LITMIR.BIZ

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       5

       Roving

      NEW YORK CITY, 2001

      Two weeks after college graduation, I took a one-way flight to New York with no job, no apartment, and a stack of clips from the Daily Texan. I’d saved some bat mitzvah money and what I’d made working in a snow cone stand off Barton Springs Road in Austin.

      I temped all over Midtown, insurance offices and nonprofits mostly. Before work, I would run around Midtown in my suit and tennis shoes and drop off my stack of clips with the mailrooms or security desks at Newsweek, Time, Fortune, etc. A month later, I got a job as a rover at Condé Nast, the publisher of magazines like GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.

      Condé Nast rovers were sort of like temps except that they had six months of steady work. We ranked beneath interns—who almost all had parents on the Upper East Side and attended a Seven Sisters school—but slightly above the outside temping agency I’d been working for. We had half a year to impress editors and publishers, demonstrating our efficiency at cleaning out closets, changing coffee filters, or picking up dry cleaning. Occasionally, we got to answer a phone. If no one wanted to hire us after six months, the gig was up and the program would be replenished with a new crop of desperate, broke aspiring magazine writers.

      We all wanted our chance to temp at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, but those magazines rarely asked for rovers. Mostly, we helped executives on the terrifying corporate floor, as white and sterile as a hospital, and were rotated in at magazines like Brides, Self, and Allure. One senior editor told me during an interview for a job labeled “beauty closet organizer” that “the best part about working at Allure is that it’s like a sorority.” Another asked if I would describe myself as a “makeup junkie,” as if one look at my almost-bare face didn’t answer that question.

      Every day at Condé Nast was an education, though not necessarily the one I thought I’d be getting.

      I was opening mail on the corporate floor for a creative director, a towering, hulking bachelor who wore ascots and had me print out all his emails and then transcribe his scribbles in No. 2 pencil in the replies. I got to a package containing a heavy Lucite box full of sand and aqua seashells, an invitation to a party in Montauk with the Sex and the City cast. He told me to RSVP no, adding, “But do me a favor. Find out if that actress who plays Charlotte is single.” I asked, in the docile voice of domestic help, if I could go to the party in his place.

      “How are you going to get to Montauk?”

      “Uh, well, I’ll take the bus.” I had no idea that Montauk sat at the tippy-tip end of Long Island.

      “You’re gonna take the bus? To a Peggy Siegal party?” Ascot said. He laughed, more amused than irritated, and walked back into his office with the cream-colored carpet and the two white leather bucket chairs that I once heard his assistant describe as “the Herman Millers.” The furniture had a name, and I didn’t.

      The one time that I’d rotated into Vogue, helping to organize the small closet converted into an office and library for the magazine’s fact-checkers, I’d worn my brand-new pair of UGG boots. Anna Wintour walked by the closet, paused, and behind her black glasses, fixated on the furry brown boots that I’d spent half my paycheck on. I never wore the UGGs again.

      I’d been crashing at my college boyfriend Russ’s place in Bed-Stuy. Back in Austin, Russ and I had bonded over our love of Midnight Cowboy, each of us waxing poetic on its artistic subtleties and our own dreams of moving to New York. I should’ve known the relationship was doomed given that this movie, the ultimate testament to big-city failure, was what brought us together. Russ had an internship at the Nation that paid a stipend of $150 a week, and he liked to remind me regularly that I worked at lightweight capitalist rags and that he was the serious journalist in the relationship.

      Fifteen years later, a Bernie Sanders supporter read my biography online and called me “a gruesome cross between Midnight Cowboy and Working Girl.” Pretty much. I’m brand spankin’ new in this here town and I was hopin’ to get a look at the Statue of Liberty …

      MY BOSS AT Condé Nast had me come into the office the morning of September 12, 2001. I walked through a nearly deserted Times Square. I tried to remind this editor that no planes were flying, but she was adamant that she get to a photo shoot in Paris.

      On my way to the office, Russ finally called. Other than a brief phone call the day before when we both had to evacuate our Midtown offices, I hadn’t heard from him and was starting to worry. He was driving his Honda Civic from its alternate-side parking spot in Fort Greene all the way back to the driveway of his mom’s house in Tulsa, presumably listening to Dostoyevsky on tape. He said he was already in Missouri and had decided to move back to Austin. He’d been the only person I really knew in New York, and he’d abandoned me.

      In that first year, just existing in New York exhausted me. I always got on an express train when I needed a local, watching fifteen superfluous stops fly by. I couldn’t walk three blocks without getting stopped by Greenpeace volunteers or some man with a clipboard who wanted to ask me a question about my hair. Not wanting to be rude, I’d always stop. No, I don’t have a perm. No, does it look like I use a deep conditioner?

      On most nights, I’d collapse, fall asleep fully clothed with the lights on. I’d wake up between the hours of 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. in a pile of saliva, the sound of sirens outside and the shape of the links from my silver Seiko imprinted on my cheek.

      FIVE MONTHS AND three weeks into my rovership, I got my first full-time job in New York. I would be the editorial assistant to the garden editor at House & Garden magazine. In the interview, Garden Editor, a fashionably malnourished redhead who wore fishnet stockings and leather skirts, had growled a little when I complimented her leopard-print blouse. “Careful,” she said. “It’s a jungle out there.” Her husband would leave messages like “Tell her I’ll be home at six and will need something hot to eat and cold to drink …”

      My duties included running to the Flower District on Twenty-Eighth Street each morning, where the sidewalks become an urban jungle of houseplants and cut flowers that supply the city’s restaurants and hotels and penthouses.

      I once got on the Condé Nast elevator hauling cherry blossom branches wrapped in butcher paper when an airy ballerina of a girl about my age strode on, an Hermès Birkin bag slung over her forearm. I only identified this purse—and its $10,000 price tag and waiting list—because of the week I’d spent in the fact-checking closet at Vogue.

      “Oh my God, I love your bag. Is it new?” another gazelle of a girl asked.

      “No,” the ballerina replied. “I got it like a week ago.”

      I tried to time my commute so that I could share the elevator with New Yorker editor David Remnick. Stalker-like, I craved even the tiniest reminder (the back of a brown head of hair) that my dream was still in my grasp.

      One time, I stepped off on the eighth floor, with the purple House & Garden awnings, wearing my usual brown plastic banana clip and thinking about my illustrious future writing gig at the New Yorker. When the doors started to close, I overheard a woman announce to the packed elevator, “Okay, who told her she could wear her hair like that?”

      Garden Editor would disappear for weeks to scout luscious private grounds in England and France and Morocco. She’d come back with a Longchamp tote stuffed with receipts for me to file and reams of film for me to develop into slides and arrange by theme (“Tuscan,” “xeriscape,” “Cape Cod”). She’d then present the hundreds of photos, which looked identical to the untrained eye, to the editor in chief, who would deem the gardens sufficiently tony (or not) to

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