Lucking Out

by James Wolcott

  He was not the one who talent-scouted me. Contact was made by Lee Eisenberg, who, knowing my devotion to a certain black feline, had a bag of kitty litter delivered to my door. The editor to whom I was assigned at Esquire was a young woman in her mid-twenties named Dominique Browning, imaginative, scarily proficient, bound for the higher rafters of magazine-dom, with transfixing crystal blue eyes whose glance always seemed to catch you unawares even if you had been looking forward to it the entire elevator ride up to Esquire’s floor. I had a crush on Dominique. Everyone had a crush on Dominique. There was a secret society of Dominique infatuees who stroked her name aloud as if it had dove wings. I probably fantasized that she would be the editorial Suzanne Pleshette to my rippling raw-talent James Franciscus in Youngblood Hawke, only Dominique wasn’t droll and raven-dark like Pleshette posing in doorways and I couldn’t quite get a Jungle Jim ripple going. It was certainly for the best, my opportunities for embarrassment more usefully deployed offstage, enabling me to maintain the facade of cool professionalism that existed whenever I practiced it in the men’s room mirror.

  In 1979, I also published my first piece for the New York Review of Books, a roundup of books about television, the subject mattering less than the fact that I was being initiated, if not fully inducted, into the intellectual Sky Club, where Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, V. S. Pritchett, Elizabeth Hardwick, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, and I. F. Stone were contributors. In my middling twenties then, I was probably the youngest of the paper’s contributors, whose median age was somewhere around the half-century mark and would only climb to Methuselah heights. My first arrival at its offices on West Fifty-seventh underlined my unripened status. I was sitting in the outer office, waiting to go over my copy, when Barbara Epstein came out with an air of dispatch and handed me a manila envelope as if it contained codes that needed to be delivered to HQ, fast. “It’s a doorman building,” she said, “but make sure the doorman buzzes the apartment while you’re there—” At which point the editor Robert Silvers rode to the rescue by popping out of his office and saying, “No, no, that’s not a messenger—he’s one of our contributors.” That I was mistaken for a messenger might have been mortifying if I had owned much in the way of pride, but I prided myself on my lack of pride. (I was only sorry that I didn’t get a chance to check out the address on the envelope, imagining myself “dropping something off” for Didion or Sontag.) Lack of undue pride, overprizing one’s lack of pretense, has a self-punitive side, a penalty tax, I recognize now. If only such enlightenments arrived when they could do you some good. A healthier dash of self-worth and I might not have finished out the seventies where I did, pacing the ceiling.

  Unable to pull enough together for a down payment on my apartment when the building on Horatio went co-op, I was in luck. I was offered an apartment on St. Marks Place that a former girlfriend was vacating, which I could sublet until the lease was up and have renewed in my name. Making the hazardous journey from West Village to East, I saw the apartment as a stopgap, a stepping-stone to the next chapter of my ruthless climb to the top of the middle, but I would stay there for ten years, as if serving out a sentence handed down from an unknown court. True, it was a rent-stabilized apartment, something so coveted in New York real estate that tenants would hold on to one until their toenails had turned yellow, their bodies had gone scarecrow, and they had become shut-in hoarders, until the inevitable day fell when neighbors would notice “a funny smell” wafting from the apartment, and out came the carcass, buried under a rotting pyramid of pet-food cans. I suppose there are worse ways to go. Incarceration wasn’t too bad for, oh, the first six or seven years, but the longer I stayed, the harder it became to leave, despite the lack of amenities that less evolved societies took for granted. It was a studio like the one on Horatio, but smaller, darker, sulkier. Horatio had two windows into which sunsets could wash. St. Marks had one window that snatched a meager slice of morning light. No air-conditioning, no cable hookup, and a bathroom where I could hear every gurgle upstairs. I never had the walls painted, letting them fade to a festive laundry gray. Homeless alcoholics, holed up on the roof for informal meetings, deposited empty bottles in the rain gutters, sending water slopping over the sides during torrential storms and cascading down the back wall, often leaking through the tops of sills and giving the inside walls small-scale topographical maps of severe beach erosion. With my studio located on the floor conveniently above the garbage room, mice didn’t have far to come to visit. I once dispatched a mouse with a broom after it dropped in around three o’clock at night, swinging at it like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs while my cat, Gully, sedately sat by and monitored the situation, interested in seeing how this would turn out. Once the mouse was suitably flattened (not something I enjoyed doing, but glue traps seemed more sadistic and the snap of mousetraps too guillotine), I, sweat drenched on this summer night by the sudden exercise, gave Gully a silent look of reproach for falling down on the job as a mouser. I may have actually voiced something like this aloud, since a person who lives alone with a pet is prone to carrying on one-sided conversations. As I prepared to sweep the dead mouse into a dustpan, Gully trotted over to the radiator, reached behind it with her paw, and scooped out a decomposed mouse body that had been there so long it looked mummified, it too unable to give up a rent-stabilized apartment. Rather than tote the dead mouse in her mouth, she scooted it over with her paw and left it next to the fresh body, as if to say, Since you’re disposing of that one, how ’bout getting rid of this one while you’re at it? Cats really do have their nerve.

