“I know.” Sam shrugged.
“Sit down,” James said. “How do you feel about it?”
“I don’t feel anything at all,” Sam said.
“You’re not feeling…traumatized?”
“No.”
“Your mother’s feelings are hurt.”
“That’s your generation. Kids my age don’t get hurt feelings. It’s just drama. Everyone’s on their own reality show. The more drama you have, the more people pay attention to you. That’s all.”
James and Mindy Gooch looked at each other, thinking the same thing: Their son was a genius! What other thirteen-year-old boy had such insights into the human condition?
“Enid Merle wants me to help her with her computer,” Sam said.
“No,” Mindy said.
“Why?”
“I’m angry at her.”
“Leave Sam out of it,” James said.
“Can I go?” Sam asked.
“Yes,” James said. When Sam left the room, he continued on his diatribe. “Reality TV, b
logging, commentators, it’s the culture of the parasite.” Immediately, he wondered why he said these things. Why couldn’t he embrace the new? This new human being who was self-centered and rabidly consumerist?
Sam Gooch bore the harsh marks of budding adolescence and the scars of being a New York City kid. He wasn’t innocent. He’d stopped being innocent between the ages of two and four, when he was applauded for making adult remarks. Mindy would often repeat his remarks to her coworkers, followed by the tagline (always delivered with appropriate awe): “How could he know such things! He’s only [fill in the blank].”
Now, at thirteen, Sam also worried that he knew too much. Sometimes he felt world-weary and often wondered what would happen to him; certainly, things would happen to him, things happened to kids in New York City. But he also knew he didn’t have the same advantages as the other children with whom he consorted. He lived in one of the best buildings in the Village but in the worst apartment in that building; he wasn’t taken out of school to go to Kenya for three weeks; he’d never had a birthday party at the Chelsea Piers; he had never gone to see his father play lead guitar in a rock concert at Madison Square Garden. When Sam went out of town, it was always to stay at the country houses of kids with wealthier and more accomplished parents than his own. His dad urged him to go for the “experience,” clinging to the quaint notion that part of being a writer was about having all kinds of experiences in life, although his dad didn’t seem to have many experiences of his own. Now Sam had had some experiences he wished he hadn’t had, mostly concerning girls. They wanted something he didn’t know how to give. What they wanted, Sam suspected, was constant attention. When he went out of town to the country houses, the parents left the kids to their own devices. The boys posed and the girls acted crazy. At some point, there was crying. When he got home, he was exhausted, as if he’d lived two years in two days.
His mother would be waiting for him. After an hour or two would come the inevitable question: “Sam, did you write a thank-you note?” “No, Mom, it’s embarrassing.” “No one was ever embarrassed to get a thank-you note.” “I’m embarrassed to write one.” “Why?” “Because no one else has to write thank-you notes.” “They’re not as well brought up as you are, Sam. Someday you’ll see. Someone will remember that you wrote them a thank-you note and give you a job.” “I’m not going to work for anyone.” And then his mother would hug him. “You’re so smart, Sammy. You’re going to run the world someday.”
And so Sammy became a computer whiz, which impressed his parents and all other adults born before 1985. “Sam was on the Internet before he could talk!” his mother boasted.
At six, having been admitted to one of New York City’s most exclusive schools—a bonus secured by the often obnoxious, unwavering determination of his mother to set him on the right track (Mindy was one of those people of whom others eventually said, “It’s easier to give in to her just to get her to go away”)—Sam realized he would have to make his own pocket money in order to survive his artificially heightened status. At ten, he began his own computer business in the building.
Sam was tough but fair. He charged the residents, the Philip Oaklands, the quiet doctors and lawyers, the woman who managed the rock band, a hundred dollars an hour for his services, but he helped the doormen and porters for free. This was to make up for his mother. The doormen considered the most egregious residents the bad Christmas tippers, and Sam knew his mother was one such Scrooge. When she doled out the twenty-and fifty-dollar bills for Christmas tips, her mouth would turn down in an unhappy line. She would check and recheck her envelopes next to the list of the twenty-five doormen and porters, and if she found she’d made a mistake—and she usually had, in taking an extra fifty or twenty from the cash machine—she would snatch up the bill and carefully lay it in her wallet. But Sam’s efforts paid off. Sam was loved in the building, and Mindy was tolerated, the word being that Mindy wasn’t as bad as she seemed. “She has a nice son, after all, and that says a lot about a woman,” the doormen said.
But now there was trouble between Mindy and Enid, which Sam would have to fix as well.
In the lobby, Sam ran into a strange girl standing before the elevators, looking down at her iPhone. He knew everyone in the building and wondered who she was, why she was there, and whom she was going to see. She was wearing a green halter top, dark jeans, and high-heeled sandals, and was a certain type of beautiful. There were girls in his school who were beautiful, and there were models and actresses and sometimes just pretty college girls on the street. But this girl, he thought, with her poochy lips turned up at the corners in a manner that was almost obscene, was a little different. Her clothes were expensive, but she was a little too perfect. She glanced down at Sam and looked away, back at her phone, as if she were embarrassed.
The girl was Lola Fabrikant, and she was on her way to her interview with Philip Oakland. Sam had caught Lola in a rare moment of vulnerability. The walk down Fifth Avenue to One Fifth had left her disconcerted. Having developed a keen sense of status, she was attuned to both blatant and subtle differences between all kinds of residences, products, and service providers, the result being that in strolling down Fifth Avenue, the glaring differences between this avenue and Eleventh Street, where she now resided, assaulted her sense of entitlement. Fifth Avenue was so much nicer than Eleventh Street—why didn’t she live here? she wondered. And then coming upon the towering gray mightiness of One Fifth, with not one but two entrances and a wood-paneled lobby (like a men’s club), and three doormen all over her in uniforms and white gloves (like footmen in a fairy tale), she thought again, Why don’t I live in this building?
Waiting for the elevator, she decided that she would live here somehow. She deserved it.
She looked down and saw a teenaged boy staring at her. Did kids live in the building as well? Somehow she’d imagined New York City as a place for adults only.
The boy got into the elevator after her. He pressed the button for thirteen. “What floor?” he asked.
“Thirteen,” she said.
Sam nodded. The girl was going to see Philip Oakland. It figured. His mother always said Philip Oakland had it easy, and life was unfair.