American Gangster (22 page)

“No one does that.”

“I do.”

“You're not typical.”

No, Schneiderman said, it wasn't going free that hurt the paper. It
saved
the paper. Kept it going, making money. The true challenge was, as everyone knew, the Web. “Craigslist is the biggest single crisis the
Village Voice
has faced in its whole fifty years,” he said with out-of-character vehemence. Schneiderman really had it in for “Craig,” whom he said had cost the
Voice
more than a few million dollars in real-estate classifieds alone.

“That guy,” Schneiderman said, “he puts himself on a pedestal, says what he's doing is for
the people
, but that's a lie. He's only in it for himself, like everyone else.”

It was then, looking around Schneiderman's office, with its displays of the
Village Voice
Media holdings—covers of the Minneapolis-St. Paul
City Pages
, the
LA Weekly
, Orange County's
O.C. Weekly
, the
Seattle Weekly
, and the
Nashville Scene
—that it occurred to me how far we really were from the glassed-in office on 80 University Place. I was speaking to a fundamentally
different person than the one who fired me twenty-five years before. Our particular visions of the
Village Voice
could no longer be the same. My paper was a chimera of longing and never-quite-requited obsession, an object to be held in the hand, sweaty ink on fingertips. Schneiderman's view, although indescribably deeper owing to his nigh three decades inside the beast through who-knew-how-much thick and thin, had a more abstract air. He was talking of the paper as a piece, albeit a big one, on an infinitely larger playing field.

Schneiderman grinned at this notion and said, even if he “woke up every morning thinking about how to protect the
Village Voice
,” quite frankly, exactly what went into the paper had ceased to be his major concern long ago.

He said, “If Leonard Stern hadn't come here and made me a publisher, I think I would have been gone after five years. That's pretty much the burnout period for an editor at a place like this. Leonard helped make me into a numbers guy. Of course I'm still a word guy, but there's a longer shelf life to a numbers guy. That's been the real fun for me, flying around, looking after our papers, handling the business side.”

Schneiderman didn't worry about what actually appeared in the
Voice
because, he said, he had trust in his editor, Don Forst. Indeed, the bantam, septuagenarian former head of New York
Newsday
has been
Voice
editor longer than anyone has ever held the job. Asked why he got the position, Forst, nothing if not blunt, said, “I'm a very good manager. I can handle a tough room. But really, I don't know. I needed a job.”

It was clear from the start that Don Forst's paper was to be a wholly different animal. One of the first acts in the Forst era was the firing of Jules Feiffer, universally regarded as the paper's most visible and beloved symbol. “It wasn't just that they canned Jules,” says one
Voice
r who, like almost everyone else, preferred to remain nameless. “It was well known that they thought he was making too much money, if you can call seventy-five thousand dollars too much for Jules Feiffer. They'd been after Karen Durbin, the last editor, to get rid of him. But she refused. She knew what Jules meant. What really blew people's minds was Forst's attitude after he pulled the plug. He said Feiffer was fired and that was that. There wasn't going to
be any of the usual shit about it, none of that letters-from-the-outraged-staff stuff that has always gone on at the
Voice
. The staff tried to buy an ad to complain, but the ad department said they wouldn't run it. That's when we knew we'd entered a period of malign neglect at the
Village Voice
.”

Once, for better or worse, the
Voice
was a “writer's paper,” but the
I
word was soon banished from most
Voice
copy. “I am simply not interested in people's individual psychodramas,” Don Forst said. Story length was restricted, with few features running longer than twenty-five hundred words. “Our younger demographic doesn't like to read long stories,” said the seventy-three-year-old Forst. One day, Forst dropped a copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
on the desk of the late Julie Lobbia. “Your sentences are too long,” he said. Most destructive, according to most, has been the redesign of the arts pages, allegedly at the behest of the ad department. In the old days, a lead
Voice
critic could address the week's fare in a free-ranging essay of about fourteen hundred words. Now it was decreed that they produce three separate “elements” on the page, each dealing with a separate film, play, or piece of music. The “big” piece runs eight hundred words.

