Lucking Out by James Wolcott Read Free Book Online Page B

of the Hollies performing at the Bottom Line, Bob said, as if reprimanding himself for overruling his better judgment, “I knew I should have assigned this to ——,” since I had made such a hash of it, revealing myself as Hollies-inadequate. Another time, looking over a revise I had done, he said, “Well, I’m glad you incorporated my suggestions, but I didn’t think you’d do it so
faithfully
,” making me feel like a retriever bearing the master’s slippers in its mouth. Bob didn’t always edit at the office, burning eyeholes in your copy and sounding the sentences in his head as if doing ballistics tests. Sometimes he edited at home, which was a trip, in both senses of the word. Once I made explorer tracks over to the apartment that Bob and his future wife, Carola Dibbell, shared in the alphabet side of the East Village, where a mound of garbage burned in the middle of the street like an anarchist’s bonfire as taxis slowed to navigate around it. Inside Bob and Carola’s apartment it was a Dickensian cove, as if their decorator had been a chimney sweep with a load of cinders to spread around. The focal point in this Stygian picture of domesticity was the spectacle of Bob, wearing nothing but red sheer bikini underwear, attending to something at the kitchen stove and pensively scratching his ass. Bob wasn’t one to stand upon formalities, adopting a more Tarzan stance. After he and Carola moved to a sunnier place on Twelfth Street (a street I too later shared, where the crunch of crack vials met the hoarse cries of hookers having an intimate conversation at the top of their charred lungs from ten or twelve feet apart), Lester Bangs told me that Bob once edited him in the nude, lying on the carpet with his butt-crack smiling northward as in a baby picture. The buzzer rang and it was Bob’s apartment neighbor, Vince Aletti, announcing himself. Bob got up and went into the other room to slip on a pair of underwear. Lester wondered, he told me, why Vince’s presence necessitated underwear from Bob while his didn’t, and then he remembered that Vince was gay—“And, you know, Bob probably didn’t
want to tempt him
,” Lester said, laughing.
    In his return to the
Voice
, Bob brought with him an air of embattlement that had a soap-opera backstory. He and fellow rock critic/politico-cultural journalist Ellen Willis had been the reigning rock critic couple on the counterculture scene, the John and Yoko of the downtown set, the future Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter of the Ministry of Pop Sensibility. If as a couple they functioned as a dual-processor dynamo, their intellectual status was separate but unequal. While Christgau had enjoyed a trapeze platform as a columnist at
Esquire
, which was a “hot book” in the magazine world under the ringmaster editorship of Harold Hayes, Willis haunted even higher, holier rafters as the rock critic of
The New Yorker
and a contributor to the
New York Review of Books
and Theodore Solotaroff’s
New American Review
(where her somber epitaph on the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention, “Lessons of Chicago,” appeared). Given his intellectual carriage and male pride, this uneven ranking must have been a cactus prick to Christgau, who was denied entrée into the more exclusive cloisters of prestige. Bob told me of the phone ringing when he and Ellen lived together and hearing the quavery, eggshell-walking voice of William Shawn at the other end and his handing the phone to Ellen with a mock-annoyed “It’s for you.” Their breakup—discreetly memoirized by Willis in a journal for the short-lived paperback magazine
US
, edited by Richard Goldstein, a wunderkind who would also rejoin the
Voice
in its radical Felkerization and not win any popularity contests—had been unamicable in the extreme. The betrayal of Ellen’s briefly taking up with some hippie dude (“The last time I got my hair cut, Ellen dumped me for somebody else,” was how I remember Bob explaining