Good Things Happen to People You Hate Read online

  Dedication

  For Nana, who loved books

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Key to Success Is Never to Have a Dream

  Real Men Will Disappoint You, Date Fictional Men Instead

  Sex Is Good for Your Complexion, but I’d Rather Have Acne

  Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk, Have a Full-on Breakdown

  Honesty Is the Best Policy, but Lying Will Give You the Life You Want

  Sometimes Your Irrational Fears Come True and Fire Destroys Your Home

  Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder Except When the Teens Think You’re a Hideous Beast

  The Definition of Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results, but Why Not Give It One More Try?

  Friends Stick with You Through Thick and Thin, Unless You Have Bedbugs

  Why Be Kind to Yourself When You Can Torture Your Mind Quietly?

  Everything in Moderation, Especially Moderation

  Misery Loves No Company at All

  How to Fail at Failing

  Good Things Happen to People You Hate

  Summer of Death

  I Went to South America to Find Myself and All I Found Was a Forty-Foot Jesus

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The Key to Success Is Never to Have a Dream

  The worst place to cry in New York is Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport. I can declare this without hesitation because I have cried almost everywhere else in this city. I have cried on every subway line. I have cried (at least four times) for the duration of any route to any apartment I’ve lived in. I have cried outside the old Hot & Crusty franchise on Fourteenth Street. I have cried on the Brooklyn Bridge. I have cried at the Foragers grocery store in DUMBO. I have cried on the Brooklyn Bridge while carrying a salad purchased at the Foragers grocery store in DUMBO. I have cried at most bars in my neighborhood and outside my neighborhood, and I once cried so hard at the Meatball Shop they brought me a free ice cream sandwich.

  So it is with great confidence that I declare LaGuardia’s Terminal B—home to the American Airlines hub, several leaking ceiling tiles, and zero bars—the absolute worst place to drop tears in this godforsaken town. I learned this lesson on November 2, 2017, when I stepped off the bus at LaGuardia, checked my email, and discovered a maniacal billionaire was shutting down the beloved local blog where I worked. To make matters worse, he’d replaced the entire website with a stupid letter alerting readers to the site’s closure, temporarily rendering the archives inaccessible. My job was gone. Six years of my work was, to my knowledge, erased. Not a single place served alcohol in the entire goddamn terminal. I was in hell.

  * * *

  I loved my blog job for a lot of reasons, not least of which was that blogging let me write about the news without having to do the scary work of reporting it. I am awed by real journalists who feel comfortable vacating their desks or kitchen tables to go outside and ask people questions. I am afraid of people and I am afraid of rejection, which makes actual reporting my waking nightmare. One of the worst assignments I had as a baby journalist was having to approach fifty people in bars and ask them their favorite New York hookup spots. I was twenty-two at the time, but I looked fifteen, and after three straight days of hounding drunk people all over Manhattan, all I had to show were a lot of rejections, a bunch of fake names, and an angry email from my editor suggesting “more thorough reporting in the future.”

  But blogging, for me, was all fun. Though I did occasionally leave my desk to report on City Council hearings, 7-Eleven grand openings, and other local newsworthy events, for the most part I got to riff on the news from the safety of my office. It was the golden age of internet writing, with the Gawker sites going strong alongside stalwarts like The Awl and The Hairpin, when young writers were encouraged to use and hone their voices. This was sometimes to the detriment of readers looking for real news, since when you’re pumping out content at a rapid clip (at my most prolific, I was writing five to six stories a day), you miss facts, make mistakes, and tend to be less informed overall than a reporter who has hours or even days to research a topic. But for those of us who thrilled at coming up with a clever way to describe the intersection of the Cronut line and new iPhone line, this was the Time to Be Alive.

