The Trouble Boy, page 12
“Ha!” He laughed as if I had suggested he jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. “You think we would invest in an Internet venture!”
“Toby, we really don’t have the money right now to do such a thing,” my mother said.
“Isabella, don’t say—”
“I think it’s important Toby understands what our situation is.”
They explained to me that revenue at my father’s company was down 40 percent, and my mother’s company was nearing bankruptcy.
“How can that be?” I asked. “I thought the label was doing well.”
“Everyone thinks that,” she said. “We’re a private company, so no one ever sees the figures. But people aren’t buying couture anymore. It’s a dying breed of fashion.”
“Why don’t you do what everyone else is doing?” I asked.
“And what would that be?” She looked at me sternly, as if I had no business making such suggestions to her.
“Branch out. Do a bridge line. Do fragrances, accessories.”
“Toby, that takes a tremendous amount of money. And you know I’ve never taken on investors. Besides, all those bridge lines are just shit, pardon me.” She started waving her hands around for emphasis, something she did whenever she was excited. “They are just watered down versions of the original vision! If I’m going to do that kind of thing, I might as well not do it at all!”
“You can’t close down the company,” I said. It was impossible to imagine my mother not running her studio.
“There are a number of people interested in buying. I just had a meeting last week with LVMH, though I’m not sure I can meet their terms.”
“You’re going to sell to LVMH?” I couldn’t imagine my mother’s label becoming part of a bigger operation. However, owned by a company like LVMH, it would be visible alongside the Guccis of the world.
“Let’s not presume anything,” she said.
“The important thing,” my father said, “is we would prefer you come home. Your rent every month isn’t cheap, and I want to see you creating a solid future in something. All this Web site stuff can be fun, but how different is it from working on the college paper? It just seems frivolous.”
“It’s not frivolous,” I said. “It’s serious journalism. I know it’s not politics or business reporting, but people use the site as a resource. They rely on us.”
“Just think about it,” my father said. “Six months from now, what do you want to be able to say you’ve done with your time in New York? I was talking with the father of one of your classmates—what’s her name, the Carr girl?—and he said she’s been working as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.”
“What an experience!” my mother said. A classmate of mine could be digging ditches and my parents would think it was fabulous.
“A lot of my friends do that sort of thing, and they hate it,” I said. “They would kill to be doing what I’m doing.” I looked at my mother. “You should understand. I’m not the type who can just do what everyone else is doing.”
“He has a point, Simon. It wouldn’t be fair to tell my own child he has to be like everyone else.”
“I’m afraid you’re living in a fantasy world. You have no idea of the things that comprise daily life.”
There was no arguing with them. And I certainly couldn’t ask them for money. CityStyle not making payroll would just be one more nail in the dot-com coffin.
“Let’s talk about something more pleasant,” my mother said, and I knew exactly what we wouldn’t be talking about.
The thing about coming out to my parents—after all the explanations, the fighting, the tears—was that it was still impossible to discuss relationships or dating. The phrase “I’m seeing someone” brought up a multitude of disastrous images: the AIDS-RIDDEN guys my mother pictured me falling into bed with, the sodomy my father imagined me committing. They hated thinking about the lack of societal acceptance, the inability to have children. To a liberal mind, these were all barriers that could be overcome, but to my parents, two people whose primary contact with homosexuals prior to my coming out was with the florist, the tailor, and the hairdresser, these were not lifestyle choices to be taken lightly. True, my mother had employed a handful of gay guys at her studio over the years, but she regarded them similarly, as members of a service industry whose practices in the bedroom were not for her to comprehend.
It took my mother longer than my father to accept that I was gay. While my father saw it purely as biology, of winning the gay gene in the genetic lottery, my mother always thought it was her fault, that she had made me gay. She even once told me I was gay because I hated her and therefore hated all women, both of which I assured her were not true.
All this, along with the introduction of a variety of boyfriends of dubious quality through the years, had made it all the more difficult for us to relate to each other.
There was a simple way around it: They didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.
There were insinuations over the years, like the time my mother returned from Costco during a vacation with a jumbo box of condoms “for your promiscuity,” she said, an assumption she made based on my proclivity for coming home at five in the morning. Or the times my father would ask me in the middle of the evening news “what the gays think about this,” as if I could be responsible for the opinions of the entire world’s homosexual population.
It wasn’t that my parents were squeamish about sex, either. Unlike many parents, mine actually introduced me to the idea of sexuality, explaining the mechanics at an early age. For them, sexuality—as long as it was heterosexuality—was a comfortable issue, not a source of embarrassment but a fact of life, as it should be.
Still, even after I had come out, my father continued to harass me for several years, hoping I would come around to the right side of the fence. When I told my parents about my plans to adopt Gus during my freshman year of college, my father said, “Why don’t you worry less about getting a cat and more about getting some pussy?”
