But Enough About Me by Jancee Dunn

London.”
    â€œCool,” she said. “What did you do?” Well, let’s see. I saw Big Ben. I rode around in a red double-decker bus with my mom alongside some nice people from Pittsburgh. I had high tea at Harrods. I watched the changing of the guard. (“Mom! Take my picture in front of this guy with the red coat! Get this, he’s not supposed to change expression!”) Oh, my God.
    I shrugged. “Oh, you know, the usual. Went to clubs.” Please don’t ask where.
    She nodded, smiling. “What were the last five records you listened to?” Time to lie! I fancied myself something of a music connoisseur, but the bald truth was that my record collection abounded with clunkers, mostly Jersey dirt-ball rock such as Van Halen and, thanks to Ritchie, an inordinate amount of bad late-eighties R & B. Oran “Juice” Jones in the house! Thinking quickly, I selected one record from each category, starting with Venerated Jazz: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Rock? The Clash’s Combat Rock, and that was actually true. Maybe something a little trendy. Neneh Cherry, Raw Like Sushi. She nodded again. Good. And, because I was going through the requisite reggae phase endemic to suburban white kids in the eighties, how about we throw in Bob Marley’s Babylon by Bus, the live double album. A live album would nicely convey my love of music. Sweat was pooling in my bra as I contemplated the last selection. I needed something that sounded authentically random, so she wouldn’t think I was filling quotas. Cypress/ Afoot by Let’s Active, which I’d played that morning, until my father told me to turn it down.
    She scribbled away. “Okay. Is there anything else that you do for fun?” Carefully avoiding the actual answer, I invented a sophisticated schedule—concerts, museums, and, most egregiously, “jogging.”
    She stood up. That was it? “Time for you to meet Bob Love, the editor,” she announced. I was ushered on weak legs into his office. Bob was crisply courteous and nattily dressed in a beautifully cut dark suit. I settled stiffly into a chair and gave his bookshelves a covert scan for clues on how to behave. Harold Brodkey, John O’Hara, Sigmund Freud: brawnier fare than the Victorian drawing-room novels that I went for, so a chat about literature was out. A guitar was propped in the corner. “Oh,” I could say. “You play?” Then he would say yes. Then I would have no follow-up question because I do not play, and we would sit in silence. As he sat down at his desk, I eyed his colorful socks, which were yellow and red and blue in some sort of dot pattern. Aha. A clue. Gay, I thought knowingly.
    â€œI see you looking at my bookshelf,” he said. “Who is your favorite author?”
    â€œI’d have to say Truman Capote,” I said, figuring I’d score some gay pandering points with Bob, who was in reality vigorously hetero and dating a string of women.
    â€œHow about your favorite Rolling Stone writer?”
    That was an easy one. “It’s a tie between Kurt Loder and Cameron Crowe,” I said. I told him that for the past eight years, a poster had hung above my bed of a Bob Marley Rolling Stone cover, his arms outstretched, a big grin on his face. I loved that cardboard poster so much that I never took the plastic wrap off it, which made it look like one of those plastic-covered couches at your grandma’s house.
    After a few more of the usual queries about grades and the like, he finished up with one last question. “Why do you want to work here?” he said, leaning back in his chair.
    How could I answer? Miserably, I stared at him. I wanted to tell him that I wished I had never had a hit of this particular crack pipe, so that I could live blissfully in New Jersey and never know what I was missing.
    â€œWell,” I said haltingly. “I know I didn’t go to an Ivy League