American Subversive by David Goodwillie

commodities. They’d become legitimate. Derrick had been proven right faster than even he’d foreseen.
    One hungover morning at the agency, I saw an ad I’d written (promoting an animated-fish movie) cycling through the top of the restaurant blog, SophiesChoice. I sat there staring at my lame sea-pun tagline and suddenly had an epiphany.
A media blog
. Derrick Franklin didn’t have one. He had the gossip hound, the arts critic, the nightlife guide, the technology guru, the political hack, the porn purveyor, but nothing dedicated to journalism. Or the lack of it. So why not me? I was as unqualified and disillusioned as anyone else. I’d take on the vaunted press, all those bombastic newspapers and formulaic magazines, the whimpering network newscasts and deafening cable shout-fests. The pomposity, hypocrisy, and self-aggrandizement: I’d call it all for what it was.
    I practiced for months, regurgitating the news of the day in a series of thoughtful diatribes and funny manifestos. I honed a voice over endless hours of agency time, but my bosses never noticed. I’d been working there three years by then, a lifetime in the ad world, and people left me alone. I was a “creative,” after all.
    And then it all came together, like nothing else in my life ever had. I found Derrick Franklin’s e-mail and sent him my blog in beta. Two days later we met at a coffee shop in Tribeca. We shook hands and sat down with our lattes. He spoke slowly. Precision, I thought. Then: money. That was it: money must be soothing.
    He asked about journalism school, why I never finished.
    â€œI’m not that earnest,” I said.
    â€œA real New Yorker.”
    â€œBorn and raised.”
    â€œWell, there is a certain swagger to your bitching,” he continued. “And it’s something I’ve been thinking about, this whole
New York Observer,
meta-media thing—reporting on reporters, creating news from news . . .”
    On and on he went, this modern-day seer, until he arrived at what I’d been hoping for: an offer. It wasn’t much—$3,500 a month to start—but I’d be operating under his corporate umbrella, which meant free publicity and libel protection—two things a blogger should never take lightly. We stood up and shook hands. I’d been out of college almost six years. Maybe the Internet would save me after all.
    The e-mail arrived at 5:42 p.m., just as I was posting my last item of the day.
    To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Barneys
The shopping wasn’t so good. The blowout sale was on the wrong floor.
P.S. This is your chance.
    Who was this? Some kind of practical joker, obviously. But what was the joke?
This is your chance.
To do what? Post Paige Roderick’s photograph? Why not just do it themselves? Why choose me?
    But the other part is what got my attention.
The shopping wasn’t so good. The blowout sale was on the wrong floor.
The intended target of the attack had become a subject of increasingly wild speculation in the four days since the explosion. With the exception of Barneys, 660 Madison Avenue was a typical Midtown office tower populated by dozens of companies, from financial firms to fashion designers. The northeast side of the fifteenth floor, where the bomb actually went off, was the New York headquarters of the dressmaker Claudio Valencia, and for most of that first hectic day the scorched fabrics andblown-apart mannequins that littered the surrounding blocks had everyone thinking his atelier was part of Barneys (which, in fact, topped off on ten). When the smoke subsided and the police and press finally got their facts straight, Valencia became a wanted man. Two days passed before he emerged, on Ibiza, teary-eyed and spaced-out on pills. Turns out he and his all-male entourage had been there for weeks, “seeking inspiration” for his next clothing line. Ah, worlds colliding. The ensuing press