Lucking Out - James Wolcott [121]
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