  What I inhabited on St. Marks was a primitive, rough-draft “man-cave,” a term that makes me shudder whenever I hear it on a real-estate show such as House Hunters or Property Virgins, a man-cave being something one needs to escape from, not a womb to revert to in middle age to revegetate. It was the only apartment I lived in in that high-crime era that was burglarized. I returned from a screening or some other outing one night and, reaching the top steps of the first-floor stairs, saw that my door was ajar. I heard nothing happening within. Whoever had been there had presumably left, unless they were waiting inside, as happened to someone I knew who had been face-punched as soon as he stepped in. I eased the door open, flipped on the light, and flinched as if expecting everything to leap to life, crying, “Boo!” What I saw was a shambles worse than the one that was the usual ordinary. Drawers open, their contents spilled on the floor, mattress askew, records and books strewn across the floor. But nothing major seemed to be missing. The TV and the VCR must have been too megalithic to lug in a jiffy down the stairs and through the narrow hall, and nothing else would have fetched much on the resale market. It wasn’t as if I had a jewelry box where I stowed all my “nice things.” It wasn’t material things I was worried about, in any case. The fear in my throat was that vicious harm had come to my Gully, that she might be lying kicked-dead on her side, her life broken. Or that in a panic as the place was being tossed she might have darted out the door, and the rest of my night would be dedicated to going from floor to floor looking for her, hoping she hadn’t somehow gotten out into the street. As worst-case scenarios were firing synaptically away in rapid overlapping succession, Gully poked her head out of the closet door, checking to see if the coast was clear, then stepped into the room, her meow sounding only marginally more cranky than usual. I filled her water bowl, which had been kicked aside by the intruder, and mopped up the spill as she sipped and enjoyed a late snack of dry crunchies. While she dined, I tidied up the debris in the living room, which was also the bedroom, which was also the workroom. Less than an hour later my girlfriend came over and we made love on the bed amid the disarray as if it were London after a blitz raid, then made love less romantically a second time, the encore having a lot more James M. Cain boiling on the stove. Next morning I phoned a professional, undergoing one of those meaningful and costly rites of passage for New Yorkers in that period, the Changing of the Locks. My saltine box of an apartment was now fortressed with the bo
lts and bars of a security cell at Rikers, but that was part of the package deal of living in the East Village, the trade-off for being at the nexus of everything it had to heave at you before it eventually turned into a simulation of itself, a watering hole for hipster doofuses on safari.

