Lucking Out (31 page)

What I inhabited on St. Marks was a primitive, rough-draft “man-cave,” a term that makes me shudder whenever I hear it on a real-estate show such as
House Hunters
or
Property Virgins
, a man-cave being something one needs to escape from, not a womb to revert to in middle age to revegetate. It was the only apartment I lived in in that high-crime era that was burglarized. I returned from a screening or some other outing one night and, reaching the top steps of the first-floor stairs, saw that my door was ajar. I heard nothing happening within. Whoever had been there had presumably left, unless they were waiting inside, as happened to someone I knew who had been face-punched as soon as he stepped in. I eased the door open, flipped on the light, and flinched as if expecting everything to leap to life, crying, “Boo!” What I saw was a shambles worse than the one that was the usual ordinary. Drawers open, their contents spilled on the floor, mattress askew, records and books strewn across the floor. But nothing major seemed to be missing. The TV and the VCR must have been too megalithic to lug in a jiffy down the stairs and through the narrow hall, and nothing else would have fetched much on the resale market. It wasn’t as if I had a jewelry box where I stowed all my “nice things.” It wasn’t material things I was worried about, in any case. The fear in my throat was that vicious harm had come to my Gully, that she might be lying kicked-dead on her side, her life broken. Or that in a panic as the place was being tossed she might have darted out the door, and the rest of my night would be dedicated to going from floor to floor looking for her, hoping she hadn’t somehow gotten out into the street. As worst-case scenarios were firing synaptically away in rapid overlapping succession, Gully poked her head out of the closet door, checking to see if the coast was clear, then stepped into the room, her meow sounding only marginally more cranky than usual. I filled her water bowl, which had been kicked aside by the intruder, and mopped up the spill as she sipped and enjoyed a late snack of dry crunchies. While she dined, I tidied up the debris in the living room, which was also the bedroom, which was also the workroom. Less than an hour later my girlfriend came over and we made love on the bed amid the disarray as if it were London after a blitz raid, then made love less romantically a second time, the encore having a lot more James M. Cain boiling on the stove. Next morning I phoned a professional, undergoing one of those meaningful and costly rites of passage for New Yorkers in that period, the Changing of the Locks. My saltine box of an apartment was now fortressed with the bolts and bars of a security cell at Rikers, but that was part of the package deal of living in the East Village, the trade-off for being at the nexus of everything it had to heave at you before it eventually turned into a simulation of itself, a watering hole for hipster doofuses on safari.

My apartment was in the rear (that’s what made it man-cavey), a refuge from the street racket that gave weekend nights the festive melee spirit of Mardi Gras for the Mohawk-haired. St. Marks Place between Second and Third avenues in 1979 was still the Sunset Strip of bohemian striving and slumming, rinse-cycling at all hours with the creative detritus and chosen outcasts without whom any city becomes merely a business address for the embalmed. It was like the set for
Rent
out there on the block, without the piercing pathos that made
Rent
such an inspirational pain. On the southwest corner was Gem Spa, where the New York Dolls had been photographed in cocky dishabille for the back cover of their debut album. Farther west was Trash and Vaudeville, whose wares resembled a garage sale of the Dolls aesthetic with a healthy stock of punk fetishistica. Next door was the St. Marks Baths, where men in strategically wrapped towels adopting odalisque poses waited in cubicles for other men to drop by for a meet and greet (or, as one wag put it, “a meat and greet”). Across the street was the venerable St. Mark’s Bookstore, before it migrated to the strip of Ninth Street where I had interviewed Patti Smith in her own saltine box. Nearby, on the same north side, was Manic Panic, the store founded by CBGB’s Tish and Snooky, where fans of Kathy Acker’s serrated fiction could get everything they needed to doll themselves up for the dawn of the dead. Farther east was a café where some of the hip, choppy-haired, beyond-caring waitresses could be as surly as the lesbian strippers in John Waters’s
Pecker
, the customers too cowed to complain. The café had a courtyard dining area surrounded by apartment buildings on three sides where you could brunch amid potted plants and agnostically pray that an air conditioner wouldn’t make a suicide leap. Farther east down on St. Marks was the apartment where W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman had lived for so many years, the poet punctuating conversations by taking a pee in the kitchen sink. “Everybody I know pees in the sink,” he told a visitor. “It’s a male’s privilege.” It was a male something, anyway. Across from the Auden preserve was Theatre 80 St. Marks, still operating, on June 20, 1979, presenting a Kay Francis double bill,
I Found Stella Parish
and
Confession
, which I was sure not to miss, being a Kay Francis fan long after it became unfashionable. Around the block from my studio was McSorley’s Old Ale House on East Seventh, which I didn’t visit the entire time I lived on St. Marks (too college-studenty), but found reassuring to simply know it was there if I wanted to pop in for a pint and a sneeze of sawdust. It’s psychologically bracing having landmarks nearby, even if you avoid them. Most important, my new address positioned me equidistant between CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, within easy walking distance of both, the perfect triangle for bat flight.