I knew it wasn’t worth it to make them understand.
7
Because it was a celebration she had never experienced as a child, planning a Thanksgiving feast that would make her husband and son proud was high on my mother’s list of priorities. When planning for any holiday, my mother embraced multiculturalism—and shopping—with a vengeance. She and my father always returned home from trips loaded down with twice as much as they had brought.
The two had traveled through most of Europe together in the seventies and eighties, and had since moved on to farther flung destinations like Africa, India, China, Japan, Russia, and South America. This year, it had been Mexico, which, though they had visited before, my mother felt they had never “done properly,” and so our table was decorated with little dolls made of corn husks and brightly colored wooden animals, including a grotesque army of little turkeys whose heads bobbed up and down obscenely when tapped.
Since a photographer from Elle Décor had stopped by earlier to record this spectacular display of colonial fetishism, the table had been set for twelve, even though it would just be the three of us. My mother’s parents lived in Italy and did not celebrate Thanksgiving, and both of my father’s parents were dead. Some years, we would do Thanksgiving with my godmother and her children, but this time they had decided to take a trip to Hawaii. So it was just the three of us sitting at an enormous table decorated with sweatshop-produced Mexican handicrafts.
We always started eating around four and were ready to pass out by eight from all the booze and food. Just as my father had finished carving the turkey Mercedes had prepared, the phone rang.
I answered it.
“Is Toby there?”
For some reason, the fact that Goth Boy was calling didn’t surprise me. I clutched my glass of champagne.
“I think you turned off your cell phone, so I called directory. Thank God you’re listed. So what’s going on?” He asked me the question as if there was sure to be something unusual and spectacular happening on Thanksgiving.
“Well,” I said, I hoped not too condescendingly, “we’re just about to sit down to dinner. Aren’t you going to do the same?”
“I’m not having Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “I was going to go to my sister’s, but she had to leave town.” I had forgotten; he had mentioned something about his parents living in Illinois.
“Don’t you have any friends you can hang out with?”
“Not really,” he said. “Thanksgiving is not a very goth holiday.”
“No,” I said, “I suppose it isn’t.”
There was a long pause. I heard a video game being played in the background.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’ve got to get going. We’re sitting down to eat.”
“Call me,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and hung up.
“Who was that?” my mother asked. “Imagine, calling on Thanksgiving! How strange!”
“Just someone I met in LA.”
“Really?” my mother said, and I knew what she was thinking. “Does that Elizabeth hang out with strange people?”
“No,” I said. “ ‘That’ Elizabeth has very nice friends, actually. She’s currently dating a model.”
“What a mistake,” my mother said, as she poured the gravy into a tureen. “I always tell my girls at the studio, ‘Never date anyone who is better looking than you are.’ ”
I wondered what my mother would think if I ever dated Donovan.
Since my mother insisted every vacation at home be stretched to its greatest possible length, I didn’t arrive back in New York until the following Sunday evening. Though the LA meetings hadn’t gone well, and I would have to tell Sonia my parents weren’t interested in investing, I had never felt so glad to be back in Manhattan.
On Monday morning, though, something had changed. Sonia looked beaten down, not rested, by the few days’ vacation we had all been granted. She told us we would be having our weekly staff meeting a day early.
“What’s going on?” I asked Donovan as we both scrambled to gather our notes so we could report on the coming week’s reviews.
“Beats me,” he shrugged.
The eight of us squeezed into Sonia’s office and waited for her to begin.
“I think many of you have sensed this day was coming,” she said, and with those words, we all knew.
“The site, I’m sorry to say, will be shutting down, effective immediately. I had a number of meetings with investors during the first half of last week, and continued to have follow-up discussions over the weekend.” She let out a sigh. “We simply don’t have the funding to keep going, and the venture capital situation is not getting any better.”
I looked at the faces around me. The staff, even Donovan, was stoic. Had they expected this? Why weren’t they angry? Perhaps there was nothing to be angry about.
“As you’ve probably realized, our last payroll didn’t go through. I want to make sure you are all compensated as soon as possible for that pay period. We can’t offer any severance, but at least we can give you that.”
Great. We were being offered our back wages as if they were some sort of grand consolation prize.
“More importantly,” she continued, pepping up a bit, “I want you all to be able to get good jobs in the field. The job market is not easy these days, especially in editorial, but I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you can find something. Ariana has graciously allowed us to use these offices through the end of the year. You are free to take advantage of the office for resume submission and to field calls until December fifteenth.”
She leaned up against her desk and folded her arms, but it was a gesture of resignation, not defiance. I felt sorry for her.
“Guys, I’m really sorry about this. I know we all thought we could create something really great here, and I think we did the best we could, but the reality of it is that the money just isn’t there.” She looked like she was about to cry. “I’ll be available all day to field questions.”
“Let’s grab a cigarette,” Donovan said to me.
