James Wolcott - Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York

We come into this world with our little egos equipped with individual horns. If we dont blow them, who else will?

Addison DeWitt (George Sanders), All About Eve

I love this dirty town.

J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster), Sweet Smell of Success

So much is gone, stricken from the scene, but its still there, a landmark site in nobodys mind but my ownthe Latham Hotel, in lower-midtown Manhattan. On those rare occasions when I go by, I half expect to see my younger self exiting the lobby, eyebrows steadied for battle. Shelved at Twenty-eighth Street just off a motley stretch of Fifth Avenue, the Latham belongs to one of those square, unfabled pockets of Manhattan that never quite got around to developing a personality. I had discovered the Latham Hotel in a used paperback guidebook bearing the now-aching title of New York on $10 a Day. Catering to the frugal-minded, the Latham held the faint whiff of former glory that attaches to places that lodge permanent transients. It was there that I checked in after arriving from Maryland, my single-bed room offering an air-shaft view with the flapping and chirring of pigeons on unseen ledges. Street noises sounded distant and abstract, as on a Hitchcock soundtrack. Seedy hotel rooms were quieter then, more media-sparse, enabling guests to hear the ticktock beneath their own thoughts. Downstairs was no frantic beehive either, the hotel partly a way station for old people on pensions and Social Security, for some of them the last stop before the last exit. The women in particular suggested minor characters in Dawn Powell novels who had slipped down several rungs in life and were left with nothing but late-inning rituals and brief flurries of bother. I overheard one elderly lady remark to another about the gentleman lolling between them on a bench or sofa, his eyes shut, his head slumped sideways, and the flap of his tongue showing, He was so lively this morning. I shared the shower on my floor with a bent-double woman whose hunchback rose like a rock formation out of her thin robe. She startled me once, coming out of the bathroom as I was going in, but she was unaware of my double take, her head crooked floorward. The radio in her room was always on.

Next door to the Latham hunkers another low-profile holdover, the Prince George, which, before the gold medallions and furry testicles of disco descended, was a popular layover for flight crews whose trim blue uniforms and clippy stride made everybody else on the sidewalk look like clumps. During a passing fancy in the seventies the Georges banquet hall was rumored to have been converted into a swing room. For swing dancing? an editorial assistant once asked me with the bluebird chirp of youth, picturing jive couples in ballroom competitions, like she had seen on TV. Not that kind of swinging, I said, implying unspoken volumes of decadence to which she would never be privy. I wasnt privy to them either, relying on picturesque hearsay of spiderlike couplings on the mats and the tentative, evolving etiquette of threesomes (permission to come aboard was requested with a shoulder tap). The Seventies in New York smelled like sex, I recently read one veteran of the decade rhapsodize (sex and urine, he amended), but it wouldnt be until I moved into the West Village that the musk of debauchery would strew the air, and there and then too I would be a bystander. Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild indulgence was for other people, the non-worriers.

Eastward on Twenty-eighth Street blazed the Belmore Cafeteria, where cabdrivers and other late-shifterswhose pithy grumblings of indigestion helped furnish the columns of Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, and the sportswriter Dick Young with working-stiff lorehunched over cups of coffee and heavy carbs while flipping through the night owl editions of the New York Post and Daily News, whose front-page headlines carried the latest earthquake reports from the Watergate investigation. A few years later the Belmore would achieve cinematic landmark status in Martin Scorseses Taxi Driver, where Peter Boyle tried to impart a little wisdom Robert De Niros way as the Belmores cursive red neon sign bathed them in a tainted glow. I was no great fan of Taxi Driver, I found it a thesis statement shot from a spatter gun, but I was able to look up at the screen and feel as if I owned part of the experience, a souvenir piece of the squalor. I had been on that same lousy corner, and now the Belmore and its venereal neon are gone, consigned to fond history.

How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell. I had no idea how fortunate I was at the time, eaten up as I was in my own present-tense concerns and taking for granted the lively decay, the intense dissonance that seemed like normality. Only F. Scott Fitzgerald characters (those charmed particles) feel the warm gold of nostalgia even while somethings unfolding before their enraptured doll eyes. For the rest of us, its only later, when the haze burns off, that you can look back and see what you were handed, the opportunities hidden like Easter eggs that are no longer there for anybody, completely trampled. To start out as a writer then was to set out under a higher, wider, filthier, more window-lit sky. A writer could still dream of climbing to the top, or at least getting close enough to the top to see who was up there enjoying themselves.

What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of