Lucking Out (7 page)
Wired under the dashboard of the chatty byplay was a serious work ethic, a professional rigor. Writers today are assigned and edited almost exclusively over the phone and computer screen, physically cut off in their own monadic domains. That’s why we’re all so
lonely.
But at the
Voice
, as at
The New Yorker
and the
Boston Phoenix
and so many other newspapers and magazines then, editing was a face-to-face procedure, a surgical operation where each paragraph was gone over in pencil, each phrase subject to query, word reps circled and remedied, your best passages complimented, your muddier passages met with a concerned moue as the two of you tried to untangle the seaweed, retrieve a sunken thought from the morass. (In those primitive, pre-word-processing times, Richard Goldstein would sometimes take scissors and paste together the paragraphs of a writer’s piece, reconfiguring them in a different progression as if cutting a film, only to misplace a graf on his messy desk, necessitating a scavenger hunt.) The weekly sit-downs fostered an apprenticeship attitude that no true writer ever outgrows, if he or she is smart, because there’s always more to learn, habits to break, imprecisions to sharpen, excisions that bring out the muscle of a sentence sausaged in flab.
There was another home-brewed brand of criticism practiced at the
Voice
—informal, unsolicited feedback that was delivered like a body check in hockey and intended to put you on notice. It was not uncommon for a fellow writer, in a warrior spirit of collegiality, to let you know that the piece that ran in last week’s issue or the new one teed up in galleys carried the risk of making you look like a fool. Not simply mistaken, not merely misguided, but a fool—a dupe who made everybody else look bad. One year at the
Voice
Christmas party, a columnist in ambush mode, having filled his tank to excess capacity with holiday cheer, intercepted me, even though I was standing still, to put me wise that a campaign piece I had done about a presidential candidate that was set to run proved that I didn’t know a thing about politics and if it were published I would look like a
fool
and the editors would look like
fools
, a diatribe/dire prediction he delivered so close up his face nearly went out of focus. He was telling me this for my own good, he said, but nobody at the
Voice
ever told you anything for your own good unless they were up to no good. Another
Voice
staffer, whom nobody dared call a fool for fear he’d do a calypso number on their heads with his fists, speculated that the weaponized use of the word was rooted in Old Left discourse, evidenced by how often
Voice
writers would quote August Bebel’s pronouncement “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools,” one of those thundering dicta certainly intended to stop an adversary dead in his rhino tracks. (As Diana Trilling would write of thirties radicalism, “Everyone judged everyone else … today’s friend was tomorrow’s enemy; whoever disagreed with oneself had sold out.”) Or perhaps “fool” simply caught on in the office because some alpha force began using it and everyone else added it to their repertoire, just as so many writers picked up on Ellen Willis’s use of “cranky” as a positive descriptive, indicating someone out of sorts with the prevailing political norms. Whatever its origin in the lingua franca, “fool” was a strangely shame-laced word, intended to make you feel like an object of ridicule based on the snickers and scowls of some invisible jury. It would later chime in my head with Piper Laurie’s crackpot mother taunting Sissy Spacek in
Carrie
before the senior prom: “They’re all gonna laugh at you! They’re all gonna laugh at you!” I resented being bullyragged for making a fool of myself because making a fool of yourself was one of the hard-earned liberties Norman Mailer had fought for in his boxing trunks. But I have to say, I don’t regret my days in gladiator school. Having your ego slapped around a bit helped the blood circulate and would prove a superb conditioning program for a future sub-career in blogging, where a tough hide would come in handy every time the Hellmouth opened. Every time I’m abused online with a battery of scurrilous remarks of a personal nature, I’m able to let them bounce off like rubber erasers, having been called an asshole by
professionals
, experts in the field.
