J.P. Stern's Press days

I first met Jared Paul Stern when I was writing for New York Press in the late 1990s. One of the paper's editors was enamored with this three-named wonder who came from seemingly nowhere.

The editor-who shall remain nameless because he is quite good and does not need his name linked to Stern's-had a book reading at a Midtown Irish pub and introduced me to Stern. The young man shook my hand with a cold, clammy, and loose grip, one that made his passivity clear. I looked him up and down and was not impressed. He had a pouty, baby face. He apparently believed that his-ever present fedora made him look edgy. It didn't. I made him out to be a pretentious man who was suffering from early male-pattern baldness.

"Hey, I didn't know that the Orthodox hats from Borough Park came to Irish joints." Alan Cabal, another Press writer, said to me as he pointed and laughed at Stern's getup. Stern was clearly uncomfortable in a working-class bar and made for the exit once he kissed the ring of the editor. That, at least, he was good at. He sucked up to whoever needed to be sucked up to. I figured he would do well in the New York media.

But he was an outsider. One that had an image of what New York wask-or rather should be-in his limited, classist mind. It was easy to feel that way in New York in the late 90s. The WTC was still standing and crime was low and dropping. New York became safe for quasi-men like Stern to walk the streets and make believe that he was a part of it all. He wasn't. He was just another young hustler trying to get a break.

Stern moved on to the New York Post and would write these horrible essays about his girlfriend whom he called "Snoodles." Stern bought a house in the Catskills and wrote article after article about it. He was just another suburban boy who couldn't handle or afford New York City.

The Post cut him, and he could only get work with Page Six two days a week. Stern at 35 was no longer a wunderkind, and his star was fading. So when he reportedly tried to con that supermarket billionaire out of $220,000, it was probably a move by a man desperate for money. And with that con, Stern effectively ruined what little career he had in "journalism" (Page Six being to reporting what skinheads are to politics).

Oh sure, he'll get a book deal out of it. You think a worm like Stern won't capitalize on this? Stern went up against a guy that could eat him for lunch. The man had to have lost his mind to think that con would ever work.

With that con, he got what he finally longed for. He became a cheap hustler, the special kind endemic to New York-but his name in headlines. So with his shameful hustle, Jared Paul Stern can finally say he is indeed a New Yorker.