Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? Read online

  “At least you're not working with Allen,” she says.

  I tell her I wish that were true. If he hadn't dumped a bunch of work on me, I'd be done and home by now. Allen is like the evil asshole twin of Skippy from Family Ties, brandishing his papier-mâché bravado, trying to assert his superiority over me in every interaction. Although he's an attorney (and one of my bosses), we are about the same age. If we had been in high school together, I would have beat his ass. The problem is, he knows that and takes pleasure in harassing me. This afternoon, he mocked me for not knowing a keyboard shortcut in Word and then dropped a stack of file folders right onto my lap. I am sure that he ran back to his office, reminisced for a moment, and treated himself to some rough masturbation.

  Sometimes after work I go to my overpriced gym on Lafayette Street and kick and punch the heavy bag, pretending that it's Allen. It's not only a great workout, but a dependable way to unwind.

  “Allen and Marilyn,” Anna says. “Dang. Listen, Thomas, I can stay and give you a hand.”

  Sometimes, I get the feeling Anna sees me as an endangered species, a manatee who will swim headfirst into a propeller if not protected by outside intervention. Sometimes, I can't believe people like her actually exist on Wall Street. But she doesn't understand that, for me, the pin is already out of the grenade. She has better things to do with her time. She has a career to think about. I kindly decline her offer.

  I never planned to end up here. After college, I traveled, stumbled my way through graduate school, and tried to discover what my life was about. While I was busy figuring out nothing, or at least nothing that advanced my career or future, my friends moved to the Bay Area, got entry-level jobs with no real work responsibilities for $75K per year, acquired hundreds of thousands' worth of stock options, and attended ridiculous site launch parties on the tab of venture capitalists. If you weren't involved with a pre-Initial Public Offering startup or the financing behind a pre-IPO startup, you were wasting the greatest economic opportunity since buying stock on margin or selling junk bonds.

  It was the dawn of a new era. Technology was guaranteed to unchain us from traditional work roles, from the stuffy expectations heaped upon us by past generations. We would be able to create the careers and lifestyles of our choosing. Business was organized around foosball tables and paintball outings. Deep house music went practically mainstream in SF, LA, and NYC. Ecstasy and hydroponics powered the irrational exuberance and infectious hedonism. Imagination was the only limiting factor. The good times were poised to endure so long as the optimism and energy of our generation endured—faith in the potential and inherent goodness of technology would fill in the gaps. We were to change the course of history. It was the ’60s love generation redux, but with vague political goals, lucrative day jobs, and expensive sneakers.

  I bided my time on the periphery of this wanton excess, while I did an esoteric advanced degree in Latin American Studies, followed by the world's shortest PhD in the department of Social Policy, whatever that is. I lasted through orientation and two classes in the PhD program before deciding to flee. At that point, being an escape artist was not only low risk, it was encouraged. The other side held the offer of consulting gigs, website positions, and stock options as far as the eye could see.

  For some reason, the good times did not last forever.

  By the time that I entered the job market, Bush had hijacked the White House, the economy had nosedived, planes had hit the Twin Towers, and hiring was frozen. I mistakenly thought that having an MA would open some doors, but I couldn't even get a callback from office temp agencies.

  In early 2002, I washed up as a retail employee at Club Monaco—a slightly fancier version of the Gap—up on 5th Avenue and 55th Street in the middle of Manhattan. Even better, I was assigned to the women's dressing room. A key part of my job was to ask female customers if they needed a smaller size. If they came back to the dressing room with a size 6, I'd ask “Are you sure that I can't grab you a 4?” If they came back with a 4, I'd ask about a 2. It was just that simple.

  One day, while I was expertly folding jeans and fitted T-shirts, the assistant store manager, a Jersey boy with LA hair and a fake tan, asked me, “Do you think that you'll ever get your act together and go to college?”

  “I have a master's from Stanford and started a DPhil at the London School of Economics,” I answered and went on folding.

  “Yeah right, man. There isn't even such a thing as a dee fill. You should really try a jay cee instead. It helped me to get this job,” he stated with the resolute authority of a Club Monaco assistant manager.

  I told him that I would consider it.

  Every boom is followed by a bust and, in America, someone will always find a way to make money off of the bust—most likely lawyers. When I heard that a Wall Street firm was hiring researchers to work on high-profile, undisclosed cases, I was so eager to get out of retail that I didn't slow down enough to really understand what the job entailed. I was told only that they represented, among other concerns, a little-known firm called Cerberus Capital Management that was buying up distressed debt. The fact that the company was named after the three-headed guardian dog of Hades and that the papers referred to distressed debt as “vulture investing” did not raise any red flags.

  I was racing toward thirty and most of the once-wide-open doors of opportunity had already slammed in my face. Maybe it was time to take the LSAT or the GMAT and get on with forging a dependable career. These were the new realities. Law seemed respectable enough: something to use your brain, make a solid income; something that I could be proud of at college reunions.

