All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found Read Online Free PDF Page B

light. I went there more than once in the daytime, but it was a bar built for the needs of the night. It was a hangout for off-duty cops and neighborhood residents and people who worked in the theater district, grips and lighting people and understudies and even the occasional name actor. It had the feel of a place that had been in the family for a very long time, as I later learned it had: half a century, to be precise. Ticket scalpers used it as a drop-off point, so there was a lot of traffic in and out, people leaning over the bar and offering their names, leaving with envelopes slipped in purses and pockets, a trade that gave the place a casually illicit flavor. I liked it in part because the help had a masterful sense for the balance of friendliness and discretion. The one thing they felt a need to know about you was your name. All the rest unfolded in conversation if you felt like talking. If you didn’t, that was fine too. No one there knew my story, which was just as well. Nobody could vouch for me, or badmouth me, as long as I avoided romantic entanglements with the regulars. For a while, avoiding romantic entanglements became my highest priority, next to finding a job.
    I sent my résumé to two dozen magazines and a handful of newspapers. I was summoned for an interview just once, a courtesy I was granted because I knew someone who knew someone who worked at the magazine. It was called Civilization and was affiliated with the Library of Congress. A secretary guided me to the office of the editor, Nelson Aldrich, who asked me about my internships. I told him of the meticulous fact-checking I’d done at the Nation , the intrepid street-level reporting I’d done during my summer at the Fargo Forum , the many things I’d learned about the ways of the world while staring into the abyss of an impending deadline. I must have gone too far with the self-marketing, because Nelson Aldrich said I was overqualified. He was looking for an editorial assistant—a gofer, essentially. I told him I really wanted the job, wanted the chance to be part of an organ of substantive journalism, even if only as a gofer. He said I’d probably find the work boring and he didn’t want a bored assistant moping around the office. I told him it wasn’t my style to mope in the workplace. He told me the pay was poor and I could almost certainly find something better. I told him I’d already been looking for two months and didn’t share his optimism. We spent most of the interview in this way—me begging in an unseemly manner for the job, him trying to talk me out of wanting it.
    After I left his office I never saw him again.
    I may have had to leave the city a failure if I hadn’t called the head of the journalism department at the University of Montana. Before retreating to academia, Frank Allen had worked at the Wall Street Journal , so I figured he knew some people in New York who could lend me a hand. He’d been kind to me as a transfer student, helping me match classes I’d already taken with a new curriculum, and now he gave me the name of an editor at the Journal , told me I should call her and ask her to coffee. The thinking was that she might know someone who was willing to take a chance on a hungry young journalist from the northern plains.
    Francine Schwadel oversaw the paper’s legal-affairs coverage. We met on the mezzanine level of the paper’s home building at 200 Liberty Street, just across West Street from the World Trade Center towers. Sitting at a tiny table with a faux-marble surface, a paper cup of coffee in her hand, Francine Schwadel said, in her gravelly Brooklyn accent, that Frank Allen had hired her when he was chief of the Philadelphia Bureau of the Wall Street Journal , and for that she was eternally grateful. There was no longer a Philadelphia Bureau of the Wall Street Journal , and about that she was sad.
    She asked me a few questions about my experience, my goals, and then she said, Well, young man, my