Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction, Page 2

  But there I was, working in the eighth circle of judgmental hell, and somehow glad to be there. I relished being force-fed good books, even less-than-good books, for it is also important to know how a book is badly written. The reviewing paid next to nothing, but I took what came. I remember the late David Boroff, also working for the Observer and one or two journals of opinion, calling what we were doing “dirty-shirt journalism,” for at these wages you couldn’t afford to send out your laundry.

  It was painful to read a bad book and then have to write a negative review. I did a few, but even when I was right I regretted it. In time I sent back books I knew I’d have to knock. I found no pleasure, as some critics do, in denigrating the work of others; my ego was never so needy, nor was rejection my way to define a critical canon. I remember an academic friend, who liked almost nothing, telling me I shouldn’t be so ready to praise, but should look for the flaws in any work. I decided this was literary sadism in the service of highmindedness. Not my way. I mentioned flaws when I thought I’d found them, but I was far more interested in discovering what I felt was valuable in a work, and illuminating that.

  Eventually I resented reviewing, and writing essays, and even doing journalistic work, for it took time from fiction writing; and yet there was always the pleasure of completing any piece of writing, serious or frivolous, to my own satisfaction. And although I’ve gone for long periods of time without writing nonfiction, I always come back to it—to challenge the imagination in a new way, or to take on an assignment too good to reject, or to extend my knowledge of a subject, or to redefine my memory. What’s more, any work that lets me run loose with the language needs no other justification.

  One of the high points of my reporting came in 1973 when I was in Dublin to cover a week-long symposium of James Joyce scholars. By what I presumed to be happenstance, but which I would like to think was something mystically richer than that, I was driving along and stopped at a street corner, looked up, and saw the sign ECCLES STREET. I quickly found number 7, where Leopold and Molly Bloom lived.

  It was one of four row houses, gone now but part of their façades still erect, including, at number 7, two boarded-up windows, the doorway nailed over with corrugated aluminum, a black iron picket fence in front, and the chalky discoloration where the 7 used to be. The bedroom door from number 7 had been installed at The Bailey, a Dublin pub. Grass and weeds grew just beyond the doorstep in the now vacant lot that was once the house. What remained had been marked long ago by a reverent Joycean or two: over the absent door, erratically printed in faded black paint, and also carved on a horizontal board, was the name “Molly Bloom.” There was also the mark of, perhaps, an anti-Joycean: the word “shit,” the only legible item among the faded bits of graffiti.

  It is probably psychically confusing to visit a house in memory of people who lived there but never actually existed. And yet in Ulysses such is the detail available about the Blooms and how and where they lived that they have a bygone reality equivalent to our dead relatives’. Through the use of the real in service of the fictional, said one scholar, Joyce “canonized the obsession with being Irish—the whole love of place, of knowing a particular street in Dublin and talking all night about it.”

  As to myself, there on Eccles Street, what I was doing was journalism. But I was also, as I now know, riding the yellow trolley car.

  1992

  THE BEGINNING OF THE WRITER:

  Eggs

  My first short story I wrote for Collier’s magazine. Collier’s didn’t know this when I wrote it. It was called “Eggs” and concerned a man who goes into a diner and orders scrambled eggs. The counterman doesn’t want to serve him eggs and suggests goulash. The man insists on his eggs, the counterman reluctantly serves them, the man eats them and leaves. End of story. I was eighteen, my first year of college. After I wrote “Eggs” I showed it to my mother and as with everything else I had done in life she thought it was very good. I also showed it to my banjo teacher, Mike Pantone. Very good, he also said. He did not say it was very very good, which is what he said when I played well during my banjo lesson.

  I showed the story to my father and he read it at the breakfast table while eating eggs of his own. He liked soft-boiled eggs with a teaspoon of sugar on them, and tea with three teaspoons of sugar. I never saw him eat scrambled eggs. What could he know of my story? He read it and said, “What the hell is this?”

  “It’s a story, a short story,” I said.

