Pretend I'm Not Here Read online

  A friend of my brother’s who was an editor in the Washington Post Style section passed along my résumé to the woman at the Post in charge of hiring fresh-faced college grads (read: easy prey) willing to work menial newsroom jobs. “You’ll have to take it from here,” Ellen, my brother’s friend, had said when she told me she had gotten my résumé to the right people, adding that if I got the job I shouldn’t tell anyone she had recommended me until I had proven myself.

  I was hired as a part-time “copy aide”—the phrase had recently come into use as a concession to the women’s movement but even I knew it was just a verbal sleight of hand for “copyboy.” Whatever the title, I was thrilled to have a real job though I was still too young to appreciate the sheer serendipity that my first foray into the professional world was going exactly according to my hastily devised plan. My main duty was to answer phones and fetch whatever anybody on the Style section staff needed—anything from clip files from the newsroom’s library, which I was disappointed to learn was called the morgue only in the movies, to deliveries from bike messengers left at the front desk.

  The best part of the job was the phone answering. The copy aides were the reporters’ lifelines to the outside world, with missed calls from elusive sources, needy children, and annoyed spouses rolling over to our phones. I liked taking messages because it gave me a sense of how the reporters actually worked. After a while, I began to figure out which ones were merely waiting for some PR flack to call, and which ones were working the phones themselves and developing their own sources. As lowly as the position was, the pace was frenetic with phones going off all the time, reporters constantly barking out requests, and the unsettling feeling I was supposed to be in two places at one time, especially when a deadline loomed.

  The one thing I didn’t like in those early weeks was the way the head copy editor, whose job it was to lay out each page of the section, would yell, at the top of his lungs, for whichever one of us who was up next to grab the dummy, a long, thin sheet of paper, and run with it through the newsroom and down two floors via the creepy stairwell to the composing room where typesetters were waiting to lay out the next page.

  He would holler, “Dummy to go!” and if you were next, you had to jump up like you’d just heard a bullet shot out of a gun. I didn’t object to the running, and I liked getting away from the chaos at the copy desk, but it was demeaning that we had to respond to someone yelling commands at us, like we were dogs being told to fetch. Also, it made us all nervous that we might hear someone scream out “Dummy to go!” at any moment, and we might not be ready to go.

  Other than that, I didn’t mind the grunt work. I basked in the reflected star power around me. The Washington Post newsroom in 1982 felt like a grand social science experiment being conducted on hundreds of idiosyncratic journalists with IQs north of 130. I was assigned to the highly regarded Style section, a new, modern iteration of the women’s pages, birthed in 1969 by the newspaper’s famous editor, Ben Bradlee, who came up with the idea of a section for an edgy, in-your-face kind of writing that would push the boundaries of where soft newswriting could go, stylistically, tonally, and topically.

  Style would become an incubator for some of the most innovative and voicey and daring feature writing of its time, including that by Nicholas von Hoffman, Myra MacPherson, Tom Shales, and Henry Allen. And there was Sally Quinn, who famously penned biting profiles of assorted Washingtonian types—social climbers, players, takers, movers and shakers. Even more famously, perhaps, Sally married Bradlee (more on that later). But I didn’t have much of a sense of this recent history, arriving with just the most cursory understanding that the newspaper and its charismatic editor were household names because of Watergate, and because of the movie chronicling that era, All the President’s Men, which had come out just six years before I stepped foot in the newsroom.

  Though the Style section had little to do with the paper’s Watergate coverage beyond proximity, it shared a sense of collective self-importance and an aura of excitement that felt like a current of electricity was always running through it. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists milled about, asking if so-and-so government official had returned their call, or if I knew where the empty notepads were (I did eventually), and I was making every effort to answer them without letting on that I was as overwhelmed as I was. I could barely breathe those first few weeks and spent much of my time avoiding eye contact and trying not to stumble over my words. Even though I certainly did not have a glamorous job there, I had landed myself in a glamorous spot.

