Read An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media for Free Online Page B

fleabag?” I wheezed. “The doormen didn’t even offer me champagne on the way in.”
    “Ha-ha, very funny, asshole. Let’s go upstairs.”
    A quick ride in the elevators and we were at her nineteenth-floor apartment.
    “Welcome to New York!” Sloane said with a grand flourish of her arms as we crossed the threshold. “Let me give you the tour!”
    My first impression was actually that the place was small—maybe about six hundred square feet. I would soon come to realize that it was a fucking palace by regular Manhattan standards. But I had been tricked by years of watching New York–based sitcoms, and all I could think was that Sloane’s apartment was even smaller than Joey and Chandler’s.
    The place was decorated and furnished almost entirely with IKEA, but Sloane and her mother had arranged it into what I had to admit amounted to a very chic, put-together setup. It still felt a bit like a dorm room, but it was at least a very grown-up dorm room. Not to mention it was way nicer than anywhere I envisioned myself living anytime soon.
    The tour ended with a big reveal from Sloane, who clearly had been waiting for this moment. We stopped in front of a door adjacent to the small galley kitchen.
    “So this was supposed to be my pantry . . .” she started. “But I decided to turn it into”—she flung open the doors, flourishing her arms like a model at a car show—“my shoe closet!”
    Sure enough, the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with three dozen pairs of shoes.
    “Wow, you’re really living the dream, Slo,” I said, wondering if Sex and the City had claimed yet another victim.
    Later that night, we were on the roof of Sloane’s building sharing a bottle of wine—the very cheapest white that a grumbling wine store clerk had in his small refrigerator—and toasting to our mutual future success, which in our youthful exuberance we both agreed was virtually guaranteed, merely on the basis of our both showing up in the right place.
    As I looked out over the city, the lights from thousands of windows piercing the humid early-summer evening, the majestic stainless-steel-clad Chrysler Building looming nearby, all I could think was Forget shoe closets—I’m the one who’s really living the dream.
    —
    The next morning, I woke up on Sloane’s couch. My head was pounding, the result of our not only finishing the cheap wine but later attacking with gusto the equally cheap bottle of vodka that—aside from an empty ice cube tray—was the lone inhabitant of Sloane’s freezer. She was already gone, having left for her unpaid “internship” at an independent film company that was all too willing to take advantage of eager young college grads trying to break into the industry. I was still three days away from starting work, so I decided to explore the city a little bit.
    I set out on foot for my future office, thinking it might be prudent to time the walk so I wouldn’t be late on my first day. I passed through Sloane’s neighborhood, which my pocket tourist map told me was Murray Hill. I found out later that the area had a reputation for being an ersatz college campus, despised by most locals for the proliferation of bars and high-rise apartments overrun by annoying twenty-two-year-olds fresh from graduation. (Fair enough, considering our circumstances.) But walking through it that day, I was struck by how quiet and orderly it seemed, especially compared to the other parts of the city I’d seen up to that point.
    Soon enough the calm of Murray Hill gave way to the traffic and mayhem of midtown. The News Corp. building was just a shade under a thirty-minute walk from Sloane’s apartment. Not a terrible commute for the few weeks that I’d be living with her.
    My new office was smack-dab in the middle of the part of town you’d probably take your parents to first if they came to visit. A couple of blocks north up the avenue was the familiar sight of Radio City Music Hall, its neon-lit façade