  “It’s about a guy who goes in and eats eggs,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “What the hell kind of a story is that?” he said.

  “It’s a realistic story,” I said. “I’m sending it off to Collier’s.”

  “They publish stuff like this?”

  “Every week,” I said.

  “Who the hell wants to read about a guy who goes in and eats eggs?”

  “The whole world reads Collier’s,” I said. “The whole world eats eggs.”

  “Is this what you learned in school?” My schooling had cost serious money.

  “I don’t want to argue about it,” I said. “You either like it or you don’t.”

  “Take a guess,” my father said.

  Well I’d show him. I sent it off to Collier’s that afternoon and I’ve still got the rejection slip to prove it. I never showed any more stories to my father. This is known as writer’s block. However, I reread the story last week for the first time in forty-five years and my father emerges from that day as a masterful literary critic. A retarded orangutan could write a better story than “Eggs.”

  Be that as it may, writing the story was valuable for an assortment of reasons. It was the first step of a career. It proved I’d get better because I couldn’t get worse. It acquainted me with rejection and I didn’t die from it. It taught me that whether they’re right or wrong, don’t trust your parents with literature. It was about a particular place, the diner down the block, that I went to five nights a week, and about a counterman named Herbie who had been a batboy for the Yankees and was a pal of mine who died of cigarettes and who was such a singular man that I wrote “Eggs” two more times in later years. I called it “Counterman on Duty” and then just “Eat,” and the story got better without getting good. Finally I abandoned it and put Herbie in a novel under another name and there he is at last, even though he missed out on Collier’s.

  Eudora Welty once wrote that a writer should write not about what he knows, but what he doesn’t know about what he knows. I translate this to mean that the writer should understand and value mystery. But the only mystery about “Eggs” is why I didn’t know it was awful. In time I did put some of my own mystery into the places I wrote about, and my fiction improved.

  I’m sorry my parents didn’t get to appreciate what happened to me as a writer. My mother died while I was still trying to get my short stories published, and my father was at the cusp of senility when I published my first novel. But he bragged about the book down at the State Supreme Court, where he worked. He said it was about how two thousand cows get swept out to sea in Puerto Rico. Actually the book is set in Albany and doesn’t have any cows. But you can see how with that kind of imagination and critical apparatus in my genes it was inevitable that I’d become a writer.

  1989

  A MEMOIR:

  Hearst Is Where You Find Him (And I Found Him in Albany)

  Charlie Davis was an old and amiably cynical newspaperman who had the falsest set of false teeth I ever saw, who had genius when he played high-low seven-card stud, who owned a bad stomach (every night he drank a cup of soup, every night he threw it up), a backwardly sloping bald pate with straight white threads hanging off it like icicles, a belly like a bowling pin, a talent for making up a front page so that you wanted to read every story, a reverence for authority that came from a lifetime of working for William Randolph Hearst and a penchant for uttering zingers.

  It was 1952, the Korean War period, and I was a bra
nd-new cityside reporter on the Albany Times-Union, a Hearst paper in a town run by a wondrously powerful and epically corrupt Irish Democratic boss machine that hadn’t lost an election in thirty years. I’d done a year in the sports department of the Glens Falls (N.Y.) Post-Star, two years on Army newspapers in Georgia and Germany, and now I was getting a fair share of bylines on hot Albany stories and cool features. Charlie Davis eventually took notice of my potential for rising in the ranks.

  “Hey, kid,” he said to me, “what are you aimin’ at?”

  “I dunno, Charlie,” I said with a young man’s candor. “I suppose I’m just out to tell the truth as I see it and write it in the best way I can.”

  Charlie leaned back in his swivel chair in the slot of the copy desk and laughed with professional glee. “Son,” he said, “you’re in the wrong business, the wrong town, and on the wrong newspaper.”

