Lucking Out - James Wolcott [75]
Lester went into a self-described hermit phase his first few years in New York, a holing up many people do when they move to the city and don’t have nine-to-fives. Lester’s work habits worked against him in his efforts to turn total pro and escape the rathskeller of rock journalism, at least as a full-time address. It wasn’t that he was lazy, anything but, but he wrote in key-clacking Kerouacian binges, cannonballing through the paper hoops of deadlines and then spilling more copy than they could use. He was less adapted or temperamentally suited for the sort of fine carpentry and assembly that a more structured piece required, too often winging it with hot-rod flames flying out of his ass and the streetlights rushing by, or so his prose read. It was said that he took the advance for a picture book about Blondie and buggered off the text in forty-eight hours, though some say he had sprinted seventy-two; whatever time ended up on the final clock, the result was a nonbook that didn’t have the discursive, loose-thread-pulling comedy of, say, Geoff Dyer doing everything he diligently could to procrastinate on his D. H. Lawrence biography, or Nicholson Baker embarking on his Updike meditation despite having barely more than smidgens of Updike’s industrious output, fiddling instead with all the silkworm ways Updike has infiltrated his brain. Even such serpentine paths take more discursive leisure than Lester had at his deadline-heavy disposal. Instead, the bigger the project, the bigger the noise-to-sound ratio, his glints of genius lost in the stew. Writing for Christgau at the Voice, Lester did superb, lively, often hilarious stuff, but it didn’t get him an upgrade to the first-class compartment. As plum assignments remained out of reach, Lester decided he wanted to step away from the typewriter, seize the microphone, and make like the howling moon.
It was like running off to join the circus without having to run very far. Lester was already a performance artist on the page, an acrobat with crazy bounces, and there was precedence for rock writers getting into the act. Greil Marcus and co-conspirators had recorded a spoof bootleg album called The Masked Marauders in which a fake Mick Jagger blues’d it up on that modern lament “I Can’t Get No Nookie,” Lenny Kaye was a journalist and editor who bean-stalked into one of Patti Smith’s transmission towers after Patti herself made the hop from print to poetry reciting to “Piss Factory,” and Cleveland’s Peter Laughner, a friend and fan of Lester’s, wrote for Creem and played guitar for a number of bands, his early death of drug-related acute pancreatitis at the rotten age of twenty-four inspiring one of Lester’s best pieces from the heart:
Realizing life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral. But there are voluntary reactions. I volunteer not to feel anything about him from this day out, but I will not forget that this kid killed himself for something torn T-shirts represented in the battle fires of his ripped emotions, and that does not make your T-shirts profound, on the contrary, it makes you a bunch of assholes if you espouse what he latched onto in support of his long death agony, and if I have run out of feeling for the dead I can also truly say that from here on out I am only interested in true feeling, and the pursuit of some ultimate escape from that was what killed Peter, which is all I truly know of his life, except that the hardest thing in this living world is to confront your own pain and go through it, but somehow life is not a paltry thing after all next to this