All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  In the course of editing Ray’s stable of critics, I played both cheerleader and scold in varying ratios as needed. I spoke by phone with interesting characters on at least a weekly basis: Nat Hentoff, the Village Voice columnist who wrote about jazz and was a living link to some of its legendary players; Ada Louise Huxtable, one of the most regal beings on the planet and America’s preeminent architecture critic during the second half of the twentieth century; and the novelist Francine Prose, who wrote fluently about art and never failed to answer her phone in a breathless rush, as if juggling five assignments at once.

  But the writer whose work changed my life came out of nowhere. Late in 1999, Ray came up with an idea to get a friend of his, the poet Frederick Seidel, the exposure Ray thought he deserved. I’d never heard of Seidel; Ray said he was brilliant but had a tough time getting started on a poem. In fact, in a review in the Journal in the late 1980s, which I found by searching the online archives, Ray had called him “gifted” but “maddeningly unproductive.” Seventeen years had passed between his first collection of poems and his second. In a career spanning forty years, he was about to publish his fifth book. Ray’s plan was to give Seidel a monthly deadline, as if he were a columnist. Seidel would write one poem per month under the title of that month, and not only would the deadline prod him to action, the paper would offer him a readership the size of which most poets could only dream.

  Here, Ray said one day, reaching into his bookshelves. Take these home with you. See what you think.

  I spent that evening in the bathtub with four of Seidel’s collections. Some of what I found was beautiful, sweet little rhapsodies in staccato lines, but reading him more often felt like riding shotgun on a fancy motorbike, through a city of voluptuous corruption as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch, with a mad driver tricked out in handmade shoes and Savile Row finery. The voice of the poems was absolutely shameless, musical and brutal in equal measure. He was a dandy, a daredevil, a scourge of official pieties, a celebrant of luxury, unsentimental in the extreme, sometimes innocent, more often guilty. He wrote with a bracing mix of erotic derangement and total liberty, and the images that recurred—cockpit voice recorders, women in stockings and garters—were charged with morbid mystery or an amorous aura or sometimes both. Among his obsessions was the thought of suicide, and I found new lines to add to my collection of commonplace quotes. Children, of all things bad, the best is to kill a king. / Next best: to kill yourself out of fear of death. . . . He had a knack for asking the sort of question I thought I’d been alone in asking:

  If you put a gun to your temple and close your eyes,

  And the enormous pressure builds and builds,

  And slowly you squeeze the trigger . . .

  Do you hear the big bang?

  The dude knew. He’d found words for a subject too often taboo. Sitting in the tub as the water turned tepid, growing excited at the many moments of recognition, I came upon a line to which I had a physical reaction, as if my skin had been pricked by a pin: Convinced life is meaningless, / I lack the courage of my conviction.

  Seidel began to write his newspaper poems in March 2000, and it was my job to format them, make sure all the italics and em-dashes and capital letters were just so, and then fax him a copy to inspect and approve. I was too shy to tell him his earlier poems had hit me with such force. I didn’t want to sound like what I feared I was, the kind of guy who reads poetry in search of himself. When we talked on the phone, I felt like a supplicant in the presence of royalty. Here was a man who as a freshman at Harvard had visited Ezra Pound in the hospital and had the temerity to suggest corrections to Pound’s translation of Confucius, who had called on T. S. Eliot in London and been the Paris editor of the Paris Review, for which he had interviewed Robert Lowell. If he wasn’t royalty, he had at least touched it. On the telephone he always said, Phil, my boy, how are you? in the most sophisticated voice I’d ever heard, very precise, as if his concourse were typically with the gods but he’d learned English as a second language so he could order lunch. He had what was called a Harvard accent, but it sounded like money to me. He never failed to ask what I thought of his latest poem, continued asking long after I’d given him sufficient reason to stop. What could I tell him? I was on deadline every time we spoke, with headlines and photo captions still to write, and stories to cut to make them fit on the page. I didn’t read his poems with the care they deserved until the next morning, before the hum of the day began, when I could sit with a cup of coffee in my hand and my feet up on my desk, the paper spread in my lap. They were by far the most interesting thing on offer, perhaps the most interesting writing to appear in those pages since Charles Dow and Edward Jones had changed the name of their daily news bulletin for Wall Street traders, the Customers’ Afternoon Letter, in 1889. Dude, I wanted to tell him, I can’t believe you’re getting away with this in the Wall Street Journal! You’re my hero! But I didn’t want to be fawning, so I’d focus on a particular stanza whose music I liked, or a particular image that struck me, avoiding mention of the lines I caressed most dearly: Put the pills back in the vial. / Put the gun back in the drawer. / Ventilate the carbon monoxide. / Back away from the railing. I think he believed that I wasn’t a very bright boy, a fact I confirmed when one time he asked me what else would be appearing on the next morning’s page, alongside his poem. I mentioned a piece on the Elgin Marbles, and he took a quick, shallow breath, aghast. EL-jin, my boy, he said in that godlike voice of his. EL-jin! Never having heard the word spoken aloud, I’d pronounced the g as you would in god, which to a certain cast of mind was akin to calling Socrates sock-RAT-us.

