Lucking Out (3 page)

By contrast, the phantasmal histrionics of Hunter S. Thompson in
Rolling Stone
never commandeered my cadet allegiance because I always found them something of a masquerade, a grown man with a cigarette holder playing outlaw dandy for his fan club. The jeweled brocade of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism bedazzled, popcorn kernels of laughter exploding alongside the typographical fireworks, but his tours de force were such feats of mind reading and magicianship that they and he didn’t seem quite human. I wasn’t into baroque caricature then, when the brick-hard reality of the sixties seemed berserk enough, and Wolfe’s dandyism wasn’t something I could relate to—in his author’s photos he looked like a painted flat posed in front of another painted flat. But each issue of the
Voice
was a barrage of articulate gabble, crackling with radio static and overlapping quarrels (like the gangster families in
The Godfather
, the
Voice
convulsed into feuds every few years to purge the bad blood and begin a fresh cycle of animosities), hitting you from an ambush trap of different angles while sticking to the actuality of what was happening, offering the cinema-screen field of view.
Voice
writers could be as egotistical as anybody else who packed words into snowballs for a precarious living, but it wasn’t a high-buffed, cachet-seeking, English-majory-brunette, every-comma-hung-like-candy-canes-on-a-Christmas-tree exercise in fine craft and delectation.
Voice
writers tended to be more direct, shooting their sentences from shoulder level. You were always aware of the hard surfaces and clashing forces off of which everything caromed—the noun-verb combination punches that had traveled from Hemingway to Jimmy Cannon to Pete Hamill—and you could almost hear the mousy scribble of quotes scratched into their reporters’ notebooks that would yield the killer payoff, the fatal clincher. So to be accepted into the
Voice
was to be initiated into a fight club where you either fit in or were flushed out. Or so I fancied, never doubting I’d make the cut if given a chance. Such confidence I had, a healthy by-product of not knowing any better.

To return to the office where Mailer’s photograph silently roared: The questions Wolf asked were basic and general, mild probes befitting an informal interview with a noncandidate for a nonexistent job. I wonder if he thought I was a rough diamond or a raw carrot. From my end, I thought—truthfully, I’m not sure what I thought, or if I was even thinking from inside the swirl of expectations I had spun out of the daydreams of glory that owed less to literature than to Hollywood films such as
Youngblood Hawke
, where the barefoot, bare-chested author straight from the provinces landed Suzanne Pleshette as his editor (“Shall I call you Youngy or Bloody?” is the line Gore Vidal cherishes), and TV’s
The Waltons
, where John-Boy and typewriter longed to sprout the heavenly wings of
Look Homeward, Angel.
But if I had envisioned that Wolf would be so impressed that I had quit college and left home to apply to the
Voice
that I would be accepted at once and sent out with an assignment to prove myself worthy of Mailer’s sword tap (and I had), the helium soon left that balloon. This wasn’t Hollywood, and a handshake wasn’t going to welcome me into the fraternity of fire jumpers. The meeting ended with an invitation to submit something and they’d be happy to take a look at it, the editorial equivalent of “Drop by if you’re ever in the neighborhood (but call first).” It was up to me to prove myself, not up to them to nurture the tender bough and outstretched leaves of some greasy kid popping in from nowhere. I didn’t need a blackboard diagram to understand that they hadn’t been waiting all their lives for me to emerge from the woods like a natural wonder, jangling my pocketful of epiphanies. Wolf didn’t try to discourage me, direct me back to college for more seasoning, so there was at least that.

