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  At the root of all our discontent was money. Understand, we were the poorest generation in memory, with little hope of financial salvation. Poverty was so inevitable, it became chic—hence the flannel shirts and dungarees and work boots. As William Strauss and Neil Howe noted in their magnificent study Generations, my cohorts and I were on course to become the most impoverished group of babies since the shat-upon Lost Generation of Fitzgerald and Hemingway. To be fair, Generations was published in 1991—that is, before the Internet exploded and my too-smart-for-their-own-good compeers took advantage of our parents’ Luddite tendencies, thus leveling the playing field somewhat. At the time, though, who could have foreseen such a radical uptick in fortune?

  The point is, 1991 was an especially bad year for money. It was a bad year to be unemployed, and a really bad year to be a wet-behind-the-ears college graduate with a sparse résumé and student loans to repay (student loans, I might add, that wouldn’t be tax deductible until the Clinton administration). How bad was it? George Bush père enjoyed a record-high approval rating in May of 1991, at the end of the Gulf War. Eighteen months later, he lost his bid for reelection. The reason for his Cubs-in-’69 choke, as famously explained by James Carville? “It’s the economy, stupid.”

  In short, the summer of 1991 was the worst moment in a generation to be in the position Taylor Schmidt was in.

  And that’s where our story begins.

  PART I

  Pink Slip

  CHAPTER 1

  T

  hursday, August 29, 1991. Dog day morning. Ninety-five in the shade, the latest entry in a summer of record-shattering heat and humidity. Baking kiln-hot heat, bus fumes like fireball gusts, the stench of boiling urine. The day before, a clutch of elderly women in the Bronx had died, overcome by fragile health and high temperatures, and the twenty-ninth was even hotter.

  Twenty-three and jobless, Taylor Schmidt stood on the lusterless stretch of East Fortieth Street between Fifth and Madison, the purgatorial half-block that most of the city’s employment agencies then called home, nursing a lukewarm cup of street vendor coffee (she would have to wait three more years for Starbucks to worm its insidious way into the Big Apple). The bead of perspiration on her upper lip reappeared as soon as she wiped it away. Her Liz Claiborne interview suit was a black funeral special, bought on special at Marshalls, and wool. A suit for winter, not for a scorcher like today, but her only other one was at the dry cleaners.

  She entertained the idea of losing the jacket, but decided that once it was off, it would have to stay that way, and her blouse was too wrinkled for that. Ah, the blouse. Its white faux silk clung to her shapely frame, her Victoria’s Secret brassiere (34 C, a darker shade of white) plainly visible. On her feet, new Nine West pumps of hard leather, black like the suit, the heels adding two inches to her five foot three. Band-Aids applied to her heels did not stop the chafing, and there was nothing to be done about the blisters on her toes. Her feet swelled in the humidity of the miserable New York August, and those shoes were unforgiving.

  Taylor ditched the coffee and peeled the plastic wrapper from a brand-new pack of cigarettes. Back then impoverished recent college grads could still afford them and smoke them just about anywhere. She smoked Parliament Lights—what was then, as now, an old fogy brand. She was aware of the irony. Others were denied the privilege, because she carried her smokes in a monogrammed cigarette case of filigreed silver, a gift on her last birthday—literally her last birthday—from Kim Winter, her best friend, who lived in Miami and claimed to have been at Au Bar the night William Kennedy Smith did whatever it was he did. Taylor fired up a smoke, put the pack in her slender handbag. Checked her reflection in the mirrored window of one of the glass-box buildings. The humidity had wreaked havoc on her hair, and her makeup could not conceal the unctuous shine on her cheeks. Shit, she thought, although I saw her when she left the apartment that morning, and sweaty or not, she looked good.

  Taylor loitered in front of the building, people whizzing by all around her, puffing on the cancer stick. She tried to relax; to forget the fact that this would be the ninth time this month that she’d been to an employment agency, and the reality that there were no good jobs to be had; to construct, painstakingly, the house of cards that was her ego; to visualize the day when she would don her waxen wings and fly into the sunshiny world of steady employment.