  Around this time there began to be heard complaints about the political thrust and aesthetic sensibilities of the Leisure & Arts page. Ray mentioned these complaints to me in elliptical asides during conversations on other matters. He’d apparently been forwarded some scolding letters to the editor about a couple of Seidel’s poems; he’d also received a memo from the publisher that raised concerns about propriety and sound judgment. But Ray was a cagey fellow, a survivor of twenty years in the shadow of Bob Bartley, and although I never asked him how he responded to questions about his stewardship, I imagined him pointing out that the occasional kerfuffle proved he had his readers’ attention, and besides, every single day a big fat ad appeared on his page.

  We were, after all, in the midst of a millennial madness, and the paper was not just an avid chronicler of the madness but an active participant in it. One month after I was originally hired, the Dow Jones Industrial Average—comprised of thirty corporations chosen by the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, and the only company brand more recognizable than the paper itself—closed above 10,000 for the first time. The Journal celebrated this triumph with a banner six-column headline, only the third in its history, the others having blared the news of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the start of the First Gulf War.

  On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ index reached an all-time high of 5,048.62. The paper was so fat with tech-company advertising, the average subscriber—white, fiftyish, male, with a yearly household income of around $200,000—risked a herniated disk when he lifted it from his doorstep. Management went on a hiring spree to fill an ever greater need for copy, and the paper hatched new daily sections and weekly supplements to cash in on the advertising lucre of companies that would go belly up before the end of their second fiscal year. I knew colleagues who charged every movie, every dinner out, every new book or bottle of high-end wine to their Dow Jones credit cards. Ad managers at the paper’s sister publication, Barron’s, were said to keep open tabs at various Manhattan bars and entertain clients by expensing the cost of strippers.

  It was easy to be carried along on this tide of giddy prosperity, writing the occasional, mildly subversive piece in order to cling to what I thought of as possession of my soul. The paper promised an audience of millions, and a part of me couldn’t quite shake the idea that the goal of writing was to have your work read by as many people as possi
ble. Once a month or so I’d propose an article for the Leisure & Arts page, and more often than not Ray would go for it. By almost any yardstick I’d lucked out in my professional life. I could have lived in Bismarck, or Dubuque, like some of my old college friends, writing stories about city council meetings. I could have been waiting tables in a Lower East Side tapas bar. Instead I saw jazz for free in any club I cared to visit, just by calling ahead and telling the doorman where I worked. When out-of-towners came to visit, I took them to Windows on the World, just across the street from the office, a view that never failed to awe. If I profiled a writer or musician—Larry McMurtry, Charlie Haden—the subject’s latest book or album shot up the Amazon sales rankings. I was, for a moment anyway, moving units and meeting people.

  I built a sweet home library from the spoils of the weekly book giveaway, the constant pile of review copies sent by American publishers to the paper’s literary editor. Not only did I make off with reissued classics from Penguin and the Modern Library, I surreptitiously swiped the volumes on tantric sex, slipping them into my bag when no one else was looking. When uttered during the exchange of small talk at parties in Brooklyn tenements—always somewhat sheepishly, and only in response to direct questions about my gainful employment—the words Wall Street Journal had the effect of a potent narcotic: dilated pupils, flushed face, and what I perceived as a perceptible slackening of sexual inhibition, of which, being a socially awkward midwesterner, I rarely had the courage to take advantage, despite my collection of books on tantric sex.

  My new apartment was a one-bedroom, second-story walk-up in Queens, on the border of Astoria and Long Island City, four stops to Manhattan on the N train. It had been trashed pretty badly by the previous occupants, the only reason it wasn’t gone before I came across the listing. When the landlord showed me the place he apologized for its condition, but I was desperate. I offered him a deal. I’d repaint the whole thing floor to ceiling, lay new tile in the kitchen, tear up the worn purple carpet in the living room, and sand and refinish the wood floors—if he’d waive the security deposit and give me the first three months rent-free. He looked at me as if I were insane, but I’d done the math—I’d save more than two grand—and when I extended my hand, he shook it.

  I removed the carpet only to discover little drifts of mouse turds along the walls, plus cockroach corpses by the dozen. The new paint job required multiple coats to cover the underlying shade of Pepto-Bismol pink. I rented a large circular sander for the wood floors and applied sealer every other day in strips so I could move from room to room without ruining the finish. The work took almost every spare waking minute I had over three weeks, and the smells of paint and polyurethane were a long time in fading. Still, it was satisfying to live alone again—no roommate, no feral cats—and in a neighborhood where I had no trouble blending in: middle class, ethnically diverse, with a Mediterranean flavor thanks to the one of the largest expat populations of Greeks in the world.

  Though I finally had a set of rooms all my own, I found my new freedom slightly unnerving. Unlike in Bed-Stuy, there were plenty of restaurants and bars and cafés within a short walk of my apartment. The options for whiling away an evening overwhelmed me with their variety; I couldn’t seem to find the place to call mine, the place where a loner could sit cocooned in silence and remain unremarked-upon, unseen.

