My second week as an indentured servant has come to a close, and I am writing this email from the peace and
quiet of my parents’ house, which means that at no point in the next hour will Sanja come up behind me and
caress me in any way.
So my second week at the studio began in fine form, as on Friday we had been informed that we
would be working on Martin Luther King Day, despite its standing as a national holiday. And despite the
fact that John was in Vietnam. I have already realized that John being in underdeveloped Asian nations has
no bearing on whether or not he can keep full tabs on us – he can, always. He calls at all hours of the day
and night, and I am pretty sure that it is in our best interest to be in the office when this happens. The
subway ride on Monday morning was peaceful because, ahh yes, nobody else in Manhattan was working. They
had the day off. No matter, I arrived at the studio to discover that ONLY the interns were on duty. All
of the actual employees stayed home, while all of us unpaid suckers were required to be there. I’m sure
somewhere MLK was smiling.
One thing I’m really enjoying about my new job is the access I have to John’s emails. Don’t worry, I’m not
being sketchy. Everyone in the studio has full access to the emails, which strikes me as very odd. I’m
fairly sure that the people writing to him don’t understand that star-struck interns such as myself are
reading them. John’s address book reads like a “Who’s Who” of celebrity photographers, and I can’t
help but be irrationally impressed. I realize I shouldn’t be surprised, since John himself is a
celebrity. It would be like working as Tom Cruise’s assistant and being overcome with awe and excitement
to find that he in fact had Nicole Kidman’s number on file. “WHAT?! Tom knows NICOLE KIDMAN??!! And
wait, he has OPRAH’s number too??!!” Of course he does, he’s Tom Cruise.
Anyway, I love looking at these emails. I love it more, if you can imagine this, than I love going
through each and every one of John’s receipts from the past year of his life. Even more than I love
trying to determine what, exactly, a receipt written in the scrawling hand a Thai street vendor is for, or
what month it’s from…or wait, is it even a receipt? Or just a random, greasy scrap of paper that was
shoved into John’s pocket at one point and has now become mine to decipher? I wanted to be an arm-chair
detective when I was little, and now I’m finally getting my chance.
Sanja and I had a little upset over receipts last week when I expressed to her that I didn’t believe it to be
possible that John was staying in hotels in both Singapore AND India on the same night, as one stray handwritten
note would have us believe. Sanja was adamant that if the receipt stated it was so, it was so. “But Sanja,” I implored, “It’s
not physically possible that John was sleeping in BOTH Singapore AND India on the same night.” Sanja was not
having it, and the result was a lot of huffing mixed with a stray “I’ve been here longer than you!” Indeed
you have Sanja, but the laws of the universe and my disbelief in John’s ability to straddle two countries
at once still apply.
There was a briefly enjoyable moment with Sanja when she asked me out of the blue if I liked English
Muffins. And I do like English Muffins, so I told her as much. To which she gleefully replied, “Well, it’s
time for some muffin lovin’!!” It was almost too good to be true.
Sanja seems to become gleeful over strange things in general. Like the other day when everyone was
discussing the new Leopard system on Macs. “Next time it will be Peacock!!! Haaaaa!” Sanja shouts, before
dissolving into a fit of laughter. And so it goes.
I don’t mean to single out Sanja. There are others. I haven’t introduced you yet to James, who may or may not
be my boss. I can’t tell. James let his wife cut his hair the other day, and now he looks like the Little
Dutch Boy. But, as you may know, I’m not one to talk. I let a drunk Canadian cut me a mullet, so I can’t
really judge. James also flosses in front of the rest of us, which I think I can safely judge.
There is also Joan, who is only 22 or so but who pretty much runs the office. Joan only has one phrase
that she likes to repeat, from what I can tell, and it’s “Oh! What a little snappy-doodle!!” That phrase is
applied judiciously and indiscriminately, all day. I have never heard it pre-Joan, but now I hear it in my
sleep. Last week Joan wouldn’t let me eat my lunch until I counted how many of each type of John’s
posters we had in a drawer (this was treated like a full-blown emergency, an emergency that couldn’t wait
until I’d eaten my falafel). So I count the posters (approximately 20-30 of each)….come to find that we
have literally thousands upon thousands of these posters in boxes, which Joan knows about. But she just
wanted me to count the ones in her drawer. Why Joan, why?
Anyway, after all of this receipt torture (a full-time job best left to an accountant really), John casually
says to me “Ok, so can you get these in order for tonight?” Um, yeah. Mind you this is ALL Sanja and I
have been working on for 14 hours a day, and there is no end in sight. The receipts are literally piled up
around us and at this point we have been relegated to working on the stove (you didn’t misread that) because
the table was being used as a space to handle fine art prints. John mentioned “getting them in order for
tonight” as if it was a casual, 5- minute task, somewhere on the scale of changing the toilet paper
and turning off the printers.
Speaking of prints, there are absolutely beautiful (not to mention valuable) fine art prints made up at
the studio and then promptly destroyed every day. Destroyed for imperfections my eye cannot even begin
to see. I’ll look at a print and think how amazing it is, while Alec, the retoucher/printer, will look at it in
disgust and rip it up right in front of me. Last week I timidly asked if I might keep the misprints? You
know, for my bathroom or something? The answer was a swift and appalled “NO!” Under no circumstances may
I keep any misprints, lest I end up selling the rejects from a cart in Chinatown after work.
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