  We copyboys were young and female—Charlotte, Ann, Kathryn, Elaine, Diane, and me—and that was enough of a draw for many of the middle-aged male reporters who, battling writer’s block, would often get up from their computers and come over to shoot the breeze. Usually three of us were on duty at a time, and we sat just outside the glass wall of the managing and deputy editors’ offices, in a perfect row like shiny new sedans on a car lot.

  The assignment editors sat in the next row, parallel to us, and they talked among themselves or to the writers they were currently editing. But we were able to hear what they were saying and just sitting in such close proximity to great editors editing great writers was worth as much as a year or two at the best MFA program or journalism school in the country. They would sometimes look up and realize we were there, hanging on their every word. Occasionally they would dole out a little mercy, offering advice to us about our (mostly imagined) writing careers.

  “Let me give you a little piece of wisdom,” Harriet Fier, one of the assignment editors, said one morning, apropos of nothing, yawning and stretching. “Don’t get too fat and happy in any job.”

  I looked at her blankly, and she sighed at my lack of understanding.

  “Always move on to the next challenge,” she continued. I nodded, though I still didn’t completely understand what she was telling me.

  Harriet’s last name was pronounced “fear” and she was a bit scary, in the sense that she was more confident than any woman I had ever encountered, and also louder. She wore black leather boots and tight sweaters and exuded an unapologetic sensuality. She had come to the Post from Rolling Stone, where she’d been a managing editor who had worked her way up from switchboard operator. I like to think we copy aides reminded Harriet of her salad days, but I can’t imagine she was ever as tentative as I was, and it’s doubtful she saw any glimmer of herself in me. She was gutsy, brassy, of the original lean-in generation decades before anybody was using that phrase.

  The Post was filled with characters like her, and the more I figured this out, the more hooked I was on the place. The smell, the noise, the hustle—all of it worked on me like an aphrodisiac. I loved it in its entirety though each section had its own vibe, rhythm, and philosophy. As soon as you moved from the “hard news” newsroom (Metro, National, Foreign, Business, Investigative, and Obits) to “soft news” (Style, Sunday Magazine, Food, Home, and Weekend), the climate changed. The hard news sections were quieter—there was much less banter and clowning around. Reporters talked in hushed tones on the phone and I always imagined shadowy figures on the other end of the line, sources deep within the bowels of the Pentagon or the FBI. Their desks were messier with stacks of files and documents, and the national reporters tended to have fewer personal artifacts like family photos or cartoons tacked up in their cubicles.

  The “soft news” sections were segregated from the rest of the paper. The cubicles of the soft news reporters were set apart from those of the hard news reporters by a mere forty yards, but the hallway that separated them was like a demilitarized zone, and when you moved from one to the other, you felt like you had crossed a border into another country. People would look up from their word processors, warily eyeing you, openly eavesdropping if you started a conversation with someone nearby.

  I learned quickly that reporters had no use for social graces or nuanced manners. Men loosened their ties—the few who bothered to wear them in the first place—women kicked
off their heels, and everyone spoke loudly and over each other. The exception was Judith Martin. She was the woman behind the popular etiquette column “Miss Manners,” and it’s possible that she took her job too seriously, floating around the newsroom in a royal haze, wearing white gloves up to her elbows. It was a cacophony of acerbic, inappropriate humor, deadline tension, free-floating anxiety, and not infrequent glimpses of genius.

  Here, in Style, each person’s workspace was a miniature art installation of personality: bulletin boards with labor union bumper stickers, “You can’t eat prestige”; tattered strips of outrageous headlines—headless body in topless bar (now a cliché but then a tabloid news story about a hostage forced to decapitate a strip club owner)—and, when seasonal affective disorder became a thing, “Happy Light” boxes popped up on desks, casting their negative-ion therapy rays. Reporters often wore headphones, listening to music on their Walkmans, which had just become a thing a few years earlier. Others shouted at each other across the rows of heads, sometimes in jest, occasionally in anger, always on deadline.

