This weekend, while tennis-watching eyes around the globe are turned toward Davis Cup, seems like a good time to sneak in an utterly off-topic personal story from the past. People—OK, one or two people—have asked how I started working at Tennis Magazine. Here’s the unlikely story.
How do you listen to your IPod? Do you scroll through Songs, Albums, Artists, Playlists? The Song file is the least efficient and user-friendly way to go. You have no idea what’s coming next, and it makes you realize how many songs you own that you really don't like very much. But that’s where the surprises, and the memories, are waiting.
It happens a lot. I put it on Song mode, find one that I like, and then start to walk, or read, or drive, or zone out on an airplane, or lie in bed in a hotel room in Melbourne and stare at the ceiling and wonder how many tennis balls I’ve just seen fly across a net. A few minutes later and my thoughts are stopped in their tracks: My IPod has progressed, while I wasn’t listening, to a song that I’d completely forgotten I owned, one that calls up so many instant, vivid memories it’s as if I’ve taken a leap back in time. Music is a Madeleine, a trigger for involuntary memory, powerful enough to put me in another room, with another vibe, in another decade, maybe even with a different smell. Music, the art form that takes place in time, also bridges it. Does time even exist at all, except in the rhythm of music? That would explain why drummers “keep time," as if it's theirs.
It happened again a few days ago. I was standing on the subway in the morning, perfecting my blank stare. It’s a craft that needs constant honing. In the midst of my daze, there was a violin in my ear, loud and whirling. In an instant, it spun me back to 1996 and dropped me way over on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. That’s a time and a place that I’ve generally attempted to forget, but there was no escaping it on this morning, with this song in my ears. It was “Last Dance,” by the Mekons, from their 1985 album of boisterous Reagan-era despair, Fear and Whiskey. For a brief and dark window of time in the mid-90s, a friend and I, both of us highly underemployed members of what was once called Generation X (remember us? where did we go with all of our angst?). The record, filled with, as one song puts it, “darkness and doubt,” was our soundtrack. It peaks with “Last Dance,” a song that takes place at the end of a party, when a guy at the end of his rope sees a girl across the room: “Looking at you in desperation/Knowing nothing ever happens.” Those words—nothing ever happens—had become our motto.
It’s a record I’ve never completely lost touch with, but unlike other longtime favorites—such as, of course, the Stones’ Exile on Main St.—Fear and Whiskey marks a definite period of time. Thankfully, I suppose, it never spoke to me as powerfully as it did when I was 24, 25, 26, a time of angry sentimentality that I’ve hopefully outgrown. At the time I was trying with less-than-middling success to become a music writer—a rock critic, if you want to be gauche about it. When I wasn’t reviewing Cibo Matto albums for 10 cents a word for alternative weeklies in Miami and Baltimore, I was working as a freelance proofreader for what we used to call investment banks, like Goldman, Sachs and J.P. Morgan. Don’t ask me how I ended up in that line of work; most of the jobs were graveyard shift. For a period of about a year, my only goal in life was to get a job in the daytime. I didn’t care what it was. I can remember being pleased when I did a substitute proofreading job for a week for a young woman who had gone on vacation. A year later, I got the same gig when she went on vacation again. This time she was in a bigger office. I felt like I was moving up the ladder with her.
By the very snowy start of ’96—that winter rivaled this one in terms of blizzard frequency—even the night time gigs had dried up. I finally had to leave the air-conditioned safety of the office world entirely and head down to the streets. A friend had recently gotten a job at a small bookstore on the Upper East Side, so I asked him if there were any more openings. He screwed up his face in a smirk. “I don’t think you want to work there, but I’ll ask.”