“It is depressing,” says one critic. “I thought if I stayed serious, I'd create a body of work that might win me a Pulitzer. At least I had the hope. Now what can I show, these little postage stamps?”

Meanwhile, management, always legendarily cheap (Schneiderman once declared that no
Voice
reporter was allowed to use 411; the policy was dropped after people started calling 1–718–555–1212, which was more expensive), kept downsizing. Gary Giddins, only the best jazz critic in the country, was pushed out after three decades. Sylvia Plachy, who along with James Hamilton had given the
Voice
a very distinctive photographic look, was laid off, apparently to save her $20,000 stipend. Her son, the actor Adrien Brody, an office regular back in his toddling days, often making copies of his face by pressing his nose to the glass of the Xerox machine, came to help her move.

“He had this baseball hat jammed down over his head, demanding to know who fired his mother,” one observer recounts.

Hearing some of this, Michael Lacey frowns. He'd been ranting about how even though he'd come from a union household, and his brother, who
helped build the World Trade Center, was the president of a midwestern boilermakers local (“which was no pussy union”), he had no use for organized labor. This didn't mean he expected any trouble from the
Voice
union. What he hoped would happen, Lacey said with confounding plutocrat noblesse oblige, was that the
Voice
employees would realize a union wasn't necessary, “because we take good care of our people.”

Word of bad morale at the
Voice
, however, brought Lacey up short. Although no slouch with the downsize scythe himself (mass-firing tales are legend in the
New Times
canon), Lacey shook his head at stories of layoffs. “You don't get rid of good people just to save money. They're too hard to find. You don't discourage them. You want a lively newsroom, some action.
Sturm. Drang
. That place seemed dead.”

He couldn't seem to get over David Schneiderman, his new partner, referring to himself as “a numbers guy.” He liked Schneiderman and had learned not to underestimate him. But “a numbers guy? … Sounds like death. I can't even balance my checkbook…. It's so sick the way most of the business runs. The top editors don't edit. Never touch a piece of copy. What do they do all day, think beautiful thoughts? The way we do it, the editors have to write too. They should never forget how hard it is,
the fucking agony of it
. I make myself write and report. It kills me, but I do it.”

Then, loud enough for the other diners to turn around, Lacey declared, “God help me, I'm in a business of weenies!”

The next day, I was talking on the phone to Robert Christgau, the
Voice
's archetypically thorny “Dean of Rock Critics.” He asked me what I thought of Michael Lacey. I said he'd probably turn out to be a nightmare, but so far I kind of liked him.

“What do you like about him?” Bob demanded.

“I don't know … he's got this bonkers sincerity about him. Who knows what he'll do, but I got the feeling he genuinely wants to make the paper better.”

Christgau snorted. “I doubt if his conception of how to make the paper better conforms to mine.”

Then he hung up. Conversations with Bob Christgau have a habit of being truncated without warning. Often voluminous on the page, verbally
he retains a compelling gift of concision. After Nelson Rockefeller reputedly died after sex with the young Megan Marshack, Bob said, “If I knew it would kill him, I would have blown him myself.” When John Lennon was shot, he bemoaned, “Why is it always Robert Kennedy and John Lennon, not Richard Nixon and Paul McCartney?” Personally, I've always treasured Christgau's assessment of my work. During the era of the Reggie Jackson Yankees, I wrote a not particularly friendly piece about the team. Christgau, a Yanks fan, came over to my desk.

“Read your piece,” he said. “
Really sucked
.” Then he stomped away. I never even got a chance to thank him for his input.

Christgau's comment about Mike Lacey seemed likewise to the point, a perfect
Voice
Person reply. To wit: sure, Lacey and his crew could take over, as Leonard Stern, Clay Felker, and Murdoch had done before. They could fire everyone, turn the paper into a desert flatter than a Scottsdale Mall. They might temporarily own the paper's little red boxes, its famous name. But they would never control its soul, never truly silence the legitimate keepers of the
VV
logos.

