Lucking Out (4 page)

When one of the receptionists ducked out for lunch or to run an errand, I would pinch-hit at the front desk, seated in the cockpit, as it were, and afforded a wide-angle view of University Place. Once or twice Anaïs Nin majestically floated by, her face powdered like a geisha’s, a blue cape trailing behind her in the Kodak sunlight. Anaïs Nin—her name carried a music-box lilt then, seldom heard now, her cult fame a peacock feather that literary fashion has left behind. In the seventies, however, she was a prefeminist upright odalisque idol and a milky apparition of Paris past, her diaries with their familiar covers clutched and carried everywhere by young women whose devotion to passion and literature had an idealistic ardency ripe for disillusionment. But in 1973 the backlash against Nin’s queenly deportment—the narcissism slathered like moisturizing lotion across thousands of pages—had yet to commence, and she swanned through the Village like the last dollop of dyed splendor in a Sidney Lumet world of screeching tires and clogged sinuses. Donald Barthelme once dropped by at the front desk, a confabulator whose stories in
The New Yorker
were whirring devices constructed from exquisite diagrams with sadness peeking from the corners, leaving residue. Jill Johnston, the dance writer turned Joycean stream-of-consciousness riding-the-rapids diarist, would wait for someone to open the back stairs (she was phobic about elevators), occasionally plucking a seashell from her denim vest to leave on the counter as a souvenir. I always liked Jill’s entrances because she seemed to bring a playful breeze with her, a sense of salutation that was like a greeting from a grasshopper, owing no allegiance to the daily grind.
Voice
writers talked a good game of being uninhibited, but for them it was more of a policy statement, a plank in the countercultural platform. She was more performative. It was Jill who would roll on the floor with a lesbian pal at the Town Hall debate on feminism starring Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer, an antic that provoked Mailer to snap, “Jill, act like a lady!”

Strangers would pop in with unsolicited manuscripts in manila envelopes to leave at the front desk for the editors. When the stack had reached a suitable height, I was given permission to open the envelopes and sort them into piles according to the appropriate department. Semi-idealistic as I was then, I accepted as gospel the democratic notion that there was all this rough undiscovered talent Out There crying out for discovery, rescue, tender care, bunny food, and a shot at publication—a phantom legion of mute, inglorious Miltons waiting for their big Broadway break. Within one of these manila envelopes ticked the explosive arrival of some railroad-flat genius or untenured academic drudge whose individuality would leap off the page like a police bulletin and knock them off their bar stools at the Lion’s Head, where men were men and their livers were shot. Boy, was I ever misaligned with reality. Based on my slush-pile diving, it was dishwater all the way down. Given the
Voice
’s status as a mouthy paper that didn’t aspire to starchy respectability, I was amazed at how so many of the manuscripts droned on with the dental-drill lecturing of letters to the editor at the
New York Times
or moused along with sensitive whiskers aquiver, emulating the crinkly-leafed, diffused-light impressionism of a
New Yorker
sketch—the kind of Talk of the Town piece
The New Yorker
hadn’t published since the fifties, not that I had read
The New Yorker
in the fifties. But as soon as I saw a manuscript with each comma perfectly tucked like a lock of hair behind a shy ear, the end of each paragraph landing with a muffled, dying fall, I pictured the author picturing himself as Updike or E. B. White, lit by an attic window.

The stabs at relevance were worse—ham-fisted and all over the canvas. The Watergate bombshell of the eighteen-minute gap in the Nixon tape produced an inundation of speculative humor pieces about what was missing on the tape, Russell Baker–Art Buchwald exercises that occasionally escalated into Paul Krassner necro-buggery fantasy without being funny. (Krassner was the creator of the champion sick-humor hoax in his satirical magazine,
The Realist
, where an exposé titled “The Parts Left Out of [William Manchester’s] Kennedy Book” claimed that the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had caught LBJ sticking his penis into the mortal hole in JFK’s throat on the flight back from Dallas. I never found that put-on funny either, but the controversy hung jester bells on Krassner that he’s been jangling ever since.) The fact that so many sharp brains—I recognized some of the names as belonging to occasional
Voice
contributors—were mining the same Nixon-fucking-the-Constitution-and/or-Rose Mary Woods fantasies showed that the imaginative lodes of collective fantasy were much thinner and chalkier than I had thought, that there was much more mental conformity below the surface than one would have guessed from all the flying elbows being thrown from these gag writers. Everybody seemed to be staring at the same targets through the same pair of binoculars.

