“Suit yourself. I’ll thank you when I win my Tony.” Rick returned to the producer, I assumed, though I didn’t look back to confirm it. I had stopped tracking his whereabouts in bars months ago. This was Rick’s milieu, drinking and flirting in a sexually charged atmosphere. With big arms and high cheekbones, he always received considerable attention from strangers, which he enjoyed, too much for my taste. If one drunken college student told him he looked like Jude Law on a Friday night, Rick would be firmly ensconced on Cloud Nine for the remainder of the weekend. If two people over the course of an evening happened to remark upon the same resemblance, he’d talk for a week about moving to Hollywood. The exponential effect of compliments on his mental state intrigued the hell out of me, and I wondered if I secretly paid ten people to tell him he looked like Jude Law over the course of a random day, would his head just explode into a million tiny pieces like a balloon full of glitter?
“You never tell me I’m attractive,” he once told me during a fight. I answered, “That’s because you seem so convinced of it already.” I thought it would sting more than it apparently did, although in retaliation he did call me an “ice queen,” which made me laugh.
In a bar filled with men in designer clothes, mostly black fitted jackets, I began to feel a little self-conscious. I hadn’t planned on going out for gay drinks and regretted not changing into something more evening-appropriate. It was mid-April and warming up, so I wore a white button-front shirt and a coral sweater by Reiss with two wings printed on the back, one on each shoulder blade. I’m a harbinger of spring, I told myself. (An older woman once called me that when I wore a turquoise paisley tie to a ballroom dancing lesson on a February evening in Boston, and it stuck with me.) It crossed my mind that the cute guy was smiling in my direction because he and his friends were making fun of my outfit, but he was wearing orange, so that would have been a little hypocritical, and he didn’t strike me as the type.
Then the cute guy started to walk toward me.
“Oh my God, Cheryl. He’s coming over here.” My boyfriend was ten feet away from me at the bar. Perhaps I had done something to lead this other—my God, he’s really handsome—guy on and now I’d have to awkwardly extricate myself from an inevitable exchange. “Shit. Fuck. What do I do?”
“First, you should wash that mouth out with soap,” Cheryl said, nonplussed.
As he maneuvered his way around clusters of chatting men, the cute stranger, I realized, wasn’t moving of his own volition. One of the guys he had been speaking with on the other side of the bar was dragging him by the elbow toward me. He doesn’t want to talk to me, I thought. Someone is making him talk to me. Oh, the indignity. Please, God, kill me now. Is this retribution for that dumb game? Forgive me my sins because I’m a schmuck.
His friend placed him directly in front of me with a smirk and asked me, “Are you Clinton Kelly?”
“I am,” I said.
“I think you know my friend . . .”
Switch!
*
At this point, dear reader—as jarring as it may be to your system—I invite you to travel back two years in time with me. I promise we’ll return to the man in the orange striped shirt very soon. But first a little more about the path upon which I had been traveling.
I was working as the executive editor of a men’s fashion trade magazine called DNR (“It’s the men’s version of Women’s Wear Daily except it’s a weekly,” I would say when explaining my career at cocktail parties) and accepting the rare freelance writing assignment when it came up. This particular week, my friend Kevin had asked me if I would write an article and direct a photo shoot about indoor rock climbing for a magazine bankrolled by Philip Morris. I said no, but he talked me into it because we had a history. And because he had money to spend.
For several years I had worked for the custom publishing company that produced the magazine. And even though I wasn’t exactly passing out free loosies to twelve-year-olds in the local playground, while employed there I had struggled morally with being a cog—albeit a minuscule one—in the Big Tobacco machine. But the pay was solid for the amount of effort the job required, and the magazine, an oversized action-adventure glossy, was actually quite good. The average person would have assumed it was a newsstand magazine like Outside or Men’s Journal, except there was always a Marlboro ad (usually involving some combination of cowboys, horses, and buttes) on the back, which would have been illegal in a consumer mag. Editorial guidelines forbade any mention of tobacco or smoking, and it was sent without charge to men over the age of twenty-one—approximately 5 million of them—who, somehow or another, had ended up on the Marlboro mailing list.
I once asked a marketing executive how Philip Morris acquired all these names and addresses. She told me, more churlishly than I would have preferred, “A great many people express an interest in Marlboro-branded merchandise.” Marlboro-branded merchandise? This information blew my mind. How much does someone need a Marlboro beer koozie that they’re willing to tell the tobacco company where they live?
I could probably report the story and write it all in one day, Kevin said; it was just one thousand words for which he would pay me three thousand dollars. At that point in my life, with credit-card and student-loan debt slowly crushing my soul like an empty milk carton, I would have done a lot worse for a lot less. I had heard the indoor rock wall at Chelsea Piers, a high-end sports complex on Manhattan’s West Side, was the best in the city, so I called and asked to speak to someone in their marketing department. The phone rang and a male voice answered.
“This is Damon,” the male voice said.
I explained that I was writing a freelance article that would be seen by a lot of people for a magazine he had most certainly never heard of and asked if I could use the wall for a photo shoot and one of the instructors as a source. With a little professional persuasion he agreed, so the next week I took a morning off of work. I figured I would report the story in half a day and write it in one evening.
I wasn’t expecting to be so flustered when we met in person. In his white polo shirt and blue chinos, standing in the middle of the weight-training floor, he looked less like a marketing exec than the sexy phys ed teacher I had always wished for in high school.
“Have you ever worked out here?” Damon asked as he escorted me to the climbing area.
“Yeah, just once,” I said.
“Why just once?”
“I took a group fitness class,” I said. “I forget the name. Extreme Turbo Power or some shit like that. Everyone in it was ridiculously in-shape.”
“You look like you’re in pretty good shape,” he said.
“Thanks, I’ve been working out. But this was nuts. Everyone in the place was ripped. And the class was all running and jumping and free weights. It was too much. I totally barfed.”
He opened his eyes wide and I noticed they were green. “You barfed in the class?”
“No, thank God. I had to run to the bathroom in the middle of it. I puked, washed my face, and walked right out the door. Never came back.”
He laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Maybe you should try another class, on the house.”
“Oh, hell no. Still too embarrassed. I’m only here for the money.”