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 Voices 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 Voices 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.
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 tri
ed 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.
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