I do recall seeing an account of jury-duty service submitted by Alfred Kazin that stood out from the rest of the laundry—wow, an actual writer, I thought, one whose authority was evident from the first footstep he took on the page. (It had originally been commissioned for
Playboy
in one of its wild, impetuous moments.) Years later I would be invited to appear on Dick Cavett’s PBS show with Kazin and a pair of fellow reviewers, taking part in a literary panel discussion in which Kazin did his blinky best to pretend the rest of us were lawn ornaments while he held forth like a highbrow hound dog bemoaning the intellectual erosion at the
New York Times Book Review
, a topic always dear to people’s hearts. He found it perturbing that the
Book Review
had given front-page treatment to Gay Talese’s snorkel submersion into the hot tub of the American libido,
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, an editorial decision he felt deserving of reprimand and reproach. That the rest of us weren’t perturbed allowed him to have the heath all to himself. Somewhere along the line the monologue in his head and the monologue out of his mouth wedded into an uninterrupted melody that you longed to interrupt, to give that murmurous, sonorous eloquence a rest. It wasn’t his conceit that rankled (hard-earned conceit being acceptable as long as it’s not ringed with barbed wire and rude to waiters); no, it was the pained moral conscience that accompanied it, the sigh of weary resignation worthy of a Moses with no followers, as if he were the last literary soul in the five boroughs who cared.

Sifting through the slush pile served the useful purpose of pointing me in the direction of what not to do as I tried to break into print from inside the building. Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble—flip the on switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five-hundred-word slot: no matter how short a piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. A number of
Voice
regulars with their own weekly beats had lapsed into a chummy informality with beer suds at the top and not much below, an anecdotal approach that struck me as a drought waiting to happen, and not just because I had so few anecdotes to call my own. Writing that was too talky lacked the third rail below the surface that suggested untapped power reserves, an extra store of ammo. Mailer’s writing could be verbose, but he never relaxed his knuckles; it never devolved into chat. Loosely fortified with these scraped-together guidelines, bent like a concert pianist over a borrowed typewriter and barely able to think further than one or two sentences ahead, I applied myself to whatever chanced by in order to break into the
Voice
with my own byline, enhanced with the versatility of a novice willing to essay a variety of subjects because I was equally unversed in all of them. American history, European history, New York politics (Carmine De Sapio, who he?), the performing arts, the drug scene, the dominant schools of psychotherapy, the factional feuds between the rugby squads of sixties radical movements, these were but a smattering of the blank regions on my intellectual road map to points unknown. My lack of education and expertise didn’t hold me back; if anything, it made me feel free, unbuckled. I didn’t know what I was capable of doing as a writer, because I didn’t know what I was
incapable
of doing, because I hadn’t done anything yet. Everything was so new to me that nothing seemed ruled out. Niche journalism hadn’t yet whittled too many writers into specialty artists, dildos for rent.

In those lax days that were soon to end sooner than anyone anticipated, the
Voice
had an idiosyncratic system for stocking the shelves of its review departments. Freelance reviews were left in a vertical folder for the arts editor, Diane Fisher. Because these reviews were unassigned, there might be three unsolicited reviews of the same rock concert or some new album trying to squeeze through the same tunnel, reviews of events and items that might have already been assigned to a regular. It was like playing darts in the dark, hoping to hit the board. It may not have been the most efficient system, but it was ego sparing. When something turned in on spec didn’t make the cut, I didn’t know if it had flunked because it wasn’t good enough, if it was a victim of column-space shrinkage, if one of the regulars had already called dibs, and so on. The pieces were never actually
rejected
, handed back with a skull and crossbones slashed in ink across the top, they just weren’t accepted, which enabled you to avoid discouragement but also left you dangling, until the next elimination dance. So I kept trying, trying to figure out the combination to the lock, find the elusive sweet spot.