As we walked out of the office, Sunny gave us a patronizing smile. She was probably glad to be rid of us as tenants.
“This fucking sucks,” Donovan said once we were out on the sidewalk. “I’m going to have to dig into my savings to make rent for this month.”
“So what next?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Start making offerings at the great shrine of Condé Nast?”
After stopping at the coffee place down the street, Donovan and I went back upstairs. Like obedient drones, the rest of the staff had started doing job searches on the Internet or packing up the contents of their desks. The two of us joined Sonia in her office. She looked like she had been through a war.
We put an iced coffee on her desk.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it gratefully.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked.
“Go home and sleep,” she said.
“Seriously,” Donovan said.
“Ariana needs someone full time to write press releases, create media kits, stuff like that. It’ll tide me over while I look for something else.”
“And what should we do?” I asked.
She pointed to Donovan. “For you, I have a contact at Gourmet. I think you’re ready to move on to a place like that. You know, serious food writing. Not all this scenester crap.”
“And where does that leave me?” I asked.
“Definitely not doing nightlife reporting. You’re too smart for that. I mean, there’s only so many times you can review clubs before it gets old. I’ve got a few leads for you, people you should call. Nothing full-time, but some people who can give you freelance work.”
We paused, in the silence that occurs after a disaster, as we reflected on CityStyle’s final burnout. I thought about how much this would please my parents, how much it would confirm their world view. But I didn’t care. I would be destitute and living on the streets before I would take the kind of job they wanted me to have.
“I think we were trying to do too much,” Sonia finally said. “I mean, sometimes you guys were working twelve-hour days! Other magazines, even other Web sites, have huge staffs to take care of everything: fact checking, research, listings. How did we ever think we could compete?”
“We had something good going for a while,” Donovan said. “Our editorial was awesome when we had enough money to pay people.”
“I know . . . it’s just that no one gives a shit about editorial. How was I supposed to explain to some venture capitalist that our site was better because it gave people the real deal on downtown? They don’t care what you’re serving up, as long as there’s a revenue stream. And who am I to be talking about revenue stream and profit margins and return on investment? I don’t know the first thing about that sort of stuff! I was an English major at Vassar, for Christ’s sake!”
Jamie knew what we should do to help ease the blow of our recent unemployment. “Donovan’s birthday is coming up. We’ll throw him a party, and you can host it. You’re the only one with tolerant neighbors.”
“I can host it? I’m completely broke,” I said, which was true.
“Exactly,” he said. “That will be your contribution. The rest of us will pay for liquor, food, entertainment.”
“Entertainment?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” Jamie said.
Within a day, Jamie and the boys had composed an email invitation and divided up the responsibilities. David and Jamie would handle the liquor, Donovan would deal with music and entertainment, Alejandro would do the decorations, and Brett would create the guest list.
With Jamie’s help, I described Subway Boy to Brett to see if he could invite him. Having gone to NYU, Brett knew every boy in the city.
“I think I know someone who knows him,” Brett said. “I’ll try to get his email address.” Brett reviewed the list, his version of Mrs. Astor’s Metropolitan 400. “Between the five of us, we have almost three hundred people on our email list. I’ve narrowed it down to two hundred. If half show up, then we’ll have a good turnout.”
“You realize,” I said, “that my apartment can only hold about thirty people, tops.”
“That’s good,” Brett said. “People like intimacy.”
The next morning, email invitations were sent out from the five of us, inviting people to “A Dot-Com Crash Party, In Celebration of Donovan’s Birthday, Hosted at the Swank East Village Digs of Mr. Toby Griffin.”
Since Alejandro spent more time at his sewing machine than he did at his laptop, he had not entirely understood the dot-com theme. The theme he did understand, however, was camp, and so he decorated my apartment with a combination of Mylar sheets, votive candles, and 99-cent Ken dolls spray-painted silver. By the time he was finished, my apartment looked like the second coming of Andy Warhol’s Factory. I hoped my sublettor, who had the habit of showing up at all hours, wouldn’t see what had become of her East Village love pad. David and Jamie had six cases of assorted premium liquor delivered that afternoon, which made an impressive display laid out on my kitchen counter. At 7 P.M., I realized we had forgotten something.
“What about food?” I asked.
“Food?” David looked at me quizzically.
“You know, like munchies?”
“Do people really eat at these parties?” Jamie asked as he fixed himself a drink.
“Sure they do!” I said. “We at least should have a cake.”
“He does have a point,” David said. “Donovan will be really insulted if we don’t get him a cake.”
“I thought he might be insulted if we did get him a cake,” Jamie said. “You know, like implying he was fat or something.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” I said. “I’ll go buy him a stupid cake!”
Jamie handed me two twenties, which meant I wouldn’t have to take another advance off my credit card. I went to a Ukrainian bakery down the street and picked up a sheet cake and candles.