  Once hired, I worked with Cerberus on a couple of cases, but I specialized in the assorted legal problems of a once-prominent research analyst who had been the foremost opinion on telecommunications companies, most notably World-Com. Research analysts are supposed to give unbiased opinion to the public on which stocks were worth buying. But during the telecom bubble, some analysts just worked hand in hand with the bankers and the telecom CEOs to promote the companies. The bankers wanted to host the overvalued IPOs, the telecom CEOs wanted positive appraisals so as to boost their share prices, and the research analysts just siphoned off as many dollars and perks as they could in the process.

  Everyone was in bed together and the analysts were the pitchmen, cheerleading the cause. Our client, a tall, leathery version of Joe Pesci, once made the cover of Business Week on account of his uncanny stock-predicting skills. He later made plenty more headlines for his role in the WorldCom bankruptcy.

  He also got nailed for bragging in a rather salacious email exchange with a “close female friend” about how he was falsely promoting shitty stocks and playing the CEO of a well-known telecom “like a fiddle” to help a big Manhattan banker orchestrate a corporate coup.

  What did he supposedly get out of it? He drummed up a letter of recommendation and a million-dollar donation to get his twins into a swanky Upper East Side preschool, of course. Everyone worth a shit in Manhattan knows that a good preschool is the gateway to Harvard and high society. Plus it's a great place for the parents to network, so it's no big deal if you need to screw over a few thousand investors—especially the kind of common investors who are naïve enough to actually listen to a research analyst.

  The argument in our client's defense went that he was simply role-playing in a cyber-fantasy in which his power on Wall Street was fetishized. Kinky delusions of grandeur, nothing more. My job was to read the thousands of emails between our client and any other close female friends that might be lurking out there. Then I was to write essays summarizing the nature of each relationship, searching for anything that could possibly prove another instance of cyber-fetishism. I had become little more than a professional voyeur. Each night, when I got home from work, I wanted to take my brain out of my skull and scrub it with soap.

  Our client ended up being a fall guy for the greater fraud surrounding the telecom bubble. The real big dogs were so rich by the time
that things fell apart that fucking tens of thousands of investors and letting a few of their underlings' heads roll seemed a small price to pay. They simply factored in legal expenses as a percentage of annual operating costs and drank away any sense of guilt while getting head in the Virgin Islands.

  I hear a few patters of thick-heeled shoes scampering down the corridor and Marilyn suddenly materializes in my cubicle. My fifteen minutes are up. I can smell the stress radiating off of her. She gnaws at the dead skin on her bottom lip and will not look me in the eye. Her fingernails are chewed to the hilt and one of her knee-high nylons is bunched around her ankle.

  She goes straight to my files and starts tearing through them, throwing an empty folder over her shoulder for dramatic effect. She's looking for something that she won't find. I keep my files in what I call the Babylon System, if it can be considered a system at all. I figure that its cryptic nature makes it difficult for them to get rid of me on short notice. Job insurance, so to speak.

  I desperately need another drink.

  “Where's the Level 3 folder? I can't . . . I can't find it,” she says in a trembling voice.

  “And is that spreadsheet . . . is it ready?”

  “I can get it to you tomorrow. I had something to do for Allen and . . .”

  “I don't care what you had to do. . . . I asked you to do something and it needs to be done. NOW.”

  “But . . .”

  “No buts. I can't trust you. I've had enough excuses from you.”

  I feel small and sold, like a hooker being called ugly by a john whom she wouldn't even accept a drink from in her private life.

  Marilyn seems further and further away. Her voice is flat and distant. I nod along and remember how great the mountains look from Seattle when they take on caps of white snow. A ski bus used to go up to Alpental after school on Fridays and another up to Stevens Pass on Sunday mornings. Even on Sundays, it was possible to get fresh tracks on Schim's Meadow if you just got out there early enough. . . .

  “JESUS CHRIST, ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME? I'm going home. The WorldCom doc and the folder had better be on my desk when I walk in tomorrow morning.” Marilyn marches off, never once having made eye contact with me.

  I stare blankly at my computer screen. I want to gouge out my eyes with paper clips and gash my wrists with manila folders. Why am I sitting here, aiding and abetting white-collar criminals and merging with my ergonomically correct office chair, when I should be on the beach in Brazil?

  Twenty-six or twenty-seven is a time of reckoning, particularly for free spirits or whatever you want to call those who don't fit into the normal expectations. It is the weigh station en route to your midlife crisis. Some of the true free spirits, the Hendrixes, Cobains, Morrisons, Joplins, couldn't make it around the bend. Most just drop off or, like the Steven Tylers, the Ice Cubes and Perry Ferrells, compromise and come around to disappointing results. The few, the chosen, the Keith Richardses, Iggy Pops, and James Browns just keep on going.

  I try to find where I would fit into this rubric. My adrenaline stirs, tingling in my gums, heating the skin along my collar. I think of Hemingway: “South America hell! If you went there the way you feel now it would be exactly the same.” But, Lonely Planet in Brazil . . . it's definitely novel. My patron saint, DB Cooper, certainly would have gone for it. Hell, he'd probably commandeer the flight down.

