Yeah, it’s a lot of words, but can you really write about your best friend of 23 years without using a lot of words?
I wrote this blog entry originally in the weeks after Herman passed away and it’s been sitting on my computer for a while. I would open it, close it, go back to it, amend it, edit it.
Recently though, as I’ve returned from my summer travel, well, you know, three months ago, I wanted to write about Washington DC portion of the trip. But then I thought that I could write the origin story about how I met Herman, what led our paths to cross in the first place. And yeah, if people get through the novel that is this blog entry, there are some pictures at the bottom. Patience pays off, lemme tell you.
Well. buckle up. Get your snacks and beverages ready. Choose a comfortable place to sit. Here is the origin story of how I met Herman and my years of working for him.
I guess the story really starts in 1997. As I’ve talked about before, I studied abroad in Denmark in 1997 and that basically turned my life upside down.
I returned to college and I knew one thing. I did not want to go to school anymore. I was really uninterested in studying anymore. But well, I wasn’t exactly calling the shots and the person who paid for my college education was kinda insisting I finish. I still remember going to see my advisor and saying — I don’t want to study anymore. He goes — well, you could go to Washington. We have this internship program. Well, that’s not what he actually said. He said — have you ever taken a trip across the country? Go do that, keep a journal and I’ll give you the 8 credits you need. I would have preferred that option, but well, more level headed people prevailed. Thank God.
I applied and got in and ended up doing a really outstanding internship at the Voice of America. On the first day of the internship, one of my new coworkers came up to me and said — I heard you were from Chicago. I said — no. I’m from New York. We lived in Chicago when I was a little kid. The guy looks at me and goes — you??? LITTLE KID??? I have ties that are older than you. And that dear friends is how that internship started.
Despite this seemingly inauspicious beginning, the internship was great. I learned so much at that internship at the Voice of America. My boss was this diminutive Texan who reminded me of Ross Perot in manner. The guy had a bust of Aristotle and a plaque with an armadillo on it. He swore Aristotle used to wink at him occasionally. And the plaque of the armadillo was from a beauty contest the critters had participated in. The Texan had a really deep Texas accent. One time someone called and asked for the website for the service. This is before the web had seeped deeply into our collective consciousness. I remember the Texas boss saying “our website is dubya dubya dubya dot VOA dot gov. It took about half an hour for him to say this.
Needless to say, everyone was decades older than me. The Texas boss enlisted me to work on these crime alerts, kind of an America’s most wanted for international criminals. The Texan was vehement about this stuff, kind of like an old fashioned sheriff. I actually really liked it. The crime alerts were for international broadcast and that to me was pretty cool. I got to know all about what kind of alerts Interpol puts out about criminals. A random piece of information if I ever heard of it. They also did editorials, which were a little bit more difficult. At first it was supposed to be one editorial during the whole internship but I think it turned into five or so of the editorials. I also got to work on a television show, sitting in the control room running a teleprompter. The guests were some pretty heavy hitters policy wise. I remember going to the front of the building to pick up the Dalai Lama’s personal representative to the United States, a jovial man who shook my hand with a lot of enthusiasm.
They were giving me pretty simple tasks but they couldn’t be sure about what my skills were and I understood that. I was treated like their daughter. I went back to them for years afterwards for references for jobs and educational opportunities.
I learned so much from all of them, not just professionally. There were four of them in the office. Two of them were completely on the right, one of them a totally lefty and another one who was a veteran journalist. They weren’t just civil to each other, they were friends. There were never any big disagreements between them. They got along really well. What I learned was beyond politics. I learned a level of civility towards other people that needed to be there in situations, something that served me well in the future.
After the internship ended, I went back to college to graduate, as I was still in my last semester of college.
It would make a great story if everything just worked out after that, but I’m leaving out the part about being dumped. Yup. The ritual post college dumping. It’s not you, it’s me honey. Yeah, ewwwww…. I mean I was a lot better off in the long run but it sure did not feel that way at the time. It took me forever to figure out why I got dumped and I eventually realized that it didn’t actually have anything to do with me. And I was absolutely better off without this guy.
I graduated from college and took off for another summer in Europe, another odd chapter of the wilderness years. A summer that saw me ending up in some truly odd situations. This was at the height of the wildness years, where I had no fixed place where I was all the time but I hadn’t found my home yet.
It was still the phase of things were I was running away from life, not towards it.
The people who gave me the first internship recommended me for a second internship. The second one was, um, interesting. I guess that’s a good way to explain it. The internship was based in the Northeast quadrant of Washington DC, on Capitol Hill. The office for the internship was in one of the old row houses.
I walked into the office at the internship and it was like a time capsule. I don’t even think the guy who managed the whole thing even had a computer. But what was the funniest thing was that the guy was there smoking. In an office. In 1999. I mean I knew people had smoked in offices. But that was in the times when men called women “broads,” men wore hats, red meat was good for you and women had few if any rights. Something told me they would have loved to harken back to those wonderful days.
Then there was the internship. Behind the smoke filled room was another room filled with these ancient computers. We’re not talking DOS here but they were in desperate need of an upgrade. None of them could even display most websites properly. I remember trying to check my email and it wouldn’t even display.
The building had its own let’s call them quirks. Quirks. The floor in the upstairs was slightly warped. The staircase kinda leaned. The quirky characters matched their setting.
The women in the internship program lived together in housing provided by the organization next door to its headquarters. There were eight or nine of us living in this three story intern house. There were bunk beds. Incredibly we had no cable, no internet hook up and we shared a phone. All eight or nine of us. One phone. What was funny was that the house was directly next to the headquarters of the internship, separated by a fence. My big decision was to just cross over the fence or walk around it. The decisions you make as a 22 year old.
Our neighbor was an old man named Finnegan. Finnegan. Another old crank. Finnegan was a photographer. Who photographed the Lincoln-Douglas debates. We’ll get to the origin story of that joke in a little while. I’m kidding, but only slightly. The guy had photographed Roosevelt, Franklin Delano. Teddy may have been a little before his time. But only slightly. He had photographed Eisenhower and probably every president after that.
And boy Finnegan was cranky. Vintage cranky. He has ties older than me cranky. When I found out that Finnegan was a photographer, I thought I could pick his brain about that. Finnegan though was having absolutely none of that. Absolutely none of it. He told me curtly that back in his day, of daguerreotypes and magnesium flare flashes, you got two tries to get a picture right. I’m kidding about Finnegan making daguerrotypes but he wasn’t that far removed from that. Finnegan had a lot of grievances about modern photography. I mean what what this bullshit about having 36 exposure film???? In Finnegan’s day, with his Graflex Speed Graphic, he got his ten shots and he didn’t complain. A journalist had come to interview Finnegan about being a historical figure on Capitol Hill. That person had taken ten rolls of 36 film. Finnegan was completely horrified by this.