My stay on the fourth floor was an idyll destined to die early. My installation as a regular fixture was resisted by the person whose opinion mattered most—my boss, Mary Perot Nichols. I had been hired against her wishes, as I soon came to understand from her verbal inflections and facial expressions, which were generally lemon flavored. Nichols, for whom I did guard-dog duty at the desk, was the paper’s city editor, a veteran of Village activism who had led the fight opposing Robert Moses’s plan to drive a road through Washington Square Park and whose fearsome inside-dope column, Runnin’ Scared, was to local politics what
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
was to the Washington lie machine—a caustic disinfectant. She thrived on feuds and court intrigue, her turf war with the political muckraker Jack Newfield resulting in huge shifts in barometric pressure inside the building when some vital piece of information was up for contention. It wasn’t her idea to hire me, and had I been a better butterer-upper, I might have schmoozed things over to the point where I wasn’t looked upon as an intrusive specimen, a bug found in an ear of corn. But I was too untutored in the art of deference, oblivious to the danger signs, and lackadaisical in the time-honored mime of looking busy when there was a significant lull in the action. It was about fifteen or twenty minutes before end of regular hours, and returning to the office when she would normally have been leaving, Nichols crossed in front of my desk, which had been cleared so that I could begin the next day with a clean slate (having stuffed everything I needed to do in the drawers), paused, surveyed my near-empty desktop, factored in my bland demeanor, which apparently contained a subcutaneous layer of insubordination, and asked: “Don’t you get bored sitting there all day doing nothing?”
A question whose tone and implication I considered a trifle inconsiderate, since I hadn’t spent “all day” doing nothing, reserving relative inactivity for that brief interval before it was time to head out. Rather than defend or explain my idle appearance, I replied amiably enough: “I meditate.”
Nichols blinked without actually blinking, looking stunned, and not in a delighted way. I’m not sure why I had replied as I had, since it would be another twenty years before I even took up meditation, enrolling in the Transcendental Meditation course in a class that included a Frenchman who later complained to the instructor that he wanted a different mantra from the one he had been assigned (“My mantra is working
against
me”), but whichever imp of the perverse activated my tongue didn’t matter: my blithe attempt at airy deflection proved to be more infuriating than any edgy comeback I might have made. I acted as if I were out of her jurisdiction, which no boss can countenance. It may have also confirmed Nichols’s (correct) suspicion that the world of hard-boiled politics was no place for a potted fern like myself. It was recorded in McAuliffe’s excellent history that upon hearing my insolence, Nichols snapped, “Then go meditate at the unemployment line.” Dramatically neat as that plays, the truth was klutzier, as it usually is. She got back into the elevator, hit the button for the fifth floor, and—so I was later informed—told the editor in chief: “I can’t do anything with Wolcott. I tell him to do something and he tells me he’s meditating.” Instead of firing me on the spot, she waited until I returned after a holiday weekend to send me on my merry way. I don’t recall the dialogue on that occasion being particularly snappy, only how compressed the air felt as I left her office, packed quiet with the knowledge shared by everyone on the floor that I had been axed. As soon as I walked in that morning I knew that they knew that I was a goner from the funny little fidgets their mouths made as they forked over the usual Monday-morning hellos. I was standing in front of my former desk with the hollow, bomb-struck feeling of the just fired when Tipmore, trying and failing to sound offhand now that the news was official, asked: “So, Jim, given any thought as to what you’re going to do with your office?”
“Well,” I said, “seeing that I’ll no longer be working here, I don’t imagine I’ll get to
keep
it.”
Which he knew full well, just as he knew that the logical next occupant of the office would be himself. With a cool twist of the swizzle stick he was letting me know that he had felt the office was rightfully his all along and now he was going to inherit it and too bad for me, buddy boy. Good-bye, good luck, and get lost. We never spoke again, one of the many noncommunication pacts formed at the
Voice
that furnished the elevator with awkward silences and straight-ahead stares. Though if anything I owed Tipmore and Mary Perot Nichols (who would go on to become the president of WNYC Communications and leave a priceless legacy to public broadcasting and the arts as the founder of the WNYC Foundation) a gift basket of gratitude. Released from duty, I drew unemployment and used my ejection time to write full out, placing pieces not only at the
Voice
but at rock magazines such as
Circus
, where I interviewed Todd Rundgren, then at the height of his musical wizardhood with attitude to match. From that point onward I never worked a regular office job again, solely writing for a living, something that would have been impossible if New York hadn’t been a city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes. The availability of affordable, problem-plagued, loosely enforced sublets made zigzag lateral movement throughout the city relatively easy, not like it would become a decade later, when each real-estate decision would pyramid under the worry load of upward mobility. In the early seventies, New York landlords were less choosy about whom they rented to, more laissez-faire as long as you didn’t give off a whiff of arson. When one of the
Voice
receptionists decided to get married and vacate the city, she offered me her apartment to sublet on West Ninety-second, between Amsterdam and Columbus. Though I had never been that far north before, above Forty-second Street being total terra incognita, I accepted her offer without a glimmer of thought because one of the advantages of being young in the city is that you can say yes to things without feeling it’s an irrevocable decision that scripts your fate. At that age apartments were just places to stay, temporary launchpads or secluded cubbyholes, not outward constructs of your identity that required Hamlet-style agonizing for fear that at the root of your being, you might not be an “uptown person.”
