In 1987, I had been living on Stanton Street for a year+plus and slowly making my way into a future I could be excited about. A large part of my last semester at the School of Visual Arts was getting an internship. My first choice was SPIN magazine so I gave them a call. The woman who answered the phone told me that there weren’t any internships available at SPIN but that if I wanted, I could start an internship at Penthouse magazine, a few floors up. Then, because SPIN‘s owner Bob Guccione, Jr., was the son of Penthouse‘s majordomo, Bob Guccione, Sr., and they basically shared an HR department, I would be well-positioned to snag a SPIN position once one opened up. To be clear, in those days HR departments were basically the people who put you into the payroll system and made sure you knew where the bathrooms were. They supplied literally zero protection around things like harassment or bullying. I mean, this was publishing baby (or rather: porn and rock’n’roll).

Somehow this offer to come work for free at Penthouse while awaiting SPIN admission made sense to me. Foot in door and all that. A few things about Penthouse I observed in my first few days there: Bob came in one day a week to shoot the centerfold in a dark room (not a darkroom, but a room with close to nonexistent lighting) that was set up for only him to use; no one could go into that room while Bob was, er, working; Bob drank endless cans of Coca-Cola, which he was never at a loss for because his assistant followed him with a six-pack always in hand; Bob did not know how to use the buttons on his shirt given they were never ever in any universe utilized so that his bare fuzzy chest was always on display. Also, he walked around with a 35-mm camera around his neck, purportedly in case he needed to shoot a centerfold at a moment’s notice. The staff was mostly women and I was mostly baffled. A part of me would get very indignant about how women were being objectified and how could any of these women working for Bob put up with it. Then I was reminded that I was working there for free, my choice. Sometimes I would think, this is very freeing what these ladies are doing, choosing to make money by posing in this magazine. Basically, a chorus of voices would stake conflicting feminist stances that I really never squared during most of my music journalism career. There was a room where the Penthouse letters team held forth. Four guys and one woman sitting in a very small room with a door. They would take the letters sent in by readers (“I would like to meet Miss July. She is very sexy. Thank you, Johann.”) and turn them into little erotic stories (“I would like to ____ Miss July. She is a ____ piece of ____ and if I met her I would _____ and _____ and ____ and then ______. Yours, BigOleMan with a very large _______”). I came to see this as pure creative writing and suspect that most of the time, the only part of the senders letter used was the person’s name, city, and state.

At least once a week I would wander into SPIN‘s offices to loiter and angle for a job. I’d often be joined by folks who had just come up off the street. It was hard to tell whether they were rock sorts or people in need of food and shelter. After about two months, it became clear that the woman in HR was wrong. SPIN, I found out, didn’t have and weren’t at all interested in having any interns. Since Penthouse wasn’t even close to where I wanted to be career-wise, I sent a letter to Rolling Stone. It turned out they did have an internship program and if I wanted to be considered for the spring slot, I should come in for an interview. Which of course I did, then got the gig, then when the semester ended and the internship was meant to be up, I decided not to leave. I was graduating in June and made the executive decision that Rolling Stone would be my full-time employer wherein I could quit all my waitress jobs and begin my career. Amazingly, it kind of worked out like that.

I became executive editor Robert Wallace’s assistant, which meant understanding that when a man called and said he was the Doctor, he wasn’t actually Bob Wallace’s doctor but Hunter S Thompson. And when said Doctor turned up with beer and whisky, that I would know not to put anything in the refrigerator and instead open all the beers and the whisky and line one after the other up on Bob’s desk. These kinds of things along with transcribing interviews from writers such as Lynn Hirschberg were my main job until a spot opened up in the copy editing department. I relocated downstairs where the copy, research, and production departments were. It was also the floor that held the Capri Lounge, which was the photo developing/drug den. Jann had brought the photo development staff from San Francisco and they’d brought their stash, along with a very ratty couch. Anyone who wanted to smoke, snort, or otherwise alter their consciousness could swing through their revolving door. Above us, the Springsteens and Jaggers roamed, and below them, we would do the dirty work of making the writers’ stories resemble excellent prose. I loved the job, and naturally, the people I worked with became my family as happens in those career jobs when you’re starting to forge yourself. When I wasn’t at work though, I was still cultivating my life downtown on Stanton Street.

Soon after the broken dishes event mentioned in last week’s post, my roommate broke up with my friend, which was awkward given she wasn’t really 100% over him so I’d often find myself on the receiving end of pointed questions such as, “What’s he up to?” and “Does he have a new girlfriend?” I would punt these as best I could. But then I went and did something irreversible and damaging: The roommate and I began to fool around. While for well over a year we’d been cohabitating and hanging out as friends with no pull at all toward each other, one night after going to see Hüsker Dü at The Ritz (now known as Webster Hall), we found ourselves literally face to face and acting on impulse. While it doesn’t do any good for 2025 Lauren to pull out the judgment to crush 1997 me, of course in retrospect and through years of inner investigation and experience, I recognize the layers of emotional blindness I was acting on. The dirty little secret, the one that I couldn’t hear except for a little scratch at my consciousness, which I ignored by turning up the volume on the rest of my life, was that for a long while I’d been conflicted in my friendship with his ex, yet I didn’t have a clue how to deal with that. The thought of pulling away cleanly from—or even just set boundaries with—her was something I couldn’t figure out. So I let a situation happen with him that turned me (&he) into a villain. It was such an impulse move toward self-sabotage that I don’t even think integrity was a word I knew how to spell. I didn’t have the emotional language, I just knew somewhere in my lizard brain that if I did this thing with him, I would blow up the friendship irrevocably and that would take care of our uncomfortable friendship. I dropped a cherry bomb right into the friendship fireplace where it wiped everything out and took casualties. (I almost need to take a nap when I think back on the blind-logic and machinations in my head as I walked blithely into the fire without looking back.)

A great sadness I can feel about that action is how it affected a really good friend of mine. Someone dear to me who was friends with both of us. I know my actions set her up for a lot of conflict with this mutual friend. But, again, as I was stepping through that fiery entanglement door, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. While the roommate and I had an almost year-long relationship, I don’t think back on it as love. In fact, there’s a certain numbness around the whole thing that has a lot to do with just how disengaged I was from my emotions. Not to mention, I was thoroughly disinterested in exploring my motivations since that would require inner work. And just to bring home how ill-equipped I was to deal with uncomfortable emotions, next week’s post will dive into the cherry bomb I dropped into the roommate/lover situation—it involves the Cadillac.

I know I mentioned that the Cadillac would be a front-and-center this week, but since writing, at least for me, has everything to do with going where the story takes you, other things bubbled up here instead. I have bounced one into the sound file below if you’d like to hear about how this large boat-like vehicle became a target of discomfort on a trip across the Canadian border. Till next time, thanks for being here as I travel these memory roads.