Then there was our stipend. The condition was that we had to keep the place clean and we all got the princely sum of $263 a week. We would receive a check that could only be cashed at an ancient bank on Capitol Hill. The bank was near Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, so on payday, you’d have a bunch of 22 year olds with nearly $270 dollars in cash on them. I mean direct deposit already existed. People weren’t getting physical checks anymore. But as I said, the place wanted to hang on to ancient ways of doing things and no, they were not looking to change anything.
We were all assigned these news stories to research, things that the two who ran the internship wanted us to report about, I guess. The topics were, um, weird. Let’s say they were to the right of what I believed, what I currently believe. My topic was about press leaks and Ken Starr. Ken Starr and his office leaking things to the press. Ken Starr leaking. I don’t even remember. And Ken Starr. Who ever remembers that name? It was that long ago. The topics definitely had a certain stance to them, let’s put it that way. A certain right leaning stance. Yes. Let’s definitely put it that way.
There was this unpleasant little man who worked there as well. One day I did say that I had no interest in the topic I had been assigned. This little unpleasant man said that journalism was about writing about things you have no interest in. I said eventually I wanted to write about my opinions. This person said that opinions were like buttholes. Everyone has them. Except he used a different, more colorful term. This was the first time anyone ever said this to me and unfortunately not the last.
The internship had these weekly meetings, these forums. I can only remember two of these forums. One was a guy who came to talk to us worked for C-Span. I had read a magazine article about how C-Span had the worst green room of all of the television stations in Washington. My fellow internship mates dared me to ask this semi obnoxious question. I’m 22, have zero brains, few inhibitions and aim to be outrageous. The guy who was there though was very gracious and answered my question very well, talking about how C-Span did so much with such a tiny budget. In a weird way, it was my first lesson in maturity and being gracious. I remembered this lesson for a long time after that.
Another session was memorable for all the wrong reasons. We were supposed to write up the sessions in a journalism way. Well I found this out later. So the unpleasant man I had mentioned before looked at something I had written and had all sorts of negative comments. Eye rolls. He sits there and goes — you put all the important stuff at the bottom. Proceeds to give me a dressing down. Lengthy dressing down. I call this my introduction to journalism. “Here. You did this all wrong.” Spectacular. How auspicious.
I’m making the internship out to be a miserable experience but really absolutely it was not. I mean parts of it weren’t great but a lot of it was a lot of fun. We went out constantly because there was absolutely nothing to do in that house. Remember, this was the era before smartphones. Smartphones were called “going out.” Wow. I sound really bitter and old.
Anyway, we did in fact have a lot of fun. One of my fellow interns, still an extremely dear friend of mine, was working for Robert Novak, a Washington DC pundit and columnist. Novak’s nickname was “the Prince of Darkness.” Novak was a total Washington character. One time, the interns got invited to a taping of Novak’s show, the Capital Gang. Novak was part of this weekly political round table with other aged pundits. There were liberals Al Hunt and Mark Shields. Novak was on the opposite side with old Pat Buchanan, veteran of the Nixon and Reagan White House’s and a guy who got into a fist fight with a Washington DC police officer.
For the show taping, the interns had to sit on the side of the studio. I remember basically sitting on the floor. Novak kept calling my friend, who was his intern, by the wrong name. Amani???? Amoni???? Novak might have had a really fierce nickname but he wasn’t so fierce in person. We all thought what Novak was doing was pretty fun.
The banter on the Capital Gang was really premium. To sound like an old codger here for a second, people like Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson are such imposters compared to people like Novak, Hunt and Shields. I can’t imagine Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingram going toe to toe with a rank and file Democratic pundit now. It wouldn’t be a discussion of any real issues.
The proceedings at the show taping were really fun. Hunt, Shields and Novak kinda sat there and play-fought during the show taping. There was nothing hateful or malicious about any of them. At one point, Hunt turns to Novak and says — Bob, you remember the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I mean you were there, right??? I have continually repeated this line since then. Thank you Al Hunt for making this joke. Those guys were FUNNY. Meanwhile, the interns were given strict instructions not to laugh because it would interfere with the taping of the show. Did we laugh??? Of course we did.
The other thing that I remember was that Novak, Hunt and Shields were actually nice to us. Novak, for all of his bluster and his unfriendly nickname was actually a pretty nice guy. We all took a picture together as well, which is unfortunately lost to the sands of time.
I had joined up with this internship program that promised that I could an internship in a place like CNN. I got there and they said (and I will never forget this) that we can get you into the Alexandria Gazette Packet. I am in no way dragging that newspaper but it was really disappointing as they had advertised themselves as a place that could place you in all of these really impressive news organizations. I ended up at the Herndon Connection.
Once I got the assignment though, it did turn out to be fortuitous. It 1999, I guess the waning years of big journalism, before social media took everything over and media started to crater. The news room at Connection Newspaper was buzzing. I still remember. It was in this anonymous building in Northern Virginia, among a lot of those buildings that look like overturned shoe boxes. There were scores of people working there, old style newspaper editors. I got paired up with this classic journalism crank named Sanford Horn. Oh was Sanford ever cranky. If you could harness the crankiness of this man, you could power a city. He would pick up the phone and say “SANFORD HORN” right into the phone, almost as if speaking in capital letters. For some reason, they put me with Sanford. On one of my first day shadowing Sanford, Sanford handed me a folder of stories and said — these are my dogs. What Sanford meant was that these were the stories Sanford had no interest in writing.
Still, I was undeterred. I had always loved to write and thought of myself as quite good at it. It was a skill I had gotten quite good at very quickly and could do it with relative ease. Could I drive a car or keep a house organized? Can I not answer in the interest of not incriminating myself? But I could always write. That was a solid skill for me.
The whole point of the Connection experience was to get “clips.” Clips, for the younger audience, are samples with your name on them with your writing. Samples containing your byline. Backtracking here for a minute, the colorful characters at my post college internship told me that the writing I had done at my wonderful college internship didn’t officially count as clips. Because my name wasn’t on them.
Connection turned out to be a really good career move, as much as I thought I was “too good” to work in a local newspaper. HA!!! Honestly I paid no attention to Sanford’s editorializing about the stories. I interviewed a bunch of retired women about the bike ride they took around Scandinavia. I interviewed another guy about his butterfly collection. I went to a high school band concert. It was real community journalism. In my mind, there’s something so innocent and idyllic about the whole time in my mind.
There was a big group of us over there. We would all go out to lunch with another intern over there named Jesse. He had a Volkswagen Beetle that had holes in the floor. He loved telling us that the car was an antique and didn’t need to follow any modern car standards, including the holes in the backseat floor where you could see the road. At lunch time, we would fight to see who got to sit in the back so we could observe the holes.
So I left with six or seven clips. I’m not talking that those were my six or seven best. I had six or seven clips total.
