Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(84)

Alex, Lindsay’s thirteen-year-old brother, attended a Reform-Jewish prep school, Rodeph Sholom, on the Upper West Side. He pretty much liked his school and liked his friends and didn’t hate the subway ride up to the place. We had sent him there because both Megan and I were thoroughly unreligious—she a lapsed Catholic, I a Jew in terms of culture only. But by the end of his first month at the school, Alex had become almost frighteningly interested in Judaism. He studied as much Torah as he did computer science. He studied Chinese, but he also took Hebrew. And of course he made me feel embarrassed that my knowledge of Judaism revolved around three things: (1) food (matzo balls should be hard), (2) superstitions that no other Jewish family had ever heard of (“Touch a coat button if you see a nun”), and (3) the words be careful, which we say to anyone leaving our apartment—a plumber, a great-aunt, a Jehovah’s Witness.

Alex and Lindsay fought constantly with each other, and when they weren’t fighting they were laughing with each other. Plus they read books—real books with real paper pages that you have to use your fingers to turn. These kids were smart, sarcastic, and usually nice. Megan and I really got a kick out of them. I don’t want to speculate how much they reciprocated the adoration.

The evening of the party found Megan and me very nervous. But we had our reasons. I poured Megan her third white wine (an unusually enormous amount for her), and Lindsay and Alex put the final touches on the dinner—Lindsay glazed the poached salmon while Alex scattered the watercress over the fish. “I’m doing watercress. Dill is a catering cliché.” Great chefs talk tough.

“Live and learn,” I said.

Megan took a sip of her wine and spoke. “Maybe we should have entitled this evening the ‘Last Dinosaurs in Manhattan’ party.”

I laughed and said, “Maybe,” but I knew what she meant. All eight guests were people whose jobs were simply not very important anymore. In a piece I had written the previous month for Salon.com, I had referred to this category of worker as “leftover people in our new hightech world.”

Yes, the friends who’d be eating our salmon that evening were folks waiting to be—as the British would say—“redundant.” I had been thinking of that scene in the movie The Tall Guy in which the boss turns to his assistant, Jeff Goldblum, and says, “You’re fired. F-U-C-K-E-D. Fired!” If I sound heartless, I don’t mean to be. It was a fact of life, and it was happening all over the country.

The night was a kind of debutante party for those “coming out” of the workforce.

Sandi Feinblum, the assistant style editor at the New York Times, was taking a buyout. She had been assigned to the “traditional” hard-copy newspaper. But the only people who still preferred the printed Times were slowly but surely showing up on the obituaries page.

Wendy Witten and Chuck McKirdy were editors of a wine magazine and a golf magazine respectively; neither publication had transitioned successfully from a newsstand presence to an Internet presence.

We had also invited an executive from Sotheby’s auction house and his very nervous, prescription-druggy wife. He was quickly being strangled into oblivion with websites like eBay and iGavel.

One woman had already gotten the ax. A former travel agent. All the people who once used her services were now making their own hotel reservations and printing their own airline tickets. In essence, she had been replaced by William Shatner.

One guy, Charlie Burke, was in a business that was about to be eaten by Fox. When that meal took place, he would probably be known as the last guy on earth who had ever managed an independent broadcasting company. His syndicated sitcoms would be just another part of neocon broadcasting.

And finally there was Anne Gutman, editor in chief of Writers Place. Anne still managed to make a living editing and occasionally publishing a few nonfiction writers such as Megan and I. But she knew—we all knew—that she was the exception to the electronic rule.

Shit. The unemployment office could have set up an application desk in our dining room. What’s more, Megan and I would have been first in line.





YES, WE WERE in trouble.

From the outside we still looked prosperous—the crazy-looking loft (full of interesting, artsy “found objects”), the two good-looking teenage kids, the August rental on Fire Island.

But the fact was, we were hurting badly.

To our shock, Anne Gutman had turned down the book that Megan and I had been working on for almost two years. Our proposed project was entitled The Roots of Rap. It traced the history of rap music from blues through early rock and roll, then doo-wop, and ultimately the past twenty-five years of rap and hip-hop.

“I just don’t have the funds anymore,” Anne had said. “I had money when you started the project, but I’ve just been squeezed too hard by the Internet …. Then, of course, there’s always the Store …. I just can’t afford to take big risks anymore …. I could shove it into self-publish, but the guys in research told me you’d be lucky to sell five hundred copies.”

The Store. This online colossus was becoming a huge player in the world of publishing. And in every other part of the consumer world as well.

The Store stocked what people wanted. Then, because it controlled pricing, it pretty much told us what to buy. It’s where we all went shopping for our toasters, tractors, Tide, soy sauce, jeans, lightbulbs. If somebody on earth manufactured something, anything, the Store sold it. Potted oak trees, cases of wine, automobiles … all usually at a lower price than the brick-and-mortar source.