A Proficiency in Being Seduced

I once rode the New York City subway carrying a dead monkey in each arm. Granted, they were stuffed and secured with plastic wrap and masking tape; but together they took up a great deal of space and were cumbersome to handle. Any apparent comedy in the situation was derived less from the objects themselves than from the man tasked with holding them.

This was about 2008. I was fulfilling a request from an editor at the magazine publisher at which I was then, in a matter of speaking, employed. They were brought to the offices for temporary use in a photoshoot for the cigar magazine we’d recently launched. They were never actually used if memory serves, so back to the store in the East Village that lent them to us. I don’t believe any bike carrier in their right mind would risk their bodily or material safety transporting them, so having nothing better to do at the time and a willingness to get out of the drab offices we inhabited on West 35th St., I volunteered.

In truth I undertook this with an ulterior motive. After a year of nonstop declarative egotism, I launched my zine and needed places to “distribute” it into the general population, if only as a marker of its legitimacy. I found independent clothing boutiques in lower Manhattan most practical, because Vice magazine, the edgy aura from which I was eager to siphon, listed them on their website. The mission was accomplished without incident, because I don’t believe the store managers cared or took me all that seriously, and for all I know may have thrown out anything I sent them. I returned to the office with a copy of Arthur. (You remember Arthur, right? No? Well, fine.)

I must have told, even written, this story multiple times. It is the most amusingly “New York media” of my experiences working in New York media. Though it is not the most illustrative. That particular span of time from 2007 to about 2009 or 2010, in which I worked for Double Down Media, a publisher of luxury lifestyle magazines marketed for the high finance set—with titles like Trader Monthly (it was bimonthly by the way), Dealmaker, Private Air, Corporate Leader, and so on—is singularly bizarre to the point that, had it not been for the daily commutes from across the Hudson, it would be hard for me to believe it had happened at all. There are things I did that would never have occurred to me to do two years before while I was in college. Nothing salacious, that was left to the ad sales department if the gossip is to be believed, but things for which no book-learning or “student journalism” could prepare me.

For about two weeks of my time at that company, the fashion editor drafted me to assist her in a spread. I was to help her acquire luxury accessories—watches, luggage, cufflinks, etc.—to be photographed on the floor of the lobby over a faux-marble background. I had no previous experience in the fashion side of things other than fact-checking the credits and watching her audition models in the back office we shared. (A note: though the circumstances probably dictated this, I will always believe that some of the nicest people you can meet in New York City are fashion models.) In truth most of what I did was make phone calls and arrange deliveries. I remember it took up enough of my time that I went into the office the day after Christmas, with only one other coworker, to work on it. I also remember that the only thing I was expressly forbidden from touching was a watch marked at $100,000; my own hands being too great an insurance liability.

There were some hiccups. I got chewed out by a manager of a luggage store to whom I may not have clearly communicated the nature of my borrowing the suitcase the editor was insistent on having, but did not use. The matter was settled with a $50 restocking fee and a lot of yelling. Then there was the fact-checking of the credits. This was usually a nightmare because they were handed over to us in a rather confusing fashion, and made no less confusing by the fact that fashion industry publicists were cagey about the exact value of the goods they represented. The rule of thumb, I’d later learn, was to always overvalue a good whose price proved elusive; or even better, mark it as “price upon request.” In any case, I hoped to provide the text with as much accuracy as could be managed, with all the necessary contact information.

Somehow, the fact-checking process fucked this up in ways inconvenient enough to necessitate additional communications of a less than cordial manner. I placed the blame for this lapse on the fact-checker, who was new, did not adapt to the role very quickly, and had lucked out with a better job mere weeks after starting, so I apologized for him to the fashion editor. She was not upset, in fact she otherwise approved of my performance, mostly because I took her directives without hassle, being not terribly ambitious about the project and being incapable of questioning her judgment. As a result, there is an issue of a magazine dedicated to people who gazed rather shallowly into the message of Wall Street where I am listed as a “market editor.”