Again I cannot overstate how confusing the post college time is. It felt like to me that there was absolutely nothing. I cannot put into words how confused I was about what I was supposed to do or where I was even supposed to work. I returned to New York to live with my parents and work at truly one of the most horrible jobs I have ever worked at.
At that time the prevailing narrative was that needing your parents or even being close to them was for the stupids. I was 22, going on 23. The whole thing, at least among the group I belonged to, was that listening to your parents or going to them for advice made you childish.
No one, no ever tells you how hard the post college time is. You are done with the first part of your schooling and you are not really sure what is coming next. It’s that uncertainty that causes the maximum amount of anxiety.
After the internship was over, I moved back to New York for a little while. I met this person named Little Edie at the internship, who convinced me to move back to DC. I mean I don’t know if I needed much convincing. I had wanted to stay in DC but I had also wanted to be close to my parents. Or maybe I didn’t want to be close. I had no idea.
I moved back to DC. The place I lived in was miserable. It really was. It turns out Little Edie had sorta conned me into moving there. As soon as I moved down there, she vanished. She was gone to her boyfriend’s and I was alone. At that age though, it felt like I was alone, always alone.
The awfulness of the place cannot be overstated. I remember sitting in the living room. There was this absolutely pathetic red futon. There was a tv on the floor, an old white television. It was an old, beat up television. There was no furniture other than that. I had a bed with no bed frame and no box spring. My bed was held up by a stack of bricks. The carpet in my room was filthy. The shower was broken and consistently leaked into the living room, to the point where I put a large bucket underneath the area it leaked into so the floor wouldn’t warp more than it already had. The toilet hadn’t been installed properly, so the floor underneath it sagged a bit. From downstairs, you could see the ceiling sagging where the toilet was. Oh and I almost forgot the hole in the ceiling. Giant hole. And little Edie’s role in all of this??? Zero. She was gone.
I remember thinking — I’m going to have to earn furniture. I’m going to have to earn a couch, a coffee table, a shelf. Needless to say, Little Edie played no part in any of this.
Oh and I didn’t have a job when I moved there. I had some savings and the rent was insanely cheap, $400 a month.
So I was sending out job applications. I sound like an ancient person but applying for a job wasn’t like it is now, where you use some stupid system with some name like Bullfrog or Simple but the name has a Q in the middle. Companies were just getting email. I remember applying to a job via fax. One big Washington publication called Congressional Quarterly actually required that you mail them the application. Mail. With a stamp. Those were the days.
There was a job board in the Hill newspaper and Journalism Jobs. I dutifully sat in a Kinkos on Capitol Hill, using their computer to send out applications. I sent out so many applications and had quite a few interviews, most of which I don’t remember.
But there was one that I do remember. It was some kind of a non profit near Pennsylvania Avenue. I got out of the interview and I had a voicemail from the office manager from some place called Tax Analysts or Tax Notes. I don’t remember which she even said. Yeah I had a cell phone. It made phone calls. That was its bell and whistle. Notice I used the singular.
And yet again in a moment that could only happen in Washington DC, the day I got the call to go to Tax Analysts, when I was on Pennsylvania Avenue, everyone, I mean EVERYONE on the street was staring at something. Suddenly a car slows down and the window rolls down and we see President Bill Clinton. Clinton was over there laughing. Somehow after all of this turmoil, this felt good.
Back to this tax place. I remember applying for the job. I remember it was based in Northern Virginia. Everything else was based in DC. This was the only thing outside of the city. I remember thinking — watch. This is the job I’ll actually get.
I had no clue about the area. I was disappointed because it wasn’t DC. Northern Virginia. What was that exactly?
I got up early for the interview and actually got there early. The orange line to West Falls Church. I think that was the terminus for the orange line then. The place was at East Falls Church. The building was on Lee Highway. I actually got there way before the interview. These were the days when there wasn’t a Starbucks on every corner. Lee Highway didn’t have anything for that matter. So I walked into a bar at 10am and asked for a cup of coffee.
I got to the interview. I looked around at this place. There was this wood paneling around the whole place. It wasn’t sleek. It resembled a den. I had an interview with Chris Bergin, who was the editor of the magazine at the time. The whole editorial staff was there at the time. A very pleasant looking blond woman. A bespectacled guy with brown hair. And a guy who looked slightly upset to be there, wearing athletic shorts and a t-shirt with a drawing of a basketball on it. This was a formal job interview?? Basketball shorts????
The interview was kinda fun. I went with my six clips from connection newspapers, the six I had. They told me I would be working as a formatter, whatever that was. In my overeagerness to find a job that I had applied for a reporting position, which I was absolutely not ready for. According to them, it would be formatting with reporting opportunities. They reassured me that when the reporting opportunities came, I could ask any question I needed about tax law and they would answer them. Whatever this formatting job was, I was ready for it. 23 and eager to please.
It seemed like they were going to hire me so we took a short walk around the office. I would be a formatter for a magazine called Highlights and Documents, H&D. I’m being shown around and the office kinda looks like a teenager’s bedroom. An edgy teenager. There was some kind of stuffed animal attached to the wall. There was a 1960s movie poster for a movie where the tag line was “Come to Susanne, both sacred and profane.” There was a bottle of a substance called “Go Away Evil.” That substance was rapidly dissolving so I guess the level of evil was rising. There was a couch that had seen much better days. There was one of those televisions in that room that was the size of a small suitcase. I’m not sure of the last time that television had even been turned on. It was one of those televisions that people turn into fish tanks now.
By far the most unique, funny, interesting and profoundly sacrilegious object in that office was a sign left by the previous occupant of my desk. Tacked onto the wall was a sign that said — Warren A* Rojas. Underneath that, next to an asterisk, it said “The A stands for Anti-christ.” If that wasn’t funny enough, underneath that it said “Crush your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women.”
But the thing that really sold me on the job was a picture of two dachshunds on the wall. It was a very formal portrait, like something you’d see of a person’s kids but it was of dogs. Those dogs belonged to Herman Ayayo, the guy in the athletic shorts. I thought — this is where I want to work.
The job I got was pretty interesting. The start time was 1pm and we’d be working until 9pm. I later learned that these were just guidelines. The real working hours were let’s say more flexible. My official job title was “formatter.” I was to work on a daily magazine called “Highlights and Documents” or H&D. The place had a weekly magazine called Tax Notes and H&D was their daily product.
Herman wasn’t my actual boss. He was the upper boss. It was the bespectacled man with the brown hair, Scott. As much as I learned from Herman, I learned almost an equal amount from Scott. Now did I appreciate this at the time??? Absolutely not.
The first thing I learned was how to put together this magazine. Now no knock against Tax Analysts, but I thought we were going to use a graphics software to do the magazine. There were already some really good software programs to do graphics then. Digital photography was happening. Digital was coming. Quickly.
