by Daniel Klein
“Let’s start off with a brainstorming session in my office tomorrow morning at ten,” he says, then adds, “We will cogito outside of the box.”
CHAPTER 2
Back in the eighth and ninth decades of the final century of the last millennium—the 1980’s and ’90’s—Digby was indeed a writer and editor to be reckoned with in that epicenter of media cool, Manhattan, New York. His beat was “the very next thing” and, first at The Village Voice and then at New York Magazine, he informed hungry-to-be-in-the-know readers what, undetected by their radar, was coming down the pike. He perceived hip social trends that, at the moment of his writing, were no more than whispered phrases in NoHo coffee shops or casual gestures in Bed-Stuy schoolyards. He identified regional garage bands that would go gold in six months’ time; he predicted what obscure party drug would be de rigeur by the upcoming New Year’s Eve. It was a gift he had and he was extravagantly paid for it.
The source of this talent, he believes, is his aptitude for empathy, albeit empathy in the service of exploiting rather than helping his fellow man. He picked up quickening vibes where others only picked up cacophony; he detected subconscious whims in the unconscious masses.
By way of illustration, consider the daytime quiz show, Family Feud. On the surface, the show seems just another vehicle for numbing the mind, eating up thirty minutes of pained, day-to-day consciousness. But Family Feud has astounding levels, levels that undoubtedly escape the notice of cognitive psychologists who should know better.
On the show, two teams of contestants—loosely related family members—attempt to guess the most popular responses to survey questions that previously have been posed to average Americans. Questions like, “Name something that you are most likely to find in a diaper bag.” But here is the tricky part: to guess correctly, it doesn’t help at all to know what the most common items found in American diaper bags actually are. No, what one needs to know is what the average American thinks are the most common items found in American diaper bags. Major distinction. The winners are not people with encyclopedic knowledge of American habits; they are people who can guess what the average American thinks average American habits are. Astounding levels indeed. For here is where Family Feud becomes deliciously tricky: the absolutely best contestants are people who simply live and think like average Americans, people who automatically figure that the items found in their diaper bags are what the pollees imagine are in the average American’s diaper bag. These contestants cut through the levels and eliminate the guesswork; they are wise to their averageness.
Digby is a whiz at playing Family Feud in front of his TV, stoned or straight. He flips his neural switch and he becomes an average American, peeks into his or her diaper bag as easily as he can peek into his own underwear. But unlike the winning families on Family Feud, Digby is also blessed with the ability to take this to the next step: he can intuit the average American’s habits and tastes before the average American is fully aware of them himself. He is a beat ahead of the average man’s self-consciousness. It is a kind of time-travel empathy.
Feedback loop that the media is, Digby’s job only got easier as his reputation spread. If he slipped the term “mall chick” into his weekly column, the expression became common parlance at New York dinner tables the following week. By predicting that it would become the term du jour, Digby made it into the term du jour. He was the very next thing.
All of this, of course, gradually went to his head. Not a whit did it matter to him that his particular talent was on the same level as some village drunk who has a knack for picking winners at the dog races. On the contrary, Digby started to feel positively papal in his infallibility. He began to strut his stuff. He held forth at cocktail parties, projecting an aura of in-the-knowness. Along the way, he regularly bedded pretty young things who saw in him a crystal ball of lifestyle secrets that could ratchet up the style of their lacking lives. It was a quid pro quo arrangement: in exchange for a tip on the very next fashion trend they took off their clothes.
Digby was well aware that he partook of this indulgence in spite of his personal moral guidelines. These had been shaped by the minor, practical-minded philosopher, Nelson Algren, who once astutely wrote, “Never, never—no matter what else you do in your whole life—never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.” (This philosophical predilection of Digby’s, he subsequently learned, plants him squarely in the tradition of Jamesian American Pragmatism.) In truth, these young women invariably had troubles worse than his own, including the troubles that come automatically from bedding down with a married man.
Incrementally, Digby was becoming insufferable—right up to the point when he became a total shithead.
