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Usual disclaimer: yada yada yada. If you’re looking for truth, go read A Million Little Pieces.
There’s no way to write a memoir about the Little Store without describing Breakpoint’s crash and burn.
That means talking about Maria.
Except I don’t really know how.
“So how do you describe someone like Maria?” I ask Ben this morning.
“That’s a loaded question. If I was an Austrian nun or even just an ordinary Rogers and Hammerstein fan, I might be tempted to break out into spontaneous song and dance.”
I smile politely.
“Okay, okay. Maria,” says Ben. “She had an ability to make you feel important. A talent, really. And because you were so important, naturally you were going to do things for her.”
This wasn’t what I was looking for. “Did you think she was beautiful?”
“I thought she was pretty,” Ben says. “I thought she was really well groomed, really well put together.”
This was definitely not true. A railroad tramp had better personal hygiene than Maria. There were always hairs clinging to Maria’s sweaters – her own, her dog’s, the stranger she’d just pitched in an elevator. The sweaters always had stains on them too, as though she'd gulped her coffee too fast. Although she didn't drink coffee. Plus if you stood close to her, you could smell her – a sweet smell, kind of like apricots, not unpleasant.
“Also she was chasing something,” says Ben.
“Oh, well, that’s not a cliché,” I say.
“What I mean to say is that obviously she’s driven but in her case the motivation is more than just personal ambition.”
“What?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
The problem was I couldn’t.
###
I had a comedy routine I used to perform when people would ask me how I got hired by People Magazine. The routine went something like this:
I had a close friend who’d been hired by Time Magazine when they first went online to manage their bulletin boards.
That part was true. Tom Mandel drafted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, one of Time’s technology editors. This was 1994 when the Well was cutting edge and the barriers to entry were so permeable as to seem non-existent.
He did such a good job with Time Magazine’s bulletin boards that eventually Time Inc wanted to hire him to manage bulletin boards for all its magazine properties. But Tom had a full time job. Plus the gig would have seriously interfered with his real life which at that time consisted of logging on to the Well nine hours a day and running up astronomical connect bills.
So instead he decided to farm the gig out piecemeal to a few of his closest cronies. Gerard got Fortune. Ben got Sports Illustrated. I got People Magazine because I read tabloids and had just written an article about how movie stars were really archetypes who could trace their lineage back to Mount Olympus. The article had landed me a few gigs on call-in radio shows as some kind of expert on America’s fascination with the O.J. Simpson trial.
I flew to New York –
Here the lying begins.
– and I showed up the next morning in a conference room at the Time Life Building. Sitting across the vast and gleaming table from me were a bunch of men in suits. I was in a dress I’d sewn for myself out of one of those purple Indian bedspread you buy at Cost Plus plus I was wearing one of those Afghan sheepskin hippie coats and it was raining that day. I smelled like a wet sheep! A wet sheep dipped in Giorgio!
This part is just bizarre. For one thing, I can’t sew. For another, I have excellent fashion sense – I was a runway model for eight months after all. I do like Giorgio on other people, but it doesn’t react well with my own body chemistry.
I can’t remember anymore why portraying myself as a hapless flower child seemed like such a necessary element in the creation myth at the time I was inventing it. Maybe to emphasize the enormous gap between the imaginary men in suits and awkward, naive, but strangely beguiling l’il moi.
Anyway, I’ve dined out on it so many times now that the lie is writ in stone.
So they asked me a bunch of questions and I was so nervous I could barely talk, my hands were shaking so hard. And finally somebody asked me, ‘Why do you read this stuff?’ and I was off and running! I told them how movie stars were just the most recent embodiment of psychic archetypes that date back to the ancient Greeks or even farther, to Venus of Willendorf! That celebrities fulfill our need for living myth, that magazines like People fulfill an important psychic function in contemporary society. That Madonna was just the latest model Kali off the assembly line; that James Dean and Kurt Cobain were just the most recent upgrades of the beautiful Greek boys whose blood turned into fragrant flowers as they lay dying. I think I nattered on for twenty minutes while the men just sat there staring at me with their mouths hanging open.
Finally I paused for the breath. And one of the men said, ‘My God. She actually reads the magazine.’
I was hired on the spot.
I suppose this fairytale was my own attempt at apotheosis and redemption. Woodcutter’s daughter makes good. If a glass slipper is good, a glass skyscraper is even better.
But, of course, it didn’t happen like that.
###
“You read the magazine. That’s good,” said Maria. She could smile and frown at the same time.
