Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Jimmy- Present Day
I know the exact time because I was sitting on the floor of an editing suite with my back against a filing cabinet, eating pad thai out of a container that was mostly sauce by that point, and I happened to glance at my phone right as the notification slid across the screen. The subject line read:
Restructuring Update — Documentary Division.
Not a meeting. Not a phone call. Not even the courtesy of a human being looking me in the eye. An email, sent at 4:47 on a Friday — the universal corporate timestamp for we're hoping you read this on your way to happy hour and don't make a scene.
I opened it and read it twice, because the first time through, my brain refused to take the words in the order they came.
The documentary division was being "restructured," which was corporate speak for eliminated.
My unit — the one I'd built from nothing over three years, the one that had produced two Peabody-nominated films and one winner, the one whose footage out of Syria made a sitting congressman cry on live television — was being dissolved, effective immediately.
Our remaining projects were "under review," which meant dead.
Our staff would be "repurposed," which probably meant fired.
The email was signed by someone named Todd in accounting. I'd never met him before. Todd had just ended my career with a form letter and a bulleted list of next steps, the first of which was returning my company laptop and the second of which was forwarding any outstanding expense reports.
I set down the pad thai and stared at the wall for a long time.
Then I picked up the container and threw it at the filing cabinet hard enough that sauce hit the ceiling.
It didn't help. But it didn't not help, either.
* * *
Three weeks later, I was still in my sweatpants at two in the afternoon.
This was not — strictly speaking — unusual.
I'd spent large stretches of my career in the field wearing the same clothes for days, sleeping wherever there was floor, eating whatever was edible.
The difference was that in the field there was a reason.
You smelled terrible because you were doing important work.
You hadn't showered because you were on a stakeout in Juárez.
You were on your fourth straight meal of instant noodles because a currency exchange that didn't love you had devoured your per diem.
Now I was in my studio apartment in Inwood, unwashed because I had nowhere to be, eating cheap noodles because I couldn't afford anything else, and the only stakeout in progress was me, surveilling my own couch — which was also my bed, and the only piece of furniture in the room that hadn't come off the sidewalk on trash day.
The apartment was small in the way New York brokers called "cozy" and everyone else called depressing.
One room, a kitchenette, a bathroom where you could sit on the toilet and wash your hands at the sink without standing up.
My Peabody sat on a shelf I'd built out of cinder blocks and a length of plank, and every time I looked at it I thought about what the thing would pull on eBay.
I hadn't listed it. Yet.
My phone buzzed. I ignored it. It buzzed again. I ignored it harder. It buzzed a third time, and then it started ringing, because Jillian Morris did not believe in being ignored.
I picked up. "I'm alive."
"That is a low bar and I’m not impressed by it.
" Jillian's voice was clipped and precise, the one she used at City Hall when she was walking a council member back from the ledge of a bad idea.
Nine years in city government had made her simultaneously warm and absolutely terrifying.
"James Goodman, it has been three weeks since you answered a text, and the last one you sent was the single word fine, which we both know is the biggest lie in the English language. "
"I'm processing."
"You're wallowing. There's a difference, and I can hear it in your voice. Are you on the couch?"
I looked at the couch. At the dent in the cushions that had molded itself to my body over three weeks. At the noodle container on the floor beside it. "No."
"Liar. Are you eating those garbage noodles?"
"…No."
"JIMMY."
"What do you want me to say? I'm thirty-six years old, I just lost the only job that ever mattered to me, and my checking account has a number in it that would make you cry." I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. "Noodles are where I am right now. Noodles are the situation."
There was a pause on the other end. Not a thinking pause — a loading pause. The kind that meant she was about to say something I didn't want to hear, and she was giving me one last breath before she said it.
"Jimmy. I love you. You know I love you. I've loved you since freshman year at Columbia, when you showed up to the dorm with a duffel bag and a poster of Christiane Amanpour, and I thought, this boy is either going to change the world or die trying."
"That's very sweet—"
"I'm not done."
I shut my mouth.
"You are too old to be this broke."
The words landed in my chest like a fist. Not because they were cruel. Because they were true.
