NEW YORK, NY-

There are facts and there are truths. The fact is, in June of 2001, I accidentally walked in on the venerated former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Tina Brown, while she was relieving her bowels. The truth is, I felt as if I had committed a kind of spiritual rape. They say rape is about power and I see no more vulnerable and powerless position to assume than the one preferred by your average bowel-mover. But what if you don’t actively seek this power out? Well, we all want power of some kind; that’s another truth. So the question becomes: What to do after the scream and ensuing door-slam?

As a member of Tina’s fact-checking troop at the now defunct Talk magazine, I was certain she had no idea who I was. Why would she? The fact-checker is the lowest life form on any magazine staff, and as a freelancer, I was seen as lower than the proverbial squid shit. So, naturally I felt finding Ms. Brown in flagrante might put me in a position to raise my status from lowly fact-checker to that of the more noble Features Writer. But how does one leverage such scatological information? If I stood on my desk and announced, “Hey everybody, I just walked in on Tina Brown taking a dump!” the security guard would surely be forced to stop sipping his codeine and usher me out the door.

It should be noted that, as far as I know, there were only six bathrooms available to Talk employees. All were unisex, and all were lined up on either side of one large corridor. “Perhaps this is how the British do it,” is all I could come up with to explain the bizarre bathroom arrangement. Why you wouldn’t have your own special toilet if you were Tina Brown is beyond me. But, so is figgy pudding, cricket and royalty—so maybe I’m missing something. It was in one of these “stalls” that Tina and I first met face to face, and from that moment, I became obsessed with the notion that I could somehow work this malodorous encounter into something resembling “moving up.” I thought, “this is it—this is how the system works.” The system doesn’t work this way.

Crush it, sister

Like most everybody else newly arrived in New York, I harbored a certain expectation of success and grandeur that was promptly depth-charged and blown out of the water. Instead of spending my days drinking vintage wine on a landscaped terrace and attending fancy parties thrown by people named Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Rothschild (in which, naturally, I would serve as the artist-in-residence expounding on The New Fiction—whatever that was, is), I found myself drinking jug wine on the roof of a seven-floor walk-up, reading lots of O. Henry and wondering why, since I frequented the bar he was said to have been so fond of, I was not achieving a similar level of success. I still wonder this, actually.

Money ran out, agents never called, and the only party I was invited to featured a dwarf wandering around the room in an oversized sombrero on which chips and dip were placed strategically for the dining pleasure of the politically incorrect guests. It was a Spartan affair compared to what I had imagined to be the “New York lifestyle.” So, in October of 2000 I availed of a friend a favor who availed of a friend a favor ad infinitum, and I wound up a freelance fact-checker at Talk, Tina Brown’s new wundermag.

Stories always circulate of the fairy-tale ascent of people like William Gaddis and Jay McInerney, who went from lowly fact-checkers to award-winning and best-selling auteurs. The fact-checker, in his/her mind, must cling to these success stories much like bored people must cling to the idea that they’ve been probed by aliens to make their lives more interesting or to rationalize that while their lives are meaningless, they are not unremarkable.

Fact-checkers are sometimes called “researchers,” a transparent attempt to confer status where none exists. There is no “research.” There are only facts—facts that, for some reason (fear of litigation, I guess), need checking. That’s it. Anyone can do it. Fact-checkers like to think that their position will lead to literary recognition, but their goal is neither truth nor beauty (apologies to Keats); it’s the journalistic equivalent of crime-scene clean up.

There were about half a dozen “researchers,” including myself at Talk. Some had jumped ship from other magazines to get in on the ground floor of this new, hotly anticipated start-up. Some were fresh out of Columbia Journalism School. All of us had “novels-in-progress.” This may have been true, but it was not the truth. We were all poseurs, a knot of supposedly keen-eyed, fact checking prodigies who had no clue about the verities that lie at the heart of literature.

The most fascinating aspect of being a fact-checker is that, while you are determining the veracity of this or that potentially actionable piece of information, you begin to develop a larger understanding the world that has little or nothing to do with your appointed charge. For instance, my first assignment:

Tina and her retinue of odd British folk deemed it newsworthy (or something) to dress up porn stars in a classy way for a photo shoot, then humiliate them in the attendant article. My first fact-check? Find out if a particular adult film star was indeed “known in the industry” for performing what’s called a “triple-anal,” and then of course, to verify the travesty of nature that is the triple-anal.

Porn Star: Hello?

Me: Hi, it’s Tyler Smith calling from Talk magazine. I’m the researcher here and just wanted to have you confirm some of our reporter’s notes.

Porn Star: Sure!

Me: Okay, first thing, I’m told that you are known in the industry as someone willing to perform a triple-anal. Is that correct?

Porn Star: Yeah, you know, pussies are bullshit. Martin Amis said that. (Martin fucking Amis? This is a higher class of smut-queen). They just want assholes. But yeah, I’ll do a triple. It’s all that pays proper paper.

Me: I see, and so when…uh…exactly what…uh

Porn Star: Exactly what it fucking sounds like. Three cocks in my ass at the same time-one under, two doggie. You know what, it’s not personal. It’s all just one big dick.

