Slab Rat A Novel [Paperback]

Zachary Arlen Post is an up-and-coming editor atItmagazine, one of the glossiest jewels in the crown of Versailles Publishing. The son of socialite parents, Zack was educated at the right schools, is an excellent golfer....
Or maybe not.
He is really Allen Zachary Post from Long Island, a guy with a background too downmarket for someone who wants to move up the ladder atIt.Despite his pose, Zack's ascent up the masthead has stalled, and his love life is complicated by two women: a cool English beauty with a hyphenated name and an eager, sweet-natured intern Zack could bring home to Mom. With the arrival of Mark Larkin, a determined, Harvard-educated editor who knows all the right moves, Zack's prospects for promotion grow dimmer. Mark seems to be the source of all of Zack's woes. Zack wishes Mark were dead.
Ted Heller has written a biting, outrageous story of how the rats that battle for dominance amid New York's skyscrapers -- or slabs -- survive and triumph, and the price they must pay to win.Ted Helleris the photo editor and senior writer atNickelodeonmagazine. He has worked at a variety of magazines, includingSpy, Premiere, Details,and (very briefly)Vanity Fair.He lives in New York City.Chapter One

Sleek, glossy art deco chrome, everything is sparkling silver and black and white. We're at a noisy restaurant downtown and I can see my reflection in everything -- the walls, the floor, the plates and food, even the wait staff. Grilled swordfish and lumpy potatoes for twenty-five dollars, nine-dollar shrimp cocktails with only four shrimp and at this swank place they make sure not to cut the little beady eyes off. About fifty of us sitting at long rectangular tables, fifteen people to a table. Willie Lister sits directly across from me, draining glass after glass of white wine, a film of sweat coating his long sloping forehead.

From the brilliantly lit Important Table, a spoon suddenly clanks al£;