  I was as lazy a student as I am an adult. I went to a private high school where everyone tried to murder one another to get into an Ivy, and then I went to a research university where everyone tried to murder one another to get into medical school. I majored in creative writing so I’d never have to murder anyone, and I started all my assignments the night before they were due. My junior and senior year, my roommates attentively joined study groups, didn’t sneak into bars during finals, cleaned their bathrooms, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I was a fuckup who rarely made dean’s list and once brought home an ex-Marine I’d picked up at a Ra Ra Riot concert. We did not understand each other.

  At my blog job, though, it didn’t matter that I studied too little and wasn’t serious enough and tended to come into work hungover. The skills I built over years of pounding out essays last minute actually came in handy when it came to writing blog posts—I usually had maybe an hour to make 400 words sing, which wasn’t all that different from working under pressure in the library. In the blog world, being a procrastinator was an asset. You had to think on your feet without time to prepare, and you had to love the rush that comes with publishing something decent in less time than it takes to defrost a chicken breast.

  As an academic ne’er-do-well, I longed to find people who were equally good at just scraping by, and once I graduated, I discovered bloggers. Bloggers are great at coming up with quick ways to be mean, just like me. They like to get drunk and complain about how miserable they are, which is my favorite combination of activities. The bloggers I met and sometimes worked with were just as self-deprecating and self-destructive as I was, and after a few years of suffering through long hours, low pay, and carpal tunnel, I started to sense that maybe I wasn’t an aberration so much as I fit a different type.

  So here I was, desperate to find a place that accepted me for the sluggish human-who-refuses-to-talk-to-other-humans-except-through-a-computer that I am, and I found it in blogging. It took some uncharacteristic persistence for me to find it on a salaried basis (I spent a couple years waiting for the blog to hire me full time, probably because I kept mixing up who and whom and insisted on writing ALL CAPS posts about new zoo animals), but once I wedged my way onto the payroll, I was in.

  It didn’t take long for my blog job to become my identity. When it came to blogging, I wasn’t just allowed to be me, I was required to be, which was a real treat for someone who’d spent the majority of her formative years being told the Real Her was too useless to function in the working world. “Let your freak blog flag fly,” my editor told me, so I did. I wrote about Taylor Swift conspiracy theories and Banksy-themed Bushwick buildings and snakes that live in the toilet. I forced my thoughts about the Boy American Girl doll upon the world. I documented drunk subway rides and rode in a Hasidic holiday caravan and did yoga in a mermaid tail on the beach. I wore crop tops and hiking pants to the office. No one made me do math. I was very happy.

  And there was this sense, too, that I was among family—that though my bosses and coworkers didn’t share my genetic code, they did share the quirks and failings my real family couldn’t quite understand. We were all maybe lazy, definitely funny misfits trying to find a home, and it was a miracle we had stumbled into one. But homes tied to turbulent
industries tend to crumble once you’ve kicked your shoes off, and our comfortable abode was no exception.

  * * *

  When I entered digital media, I assumed the internet’s plentiful bounty would spare me the bloodletting I saw at print publications, all of which seemed to suffer bulk layoffs on a weekly basis. The alt-weekly I worked at in Baltimore fired a wave of staff writers and copy editors three months after I started. In the first hour of my first day at my first post-college internship at a big New York City magazine, half the staff was laid off. But the internet, with its vast resources and young writers, felt like the safe place.

  Like most twenty-two-year-olds, I was an idiot and wrong about everything. It wasn’t long after I hitched my wagon to the blogverse that publishers discovered internet money was a lie. Facebook and Google changed their algorithms and fucked up everybody’s numbers. Corporations realized they could run fewer digital ads and make the same number of sales. Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel sued Gawker into oblivion.

  The blog I worked at was independently run, but after all that madness, the owners decided to sell it to Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire, bison superfan, and noted Donald Trump donor. Ricketts owned a hyperlocal news site called DNAinfo, and we, a gang of scrappy underpaid bloggers, were the cheap labor he hoped would ultimately bring down costs at his own site. We were moved out of our lovely little home in DUMBO to a sad midtown office where my crop tops no longer seemed welcome. Our management also had to slash jobs at the site we were joining up with, which made us very popular with our new coworkers.

