A Little Trouble with the Facts Read Online Free Page A

at potlucks and sing-alongs. I couldn’t sit cross-legged and bless my soy stir-fry. I was always too antsy, too ready for my screen test. As I saw it, life was high above this earthly gloom, somewhere in the skyscrapers that touched the clouds over Manhattan.
     
    I arrived at the Port Authority by Greyhound bus on my twenty-third birthday, with everything I owned stuffed into my Guatemalan backpack. I had a few names scribbled on a piece of notebook paper in my pocket, those I could remember from my father’s stories over his steamer trunk. But I hadn’t counted on inquisitive doormen. And I hadn’t realized how many Millers there were in the Manhattan White Pages.
    So I gave up on the family reunification dream—for the moment—and started circling ads for cheap shares in The Village Voice . After my futon was ensconced in an East Fifth Street walk-up, I called Zachariah Winkle, the publisher of Gotham’s Gate, a weekly glossy with a flair for the indiscreet. My English professor at Reed had given me his name.
    “Call me Zip,” he said. “Everyone does. I’m not hiring now. But I’m always willing to look at a fresh face.” I offered to flash mine over coffee in SoHo, and landed an internship three days a week.
    As it happened, I arrived during penguin suit season, that stretch of springtime when the city’s nonprofits host the $3,000-a-plate suppers that keep them afloat for the year. Guests get poached salmon, duck confit, a few speeches, and a chance to demonstrate charitable zeal. Corporate bigwigs buy tables for $10K to $50K a pop, and promise to show their expensive mugs. But when the time comes for them to lift a fork, they beg off and fill their seats with hired hacks.
    Penguin-suit soirees are a snore to anyone in the know. But I was out of the know. My first month in New York, I was a blank book wanting script. In the first weeks, I’d tasted my inaugural almond cookie at Veniero’s on East Eleventh, played impromptu chess in Washington Square Park, skipped down the East Side promenade. One evening I’d even found myself on a fishing boat on the Hudson, drinking German Riesling while listening to a Czech opera with a Belgian chef. When Zip Winkle mentioned the PEN American Center Gala to this Oregonian wildflower, she very nearly swooned. “Oh, just do me one favor,” Zip added. “If you happen to notice anything intriguing about any of the guests, call it in to Bernie.”
    Bernie Wabash was the Gate ’s chief gossip columnist who penned “Inside Line,” six inches on page three with a handful of bold-faced lies. He always needed items, and all the mag’s lackeys were expected to supply them. I’d always wanted to get a tidbit on Bernie’s page. This was my first inside shot.
    At a secondhand shop on West Tenth, I found a pink gown with a three-foot train and matching satin gloves. My redheaded roommate pinned it up with safeties, and I dabbed my lips red until she said stop. I counted my quarters and took my first yellow cab, gabbing at the hack all sixty blocks north. When my pink-tinted pumps tapped the grand plaza at Lincoln Center, I figured myself for Sabrina, just returned from Paris.
    Inside, I snatched a flute of champagne from a silver tray,almost toppling the waiter, found my place card with my name at Table 13, and placed my satin gloves on my plate. I had nothing to do but read and reread the gala program, memorizing the names and titles of the listed sponsors, assuming they’d all be my pals by the end of the night.
    The evening’s honoree was Jeremiah Sinclair Golden Jr., son of the Vermont senator and founder of TriBeCa’s Odyssey Pictures, the indie film giant known for cinematic milestones such as Under the Milk Sink and Dancing in Moscow . Not yet thirty, People magazine described Golden as “the glamour puss of the cutting-edge art set,” praising his “indefatigable faith in unproven quantities.” Tonight, he was being honored for promoting poetry slams in the