Page 5 of Making It Live!

Somewhere outside, a car horn blared.A dog barked.Four stories down, the city kept moving, completely indifferent to the fact that mine had just split down the middle.

This morning, I'd left this apartment as one man.I'd walked out of Beacon Broadcasting as another one entirely.And now I was sitting in the wreckage of a life I'd thought was unbreakable, holding a goodbye note from the only person I'd ever loved.

"How am I going to move on without you, Jimmy?"

ChapterThree

Jimmy- Present Day

The email arrived at 4:47 on a Friday afternoon.

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 forwe'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."