Tax Analysts though was sticking to this unholy marriage between graphics and Microsoft Word. Let’s just say that those graphics and the text parts of this marriage did not get along. And we dealt with this daily. And it filled our lives with joy.
Putting together the magazine involved running macros on all of it that I slowly learned. We also had to copy and paste tons of things into the magazine. What I learned really quickly was how to deal with content, how to label content, how to navigate content. This was so valuable for me in every way because I could solve any problem involving dealing with content. Even now I make it a point to teach my writing students how to deal with small and large amounts of content. I teach them how to properly label files, how to format documents, how to deal with people’s names on the first instance and the second instance and how to refer to things that are acronyms. All from this education I received in this small room in this forgettable brick building in Falls Church, Virginia.
What is also funny or interesting or strange is that I still use the same file labeling system that Herman taught me long ago in that H&D room on my own personal files. When I would write a paper in graduate school, I had a notes file that had the file name reversed and a final file name that had the class number first, then the topic, then the due date. The same goes for the files I make now for my students. They are always class section topic date. Oh and not to mention my photos, which are always place, subject, date and number. And what’s more, I cannot stand when people don’t label their files correctly or put extra punctuation in their file names. Again, all because of what I learned in that tiny room.
I don’t really remember every single minute detail of the first few months working there, job wise but I do remember Herman and his funny antics. The first email he ever sent me was Clippy the Microsoft assistant, offering to help me with my suicide. This sounds weird and morbid, but one of the choices was “pastry” so that was pretty interesting. Unexpected.
The other thing was that Herman was the first person who agreed with me that bagels in Washington DC were absolutely inedible. Does Washington have some great food??? Yes. Were bagels on that list at the time??? Well, no. I remember going to some free event in Washington, of which there were many, and grabbing and bagel. I took one bite and thought I had bitten into sawdust. I didn’t realize that you could mess up bagels but you could. Absolutely you could. And here was clear evidence of that.
Herman had grown up in New Jersey and he knew this better than anyone else. On a trip back to New Jersey, Herman brought back a giant bag of bagels. I remember thinking — this man knows the truth about the bagels in DC.
Then there were the dogs. He had two long haired dachshunds named Ebony and Greco. He used to bring them to work with him and walk around with the dogs on his shoulders and say — hey dog. You got a Herman on your ass!!!!!! More on the origin story of the dogs as we go along in this blog post.
What really cemented our friendship was when Scott went to England for a week. I was about two months into the job then. Scott really wanted to make sure I was ready for him to leave so I could do the magazine on my own. Now to be clear, I was not ready to do the magazine on my own, far from ready.
My one big fear was that I would be left alone with do this and I was not ready for that. I’m 45 now and have been teaching for 14 years. As a former coworker said to me once — you have seen it all. And yes. I have seen it all. But 23 and on my own and responsible for formatting and making this magazine. I could not do this, so Herman came in to help me and we were ok.
My fear was not unfounded. Before getting hired at Tax Analysts, I worked at the single worst job I have ever worked in my entire life and believe me, BELIEVE ME, I have seen some things in my life. I worked for this utterly insane man in this five person news organization in some random office on some random block in some random part of New York. One day he screamed at me from across the office, cursing, spitting, about some story I had written. This man provided no support for writing things and expected a 23 year old who had just graduated from college to know specifics about some kind of loan collecting. I quit this job via fax and never went back. And that’s all I’m going to say about that. Again, no names. So my fears were not unfounded. Somehow though with Herman helping me, we were ok. The magazine got done and everything was fine. Little did I know that I would continue to lean on Herman for years after that.
Herman also did the thing that it turned out he always did for people. He drove me home after work. Now why this a big deal? The job was out in Northern Virginia and I lived on Capitol Hill. I could take a train home, then another train, then a bus home. With Scott being gone, Herman was my ride to the train station. The train station was about two minutes from the job but here we are getting on Route 66 towards DC. Herman goes — I’ll just take you into DC.
The first night Herman drove me home, I unloaded. That was my habit back then and well, continues to now, but I hope to a lesser degree. The topic of my unloading was the aforementioned Little Edie of Maryland Avenue.
And who was the aforementioned Little Edie of Maryland Avenue? She was my roommate at the time. How to describe this person? Well, the nickname really tells the story. Of course it is a reference to Grey Gardens, this 1970s documentary about Edith Ewing Beale (Big Edie) and Edith Bouvier Beale (Little Edie). If you haven’t seen the documentary, it’s about these two women, a mother and a daughter, who were part of the America’s Catholic aristocracy. Bouvier, as in Jacqueline Bouvier, who became Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Jacqueline’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, was Big Edie’s brother, so these two women were direct relatives of probably the most famous family in America. And the Bouvier’s themselves were no slouches in terms of money. That was country club money. Debutante money. And then it fell apart. Spectacularly.
The women’s financial circumstances really changed after Mr. Beale divorced Big Edie. Grey Gardens, the aforementioned estate fell into serious disrepair. Horrible disrepair. We’re talking raccoons in the house, dead cats. They had had an army of servants to take care of the 28 room mansion and all of the sudden, there was no one to take care of it. These were women who were raised to expect a certain level of comfort in their lives, in a way hot house flowers who could only exist under certain circumstances. Through no fault of their own, they were not raised to have any degree of self sufficiency, so the house fell into a degree of disrepair that they could not come back from.
What makes the documentary so interesting is that neither of them ever acknowledged their change in circumstances. Little Edie still speaks in the East Coast lockjaw, which is to be expected. What made this film so curious was that the two women completely acted like they were still a part of this refined aristocracy, when in reality, they lived in this complete ruin. Neither of them ever breaks character. Edie speaks about what was in the maid’s dining room in the present tense, as if they still had a maid. At one point, Edie says to the filmmakers “it’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.” Edie talks endlessly about her education at Miss Porter’s School or Farmington, as the people in the know call it. Both Big Edie and Little Edie endlessly reminisce about their glamorous lives. Little Edie at one point says that you can’t have your cake and eat it too in your life and Big Edie vociferously disagrees with her. She had her cake, loved it, masticated it and generally had an ideal life. Never had a cross word with Mr Beale, fabulous marriage, beautiful children. Now this would be fine except this conversation happens in the bedroom Big Edie and Little Edie share in their dilapidated house. I mean ok people say these things but Big Edie is saying this while they are both in a room that is half full of trash and Edie seems to be feeding several feral cats while her mother is speaking. The bedroom is lined with pictures from their formerly fabulous lives. The family posing outside of the house when it was in its glory days. The bedroom is, to put it lightly, in a state of disrepair. There’s a stove in there for some reason. Little Edie is cooking corn on the cob on a hot plate. A far cry from the Maidstone Club, I’d say.
