“Oh, right,” I said, offering a pale, trembling hand. “Chris. The Times man.”
She gave me a blank look.
“Ad sales,” explained Adam. The New York bureau of The Times, it seemed, was this single cubicle wedged between the mail room and the advertising sales department of the New York Post. In fact, The Times’s bureau was actually in the mail room. And no one seemed to know it existed.
Adam hadn’t yet cleared his desk (which was meticulously tidy, in maximum contrast to the surrounding chaos), so he showed me to the spare cubicle next to it. I lifted a pile of undelivered mail from the broken swivel-chair and sat down. “This is your computer,” said Adam, pointing to a device that looked as though it predated the vacuum cleaner. I had to kneel down on the sticky carpet—avoiding someone’s dusty, half-eaten croissant—to locate the “on” button. “Don’t look at the keys,” came Adam’s voice from above. He made an “ew” face.
I looked.
The keys had turned almost black with newspaper ink from hundreds of deskless IT support staff, freelancers, and secretarial temps. The gaps between the keys, meanwhile, served as gutters for spilled drinks and crumbs. The desk was slick with rings of congealed coffee and grease from countless lonely takeout lunches. I would later learn that my deadline was 3:00 P.M.—which made lunch breaks almost impossible, unless they were taken at 4:00 P.M., as the waiters cleared the tables around you. I noticed that in Adam’s cubicle there was a heavy, thirty-eight-inch Sony television set—a late-1980s model, tuned permanently to CNBC, the American business news channel. I wondered how Adam had time to watch television during the day.
“You’ll find that the Aussies sometimes use this desk,” said Adam, plucking an empty can of Foster’s from behind my computer monitor and dropping it in the bin. “They share the New York bureau with us.”
The Aussies, I later learned, were two New York reporters for News Corp’s Australian papers. The brutal thirteen-hour time difference between Manhattan and Sydney meant that the Aussies kept very odd hours. Sometimes, clearly, cans of Australian lager were required to keep them motivated.
Before my spirits had time to sink any further, Adam offered to introduce me to Joanna. I stood up and turned around, catching a glimpse of blonde through a glass office door. Thank God, I thought: the bureau is larger than one cubicle. I wondered if Adam had also fantasized about having an office romance with Joanna. Then I remembered that he was married. Adam swung open the door to her office, which had little more charm than my cork enclosure, “Joanna, this is Chris,” he said, then jogged back to his desk, where his phone was ringing.
“Hiiiiiiiiii,” said Joanna with impressively feigned interest. I noticed that she was also watching television—CNN—and had a copy of the New York Times open in front of her. She was wearing stretchy trousers, a heavy sweater, and no makeup, but she still looked glamorous. “So, you’re the new Wall Street guy,” she said in an enthusiastic but motherly tone that reminded me of my old high school English teacher and immediately destroyed any serious notion of a Mrs. Robinson affair.
“So, I expect you’ll soon be getting used to lift and view,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
Why was she talking about the lift? And there was no view—we were a long way from the window and, besides, we were on a low floor.
Once again, I felt like a schoolboy.
“Lift and view, Chris, is what we do here.” Her sentences, I noticed, were emerging fully formed from her mouth, as though part of a prewritten column. Had she researched this speech? Or was she as intimidatingly bright as I feared she might be? “We lift from the New York Times.” She held up the copy on her desk. “And we watch the news.” She pointed to CNN. “We lift… and view. If you can get the hang of that, you too can be a foreign correspondent.”
Her blue eyes bored into me.
Was this a test? Was she serious?
I laughed and said something about exclusives and “off-diary.”
“Good luck,” she said.
The next few months proved Joanna’s point. Foreign reporting from New York, it seemed, involved an awful lot of following-up stories from the New York Times and watching CNBC. I had imagined something more glamorous. Given the number of stories I had to write, and the wide range of subjects to cover, it was almost impossible to make insider “contacts”—the PRs, bankers, and analysts who usually supply journalists with scoops. Joanna, of course, had been deliberately provoking me with her lift and view comments (she had, after all, managed to get the first interview with O. J. Simpson following his acquittal), but I wondered how Adam had found the time to leave the office and profile everyone from Donald Trump to Jeff Bezos, the nerdish founder of Amazon.com. Patience and Barrow, however, seemed impressed with the hasty, robotic rewrites I produced for them every morning. Meanwhile, I tried to distract myself from work by creating a social life. My initial attempts at meeting women, however, didn’t go welclass="underline" My first date was with an Upper West Sider named Sadie Smith who spent the evening quizzing me about Prince William and telling me about her plan to produce a stage adaptation of a porn film (it later became an off-Broadway hit). Meanwhile, the dizziness I had felt on my first day in the office kept returning. That was when my sessions with Dr. Ruth began.
By spring I had found a girlfriend. Her name was Alana, a tall, graceful Midwesterner with a concave stomach and hair cut into a Cabernet bob. She voted Democrat and wore pointy-collared shirts with pin-striped pantsuits. For a girl who’d grown up in rural Ohio, she’d adapted well to city life. For a start, her apartment was so small it barely had four walls. And then there was her New Yorker attitude: On one of our early dates, at a West Village pavement café, she had warded off an abusively drunk hobo by picking up a heavy ashtray and threatening him with it. The hobo fled. I found Alana’s confidence reassuring. She was, in fact, the alpha male in our relationship. Not that I would ever have admitted that.
But I still wasn’t happy. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with me. Why, for example, was I was so frazzled by nerves? After all, my generation—the fat, spoiled offspring of the seventies—have nothing, or at least very little, to be nervous about. Take disease: We’re so doped up at birth with flu-jabs and pox-shots that the only life-threatening illness we’re likely to get is a self-inflicted one. As for hunting and gathering, the nearest we get is the remote control and the takeout menu. Then there’s our day-to-day safety: Last century, a car crash at anything over thirty miles per hour would be a guarantee of death—or at least of a coma and an off-switch. Today you can lose control of a cheap Korean saloon traveling at 110 miles an hour, down a hill, in a monsoon, and suffer only minor airbag bruising. We’re virtually indestructible.
Then, of course, there’s war. The children of Reagan and Thatcher—my generational brothers and sisters, on both sides of the Atlantic—are war virgins: never drafted into military service; never invaded by a foreign army; never expected to defend their countries with their lives. The few conflicts we’ve lived through—the Falklands, Gulf War I, Bosnia—lasted a few days, or weeks, and were fought by volunteers, not school-yard conscripts. The Allied forces, it seemed, could win any war with a few Stealth bombers and an A-10 Warthog. Air offensives could be conducted online, like banking: One click of a mouse in the Pentagon, and a Kosovar village disappears. Casualties, on our side at least, were extraordinarily low. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme the British lost 19,240; during the entire Gulf War, the British death count was 47. As teenagers watching television at home, it was tempting to regard these latter-day conflicts as entertainment; real-life video games. Perhaps it was because we had grown up being told that a proper war would involve fifty-megaton nukes. The Soviet arsenal alone, we learned in the eighties, could kill 22 billion—and yet there were only 4 billion people in the world to kill. Back in the winter of 1991, it was almost a relief for us to discover that war was still possible without Armageddon.