My new apartment and I were relatively well suited. An acceptable holding cell for the unchoosy bachelor/bachelorette, it was a studio shoe box slightly below street level, affording a window view of feet going by. Because the former tenant was an attractive young woman living solo, she occasionally drew peepers on balmy days when she raised the blinds and cracked open the window in futile hope of a breeze. (No air-conditioning.) Neighborhood men of varying ages and maturity levels who had watched her lug in groceries would sometimes pretend they were picking up a stray dime or quarter, craning their necks forty-five degrees in hopes of a floor show. Sometimes they wouldn’t even bother with the loose-change pantomime, simply bent over double and gawked. So for the first few weeks I had my share of prospective admirers who either hadn’t gotten the news that she had vacated the address or were hoping I was just a temporary sitter and were checking to see if she had returned. On the sunniest of days, the studio admitted barely enough light to imply the slim hope of redemption in a prison movie, and no bulbs seemed bright enough to keep the kitchen from looking depressed. The studio was also right next to the stairs, which reverberated like a bowling alley with each arrival and departure of lead boots and echoing laughter.
When the weather was warm enough for raised windows, I could sometimes hear the couple upstairs making love like a train chugging into the station, picking up speed as they reached the final whistle and ground to a halt. The male partner of this duo was the burly playwright John Ford Noonan, who would often be confused with the playwright and director Tom Noonan (whose eggplant head would loom so spookily in Michael Mann’s
Manhunter
and
Heat
). The Noonan upstairs had a knack for catchy titles—
Heterosexual Temperature in West Hollywood, Raunchy Dame in the Chinese Raincoat
—but the play that made his name was the widely produced
A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking.
Years later it was on one of our first dates that I took my future wife, Laura, to a play written by Noonan and performed with his daughter called
Talking Things Over with Chekhov.
(Before the play we had dinner at the Lion’s Head, whose glory years as a writer’s bar were now as faded as the book jackets on the walls, a too-neat analogy, but there it is, go bother somebody else.) And years after that I was crossing West Twenty-third Street when I spotted Noonan buffaloing toward me with undiminished life force. Though we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in decades, I recognized him, he recognized me, and without breaking stride, he spread his arms and shouted what we were both thinking, “Hey, we got older!” and kept on barreling.
The IRT stop closest to my Ninety-second Street apartment was a convenient four blocks north, but those four blocks often required nimble footwork and ninja awareness of impending action. So much of New York did. Most of the parks were safer walking around than through. (I was warned about venturing into Riverside Park, where, I got the impression, dead bodies were always being discovered after having rolled downhill the night before.) Entire neighborhoods were considered no-go areas where you never knew what the hell might fall from the fire escapes, and even sections of town that didn’t resemble standing rubble had stretches that you avoided, had you been properly briefed. Otherwise, you’d be walking down some leafy block, moderately carefree, turn the wrong corner, and find yourself staring down the barrel of a hostile street, forced to either retrace your steps or run for your freaky life like Cornel Wilde in
The Naked Prey.
It wasn’t just the criminality that kept you radar-alert, the muggings and subway-car shakedowns, it was the crazy paroxysms that punctuated the city, the sense that much of the social contract had suffered a psychotic break. That strip of upper Broadway was the open-air stage for acting-out episodes from unstable patients dumped from mental health facilities, as I discovered when I had to dodge a fully loaded garbage can flung in my direction by a middle-aged man who still had a hospital bracelet on one of his throwing arms. Then, as now, the Ninety-sixth Street crosstown nexus was an irredeemable eyesore that served as a magnet for unmanned shopping carts abandoned on their sides or commandeered as a homeless moving van. It was at the newsstand at the southwest corner of Ninety-sixth that I picked up the copy of the
Daily News
with the arresting headline FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, and it was the perfect spot to receive notice of impending collapse.