Lucking Out - James Wolcott [44]
Down the hall Pauline and I go, past a long table sparsely piled with miscellaneous reading material and past the lobby desk, where Morticia hands Pauline phone messages she had taken that had somehow slipped her mind earlier, as if they were parking tickets that had collected under the windshield wipers. Pauline waits to read them in the elevator to see which important calls she has missed and which needn’t be answered because now it’s too late. Once an older gentleman entered the elevator with us and replied to Pauline’s greeting with what sounded like a semi-monosyllable, as if he were withdrawing a word in mid-release. When the elevator deposited us in the downstairs lobby and distance was thrown between us, Pauline said, as if indicating a local landmark, “That’s Joe Mitchell.” Joseph Mitchell, whose reputation would be resuscitated and permanently restored with the publication of Up in the Old Hotel in 1992, was the legendary “fact” reporter of raffish dives and waterfront lore who had hit the unmerciful wall of writer’s block following the publication of Joe Gould’s Secret, where the secret was that Joe Gould, a Greenwich Village bohemian human scarecrow legend who claimed to be working on a diary that would be the masterpiece the century was waiting for, was a fraudster whose magnum opus was all gummy mouth. Mitchell, like so many in the Village, had been taken advantage of and taken in. (The cranky co-dependency of author and subject became the basis for a too-stately film starring Stanley Tucci as Mitchell and Ian Holm as the Greenwich Village John Aubrey.) Although Mitchell maintained an office at the magazine, he had not been published in its pages since 1964, his decades-long journalistic silence a phenomenon as pregnant with absent presence as J. D. Salinger’s permanent sabbatical a’twidst the protective birches of New Hampshire. But while there were those who insisted that Salinger was diligently, monkishly scribbling away, fewer prospects were held that Mitchell was squirreling anything away for posterity. His garbage can was often empty at the end of the day, no bouquet of balled-up discarded pages left behind as evidence of frustrated effort. His muse seemed to have given up the ghost. It was after another round of throat clearing from Mitchell (this time in the lobby) that Pauline said to me, “I keep reading about Joe Mitchell the Southern gentleman. I’ve been saying hello to him for twenty years and all I’ve ever gotten back is a grunt.”
We head to Sixth Avenue, along Forty-fourth Street. Picture blue-gray garbage-y streets, multilayered traffic tiered all the way up to Fifty-ninth, where Central Park begins. Most of the screening rooms are on the West Side, if not in the Times Square area, then higher up, approaching Carnegie Hall. If the screening room lies within reasonable walking distance, we’ll hoof it; if not, we’ll try to snag a taxi, always an adventure in midtown, especially in the seventies, when the most frequently spoken language from the driver’s seat in the cab was surly, especially at rush hour. We catch one at Sixth, the driver grumbling after hearing we’re only going a few blocks up and over. At night, when the traffic had thinned, the mood coming from the front of the cab might be more philosophical, more inclined to a comme ci, comme ça approach to the human endeavor, but now, the minutes ticking down to reach a 6:00 p.m. screening, f-words and car honks alternate as if The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle were bent over every steering wheel, boiling from the eyebrows up. Anticipating the light going green, the cab hops forward, then brakes to avoid fendering a pedestrian of nonwhite denomination.
“Nigger got lucky that time,” the driver says.
“Now, now,” Pauline says.
The driver’s elbow juts out his rolled-down window as the light turns green and he eases ahead. Detecting the note of reprimand in Pauline’s words, he explains that he doesn’t have a beef with all blacks, just the ones who make it shitty for everybody else.