The contrast between the present state of the house and what Big Edie and Little Edie are talking about is really jarring. Little Edie’s pronouncement that it is really hard to separate the past from the present absolutely plays out on the screen.
Yeah, ok, we went off into this crazy film studies tangent. Yes. Yes we did. But I needed to introduce the original Little Edie to relate her to the Little Edie I shared the space with. Unlike Big Edie and Little Edie, Little Edie of Maryland Avenue was not an American aristocrat. Let’s say she belonged to a more recently arrived group of people to the United States. Little Edie of Maryland Avenue had similarly strange ideas about the world and most of all, of the place we lived in. To put it bluntly, she was ABOVE that place. It was almost like she didn’t live there, instead kind of flitting in and out to comment on my decorating choices I had made. “Decorating choices” as if she were decorating an estate in East Hampton like the Beales. This was a dilapidated row house in pre-gentrification Capitol Hill, hardly a candidate for a feature in Architectural Digest. And yet Little Edie of Maryland Avenue lived this way. She absolutely did. The house needed a better couch than the one we had been given by the landlord. The curtains I bought looked like paper towels. The shelf my dad gave me was ugly. The dining room table was substandard. The house of whatever random rich person she visited had much nicer furniture. Why couldn’t we have the expensive furniture that the people on the television had?? She was like a little child begging her parents for much nicer things than what they had. It all grated on me to an extreme.
Now I named her little Edie on purpose, because like the women in the documentary, her family had experienced a reversal of fortune, with her father losing his livelihood and he was basically completely blocked from ever getting it back. The family had had some kind of money but that vanished when that happened, just like for the Beales. They would not be able to help Little Edie of Maryland Avenue at the start of her career.
See, but the thing was that she wasn’t open about the family losing its privilege. She just completely ignored that part and kept right on acting like a wealthy person. Or how a non-wealthy person thinks a wealthy person acts. Little Edie of Maryland Avenue, just like the original never broke character, even for a second. She was rich and that was that. We didn’t live in a place teeming with cats and raccoons but the place was very bare bones. Most of the young kids on Capitol Hill lived that way. Rent was ridiculously cheap and the pay in a first job is notoriously low. The arrangement was convenient.
Again though, Little Edie stuck to her rich person personality, despite lacking any sort of funds to back this up with. One day she said to me that her dream in life was to live in a house with servants. Another time she told me that I didn’t understand people wearing fur coats because it was a rich people thing and I didn’t understand rich people because I wasn’t rich. There were so many other lines like this. I mean what do you even say to this? It was ironic she was saying this to me because my parents had started to make good money then, but that really had nothing to do with me. I was out there to make my own money and make my way in the world.
Outside of the commentary about how I didn’t understand rich people, she was generally an extremely unpleasant person to be around. I would say things about how much I hated my high school. Well, her high school was one of the top schools in the United States. In fact, she had been with the popular crowd. So popular, she was. Nobody ever made fun of her. I had gone to a state university that I didn’t particularly like. Well, she had gone to a private college because HER parents were willing to make sacrifices for her. One night we were there watching Jeopardy and I thought the questions were kinda hard and I only knew a few of them. She goes — HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL OF THIS? YOU WENT TO STATE SCHOOL!!!!!!!. Like Trump, she extolled herself constantly. This was never ending.
One day I asked her if she had the day off the next day which was some kind of a holiday, she said that at a real news organization, like the one she worked at, you never got days off because news could happen at any time. She was implying somehow that going to the Hill every day and going to these really complex hearings about tax law and tax legislation wasn’t journalism. She worked at CNN, where REAL news happened. I mean I wasn’t about to get into some big pissing contest with her about this. We both worked in media, at times crazy hours. But I can say this much, she wasn’t on the Hill every day getting news, sitting through some really complex Congressional hearings, trying to figure out what if anything they said would constitute a news story. They never sent her out to do that.
Needless to say, her behavior grated on me, to the extreme. I couldn’t really leave because there weren’t places that were any cheaper to live in around and my salary was so small. So the first night Herman offered to drive me home, I unloaded on him about this situation and how much this person was annoying me. I remember Herman just listened, which was what I needed. His advice at the time was quite wise. Get away from this she-beast. But I felt like I couldn’t because of the money issue. I felt utterly trapped.
That was a continuing theme in those first few years of work. I felt completely powerless. Completely. I didn’t make a good enough salary to move out so I had to live with this she-beast. Even then I didn’t expect people to be nice to me but I didn’t think they would make it worse, like Little Edie and her comments. OK I get it. You are so much better than me. Thanks for reiterating that, constantly. I had forgotten.
A lot of those car rides with Herman, I’m a little embarrassed to say, I spent most of the time complaining about Little Edie and her myriad antics. I’m older now and I don’t really think I can change people anymore. I’m also not really around people like that anymore. My life is a lot more sane now. I tend to push away or just not even pay attention to negative things. I don’t let them bother me. But at 23, 24 years old, I really let other people bother me. I unloaded on Herman a lot about this situation and to his credit, he listened patiently. I really don’t know how he did this. A lot of nights though revolved around going to late night diners and places where he’d have the opportunity to change the subject. That was good too, to get me off the topic of, as Herman called her, the she-beast.
I think Herman could sense how powerless I felt at that age. There’s this strange idea that your 20s are supposed to be the greatest time of your life. I’m sure as soon as I say that, someone will come up here and say that THEIR twenties were completely awesome, best time of their life, how could anyone ever think any different.
Me in my 20s, that was hard. There was no other way to put it. I soon realized that I was surrounded by immensely rich people for the most part, and as little Edie loved saying, I didn’t understand rich people. What a shortcoming that was. I was there trying to survive on the $12 an hour I made at that job. I didn’t have much of a choice in terms of where I could live because I couldn’t really afford anything else. I had to put up with little Edie because I was trapped, at least in my mind I was.
Herman was such a good resource in all of this because he was older than me. As soon as I started unloading on Herman about my Little Edie problems, he spoke to me from the place of a person who had seen the things I was going through. And I’m making the talks out to be so serious all the time, but honestly, they were really funny a lot of the time.
That was the thing too. I was happy when I was at work. I had landed in Washington knowing very few people, almost no one. People always marveled at how I did this, how I could just go places where I didn’t know anyone. But to me it never seemed like a big deal. So what I didn’t know anyone? As if I had a huge group of people around me, ever.
Navigating the social life in Washington was really hard for me. First, I felt like a complete imposter there, constantly feeling like I was going to be found out at any moment. Was I really good enough to be there, this immigrant with a degree from a state university? I mean and the other thing was the people I was around. Everyone looked the same. And a lot of people could have used a lesson in humility. So many of them acted like they ran things on Capitol Hill and those politicos up there are just dumb. I mean I was past the hero worship and the idealism but this just seemed stupid to me. On the other side of things, it was always that “their” senator was so brilliant. “Their” senator. They have a senator who belongs to them? Why are you out on a Saturday night talking about “your senator’s” stance on environmental policy? Why?? Why do this???
