Unwifeable(24)

Because there was no status quo in our home.

When my dad first received his Purple Heart, he threw it in the trash. Twenty years later, he became active with veterans’ groups and reversed course, getting a new one to display at home. One week we were religious (my sister was born on a day my dad was feeling Catholic, so she was baptized at birth). The next we didn’t go to church anymore.

Years later, on another religious upswing, my parents decided on a nice Lutheran church, and at eight, I was excited to finally be saved. In fact, I so couldn’t wait to be the embodiment of a good Christian congregant, I signed up to be an altar girl. On Christmas Day—the most important Mass of the year—I stood in front of the entire church, and when I couldn’t get my oversize altar girl lighter to work, I just stood there, paralyzed and weeping, until I was pulled off the stage, Catholic Gong Show style.

During the sermon that night, the pastor bellowed, “I think we can all say we’re grateful for little Amanda, the altar girl who tried so hard to light the candles tonight.”

After the service, my dad took me aside and congratulated me.

“Look at it this way,” he said, laughing. “Pastor Dave only mentioned three people in his sermon tonight: Jesus, Mary, and little altar girl Amanda.”

I laughed, too, and this lesson registered in my brain: Laughing at pain meant you didn’t have to deal with it. When everything was wrecked, nothing was. When the worst had happened, the worst was over.

“So, you use humor,” the therapist observes. “Humor is deflection.”

I can feel the rage boiling up inside of me. This always happens with therapists. Because I can’t take looking at it—any of it. My childhood makes me feel so many toxic and conflicting emotions, it overwhelms me. It causes me to shut down. It makes me want to drink. It makes me want to overeat. It makes me want to fuck.

After I am quiet for some time, the therapist changes the topic. She brings up the subject of the New York Post, where she saw I put down that I worked in my inventory.

“Does that mean you agree with its politics?” she asks.

I hesitate, looking at her. What?

“No,” I say. “Don’t worry. I’m a liberal.”

“Oh good,” she says, and I hate that. So much. If I were a conservative, would I be less deserving of her help?

“Now, how many alcoholic blackouts have you had again?” she asks.

I don’t need this shit, I think. I never see her again.



* * *




AS A THIRTY-YEAR-OLD woman, I am all about laughing at pain.

I do not want to look inside myself while working at the Post, so instead I look everywhere else. Every day is not only heart-racing (“You’re going to the Dakota because Jared Leto is re-creating John Lennon’s murder—get reaction!”), it is also the most fun at a job I’ve ever had.

You want extremely dark comedy to get through crushing pain? Working at a tabloid, you have it in spades. “Oh yeah, I think I just felt another egg die,” one female reporter would joke. Another would go darker still, with the line, “Don’t worry, you’ll be spared”—meaning, if someone comes back for a shooting spree. “Best to get a picture of you on file,” one editor suggested, “in case you die or something.”

It is honestly the perfect place for me.

So many share the same wonderfully warped sense of humor befitting a city as warped as New York. The closest I’ve ever seen to anything capturing the pitch-black, anything-goes barbs is in the most brutally funny episodes of Veep. When daily suffering is coming at you nonstop just by virtue of the daily suffering of the news cycle, you either laugh or you cry. We choose to laugh. A lot.

Mackenzie emails me helpful updates about how many times the word perv and the word fiend have been used in Post headlines as the year progresses. (In case you’re wondering, in 2006, there were 271 instances of perv, and fiend took the lead at 283.) When things are feeling scary, Mackenzie and I counteract our fear by going even more gallows, theorizing as to “who is going to finally murder me” among all the unsavory characters I either date or do stories about (like the former pimp who tells me that in every situation there is a pimp and a ho—and I make a point of implying that he is the ho in my story). Our conjecture is further supported by handwritten letters I get sent from prison, and some sweeter ones, like the one from the trucker who asks me for a picture, because the one he put up in his truck has faded with sunlight.

I and my closest friends at the Post develop a language all our own (sometimes writing Ibsen-like non sequitur Post headlines when we shoot emails to each other, like “Sex Perv Fiend Tragic Tot Mom Slay?”).

Other Post friends teach me “gossip math”—Paula Froelich, specifically, is so helpful. (She also writes about it in her excellent book It! if you want to go deeper.) The lessons include:

1. “Two items for a favor.” Meaning, if you want a shout-out for your event or client or whatever, you best have “paid your rent” in passing on some juicy dirt to help Page Six out first.

2. “Don’t try to sell a favor as a scoop.” Meaning, if you are a reporter or a publicist, don’t try to pretend a plug or an item that benefits you is somehow really benefiting the Page, and that you’re doing them a favor. Nope. This is also known as “don’t bullshit a bullshitter.” (In discussing this principle one night with the Post’s much-storied columnist Steve Dunleavy, he suggests another good gossip corollary: Be incredibly careful with the assistant staff. Or as Dunleavy phrased it—with far more linguistic flair: “Never lose a number, kid. Because today’s junior cocksucker is tomorrow’s senior motherfucker.”)