City on Fire (25 page)

Improbably, the name stuck. Your deal, National Magazine Award Finalist Richard Groskoph. National Magazine Award Finalist Richard Groskoph raises … calls … folds. Richard did his best to smile and nod, as if to say, yes, go ahead, have your fun. Only Larry Pulaski seemed to notice anything was wrong. Back when Richard first recruited him for the game, some fifteen years ago, the newspapermen had treated the diminutive cop almost as a mascot. He’d long since made detective, though, and the Assisian gentility of his manner, the air of martyrdom his polio conferred, belied a ferocious ability to read tells. “You okay?” he asked at the end of the night as, twenty bucks poorer (Richard) and richer (Pulaski), they put on their jackets to go home. “Right as rain,” Richard said, and declined the ride Pulaski offered. He would walk instead, albeit only as far as the nearest bar.

ANYWAY, HE WASN’T IN THIS FOR THE GLORY, was he? When he’d been twenty-three, just back from Korea and stuck on the city room’s rewrite desk, there had been no Ellies, no journalism school, and no such thing as a twelve-thousand-word feature. Someone called in sick and someone else shoved a pencil in your hand and aimed you in the direction of a burning building somewhere and told you not to come back without a quote from the fire marshal, kid, and that was it: you were a reporter. Well, that and a steady drip of spirituous ethers. Even now, at seven a.m., in this shift bar near Penn Station, newspapermen hunched over their drinks like some lower order of monks. You knew them by the volume of their talk; they were half-deaf from a night of jangling phones and Linotype rattle and barking sub-sub-editors. It was part of the dignity of the thing, the long suffering, the shitheel pride.

And in truth, this promise of collective identity was what had drawn Richard to the trade in the first place, for the quality that set him apart was not a quality at all, but its absence. He’d known since puberty that he had what a shrink might call “a weak sense of self.” (Unless, that is, his strong sense of not having a self itself constituted a self.) The other kids at school seemed to carry some inner map of where they were going, who they were becoming, that stabilized them through all the outward transformations, but Richard, the world’s first 6’3” thirteen-year-old, felt as if he’d been cast into the wilderness without so much as a stick of gum. Or as if there were more than one of him: a whole multitude, good and bad. He never knew when he woke in the morning which Richard he was going to be. And rather than soften with time, the dissonance grew harder to tolerate. On graduation night, he plowed his father’s car into a tree, half on purpose. It was decided in the clearer light of morning that maybe the best thing for him would be the army, and within the week his father was driving him in a new car down to the recruiter’s office.

The expectation—even on Richard’s part—was that military discipline might mold him into something definite, but in fact the void within proved unmoldable. His buzz cut and ill-fitting uniform only made it clearer that he was no G.I., any more than he was anything else. Overseas, he spent any free time he got reading, or hunkered over his portable turntable, listening to records a cousin sent from back home. The other fellows tended to interpret this as arrogance, but in fact what Richard was mostly doing, with his Lester Young and his serviceman’s paperbacks, was groping for a different way out. One night, on the way back to the barracks from KP, he noticed a group of foreign correspondents huddled at their end of the mess tent, playing cards under a bug-swirled light. “Fuck me,” one of them said, grinning. Richard had seen them before, of course, but he’d never really seen them, their shambolic rumple and manifest travail (he was working his way through Faulkner at the time). And he’d thought, out of nowhere, That’s an army I could be part of.

It was the kind of intuitive leap that would serve a reporter well. As would, it turned out, a lack of fixed personality. Richard’s first beat back home was the Village, and when there was no news to report—no strike on the docks, no murders, no robberies to go pestering Larry Pulaski about—he spent hours in the jazz clubs, soaking up the between-sets patter of the musicians who came down from Harlem to play. He could hear his accentless voice echo their argot as he sat with them, urging them on. The stories they told would form the early installments of the column that began to run under his byline in the Metro section. Notes from All Over, he called it, with the self-deprecating self-aggrandizement that was the column’s sense of humor. “All Over” in this case meant all five boroughs. He profiled freak show performers on Coney Island; a man who played cello on a Long Island City subway platform; a woman in Mount Morris Park who fed both pigeons and bums. It was news only in the sense that it appeared in a newspaper, but there was nothing New York liked reading about more than itself. For a few months in the early ’60s, the name of the column, in foot-high cursive like the name on a bakery box, decorated the sides of the newspaper vans, Now with ‘Notes from All Over,’ Tuesdays and Fridays. It should have been a triumph: everyone else out there knew who Richard was, even if he didn’t. But he wanted more.

