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By Root 876 0

the perverse activated my tongue didn’t matter: my blithe attempt at airy deflection proved to be more infuriating than any edgy comeback I might have made. I acted as if I were out of her jurisdiction, which no boss can countenance. It may have also confirmed Nichols’s (correct) suspicion that the world of hard-boiled politics was no place for a potted fern like myself. It was recorded in McAuliffe’s excellent history that upon hearing my insolence, Nichols snapped, “Then go meditate at the unemployment line.” Dramatically neat as that plays, the truth was klutzier, as it usually is. She got back into the elevator, hit the button for the fifth floor, and—so I was later informed—told the editor in chief: “I can’t do anything with Wolcott. I tell him to do something and he tells me he’s meditating.” Instead of firing me on the spot, she waited until I returned after a holiday weekend to send me on my merry way. I don’t recall the dialogue on that occasion being particularly snappy, only how compressed the air felt as I left her office, packed quiet with the knowledge shared by everyone on the floor that I had been axed. As soon as I walked in that morning I knew that they knew that I was a goner from the funny little fidgets their mouths made as they forked over the usual Monday-morning hellos. I was standing in front of my former desk with the hollow, bomb-struck feeling of the just fired when Tipmore, trying and failing to sound offhand now that the news was official, asked: “So, Jim, given any thought as to what you’re going to do with your office?”

“Well,” I said, “seeing that I’ll no longer be working here, I don’t imagine I’ll get to keep it.”

Which he knew full well, just as he knew that the logical next occupant of the office would be himself. With a cool twist of the swizzle stick he was letting me know that he had felt the office was rightfully his all along and now he was going to inherit it and too bad for me, buddy boy. Good-bye, good luck, and get lost. We never spoke again, one of the many noncommunication pacts formed at the Voice that furnished the elevator with awkward silences and straight-ahead stares. Though if anything I owed Tipmore and Mary Perot Nichols (who would go on to become the president of WNYC Communications and leave a priceless legacy to public broadcasting and the arts as the founder of the WNYC Foundation) a gift basket of gratitude. Released from duty, I drew unemployment and used my ejection time to write full out, placing pieces not only at the Voice but at rock magazines such as Circus, where I interviewed Todd Rundgren, then at the height of his musical wizardhood with attitude to match. From that point onward I never worked a regular office job again, solely writing for a living, something that would have been impossible if New York hadn’t been a city of low rents and crappy expectations that didn’t require a trust fund or a six-figure income for the privilege of watching everything fall apart before your eyes. The availability of affordable, problem-plagued, loosely enforced sublets made zigzag lateral movement throughout the city relatively easy, not like it would become a decade later, when each real-estate decision would pyramid under the worry load of upward mobility. In the early seventies, New York landlords were less choosy about whom they rented to, more laissez-faire as long as you didn’t give off a whiff of arson. When one of the Voice receptionists decided to get married and vacate the city, she offered me her apartment to sublet on West Ninety-second, between Amsterdam and Columbus. Though I had never been that far north before, above Forty-second Street being total terra incognita, I accepted her offer without a glimmer of thought because one of the advantages of being young in the city is that you can say yes to things without feeling it’s an irrevocable decision that scripts your fate. At that age apartments were just places to stay, temporary launchpads or secluded cubbyholes, not outward constructs of your identity that required Hamlet-style agonizing for fear