TO: Mike Albo
FROM: Bettina Faustwell, Dudester PR
Re: M?stery Tour

Hi Michael very nice to e-meet you. Charles says fantastic things about you. I am glad to hear you are a fan of Dudester! I wish I could take credit for the insanely good content, but I am just a girl…ha ha…all the content is written by awesome (and handsome) guys…. This being said we have a totally insane event coming up… Here are the deets:

You are officially invited on a TripBlue M?stery tour! The M?stery tour is a three-day excursion into the exotic unknown: 150 people, jetting off to an undisclosed location, which may be anywhere in the ever-expanding TripBlue-niverse—NY, to LA, to Santo Domingo, or to…White Plains! You won’t know until you arrive at the gate!

This TripBlue Mystery tour is co sponsored by amazing brands like H&M, Starbucks, Gillette, Kik Energy Water, Cold-EEZE, and Trojan Condoms, whose goods you should probably hold off using until arriving.☺ Once landed, there’ll be cocktail parties, live entertainment, feasts, more cocktail parties, post-cocktail parties, and group activities not revolving around natural history museums.

We are leaving early Saturday, October 17th and coming back late afternoon on the 19th.

What do you say?

Bettina Faustwell
www.dudester.com
Director Of Communications
666 Broadway Ste. 666
New York, NY, 10012
(o) 646.555.5555
(c) 917.555.5555

I am always afraid I am about to become one of those bitter New Yorkers. Someone with a constantly sour expression on his face and wrinkled, yellowy skin like an old front page. That person you see in the deli who screams: “Eight dollars for grapes? This city is for yuppies!”

Not long ago, in 2009, I went on a trip that sort of put me on the fast track to becoming a bitter New Yorker and I need to tell you about it before you find me raving on the street corner and nervously pass me by.

This story needs to be told without much fictionalization or allegory, from my point of view. It’s not like I want to do it this way. I wish I could transmute my middle-aged gay pain into some teen vampire drama. But I do need to bend the truth a bit or I will get into even more trouble. So think of this as a memoir with a fictional $3,000 sheer Thai silk veil lightly draped over it.

Let me just launch into things: I am a freelance writer, and I have been living in the city for over fifteen years. Around 2007, I started writing the Retail Reviewer — a popular column which appeared in the Thursday Styles Section of a major newspaper which, for legal reasons, I will call The New York Paper. I was a freelancer for them. I didn’t get any health insurance or pension plan or expense account or office space. I wasn’t even invited to the Christmas party.

In October of ’09, I was invited on a trip organized by a shopping website for men that I am going to call Dudester. Dudester invited 150 writers, editors and bloggers to get on a plane and go to an undisclosed location. A “M?stery” tour. It was co-sponsored by an airline I will call TripBlue and would promote a new TripBlue destination as well as fifteen other brands that had attached itself to the trip like fungus. We were all to meet at the TripBlue terminal. At the gate, we would find out where we were going. And when we did, we writers, editors and bloggers would all clap enthusiastically, trying to exude excitement that this whole campaign meant something to us.

Let me explain. If you haven’t been to Manhattan in the last ten years, you should know that it no longer trades in durable, fungible goods except for artisanal cheese and celebrity cupcakes. These days, the city is a marketplace of intangible ideas and the internet efforts that promulgate them. Now people make millions by crowd-sourcing, aggregating and hedging funds.

Dudester is one of the city’s new internet success stories. It’s a website that aggregates information and gives tips and updates on shoes, gadgets, and clothes for men in the much sought-after 26-35 age demographic. The start-up started with three people in a downtown office. It now employs eighty and is bleeding precious ad dollars from print journalism, speeding up the collapse of traditional newspapers like The Paper.

Dudester was founded by two straight guys in their late twenties named Peter and Dan who are friendly and hot in a frat-boyish way. They have good bodies and cool spiky haircuts and are making money as easy as a sneeze. Peter and Dan of Dudester are studs of the city’s internet culture. Every brand wants to get in their pants so they can appear on their shopping website and get sought-after attention from their consumer guy-niche. In their inevitable profile in The Paper’s Business section (“Dude, Where’s My Internet Phenomenon?”), they have this look of incredulous, doofy wowness on their faces, similar to the way Matt Damon and Ben Affleck looked when they won their Oscars at the ages of twenty-eight: “This award is for me? Wow, I can’t believe how easy it is to be successful! The world is so cool!”

I wish I had their naturally lubricated ability to make money but I’m the opposite. Instead of creating a lucrative web venture I decided to write poetry and feel suspicious about capitalism and my place in it. I moved to the city and became a performance artist/comedian/poet/writer. Ka-ching!

I spent my youthful leveraging energy in downtown gay bars, getting in good with the drag queens and club promoters so I didn’t have to pay a cover for Sperm night at The Cock. Instead of working my way up the socialite ladder, I achieved minor downtown clout in the alterna-queer scene.

I was a drug addict butterfly in my friend’s experimental opera, I sat naked on a fake rock in a gallery for a friend’s friend’s art opening, I portrayed Joseph in a live nativity scene, gazing over the rippled abs of a nude gogo boy Jesus, and, perhaps one of my proudest achievements, I helped create a naked, glitter-smeared amateur dance troupe. (There are about twelve of us, we dance in skimpy outfits and then get naked. We usually get paid in drink tickets. To be fictitiously consistent, I will call it The Sparkle Squad.)

I also perform wherever I can: comedy nights or variety shows or storytelling gigs in bars or art galleries or clubs or cabaret spaces, sometimes in actual theaters. I’ll get a free drink or—if I am lucky—a bit of money. The side room in my apartment is full of wigs and costumes, as well as a plastic gun, a purple dildo, a baby doll, along with a myriad other props necessary to poke fun at our slutball culture. For a while now, I have dressed up in a pink bikini and pumps so as to portray one of those annoying and loud cellphone girls I see now, everywhere in the city, screaming about sushi and shopping.