I took a job as a clerk “there” a week or so later. It was a long, zig-zag multi-subway trek from my place in Brooklyn to the store, which was all the way over by the East River in an old and un-glamorous neighborhood many blocks from the nearest train. It turned out that the owner, an odd, half-socialized character named Franklin Vane IV, was a born-again Christian. Half the books he sold were Christian-oriented, half were secular. All of them were bent, bruised, or otherwise beat-up, but he tried to foist them on customers at full price. Sporting an overly bristly and ill-kept mustache and a rumpled green bow-tie, he had been a lifelong disappointment to his wealthy, WASP-y parents—Morris had grown up on Park Avenue. He spent his days in a disastrously cluttered back office playing hearts on a computer and moaning about how his “staff,” i.e. my friend and I, weren’t selling enough books. One day, finally, my friend responded that it would have helped if a few customers had walked in the door first. Franklin put his index finger to his lips, cooed, “Hmmmmmm,” in a weird, high-pitched voice, and walked back to his office to continue his hearts game.
It wasn’t a dream job, certainly. It was likely, in my college friends’ minds, a new and unthinkable low. And I did start out wondering, as with my proofreading jobs, what circuitous route of doom had led me to this out of the way location. But how could I complain—I was working during the day! Of course, I was also working weekends, mopping the floors, washing the windows, nailing together bookshelves, and sweeping the sidewalk in front of the store. I kept one eye out for old friends when I did. None of them would have wandered within 10 blocks of this neighborhood.
So why did I like it there? Why did I enjoy the manual labor? The total lack of customers or supervision made the place feel like my own. It gave me time to read, a fact that was enhanced when I took over the job of ordering the store’s new books each week, books that would inevitably languish on the shelves until I picked them up, dusted them off, and read them myself. The long hours gave me a chance to broaden my reading horizons far beyond anything I would have managed at any other job.
More than that, I liked the sense of community you got from being on the street. The sun streamed through the big store windows out front, and when I kept the front door open, leaves blew in on a breeze that grew warmer each day. Even the weekends were tolerable. In the afternoons, I would tune into the Yankees game on the radio; their late-90s dynasty began that year. If I stood outside or walked down York Street, I felt like I could hear the same game coming out of every Irish bar and Italian restaurant and OTB I passed. The gawky, wild-haired kids in dark uniforms from the famous prep school down the street liked to come in and listen to the Leonard Cohen CDs I was obsessed with at the time. It made for a chummy scene, in a gloomy kind of way.
I spent the early part of that summer reading and writing and sending out umpteen futile queries and story ideas to magazines, including half a dozen to Tennis to which I never received a response. All around, you could see the economy picking up, friends getting better jobs, making money, buying apartments, but none of that prosperity seemed to reach the nondescript, friendly neighborhood around me, or come close to penetrating the store I was holed up in. But I enjoyed the days as they were.
In July, a young, long-limbed woman, Southeast Asian, walked in the front door. She smiled and said she lived in the neighborhood and asked if we had any part-time work available. I knew we didn’t; the place seemed destined to go under any minute. But I went back to check with Franklin. He was asleep.
“Hmmm,” he cooed, when the woman, who introduced herself as Reshma, asked him about coming in to help out on Sundays. It turned out she had just gotten a day job as a copyeditor at 17 Magazine, but the pay wasn't what she'd hoped it would be.
“Hmmm,” he repeated unhelpfully, his index finger on his lips. “What about Sundays?” She said that would work.
On her way out, Reshma looked at me. She made a skeptical face and asked me what I was reading. I took it as code for, “What the hell are you doing here, in this weird little place?”
“Henry Green,” was my answer to her verbalized question. “Uh, a British writer.” Henry Green was an example of my horizon expanding. I’d read an essay by John Updike in which he essentially called him the best writer in history. After 50 pages, I couldn’t say that I agreed. Frankly, I would rather have been reading Updike on Green than Green himself.
“What’s the book called?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“That’s the title, Nothing.”
“Sounds . . . great?” She smiled. “See you on Sunday.”