  The copy editors were the grown-ups of the newsroom, and they sat by themselves, in a bay of terminals off to the side. Their shift started around 4:00 p.m. and lasted long into the night, often past 1:00 a.m. Each day, they saved the newspaper from embarrassment and legal action and saved the writers from themselves, from errors of both judgment and fact, not to mention grammar. They grumbled about the collective lack of attention to the newspaper’s in-house style guide for grammar and language, but secretly they were pleased because it was a constant validation of their existence.

  I marveled at how bold and pushy the reporters acted, but eventually it became clear that much of their bravado was covering up a lot of garden-variety insecurities. It wasn’t unusual for a reporter to get up in the middle of a contentious editing session and stomp off to have a cigarette or, even worse, disappear across the street to pout in the Post Pub, nursing a bruised ego with a beer. In high school they’d been the ones who had taken refuge in the school newspaper, or, if they were late bloomers, hadn’t found their passion and tribe until they’d arrived at college, where they had stumbled into a campus newsroom and never left. They spent the next four years socializing exclusively with other student journalists, the closest facsimile to a band of brothers that civilians can join. And they continued this camaraderie when they found their way to the Post newsroom, albeit a bit tempered by what Ben Bradlee famously called “creative tension,” the friendly, competitive pitting of newsroom staffers against each other for bylines and “gets.” The newsroom crackled with a collective ambition that demanded you subscribe to or risk being left behind.

  I hadn’t been one of those J-school types. While my peers at the Post had hung out in campus newsrooms writing stories about their university’s administration wrongdoing and learning about the inverted pyramid, I was scribbling bad poetry under eucalyptus trees on the Berkeley campus or in crowded, smoky coffee shops. Besides the core curricular requirements, I took creative writing workshops where I worked on plays, short stories, and novellas and talked about narrative arc and craft and voice. Not only had I never been involved in campus media, I had never even considered a career in journalism until I arrived in Washington. I wasn’t yet sure where I ultimately wanted to go, but I knew I wanted it to involve words and stories, and people who cared about both.

  Style was a great section for me to start my career in because it was a place where women had risen to the top ranks. I was surrounded by confident, competent newspaperwomen who didn’t look to men for approval or permission: Harriet Fier; Mary Hadar, the Style section managing editor; and her deputy editor, Ellen Edwards. Also, working for a company headed by Katharine Graham—a legendary figure who had taken over leading the paper after her brilliant but mentally unstable husband killed himself—mitigated my overall sense that journalism was largely the realm of powerful white men. Nearly two decades later, in a collection of pieces about Washington that Mrs. Graham edited, she would observe: “Washington is a tough town for women—and especially for wives. This is in large part because, since its inception, Washington has been and remains a man’s town. For most of the decades of my Washington life, it was men who were in charge.”

  It never occurred to me that it was unusual that a woman was at the helm of a ship as hulking as the Washington Post. The few sightings I’d had of Mrs. Graham in the newsroom my first year left me with the impression that she was untouchably regal, even unearthly in her sense of confidence and command. I knew only the briefest of outlines of how she had gotten there. I didn’t know about the decisions she made, the risks she took, and—what would be for me, when I did finally school myself in her personal history, the most resonant—the fears she thwarted or at least managed. I had no idea that in her own way she felt as much an outsider as I did in my lowly position. Despite her place at the center of power, Mrs. Graham also felt oddly on the sidelines and wanted so much to be in the game.

  Though in my salad days, I also wanted to be in the game, and my perch on the periphery of the Style section was as good as any to figure out where I might begin to build a career.