I don’t make much money doing this. My one paying skill has been writing for magazines and newspapers. And now I am watching the value of that one skill plummet like a condo in Florida.

The trip Dudester organized was truly cosponsored by TROJAN® Brand Condoms, Gillette razors, and Cold-EEZE; and sounded so gross and crass and American, I had to go. I was tickled and repelled at the same time. Also the heat wasn’t working (again) in my apartment and would take days to fix because my insane, paranoid landlord had conveniently disappeared (again) after I paid him rent (in cash, again).

I knew this wasn’t going to be a glamorous vacation. In fact, it looked quite cheesy. Why did I want to go? Because I was invited. I have to say yes to everything. I don’t have the luxury to say no.

I am not a drug addict, I am not in a shame spiral, I don’t need to find the love inside myself. I am just poor. And a writer, stupidly. Instead of a brain surgeon or broker or reality show star I decided to become a writer. I have been doing it so long that I have developed no other skills so this is what I am. Now I was invited on a M?stery tour, into the weird new world of internet entrepreneurialism, where everything was an opportunity, and everyone was m?steriously cashing in.

It’s my fucking grandmother’s fault. She’s the one who suggested I move to New York. I was thirteen, in suburban Virginia, and I was sitting on the grey leather couch in our family room. Grandma was visiting. I must have shown her some of my wandering, weepy poetry about forests and far-off airplanes. I remember her looking at me and chopping the air with her hand: “If you want to be a writer, you have to move to New York.”

I obeyed her, moving up to New York in 1993, soon after graduating from college. I had this bright shining confidence that the city would embrace me and my aspirations would become effortlessly successful, like I was Paul Auster or Jim Jarmusch but with more cocks around.

Over the years, I morphed into a freelance writer. Since I moved here, I have contributed to nearly every magazine or periodical that you have heard of (GQ, Details, Elle Decor, Village Voice) and ones that you have never heard of (Coastal Living, City Style, Luxury Travel, Budget Bathrooms). I’ve written horoscopes, a love advice column, histories of both the beret and the orgasm. I have written “front of the book” articles about “Mushrooms: The Little Known Aphrodisiac,” “The Funniest Nude Scenes in Film,” and “The Ten Best Summer Salads.” Charticles and listicles and grey boxes and end pages. Words that skip along the page, pseudo-research think pieces, digestible subjects that you won’t remember tomorrow: “Are Men Losing Their Masculinity?,” “The New Chub Hunks!,” “When Not To Call,” “The End of Manscaping.” When I am not writing, I am pitching stories, constantly, to any editor, anywhere. “Strays: Gayish Straight Guys,” “Anti-Feng Shui Your Home,” “The Non Ejaculatory Orgasm for Men.”

Every now and then, I get to write something I am proud of, in my voice. Although, just as often, my words are edited and combed out into smoothly vacuumed sentences by eight editors.

But still it’s me there. Behind all the zingy copy about chocolate or French windows or Natalie Portman there is someone like me typing out its fruitless gush. And despite it all, when people ask what I do, I respond, “I’m a writer?” with a soulful, singer-songwriter voice, making a hand gesture like I am holding a freshly inked quill.

Usually my bank account hovers around $227. I have no savings, no health insurance, no real job, no big commitments, and yesterday I found mouse droppings next to my laptop. I keep waiting for the money—the matching grant—for the constant fundraiser that is my non-profit writer life.

Don’t get me wrong. I love what I do—I had better because it’s really my only skill. After the apocalypse when Sarah Palin becomes President of the Remaining Un-charred United States of America, I’ll be writing kooky copy for Apocalypse Magazine: “15 Fresh Ways To Wear Your Trash Bag!,” “How To Date With No Hands!,” “The Ten Best Recipes For Rat Meat!”

I’ll do anything for a paycheck and New York knows how to tease it out of me. My livelihood is tethered to the city’s mood swings. If people are full of optimism about the future, shopping confidently, stampeding over each other on Black Fridays, then there is work for me. I will get hired for some new magazine or, increasingly, a website plump with venture capital—any effort that lubricates the movement of goods. Senseless amounts of cash need to be overflowing like champagne. The city needs to be swampy with startups and pipe-dreams. There needs to be a constant buffet. Then I can scurry into the obese American beast during the gorgefest and get my little driblet of chum.

When you write about clothing and shopping and stores, these driblets of chum usually come in the form of swag. You write a nice article about someone and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a free pair of sneakers, a pair of jeans, or at least some free booze at a party. And, over the years, it’s these swaggy scraps that have kept me clothed and partially fed in this city I can’t afford.

Some of my best swag came when I worked at ManMade—Condé Nast’s short-lived shopping magazine for men. It was 2004, the height of the premium denim trend, when pairs of jeans suddenly skyrocketed to $180 or more. I wrote a thirty-word “article” about Denzy Smuck, a new denim brand with a fogeyish style and, out of gratitude, they sent me two pairs of their “23 Skidoo” style. I wore them every day for three years until the crotches disintegrated.

But now I was writing for The New York Paper. I knew that The Paper was particularly nervous about swag and freebies and lunches with politicians who seduce you into thinking there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so when I was requested by Bettina, the publicist at Dudester, to fill out a journalist questionnaire, I did so carefully. I kept The Paper off the list as one of my outlets, stating I was a freelance journalist. I also emailed Bettina that I wouldn’t be representing The Paper; I would be attending as an individual. “You are a freelancer, so go ahead,” said a friend. I wasn’t on assignment so it seemed OK. My time is my own time, and it’s not like I was demanding health care or anything.