  At this point, digital media companies like Gawker and Vice had started unionizing. We had no legal protection and nothing but the promise of two weeks of severance if we were unceremoniously cut loose, a threat that seemed all the more likely under our new stewardship. So we joined forces with our new colleagues, unionized under the Writers Guild of America, East, and publicly announced not long after the merger.

  It turns out rich people who haven’t figured out their money won’t spare them eventual death don’t like to bargain with their underlings, and Ricketts threatened to can the whole company. We spent months wondering if we’d have jobs in the morning, or if Ricketts would shut us down on a whim. Which brings me to November second, at LaGuardia’s Terminal B.

  * * *

  I thought digital media would be a good way to make money as a writer. I was incorrect. It turns out there is no good way to make money as a writer, and I should have listened to my grandfather and gone to law school. On the other hand, law school sounded (and still sounds) like a lot of boring work with a lot of boring people. Media is a lot of interesting work with people who like to bitch about it at weekly happy hours. But that’s assuming you have work or beer money in the first place.

  The thing about media is that if you have a staff job, at some point you’ll probably lose it. Journalism is an industry in permanent turmoil, with publishers on an everlasting quest to balance profitability with quality work. They still haven’t figured it out. It’s possible they never will.

  About a year before I lost my job, a popular website axed a chunk of their staff writers. A few months after that, yet another one laid off over a dozen on a single afternoon. A bunch of them showed up to a bar I was at, and I bought them drinks even though I didn’t really know them. That’s what you do when you’re on a career track that’s derailing in front of you. The assumption is that the last crop of unemployed writers will return the favor when it’s your turn to get the carpet pulled out.

  On the night my blog shut down, there was a big memorial meetup at a bar on the Lower East Side. I missed it, of course, because I was at the airport, crying and pacing the terminal and wondering if I should skip the stupid trip and go home. There was a lot of information to process. According to Ricketts’s email, we were getting four months severance and four months of health insurance. This was a solid financial cushion, although months go by a lot faster than you would think; but at the very least, my panic attack in LaGuardia’s Terminal B did not include a freak-out over how I would pay my next rent check.

  Still, the place that had helped shape me was gone; and so, it seemed, was the work that had given me the first identity I liked. I was no longer Rebecca Fishbein, Staffer, Local Blog Queen, Slayer of Subway Delays. I was just a person standing by a rack full of $12 listless CIBO Express sandwiches, with no job and no purpose and no friends to buy me shots and hold me while I cried. I did, however, rack up, like, $200 in Venmo payments from journalists I knew and didn’t who were clamoring to feed me alcohol. Solidarity is, as I said before, a real thing in a tempestuous working world.

  * * *

  I briefly considered fleeing the terminal to go get drunk on the Lower East Side, where my now-former coworkers and other journalists were gathering to toast my website goodbye. I did not want to miss my own funeral. But I decided against this plan. I had a friend waiting for me in Nashville and another meeting us on the way, and it would have cost me at least $400 to change my ticket. I couldn’t afford that when I’d been employed, let alone having lost my job, so I boarded the flight.

  I flew a few hours down south and took a cab to the hotel, where my friend handed me a takeout container filled with barbecue chicken. “I’m really upset,” I told her. “You’ll get another job,” she said. I wasn’t so sure. At least I had free chicken.

  We walked down Nashville’s famed Broadway, which was lined with neon lights like the Broadway back home. But unlike my Broadway, these lights were in the shape of cowboy boots, there were no child-kicking costumed Elmos, and all the pedestrians on the sidewalk were blond. My friends and I ended up drinking Budweisers and doing whiskey shots at one of the many country music bars, which I categorized as keeping up with my former colleagues getting trashed without me on the Lower East Side. At one point, I struck up a conversation with some dudes. “I just lost my job,” I said to one of them, who was . . . tall? With a face? Hard to know.

