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By Root 830 0

been his faithful sidekicks for so many years. He had reversed the tailspin that had sent Peter Laughner and so many others nose-diving. It was Albert Goldman—who didn’t know Lester personally but who was a psychopharmacological wizard whose forensic premise was that you couldn’t fully comprehend any rock star’s phenomenology unless you knew what he was “on,” what was in his tox screen—who later explained to me how common such fatal setbacks were, the why factor. The heavy-duty addict who’s dumped the booze and drugs from his system is in a weakened state that persists longer than he anticipates, and is often most vulnerable when he’s feeling better but his system is still processing the slow-motion shock of withdrawal; it’s really a time to take it nice and slow and easy. However, the addict’s ego, that Gollum clinging to the rocks, tells the withdrawer that after all the big-time stuff he’s taken and the epic binges that they still talk about wherever bearded sailors gather, having a taste of this or popping a little of that is nothing he can’t handle, no big deal. Lester was especially vulnerable because for good or ill he seldom did anything in a small way, using a mental measuring cup.

Goldman’s snap diagnosis was confirmed (for me, anyway) when DeRogatis’s biography came out in 2000, detailing how on the night before Lester died, the guitarist Bob Quine (of Richard Hell and the Voidoids) visited his apartment carrying a tape of the new Voidoids album. “Lester emerged from the bathroom and swallowed a handful of pills. ‘Valium,’ he said when Quine inquired.” The next day Lester rang up a friend named Nancy Stillman, whom he hadn’t spoken with recently, and “she thought she recognized the higher pitch that Lester’s voice assumed when he took Valium, and she asked him what he was on. ‘Don’t be my fucking mother,’ he snapped.” It was Stillman who found the body later that night. It wasn’t Valium that ended up fingered as the primary suspect in Lester’s death, but Darvon, a narcotic and analgesic that packed a much bigger risk of overdose. Whatever the final tab (“No one will ever know for certain whether Lester took two Darvons or twenty-two,” DeRogatis wrote), Lester’s death at the robbing age of thirty-three was a resonating heart-punch to everyone who knew and read him, though within journalism the resonation was confined at first to a small shock field.

In the obituary for Lester that ran in the Voice (May 11, 1982), Christgau wrote of Lester’s problems bending the cage bars of rock reviewing and making his escape. “Although he was a more coherent, punctual, professional journalist than 90 per cent of the editors who considered him a lunatic, his autodidactic moralism, chronic logorrhea, and fantastic imagination rendered him unsuitable for the slicks. Anyway, rock criticism is below police reporting and horoscopes in the literary hierarchy, and while Lester wanted to write—and did write—about almost everything, rock criticism was what he was best at.”

How low rock ranked in the literary hierarchy was played out for me just a day or so later, when I attended a cocktail party hosted by Mort Zuckerman, the real-estate mogul who bought the Atlantic Monthly in 1980 and wooed William Whitworth away from The New Yorker to be the magazine’s editor in chief. I’m not sure why I was invited to the party. I knew Whitworth through Pauline—he was one of Pauline’s editors, a model of tact and equanimity—and wrote for him at the Atlantic, but not every New York–based writer who contributed to the magazine under its new regime had been invited to this clambake, and I felt like a guest pass among a bevy of season-ticket holders. Since it was news in my universe, I mentioned to a couple of writer/editors there how awful it was about Lester’s death, and it was clear I had flown right into the clouds as far as they were concerned, so few pigeon tracks did they have of who Lester was or what he did, apart from a front-page Voice byline or two that may have leaped off the newsstands. He was a distant rumble downtown that they were dimly