We’d met at the Chez Panisse café in Berkeley. She was not what I expected, and I’m sure she could say the same about me. For one thing I was vastly pregnant – a fact I had not deemed important enough to mention in any of our extensive emails or phone conversations. In utero, Robin had Olympic gymnast ambitions and Maria kept slipping covert looks at my stomach as he practiced backward flips.
Maria was extremely beautiful. She looked kind of like Lord Byron’s favorite mistress if that poet had had the prescience to be born a hundred and seventy years after crazy Catherine Gordon’s due date, very lush – dark shoulder-length hair; bangs; dark eyes; white, white skin; pillowy lips; large breasts. She knew she was beautiful but one got the sense she didn’t take any particular pleasure in it. Beauty was just another weapon in her arsenal.
“And you’re Sicilian! That’s even better,” she added. “I’m Sicilian. We have a very different outlook on the world.”
I was dying to ask her how so? but judged it more prudent to smile and nod enthusiastically.
“Other people don’t understand, do they?” Her portable phone rang. “Pardon me for a moment.”
“Jim.” Her voice was breathless and caressing. “I talked to Jeremy. It’s a go.”
I’d never seen a portable phone before. I don’t even know what the technology behind it was. Was it what we now call a cell phone? Not even Tom Mandel had a portable phone and he had every electronic gadget under the sun.
“Special projects for now so we get Eric. We’ll deal with it. And Hala.”
She held up one finger and smiled at me, listening to the phone. “Right. Right. But she’s our pit-bull. I’ve got to go.”
She had a knack for holding you in her eyes when she smiled. “Phil DeWitt thinks very highly of you. Mandel too. He’s a character.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it.”
“So,” she said. “Where do you think the Internet is going to end up in 20 years?”
This was the one question I'd shown up prepared to answer. I launched into my schpiel: blah blah blah cost-shifting blah blah blah our information, their printers. I thought using the first person plural was a good touch.
She interrupted me. “Oh, you’re thinking way too small. It’s much, much bigger than cost-shifting. It’s a whole new medium, a whole new distribution network.”
Of course she turned out to be right.
To be continued if I can ever find the time…
###
In other news, I’ve been listening obsessively to the Jimmie Rodgers collection from Bluebird. What’s the deal with all that yodeling? And what the hell is a “rounder?”
There’s no way to write a memoir about the Little Store without describing Breakpoint’s crash and burn.
That means talking about Maria.
Except I don’t really know how.
“So how do you describe someone like Maria?” I ask Ben this morning.
“That’s a loaded question. If I was an Austrian nun or even just an ordinary Rogers and Hammerstein fan, I might be tempted to break out into spontaneous song and dance.”
I smile politely.
“Okay, okay. Maria,” says Ben. “She had an ability to make you feel important. A talent, really. And because you were so important, naturally you were going to do things for her.”
This wasn’t what I was looking for. “Did you think she was beautiful?”
“I thought she was pretty,” Ben says. “I thought she was really well groomed, really well put together.”
This was definitely not true. A railroad tramp had better personal hygiene than Maria. There were always hairs clinging to Maria’s sweaters – her own, her dog’s, the stranger she’d just pitched in an elevator. The sweaters always had stains on them too, as though she'd gulped her coffee too fast. Although she didn't drink coffee. Plus if you stood close to her, you could smell her – a sweet smell, kind of like apricots, not unpleasant.
“Also she was chasing something,” says Ben.
“Oh, well, that’s not a cliché,” I say.
“What I mean to say is that obviously she’s driven but in her case the motivation is more than just personal ambition.”
“What?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You tell me.”
The problem was I couldn’t.
I had a comedy routine I used to perform when people would ask me how I got hired by People Magazine. The routine went something like this:
I had a close friend who’d been hired by Time Magazine when they first went online to manage their bulletin boards.
That part was true. Tom Mandel drafted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, one of Time’s technology editors. This was 1994 when the Well was cutting edge and the barriers to entry were so permeable as to seem non-existent.
He did such a good job with Time Magazine’s bulletin boards that eventually Time Inc wanted to hire him to manage bulletin boards for all its magazine properties. But Tom had a full time job. Plus the gig would have seriously interfered with his real life which at that time consisted of logging on to the Well nine hours a day and running up astronomical connect bills.
So instead he decided to farm the gig out piecemeal to a few of his closest cronies. Gerard got Fortune. Ben got Sports Illustrated. I got People Magazine because I read tabloids and had just written an article about how movie stars were really archetypes who could trace their lineage back to Mount Olympus. The article had landed me a few gigs on call-in radio shows as some kind of expert on America’s fascination with the O.J. Simpson trial.