  Key word: steady. By now, she had found, and lost, work at several restaurants, most recently the newly minted Planet Hollywood, where she served as hostess. In the summer of 1991, the concept of sexual harassment was new. Disclosure had yet to be written. The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, with their pubic hair on the Pepsi can, did not go down till October, and when they did, the consensus was that Anita Hill was an uppity bitch who should know her place. In the food service industry especially, sexual harassment was the rule, not the exception. Without fear of reprisal, guys did what they pleased. Poor Taylor, not surprisingly, was a magnet for such lewd behavior. And boy was she sick of it. This is why she left, or was asked to leave, jobs at the Bottom Line, Tropica, and Planet Hollywood. In the latter case, it was a Schwarzenegger look-alike who goosed her ass and suggested a rendezvous (“Maybe you could join me in duh hot tub, Tay-luh”). She smacked his smug imitation-Austrian face and was promptly eighty-sixed.

  Now, standing in front of the building’s sooty mirrored glass in the dragon’s-breath cauldron of summer in the city, she banished these dark thoughts from her mind.

  “This can’t last forever,” she told her reflection, taking a last drag on the Parliament. “Somebody has to hire me, sooner or later.” With that, she flicked the butt into the gutter, applied fresh gloss to her lips, and went inside.

  Today’s appointment was with Fraulein Staffing, a now-defunct competitor of Mademoiselle (the placement specialists, not the magazine of the same name). She’d been to Mademoiselle already, and Katharine Gibbs, and Rand, and Manpower, and four others besides, hands outstretched, begging for the alms that were job interviews. Those efforts had been in vain. Taylor couldn’t even land temporary work—not even a job prettying up a reception area in a law firm or something. That’s how bad the market was.

  As soon as Taylor hit the lobby, the air-conditioning bowled her over. Through the wool blazer she could feel the sweat on her back freeze. It was a shabby lobby—no security guard, no doorman, no sign-in sheet. She walked directly into a stuffy, un-air-conditioned elevator with four other people, and prayed to a God whose existence she didn’t acknowledge that the thing wouldn’t break down. Her prayers were answered, or maybe it was just dumb luck; at any rate, the lift got her where she needed to go, loudly and slowly, but surely.

  Fraulein’s offices were on the seventh floor. As Taylor strode into the well-air-conditioned lobby, she noticed the same uncomfortable foam rubber couches, the same gray carpeting, the same pastel prints on the same eggshell walls that she had seen in the eight other agencies she’d been to. Uniform phones rang off the proverbial hook, were answered, in time, by automatonical receptionists (“Debbie? I’ll transfer you. Please hold.”) and rerouted before the caller could request to leave a message. Even the other job-seekers were familiar: the same polyester suits, the same résumés, the same look of abject desperation in their eyes. She watched them squint at yellow legal pads, leaf through magazines, stare hopefully at the receptionists. I can’t believe I’m here, she thought (and would write in her diary that night), with these fucking losers.

  Taylor checked in, sat, filled out her paperwork: the application, the I-9, the copy of her Missouri driver’s license, the W-2. She’d filled out all this shit eight times already. How many exemptions…? What did it matter! Let the government exact its pound of flesh, just give me a job already!

  “Here you go.”

  “Super. Please take a seat. Someone will be right with you.”

  With great reluctance, Taylor joined the undulating swath of lesser humanity in the lobby. She sat, crossed her legs, and k
ept still as an ice sculpture—the sweat on her back had pretty much frozen her into place. Only her cold eyes moved, studying the other occupants of the waiting room. A kinky-haired bitch with a Lawn Guy-land accent; a frat boy reading Sports Illustrated; a bovine black woman with bright yellow earrings and matching shoes, bulbous feet spilling out of them like yeasty loaves of pumpernickel. Humiliating that she would have to share a room with these bottom-feeders.