On Sunday morning, I was standing outside the front door in the sun, broom in hand, surveying the leaves and dirt on the sidewalk in front of me, when Reshma, skinny arms, skinny legs, black hair, black eyes, walked up the block. She was wearing a pair of purple canvas Converses, which for some reason made me smile.
“Laughing at me?” she asked with a laugh of her own. “Is it sweeping day?” She looked around at the sidewalk. “About time, I would say.”
Reshma, I learned that day, was from Bangladesh. “Not Bangladesh,” she said when I repeated the word, “the way Americans say it, bang, bang, bang. Bongladesh.”
“Like bonghit, I get it.”
“Are you one of these people I’ve heard of, slackers?”
She had gone to journalism school in the Midwest and come to New York hoping to get a job as a reporter. She’d been disappointed to find herself as a copyeditor instead—it seemed like a highly respectable job to me, way better than book store cashier, anyway. She showed me some of her J school stories. They were good. She had also just broken up with a boyfriend, and I got the feeling that she wanted the extra work mainly to keep her mind occupied on something.
We had fun on Sundays that summer. Franklin spent all day in church, and the customers continued not to arrive, so we had the place to ourselves. We were free, in a sealed-off way; free to read, talk, stand outside and look up and down the street, explore the weirder reaches of New York radio. I was free, even, to go to an Irish bar around the corner and watch tennis. The bartender automatically turned it there when walked in; I think I was his only tennis-watching customer. That fall I made the trip four separate times to keep up with the Sampras-Corretja classic at the U.S. Open.
One problem, though, was Reshma’s musical taste: It ran to the awful. She practically pushed me to the ground when I imitated, in an exaggerated Indian/Bangladeshi accent, her singing along to “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt. But I couldn’t convert her to my supposedly superior tastes. Indie rock was pretentious and drab to her; punk was “mindless rebellion”; doo-wop “sounded old”; jazz was unmentionable. She did seem to like my writing about music, though, especially a story I did around that time for a small magazine about Catpower. (Funny and surreal aside: I briefly became friends with Catpower, aka Chan Marshall, while doing that article. In need of money at the time (she wouldn’t for very long), she even more briefly came to work at the bookstore! I think she lasted three weeks before Franklin drove her away. My article on her, somehow, still exists here).
Listening to a mix tape one day, I finally played something that Reshma liked, something I hadn’t listened to in years, R.E.M.’s “Fall on Me.” When I hear it now, that song, even more than “Last Dance,” always triggers an instant, involuntary memory. It sends me straight back to that Sunday. The sun, the August-in-New York humidity, the sounds of cars swishing past and even distant honks on the street, and across the room Reshma standing with her back to me, flipping through a book, unconsciously lifting one of her purple Converses up and down, keeping time—that phrase again—with the beat.
I got sick for a month soon after. When I came back, I found out that Franklin had hired a new “floor manager,” a smooth-talking, well-dressed, vaguely mobsterish British guy named Tommy who conned him into thinking he could get any customer to buy any book. This dude was now my boss. I also found out that Reshma had quit; she’d gotten back together with her boyfriend, so she didn’t need to occupy her mind anymore. I’d be spending Sundays with Tommy from now on. It was a tough double whammy to face.
A few weeks later, I was in front of the store, staring into space, broom in hand, trying unsuccessfully not to imagine my future. Summer was over; manual labor no longer seemed like fun. At that moment, Reshma walked up the block, holding two huge laundry bags.
“Still scoping out the local bimbos, I see,” she said. We talked for a little while, and she said she was feeling better now, but that she would “actually miss the book store, and maybe even your music.”
She started to cross the street, and I put the broom to the sidewalk, knowing, again, that nothing ever happens. Then I heard her call back to me. She was running back across the street and through traffic, trying hard with her skinny arms not to drop her laundry.
“Hey, my boss’s husband just got a job at Tennis Magazine,” she said when she finally made it safely to the sidewalk. “They have some openings. I told her about you.”
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