Lucking Out - James Wolcott [119]
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