’s wounded pride and obstinacy prevented Ellen from being given a full editorial role at the Voice, Bob deploying a her-or-me ultimatum that was eventually lifted after mutual friends and colleagues, tired of being tugged in the middle, impressed upon Bob that his gruff resolve made it appear that he still hadn’t gotten over the breakup despite the intervening years, which wasn’t very flattering to Carola, who was by then his wife. I had no great opinion to drop one way or the other on the scale of justice because I never quite “got” the Ellen Willis cult of genius, the whole Rosa Luxemburg mystique aureoled around her curly Ed Koren cartoonish head and goggled squint. Written as if her words represented the patter of rain, Willis’s pop music reports for The New Yorker had none of the toreador flash and headlong plunge of the best rock writing being done in the sixties and seventies; they lacked the authority she stamped into her political essays, as if she were doing a series of liner notes, keeping the grown-ups informed about what the kids were up to. Not that I liked her political writing any better. I liked it less. It ground forward like an earthmover along with the worst liabilities of left-wing pamphleteering, her Marxist-feminist-Reichian calls for erotic freedom and social liberation laid down with the iron clang of railroad spikes hammered to the heavy metronome of jargon. It was evident from the worship and emulation Willis inspired that she possessed a personal charisma that transcended the page, but that charisma and I never cloud-mingled, so all I had to go by were pieces that seemed weighed down by their pedagogical intent, bottom-heavy correctives to liberal orthodoxy, and radical cant that made the pages you were holding in your hands turn to lead. But I was in the minority when it came to Willis’s acuity and importance and would remain so, not that it mattered then or now. What was important then was this sense, this supposition, that sixties scenes-bursters such as Christgau, Willis, and Goldstein were destined to inherit or hijack in slow motion the intellectual-journalistic establishment of The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Commentary, Partisan Review, and Dissent and become the presiding grown-ups of this generational power bloc. They had the brains, the ambition, the range and grasp, and the lengthening track record of a countercultural commissariat set to inherit the big desks in the editorial offices and give culture its marching orders. Yet it didn’t happen, they never assumed command; their schemas never got off the drawing board. Ice formed on the ceiling, the elevators got stuck between floors, they were no match for Harvard—choose your own metaphor, but the upward push that seemed inevitable was somehow arrested and the books never completed that might have planted their flags on the surveying heights. That’s one of the advantages of sticking around in life long enough: you get to see how other people’s stories turn out, though it doesn’t do your own story any good, the future having laid its own special snow-covered wolf traps just for you.
Having done just about as much damage as I could do to the circulation department short of embezzlement, I was promoted to a writer-receptionist’s job on the fourth floor, a hybrid role almost as lottery-winning as landing a rent-controlled apartment. It provided the ideal setup for a pinball-machine brain embedded in a body content to be indoors, off the streets—wherever the action wasn’t. Three days a week I was assigned to man the reception desk for the fourth floor, where staff writers had their offices, some of them outfitted with cots for those all-night word-bashing deadline-looming marathons and, presumably, the occasional tryst or hangover nap. My job entailed sorting mail, answering the phones, clipping articles, doing some light filing, nothing requiring heavy mental lifting or seamless multitasking. The two days I wasn’t desk jockeying I could retreat to my own private Yaddo and attend to my own articles. Today writers would murder