  The frat boy gave her the once over, twice; his eyes meandered from the tips of her shiny Nine Wests, up the divine contour of her black-stockinged legs, held for far too long on her chest, and then found her glare.

  “Hey baby,” he grinned. “Come here often?”

  Not a terrible line, under the circumstances, but its underlying truth, and the pathos to which it alluded, did not sit well with Taylor. And neither did the frat boy. “Save it,” she said.

  This did not deter him. “What’s Pee-wee Herman’s favorite baseball team?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What’s Pee-wee Herman’s favorite baseball team?”

  Paul Reubens had been fodder for the tabloids and the late-night talk shows lately, after his arrest in Sarasota, Florida, for exposing himself in an X-rated theater, ostensibly to masturbate. These were innocent days, remember: the browser, that entrée to the pornographic cornucopia that is the World Wide Web, had only just been conceived.

  “The Yanks,” she told him. “I heard that one already.”

  “That’s his favorite American League team,” the frat boy gallantly explained. “In the National League, he likes the Expos. Get it? Expose?” and he burst into hyenic laughter.

  While Taylor Schmidt attracted admirers indiscriminately, sure as a magnetic field attracts every piece of iron in its range, her curse was that shitbirds like this were the only ones who invariably worked up the nerve to make a pass. And as I said before, she wasn’t easy. She had standards. And to her undying credit, she didn’t dig on frat boys. Bad boys were her cup of tea. Like this dude J.D., a bartender at Continental, the heavy metal bar on Third Avenue—number seventy-four on the list. He had spiky hair and tattoos and a pierced lip, and his fingernails were painted black, and he was already bitching that the upcoming Metallica release was a piece of shit, that “Enter Sandman” was a sellout song. If Taylor had a type, J.D. was it. The jerk-off frat boy in the Fraulein lobby stood no chance.

  Before he could further embarrass himself, a receptionist summoned Taylor.

  Her spirits soared—“Today’s the day,” she thought to herself—and were promptly deflated when she was told, “First, we’ll have you take some tests.”

  Taylor followed the receptionist into a tiny room, in which sat six computers and five of her nemeses.

  “Enter your data and the tests you’ll be taking. WordPerfect, and of course Typing. See me when you’re done.” Then the bitch curled her lips into a Susan-Lucci-at-the-Daytime-Emmys demi-smile and was gone, leaving Taylor to fidget with the PC.

  An electronic wizard appeared on the screen and waved his wand, magically compelling her to enter her name and Social Security number. After a few clicks of the mouse, she navigated the same word processing program in which she’d written all her college papers, to prove to the world that she did in fact know how to open, print, and save documents. The bliss ended with her typing as much of this:

  The telephone is an important part of the service industry. Most of our contact with our clients is done over the telephone. Without the telephone, we would not be able to talk to our clients. Also, our clients would not be able to talk to us. When you answer the telephone, you should be friendly. A friendly voice goes a long way. Mark Twain once said he could go a whole week on one compliment. Of course, Mark Twain didn’t spend much time on the telephone…

  as she could in five minutes, on a keyboard with a temperamental space bar and half the letter markings worn away.

  As this was her ninth time taking the test, Taylor kicked ass. She could now type eighty-five words a minute and was completely proficient in mail merge, although she had never used that particular feature in real life. She could almost do the whole test with her eyes closed.

  Finished, she delivered the printout to one of the receptionist-clones (impossible to say which one), who accepted the offering, scoffed at the many inventive spellings of telephone, and motioned for her to wait in the lobby. By then there was a new crop of losers for Taylor to obsess over, and another frat boy fuckwad to declare his intentions.

  Eventually, one of the employment agents—or placement coordinators, or personnel consultants, or whatever they called themselves—emerged from behind the double doors, displaying a sharp-toothed smile that made her look like an actual headhunter. “Hi, I’m Debbie! Nice to meet you, Taylor!” The resultant handshake was borderline battery.

