without saying a word.
Wendy and I looked at each other after he left and noisily burst out laughing. “Well, that was awkward,” she said. We thought perhaps there would be some belt-tightening—no more holiday dinners at Bobby Van’s. Maybe due to lack of imagination, or over-confidence, or just plain naiveté, we had no idea what we were in for.
We should have known better.
Still, I didn’t think too much of Jack in the elevator. Later, I was meeting some friends for dinner at Otto off Fifth Avenue, and I had some time to kill. As usual, I was ultra-early, so I sat on a bench and stared at the fountain in that little triangle park where Bleecker Street and Sixth Avenue intersect.
I had a bad feeling that I couldn’t shake, so I called the anchor of our show as I sat there soaking in the last licks of September sunshine.
“Do you think we will lose our jobs?”
She insisted we had nothing to worry about because we were making money for the company. Still, deep in my gut, I felt a shift on the horizon.
And, of course, there was the Jack incident, this probably marked the last time for a long time that I would trust my gut.
When in Doubt, Buy a Bad-Ass Handbag
Anticipating that I might never again earn a proper living, I did what everyone should never do when facing unemployment and financial collapse. I got up from my seat in that park and walked, with urgency, to Marc by Marc Jacobs and bought a show-stopping five-hundred-dollar purple leather bag.
It was a floppy, large, chunky-hardware, hobo-type bag with lots of outside pockets (a subway rider’s dream). For years, I’d been contemplating what life would be like if I owned that bag or one like it, but up until then I’d never spent five hundred dollars on any single clothing item or accessory. It was an insane purchase, but I felt strongly it was the last expensive purse I’d ever be able to afford. I joked later that night with my friends that if I did get laid off, I would live in the handbag.
I had been right to worry.
A week later, I was late to work. Very late, for some reason I can’t remember. At ten fifteen, I got a call from my boss asking where I was. I said I was on my way in a cab. He’d never called before.
“Hurry up and get here,” he said. “We’re all assembled in the conference room.”
“Are we being laid off?” I asked. Somehow I knew.
“I can’t say,” he said.
“So, yes,” I said.
I was late for my layoff.
Everyone had been sitting in the conference room since nine, waiting to get axed, when I rolled in wearing ripped jeans and black suede boots suitable for farming. They had filed out eventually, and when I finally arrived everyone filed back in. And with a prepared statement and limited information from non-human human resources types, it was over.
The magazine would live. The TV show and my career would die.
I was gutted. In slow motion, everybody on the team walked to their desks and made a phone call. I didn’t call anybody right away. I just sat there and stared off into space, feeling humiliated. I’d never experienced anything like this before, and I simply didn’t know what to do.
Later that day, on the subway ride home, I looked at all the people on the B train heading uptown and wondered if they knew I was a loser, who, in three months’ time, would be without a paycheck.
“This will be the best thing that ever happened to you.” I heard that a lot from well-meaning friends when, shell-shocked, I told them what had happened with my job.
I’ll say this as yogically and New-Age-ily as I can, but every single time someone said that to me after I was laid off, as a single-income homeowner facing a mortgage on a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, staring at the end of my thirties—and likely the end of my best days professionally, not to mention for my ovaries—I wanted to literally punch the living crap out of them.
And I’ve never hit anybody. Except my younger sister, Jennifer, but only once, and that was a long time ago.
Even now, after making it through the layoff, I don’t view my experience as “great” or “the best” in any way. To be very clear: Getting laid off was not at the time, nor is it viewed by me today as, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not even close.
Getting a coupon for a free bagel and cream cheese in a gift bag at a charity event was a better, more enjoyable life event. Losing my American Express card somewhere on 72nd Street, then replacing it, only to have the new card fall out of my pocket again two weeks later—basically sprinkling Manhattan with my line of credit but having nobody use either card—was a more thrilling life event than getting laid off.
In fact, rage was all I felt when that sentiment was recklessly tossed my way by well-meaning friends. To this day, I don’t view it as the best thing that ever happened to me, but the worst, maybe. And I concede that, if that’s the worst thing that ever happened to me, I’m an incredibly fortunate person.
Did I get through it? Yes. Over it? No. Not even close.
Only looking back do I see where that sentiment may have come from. They’d all been watching Oprah, too.
The Secret had permeated the collective mindset by that point. Many people were suddenly and breathlessly explaining to me that I could finally “do what I loved!” with my life. (I, by the way, loved working in television news.)
There they were, the first squeaks of self-help-esque optimism. Most everybody seemed gung-ho and on board with the Best Thing attitude. Keep in mind, I was a product of the ‘90s workforce. Work-life balance? What the fuck was that? You worked. Period. I am the daughter of parents who worked every day to provide for their children and the granddaughter of an Armenian immigrant named Mgerdich Krikorian, who walked to work to pour steel in the foundry for a dollar a day so he could send his four children to school. Doing what you loved? Liked, maybe.
Of course, this sentiment was coming from people with paychecks and spouses with paychecks and 401ks and health care—people who were all fine espousing the new-found New Age wisdom, but I don’t recall too many of them leaving their six-figure jobs to practice what they were preaching. There’s a chance that the concept of facing what I was facing seemed a dream to them. Perhaps they were seducing themselves to not have to decide to leave a job they didn’t like and chase a dream? Maybe. Maybe they really did see me as the lucky one.
Still, what New Age way of thinking could possibly suggest that an end to a career that I loved was the best thing? Or was I being too pessimistic in my frustration? Would my mortgage company in fact take a check for “doing what I loved,” or did that require actual money?
Something else that I found weird at that time that always stuck with me: Many people felt the need to point out that things could have been worse. We all knew that. Things can always be worse. It was true.
But it’s not exactly the thing you need or want to hear as you face your own personal end of days.
“At least you don’t have cancer.”
I didn’t. And for that I was grateful. But that didn’t mean my crisis was any easier on me.