I mean now I’m a bit older and wiser and to me this is the idle chatter of children but back then, this really had an impact on me. There’s this idea that if you don’t do everything in your 20s, find the ultimate great group of friends, the relationship of your dreams, the job of your dreams that pays you in piles of money, you’ll never do it. It is unachievable after the age of 29. I’m 46 now and I absolutely do not believe this, but this 23, 24 year old, with Little Edie chirping around the corner all the time, I believed this.
There was also always the thing that I was weird. From the time I was probably 12 or 13 years old, I was incessantly told I was “weird.” I remember a girl I knew at college who said — you dress weird, you talk weird, the music you listen to is weird, everything about you is weird. I never understood why people said this to me. I mean I never understood why being curious about the world, paying attention to what goes on around you and being knowledgeable about a variety of topics, why was that weird? Just struck me as so odd. To me, that was weird. No one sees themselves from the outside so I didn’t know how I modulate my weirdness. In my mind, the way to deal with it was to just let go of parts of myself. Slowly over those years, I gave up a lot of interests. I even stopped taking pictures for about five years. But the chirping about being weird continued.
Then though I would go to work. I never felt weird at work. I remember thinking — these people are fine with me. They like me. Again, a big part of that was Herman.
Slowly I realized that the 1pm to 9pm aspect of the job wasn’t really true. It was “whenever we tell you to show up” to “whenever we tell you to leave.” That never really bothered me. I kinda loved it, actually. We would be up against some pretty strict deadlines at the job, but most of the time, it was fun. The person who made it fun was Herman. The main reason the job ran so late was because of this thing called Tax Notes Today, or TNT. The compiling and processing of the TNT file would take a while, sometimes a long while. I never actually knew why it took so long and I think a big part of that was because Herman was there.
The office was like this tiny little rabbit warren. Now a lot of offices are sleek. Tax Analysts offices did not fall into that category. They looked like people lived in them and in some cases, people did live in them.
The H&D office was the smaller room. To the right, there was the proofreading “den.” “Den” was the correct way of describing it because again, that room looked like people lived there. There was a couch in the H&D room. And the main office, where the editor in chief’s office was, was full of these budget looking cubicle dividers. That was where the copy desk was as well.
There were a lot of great moments with Herman in the H&D room. Probably my favorite moment was when I came in and Herman was white as a sheet. I mean the man was WHITE. I didn’t know what had happened. Herman was staring off into space and goes — they double teamed. A SQUIRREL. THEY DOUBLE TEAMED A SQUIRREL. Who?? What??? What happened??? Apparently his dogs, Ebony and Greco, had encountered a squirrel and had proceeded to dismember the squirrel. Unfortunately a squirrel head had ended up in the stomach of one of the dogs. Herman had to take the dogs to get the squirrel’s head removed from the dog’s stomach. I mean this is a horrible, gross story but seeing Herman that day was so funny.
In that room, there was another semi ancient television. Herman and I would wait for the file to close. Usually we’d go on a food run while this was going on. Herman loved Klondike bars and we’d get a bunch of those and watch all sorts of things on that television. We definitely watched Beavis and Butthead and Golden Girls. Sometimes the laughter would get so loud that the Editor in Chief would come and tell us to be quiet. I mean I’d be at work until after midnight a lot of the time. Still though, it never felt like a pain or anything. There was food and company and I was fine.
The car rides and these late nights at the office were really the times that I got to know Herman. Immediately there were so many stories. Among the first stories I heard was about the legendary bookstore in Fells Point in Baltimore, about how it had gone out of business. It went out of business because a Barnes and Noble had opened up in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, or as it was known from that point forward — The Inner Horrible. I also heard for the first time and certainly not the last time that he had walked out of his medical school admissions exam and then had his plays produced by Edward Albee. He also told a story about being a background extra in a movie called “The Replacements” with Keanu Reeves. I heard about his teenage study abroad in Belgium, where he was almost signed to a youth soccer league and made a really embarrassing radio appearance during that trip. I heard about his cat, Leon, named after boxer Leon Spinks, who used to pee in his bed. Some of his comedic material about Leon and cats in general. Unfortunately, most of it is really unprintable for a family blog, like this one. One random night, when the file was taking a really long time to close, we went for a ride to a local Ikea to buy a cushion for one of the chairs at his house. He said he needed to get one that wasn’t light blue because that had set off the dogs. The particular shade of light blue had set off the dogs and they had destroyed his cushion. So, anything but light blue. The dogs irrationally hated that shade of blue. I have retold this story a million times. So Herman.
I also realized that everyone got a nickname in Herman world. Everyone. Even if they didn’t want one. Some of them were easy. My coworker Warren was obviously the Anti-Christ. I mean he was the self proclaimed Anti-Christ. Then one day, Warren came back from some reporting assignment and brought a sign that said “Pepper Santa Lucia.” Warren told us that he wanted to be known as Pepper Santa Lucia from now on, so sometimes we called him Pepper. Other times by his full title, Pepper Santa Lucia. An incoming news story from him though was always known as an AntiChrist special. Sometimes we even called him “the artist formerly known as the antichrist.” Another coworker whose last name was Gnaedinger, with a silent G because the Gnaed, where the G was not silent. We had a coworker who just showed up with curly hair one day. A man. So Herman nicknamed him “man-perm.” One day our coworker had straight hair again, so Herman said that there had been a coup d’etat in the land of man-permia.
Initially when I had interviewed for the position, they said there would be “reporting opportunities.” I thought this meant four or five times a year, they would send me out to cover something. No. “Reporting opportunities” meant that I was basically the B team for the two official Capitol Hill reporters. There were constant hearings, forums and conferences going on in Washington and someone had to go and cover that stuff. At first I wasn’t sure that I even wanted to do the reporting because of the experience I had had with the job in New York.
“Reporting opportunities” wasn’t really the right way to describe the job duties over there. Slowly the job became 24/7 insanity. I mean the 7 part isn’t really true, but the 24 part was definitely true. In 2001, George W. Bush decided to cut taxes. Remember him? George W.???? More innocent times, I guess you could say. As 2001 rolled on, the reporting assignments increased and increased. And I’m not going to lie. I was afraid. I was really concerned I wasn’t going to understand what they were saying at these hearings and policy forums. I made Herman promise that when I was sent out to cover these things, that I could come and ask him things about what I had heard and that he would help me. And he kept his promise. He always helped me.