At the time, this didn’t bother him in the least. Among the consolations of being a shithead is one’s liberation from common moral standards, not to mention other people’s regard. It did, however, bother Fanny, so she did what any modern woman with an ounce of self-respect would have done: she divorced Digby. It was not the infidelities that tipped the balance, she informed him, it was that he had outlived his usefulness as a member of the family. (This places her in the Benthamite Utilitarian school.) Of course, Fanny knew that this assessment would hurt him, that is, as much as anything possibly could hurt him at that time; if nothing else, Digby still aspired to being useful.
To be fair to all concerned, Fanny and Digby’s marriage never suffered the common fate of passion run out of steam, because there was never much steam there to begin with. They married soon after Digby snagged his first job as a columnist and Fanny graduated from law school, a period in their young lives when they both were full of promise and promise was what mattered most.
Indeed, they were typical of their generation, taking what they considered a mature, long-range view of their union. It was akin to buying hog belly futures. Fanny, who was a gifted list and chart maker, filled legal pads with two-, five-, and ten-year plans for their joint journey, while Digby, who depended on the general unpredictability of the future for his livelihood, looked over her shoulder with admiration and alarm. Despite his aptitude for forecasting popular tastes, Digby had always viewed his own future as a region cluttered with trapdoors. He looked to his bride for leadership.
Their sex life was only a tad better than adequate, but that mattered far less than the fact that together they would become a Manhattan couple to be reckoned with, a duo on the move. It was an arranged marriage which they had arranged themselves. And so for Fanny to ultimately break up the partnership on the basis of failed utility made perfect sense. Then again, if she had not happened to spot Digby exiting the Gramercy Park Hotel one late October afternoon, his left hand cupping the right cheek of a twenty-something’s buttocks, she may have made do with a lower standard of utility.
For reasons that only a true shithead can fully appreciate, Fanny’s rejection pained Digby less than when, only a few months afterward, the managing editor of New York Magazine, Scott Kravitz, informed him that his gift for spotting the very next thing had not aged well and furthermore that his prose had become far too snarky for both him and their readers. Even worse, said Scott, was that the writers to whom Digby assigned articles were deeply unhappy with his management style; “insufferable” was a word that popped up frequently in their complaints. Digby’s days as New York’s preeminent trend maven were numbered and those numbers were already down to two digits, Scott informed him.
“Jesus, Scott, I didn’t see this coming,” Digby sputtered.
“My point exactly,” Scott retorted.
“Maybe I’ve been a bit distracted lately,” Digby pleaded. “You know, the divorce and all.” Unlike many men, Digby has no problem humbling himself before other males. Even groveling is not beneath him. To him, groveling just feels like getting down on the floor and goofing around like a puppy, although that may be why his style of groveling rarely achieves its desired effect.
“I don’t think it’s that,” Scott said. “It’s an age thing
. I’ve always seen you as a sort of romantic poet of the zeitgeist and, as we all know, romantic poets burn out young.”
“That’s because they die young.”
“Well, then, do take care of yourself, Digby.”
Yes, groveling Digby does shamelessly, but he draws the line at being on the receiving end of ironic pity.
“Actually, I do have a final report from the zeitgeist for you, Scott,” he said. “In less than a year your whole fucking magazine is going to be dead meat. Your baby boomer readers have more hair growing out of their ears than they have on their heads. Your best option would be to merge with Modern Maturity.”
Digby actually did have his finger on something here, although he did not know the half of it until several months later. His dismissal from New York Magazine coincided with a sharp downturn in the popularity of print periodicals all over the map as blogs and Twitter literally altered the dimension of time. Gossip became an echo chamber in one’s hip pocket Blackberry; the moment a trend gained traction, it was instantly sooo last year, sooo last week, sooo last nanosecond. The very next thing was happening now or, at times, had already happened. Of course, Digby had seen the digital communications revolution coming down the pike for years. What he had failed to envision was its potential for wiping him out.
Digby started working his Rolodex (another item on the brink of extinction) the morning after Scott dumped him. Right off, he phoned Phil Winston, owner and editor-in-chief of The Village Voice, reaching him at his high command hot tub in his SoHo penthouse. Not surprisingly, Phil already knew why he was calling. “Bummer,” was his greeting.