Having intercepted a publicist’s phone call one day at the front desk, I zipped uptown to interview Groucho Marx, who was in town to promote a Marx Brothers festival. It was the last interview of a long day, and he was flagging but cordial (if a little puzzled), a cheery tam-o’-shanter perched on his head as he humored this obvious novice, his sharpest retort coming when I asked what he remembered most about working with Marilyn Monroe on
Love Happy
, and he said: “She had square tits.” His minder was Erin Fleming, who had played the NYU graduate with pretentious airs (“For me, Norman Mailer has exactly that same sort of relevance—that affirmative, negative duality that only Proust or Flaubert could achieve”) whose portal Woody Allen’s anxious sperm prepared to ford in
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.
Fleming was later sued and removed as Groucho’s legal guardian by his family, who accused her of pushing him into public appearances past the limits of elderly fatigue, resulting in numerous minor strokes. Falling by the wayside, Fleming eventually died of a self-inflicted gunshot, but nothing was foreshadowed on that late afternoon; she was charming and helpful, papering over awkward pauses with diplomatic interjections and bringing the interview in for a gentle fade so that Groucho could have a nap before the carousel restarted in the evening. The Groucho article didn’t run, but brief reviews I did of rock albums, downtown plays, and TV programs began to be published. Upon appearing in print, I realized that I possessed an asset that I had never reckoned on, something given to me at birth.

My name.

My byline, James Wolcott, it sounded so
mature
, so English, so litty-critty and stamped with authority. It was a byline that sounded as if it knew what it was talking about and had an extensive library for backup. That the impression my byline gave bore little resemblance to its owner didn’t matter, because no one could see me eating lunch at my desk. It would be years before people realized I was nowhere near as lineaged, assured, and stately as my byline suggested, one well-known editor from Knopf exclaiming upon meeting me, “And here I always thought you were a member of the fucking
gentry.
”

These small incursions not only bolstered my confidence but gave me something to clip from the paper as proof to my parents and other interested parties that I wasn’t just gazing out the window in the circulation department wishing the phone wouldn’t ring.

Then the everyday drift of events picked up speed and went over the falls into the thundering foam. In 1974, the founding fathers of the
Voice
were dethroned in a coup that sent Dan Wolf and the publisher, Ed Fancher, packing into exile, or as far as “exile” could take you while still maintaining an abode in Greenwich Village. In a buccaneer move that none of us underlings saw coming (and caught nearly all the overlings off guard), the paper was sold by its principal owner, the patrician pretty boy and former New York City councilman Carter Burden, to Clay Felker, who had made
New York
magazine the flagship station of the New Journalism, the only weekly worthy of the racing silks and the dusty roar of career jockeys working the far turn. The sale was a culture clash fused with a shotgun wedding. Where the
Voice
was a downtown scrappy collage, a bulletin board that shot back,
New York
was a midtown, Madison Avenue, starfucky, glossy display window where the contributors shone with the reflected glow of their glamorous subjects, achieving their own celebrity shellac—Tom Wolfe, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Breslin, John Simon, Albert Goldman, Gail Sheehy, Nick Pileggi, Nik Cohn, Judith Crist. If the
Voice
still fancied itself as something of a rogue enterprise, punching above its weight with wicked uppercuts,
New York
aspired to the cocktail party in the penthouse suite where every name was boldfaced and the tinkling of ice was musical delight. In this, my first experience with an editorial coup, I had the psychic cushion of being a bit player not worth waging a custody battle over. I had little stake pro or con in an editorial changeover because I was still down in the circulation department, hiding incriminating mistakes in my desk and fielding phone calls from the highly frustrated. It was far more emotionally whipsawing for most of those around me, whose histories with the paper went back a decade or more and had become integrated into their cellular structure. For those of such braided loyalty, the
Voice
was the only journalistic home they had ever known, the only hut on the island willing to accept the idiosyncratic and unclassifiable and provide refuge. Dan and Ed, Ed and Dan (their names went up and down together like a teeter-totter), were soft-spoken patriarchs whose presences were taken for granted as enduring. The sense of dismay and betrayal at the paper being sold cut deep and cross-angled, serrated with the knowledge of how much Dan and Ed had profited from the original sale to Carter Burden while writers were subsisting on financial scraps. As would later happen at
The New Yorker
when William Shawn was deposed, some would never recover from Wolf’s departure, banking their bitterness for long-term capital losses and never quite finding themselves again.