Lucking Out - James Wolcott [10]
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