🧱Rebuilding from Rubble

🍽️ "That's interesting" + Why I pay the New York City tax

“The ground where you stumble and fall is the same ground you use to stand up.”
—Shunryu Suzuki via Finding Clarity by

Marc Lesser

✍️ June 6, 2023

It’s a warm summer morning with a cool breeze cutting through off the Hudson. I am sitting at an outdoor table on Gansevoort Street at the not-so-newly reopened Pastis restaurant in Meatpacking.

To quell the knots in my stomach, I am having breakfast with E, a former coaching client who has since become a dear friend after ending our work together. He looks dapper (as always) in his signature black mock turtleneck, ordering poached eggs with a side of sourdough toast.

In a few hours, I will return home to meet with my biggest corporate licensing Client. They have been icing me out, deflecting my repeated requests to meet—or even return any information that could help discern the fate of our contract—for six months. Not a good sign.

Finally—hallelujah—someone reached out three weeks before our contract agreement was set to expire, and I scrambled to schedule the call for the soonest available date: 6/6 at 3:30 p.m. (a third six for the numerologists who are counting).

😬

I didn’t love those numbers, but I also had a feeling they aligned with where this was heading: The Ax.¹

I first encountered Pastis on television, where else but in a 2004 episode of Sex and the City called “The Cold War.” Living in New York City was still a faraway impossible-seeming dream of mine, especially after getting rejected from all but one of the East Coast universities I applied to in high school. That one was in D.C. Not quite my vibe.

As Carrie and Petrovsky cozy up in a booth, she is judged as unserious by his smug Art Friends who wedge themselves into the spare seats:

“Are you an artist as well?” they ask Carrie.
“No, I’m a writer.”
“Novels?”
“No, I write a column . . . for a newspaper.”
“The Times?”
“No, Substack the New York Star.”

As we turn the corner on SATC’s twenty-fifth anniversary, I am now sitting in that same restaurant, about to launch a new phase of my own writing career. But I don’t know that yet.

This morning, at this breakfast, with this sophisticated client-turned-friend, writing was nowhere near my radar. First, I’d need to get to the end of this nauseating day. Thank goodness for his distraction and wise counsel.

I tell him what’s on deck for the afternoon. Having worked as a publisher with some of the most famous magazine editors in media, he knows a thing or two about navigating tricky conversations. Now the coaching tables have turned.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I was slowly unwinding all the credibility I had built up in the years when we were still working together, meeting regularly to plan his career pivots. E could now see me for what I was: as lost as anyone.

I am wearing one of my best blouses, a sky blue silk-adjacent long-sleeve with a repeating palm leaf pattern, albeit accompanied by superglued Italian Baldinini shoes. But as far as where this conversation is heading, I—coaching empress—no longer have expertise clothes.

As I sit there unsure of what financial blows will follow, I debate with E about what would be worse: the Client canceling the contract altogether or them asking for a massive price adjustment, the way other corporate clients had when the pandemic hit.

I didn’t know if I had the strength to resist such a request, and I certainly didn’t have the leverage. I needed that money—any amount, desperately—far more than they needed me. After all, a company recently anointed into the trillion-dollar club doesn’t need my framework to stay afloat.