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By Root 881 0

of thirties radicalism, “Everyone judged everyone else … today’s friend was tomorrow’s enemy; whoever disagreed with oneself had sold out.”) Or perhaps “fool” simply caught on in the office because some alpha force began using it and everyone else added it to their repertoire, just as so many writers picked up on Ellen Willis’s use of “cranky” as a positive descriptive, indicating someone out of sorts with the prevailing political norms. Whatever its origin in the lingua franca, “fool” was a strangely shame-laced word, intended to make you feel like an object of ridicule based on the snickers and scowls of some invisible jury. It would later chime in my head with Piper Laurie’s crackpot mother taunting Sissy Spacek in Carrie before the senior prom: “They’re all gonna laugh at you! They’re all gonna laugh at you!” I resented being bullyragged for making a fool of myself because making a fool of yourself was one of the hard-earned liberties Norman Mailer had fought for in his boxing trunks. But I have to say, I don’t regret my days in gladiator school. Having your ego slapped around a bit helped the blood circulate and would prove a superb conditioning program for a future sub-career in blogging, where a tough hide would come in handy every time the Hellmouth opened. Every time I’m abused online with a battery of scurrilous remarks of a personal nature, I’m able to let them bounce off like rubber erasers, having been called an asshole by professionals, experts in the field.

My stay on the fourth floor was an idyll destined to die early. My installation as a regular fixture was resisted by the person whose opinion mattered most—my boss, Mary Perot Nichols. I had been hired against her wishes, as I soon came to understand from her verbal inflections and facial expressions, which were generally lemon flavored. Nichols, for whom I did guard-dog duty at the desk, was the paper’s city editor, a veteran of Village activism who had led the fight opposing Robert Moses’s plan to drive a road through Washington Square Park and whose fearsome inside-dope column, Runnin’ Scared, was to local politics what I. F. Stone’s Weekly was to the Washington lie machine—a caustic disinfectant. She thrived on feuds and court intrigue, her turf war with the political muckraker Jack Newfield resulting in huge shifts in barometric pressure inside the building when some vital piece of information was up for contention. It wasn’t her idea to hire me, and had I been a better butterer-upper, I might have schmoozed things over to the point where I wasn’t looked upon as an intrusive specimen, a bug found in an ear of corn. But I was too untutored in the art of deference, oblivious to the danger signs, and lackadaisical in the time-honored mime of looking busy when there was a significant lull in the action. It was about fifteen or twenty minutes before end of regular hours, and returning to the office when she would normally have been leaving, Nichols crossed in front of my desk, which had been cleared so that I could begin the next day with a clean slate (having stuffed everything I needed to do in the drawers), paused, surveyed my near-empty desktop, factored in my bland demeanor, which apparently contained a subcutaneous layer of insubordination, and asked: “Don’t you get bored sitting there all day doing nothing?”

A question whose tone and implication I considered a trifle inconsiderate, since I hadn’t spent “all day” doing nothing, reserving relative inactivity for that brief interval before it was time to head out. Rather than defend or explain my idle appearance, I replied amiably enough: “I meditate.”

Nichols blinked without actually blinking, looking stunned, and not in a delighted way. I’m not sure why I had replied as I had, since it would be another twenty years before I even took up meditation, enrolling in the Transcendental Meditation course in a class that included a Frenchman who later complained to the instructor that he wanted a different mantra from the one he had been assigned (“My mantra is working against me”), but whichever imp of