  My apartment was in the rear (that’s what made it man-cavey), a refuge from the street racket that gave weekend nights the festive melee spirit of Mardi Gras for the Mohawk-haired. St. Marks Place between Second and Third avenues in 1979 was still the Sunset Strip of bohemian striving and slumming, rinse-cycling at all hours with the creative detritus and chosen outcasts without whom any city becomes merely a business address for the embalmed. It was like the set for Rent out there on the block, without the piercing pathos that made Rent such an inspirational pain. On the southwest corner was Gem Spa, where the New York Dolls had been photographed in cocky dishabille for the back cover of their debut album. Farther west was Trash and Vaudeville, whose wares resembled a garage sale of the Dolls aesthetic with a healthy stock of punk fetishistica. Next door was the St. Marks Baths, where men in strategically wrapped towels adopting odalisque poses waited in cubicles for other men to drop by for a meet and greet (or, as one wag put it, “a meat and greet”). Across the street was the venerable St. Mark’s Bookstore, before it migrated to the strip of Ninth Street where I had interviewed Patti Smith in her own saltine box. Nearby, on the same north side, was Manic Panic, the store founded by CBGB’s Tish and Snooky, where fans of Kathy Acker’s serrated fiction could get everything they needed to doll themselves up for the dawn of the dead. Farther east was a café where some of the hip, choppy-haired, beyond-caring waitresses could be as surly as the lesbian strippers in John Waters’s Pecker, the customers too cowed to complain. The café had a courtyard dining area surrounded by apartment buildings on three sides where you could brunch amid potted plants and agnostically pray that an air conditioner wouldn’t make a suicide leap. Farther east down on St. Marks was the apartment where W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman had lived for so many years, the poet punctuating conversations by taking a pee in the kitchen sink. “Everybody I know pees in the sink,” he told a visitor. “It’s a male’s privilege.” It was a male something, anyway. Across from the Auden preserve was Theatre 80 St. Marks, still operating, on June 20, 1979, presenting a Kay Francis double bill, I Found Stella Parish and Confession, which I was sure not to miss, being a Kay Francis fan long after it became unfashionable. Around the block from my studio was McSorley’s Old Ale House on East Seventh, which I didn’t visit the entire time I lived on St. Marks (too college-studenty), but found reassuring to simply know it was there if I wanted to pop in for a pint and a sneeze of sawdust. It’s psychologically bracing having landmarks nearby, even if you avoid them. Most important, my new address positioned me equidistant between CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, within easy walking distance of both, the perfect triangle for bat flight.

  Barricaded inside when nothing outside called, I made the most of the sensory deprivation, which did wonders for my productivity. So much work I got done there. It was like a sewing room for words. And though my memory may be mussed, writing didn’t feel like drudgery at the time, a way to earn parole. It was as if I had the whole outfield to myself to run around in. In 1979, I did a review for the Voice of a Pete Hamill paperback thriller that was just too juicy for a joker like me to resist, though maybe I should have. Few remember Pete’s thrillers today. He may only hazily recall them himself; for most prolific authors, books often recede from consciousness once they’re pushed out the parachute door and sent praying. Hamill’s career in fiction, though still riding backup to the pugilistic impact of his justifiably lauded newspaper journalism, is known largely from the late-flowering lyrical nostalgic word-daubing of Snow in August, from 1997, and the novels that followed. But in the late seventies, Pete cracked his knuckles and set out to do a series of smart urban action kiss-kiss-bang-bangs featuring a tough-guy-with-a-soft-cookie-center alter ego hero named Sam Briscoe, “who loves women, fast cars—and solving murders.” Sort of like Spenser: For Hire with his own honorary bar stool at the Lion’s Head (where Jessica Lange had waitressed in the mid-seventies before ending up in King Kong’s paw) and a bust of Brendan Behan to bless the beer foam. The cover illustration of the paperback of Dirty Laundry featured Hamill’s own handsome Hollywood head of hair with some icy dame in the background whose V-plunging cleavage was an open invitation for uptown snob and downtown knob to clash in the satin sack. For all of his ability to nail down a phrase and magnetize a regular-guy rapport with readers, Pete didn’t possess the primitive guile and gusto of the phenomenal Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer and such disreputable brute forcers as I, the Jury and Kiss Me, Deadly, whom I once had the opportunity to interview at a police equipment office, for reasons now forgotten. Mick was a swelluva guy, if I may be idiomatic. Spillane didn’t believe in fancy setup fiction. Go in hard, get them hooked, and leave them happy, that was the literary praxis he lived by. “The first page of a novel sells that novel, the last page sells the next one” was his maxim, and it’s a better one than most of the wrapped morsels of wisdom from those Paris Review “Writers at Work” interviews with various laureates who discuss their craft like medieval wood-carvers. Hamill tried to muster the door-busting pulp energy of a Mike Hammer-head (“I skulled him with the gun butt,” growls his he-man avenger), but he was too much of a self-conscious poet of the common man to pull it off, which made his steamier passages worthy contenders for what would later in London earn their own Bad Sex Awards. Here is how my review of Dirty Laundry for the Voice ended:

