I Have Been Downsized

I should have known this was going to happen. Before I moved to New York City and took a job with a surreally optimistic and we're-going-to-make-millions Web start-up, I couldn't tell you what the NASDAQ was. But I found out right quick when said NASDAQ went screaming through the floor.

At first, I found this a novelty. I own no stock, have no desire to own stock; I'm just a nerdy writer guy who wants to watch baseball, analyze Woody Allen movies and masturbate as the whim might hit. I shed few tears when the NASDAQ, as the pundits put it, "plummeted" in May. (Or was it April? I have drunk much since that fateful month and memory tends to be a bitter mistress.) I just figured, hey, a bunch of young rich fucks finally got what was coming to them; let them go out and get a real job rather than being paper millionaires.

But as Ronald Reagan elucidated so eloquently, these things tend to trickle down. One minute the world was happy, 24-year-olds were making $100,000 a year for coming up with an outline for a treatment of a concept for an idea of a business model, people actually thought that writing on the Web could be a viable way to make a living, lo, be "part of the revolution." The next?hey, anybody know where a brother can still get a box of wine?

I was hired, back in April, to assume the position (and that I did; at this job, I assumed the position many, many times) of film/tv editor of an as-yet-unnamed twentysomething website, the MTV of the 21st century, a brand-new planet full of sunshine, flowers and pretty things that are singing. Problem is, the employer wasn't really sure how to put such a venture together (or, really, how to tie his shoes without a spotter). The NASDAQ flopped, and for Happy Writer Guy, Hey, guys, let's put together a website! Yay! turned quickly into I'm Sorry We're Out of Money We Have to Let You Go But Good Luck in Your Next Job, Here's Hoping Your Last Check Doesn't Bounce. Quite quickly. On Wednesday I was writing three stories, stories that would be studied by later generations as the very foundation of literary journalism on the Web, and on Thursday I was fired. No severance. No vacation time. Just the boot.

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I grew up in a quaint-if-you-didn't-live-there, crushingly-boring-if-you-did small town called Mattoon, in southern Illinois. My parents were blue-collar types. My father is an electrician, my mother a nurse. Both were married by the time they were old enough to drink. As their first son, a pensive sort, grew up, it became more and more obvious that in the face of years of Leitch family tradition (most of my ancestors are buried right next to one another in a cemetery on the outskirts of town; a plot is reserved for me and my presumed wife), he was not likely to stay in Mattoon long. He spent recess away from the other kids reading Mom, the Wolfman and Me behind a tree thick enough to block all the kickballs fired perilously in his direction. He read big books with no pictures, watched really long movies with not a single dismemberment in them and, believe it or not, thought the idea of heading into the wilderness to shoot a deer was kinda mean and certainly pointless (though he always loved the orange outfits).

Matters became worse when I realized, to the bewilderment of all family members, that I wanted to be a journalist. No, not just a journalist?a writer. Wiring trailers or performing sponge baths wouldn't do the trick for me (though they always proved moderately fulfilling in a pinch); I was bigger than my small-town constraints. I had the world to see, and I had to record it and its effects on a kid for whom the mullet was a rebellious haircut.

Well, to Mom and Dad, This. Just. Wouldn't. Do. Their repulsion and confusion about this odd twist in their son's life knew no bounds. Dad worked with a woman whose ex-husband had written for a newspaper. "He couldn't make a dime. I made more money than him at Gill's Restaurant." My mother begged me to do something worthy, like law or accounting. I would have none of it. I had the dream.

If just to spite all I knew and despised about my hometown, I followed the dream, which basically sent me to four tequila-soaked years in something called a journalism major and, after that, dead-end positions writing mind-numbing stories on city councils and zoning commissions and policy statutes for newspapers with the circulation of your average roll of Charmin. There was no freedom, no smidgen of my self and "what I had to offer" in any of my stories. They were inverted pyramid nightmares, verse chorus verse, rinse lather repeat. Didn't my editors realize I was an artist?

