Lucking Out Read Online Free Page A

bohemianism of the Village but with a lot more riding on the outcome, a sense that each week might be pivotal as the war in Vietnam raged and American cities rioted and burned. Reading the
Voice
, you could practically hear the clomping hooves of police horses as a protest threatened to get disorderly, tear gas canisters about to hit the cobblestones. Since New York didn’t actually have that many cobblestoned streets, my aural imagination must have been using its embellishing brush.
    By contrast, the phantasmal histrionics of Hunter S. Thompson in
Rolling Stone
never commandeered my cadet allegiance because I always found them something of a masquerade, a grown man with a cigarette holder playing outlaw dandy for his fan club. The jeweled brocade of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism bedazzled, popcorn kernels of laughter exploding alongside the typographical fireworks, but his tours de force were such feats of mind reading and magicianship that they and he didn’t seem quite human. I wasn’t into baroque caricature then, when the brick-hard reality of the sixties seemed berserk enough, and Wolfe’s dandyism wasn’t something I could relate to—in his author’s photos he looked like a painted flat posed in front of another painted flat. But each issue of the
Voice
was a barrage of articulate gabble, crackling with radio static and overlapping quarrels (like the gangster families in
The Godfather
, the
Voice
convulsed into feuds every few years to purge the bad blood and begin a fresh cycle of animosities), hitting you from an ambush trap of different angles while sticking to the actuality of what was happening, offering the cinema-screen field of view.
Voice
writers could be as egotistical as anybody else who packed words into snowballs for a precarious living, but it wasn’t a high-buffed, cachet-seeking, English-majory-brunette, every-comma-hung-like-candy-canes-on-a-Christmas-tree exercise in fine craft and delectation.
Voice
writers tended to be more direct, shooting their sentences from shoulder level. You were always aware of the hard surfaces and clashing forces off of which everything caromed—the noun-verb combination punches that had traveled from Hemingway to Jimmy Cannon to Pete Hamill—and you could almost hear the mousy scribble of quotes scratched into their reporters’ notebooks that would yield the killer payoff, the fatal clincher. So to be accepted into the
Voice
was to be initiated into a fight club where you either fit in or were flushed out. Or so I fancied, never doubting I’d make the cut if given a chance. Such confidence I had, a healthy by-product of not knowing any better.
    To return to the office where Mailer’s photograph silently roared: The questions Wolf asked were basic and general, mild probes befitting an informal interview with a noncandidate for a nonexistent job. I wonder if he thought I was a rough diamond or a raw carrot. From my end, I thought—truthfully, I’m not sure what I thought, or if I was even thinking from inside the swirl of expectations I had spun out of the daydreams of glory that owed less to literature than to Hollywood films such as
Youngblood Hawke
, where the barefoot, bare-chested author straight from the provinces landed Suzanne Pleshette as his editor (“Shall I call you Youngy or Bloody?” is the line Gore Vidal cherishes), and TV’s
The Waltons
, where John-Boy and typewriter longed to sprout the heavenly wings of
Look Homeward, Angel.
But if I had envisioned that Wolf would be so impressed that I had quit college and left home to apply to the
Voice
that I would be accepted at once and sent out with an assignment to prove myself worthy of Mailer’s sword tap (and I had), the helium soon left that balloon. This wasn’t Hollywood, and a handshake wasn’t going to welcome me into the fraternity of fire jumpers. The meeting ended with an invitation to submit something and they’d be happy to take a look at it, the editorial equivalent of “Drop by