“You know what,” I thought to myself, then to every one else at the bar, “it IS all one big dick!” Perhaps I should not have announced this with such conviction to the bar patrons, but great truths should be shared, even if it turns out that most of the customers are going to scatter like billiard balls at the break. And while some would argue that walking in on one of the preeminent editors of our time would serve as little more than a bagatelle, a non-moment devoid of career potential, I resolved to work with it.

But how? Every time I set eyes on Ms. Brown at the Talk offices she was surrounded by a menacing security detail escorting Janet Reno or a Weinstein or the cast of American Pie. I couldn’t even get close. Occasionally, I’d arrive at the elevator at the same time as Ms. Brown, but there she’d be with the uppity Features Editor who would awkwardly shoo everybody away who had slogged through the Manhattan streets all morning, freezing, boiling—depending on the season. Just he and Tina allowed in that cavernous freight elevator. And day after day, no opportunities. No late-night calls from Ms. Brown asking to “cut a deal,” or “settle” for some undisclosed amount of money. It seems my notions of spiritual rape were lost on the stalwart Ms. Tina Brown.

The days went on. The facts grew tiresome. Spell Manolo Blahnik. I had never heard the term, and so, like any enterprising whitebread fact-checker from Texas might do, I decided to consult my Yiddish-English dictionary—procuring nothing from the effort but howls of derisive laughter from my predominantly gay colleagues who finally set me straight, so to speak. What was Hugh Grant drinking during our interview? Was this girl abandoned by her parents before or after her classmate set her on fire? Is “zipless fuck” hyphenated? Was he eaten by a panther or a jaguar? Does Lara Flynn Boyle smoke Parliaments? These are just a few of the questions, the “facts,” I plodded through, along with my researching colleagues.

As time went on, the terrible truth dawned on me: I had been the victim of the spiritual rape in the restroom that day. Tina had broken me down. My obsession with exposing her as some kind of rogue defacatress had consumed me and in the end, led to my demise. It was I who could not face her. The saucy little Brit got me twisted. Tina knew exactly what she was doing in the bathroom that day. She was waiting. I began to think that I was simply a pawn, crushed by the cunning and vigorous (and predatory) Queen. Had all my colleagues had the same experience? Face-to-face with a squatting Tina? Had Tina raped all of us? I never told anyone of my encounter with Ms. Brown, anxious and unsettled as I was. Perhaps this was her modus operandi. Legions of fact-checkers, face-to-face with the inimitable Tina—kept down by her ownership of us. Where was William Gaddis? Where was Jay McInerny? What more was there to dream of? Tina would own us for the rest of our lives. This was the fact, the only fact that seemed to matter. And it had become an unpleasant truth.

My alienation grew. I think a collective wave of alienation grew among all of us, in truth. Our group of fact-checkers had, at one time, been a unified front. We went out drinking, we stayed in drinking, we kept bottles of scotch at our desks (I challenge anyone to come-up with more committed alcoholics outside of a law firm) and we bitched. “You know what I’m going to do?” someone would announce, scotchfully, “I’m going to sabotage the fucking piece. I’m going to jumble that cocksucker hack writer’s piece of shit piece until there’s not an accurate statement in there. Godamnit.”

“Yeah!” we’d all scream. Then somebody would usually throw up. But, to my knowledge, nobody ever deliberately tried to sabotage a piece. This was the last bastion of our self-esteem, the notion that we actually mattered, even if no one really seemed to care. Besides, what better way to get our ass kicked out the doors of Talk than to drop the ball on a crucial fact? And who the hell can afford to be fired in New York? Fear was all that kept us together now. No more late-nights bitching with colleagues, no more knowing glances whenever a senior editor or writer misused a word. No more talk of the novel we had almost finished.

I left Talk magazine (and New York) just before the attack on the Twin Towers. The fact-checking team had all gone their separate ways and soon, I’d learned that Talk had folded, some say as a result of the advertising lull that occurred after 9/11. Although in my opinion, the reason was social, not economic: America wasn’t ready for a British tabloid. After Lady Di, we really couldn’t give a shit about English royalty—an important fact lost on Tina and her crew.

I returned to New York recently—my first visit back since I’d left. My first visit since Tina Brown had beaten me. Since New York had beaten me. What was I doing here? Later that evening, walking down 2^nd avenue, I ran into Michael, also a freelance fact-checker who signed on with Talk about two months before my departure.

“Mike!”

“Tyler!”

“How are you?

“I’m good. Still working on the novel?”

“Oh yeah. You?”

“Still plugging away.”

“So, you were with Talk when the ship went down?”

“Yeah, but I was ready to get out almost immediately.”

“Why’s that, Mike?”

“I walked in on Tina Brown taking a shit. You know, I really haven’t been the same since.”

“I know, Mike. I know. It’s the truth.”

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Art, Assholes, Bodily Fluids, Current Affairs, Fetishes, Nihilism, Oddities, Personal, Vagina, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.