve said. “Or maybe that’s just what I want to think.”

  In the time it took to say these few lines, Eve’s ballpoint drawing had taken form on the napkin: a crosshatched portrait of a young woman’s big-cheeked cherubic face. I stopped the conversation to gush about how much I loved it, how crazy it felt to see it come out of her so suddenly and casually when I didn’t even know she drew. As I rambled, she added to the drawing a cartoonish buck-toothed tentacled monster growing out of the young woman’s head like a parasite. She added a word bubble to the monster’s mouth but didn’t fill it.

  Eve looked thrown off by my praise, so I asked, “Are you one of the people who gets uncomfortable when someone freaks out about your art?” Before she could answer, I told her, “When I say people hate honesty, they assume I’m talking about negative honesty, like criticisms, but I find people are even more bothered by positiv
e honesty, compliments, telling someone you care.”

  Eve laughed at this, partly unnerved, partly charmed. “You are really honest,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I told her. “When I tell people I’m honest, they never believe me.”

  “Of course not!” Eve said, laughing. “It’s the most suspicious line ever!”