Unwifeable(12)

“Hummer strollers!!!”

You get it. Immediately. You can’t not get it. So I begin the hunt for my own enterprise masterpiece. Since I am such an avid dater, I try to think of the most salacious story I can—either from my own experience or based on anything else I dig up online. I keep finding one phrase that jumps out as the ultimate outrageous you-immediately-get-it concept in the Rants and Raves section on Craigslist. It strikes me as the perfect Post piece: a phenomenon called, classily enough, “dinner whores.”

One poster bitches about a woman ordering drink after drink on his dime, all the while exhibiting no desire to ever see him again: “What the fuck? Did she think I was some asshole?”

Yeah, this is my Post story, for sure. Now I just need to find women who will admit they are searching for guys whom they have no interest in dating—beyond the prospect of a gourmet meal and plenty of cocktails. While Katherine aids me in maneuvering assignments with everything from “you got this”–style encouragement to the much more practical brand of help like, say, telling me where the West Village is (west, it turns out), I use my evening hours to track down my dinner whores.

I have something on my computer I dub “source list” (as it rapidly expands, I change the name to “new source list,” “hot source list,” and, eventually, “BEST NEW HOT SOURCE LIST”), which contains the names of a hodgepodge of people I meet, from strangers on the subway to old college acquaintances. I email them all asking if they know any women who might fess up to the maneuver.

One after another, I make new friends who tell me their stories of suffering through boring-ass business guys who get them into Michelin-rated restaurants and how they feel no qualms about taking them for a $300 meal because the guy is getting their company.

But no one wants to go on the record.

Then I realize I’ve had the answer within me all along. Just like I was rediscovered through my self-published blog chronicling all my adventures, there have to be plenty of fame-seeking young New York women who would love to go on record who are self-promoting via their blogs.

I google “New York,” “dating,” and “blogspot,” and a million combinations thereof and eventually hit the jackpot when I discover belleinthebigapple.blogspot.com and a blond, bubbly young lady who after several emails back and forth eventually identifies herself as Brooke Parkhurst, a former Fox TV intern (who pals around with Gawker’s favorite target, Julia Allison) who’s just landed a literary agent who is trying to sell her book. This, I soon learn, is key. When someone has something they want to push, they will work with you. Big-time.

As I develop the story, I still fear everything will fall apart. Will Brooke and the other women I interviewed back out last-minute? Will the pics the photographer snaps not be Post-y enough? Will everyone realize I am a fraud and ought to be back in Chicago, still writing about science grants and languishing in an unhappy marriage?

Wait—no. That is my impostor complex talking.

Fake it until you make it. Fake it until you make it. Repeat it until you believe it. Tattoo it on your fucking forehead if you have to.

During these early days at the Post, I think a lot about a fellow intern I worked with at the Washington Post right after graduating in 1997, one of the biggest name-droppers I’ve ever met. His tales usually involved a celebrity or politician he had just lunched with or, oh, here’s a funny coincidence, did you know the son of the newspaper’s editor actually lives in his dorm at Harvard, too? But that guy, man. He had more get-shit-done confidence than any young person I’d ever met. He just did not apologize. He walked around the newsroom like he owned it.

I, by contrast, would go to intern parties; get drunk; look at my short, stringy, dishwater-brown hair in the mirror; then return to the party and proceed to kill the entire mood. Here’s a good recipe for how to do that in case it ever comes in handy: Say a bunch of unfunny, radioactively self-loathing (beyond the normal level of light self-deprecation) bons mots like, “I look like a drowned rat.”

Everyone will proceed to shift uncomfortably, staring down at their Grey Goose. The other intern, meanwhile, would find a way to work in that he had just grabbed a meal with David Foster Wallace.

So now, as I returned to newspapers after a long-ass, marriage-filled absence, that dude became my spiritual guide. Here’s an actual non-sarcastic helpful trick: If you suffer from debilitating low self-esteem and crippling shyness most of your life, just pretend to be someone who has what you want instead.

It was actually the year 2000 when I first really tested out the pretend-to-be-someone-else trick, during my first major impostor-complex experience, after having been hired by an Internet company called MarchFirst to fill a questionable position called “content strategist.” (I believe that job title went bust right when the economy did.) Formed a few months before the dot-com bubble burst, MarchFirst hired me after I rewrote my résumé enough times to make it look like I spoke Internet. My annual salary shot up from $32,000 to $47,000, and soon I was being flown from Chicago to Philly to talk to middle-aged chemical industry executives to justify my $200-an-hour bill rate.

My boss at the time was a perky blond twenty-seven-year-old named Stephanie, who gesticulated wildly in front of the ever-present whiteboard while using made-up words like bucketizing.

“We need to bucketize content!” she’d say, making exaggerated motions of what it would look like if content were physically plunked into imaginary buckets.