What links both of these events is that I received no compensation for either of them. Nor did I receive compensation for my primary task of fact-checking the magazines. Such is the inverted nature of the internship, in which your lack of monetary value is proportional to your professional elasticity. Someone who is not paid a certain amount for a certain task is magically capable of doing any odd thing. This is not a major revelation. The internship was always a source of both comedy and glamor in depictions of urban office life. Indeed, in addition to—and perhaps as a result of—the release of The Devil Wears Prada, MTV spun off The City, from the earlier spin-off The Hills, in which Whitney Port could be seen around Manhattan surrounded by camera crews as an employee in some manner for Diane von Fürstenberg. She was not probably an intern proper; more an “administrative assistant.” At least as I can deduce in my own experience, in which I was never an intern but an “editorial assistant,” even more boldly an “assistant editor” in a position with even fewer notable responsibilities. Port, and her “nemesis” Olivia Palmero, were of course being paid obscene sums to play these parts, to affect a lifestyle and to represent a social situation I, as someone in their immediate age group, just happened to be living out.

One of my greatest regrets is that I will likely not live long enough to see this situation brought forth to the judgment of historians of our era. But this is a sad necessity. Only after the extensive passage of time, and the demise of entire generations, can the internship be examined with the most clarity, with the least amount of skin in the game, and the least amount of dependence upon or survival imperative through this institution. My own assessment, scabrous and embittered but in a fun way, will prove the necessity of this task.

The internship, more than the Sexual Revolution or the collapse of governmental integrity or the perpetuation of social media, is the symbol of our cultural decadence. Nothing better exposes the tensions between luxury and exploitation that American society subsists on than the opportunity to be “paid in experience.” It is in itself a luxury exploitation. It never seemed so at the time since, for a while anyway, in a certain level of industrial stability, it worked. “Industry” is the correct term here, as the intern was very much a supply that came and went with the glide of the conveyer belt. A steady stream of potential helpmates could easily be vomited out of NYU or Bard or Vassar or Oberlin or wherever and onto a cubicle desk for a summer. Often, however, they came with certain attributes that reinforced this unusual arrangement, such as a trust fund, easy access to a city that did not necessitate relocation, or the position as the coke-addicted niece or nephew of a creative director. Questions as to individual sustainability were not an issue under these conditions. But that supply is meager and once exhausted would require replenishment with a more abundant but lower-quality model: people who came from middle-class homes, having no apparent connections, and carrying degrees from giant state-funded warehouses or private liberal arts cottages. People, that is, with very definite conceptions of transactional work, personal merit, and expectations of success. They would abjure decadence in no uncertain terms assuming they ever encountered it.

What value can be found by the purveyors of internships in taking these hordes on? The possibility of seduction. The seduction can be literal, of course, though here I speak of a general seduction in which a naif intern is convinced to turn away from old values of merit, utility, and dollars as a feasible currency and toward newer values of clout, frivolity, and access as a feasible currency. What an internship lacks in stability it makes up for in temptations, even when you have no interest in them. I am not an enthusiastic drinker, but my being handed an alcohol beat from an outgoing intern brought me into a pipeline where booze otherwise unaffordable to me in regular circumstances was for the taking—or rather for being given freely. I can’t remember the exact haul, but it included three Macallans (two 12-year and one 18-year), a Highland Park, and a bottle of port that came in a fancy wooden box. I was invited to many fancy press get-togethers at places like BLT Steak to hear about and taste similar products. I learned that you could make a living just traveling the world proselytizing about booze. During a one-on-one at this high-end bar in the Financial District, a Highland Park representative claimed that he was either almost or very briefly a drummer for Mogwai, something that seemed so unexpected, and not too widely impressive to anyone else in this context, that I felt compelled to believe it.

These are trivial compared to the parties and lavish press trips that were just as common and happily taken up on by people with stronger stomachs for socializing and travel. Not that that convinced anyone. At a certain point, it had to be stared at that career advancement in the traditional sense, let alone financial stability, was not a given without a certain degree of luck and networking prowess. It was especially hard at that point when magazines, never solvent endeavors to begin with, were dropping dead and hemorrhaging staff at unprecedented frequency and volume. Despite constant assurances to the contrary, Double Down was in free-fall after the market crash. Weirdly by that time I was brought back on at an hourly rate, but layoffs were becoming more frequent, and the ad sales team was working for commission only. Eventually the bottom dropped out and I absurdly made a claim in the bankruptcy case for the $600-ish that was and remains owed to me, still, nearly 20 years later. Only a few of my fellow interns stuck it out in the industry, though some of those left New York. Others went into other professions like yoga instruction or carpentry. I just drifted away from lifestyle media to intellectual media, which I discovered had many head-spinning distinctions from the former. That is an essay for another day.

