Another Little Piece of My Heart (8 page)

There was plenty to write about. The Stones were dressed for the press, Mick in a bright, striped blazer, Keith Richards in red suede boots. Brian Jones, their rhythm guitarist at the time, wore a button on his fly that read
SEX IS HERE TO STAY
. Only the quietest member of the band, Charlie Watts, noticed me. “Don't let the photographers make you nervous,” he said. “Ask your questions.” I whipped out my Kodak and snapped a few shots of Brian as he put on his best sneer, and then I sidled toward Jagger. He was surrounded by women and chatting with no great enthusiasm. I had the feeling that he was standing in a suit of shining armor. I'm not surprised that he's still a brilliantly preserved version of himself, whose only giveaway is the portrait of Dorian Gray that is his face. Brian Jones might have aged into a similar creature, but in 1969, he drowned in a swimming pool. Accidentally or willingly—who can say?

I didn't get much face time with Mick that day, but when the reception ended, Charlie motioned for me to follow him. We slipped into an underground garage where a limo was waiting. A mob of fans rushed us from nowhere, shrieking, tearing at the guys. Everyone made it into the car except Brian. He was engulfed in lips and fingernails. Five girls clutched at his jacket and pants. Others flung themselves over the hood, pounding on the windows, kissing the glass. Finally Brian was rescued
by the police and he climbed into the limo, impassive. So were the others. They'd seen this before, but I hadn't. I was deeply moved. These girls were expressing my own response to rock, but they were able to act on it in a way I couldn't. It was like watching a mystery cult. Suddenly I knew what my piece should be about, not just a description of the hype surrounding the Stones but a speculation on how it must feel to be a rock god. I conjured up the African deity Shango, god of thunder, and I transferred his attributes to Mick. What was it like to regard divinity as a day job? What did it feel like to stand on a stage and make thunder? I didn't have the answers, but I had the spectacle and the devotion down cold.

In the months that followed, my
Voice
column rode the wave that rock created. Only one thing was missing: money. The
Voice
paid so little that I survived mostly on cans of tuna from my parents. (“Don't give it to the goy,” they said of my roommate, John.) But the paper allowed its meagerly paid writers to publish elsewhere, and I'd begun to find other venues for my work. One day I got a call from a legend of New Journalism, Clay Felker. He was the editor of
New York
, then the Sunday magazine of the city's hippest daily (by far), the
Herald Tribune
. Style was one of its major selling points, and it featured writing by the likes of Jimmy Breslin, Nora Ephron, and Tom Wolfe. Soon I was part of the magazine's stable, finally earning the uptown credentials that would give me access to major rock stars. I also gained entry to the fabled back room at Max's Kansas City, where Warhol's minions frolicked. I felt like a total snob for going there, but I couldn't resist the self-importance. Only a year earlier, I'd been a student begging to be noticed; now I was an underground media celebrity. At some point the inevitable happened: I was caricatured in an ad for pickled herring. It was part of an upscale campaign for the briny fish, featuring a character who flitted among trendy milieus. One ad was called “The Herring Maiven Goes to the Discotheque.” At the edge of the sketch, amid the renderings of famous people twisting the night away, was me.

Clay Felker was a man of monumental enthusiasms, and he came up with some very unlikely assignments for his new pop expert. One of them took me to Mexico City, where John Wayne was making a movie about the Alamo. I was nervous about meeting an American icon whose
face was its own John Ford landscape, craggy and monumental. But Wayne was infinitely more cosmopolitan than the characters he played. I thought he would let me have it for my long hair; instead he was consoling. He may have sensed the queerness under my look, because he told me that he knew what it was like to be different. His real first name was Marion, and he'd grown up being teased mercilessly about it. Was there a relationship between that childhood vulnerability and the male icon he'd become? I wondered, but I didn't pursue the point. I hadn't yet learned to ask leading questions, and I was too uncomfortable to stray from my prepared notes. He tried his best to deal with my rather cerebral topics, and I wrote an undistinguished piece about his myth, which had already been amply commented on. It missed the most interesting thing I had detected in him: his empathy. A photographer took a classic odd-couple shot of us, him in cowboy regalia and me in rock-critic drag. He was a foot taller than me, large and rugged. I was pudgy and pubescent. “We'd look funny walking down Fifth Avenue together,” he quipped.