There are people who say these ridiculous things about how the “best way” to learn things is by just dropping people into things. That is so stupid. “Throw them into the deep water.” Sure. To watch people sink. “Nobody held my hand.” Great. You were gaslit into believing that this kind of treatment is right by people who didn’t care about you. But Herman cared. He cared enough to make sure I was ok with my reporting. Pretty soon after I started, I didn’t need Herman’s help anymore. Just giving someone a small helping hand can make all the difference in their development as a professional.
Of course Herman’s office was another manifestation of a very interesting person. His office was a tribute to every campy thing on the planet. I love campy things, trashy things. He had a bumper sticker from a place called South of the Border, which I found out much later on was a kind of a camp ground/roadside attraction/ice cream store/amusement park off Interstate 95. He also had an Edgar Allan Poe action figure. The greatest object though was his signed photo of Tammy Faye Baker, wife of the disgraced televangelist Jim Baker. I think the story was that he had met her at some event and had convinced her to give him her autograph. Either way, the office was a museum of camp.
It was such a tremendous mix of emotions for me being sent to those things on Capitol Hill and being there every day was really complicated. It was this weird mix of a couple of emotions. First, I always felt like I was worthy of good things, that I should have good things, but my high school experience had really beaten this out of me. Was I really worthy to be there??? Again was I going to be found out at any moment? Am I going to be escorted out of here when they find out what a loser I was in high school, which I had only finished five years earlier. Intellect wise, I felt on par with everyone. I didn’t feel outmatched intellectually but just worthiness of being there, that I had a problem with.
I mean I’m five years out of high school. HIGH SCHOOL. I had this notion that I wanted to do journalism in my dorm at college two years earlier and here I was doing it on this big stage. But somehow at the time, I still felt like a failure. I was writing for a specialty press, not the New York Times. At the time, there was a journalist who was the exact same age as me named Sewell Chan who had been the editor in chief of the Harvard Crimson and he was working as a reporter at the New York Times. I thought — I’m not a reporter for the New York Times. I’m coming up short. I mean according to Little Edie, I didn’t even work at a real news organization.
Still the imposter syndrome would set in quite often. Were they going to find out that I really didn’t belong there? This little loser from some nothing high school in New York who had been brutally made fun of for years. But Herman would just always say the same thing — do your job. Go do your job.
I have to admit that the reporting part of the job was a lot of fun. Too much fun probably at times. I’ve detailed some of what went on when I was a reporter. Just a sampling. There was a lot more.
One time a certain Congressman from New York who Donny Q Trump nicknamed “Fat Jerry” pointed at me and said — no one from the press is here. I’m here Jerry. Me. I’m here. Another time I was at a forum, extremely early in the morning, dead tired, barely keeping my eyes open. A man rolls up next to me, sees my name tag and proceeds to tell me about the work he was doing to repeal the estate and gift tax or as it was nicknamed at the time, the death tax. I’m gulping down coffee while this guy is telling me about this. I must have faked interest well enough because before I knew it, he was gone for some reason. He returned with Xerox copies of an article that someone had written about him with the title “They call me Mr Death.” He hands me this article about himself. So considerate. At another policy forum, the former governor of Indiana got snippy with me when I asked him a question. I told some of the other stories already, about Kevin Hassett pointing at me and telling me Paul Krugman always gets his tax wrong and that I could quote him on that in Tax Notes. Now mind you, I didn’t think that guy even knew who I was. Another time, a politician named Dick Armey, came into the House press gallery and did a stand up comedy routine. That man, whose politics I heartily disagreed with, was so unbelievably funny that I forgot that I was supposed to dislike him because of his politics. Herman had another rather unprintable nickname for the guy that was not derisive but that made reference to first name and his last name sounding like a branch of the armed forces. Use your imagination.
The job was for lack of a better word HILARIOUS a lot of the time. To call out my beloved Pepper Santa Lucia/artist formerly known as the Anti-christ, one day I’m aimlessly flipping the channels and I see my coworker Warren sitting behind Paul O’Neill, who was the Secretary of the Treasury then. I look closer and Warren appears to be picking his nose. Another time I’m watching the evening news and I see myself standing behind Tom Daschle, a now former senator from South Dakota who had been the majority leader and the minority leader in the Senate at different points. Almost everything I attended was broadcast later in the day on C-Span so sometimes I’d call my parents and tell them to put the channel on and we’d laugh at whatever I said or was wearing that day. One time I saw myself playing with my hair at some policy forum while I sat in my living room, yes, playing with my hair. Perhaps the funniest appearance of the back of my head was at one of my White House visits, where I actually raised my hand to ask a question at the press briefing. I sat and thought — am I going to turn my head so you can actually see me? I mean who was going to believe me that I had actually been there, in the era before camera phones?? I mean nowhere to flex about this??? Why even go???
As I alluded to before, Herman did send me to the White House a couple of times. I don’t care who you are, going to the White House is a big deal. But I felt like I couldn’t get excited about this because everyone around me was so jaded to the whole thing. I was there for work but other people had been there for the Christmas party or to meet celebrities. I knew someone who had already been there many times before I went and had pictures of himself on his walls at home with various celebrities at the White House. I remember someone saying to me something along the lines of — so you are excited about going to the White House? Interesting. It all dripped with jaded contempt. Oh so that’s a big deal to you??? In any case, I was there to cover a summit meeting between George W. Bush, the president of the European Union at the time Romano Prodi and the prime minister of Spain at the time, Jose Maria Aznar. 43 tried some Spanish on Aznar and Aznar was having absolutely none of it. I also went there for a tax bill signing and to another summit meeting when the Greek prime minister was meeting with Bush. I’m not trying to flex here or make myself out to be fancy or better than anyone else. I cannot express just how out of place and insecure I felt in that environment. Why was I not there for the annual Christmas party or to meet celebrities? I just there for work. No big deal. Everyone goes to the White House right? Who would even get excited about this anyway?
Again too, I felt so profoundly that I did not belong there and that at any second, someone was going to come from behind a curtain and say — she’s a loser with a bachelors degree in political science from a mid range state university in New York.
That was the thing about Herman too. Herman wasn’t too taken by all of that and it truly was just work to him. Underneath it though, was the message that I did belong there and that I had no reason to think I didn’t. Again, just do your job. Don’t get too taken by any of this.
Herman protected me too. I remember years later when the Me Too movement started and I told Herman that I don’t remember getting sexually harassed at any of these things I was sent out to do. Not that men weren’t inappropriate with me in other contexts but that never happened when I was reporting. Herman said to me that if it had happened, whoever did it would have to answer to him or Chris Bergin, who was the editor in chief of Tax Notes at the time. Neither of these people were anyone to be trifled with. Herman’s whimsical office always featured a lacrosse stick.
