The thought of taking antidepressants depressed me. “No, absolutely not,” I muttered. “I’ll be fine. I’ll deal with it.”
“Zoloft isn’t only for depres—”
“No, no. Really, no,” I said.
Dr. Ruth gave me a long look, then shrugged. “Oookay,” she announced before hauling herself out of her chair and limping toward the door. “Here, take this with you,” she said, picking up a leaflet entitled Facts about Irritable Bowel Syndrome. “You should also try this.” She handed me a square paper bag of brown gunk labeled “Fiber Supplement.” “Just add water and drink it in the morning,” she said. “It’s unpleasant, but it might help.” She gave me another low-wattage smile as she leaned on the doorknob. “Good luck, Christopher. And come back if you need anything. Not that I need to tell you that, of course.” I walked out with a worried grunt, signed insurance documents at the reception desk, then jammed myself into the creaking elevator with some of my fellow patients, all of them toothless and geriatric.
They all looked so damn healthy to me.
So how did I end up in New York? The nib I completed for Barrow on that traumatic Friday was followed by more nibs, then, in a profound development of my Times career, some “lead” nibs. Eventually I was trusted with a few proper news stories, which carried my name at the top of them. My copy of How to Read the Financial Pages, meanwhile, became ripped and bent with heavy consultation. By August, Barrow had agreed to pay me thirty pounds for a nine-hour shift. I soon became fluent in finance, able to riff confidently on price/earnings ratios, dividend yields, “Pac-Man” defense strategies, stock option trigger prices, and “discounted cash-flow” balance sheet analysis—as though I knew what it all meant. I watched and rewatched Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, with Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecko, in the hope of eventually understanding the plot. Then the lunches started. My first was with the chief executive of Treatt, a fragrance manufacturer. The lunch wasn’t held in a restaurant, but in the catered offices of a PR firm. I followed Robert Cole’s advice to the word. As homework, I read the novel Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, so that I would have something to talk about over the appetizer—after, of course, I had discussed the weather, the traffic, and the route my cab had taken. It worked flawlessly, as Cole had said it would. By the time the fish course arrived (“Hope you like skate,” whispered the PR woman), my nerves and nausea had gone. I had, however, drained half a bottle of Cabernet by then.
As the weeks passed I became a veteran of the business lunch. Cole’s tutorial had liberated me from the nervous dyspepsia that had ruined countless social occasions since I’d left home at the age of eighteen. Now I had some catching up to do. I consumed fields of lamb shanks, oceans of lobster tails, and pints of gazpacho. I snacked on blinis and shards of parmigiano reggiano. I scarfed steak tartare, with fried, garlic-soaked bread, for breakfast. In short, I became fat. My head, with its permanent sunburn and sheen of boozesweat, inflated. My waistline bullied my trouser seam. By the time a new business editor was appointed, I had become a restaurant snob, never to be tempted again by the color photographs in a Pizza Hut menu.
Cook’s replacement was a redoubtable woman named Patience Wheatcroft, a middle-aged mother with a teenager’s figure who had previously worked at the tabloid Mail on Sunday. Her wardrobe was sensational. She would click into the office on Manolo Blahnik stilettos, wearing a short leather skirt and checkered red-and-black Chanel jacket, accessorized with oversized gold buttons. Her stilettos, the office soon learned, came in a variety of violent shades: blood red, furious purple, and death black. Once she turned up in the office in a cowboy jacket with tassels. She reminded me of one of Donald Trump’s ex-wives: a flamboyant eighties anachronism in the sleek, monochrome nineties. From the day she was appointed (she introduced herself to her subordinates by asking them, in turn, “What exactly do you do here?”), Patience was known only by her first name: She was too terrifying to be dismissed as “Wheatcroft.” She did, however, earn an unofficial nickname—Margot—which was whispered only after particularly heroic lunchtime boozing sessions. It came from the 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life, in which Margot Leadbetter (played by Penelope Keith) is the prim Little England conservative who lives next door to two hippie-ish, downwardly mobile neighbors who are earnestly trying to opt out of the rat race by raising their own livestock and growing vegetables. Some on the business desk also liked to joke that when Patience went home at night, she swapped her aristocratic warble for an un-fashionable Birmingham drawl—switching back into character at ten o’clock the next morning.
I liked Patience a lot, even though she made my palms sweat. She, in turn, saw me as cheap and motivated labor (that is, poor and indebted), so she gave me a temporary six-month contract worth nine thousand pounds. I was immensely grateful. Unable to get excited by banking, insurance, or heavy industry, I suggested stories on media and technology companies. Barrow, who had made his name in business journalism by covering the oil industry during Gulf War I, was not very impressed. “But Chris, they don’t make anything,” he said with a pinched face.
Regardless, the media beat was a good way to get invited to parties in Soho with B-list celebrities and “it girls.” In the technology industry, meanwhile, something very curious was happening. I began writing features on the wildly out-of-proportion stock market success of firms such as Yahoo!—whose young founders had made millions each after going public. It seemed as though the Americans were getting excited over nothing. At the time, I used the business section’s computer to go online; it had a dial-up modem the size of a concrete block, which downloaded web pages at a rate of one frame per day, making it a useless research tool. How could this be the future? As the dot-com boom started to echo across the Atlantic, however, I became converted, and my contract was upgraded to a staff position. Patience eventually gave me a technology column, and, as the speculative bubble inflated, some of my stories started to appear on the front page. On a few occasions PR firms flew me first-class to Silicon Valley to interview the billionaire chiefs of Oracle, Intel, and Cisco Systems. I even met Bill Gates. (So did Patience. “Not even $45 billion can guarantee freedom from dandruff,” she clucked on her return.) By 1999 my responsibilities had been expanded to cover media and telecommunications, and by 2000 I was also editing a weekly section on “e-business.” My career, like that of so many other young and hopelessly inexperienced dot-commers, had been built entirely on the funny money of the hyperinflated Internet economy. I was, in short, a fraud. But when the position of Wall Street correspondent became free in late 2000, I was in the ideal position to seize it.
“You’re probably too young for this job,” Patience told me. “But it’s yours. Just don’t muck it up. I’ll be watching you.”
I had lobbied Patience for the New York job without really thinking about what would happen if I got it. And so the enormity of my move to Manhattan only really sank in as I stood outside my new office at 1211 Sixth Avenue, or, to use its official name, Avenue of the Americas. The building is one of several imposing skyscrapers that make up the Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan. The seventies-style behemoth, which looks like a scaled-down version of the former World Trade Center, is also the headquarters of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in America. The Fox News studio is on the ground floor, the New York Post’s headquarters on the ninth and tenth, and Murdoch’s executive suite somewhere in between the two.