Barricaded inside when nothing outside called, I made the most of the sensory deprivation, which did wonders for my productivity. So much work I got done there. It was like a sewing room for words. And though my memory may be mussed, writing didn’t feel like drudgery at the time, a way to earn parole. It was as if I had the whole outfield to myself to run around in. In 1979, I did a review for the
Voice
of a Pete Hamill paperback thriller that was just too juicy for a joker like me to resist, though maybe I should have. Few remember Pete’s thrillers today. He may only hazily recall them himself; for most prolific authors, books often recede from consciousness once they’re pushed out the parachute door and sent praying. Hamill’s career in fiction, though still riding backup to the pugilistic impact of his justifiably lauded newspaper journalism, is known largely from the late-flowering lyrical nostalgic word-daubing of
Snow in August
, from 1997, and the novels that followed. But in the late seventies, Pete cracked his knuckles and set out to do a series of smart urban action kiss-kiss-bang-bangs featuring a tough-guy-with-a-soft-cookie-center alter ego hero named Sam Briscoe, “who loves women, fast cars—and solving murders.” Sort of like
Spenser: For Hire
with his own honorary bar stool at the Lion’s Head (where Jessica Lange had waitressed in the mid-seventies before ending up in King Kong’s paw) and a bust of Brendan Behan to bless the beer foam. The cover illustration of the paperback of
Dirty Laundry
featured Hamill’s own handsome Hollywood head of hair with some icy dame in the background whose V-plunging cleavage was an open invitation for uptown snob and downtown knob to clash in the satin sack. For all of his ability to nail down a phrase and magnetize a regular-guy rapport with readers, Pete didn’t possess the primitive guile and gusto of the phenomenal Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer and such disreputable brute forcers as
I, the Jury
and
Kiss Me, Deadly
, whom I once had the opportunity to interview at a police equipment office, for reasons now forgotten. Mick was a swelluva guy, if I may be idiomatic. Spillane didn’t believe in fancy setup fiction. Go in hard, get them hooked, and leave them happy, that was the literary praxis he lived by. “The first page of a novel sells that novel, the last page sells the next one” was his maxim, and it’s a better one than most of the wrapped morsels of wisdom from those
Paris Review
“Writers at Work” interviews with various laureates who discuss their craft like medieval wood-carvers. Hamill tried to muster the door-busting pulp energy of a Mike Hammer-head (“I skulled him with the gun butt,” growls his he-man avenger), but he was too much of a self-conscious poet of the common man to pull it off, which made his steamier passages worthy contenders for what would later in London earn their own Bad Sex Awards. Here is how my review of
Dirty Laundry
for the
Voice
ended:

Oh, I was such a scamp. Shortly after the review appeared, Pete did a column in the
Daily News
in which a buddy commiserated with him over my slam. Was it a real buddy or a ventriloquist’s dummy? Newspaper columnists had a much freer hand with colorful dialogue back then, in the heyday of Jimmy Cannon, Jimmy Breslin, and similar heirs to Hemingway, John O’Hara, and salted peanuts.
He banged you up pretty good
, Pete’s buddy said.
Yeah
, Pete conceded, like a weary sailor home from the sea,
but he’s young, and someday he’ll be on the receiving end, then he’ll know what it’s like.
Laugh while you can, buddy boy, but someday I’d be the one hurting, that was the word from the ring corner of the reigning champion. And of course Pete was right! Curse his perspicacity! I brought out a novel of my own years later, a novel Pauline Kael had tried to mother out of existence, and I got mine. Not universally, but the naysayers had a pecking party while I made like Tweety Bird with my little wing in a sling. (Showing his resilience, Pete revived Sam Briscoe in a 2011 crime solver called
Tabloid City
, and bully for him.) But, looking forward, looking back, what was the alternative?
Not
writing criticism,
not
trying fiction? The filthy secret about writing fiction is in the early ski runs, when no one’s watching, it’s
fun.
A reviewer’s praise only means something to readers if it has a force of personality and conviction behind it that hasn’t been compromised by too much cream filling in everything else you’ve written. Free-swinging writing was more expected in the seventies, and there was more room for it in print, but even in a rude decade it wasn’t going to win you any popularity contests. One of the minor revelations I got after clocking a few years in journalism was how many writers
wanted
to be in the popularity pool, wanted to be invited for weekends at the Vineyard. Although I should have known better, being aware that one of the bedsores of Norman Mailer’s resentment toward Norman Podhoretz was Podhoretz’s inviting of Mailer’s then-archrival William Styron to a party for Jacqueline Kennedy and not him, I couldn’t understand how not being asked to certain parties or panel discussions or petition drives could plunge a can opener into a writer’s pride and morale. I was naive enough to believe that such pouting ended once you graduated from high school, when it was replaced by a jolly new set of pouting opportunities and grudge breeders. It took me a while to learn that warm grievances fresh from the bakery do come along in life but they’re simply piled atop the old, cold ones, a sedimentation akin to Philip Larkin’s accounting of how Mum and Dad muck you up in “This Be the Verse” (“They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you”).

Going into writing for the social-climbing glory was never the goal, and not just because I didn’t have any long-range goals, never picturing myself in the white mink palace of penthouse nooky and celebrities with all-cap names that gave the critic Seymour Krim such gnashed teeth. I was making my name almost solely as a critic, where restrictions apply. Being a critic isn’t anyone’s childhood dream, an occupation that schools set out a booth for on Career Day, a religious calling that glimmers in the goldenrod. It’s impossible to imagine George Sanders’s Addison DeWitt from
All About Eve
as anything other than a fully formed adult, issued from a printing press. To those literary cubs who fancied having a cigarette dangling from their mouths like Albert Camus or Jack Kerouac, or sharing a club table with Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Tama Janowitz to anteater a line of coke from here to the Vegas strip, or getting a Chinatown tattoo alongside Mary Gaitskill, or watching Jonathan Franzen adjust his eyewear (and who today would be happy just to get through breakfast without feeling as if everything’s turned to gravel), to them, critics are the snipers in the trees that the director Sam Peckinpah heard whenever the palm leaves rustled. To creatives, the Critic is the undermining inner voice maliciously put on the intercom to tell the whole world (or at least the tiny portion of it that still cares),
You’re no good, you were never any good; your mother and I tried to warn you this novel was a mistake, but, no, you wouldn’t listen, Mister-Insists-He-Has-Something-to-Say.
Failed artists consider critics failed artists like themselves, but worse, because unlike them they took the easy way out by not even
trying
to succeed, critics not having the guts to climb into that Teddy Roosevelt arena that everyone likes to invoke as the crucible of character, or risk the snows of Kilimanjaro. Even prestige authors who flex their fingers at performing criticism as if filling in at the piano on Monday nights feign disdain of it as a secondary activity, siphoning off the creative juices necessary to keep genius fertile and gurgling. For some reason, the elegant retort “If doing criticism didn’t cost Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and John Updike any candlepower, what makes you think you’re too good for it, buster?” never seems to stick.