After about two years on the federal side of the tax reporting, I moved over to the international side of the company. There I would do reporting about the European Union, which I had mentioned before. There was also another whirlwind of activity, press briefings, embassy visits, and the like. We’d write about the EU trade commissioner at the time, Pascal Lamy and Frits Bolkestein, who was the EU trade commissioner for taxation and the internal market. As I have mentioned many times before, I dragged my camera absolutely everywhere, my tiny little Soviet made spy camera. Herman told me to take my camera and snap some pictures of Bolkenstein, which ended up on a website about internal EU matters. Bolkestein was a good sport about the pictures and the questions I would ask him during or after the briefings.
Lamy was the one with a bit of a sense of humor. He’d be in town. Herman gave him a nickname too, and you must realize now that this is a trend. We would call him the Lamy-in-a-tor. I hope Pascal Lamy does stumble upon this humble blog one day and sees this. I’d go to the EU delegation once a week for a little press briefing, called Entre Nous, between us. I got to know the people over there pretty well and they were fun. Lamy would be there via video conference from Brussels periodically. One day some of us were a bit early and it was us and Lamy. We just sat there and waved at each other for a bit and just goofed around. Us in Washington DC and our friend Pascal, advisor to world leaders and soon to be director general of the World Trade Organization. Normal. Completely normal.
The people at the delegation were fun too. One time there was a teleconference with the Lamy-in-a-tor and they were testing out the audio-visual equipment. The guy who ran the AV equipment asked one of the people over there who ran the briefings to test one of the microphones. The guy picks up the microphone and says — I have long had a candle of love burning in my heart for you. SO funny. You better believe I stole this for later use. The AV guy, his last name was Brown. One day he went around and said — what can Brown do for you? That was the slogan of UPS at the time.
Every year the EU celebrates something called Europe Day, the anniversary of founding of the European Union. It’s usually in May, when the climate in DC is a little bit less like the inside of your average sauna, which is descends into in the summer. Usually I’d get sent to cover something and then I’d go back to the office to work on the news file with Herman. On Europe day though, in 2003, when I was covering the EU, Herman let me go to Europe Day, which was great fun. They gave out all kinds of EU swag and I go to visit the residence of the European Union’s ambassador to the United States. It was this absolutely stunning villa, that looked more like something that belong on the shores of Lake Como than Embassy Row. It was pink with a courtyard in the middle of it. I seem to recall a fountain in the courtyard. In a terrible lapse of judgement, I neglected to take a picture of this place. Our hero stood around with her buddies from the EU delegation enjoying some hors d’oeuvres. Divine. Again, all thanks to Herman having faith in this inexperienced child.
Again, you would think that I would have been happy doing all of this. It sounds so incredibly glamorous, and I think if I had been doing this now, I would have been happy and more importantly, grateful. I really should have been much more grateful. This isn’t the normal environment for a 25, 26 year old to be in. But in my mind, the doubts lingered. Why wasn’t I working in a bigger, more famous publication? Why wasn’t I working at the European Union? Unbelievably I thought I had accomplished nothing in my life. The tricks the mind plays on you. The things you think at that age.
While working in the international division of the company, I got a bit more of the Herman origin story. Well, the origin story of the dogs, Ebony and Greco. One of the first days when I got to international, I saw this little plaque with a news article printed on it. The news article included a picture of Herman bending down with a dog. The caption said — Herman Ayayo with special correspondent L. McTavish Way. I thought — oh cute. A bit later I found out that L. McTavish Way had belonged to an editor and journalist at Tax Analysts who had unfortunately passed away. Herman was in charge of taking care of the guy’s dog during this sad time. Herman ended up taking care of Louie, L. McTavish Way’s nickname. Now comes the punchline of this story. As I mentioned, L. McTavish Way was referred to as a special correspondent and it turned out he had been. Louie’s owner, the man who unfortunately passed away, used L. McTavish Way as a pseudonym when he didn’t want to publish under his own name. His name was already on the masthead. Herman told me that at one point, L. McTavish Way had the fourth highest number of bylines in the history of Tax Analysts. People used to call in to ask to speak to L. McTavish Way. If he had had thumbs, I’m sure he would have gladly taken the call.
Again as I mentioned before, your 20s are a very difficult time in your life, at least they were for me. I mean if you want to leave a comment up here about how your twenties were so awesome and great, go ahead and by the way, bless your heart. And I mean that in the passage aggressive southern way. Anyway, I was trying to figure out what my next move was going to be, life wise. I had a long standing interest in international politics, especially Cold War politics. I’m a child of the Cold War, literally born behind the Iron Curtain. I was also interested in the modern European Union. I had no idea where this was going to go but I would go to graduate school and figure it out. I hoped. I applied and was accepted to New York University, Boston University, George Washington University and I was wait listed at Georgetown University. Your loss Georgetown. I decided on George Washington, the Elliott School of International Affairs. They sent me a letter about how incredibly impressive the admitted class was and how I was a part of this. That imposter syndrome crept in again.
I made the decision to leave Tax Analysts, thinking it would be best for me to focus on school full time. The university had said there would be all kinds of work and internship opportunities. In retrospect, I should have stayed but live and learn.
I also needed to new place to live. I went around to look at different places to live. I was visiting a new place to live in Georgetown when Little Edie called me to inform me that our house, well, let’s be honest here, my house, had been robbed. I got home and the place had been broken into. The bars on the back windows had been undone. They took the DVD player and a bunch of my DVDs. My PBS documentaries. An odd choice to say the least.
Herman drove me into DC to check out the damage. Little Edie swanned in to check on the house, this house she sorta floated above. She got on the phone with some friend and said — it’s ok. We live in a bad neighborhood. We were entitled to get robbed. That was the moment I lost it. I ran down the stairs and started screaming at her that we were not entitled to get robbed. Screaming. She sorta laughed and said — you are going to clean this up, right? It was at that moment that I decided I was going to stop speaking to her.
Herman said he was going to stay over, sleeping on the floor in the living room, lacrosse stick at the ready.
I moved out not too soon later, to the place I had been looking at when the house got robbed. I lived in the house for a month without speaking to Little Edie.
I want to put in here that yes I spent a lot of time talking about Little Edie, that I have begun the path to forgiving her. She wasn’t open about the financial reversal the family had suffered and I’m sure that had a big impact on her behavior. And my behavior wasn’t perfect then either. I mention her here because Herman and I talked about her a lot and she did play into my whole inferiority complex. All I can say is that I’m on a path to forgiving her and that holding on to old hurts, slights, and insults does no one any good.
On my last day at Tax Analysts, Herman took me out to lunch at a local restaurant in Northern Virginia. It was again, a happy occasion. At the end of the lunch, Herman goes — goodbye and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
This closed the chapter of having Herman as my boss and began us being friends with each other.
Oh and this is a picture blog, so here’s are some pictures from Eat Pray Herman Washington portion. Enjoy.
And as an extra, added bonus, that time when I visited the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and sorta pretended I was William Eggleston. Dime store William Eggleston.
wrong side of the camera 