  “That sucks,” he said. “I really loved it,” I said. “That sucks,” he said again. I noticed he didn’t ask me what I did, a common refrain in New York and D.C. and maybe Los Angeles, but not always in places where your life isn’t necessarily defined by your work. He had no further comment. I wondered if he would buy me a beer. He did not. I wondered if he would make out with me. He did not. People lose jobs all the time. I wasn’t special.

  I woke up the next day to a hangover and a hotel breakfast, and my friends and I shuttled to the Country Music Hall of Fame. I wandered through mocked-up cornfields from Hee Haw and Shania Twain photographs as I scrolled through my Twitter feed, which was full of journalists and readers lamenting my blog’s death. My old colleagues appeared to be drinking themselves to their own deaths somewhere in Brooklyn. They were in New York, all together, and I was here, alone, staring at a mannequin wearing Jason Aldean’s fourth grade basketball jersey. If this was the future, I didn’t much care for it.

  My flight back to New York was set to get me home sometime Sunday afternoon, and I was desperate to meet up with some of my fellow fireds. But New York doesn’t like it when you leave, and it chastised me by sending “wind” to delay my flight three hours. Once I landed, it took me over an hour to get out of LaGuardia, thanks to “construction,” which I can only assume was the airport’s way of doling out punishment for all the times I blogged about its crappy broken ceiling tiles. I figured I’d just go home and cry alone, but a friend was nice enough to meet me at the bar across the street from my apartment so I could cry to him instead. I cried about being scared about money and health insurance and bills and, just generally, the future, which at this point was a big amorphous unknown.

  “What am I going to do?” I said, deep into my third glass of dive-bar wine. He couldn’t answer me. I ordered more wine.

  * * *

  A lot of things happened after that, in a relatively short time span. Most of us found enough freelance gigs—reporting, blogging, copywriting, sponsored content, this dam
n book you’re reading right now—to keep us from going bankrupt. The very companies that slashed staff jobs by the hundreds needed freelancers to write sans benefits, and we, starving scabs that we were, tended to take their places. We got disaster health insurance and Medicaid and stopped going to the doctor and maybe started biking with helmets, because we were young and healthy and could put off getting that mole checked out. The Ricketts money got deposited into our bank accounts for months, and by the time it was gone, we’d found more solid footing than we had on November second.

  I staved off existential and economic despair by falling into some regular blog gigs, picking up some real estate writing, and publishing personal essays and dating advice pieces (LOL) in a bunch of publications I’d eyed back when I was exclusively tied to my old job. I missed being Rebecca Fishbein, Staffer, Local Blog Queen, Slayer of Subway Delays, but now I got to be someone else. Sometimes I was Rebecca Fishbein, Destroyer of Celebrities, Queen of Menstrual Cramp Killing Tips. Others, I was Rebecca Fishbein, Barer of Affair with Roommate in National Publication. And sometimes I was Rebecca Fishbein, Eater of Goldfish, Writer of Many Tweets, Taker of Many Naps. Freelancing is a roller coaster! But there was a certain satisfaction in knowing I could be whomever I wanted, and that my sense of self wasn’t tied to a job that was out of my control.

  * * *

  After our website was shuttered, my friends at another blog, Death and Taxes, lost their jobs when it folded. In the summer, dozens of Gawker refugees who’d found a new home at Univision took buyouts when the company threatened mass layoffs. The Outline laid off all their staff writers. The Daily News canned half its staff. The Village Voice ceased print production, then killed the alt-weekly altogether. Though the gang of journalists I roll with once consisted of a solid mix of staffers and freelancers, by the end of that summer, almost no one had a job.

  Journalism has always been like this. A few weeks ago I watched The Paper with a bunch of my unemployed friends, and the panic over ad sales and subscriptions and cost-cutting hung just as heavy in 1994 as it does now. It makes me wonder how long I’ll stick this world out, if at all.