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By Root 859 0

a passing fancy in the seventies the George’s banquet hall was rumored to have been converted into a swing room. “For swing dancing?” an editorial assistant once asked me with the bluebird chirp of youth, picturing jive couples in ballroom competitions, like she had seen on TV. Not that kind of swinging, I said, implying unspoken volumes of decadence to which she would never be privy. I wasn’t privy to them either, relying on picturesque hearsay of spiderlike couplings on the mats and the tentative, evolving etiquette of threesomes (permission to come aboard was requested with a shoulder tap). “The Seventies in New York smelled like sex,” I recently read one veteran of the decade rhapsodize (sex and urine, he amended), but it wouldn’t be until I moved into the West Village that the musk of debauchery would strew the air, and there and then too I would be a bystander. Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.

Eastward on Twenty-eighth Street blazed the Belmore Cafeteria, where cabdrivers and other late-shifters—whose pithy grumblings of indigestion helped furnish the columns of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and the sportswriter Dick Young with working-stiff lore—hunched over cups of coffee and heavy carbs while flipping through the night owl editions of the New York Post and Daily News, whose front-page headlines carried the latest earthquake reports from the Watergate investigation. A few years later the Belmore would achieve cinematic landmark status in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, where Peter Boyle tried to impart a little wisdom Robert De Niro’s way as the Belmore’s cursive red neon sign bathed them in a tainted glow. I was no great fan of Taxi Driver, I found it a thesis statement shot from a spatter gun, but I was able to look up at the screen and feel as if I owned part of the experience, a souvenir piece of the squalor. I had been on that same lousy corner, and now the Belmore and its venereal neon are gone, consigned to fond history.

How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell. I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time, eaten up as I was in my own present-tense concerns and taking for granted the lively decay, the intense dissonance that seemed like normality. Only F. Scott Fitzgerald characters (those charmed particles) feel the warm gold of nostalgia even while something’s unfolding before their enraptured doll eyes. For the rest of us, it’s only later, when the haze burns off, that you can look back and see what you were handed, the opportunities hidden like Easter eggs that are no longer there for anybody, completely trampled. To start out as a writer then was to set out under a higher, wider, filthier, more window-lit sky. A writer could still dream of climbing to the top, or at least getting close enough to the top to see who was up there enjoying themselves.

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of The Naked and the Dead and American literature’s leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the Delphic editor of the Village Voice. It was the reason I had left college after my sophomore year, spoiling my parents’ dream of my becoming a teacher, collecting a regular salary, wearing a grown-up tie to work, and getting those great summers off. How I got to Mailer was the equivalent of firing a paper airplane out the window and having it land at JFK. I had been a hero-worshipper of Mailer’s since being zapped by his writing, the closest my brain has come to hosting a meteor shower. I was in high school, Edgewood High School to be exact, just down the highway from Cal Ripken’s hometown of Havre de Grace (known to the local Restoration wits as “Haver Disgrace”). I was lounging around the local library and flipping through the latest magazines,