"You have a Peabody on a shelf made of cinder blocks, Jimmy.
You have been shot at in four countries.
You've had dysentery twice. You have a scar on your shoulder from actual shrapnel — and you're eating dollar noodles in a studio with a window that doesn't lock, and I love you too much to keep letting you call it noble. "
"It's not about noble—"
"It is entirely about noble. It has always been about noble. You have spent thirteen years being the most principled, most uncompromising, most self-righteously broke journalist in America, and it has gotten you exactly here." A beat. "Where's here, Jimmy? Describe here for me."
I looked around the apartment. The cinder block shelf. The window that didn't lock. The noodle container. The Peabody, gleaming uselessly in the afternoon light.
"Here is not great," I admitted.
"Here is terrible. And you know the worst part? You're brilliant. You are honestly one of the most talented journalists I’ve ever known, and you've been pouring all of it into a principle that doesn't cover your rent."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that independence mattered, that integrity mattered, that the work was supposed to be its own reward. But every version of the sentence died on the way to my mouth.
"So what are you suggesting?" I asked, which was as close to a white flag as I was willing to run up the pole.
Jillian heard it. She could hear a white flag from a borough away.
"I'm suggesting," she said, her voice sliding from drill sergeant to strategist, "that you take that enormous, ridiculous pride of yours, fold it up very small, put it in a drawer, and sell out. For cash."
"Jillian—"
"I'm serious. This is New York. Every network, every cable outlet, every streaming service with a news division is headquartered here.
And you — J. Goodman, Peabody winner, whose Yemen film made Congress hold emergency hearings — you could walk into any one of those buildings and they'd trip over each other to hire you. "
"As what? I'm not reading a teleprompter, Jill."
"As a producer, you stubborn, impossible man.
An executive producer. You've run a documentary unit for three years.
You know how to build a show from the ground up.
You know how to handle talent, a crew, a story.
Seriously, you'd be brilliant at it — and here's the part I need to actually land — they would pay you.
Real money. The kind you could use to buy furniture that didn't spend last night on a curb. "
I stared at the ceiling. A water stain in the corner had been slowly spreading for six months, into a shape that had started to look unsettlingly like Texas.
"I'd hate it," I said.
"You'd hate it less than noodles."
"That's a low bar."
"It's time to raise the bar, Jimmy. Maybe it's time to stop punishing yourself for wanting to be comfortable. Wanting a salary is not a moral failure. Wanting health insurance is not selling out. Wanting one meal that doesn't come in a plastic wrapper is not—"
"Okay."
Silence.
"…Okay?" she said, like she didn't trust the word.
"Okay." I said it again, testing the weight of it. It tasted strange — like giving up and growing up at the same time, and I couldn't tell which one it was. "Okay. I'll look into it. Producer jobs. Networks." I swallowed. "Corporate news."
Somewhere down at City Hall, Jillian Morris let out a breath she'd probably been holding for over a decade.
"I'm sending you a list," she said, and she was already typing; I could hear the keys. "Every major outlet with a newsroom in this city. You're going to update your résumé, you're going to put on real pants, and you're going to start making calls."
"You're awfully bossy for someone who isn't my mother."
"Your mother would agree with me and you know it. List's coming tonight. And Jimmy?"
"What?"
"Throw away the noodles."
She hung up. I set the phone on my chest and lay there, listening to the radiator clanking like a ghost was trapped inside it .
The Peabody glinted on its cinder block shelf. My laptop sat on the floor beside the couch, still open to the email from Todd in accounting — twenty-one days old, read more times than I'd admit, memorized against my will.
I turned my head and looked at the apartment.
Really looked, the way I'd look at a location I was scouting for a film.
The single overhead bulb that buzzed. The kitchenette with its two-burner stove and the cabinet door that wouldn't quite close.
The window that didn't lock, letting up the sound of the street — somebody's car alarm, somebody's music, somebody else's life running louder and fuller than mine.
This was what thirteen years of integrity looked like. This was what principles bought you once the checks stopped coming.
I sat up. Swung my feet to the floor. Carried the noodle container to the trash and dropped it in.
Then I opened the laptop, closed the email from Todd, and started a new résumé.