“I guess it’s time for me to come home to the Voice,” Digby said cheerily.
“I hear you,” Phil said.
“So, what do you say?”
“We’ve got this kid, you know. Billy Fairchild. Answers to ‘Nappy.’ Nappy Napp. It’s a hip-hop thingy.”
“I’ve always been in favor of diversity.”
“Napp has his hand on the pulse of America,” Phil went on. “He feels the vibes. He talks the talk. You know?”
Digby knew.
In the moment, he also remembered that Phil was the main reason he had left the Voice in the first place. The heir to a mineral mining fortune, Phil suffered from trust fund guilt and was trying to overcome it by becoming hipper than hip, which in his case meant buying a downtown newspaper with his unearned cash and assigning articles that blasted corporate life. Phil wore his unwashed sandy hair down to his shoulders and usually sported a denim shirt open to his sternum and paint-spattered jeans. (There was a great deal of speculation in the Voice’s offices about who, exactly, had furnished the splatter; the good money was on ‘Mr. Z.,’ a popular graffiti artist of the day who was known to do just about anything for a buck.) And, of course, Phil spoke hipster-stoner talk, or at least his quaint version of it that made him sound like a recent immigrant who had taken an ESL course from a superannuated hippie.
After reading Existentialism in a Nutshell during his autotutorial marathon, Digby discovered that he is definitely not of the Jean-Paul Sartre school of persona-hood. J-P believed that role-playing, be it as a Paris waiter or a New York hipster, is “pour soi,” that it is treating oneself as an object rather than as a subject. Très unauthentique. True enough, Jean-Paul, but to Digby’s mind role-playing sure as hell is the most efficient way to get through a day, especially if that day involves any face-to-face contact. This marks Digby as more of an American Pragmatist than a French Existentialist and therefore he has an unusually high tolerance for phonies. But there are limits to Digby’s tolerance and his was reached when an old friend informed him that Phil secretly dined at the Yale Club every Friday night where he hobnobbed with bankers and mutual fund analysts. Therefore Digby is probably closer to Sartre than he originally thought: they both draw the line somewhere.
“Is Nappy a Yalie?” Digby asked Phil.
He heard some hot tub splish and splash before Phil grunted “Good luck” and hung up.
Digby worked his way down his call list, ending with New Jersey Magazine, a monthly that regularly features top ten lists—The Top Ten New Jersey Dentists, Casinos, Bar Mitzvah Venues, etc. In Digby’s phone interview, NJM’s editor-in-chief gently suggested that Digby was a tad over the hill for their super cool enterprise.
Washed up was he.
It was at this time that Digby rekindled his college hobby of smoking pot, usually starting with his morning coffee. This practice was, of course, an escape. It helped him keep the reality of his new situation in the same remote area of his brain as the names of his kindergarten classmates and the members of the Supreme Court. Yet with his inherently slippery self coupled with his inherited bent for metaphysics (a propensity he was not yet aware of), stoned reality struck him as having no less validity than everyday, non-stoned reality. For a man who routinely saw the world from other people’s points of view, the view through a haze of marijuana seemed just another reality.
This was later confirmed by Digby’s sniff through the works of Thomas De Quincey, a nineteenth-century British philosopher and opium aficionado. De Quincey made the stunning observation that what actually made him high on his favorite drug was the contrast of altered consciousness with his normal consciousness. So if one were high on opium all the time, that would become his normal consciousness and no kick would he get. A case in point is the first importation of Indian tea—Camellia sinensis—to England. British intelligentsia wrote rhapsodic chapbooks detailing hallucinations and transcendental insights occasioned by just one cup of the stuff. Yet by the end of the 1800’s, when every Brit was downing several cups of tea daily, tea consciousness had become normal consciousness, and that consciousness was nothing to write home about.