Coming from Christgau, now sixty-three, more than half his life spent at the paper, it was a defiance you had to respect. This was especially so, since of all the supposed
Village Voice
“dinosaurs,” those masthead survivors who never seem to go away, nobody comes in for as much sniping as Bob. Typical is the commentary of Russ Smith, the snarkish “Mugger” of the
New York Press
, the most recent bottom-feeder paper whose entire existence is bound up in the fact that it is not the
Voice
. Smith said the merger would certainly mean “sayonara to Robert Christgau, who could then be reached at either an upstate retirement community or the publicity department of a record company.”

No doubt much of the ire directed at Christgau stems from his long-running “Consumer Guide” feature, in which he hands out letter grades to discs each month, a practice that caused Lou Reed to once refer to Xgau as “an asshole” on a live record. The subtext:
School of Rock
might have been a hit, but “rock as school” will never be, and what's a sixty-three-year-old guy who has never burned a CD got to say about pop music in this day and age anyway?

The answer is quite a lot, if you care to listen. Present from the moment rock became “serious,” Christgau, like other all-inclusive
Voice
critics J. Hoberman and Michael Feingold, knows everything from the beginning to now and continues to put it to the page, albeit a tad densely. Indeed, writers like Christgau—and this probably goes for Nat Hentoff, too, still batting away on his Selectric 3 and too busy to have me come by because “with the Constitution so endangered, it needs my total attention all the time”—could have existed only at the
Village Voice
.

This was the realm of the non-J-school, self-invented, pop-cultural autodidact, a place where the high tone met the vulgar and an Everyman could hawk his expertise. It is no coincidence that many of the older
Voice
writers come from working-class, outer-borough backgrounds (Christgau's father was a Queens fireman, Richard Goldstein's was a Bronx postal worker), people who threw in their lot with the egalitarian vision of the paper where they could write what they wanted. What's the term limit on that, even in a journo-world desperate to “get younger”? No doubt Christgau will go to his grave positive that the
Voice
, the true
Voice
, exists only as “a left-wing, intellectual, writer's paper,” and believe me, he is not likely to go quietly.

“It might sound strange, but people my age are much more suited to working at the
Voice
the way the paper is these days,” says Jarrett Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old front-of-the-book reporter. “We came into this business knowing it was a potentially dying industry. I would have loved to have worked at the
Voice
when it was great. You just have to look at the fiftieth, see all those covers, and it gives you a chill. But you have to be realistic, deal with what is.”

It made you wonder if it might have been better to have taken the paper out and shot it, like a used-up racehorse, before, say, the humiliation of going free.

“Don't think I would have liked that,” said Richard Goldstein, who worked at the paper for thirty-eight years in an unparalleled career that comprised more or less inventing rock-and-roll criticism and establishing an above-ground media outlet for the gay community. This is not to mention uncounted hours of engaging in all intrapaper turf squabbles (in my
day, the alleged macho “white boy” news writers at the front of the book were always at war with the whiny art-culture people in the back). Now sixty-one, Goldstein, raised in a Bronx housing project, is one more perfect
Voice
Person who started reading the paper early, sussing out that a trip on the Woodlawn-Jerome line to MacDougal Street could make even him a
bissel
cool. Present for every regime change in the history of the paper, Goldstein will not be around for the
New Times
era. He was fired in the summer of 2004, after an increasingly fractious relationship with Forst.

Goldstein contends that Forst has waged a long-running gay-baiting campaign against him. “He said things to me I hadn't heard since the playground in the Bronx. He just kept doing it. It was sick.” In 1999, in accordance with
Voice
policy on verbal abuse, Goldstein wrote a letter of complaint. It was after that, he says, that Forst retaliated by “taking away my job…. I hired and edited Mark Schoofs, who won a Pulitzer Prize; I wrote ‘Press Clips.' It wasn't like I was slipping. Then one day Forst comes in and tells me I won't be writing for the paper and I should just think of myself as a ‘cobbler.' I don't want to be maudlin, but the
Voice
was such a big part of my life for so long, to have it disappear was incredible.” Eventually, Goldstein wrote a letter to David Schneiderman, telling his side of the story.