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By Root 884 0

to have their own offices and the opportunity to interrupt one another’s work (one reason there will never again be Here at the “New Yorker”–like memoirs is that there is no more office lore to mine—writers are now relegated to their own bobbing life rafts, requiring guest IDs to enter the editorial mother ship), and here I was in my early twenties with a sunlit parlor of my own. I didn’t have a cot or napping sofa. More than once I stayed up all night to meet a deadline and slept curled up on the floor, stiff as a carp. But there was something romantic and borderline roughing it about staying up all night writing and crashing on the floor—this was one of the reasons one came to New York to become a writer, to impress yourself with your own determination. The writer with whom I shared receptionist duties had an even sweeter deal, or so it seemed to me. He only had to cover the desk the two days a week that I had off. Not being given an office of his own, he wasn’t obligated to occupy the premises for the other three days; he had liberty leave to do whatever he wanted—go to the movies, visit museums, do library research, sit on a bench and study humanity, or just stay home and make with the jeweled prose there. But I didn’t reckon with the passionate hold of the nesting instinct for those looking to consolidate their position from within, hoping to secure their niche inside the editorial command module. I didn’t understand that in New York, real estate trumps everything, that the territorial imperative didn’t care how small an amount of square feet was involved.

The co-receptionist’s name was David Tipmore. I wonder what became of him. His was an individual talent, even for a boxing academy like the Voice, where the rumble of rough promise kept the thunder going. Tall, blond, thin (after he close-cropped his hair, he was teased for looking like an Oscar statue), T. had a lavish way of expressing himself, especially when ladling out superlatives. “I love Blair,” he would verbally skywrite about Blair Sabol, the Village Voice fashion writer whose father was the head of NFL Films; he would say it in anticipation of her arrival on the fourth floor and repeat it again once the elevator had deposited her back on the ground floor for her reentry into society. I began to look forward to her visits; it was like having Princess Margaret drop by. David could make me laugh by the catholic enthusiasms he displayed and then would laugh at my laughter, as when he exclaimed, after reading one of Al Goldstein’s foulmouthed, turd-brained tirades in Screw magazine (where all the porn-star fornicators looked like topiaries with their hippie hair), “I love Screw magazine!” Sometimes he forgot to fasten the safety lock on his mouth, and his impromptu expressions of delight would go badly astray. Once Christgau punctured our airspace with his presence, looking uncommonly fluffy. “Bob,” David exclaimed in congratulatory surprise, “you washed your hair!” It was his transparent lack of malice that made this most backhanded of compliments hard to resent, and Bob accepted the comment with near-gracious chagrin, mentioning something about a new shampoo. The exclamation marks that punctuated Tipmore’s talk were astringently absent from his writing, which had some of the tactically efficient lack of affect, eyewitness testimony, and finely manicured irony that George W. S. Trow was making a house specialty at The New Yorker, to which Bret Easton Ellis would later add a chic coat of anomie. Tipmore’s best sentences had a white birch quality, lean, upright, singular. He did a review of Peggy Lee in performance at the Empire Room of the Waldorf that remains a gleaming artifact of sly dissection: “With a burst of white light Miss Lee appeared stage right in Stavropoulos chiffon, acknowledged the audience reception, and segued directly into ‘I Don’t Know Why (I Love You Like I Do).’ She was difficult to see because intense lighting gels obscured her face in an opaque sheen. She was difficult to hear because the orchestra, which Miss Lee conducted periodically