Lucking Out - James Wolcott [21]
He and I were the supporting players on the floor, the star roster consisting of staff writers such as Clark Whelton, whose cover story about staying overnight in Central Park, an assignment that in those crime-ridden days was worthy of combat pay, was ridiculed by an up-and-comer named Jamaica Kincaid; Lucian K. Truscott IV, the combative grandson of a decorated general who had served under Patton (“Lucian was probably one of the few urban sailors who could spot a corpse floating in the river … and then write about it for the Village Voice” [McAuliffe]); and Ron Rosenbaum, whose orange-red beard burned with biblical fervor and Blakean prophecy. “Ron’s the real genius of the Voice,” a writer named Robin Reisig whispered just loud enough for posterity to hear. (Reisig was given to gnawing on a pencil in a state of spellbound distraction, emerging from inner transit to ask, “Did somebody just say something?”) Rosenbaum’s genius aura, unlike Ellen Willis’s, did have a dynamic element, a roaming shadow existence. Investigating far-out terrain and the machinations of secret societies closed off to all but the chosen, he seemed to haunt the night like an Edgar Allan Poe story, alternating between his apartment and his office at the Voice, a restless nocturnal commuter. The columnist Nat Hentoff, whose beard was as wise and Talmudic as Rosenbaum’s was insurrectionist, tore articles out of the Times as he walked the Village and tucked them into his pockets; by the time he arrived at the office, he had so many columns of newspaper clippings spilling out of his pockets that he seemed to be going into leaf. His wife, Margot, a contributor to the New York Review of Books, had a sharpshooter mouth that could knock a tin can off your head from across the room. Other contributors were more raconteurish, their bottoms finding a home on many a bar stool, their sentences leaving footprints across the sawdust floor. As, for instance, Joe Flaherty, who wrote a ruefully funny memoir called Managing Mailer about his misadventures as Mailer’s campaign manager for his mayoralty run in New York City (Mailer’s running mate was Jimmy Breslin); their campaign went afoul when the candidate laced into his loyal supporters at a rally for being “spoiled pigs.” And Joel Oppenheimer, who personified the poet as billy goat and whose lowercase columns were devoted to the Mets, losing his teeth, and the valuable protein in semen. But a weekly paper like the Voice was more than the clashing palette of its high-profile personalities. It was ribbed with writers who went about their work with self-effacing dedication to their beat, such as the theater reviewers Michael Smith, Julius Novick, and Michael Feingold. The dance critic Deborah Jowitt had the fine-boned fortitude of a frontier settler with eyes forever fixed on future horizons; her merciful consideration of even the most flailing effort and her descriptive set pieces suitable for framing set her apart from the tomahawk throwers. The classical music critic Leighton Kerner, with his stooped posture and ever-present briefcase, resembled a sad pachyderm covering Willy Loman’s old rounds. Andrew Sarris, the chief movie critic and godfather of the auteurist school of film criticism, had the dark circles under his eyes of an honorary member of the mole people, the wag of his head and his staccato laughter the marks of a man who was pacing inside his head.
Upstairs, on the fifth floor, there was enough snapping-turtle turmoil to keep The Caine Mutiny afloat. Office renovation removed private sanctuaries for a more open cubicle layout that allowed greater visibility for frank exchanges of differing opinions that could be overheard the length of the floor, depending on wind conditions. Monarch of his midtown principality, Felker