What I didn’t understand until later was that by the autumn of 1972, Wolf had wearied of the
Voice
and its perennial teething problems and gnawing neuroses, tired of being father-confessor/mentor-guru/chief rabbi to a restive band of underpaid, psychological dependents. They, in turn, resented their dependency, confronting Wolf in December 1971 (the same month as the Mailer-Vidal fracas) to demand more money from management (was this what Mailer was slyly alluding to in his letter to Dan about “sterling reporters” unwilling to live on hot dogs?), their demands undercut by their expressions of devotion. After the death of Don McNeill in August 1968, a drowning accident that devastated Wolf, he wasn’t looking for new candidates to fill the role of rising son. (One historian of the paper wrote, “There was no young writer [McNeill was only twenty-three] who had ever shown more promise, or to whom Dan Wolf had ever gotten closer, and … in all his years as editor of the
Village Voice
, no event ever hurt Dan Wolf more than when Don McNeill left it.”) It was exhausting enough trying to keep everybody happily unhappy within the fine
Voice
tradition of constant uproar without the stress and disappointment of tending another litter of possible protégés. He was beginning to tune out the conflicting
Voice
s to a pinched whine, dialing out the indoor traffic. Which, had I known, would have been okay because I wasn’t searching for a father figure, not even in Norman Mailer, believing (or so I believed that I believed) that discipleship was best practiced from the on-deck circle, where you were less likely to get on the font of wisdom’s nerves.

Every few days I would visit the
Voice
, asking if anything had “opened up,” varying the timings of my visits to lend them an air of happenstance, as if I were just popping in on my way elsewhere, some trifling errand perhaps, toeing that delicate line between harmless nuisance and complete pest. In the meantime, I had gone through the little money I had brought, living on Cokes and powdered donuts, a regimen that would yield so many negative dividends in future years. I also went in search of other work, one job agency declining to send me out on interviews because I didn’t have a proper coat—“I can’t send you into a personnel office with you dressed like that,” one young man said with a note of kindness that I appreciated. A less choosy outfit sent me to apply for a dishwasher’s job at a restaurant where there was so much steam, slop, and cursing it was like a submarine taking on water. I responded to a newspaper ad for holiday-season helpers at a department store—was it Altman’s?—where everyone there already looked as if their feet hurt and we were sent home as soon as the available slots were filled. I had perfected a modest pantomime of entering and departing the Latham Hotel in a slow, eyes-averted, nonchalant hurry to avoid detection, which didn’t stop the billing notices from sneaking under my room door, making a little whisking sound that I learned to dread. Perhaps if I had had other contacts in the city, I could have used them to score temporary work, but I didn’t know anyone yet and hadn’t made any new friends, a gift for friendship not being a prominent item in my golf bag. I had only one ladder propped against the wall, and that ladder led to the
Village Voice
, but the ladder only went so high—I couldn’t get over that wall.

Once the money dwindled until there was just enough for a bus ticket back to Baltimore, I packed to leave, having just barely arrived. My suitcase was spread open on the hotel bed, thinly packed, my having brought just enough clothes to throw on in case of fire. I had made it through the previous winter at college in the whistling-cold mountains of western Maryland in a single pair of sneakers and, when not feeling sorry for myself, fancied myself quite the Spartan pioneer. I told myself I was beating a tactical retreat and would return once I had saved more money and mapped things out better, but an alternative reel in my head had me returning to Frostburg to get my B.A. and maybe move on to graduate studies in English lit, where I would scoff at John Barth to show what a rebel I was. I put through a last phone call to the
Voice
and asked for Dan Wolf, who, surprisingly, took the call. (When I had asked for him before at the front desk, he was either out or in meetings.) I explained my situation without laying on too much melodrama and told him I wanted to leave a forwarding address in Maryland where I could be reached if anything opened up in the future. I wasn’t bluffing or making a pity ploy; my mind was made up to go. But instead of taking down my address, Wolf sighed and said: “
Ohhhhh
, all
right
, why don’t you come down, we’ll see if we can find something.”

And, really, everything that’s happened to me since swung from the hinge of that moment, the gate that opened because one editor shrugged and said,
Ah, what the hell.