  Taylor followed her into the warren of desks that comprised the office. The place was bustling with activity: headhunters racing to and fro, distributing xeroxes, blathering stridently into headsets, navigating the jobless through the maze of desks, shaking hands, offering chairs and coffee and jobs that weren’t open. The office resembled a trading room floor—which in effect it was.

  As Taylor walked by the first cluster of desks, one of the agents—a slick-looking guy who was kind of cute, in a Republican/golf/cigar bar kind of way—cried into the phone, “Full editor? HarperCollins?” pretended to notice her for the first time, winked, and continued, “Sixty-five thou a year? Sounds great. Yes, he’ll take it!”

  When they had journeyed far enough, the headhunter motioned for her to sit down on a cracked plastic chair reminiscent of those in her high school cafeteria. Taylor sat. Debbie also sat, although she was so manic she seemed to levitate an inch or two above the cracked plastic. “I have a lot of terr-if-ic positions to tell you about, Taylor! And a lot of people for you to meet!”

  “Great.”

  “But first, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  Taylor crossed her legs, smoothed her skirt, and launched into the litany. “Well, I graduated this past May from Wycliffe College,” gauging the interviewer’s face for a reaction, getting none, “where I majored in English lit. I copyedited the campus weekly—I brought a copy with me, if you’d like to see it…”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Blinklessly, Debbie stared at her. Waiting for her to sweat. To break.

  “Oh. Okay.” Taylor’s steel-blue eyes drifted to a sign on the wall reminding her to MAINTAIN EYE CONTACT.

  “So what brings you to Fraulein?”

  “Your ad in the Times piqued my interest.”

  I still recall the ad—I’d clipped it for her two days earlier:

  Writer/Editor, up-and-coming 20’s-geared mag, great env, great benefits, salary low 20s, call Debbie at Fraulein

  Debbie dismissed this with a wave of her skeletal hand. “Yes, well, I’m afraid they’re looking for someone with a bit more experience.”

  If you’re keeping count, this was now the ninth time one of these people had fed Taylor this line. The bait and switch was alive and well.

  “But it was listed under ‘Recent College Grad.’”

  “Yes, recent college grad. As in, two or three years removed from school. Preferably grad school. I do have some great openings to discuss, though. Tell me, Taylor, what do you want to do?”

  This was the Million Dollar Question. That she’d had eight previous cracks at an answer didn’t make responding any easier. “Well, I was thinking publishing. Because I have editorial experience. But advertising, I’d be interested in that. Anything that’s, like, creative.”

  Debbie nodded, her cobra-like incisors gleaming in the fluorescent light. “I’ll see what we have.” And she flipped through a stack of loose papers in front of her, her head slowly but very surely shaking back and forth.

  Two desks away, another agent exclaimed into his headset, “Creative Programming Consultant? MTV? Eighty thou a year? She accepts.”

  “We don’t h
ave anything right now in publishing or advertising,” Debbie said. “August is a slow month. I do have a terr-if-ic opening as an admin assistant at Arthur Andersen!”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You don’t know Arthur Andersen? It’s Big Six!”

  “Big…Six? Of what?”

  “Accounting!”

  Taylor noticed, Scotch-taped to the wall behind Debbie, a cluster of thank-you notes. Perhaps they were just props. “Oh. But I, um…I don’t want accounting.”

  “But it’s not accounting, it’s an admin assistant position!”

  This was the first actual job any of the agencies had produced, sorry though it was, and Taylor probably should have jumped at it. If she had, she might still be alive. But she let it go. It was beneath her, period. She was holding out for something better, she told me later; something with a future.

  “That’s…I mean, I’m not interested in that.”

  “I see.” Now visibly annoyed, Debbie returned to the stack. “Well, the only other thing I have right now that you’re qualified for is an underwriter training program at CryoHealth. It pays twenty-five a year!”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s located in Newark. But it’s a growing section of Newark.”