And then everything changed. Suddenly, the Web mistress came into the picture, and boy, she sure was pretty. You could do anything you wanted on the Web. Want to say "fuck"? Dude, go ahead; it's the Web! Want to write 2000 words on why your mother doesn't eat oatmeal on Thursdays? Hey, it's the Web! It's a new world! Hop on board! Wheeee!

Suddenly, the sky opened up for a 22-year-old journalism grad who fell asleep logging agate text. I hopped onto a website started by a friend of mine, someone equally disenchanted with fetching coffee for 90-year-old grizzled vets of the newspaper world who sat around and speculated about Deep Throat all day while cursing This Pampered Generation. Our website wouldn't be like those old fuckers and their rules. We would give writers, young writers, the chance to be heard, use those talents that the old media just couldn't understand.

And it was beautiful, goddamn, it was beautiful. I wrote and wrote and wrote, long-winded pieces about girls who wouldn't go out with me in high school, about my childhood infatuation with St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Steve Braun, about my nasty predilection for women with double consonants in their surname. Nothing was off-limits. And the old suckers fell for it. A media startup company?a bunch of old media farts finally getting with the program?bought our website and hired my friend and me, along with a load of other twentysomething snots ready to kick the planet in the nuts. They would even pay me! Like a real job!

We were indestructible, answering to no one, playing our own game by our own rules. Those poor bastards toiling at the bottom of the masthead for ancient magazines and relic newspapers?you almost had to pity them. Journalism a questionable career choice? Hell, I was making more money than either one of my parents.

I went nuts. A still-hanging-around girlfriend, clinging to what I was like as a helpless schmuck under the thumb of old-world curios?gone. No time for her. I'm in New York City, and I'm a media superstar. I can't settle down; I'm too important. I searched for the perfect New York apartment, the type of place worthy of a Web icon like me, a voice for the mute, the hero of the antiestablishment. Expensive new apartment? Who gives a shit? I am an online writer?people will be hiring me forever. We stand on the cusp of a revolution.

And then came the NASDAQ flop, and then the warning signs. The memos dribbled in. "Could you be careful with your constant printing? Paper is expensive." "Please try to limit any long-distance phone calls to under 10 minutes." My checks, always quietly and subtly direct-deposited in my liberally dipped-in checking account, suddenly weren't from payroll. They were personal checks, and it took them about two weeks to clear. Our tech staff started to disappear. The receptionists started printing out their resumes clandestinely. People started noticing pieces of furniture disappearing. My bosses spent long hours in meetings, exiting with a solemn scowl and a fleeting but blatant sympathetic glance in our direction.

Then Black Thursday. They gathered us all up in a cramped conference room and delivered the news. "I'm sorry. Just, the way the economy is now... It's a different world... We appreciate all you've done for the company... We'd like it if you kept this situation quiet from the media." And then we were gone.

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Now I am filing for unemployment and taking temp jobs carting large boxes of t-shirts across Manhattan, and barring a sudden influx of money from either God or Paul Allen, whomever I can get on the phone first, the sojourn in paradise is over. I am way behind on rent, and the ramen noodle supply is starting to dwindle dangerously. It is only a matter of time before New York, and the whole media world, will have finished chewing up the Midwestern kid with the center part and pleated pants. It will spit me out soon, shooting me back whence I came, a tail-between-legs return to the dreary moil that 24-year-old journalism graduates have suffered through since Gutenberg told his intern to fetch him some coffee while printing out this one book he came across. This New York dream was mighty glorious there for a while, but I must know my place and my limitations. After all the mess and the grandeur and the visions of imminence, Mattoon and my predetermined slot in Middle America beckons. It probably just wonders why I was gone so long.

So I better get on the job hunt, and fast. Actually, I hear that Gill's Restaurant is hiring. No benefits, shitty salary, long hours, but, hey, they're not going out of business. Say what you will about human nature and changing economic climates, we can all agree that people will always want their flapjacks.