Actually, it was worse than that. What Digby had forgotten (and perhaps De Quincey never knew) is that once drug-induced reality becomes basic reality, feelings of transcendent happiness take a precipitous nosedive. Being high leads to being low. It is the psychic equivalent of physics’ Law of Conservation of Energy (i.e., the amount of energy in the universe is fixed and cannot be created or destroyed). Ditto for bliss. If one uses up his fixed allotment on an excellent drug trip, sooner or later he pays for it double in melancholy. Thus did Digby’s renewed hobby increasingly and ineluctably lead him into the dark room of despair and panic.
The exact location of this room was on the second floor of 145 Bleecker Street where Digby’s boyhood friend and pot connection, Asim Moustavavi, rented him his sofa after Digby could no longer afford to pay the tab at the residence hotel to which he had decamped after Fanny sent him packing. Asim gave him a package deal for both the sofa and a weekly supply of Buenos Aires Red.
Digby was a quiet guest. He often spent several days in a row without leaving the apartment. His days developed a certain rhythm: late morning coffee and a few tokes, TV talk shows and a few more tokes, a nap, preparing dinner for Asim and himself accompanied by several additional tokes.
Occasionally, he would vary his routine by playing a trippy game of his own invention that he called, “Me Too.” Clad in T-shirt and boxers, a cup of Asim’s superb espresso in hand, he would stare out the front window onto the street below where West Village folk of a grand variety of ages, races, and genders would be parading by. Digby would select one of these pedestrians and fix his gaze upon him or her. And then he would perform his little trick: he would become that person. Slip into that person’s self.
Mind you, this would be a full slip, empathy on a Husserlian scale. As Fanny was wont to remind Digby, his talent for personal identification with complete strangers is born of his nebulous selfhood. With no ‘there’ there, assuming another’s identity is a piece of cake—there is no self to transcend before making the leap. Digby would not only inhabit the body of the selected stranger in the street, he would experience his emotions, his loves and hates, his responses to his environment, his entire worldview.
Do I have time for a mocha latte? Digby w
ould ask as he inhabited the frantic, sharp-featured young man in a lime green polo shirt striding down Bleecker. Maybe just a half-and-half. I don’t want to be wired for my meeting with Clarence.
It was a soothing exercise for Digby, at once transcendent and mundane. At the very least, here and there it kept his mind off his own prospects for a few minutes.
Another activity Digby added to his day was watching for the arrival of the mailman, then meeting him in the foyer and relieving him of Asim’s mail, which he then took upstairs and read in the kitchen. And so it was one afternoon, leafing through Asim’s newly arrived copy of the Louden College alumni magazine that, on the same page as personal ads of Louden grads seeking companionship that may or may not lead to a romantic relationship, Digby spotted a headline at the top of an advertisement situated inside a death notice-like plain black border:
Independent Philosophy Magazine Seeks Editor-in-Chief Background in Contemporary Culture Primary Requirement
Digby giggled, a rare occurrence in those days. What exactly would a dependent philosophy magazine consist of? Would it contain infomercials written by wealthy Kantian lobbyists?
Obviously, the ‘primary requirement’ bit caught Digby’s eye too; but at the time it only reanimated his old amused condescension toward out-of-touch academic types, that is, reanimated it right up until that recess of his brain that was still informed about his current lifestyle spoke up, saying, in effect, Who the fuck are you to condescend to anybody, loser?
Digby abruptly tucked Asim’s alum mag under more pressing mail, which included an overdue electric bill, and opted once again for chemical aid in quieting that know-it-all scold inside his head.
Sometime later, during his three-week, ADD-ish philosophy study marathon, Digby was struck by how often the concept of fate popped up, whacking against the concept of redemption once he began reading the big Christian thinkers. Apparently if everything is predestined, it is hard to make a case for mending one’s ways and making a fresh start. No matter what you do, que sera, sera. It is all an appointment in Samarra. Nonetheless, for several days after reading that advertisement, Digby was visited by the thought that not only had Fate put that magazine in his hands, but he may have just been offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to redeem himself. Digby was not usually given to such magical thinking; he always considered such thinking as the last refuge of a desperate man. But, of course, Digby was a desperate man.