  But it was Charlie who was wrong. The Times-Union was exactly the right place for me. The job let me live in and learn about my own city. The editors, before long, let me write the way I wanted. And so between 1952 and 1956 I covered everything worth covering, except heavy politics. Also the Times-Union was the paper where I’d first come across Damon Runyon, my earliest writing hero, and there was something mythic in that.

  There was also Hearst himself, The Chief.

  From 1952 until I left town in 1956, I slept with a crucifix of you-know-who, plus a pair of photographs, hanging over my bed. One photo was an artsy shot of the Eiffel Tower I’d taken on a weekend pass to Paris, and the other was a framed head-and-shoulders portrait of Hearst that I’d liberated from a dusty file drawer of the Times-Union’s morgue. The Chief’s portraits no longer hung in the newsroom, or anywhere else in the building, this perhaps because he was now dead.

  Nevertheless, I was conscious of the power he, along with Jesus and the city of Paris—Hearst, God and mammon—exercised over my life. And so I stole and hung The Chief on my bedroom wall.

  Hearst, and the Times-Union (a morning and Sunday paper), were emblematic of an age that had ripened before I was fully awake to the life around me. Popeye, Maggie and Jiggs, the Katzenjammer Kids, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, the American Weekly with its exotic artwork and its stories of mummies, murder and the evils of vivisection (nowhere else in the world, before or since, have I read so much about the evils of vivisection), the brilliant Westbrook Pegler before and after he turned into a journalistic fascist, and the great Runyon, all arrived with notable fanfare, surrounded by large and compellingly black headlines and the magnetism of spankingly fresh news. Buying tomorrow’s morning newspaper from an aging paper boy in an all-night coffee joint at 2:00 A.M. is a mystical experience to which no television news addict can ever attain.

  I tried to get a copy-boy job at the Times-Union when I was in my last year of college but I didn’t make it. Three years later I was sitting in the office of the paper’s managing editor, George Williams, and he was reading my Army newspaper columns and telling me, “I like your leads,” and all of a sudden I was a general assignment reporter.

  George was a great character, irascible, slightly daft as all editors out of the Front Page era were supposed to be. I put him in my novel Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, called him Emory Jones, and elaborated on a true story Bill Lowenberg, a pal of mine who went to work for Hearst in the early 1930s, told me. It had to do with a night editor failing to take note of a major change in one of The Chief’s editorials concerning President Roosevelt, and of all Hearst papers, the Times-Union was alone the next morning in failing to carry the new and critical view of FDR. Emory, on a later occasion, met The Chief when his train pulled into the Albany station:

  “The Chief received Emory Jones, who presented him with the day’s final edition, an especially handsome, newsy product by local standards. The Chief looked at the paper, then without a word let it fall to the floor of his private compartment, and jumped up and down on it with both feet until Emory fled in terror.”

  Thus did authority from on high arrive at Albany.

  But that authority related principally to national and international matters. Local editorials were homegrown, as were local political allegiances. Hearst may have been antipathetic to New Deal Democrats, but in Albany the local Democrats and the Times-Union’s editors and publisher were as close as Siamese twins. If a reporter put a hostile question to the mayor, by the time he got back to the city room the mayor would have called George Williams to complain. George would thereupon ream the offender sideways for insubordination to an elected Democrat, take the city hall story away from him and send him out to cover a manure auction.

  That’s how it was until 1960 when Gene Robb, the Times-Union’s publisher, led the consolidation of the T-U and the Knickerbocker News, a Gannett daily. The machine always threatened both newspapers with withdrawal of city and county legal advertising (as much as $300,000 a year) if they became critical of city hall. In light of this, the two papers’ traditional economic competitiveness argued for discretion. But after Robb controlled both papers, he kicked discretion out the door and began a new era in Albany journalism.

  I left the paper in 1956 because I was bored and repeating myself, covering yet another St. Patrick’s parade, another ax murder. The final straw was the story I wrote after a two-hour interview with Louis Armstrong at the Kenmore Hotel. The news editor (not Charlie Davis) looked at it and tossed it in the wastebasket. “Just another bandleader,” he said. I retrieved the story, complained to the boss and the story ran. But by then I was suffocating.