  This could be my opportunity to experience the present with no regard to the future—to fully exist in the moment. Like Ronnie Biggs, I will mock conventions and live unencumbered with the responsibilities of normal society. Ronnie, one of the perpetrators of Britain's 1963 Great Train Robbery, escaped to Rio and, much to the chagrin of Scotland Yard, flaunted it openly, hosting tourists for dinner at his house and selling commemorative coffee mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with his picture. I think that he even cut a couple of punk songs about his antics. The U.K. couldn't extradite Ronnie because he had fathered a Brazilian child (a reliable contingency plan that I should look into). Ronnie only returned to the U.K. in his seventies, after he'd had a couple of strokes, so that he could take advantage of the National Health Service's free treatment in prison. He was even flown home on a private jet, paid for by a British tabloid.

  Ronnie had vision. But in order to execute that vision, he had to be willing to walk away from it all, to be ruthless with his own sentimentality. What about my friends, my apartment, my girlfriend?

  Shit, my girlfriend.

  Sydney and I have been together for a few years and we are in love. In many ways, she is my perfect woman. She claims that I am her perfect man. Unfortunately, our relationship is garbage. It takes a long time to swallow the fact that the person with whom you are in love is not necessarily the person with whom you can build or maintain a functional relationship. We are both still trying to choke that down.

  I call her at home. The phone rings five times before she answers, “We're late for Celeste's shower, remember? What are you still doing at work?”

  “I'm trying to finish up, trying to find some purpose in my life.”

  “Not this again . . .” She exhales. “Why can't you just suck it up and get it done and get home—like everyone else?”

  Sydney grew up in an Air Force family and skipped from base to base across the States and the South Pacific. At twenty, she washed her hands of military life and moved to the promised land of Manhattan. Aided by a lacerating tongue and striking looks, she clawed her way into the metropolitan world.

  “I'm not sure that I want to suck it up. This universal dedication to office life is a fad anyways—it's only been around for a generation or so . . . what do you think if I were to become a travel writer?”

  “Considering that you don't have any significant writing experience, let alone a Pulitzer or anything, I don't think it's such a good idea. What if we want to have kids? I mean, it sounds like a great hobby, but I'd suggest you keep your paycheck, because I'm not supporting your ass. . . . Really, Thomas, you're the only fucking hippie I know who wears Marc Jacobs cologne and an Armani watch.”

  “It's hard to be a conscientious narcissist.”

  “I feel real sorry for you. Get car service and come and pick me up; we're supposed to be at that shower already. . . . Wait, does this mean that we're gonna have to start going Dutch on dates?”

  “I just don't know if I'm going to be able to make it tonight, I've got this—”

  “Fuck it, fine . . . I'll go by myself . . . but honestly, I expect more understanding from you. I thought we were in a mutually supportive relationship.” Sydney is used to getting whatever she wants from men. That's not to say that she isn't intelligent or capable in her own right, merely that she will resort to her black-belt form of emotional and sexual warfare when necessary.

  “I'm sorry. Really, Sydney, I just—”

  She hangs up. It has become the standard end to all of our conversations.

  I bask in the warm romantic afterglow.

  Truthfully, I don't even have comfort in my own apartment. Last week, I came home from work to find a sizable hole from the hallway into the back of my bedroom closet. My room looked like the scene in the movies when the apartment is ransacked in search of the hidden microfilm: drawers overturned, laundry strewn across the floor.

  The cops told me that professional thieves, working a neighborhood, will trash an apartment to make it look like the crime was perpetrated by random junkies. They probably stole my dirty underwear, T-shirts, and plastic hamper to wrap the electronics and inconspicuously carry them right out the front door.

  I had a state-of-the-art laptop. It had all the bells and whistles, although I really only used it to download music and admire some Internet porn.

  I had the new MP3 player that held twenty gigabytes of music.

  A two-hundred-CD changer that was already obsolete.

  A Palm Pilot to hold all of my important contact info—just in case.

  A Zip drive to back up the Palm Pilot. That was already obsolet
e, too.

  They even took the cradle for my flip phone.

  I was on the crest of the technology wave. Almost everything that I had was small, sleek, and silver. I almost caught up with the twenty-first century—and suddenly it was all gone.

  I remember feeling numb upon seeing my room. I've tried to justify the robbery in my head by reminding myself that the thieves can't be having as much negative impact on society as the people who are paying my income. But sociology doesn't mask the fact that I haven't slept in my room since the break-in. I am the little birdie who won't return to its nest after it's been touched by marauders.

  The WorldCom spreadsheet sits open on my screen: miles of grids chronicling business decisions alongside the dates of potentially incriminating emails. I look at my convex reflection in the middle of all my Post-it notes. I appear tired, aging, bored, and, worse, boring. Blood fizzes in my veins. Churning and popping. Bubbles race toward my brain as I start typing an email.

  Dear Marilyn,

  I am not going to be able to finish the WorldCom project tonight. Or ever.

  I'm off to embrace spontaneity, imagination, and other stuff that doesn't exist around here.

  Don't worry about the WorldCom spreadsheet. No matter how many charts we make, they're still guilty.

  Sincerely, Thomas

  I hit SEND. My mind starts collapsing inward like the fancy building demolitions that they show on PBS. Blasting points on all major support columns. It tumbles in upon itself, compacting into the ground and belching forth a plume of dust.