I learned how to cover my tracks, so what happened in J-school wouldn’t happen again. If an editor asked for my notes, I’d carefully comb through to make sure they reflected what was in the story. If I needed a particular detail, for instance, I’d dig deep for some true but irrelevant observations I hadn’t written down at the time, then manufacture a page that tucked my invention in among those observations. Once, I spilled coffee across the margin where a source’s number had been written, so I said—the digits washed away in brown. After enough practice it became like an instinct, or a method, or an addiction, and the further I traveled down the path, the more the secret seemed unspeakable. I lived in the shadow of the creep.

Sure enough, my stories started attracting positive attention. People at the P-I talked about how much my work had improved. I became a writer of promise. I got offered a position, and eventually built a portfolio big enough to make a go of freelancing in New York.

It was in New York that I discovered my niche in culture. I found that if I limited myself to frivolous subjects—books, music, movies—I could hold the story firmly in place. Perhaps I misread a novel, or let my analysis of some lyrics run amok, or overburdened the screen with my own pet theories, but it could never be said that I was wrong about the facts. There were no facts. Culture wasn’t a current event with its own objective reality, it was a protean phenomenon, a set of omens available for any half-decent writer’s elucidation. Soon the creep seemed to disappear. I told myself I’d just been writing about the wrong things.

But I knew I had to stay vigilant. That was especially true when I strayed near hard reporting. The journalist from Vice wants to talk about my profile of Courtney Love, for example. It appeared in the Village Voice in 1998, and I got a call from Love’s publicist shortly after publication.

“It’s just a small thing,” she said, “but Courtney’s curious. This scene where you’re in the East Village.”

Love had ditched her entourage and we’d wandered until she found a store she’d heard about, some nameless spot that sold T-shirts screen-printed with Dadaist collages. Soon a man entered the shop in neon-yellow Skechers, carrying a clipboard. He started posing questions to the girl working there—like what bands she liked, what restaurants, what shops.

Love called the guy a trendspotter, sent to suck young blood for some corporation, and was pissed. I used the scene as a springboard to discuss her obsession with selling out, a theme she’d been confronting head-on in the aftermath of her role in The People vs. Larry Flynt.