Earlier that year, Truman Capote had come out with his “nonfiction novel.” Richard had heard rumors of its greatness, of course, when the thing had been serialized in The New Yorker at 100,000 words—an indulgence previously granted only to the bombing of Hiroshima, and at a quarter a word, enough to dine out on for at least a year (though maybe a little less, if you were Capote). Now, from the window of the bookshop on the corner, pyramids and campaniles of In Cold Blood taunted him, along with a propped-up photograph, like a French postcard, of the author recumbent on a dark divan. It was out of date; the last time Richard had seen Capote at a party, he’d been older and fatter, though still vain as hell and oddly impish. Yet he couldn’t help pausing to look at it, drawing so close that his own face hovered in front of Capote’s in the polished glass. Finally, after checking to see that no one who knew him was around, he went in and bought the damn book. It was ten in the morning. He finished reading it at ten at night. And, it pained him to admit, it was great. Truman had demons of his own—anyone who’d emptied a glass with him could tell you that—but no one could take away what he’d pulled off here: to disappear this completely into other people’s lives. From here until eternity, he would be able to look in the mirror and see the author of In Cold Blood. And so, when the editor of one of the glossy magazines approached Richard with the offer of higher word counts, longer deadlines, more various subjects, Richard threw himself on it as if it were a life-preserver.

The newspapermen in their egalitarian scrum had bitched about the self-indulgence of the emerging “New Journalism.” (Q: “What do you call someone who neither contributes nor edits?” A: “A contributing editor!”) But now, on a magazine salary, Richard could spend an entire morning taking a single sentence apart and putting it back together again—Friday nights the West Side gathers … It is a Friday night and the West Side is gathering itself—with no outside voices baying across the room for copy. What he wanted above all to get right was the web of relationships a dozen column inches had never been enough to contain. Family, work, romance, church, municipality, history, happenstance … He wanted to follow the soul far enough out along these lines of relationship to discover that there was no fixed point where one person ended and another began. He wanted his articles to be, not infinite exactly, but big enough to suggest infinitude.

Some of the universes he explored, as the ’60s gave way to the ’70s: Negro league baseball, folk rock, TV evangelism, stand-up comedy, stock-car racing. It was this latter, in a roundabout way, that had led to that awards banquet. He’d been lurking on the edges of a big post-race party in Daytona, Florida, when a pit mechanic had invited him to a wee-hours bonfire on the beach. Some hippies had gathered there to watch the launch of Apollo 15. The odd part was, they were stone cold sober. Talking to folks, he discovered a kind of leaderless cult, devoted to the eschatology of rockets. The launch was their sacrament. They believed, they told him with disarming frankness, that the earth was due for a thousand-year flood (“Aquarius, man … get it?”) and that in time the rockets would carry them to the safety of a new home in outer space. He knew at once he was in possession of a story.

To report it, he went native. Grew his hair out, grew a beard, shacked up with a lovely twenty-four-year-old airline stewardess who wore what she insisted was a chunk of moon-rock on a leather thong around her neck. She was otherwise wonderful: articulate, passionate, well-if eccentrically read, and he often thought later he should have stayed with her. Who cared if she believed life on earth was coming to an end? Who was to say it wasn’t? On December 7th of 1972 (which he didn’t tell her was to be his last night before leaving), he found himself back on the same beach. Surrounded by what he’d come to think of as his people, acid casualties and alligator wrestlers and Jesus freaks, he watched the last of the Saturn V rockets lift off like a great Roman candle. And certainly there was a sense of something ending—being dragged up behind that rocket, never to come down again. They all felt it, there on the beach. Getting down what it was in words, it occurred to him, was what he’d been trying to do now for nearly a decade.

Or so he would tell the editor at Lippincott who contacted him after the awards banquet. There was a clause in his magazine contract that allowed him to republish his pieces in book form, and ever since In Cold Blood he’d oscillated between certainty that what he wrote wasn’t fit for bathroom reading and imagining how it would look in hardcover. “I’m almost seeing it,” the editor said. “That whole ‘Death of the American Dream’ trip, Hunter’s done very well with that. But looking at the manuscript, I think what we need here is one more piece, a capstone, something to kind of distill and connect the big theme.”