  A month later I was working on a new daily in San Juan and I stayed away from Albany for seven years, most of that time in Puerto Rico, less than a year in Miami. I also turned myself into a half-time newsman and full-time novelist (aspiring), and came back to Albany in 1963 to discover Hearst and the political machine at war. The newspaper business, the town and the paper were no longer recognizable.

  I hired on again as a part-timer and wrote features for a while, then turned into a muckraker. Nobody censored me, and my stories about political corruption, civil rights and black radicalism ran around the block. Our executive editor, Dan Button, quit to run for Congress against the machine, and he won. This wasn’t the Hearst paper anybody in Albany over the age of six was used to reading, but on we went and I became one of the machine’s public enemies.

  It was sporty stuff but you can’t do that forever either, and so I turned into a movie critic to change my mood. Then Gene Robb died and the paper’s radicalism died with him. In a matter of months the new editors were running a condensation of a vanity press book attacking the welfare system and its recipients (“Lawrence Lazy,” “Sally Stupid,” “Sonya Sleepy”). Also the new managing editor refused to consider even the idea of a story of my experience during the 1970 peace march on Washington, or one on student riots at a local college. “Irresponsible people,” he said, were getting too much publicity. He preferred the story of hardhat construction workers in Manhattan attacking student protesters. I slowly tuned out and left the paper finally in 1970 during this man’s tenure.

  Well, he passed out of the picture too, as did the fellow who dumped Satch in the wastebasket. The legacy of Gene Robb survives in the present-day Times-Union, which is cozy with no politicians and has an edge to its coverage.

  We all evolved over the years, and in 1983 I published my notes on this evolution—thirty years of Albany-watching—in a book called O Albany! I neglected therein to thank properly The Chief and all his subalterns, cosmic and regional, for my roller-coaster ride through the hills and dales of their dynamic inconsistency. But here and now I have rectified that.

  I am still taking notes, however.

  1987

  EARLY ASSIGNMENTS:

  Langford, Prominent Cat, Dies

  Albert the Swimmer

  Tracking the Missing Leopard

  Langford, Prominent Cat, Dies

  Langford, widely known North Albany cat, died Friday night at the Albany Animal Ho
spital. He had undergone surgery earlier in the week for the removal of a tumor and was on the way to recovery.

  Then on Saturday his owner, Jerome Kiley of 1232 Broadway, announced to a gathering at Jack’s Lunch, at 1247 Broadway:

  “Langford took a turn for the worse and they had to gas him.”

  The animal’s fame was so widespread throughout the North End that a wave of sentiment inundated Jack’s customers and almost spontaneously a collection was made to buy Langford some flowers.

  Jack Thorpe and John Itzo, owners of Jack’s Lunch, Gratton Finn, George Brown, Joseph Sheehan and several others contributed to the fund for the floral wreath.

  “We got about six dollars altogether,” Thorpe said.

  Langford, who was three years old at the time of his death, was described by acquaintances as being “tan, gentle, something like an Angora, and fat—almost as big as a dog.”

  He was said to have been a fussy eater and to have subsisted solely on a diet of chicken livers. He also slept on a bed, constructed especially for him.

  His treatment at home was so preferential, in fact, that Jerome Kiley often confided to intimates:

  “That cat lives better than me.”

  Kiley, who weighs about 250 pounds and stands six feet, three inches, is self-employed. He repairs and cleans beer coils for tavern owners.

  The floral piece was put together by another acquaintance of Langford’s, John M. Tracey of the Danker Flower Shop. It contained, among other things, a few strands of pussy willows. And perched atop the flowers was the figure of a bird, bearing a card addressed to Langford. The message on the card read:

  “I don’t have to worry about you anymore.”

  In addition to his parents, who are unknown, Langford is survived by an estimated forty-six children, plus innumerable brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, etc.