The
Voice
did find me something, not in editorial, but in the circulation department at the rear of the first floor, where I processed subscription orders and fielded telephone complaints about late delivery or copies lost or chewed beyond recognition in the mail, the latter task requiring patience, a caring tone, and similar affiliated “people skills” that made every phone call an adventure. Were I to man a crisis hotline at some volunteer center today, I could muster the soothing tones of a late-night jazz DJ and defuse most minor crises, but back then I met friction with friction, which was the house style at the
Voice
, but no treat for the nervous system, mine or anyone else’s. It was my first extended contact with that hardy, nasal species of persistence known as the New York Complainer, capable of raising the smallest dispute into
Judgment at Nuremberg
, and it made the head hurt. Although it’s the writing that’s remembered, one of the major drivers in the
Voice
’s downtown bible status back then was the classified-ads section for apartment rentals and job listings that no prospector could do without. An urban legend had taken hold that there was a special secret drop-off point on Tuesday nights where early birds could get the jump on everybody else to prospect the classifieds before deliveries were made in the rest of Manhattan. It wasn’t true. If memory serves, the first bundles were always dropped at Sheridan Square early Wednesday morning, but the rumor mill kept churning about a treasure-map rendezvous point on Tuesday nights whose location was known only to a cunning few. I fended call after call from job seekers and apartment hunters wanting, pleading,
demanding
to know where the first bale of
Voice
s landed so that they could get the paper before anyone else and circle the real-estate ads in ink. Nothing I said could disabuse them. It got to the point a few times when I would say, in a whispery, scared voice, “I’m sorry, I’d like to tell you, but I can’t, I can’t—” then hang up as if a black glove had landed on my receiver, cutting off the transmission to Allied forces. Some would then ring back and ask to speak to my supervisor, for whom I was already an albatross, a cross to bear, and a daily penance. For justifiable reasons, I was nearly fired on a number of occasions—I called in sick one Friday to catch the opening of Sam Peckinpah’s melancholy canter through auburn-drenched mortality,
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
, returning on Monday to find my desk had been completely cleared off by my boss, as if a crime scene had been eliminated—but was given more stays of execution than I deserved.

On the inside looking out, I managed to become a minor fixture in the aquarium, part of the sandy grit at the bottom of the
Voice
’s ecosystem. I dated a co-worker, though dating isn’t exactly what we did. I’m not sure what it was we did, recalling only the prison heat of her five-floor walk-up on Eighth Street—a street as unpicturesque today as it was then—where she once chucked her shoes at me as I exited following a minor spat in which it had been determined I was in the wrong. This being the seventies, it wasn’t standard-issue footwear she was hurling but chunky platform shoes worthy of Carmen Miranda or a member of the New York Dolls, real clompers that, her aim slightly awry, landed against the door with a murderous thud. I’m not even sure her firetrap of a studio had a bed, since I recall the two of us spending a lot of time on the floor listening to the jazz station on the radio. She was a luscious string bean, the woman I’ll call Leanna, an Italian-American tempest with a raucous, dirty laugh and chocolate eyes who enjoyed a smattering of rough sex, the bruisier the better. In this area, as in so many other areas where she and her mattress were concerned, I was frustratingly half-measured, reluctant to close the gap between a light open-hand slap and a closed hard fist. Once she accused me of trying to choke her after we came out of a Robert Altman movie called
California Split
over whose merits we differed, she finding it completely sucky and me being somewhat more judiciously appreciative. Our disagreement escalated until my hands floated into a choke position around her throat without actually touching. “But the other night you
wanted
me to choke you,” I said after she had let out a yelp on the street, to which she replied: “Yeah, and of course you wouldn’t—you never want to do things when I want to, only when you want to.” It was soon clear that I wasn’t the considerate brute she was craving. Months after our brief office non-affair ended without having established enough traction for a genuine breakup, Leanna, playing show-and-tell after work, lifted her loose blouse here and there to display purple-blue nebula-like bruises bestowed by her latest beau, a member of the NYPD. It was as if—no “as if” about it—she were taunting me about finding someone macho enough to give her what she wanted, a
real
man who didn’t putter around and hide behind some nice-guy bullshit. Leanna later moved to Los Angeles, where she lived with a well-known character actor who, during one cocaine fugue, chased her around the lawn with hedge clippers, threatening to cut off her nipples. “You have a
lawn
?” I said, and she laughed. Despite my allegiance to Norman Mailer and Peckinpah movies, I had too much altar boy in me to seize the bitch goddess of success by her ponytail and bugger the Zeitgeist with my throbbing baguette. That just wasn’t me. I was so unmacho I couldn’t even pronounce the word properly, giving it a hard
c
until someone in the circulation department corrected me so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself further.