He was right. Whatever change Richard had sensed in the zeitgeist remained tantalizingly inchoate. Something about loss, something about innocence, something about desire, and America, the individual and the altogether.… It was a half-complete metaphor, a tenor in search of a vehicle.

“You could sell it to the magazine, too, of course,” the book editor said. “Get paid twice, and promote the book in the bargain. You think you’ve got it in you?”

He knew better than to take an advance before a book was finished—and had his defeat at the hands of The Atlantic Monthly not reawakened his hunger to be somebody specific, he might have been strong enough not to. But here was something, finally, to launch him into the firmament inhabited by Talese, Mailer, Sheehy … and, of course, Capote. He would be Richard Groskoph, author of The Loneliness of the One-Hit Wonder, or whatever they decided to call it. “I’m sure I’ll come up with something,” he told the editor, and two weeks later, they cut him a check.

IS IT ALREADY OBVIOUS the money was cursed? He sat down at his desk at half past eight the next morning and found he had no idea what to write about. He tried itemizing the contents of his desk. It sometimes helped him to do this, as though together they might reflect a way forward:

a) one tartan-patterned insulated thermos bottle;

b) one Halloween mask, never worn;

c) one ancient photograph of a Lower East Side knife grinder;

d) one dried-out starfish;

e) one paperback edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary;

f) one fedora-style hat;

g) one bit of perforated rock, strung on a necklace;

h) LP sleeves: Live at the Apollo, Forever Changes;

i) one Underwood typewriter;

j) one battery-operated police scanner;

k) assorted unopened utility bills and sheets of A4 paper;

l) highball glass with orange peel, pencil shavings, old toothbrush;

m) stack of The New York Times, roughly nine inches in height;

n) stack of the New York Post, roughly 14 inches in height;

o) one bottle rocket, unignited;

p) one 40-watt light bulb missing its filament;

q) The Prefaces of Henry James;

r) stack of the New York Daily News, roughly 12 inches in height.

But by ten he was out of things to list. Be patient, he told himself. Something will turn up. He’d acquired at a police auction a few years back a Wurlitzer jukebox from the seized possessions of a mobbed-up social club. A hubcap full of quarters and slugs rested atop it, and he sat for the next several hours with his head back, listening to his 45s, trying not to think of the word “blocked.”

RICHARD HAD ALWAYS, RITUALLY, REWARDED HIMSELF for an honest morning’s work with a drink or two at lunch, but that summer it got difficult to see his coffee down to the dregs before reaching for the bottle. At three—another ritual—he would allow himself to go buy the daily papers, but now, just to get away from the silence of his typewriter and his phone, he went as early as noon, and to newsstands farther and farther afield. On a Thursday afternoon, Union Square was Rabelaisian: people were strung out in broad daylight. On a bench under a tree, a longhaired boy and a flat-chested girl or vice versa stuck their tongues into each other’s mouths, their eyes closed as if in sleep. Farther down the square a student with a megaphone demanded justice for the Cambodians. They were everywhere he looked, suddenly, these kids who no longer believed in progress. And why should they? Progress was Watergate and Mutually Assured Destruction. Progress had looked on as tracts of jungle and thatched huts disappeared beneath a carpet of flame. Progress had raped villagers at My Lai and bayoneted babies. How to approach all this, though? How to get your arms around the craziness left behind, when the orderly Rand McNally map of the world you’ve been relying on has rolled up to the ceiling?

There had been a time when he might have looked to music for consolation—indeed, he had vague ideas of stumbling across some band whose story might perfectly emprism the passing of the age—but even music now betrayed him. From the little jazz and folk clubs where he’d ridden out his twenties and thirties and from church basements and union halls issued new sounds that, rather than harmonizing what was discordant, made more discord. One afternoon, he was wobbling down one of those sidestreets whose denizens he’d once written about so well, when he heard a sound like white noise from over on Broadway. In the plantered median, a woman in an unseasonable overcoat slumped on a bench, next to a cart swollen in every direction with possessions. A radio unit on top seemed to be operating under its own power, and despite himself he stopped to listen. Threaded through the crunching electric guitar chords and roiling drums was a Farfisa organ, like the calliope of the minor-league ballpark of his Oklahoma youth. Then a voice that sounded English began barking words he couldn’t quite make out. The sidewalk yawed under Richard like the low-gravity surface of the moon.