That picture ran in
Newsweek
, along with an article claiming that I'd created something new in journalism: the “pop beat.” This was the kind of thing that made me feel simultaneously like a genius and a fraud. I veered between both perceptions, with no way to gauge the praise. My precocity provided an unassailable mystique, which I took full advantage of, in a benumbed state. There's another, equally absurd photograph of me. I'm on a panel at the Yale Club with several movie-industry honchos, including Jack Valenti and Darryl F. Zanuck, sitting at my side. Zanuck is puffing a cigar, trying his best to hide his contempt for this bizarre creature in a costume that made no sense to him, because he needed the kid, needed the insight that was nothing more than supposition, since who the fuck knew what it all meant? Not me. I shudder when I look at that picture, because I know how I felt. Time was moving on two tracks—professionally at breakneck speed, but emotionally not at all. I was frozen, yet careening.

Clay Felker didn't regard me as a caricature. He was the first editor I'd met who treated me like a peer. That might mean hitting on a woman I was seeing (if he was more her speed), but it also produced a comforting informality. Sometimes we met in his apartment, a large, messy duplex on the tony end of 57th Street. He was married to Pamela Tiffin, an actress so beautiful in a classic Hollywood way that, when she came down the staircase, wearing a pale blue robe trimmed in fur, my eyes
went out of focus. At such moments, all doubt about my sexuality vanished. I couldn't be queer if Pamela Tiffin left me breathless. What did it matter if Mick Jagger did, too?

One day, Felker called to tell me that I didn't have to file my latest piece. The
Trib
had folded. There wasn't room in the city for a hip daily alternative to the
Times
. It would take him several years to raise the money to publish
New York
as a stand-alone weekly, and when he finally succeeded I became a contributor, migrating between that magazine and the
Voice
. I used
New York
's expense budget to travel to places where the
Voice
would never send me. Once there, I would write about a well-known rock band for my uptown outlet and report on the scene for my downtown column. In the
Voice
I could be as polemical as I liked, and I began to develop a sense of pop as a unique aesthetic experience. It was clownish and trashy, inherently political, since it could subvert the past with lightning speed, and able to bite the hands of the industries that fed it—so I argued. This theory allowed me to tie rock to the emerging idea that mass culture could be a source of radical change. “A pop critic,” I wrote, “needs his eyes, his ears … and an impressive German vocabulary.” (I'd just discovered the Frankfurt School.)

The
Voice
was doing well enough to have its own ad campaign. “Expect the unexpected,” the tagline read. But its office was oddly formal—a hip hush prevailed.
New York
had a more casual vibe. If I dropped by to bat around ideas, I was likely to run into a writer I'd imitated in j-school. The peak experience came when a man in a white suit introduced himself. This wasn't just any white
schmatta
. It was a package as distinctive as my rock-critic drag, and inside it was Tom Wolfe.

The first thing I noticed was his face. It was a shade of pink that didn't exist in the Bronx, except on a new Spalding. But the most fascinating thing, to a boy journalist like me, was his demeanor. He was engaged but remote, curious yet impenetrable—the perfect stance for a reporter, I decided right away. I was already copying so much from Wolfe—the voice that operated as a personal signature, the rhetoric meant to suit the story, the focus on those rituals of dress and jargon he called “status details.” One look at him and I realized that I could never crib his look. I was far too grubby. Thank God for paisley shirts—they didn't show stains.

Tom Wolfe was very solicitous of me. He included one of my
Voice
pieces in his anthology of New Journalism, and he even agreed to give
me a letter of recommendation to the American Studies program at Yale, where he'd earned a Ph.D. (“So you want to get closer to God,” he snickered. I took his drift and never applied to the school.) I think his attitude toward me was part of a larger affection for men who had invented their own roles—pop-music millionaires, custom-car Michelangelos, psychedelic prophets. Eventually this fascination with the exceptional man pushed Wolfe to the right. He was a gifted picador of the liberal cultural elite, but he had no feeling for social oppression, and this prevented him from understanding the movements springing up around him. As my politics veered leftward over the course of the sixties, we drifted apart. Felker, however, remained in my life for many years. At one point I actually punched him in the stomach when he killed a story that was sympathetic to the Vietcong. But, being Clay, he reacted by inviting me to breakfast at his apartment.