  I worked about twenty hours a week those first few months, hoping they would give me more hours while I struggled to save enough money to get my own place. I was living in my brother’s brownstone at Fifteenth and Q Streets NW, a neighborhood on the edge of Dupont Circle that was slowly becoming the gentrified, trendy mecca it is for young professionals today. My brother, David, was then a happy bachelor, and he good-naturedly put up with housing me temporarily. The deal was that once I saved enough for first and last months’ rent I would find my own place. He helped me navigate Washington and the beginning of adulthood. Right after I arrived he took me out on the front stoop and pointed in the direction of the Post.

  “When you walk out the door, you can go that way. Don’t go that way,” he said, wagging a finger in the opposite direction. “The methadone center is two blocks over. Unless you’re secretly an addict, you don’t want to go there. And if you work late, after dark, you have to take a cab home. No exceptions, ever.”

  David was secretly proud of my job, I could tell, but he had a weird way of showing it. His favorite gag was to creep up on me just before sunrise, when I was still deeply asleep, and yell in my ear, “DUMMY TO GO!” I would leap out of my bed and run toward what I believed in my stupor was the direction of the copy desk. He did this day after day for a month, and I fell for it every time.

  Copy aides were allowed to pitch stories, and if their idea was approved, they could go ahead and pursue it, as long as they did it on their own time. If a story actually made it into the paper, the aide was paid a freelancer’s fee, usually a couple hundred bucks.

  The Food section was particularly open to freelancers, and even though my idea of a meal was a tuna sandwich or a can of smoked oysters on crackers, I volunteered to write whatever they needed. Soon enough they gave me my first assignment, a medley of pumpkin recipes, and I turned David’s kitchen into my own test lab. That’s making it sound too sophisticated because my performance was more I Love Lucy than Julie & Julia. I also thought David and I might both throw up from eating too many pumpkin muffins, pies, and bread, but that concern disappeared the morning I picked up the paper off the front stoop and, spotting my very first byline in bold black typeface, ran into the house shrieking with delight.

  After a few months, just as my brother’s patience was beginning to wear thin, the Post gave me a full-time position. I was still a copy aide, but now I was working a forty-hour workweek. That pay, along with what I made freelancing, meant I’d be earning just enough money to support myself. I was still writing for Food and Home (hard-hitting stories like how a Redskin offensive lineman decorated his bachelor pad and when to refinish your hardwood floors), but I also began to get assignments covering parties, mostly political fund-raisers.

  I moved to a studio apartment in Foggy Bottom, close to the White House and the State
Department and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was also walking distance to work. The building was art deco-ish and, if you squinted, it had a shabby elegance except for the occasional cockroach in the kitchen. My apartment was small but serviceable and sunny, being on the sixth floor facing east. It had parquet floors I would hate now but loved then and a Murphy table that unfolded from the wall in the unlikely event that I cooked dinner for anyone.

  I was now truly on my own, gainfully employed, and my life was taking shape. My routine was to work the day shift, 9:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., and as winter approached and the temperature dropped, I was able to fit ice-skating into my regular schedule on the nights I didn’t get assigned to cover a party. I had figure-skated since I was a kid, though I was never good enough to compete. But now that I had established myself in Washington, I started to explore the city’s outdoor rinks and a few nearby indoor ones, too. There was an adequate outdoor rink on my way home, and I would bring my skates with me in the morning and stop there for an hour or two before heading home for a late dinner.

  One day I was walking through the Style section with my skates slung over my shoulder, and Henry Allen, a Vietnam vet with a gruff voice that bordered on a growl, yelled out, “Hey, Blades.” Not realizing he was talking to me, I kept walking. “Hey, BLADES!” he yelled louder. And then, in a cheesy Mexican accent, he hollered, “Senorita Blahh Daze.”

  After that, whenever Henry saw me, skates or no skates, he would bellow from across the newsroom either “Blades!” or “Senorita Blahh Daze!” He would chuckle to himself every time as if the clever nickname had just then come to him. It was a friendly hazing, the first sign that I might someday get keys to the club of Post insiders. I turned bright red and fumbled and sometimes walked into the nearest desk, but secretly I was thrilled by the acknowledgment.