John Kenney - Talk to Me

She was on deadline on a potentially large story. Or so said Henke. He’d texted Franny and several members of her team last night, late. Apparently, Salma Hayek had experienced a minor wardrobe malfunction at the opening of a new restaurant in Los Angeles, thereby exposing a portion of her nipple. The kids in editorial were blowing up the video—just four seconds—and creating a GIF. There was clearly a quarter inch of nip—so said an unscientific mini focus group of four scheisse employees. Franny knew the nip would play big and that they could milk it (ha!) for more than one story. Why not an additional story, and by “story” Franny meant a video compilation of “Best Nip Slips” in history?

Franny was one of the original seven employees of scheisse . She had felt, at the beginning, anyway, that scheisse made a difference. She initially proposed longer pieces but they kept asking for shorter.

Still, she felt that she and her colleagues were at the center of entertainment and fashion blogging, of infotainment, the physical and literal center of everything important and fun that was happening in the world.

Did Franny really believe this? No. But it’s what she told herself. She also told herself that she’d get a real job once her life began. She would be changed by love, perhaps marriage, by happiness, large, elusive, cloud-like thoughts that seemed reachable for others. There would be dinner parties and children’s birthdays and the riches of life as seen in magazines, TV shows, and Subaru commercials. These images seemed to slip further away with each passing year, each empty hookup, each disappointing date, each late-night drink with like-minded friends whose cynical worldviews only confirmed that life sucked. This was not the plan.

Why did men suck?

Her father sucked. Greg sucked. She and Greg had dated for three months and he’d talked about moving in together and then last fall he texted that he wasn’t over his old girlfriend and that they were giving it another shot but that he hoped he and Franny could stay friends. Franny had texted back. Absolutely. Call me and I’ll perform your bris.

Dalton. Rippowam Cisqua Northfield Mount Hermon. Trinity College. American history major. She’d been a standout squash player. She and Claire still played together once in a while, Claire occasionally winning and leaving Franny in a bad mood for thirty-six hours.

It was that time of life when her friends were getting married. So many weddings. Two last year; three the year before; three invites so far for this summer. Now she would go dateless, or maybe with her gay friend Brian. She would turn twenty-eight in May and this, too, caused her mood to foul, as she fully expected to be married or at the very least seriously involved with someone at this point. And that further angered her because she felt that she should not need a man to be happy even though she wanted a boyfriend to be happy.

The prospect of nearing thirty frightened Franny. It didn’t seem possible. She felt both far younger and far older, though she didn’t quite know how to explain that. Twenty was a lifetime ago. Thirty was ten short years to forty and that both blew her mind and depressed her to the point of dizziness.

She’d recently stopped dating, stopped hooking up. No more Tinder or Bumble. Last New Year’s Eve, with friends in Stowe, Vermont, she’d stayed at a small inn. While most everyone was in the tavern getting hammered, she’d rung in the New Year talking with an older couple in the living room, sitting by a fire. The three of them toasted with small flutes of champagne and Franny listened as the couple talked about the cruise they took on the Queen Mary for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The man laid his hand over his wife’s as she talked and didn’t take it away.

After they’d said their goodbyes, Franny walked outside and stood looking out over a field of snow, listening to the silence of the night, inhaling the smell of the clean Vermont air, wood smoke and pine. So many stars, so far from city lights. Later, she went back to her room and took a yellow legal pad, and wrote as fast as she could think, the fleeting lightness of New Year’s Eve hopes dancing across the page.

Read more.

Find peace.

Call Mom more.

Be a better daughter to her.

Be a better friend.

Find a new job.

Take time off.

Travel.

Learn French.

Get in shape.

Play squash again.

Don’t be afraid.

Be clean again. Detoxify.

No hooking up.

Find someone.

Children.

Volunteer.

Silent retreat.

Dad.

Here she stopped, surprised to see the word.

An air horn blared. And even though she was wearing headphones, the noise startled and annoyed her. Someone had used the word “millennial” in a story. Henke’s rule.

Franny hadn’t planned to be at scheisse this long. In the few days that her post–New Year’s high lasted, she promised herself she’d quit at the end of the year, get rid of her apartment, put her things in storage, and travel. Mexico, maybe. Or Guatemala. Maybe Vietnam. Someplace inexpensive. Someplace she could find… what? She wasn’t sure. She just wanted to escape. Ironically enough, that’s exactly what she felt the readers of scheisse craved. Did she buy into Henke’s manifesto? Not really. But she did believe that old media was dead, that they didn’t understand the new world and the way people consumed information, what they wanted from information.

Real life, Franny believed, was boring. It was traffic on the Major Deegan, on the 405, on the highways and byways of this vast land. It was a delayed, uncomfortable flight to Chicago. It was whining kids and an unappreciative husband. It was rote. A shower where you forget you were showering. A meal where you later had almost no memory of eating. The gurus and yoginis and SoulCyclists wanted you to believe that life was best lived in the moment . Horseshit, Franny thought. What people wanted was the exact opposite . And that was where the money was.

What the networks and the serious newspapers didn’t understand was this: people didn’t want more bad news. They wanted less. Because what was happening on their screens—their phones and tablets and desktops—was overwhelming, nonstop awful. And now it was everywhere. Constantly being packed and manufactured and made newsworthy, even though most of it wasn’t. Breaking news: tax bill passes. Breaking news: Famous Actor out of rehab. Breaking news: last remaining midget from Wizard of Oz dies. Breaking news: little people community up in arms over use of the word “midget.”

Yes, we wanted to know the news. Flood? Fire? War? Okay. Good to know. But let me show you this video of the singing monkeys. We wanted to go home at day’s end, lock the door, sit down, and hold back the tide. We wanted to stop the world for a bit. Each of us retreating to a device of some kind to watch Netflix or Amazon Prime or HBO or some easy-to-swallow network sitcom or the shows where people sang and cried to a live audience and a panel of judges, as well as reality TV that went as far as it possibly could to shock. The Real Erections of San Luis Obispo. We wanted to sit on the oversized couch and hold that clicker and escape. We wanted to get into bed fully clothed with a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a liter of Pepsi and hold that iPad and read about Jennifer Aniston’s obsession with Greek yogurt or Surprise! Angelina Jolie’s travel loafers are actually affordable!