Moving among famous writers didn't faze me, maybe because I didn't think of them as charismatic. I saw writing as a shelter from self-exposure. It went well with masturbation, and I was sure every author did that as a reward for producing a great paragraph. But there were some literary lions so fearsome that they might as well have been gods of the guitar to me. Norman Mailer was one. I'd sharpened my knives on his grindstone. He was my model of what a critic should be: a political thinker with a persona that challenged every orthodoxy. In college I'd devoured his collection of early essays,
Advertisements for Myself
. His style combined the swagger of a working-class bruiser with the intellectual reach of an Ivy League grad and the acuity of a radical—everything I wanted my own style to be. What I didn't want was to meet him. Mailer was renowned for his fistfights, and he'd stabbed his wife. But meet him I did, when he stopped by the paper.

As a founder of the
Voice
, Mailer was welcome there, and he would sometimes show up to poke around. He wandered through the office, chatting with writers. As he approached my desk I flashed the grin that meant I was terrified. His eyes widened and he raised his fists. This was his way of greeting a comer in the game. It was a well-known shtick, and I probably should have realized that. But all I saw was a bruiser who wanted to fight me. I was seized by confusion and panic. I fled from the office.

Yes, I was a wuss when it came to meeting my heroes. That was why I'd always shrunk away from Bob Dylan, though there were several opportunities to be introduced. I had a recurring waking nightmare in
which any Dylan song about how phony most people are was really about me. At moments when I was sure my inner fraud would burst out, I heard him singing: “Something is happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Disco?” This wasn't just a fantasy about humiliation. Dylan's lyrics posed a major challenge to my competence as a rock critic. Their meaning kept slipping out of my grasp. I should have understood that this is precisely the Dylanesque experience. The song flees from whatever it represents; it eludes definition. His great achievement in the sixties was not wisdom but dexterity. Yet I felt compelled to crack the code.

I was never tempted to search the Great Man's garbage, as one notorious fanatic did, but in my need to dredge for meaning I made one of my worst errors (and there were several doozies). I analyzed the song “All Along the Watchtower” without a lyric sheet. The words were usually printed on the back cover of albums, but I had an advance copy without a jacket. A certain line intrigued me: “Two riders were approaching and the wind began to howl.” I heard it as “Two
writers
were approaching …” and I concluded that it was a reference to Dylan and his fellow prophet Allen Ginsberg. After the paper came out I was told by one of his associates that Dylan got a good laugh out of that.

Like many of my heroes, Dylan eventually moved rightward in his sexual politics, toward a nostalgia for patriarchal values that, I think, has rigidified his work. Ask yourself how many women artists cover his songs and you'll see what I mean. Get me stoned and, like many people my age, I will chatter on about what Dylan was and is. But the conversation usually gets around to,
Did I finally meet him?
Yes and no. Sometime during the late sixties I was invited to his dressing room before an arena concert. He sat on the edge of a table, looking like a boxer about to have his hands taped up. I, of course, had lost the ability to speak.

“I've been hearing a lot about you,” Dylan drawled.

“Me too,” I peeped.

I don't remember anything else about that brief conversation—the awkwardness is what sticks in my mind. I had blown it. Failed to make an impression. And, unlike Charlie Watts, he was not about to say, “Don't be nervous, ask your questions.” Afterward I realized that this had been a very charged encounter. I was looking at someone with a mask of perfect insulation. At this point in his career, he was a man whose survival, creative and otherwise, depended on hiding, and he was
very good at it. I was in hiding, too, for different reasons. I felt closest to myself when I got to be a fan, and that's what I became in Dylan's presence. But sympathy wasn't his strong suit. I was relieved that he didn't insult me.