I flew to New York –
Here the lying begins.
– and I showed up the next morning in a conference room at the Time Life Building. Sitting across the vast and gleaming table from me were a bunch of men in suits. I was in a dress I’d sewn for myself out of one of those purple Indian bedspread you buy at Cost Plus plus I was wearing one of those Afghan sheepskin hippie coats and it was raining that day. I smelled like a wet sheep! A wet sheep dipped in Giorgio!
This part is just bizarre. For one thing, I can’t sew. For another, I have excellent fashion sense – I was a runway model for eight months after all. I do like Giorgio on other people, but it doesn’t react well with my own body chemistry.
I can’t remember anymore why portraying myself as a hapless flower child seemed like such a necessary element in the creation myth at the time I was inventing it. Maybe to emphasize the enormous gap between the imaginary men in suits and awkward, naive, but strangely beguiling l’il moi.
Anyway, I’ve dined out on it so many times now that the lie is writ in stone.
So they asked me a bunch of questions and I was so nervous I could barely talk, my hands were shaking so hard. And finally somebody asked me, ‘Why do you read this stuff?’ and I was off and running! I told them how movie stars were just the most recent embodiment of psychic archetypes that date back to the ancient Greeks or even farther, to Venus of Willendorf! That celebrities fulfill our need for living myth, that magazines like People fulfill an important psychic function in contemporary society. That Madonna was just the latest model Kali off the assembly line; that James Dean and Kurt Cobain were just the most recent upgrades of the beautiful Greek boys whose blood turned into fragrant flowers as they lay dying. I think I nattered on for twenty minutes while the men just sat there staring at me with their mouths hanging open.
Finally I paused for the breath. And one of the men said, ‘My God. She actually reads the magazine.’
I was hired on the spot.
I suppose this fairytale was my own attempt at apotheosis and redemption. Woodcutter’s daughter makes good. If a glass slipper is good, a glass skyscraper is even better.
But, of course, it didn’t happen like that.
“You read the magazine. That’s good,” said Maria. She could smile and frown at the same time.
We’d met at the Chez Panisse café in Berkeley. She was not what I expected, and I’m sure she could say the same about me. For one thing I was vastly pregnant – a fact I had not deemed important enough to mention in any of our extensive emails or phone conversations. In utero, Robin had Olympic gymnast ambitions and Maria kept slipping covert looks at my stomach as he practiced backward flips.
Maria was extremely beautiful. She looked kind of like Lord Byron’s favorite mistress if that poet had had the prescience to be born a hundred and seventy years after crazy Catherine Gordon’s due date, very lush – dark shoulder-length hair; bangs; dark eyes; white, white skin; pillowy lips; large breasts. She knew she was beautiful but one got the sense she didn’t take any particular pleasure in it. Beauty was just another weapon in her arsenal.
“And you’re Sicilian! That’s even better,” she added. “I’m Sicilian. We have a very different outlook on the world.”
I was dying to ask her how so? but judged it more prudent to smile and nod enthusiastically.
“Other people don’t understand, do they?” Her portable phone rang. “Pardon me for a moment.”
“Jim.” Her voice was breathless and caressing. “I talked to Jeremy. It’s a go.”
I’d never seen a portable phone before. I don’t even know what the technology behind it was. Was it what we now call a cell phone? Not even Tom Mandel had a portable phone and he had every electronic gadget under the sun.
“Special projects for now so we get Eric. We’ll deal with it. And Hala.”
She held up one finger and smiled at me, listening to the phone. “Right. Right. But she’s our pit-bull. I’ve got to go.”
She had a knack for holding you in her eyes when she smiled. “Phil DeWitt thinks very highly of you. Mandel too. He’s a character.”
“That’s a polite way of putting it.”
“So,” she said. “Where do you think the Internet is going to end up in 20 years?”
This was the one question I'd shown up prepared to answer. I launched into my schpiel: blah blah blah cost-shifting blah blah blah our information, their printers. I thought using the first person plural was a good touch.
She interrupted me. “Oh, you’re thinking way too small. It’s much, much bigger than cost-shifting. It’s a whole new medium, a whole new distribution network.”
Of course she turned out to be right.
To be continued if I can ever find the time…
In other news, I’ve been listening obsessively to the Jimmie Rodgers collection from Bluebird. What’s the deal with all that yodeling? And what the hell is a “rounder?”
