Ghost Writer - Part II
I had just moved back to New York City and was staying with my parents temporarily while waiting for my own apartment to be ready. I was also desperately looking for a job. Eventually I had the luck of meeting a very unusual woman who was looking for a ghostwriter.
THIS IS PART 2 of a SEVEN-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
Image: Aaron Lares
I found a paying job with a small PR firm. Actually, it was a part time job, three mornings a week, writing public service announcements and making phone calls to local radio stations. “Small” is an understatement. The firm consisted of one woman, whose name was Hilary Kleinfelder, and whose office was located midtown, in a single tiny room overlooking Fifth Avenue. I liked Hilary in an arm's length sort of way; she was smart, pleasant, even gracious, but she was also overbearing, constantly checking and rechecking my work, mouthing the words I was to say during phone calls, and keeping too stern an eye on me as I wrote copy at the desk across from hers. All in all, it was an uncomfortable job, and I much preferred my mornings with Lauren Shapiro, trying to tease out ideas for a best-selling novel as she sat on the couch and brushed the tangles out of her long blond hair.
Truthfully, I cannot at this point remember the ideas we came up with or what the presumptive novel was about. I’m sure there was a murder in it. Probably also a duplicitous affair, an infidelity, a seedy relationship, a jealous attack. All I know is that our mornings together followed a curious routine. I would arrive, we’d have coffee and talk at length about what we’d done the evening before, what movies we’d seen, who we’d been with, what we’d watched on TV. Lauren would disappear a few times to the bathroom, but that didn’t seem strange. At some point she’d go into the kitchen and emerge with a full tumbler of scotch, which she’d deposit on the end table beside me, without my having asked for it. The first time this happened, a week or two after I’d started working with her, I was a little shocked – who offered, or drank, that amount of liquor that early in the day? But I was also secretly gratified: this was a woman who understood something about me that no one else did.
I was a drunk. I’d gone to great lengths to hide my problem over the years, but the fact was I’d drink till I passed out every single night of my twenties and early thirties.
Somehow Lauren figured that out. After providing me with liquor, she’d vanish into the kitchen again, this time to emerge with half a hunk of iceberg lettuce and a jar of mustard. While I sipped at my scotch, she’d dunk shards of lettuce into the Grey Poupon, consuming every morsel with rabbity teeth until all the lettuce was gone. Then she’d go back to the kitchen for the other half of the iceberg. Neither of us discussed this odd behavior, and it was quite a while before I understood what was going on.
Cover Image: Brando Makes Branding