After my dismal performance at the real estate agency, I no longer received assignments from the toney, genteel agency, but as it turned out, it didn’t really matter, though I did miss my contact there. He was a nice man. I indicated to my remaining two agencies that I was interested in jobs in publishing, and one of them immediately came up with a three-week position at Davis Publications.

 

 

 

The offices themselves were something right out of a Raymond Chandler novel; frosted glass windows were inset into the doors, with the name of the resident stenciled on the glass in black and gold letters. The place where I worked, however, as the administrative assistant to the vice-president, was a long, narrow, windowless cubby sandwiched in between the classifieds department, the small ante-room occupied by an assistant to the editor of a money magazine (the name of which now escapes me), and the office of my boss. The two extremely sweet ladies who worked in the classifieds department were from Queens and delighted me with their classic Queens’ accents. “Yih,” they would often sigh in agreement with some statement or other, “Yih.” One of them said to me one day, “So, I noticed your accent, wheah ya from?”

 

 

They also chain-smoked, which filled the entire area that encompassed our little suite of offices with smoke, since the cubicle walls only went up to about five-and-a-half feet. Being allergic to tobacco smoke, I was usually feeling pretty woozy and sick by the end of the day. But that was nothing compared to the research project my boss wanted me to undertake. Remember when I said I had a phone phobia? He wanted me to cold-call an endless list of media contacts to see if I could send them a media kit for the publishing company’s best-selling magazines in order to tempt them into advertising.

 

You know, suffering is a very powerful teacher of empathy and compassion. I happen to hate getting telemarketed to, as I imagine most people do, but this job taught me not to take my anger out on the poor schmuck doing the calling.* It’s not their idea! If they could find any other way of making some money, I can assure you they would. It’s a miserable, miserable job. Lots of people I called were more than happy to take their irritation with my superior’s mission out on me. I don’t know if it made them feel any better—I tend to doubt it—but it didn’t do a thing for my phone phobia.

 

I began to hate this new job so much that I was desperately looking around for another one when my three weeks were up, even though the VP would have loved for me to stay longer and keep at my “research.” I did get an interview with one of the editors at Davis who offered to look at a sci fi novel I was working on (though that didn’t go anywhere), and I also got a killer recipe for an apple and cranberry crisp that I ran across while thinning out my boss’s file cabinet at his request. But those things, apart from the Chanin Building itself, were the highlights.

 

One cool unrelated thing that happened while I was working there is that two different contacts at major publishing houses, Bantam Books and Avon Books, brought me some freelance cover copy work. Back then, the publishing industry was healthy and strong, and they employed freelancers to write their overflow book jacket copy. It was pretty decent money—around $100 to read and blurb a book—and fun. Not only that, I got to visit the publishers’ headquarters, which, for an aspiring young writer, was very exciting. I mainly blurbed sci fi at Bantam and romance fiction for Avon. The cover copy editor at Avon was pretty funny when offering me the work. “You don’t have to read the whole book,” he told me; “they’re pretty much all alike.” Having never read romance novels before this, I didn’t know what to make of his recommendation. But I will say that one of the most disappointing things about this job is that out of the dozens and dozens of titles I ended up reading, only two stood out as noteworthy. I wouldn’t have spent my money on any of the rest. Even the sci fi genre, which you would think would be a particularly rich medium for originality, was dominated by what publishers perceived to be selling at the moment: generic swashbuckling sword-and-sorcery populated by a lot of feline-type entities. After a while, I could barely keep them straight, and it became a real challenge to come up with cover copy that would distinguish them.

At any rate, when the next full-time job offer came up, I jumped on it, even though it didn’t have anything at all to do with publishing. The Salvation Army Foster Parent Program downtown needed a medical secretary; and I was about to get quite an eye-opening education about a part of American life I knew absolutely nothing about until then.

 

 

* Unless said telemarketer gets really pushy. Then they’re fair game, as far as I’m concerned.