Before I came to Double Down I was an “assistant editor” at GO! NYC, a sort of New York for lesbians. My time there was shorter and my job was more malleable. I did lots of proofreading, inputting changes in the back-of-the-book listings, and various menial tasks, like going out for gummy worms. I worked the ticket booth for their anniversary party, held in some warehouse behind FIT and hosted by some realty show/fitness celebrity. I remember that the fancy famous local journalist Michael Musto had showed up at some point, apparently unexpected going by the look of panicked delight on the managing editor’s face upon telling us, though I myself never saw him. The only notable experience I felt I took from GO! was a “proficiency” in Quark, which is sort of like saying you have a proficiency in mouth-breathing.

My training at Double Down was more intensive. For magazines that were routinely derided on Gawker and Dealbreaker, great care was taken to maintain their credibility with their equally derided, and soon-to-be-hated, readership. Fact-checking had me breaking down a single sentence as one would an engine and reassembling it in more working order. To the managing editor, who arrived at the office before anyone else (provided no one was sleeping there overnight, which was frequent), to drop copy at our desks, this was an important defensive measure. But a magazine dedicated to finance and lifestyle created certain conflicts in editorial style, even philosophy of language itself.

The finance editors prized technical accuracy reliant on industry jargon, statistics, and interesting insider information that could not be gotten by the reader from anywhere else. Imagine how foolish I felt and sounded trying to get wholly foreign data straight in my own head before trying to cogently convey it to the subjects, actual professional traders and M&A honchos who could be as abrupt as they could be patient and helpful. The lifestyle editors, on the other hand, prized narrative flourish; fact-checking for them was more of a creative exercise. One of these editors had a particular way of going about it, taking certain details and reshaping them, sometimes paying no mind to the writer’s intent, to suit a more aspirational reality. Manufactured details, in other words, that were plausible but which we were expected to confirm as true or, if not, then to replace them with the next best thing. This approach caused the most hassle because it gummed up an already complicated editorial process and steered interns and writers into unnecessary ethical quandaries. Most annoying for me was the expectation that I had to intuit this process, the editor’s intentions in using it, and conceive of a piece of information as highly sought after and as a placeholder. In my calmer moments I couldn’t help but marvel perversely at this man’s stubborn drive to bend reality to his niche whims. I hope this person is writing or will at some point write an adventure novel.

It was here, also, that the “30 Under 30” list debuted before gaining its present infamy at Forbes. Its creator, Randall Lane1, was the boss of my bosses. Through this mechanism he curated the youthful vanguard of our financial future (though Dealmaker’s list was aged up to “40 Under 40,” he wasn’t mad). This was an arduous undertaking to bring to completion. It was as if Lane had built layers of looping highway ramps where every department crashed head-on into each other or otherwise careened over an unfinished edge into a swampy abyss. I recall an entire week on the phone falling into every labyrinth of corporate media relations extensions to assure the veracity of this collage of data. I don’t know how, or even if, I accomplished anything. The scandals related to that list in recent years make me recall one “30 Under 30” trader who got us bad press for lying about some portion of his employment history. Or something. It was just before I came on.

There is no question that I took from my tenure some precious experience; and I’ve managed to carry it on elsewhere to greater profit. But even, perhaps especially, with that knowledge safely implanted, I am still aware that it too was specially formatted for the intern institution. The intern, whatever their level or prestige or sophistication, is in the business of satisfying desires with a wide, unpredictable range. I look back and am a bit shocked to remember how pliant I could be; it was the only way I could tell I was doing a good job. Had this been a time of more elegant corruption, I imagine I would have made a very dedicated courtier or mandarin in service to an empire worthy of the status. I cope with my chronological ill fortune by remembering that, though I could be yelled at, overwhelmed, buttered up by flaks, and shat upon by pigeons (which happened once), I never needed to worry about, like, syphilis or being disemboweled.

Yet it was from appeasing these desires that I ended up being seduced myself. The editors were some of the most overworked people I’ve ever met, but the perception of their power by calling upon my service made it worth emulating. An ironic outcome of this was that my writing was shielded almost entirely from this pursuit. I did so little of it while there, and what I did write had to be overhauled to fit the house style. I was ambivalent about writing at the time; being an editor, my thinking went, would distract me from that ambivalence forever. I even approached the zine in this manner for the first two issues. I won’t say that my God-given talent was working its resistance against some unfortunate quest, but rather when that quest inevitably imploded, writing was the only thing that was left. It was waiting, with a detectable smirk, to be applied in face-saving instances such as these to the fullest extent of its power. Good thing, too, as I have lost my proficiency in Quark.