  Committing to the life of a loner involves one difficulty above all others: even loners, perhaps especially loners, often find themselves horny. In New York whole industries thrived on the basis of this simple fact, and nowhere was this more evident than in the Village Voice classifieds. I began to study those pages with what I thought of as a detached and almost scholarly amusement, but one ad in particular kept calling to me with the promise of amateur phone sex. The very existence of amateur phone sex intrigued me. I’d always assumed it was a realm for professionals.

  It wasn’t long before I memorized the prerecorded greeting. I even learned to mimic the perky-bimbo inflections of the woman who recited it:

  Thanks for calling the all-live, all-the-time phone line where ladies call free to share their fantasies with you. If you’re under eighteen, you must hang up. . . .

  Welcome to the exciting new way to talk one-on-one with the area’s hottest students, housewives, and working girls for just thirty-five cents per minute, seventy-five for the first. . . .

  I knew the city’s hottest students, housewives, and working girls weren’t sitting at home pressing speed-dial with one hand while petting themselves with the other, but when I called that first night I thought I might get lucky and connect with an introverted bombshell, a naughty librarian. We’d talk about music or books or the Kyoto Protocol. We’d choose a place to meet for a drink. We’d proceed to her place, or mine, and lick each other’s privates in the dark.

  Half the single people my age in New York were already using the Internet as a portal to erotic adventure, but I’d always been a little slow adopting new technologies. It was the new millennium and I was still using a manual typewriter.

  Main menu: Press one for sexy recorded personals, or press two for live connections on the talk line.

  I pressed two.

  Press one to talk to women, or press two to talk to men.

  I pressed one.

  Live talk main menu: Press one to connect with callers who are on the line right now. Press two to record or update your dateline personals greeting.

  I pressed one.

  You have ninety seconds to describe who you are and what you’re interested in. Take care with your privacy—no full names, addresses, or other information that could be abused by other callers. Here’s your chance to make an introduction. The most intriguing greetings get the most responses, so make your ad as sexy as you can. Your privacy is guaranteed. Your greeting will play only to others who are on the talk line when you are. To remove your greeting, just hang up. You can rerecord as often as you need to, until you’re satisfied. Start speaking at the tone. Press pound when you’re done. Good luck.

  I was drearily earnest at first. I stressed my status as a gainfully employed, suit-wearing monkey. I laid on the midwestern charm, the whole small-town-boy-in-the-big-city act. I waxed poetic about my love of music and books, going to museums, eating out. I was, in short, Prince Charming, a perfect gentleman straight from the script of a rom-com, just the push of a button away.

  Welcome to the talk line!

  Rarely have I heard such scorn. Women sent recorded messages in which they simply cackled at me. Some were incredulous: You’re actually looking for a date? On this line? One even presumed to judge my anatomy: Come on, little boy, pull that itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie out of your pants and play with momma. . . .

  I hung up that first night completely demoralized. I wanted to be appalled at all the perverts and misfits on their telephones across the city—the heavy-breathers, the pre-op transsexuals, the women from the Bronx looking to play for pay—but I was mostly disappointed in myself. They, at least, were candid about what they wanted.

  And what did I want? There’s no way I could have been honest about that. What was I supposed to say: I need someone to sleep with me so I can tell the story of my brother’s death? That would have had the virtue of being true, as if the truth were a virtue on a phone-sex line. Over the course of a few short-lived flings in the time since Dan’s suicide, I’d discovered that sex emptied my mind of everything nonessential, and the one thing that remained essential, I thought, was the story of his suicide. Everything else was a dream or an anecdote. Nothing else meant a thing, not compared with the big story, and I just couldn’t talk about it unless I’d bared myself in physical intimacy. Hard to imagine working that up as an attractive come-on, though: Hey, sweetheart, let’s screw with our eyes closed and then snuggle up for some pillow talk about the mysteries of self-inflicted death. Will you listen if I tell you?

  In time I worked through my initial misgivings about phone sex. I did the practical thing. I listened and learned.
The rules were simple. You could lie about what you looked like—who would know the difference?—but you’d best be blunt about your desires if you didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. It was all there for the ear, an aural smorgasbord of titillation and perversion, thirty-five cents per minute, seventy-five for the first, every kinky fantasy you’ve ever heard about and more, and plenty of people willing to pay and be paid for real-world sex. You listened, one after another, to little personal ads (“greetings”) in the voice of the person being personal, and make no mistake, they were personal, about everything under the sun from golden showers to gang bangs, with an emphasis on interracial pleasure seeking and an unmistakable undertone of pitiful desperation.

  Press one to repeat this greeting. Press two to send a private message. Press three to ask this caller to connect with you live, one-on-one. Press four to hear the next caller’s greeting. Press five to return to the previous ad. Press seven to block this caller from contacting you.

  With a bit of practice I developed a whole portfolio of personae, ranging from the iconic to the cryptic. Clark Kent Calling from a Phone Booth was my go-to line. His ready-made image allowed me to dispense with laborious physical description. He was also the perfect fantasy man of the women’s magazines—a reliable breadwinner, a modest but hunky journalist who morphed into Superman when he took off his clothes.