Lucking Out - James Wolcott [9]
What I didn’t understand until later was that by the autumn of 1972, Wolf had wearied of the Voice and its perennial teething problems and gnawing neuroses, tired of being father-confessor/mentor-guru/chief rabbi to a restive band of underpaid, psychological dependents. They, in turn, resented their dependency, confronting Wolf in December 1971 (the same month as the Mailer-Vidal fracas) to demand more money from management (was this what Mailer was slyly alluding to in his letter to Dan about “sterling reporters” unwilling to live on hot dogs?), their demands undercut by their expressions of devotion. After the death of Don McNeill in August 1968, a drowning accident that devastated Wolf, he wasn’t looking for new candidates to fill the role of rising son. (One historian of the paper wrote, “There was no young writer [McNeill was only twenty-three] who had ever shown more promise, or to whom Dan Wolf had ever gotten closer, and … in all his years as editor of the Village Voice, no event ever hurt Dan Wolf more than when Don McNeill left it.”) It was exhausting enough trying to keep everybody happily unhappy within the fine Voice tradition of constant uproar without the stress and disappointment of tending another litter of possible protégés. He was beginning to tune out the conflicting Voices to a pinched whine, dialing out the indoor traffic. Which, had I known, would have been okay because I wasn’t searching for a father figure, not even in Norman Mailer, believing (or so I believed that I believed) that discipleship was best practiced from the on-deck circle, where you were less likely to get on the font of wisdom’s nerves.
Every few days I would visit the Voice, asking if anything had “opened up,” varying the timings of my visits to lend them an air of happenstance, as if I were just popping in on my way elsewhere, some trifling errand perhaps, toeing that delicate line between harmless nuisance and complete pest. In the meantime, I had gone through the little money I had brought, living on Cokes and powdered donuts, a regimen that would yield so many negative dividends in future years. I also went in search of other work, one job agency declining to send me out on interviews because I didn’t have a proper coat—“I can’t send you into a personnel office with you dressed like that,” one young man said with a note of kindness that I appreciated. A less choosy outfit sent me to apply for a dishwasher’s job at a restaurant where there was so much steam, slop, and cursing it was like a submarine taking on water. I responded to a newspaper ad for holiday-season helpers at a department store—was it Altman’s?—where everyone there already looked as if their feet hurt and we were sent home as soon as the available slots were filled. I had perfected a modest pantomime of entering and departing the Latham Hotel in a slow, eyes-averted, nonchalant hurry to avoid detection, which didn’t stop the billing notices from sneaking under my room door, making a little whisking sound that I learned to dread. Perhaps if I had had other contacts in the city, I could have used them to score temporary work, but I didn’t know anyone yet and hadn