  When Briscoe is naked and handcuffed, a Mexican whore unzips her jumpsuit and straddles the defenseless hero. As she rapes him, she keeps her boots on, the perfect porno touch. The funniest sentence in the book is when Hamill, after describing her up-and-down motions, writes: “She tossed her head, but the bun stayed in place.” After her muffled orgasm, Briscoe grabs a gun and jams it in her gut. “Stop right there, sweetheart,” he says. “Or you’ll never come again.”

  After 200-plus pages of pistol-whipping and kiss-my-boots kink, it’s a bit disconcerting to flip to the front of the book and read the dedication:

  This book is for my Daughter

  DEIRDRE.

  Daddy, you shouldn’t have!

  Oh, I was such a scamp. Shortly after the review appeared, Pete did a column in the Daily News in which a buddy commiserated with him over my slam. Was it a real buddy or a ventriloquist’s dummy? Newspaper columnists had a much freer hand with colorful dialogue back then, in the heyday of Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, and similar heirs to Hemingway, John O’Hara, and salted peanuts. He banged you up pretty good, Pete’s buddy said. Yeah, Pete conceded, like a weary sailor home from the sea, but he’s young, and someday he’ll be on the receiving end, then he’ll know what it’s like. Laugh while you can, buddy boy, but someday I’d be the one hurting, that was the word from the ring corner of the reigning champion. And of course Pete was right! Curse his perspicacity! I brought out a novel of my own years later, a novel Pauline Kael had tried to mother out of existence, and I got mine. Not universally, but the naysayers had a pecking party while I made like Tweety Bird with my little wing in a sling. (Showing his resilience, Pete revived Sam Briscoe in a 2011 crime solver called Tabloid City, and bully for him.) But, looking forward, looking back, what was the alternative? Not writing criticism, not trying fiction? The filthy secret about writing fiction is in the early ski runs, when no one’s watching, it’s fun. A reviewer’s praise only means something to readers if it has a force of personality and conviction behind it that hasn’t been compromised by too much cream filling in everything else you’ve written. Free-swinging writing was more expected in the seventies, and there was more room for it in print, but even in a rude decade it wasn’t going to win you any popularity contests. One of the minor revelations I got after clocking a few years in journalism was how many writers wanted to be in the popularity pool, wanted
to be invited for weekends at the Vineyard. Although I should have known better, being aware that one of the bedsores of Norman Mailer’s resentment toward Norman Podhoretz was Podhoretz’s inviting of Mailer’s then-archrival William Styron to a party for Jacqueline Kennedy and not him, I couldn’t understand how not being asked to certain parties or panel discussions or petition drives could plunge a can opener into a writer’s pride and morale. I was naive enough to believe that such pouting ended once you graduated from high school, when it was replaced by a jolly new set of pouting opportunities and grudge breeders. It took me a while to learn that warm grievances fresh from the bakery do come along in life but they’re simply piled atop the old, cold ones, a sedimentation akin to Philip Larkin’s accounting of how Mum and Dad muck you up in “This Be the Verse” (“They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you”).