Shelf Life: 1971—from The New Hibernia Review, fall 2023 [Terence Winch]

 

The way I got my first real job was to me a miracle. I was finishing up graduate school as a doctoral fellow at Fordham University in the Bronx and needed money now that my fellowship stipend was about to expire. A college classmate of mine named Terence Hegarty, who worked at Dover Publications in lower Manhattan, helped me get an interview there for an editorial position. But I had no real professional work experience. I had worked as a construction laborer for four summers; I was a movie usher for a while when I was fifteen; I was a temporary postal worker one Christmas vacation when I was eighteen; I spent the summer of 1969 working the graveyard shift as an elevator operator in a swanky building on Park Avenue; I played the drums in ceili bands in the New York area for years. When I was sixteen, I spent the summer as the drummer in a very strange trio that played six nights a week at the Emerald Isle House in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, the so-called Irish Alps. For about six months, also when I was sixteen, I played drums every Sunday at Gaelic Park in the Bronx as part of the Mickey Carton orchestra. But I’d never worked in an office before. And my interview was to be conducted by Blanche Cirker, who started the company with her husband Hayward (photo below) and was rumored to be prickly and difficult. My interview was set for Thursday morning, May 20, 1971. I regarded my chances as slim.

My life was complicated. I had been writing a multitude of songs and poems, performing here and there in obscure venues, and publishing poems in little magazines. I had finished all requirements for a PhD in literature, under the mentorship of Fordham University's brilliant Richard Giannone, with only one chapter left to write of my dissertation to secure the degree. I was living in a great apartment off Fordham Road in the Bronx (often joined by my girlfriend, Marie Ringwald) and visiting DC as often as I could to hang out with my brother Jesse, who was a grad student at Howard University. I had also taken to writing journalism, some of which I was actually asked to produce—I was, for example, a regular book reviewer for the Boston Review of the Arts. But most of my pieces were assigned by me to me. I would write an essay on something and drop it in the mail. Which was a bit crazy, as the topics I tackled all had a short shelf life. But I met with some success. For example, the East Village Other, the radical left alternative to the Village Voice, accepted two long pieces by me. 

On the day of my interview with Mrs. Cirker, I stopped off at the newsstand on the way to catch the D train downtown, picking up the Times, the Post, and the Voice. I settled in for the long ride to lower Manhattan, leafing through the papers. I’ve always loved reading newspapers. 

When I turned to page sixteen of the Voice, I think I came close to levitating. For there, magically, was my piece on Fordham Hospital: “A Hospital in Jeopardy: Let Them Eat Aspirin.” The paper didn’t even contact me beforehand. There was no discussion ever, no official or unofficial acceptance. I mailed it to them, and now, a week or two later, here it was in the Voice. I was in a state of half rapture, half disbelief. This was a fantasy come true. Clearly I was on my way to becoming the next Jimmy Breslin or Pete Hamill, two of my heroes in those days. The subway immediately became an enchanted place of dreams fulfilled. 

                                                                       Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin

I made my way to 180 Varick Street, Dover’s address, my feet barely touching the ground. My luck got even better: turns out Mrs. Cirker had a special interest in medical and healthcare issues. “So, do you have any writing experience, young man?” she asked. “Well, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Cirker, I have a piece on Fordham Hospital that just came out today in this week’s Voice,” I replied, handing her the paper, folded to the story in question. I was hired on the spot. 

My boss at Dover was a polymath named Everett Bleiler, a very decent man with a photographic memory. My first day on the job, he gave me an old copy of M. R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. “What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Just read it. Take your time.” So I would come to work every morning, settle in, and read Victorian ghost stories by the author who, as I recall, created the whole image of the ghost as a white-sheeted figure. Could any job be better than this? When I finally finished the book, Everett told me to write promotional copy for the back cover, using other Dover books as models. When I submitted my first draft, he glanced at it for just a few seconds, then proceeded to give me detailed feedback on specific aspects of the text. I was amazed he could read that fast, never mind with such atomized focus. I worked on other wonderful books—William Blake’s Songs of Innocence (sans Experience), Sleeping Beauty (illustrated by Arthur Rackham), The Rectory Umbrella and Mischmasch by Lewis Carroll, and many more. When Everett started assigning me books on thermodynamics and other topics beyond my ken or interest, I realized it was not actually necessary to read the books in order to crank out the requisite promotional boilerplate.

Meanwhile, in the universe beyond the confines of my inner life and personal routines, momentous happenings were taking place. Two events of that summer remain vivid to me: the front-page story in the New York Times regarding the Pentagon Papers, and the attempted assassination of mob boss Joe Colombo in Columbus Circle. I usually ate lunch at my desk while reading the paper. For those of us who passionately opposed the Vietnam War—in my case, for reasons of principle along with a potent combination of fear and cowardice— Daniel Ellsberg’s daring act of subversion pulled back the curtain on the lies the US government had been telling about the war for years. In truth, many of us on the left saw through that curtain much earlier. I had gotten to know the antiwar priests Dan Berrigan and his brother Phil. Dan Berrigan’s writing along with his courageous and charismatic presence exerted a profound influence on me. The shooting of Colombo was just another reminder of how scary New York had become in those days. Taking the subway home to the Bronx every night always made me a little nervous. 

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The conflict in the north of Ireland was becoming ever more intense in ’71. I had gotten involved with NORAID (Irish Northern Aid) through a Belfast couple named Tom and Anne Egan, the parents of Jim Egan, another college friend. Jesse and I played for NORAID fundraisers in the basement of the Egans' building on Nagle Avenue in Inwood, their upper Manhattan neighborhood. These get-togethers would start off with a song I wrote for a NORAID fundraiser in 1968 called “The Streets of Belfast,” which I kept adding to over the years as the Troubles progressed. We even got to know Brian Heron, James Connolly’s grandson, who appeared on the NORAID scene in 1971. [left: Brian Heron, 1971. Photo © by Jesse Winch] 

This was a great life I was living. I was twenty-five, I had a fantastic job, an amazing girlfriend, an apartment I loved, and I was a millimeter away from getting my doctorate. So, of course, I decided to uproot it all and move to Washington, DC. In the Bronx I led the ascetic life of a scholar. Four years of grad school, smoking cigarettes, reading constantly, holed up in my apartment. Just enough money to pay my basic expenses. Then I would visit DC and everyone I met through my brother was some kind of artist—painters, writers, musicians. Everyone seemed to live in a group house. Never-ending parties, everyone stoned, everybody caught up in the counterculture and left-wing politics. The anti-war movement, gay liberation, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the music revolution. You would think that New York, not DC, would be the epicenter where it was all happening. But for me, DC became the paradoxical mecca of the sweeping changes that young people were generating throughout the country. Jesse already had a band lined up for me to join. I came up with a name for the group: Big Deal, which it turned out not to be. Marie, a visual artist herself, and I decided to give Washington one year. Neither of us expected to stay there. We were New Yorkers. We would certainly come back. I sublet my apartment for the year to a fellow grad student. We filled a U-Haul with our collective stuff, including my cat Spooky, and on September 12 we took off for the Capital of the Free World. Marie and I broke up a few years later, but neither of us ever moved back to New York. 

DC offered me an entirely new life. I quickly got a job in one of the few major bookstores in town back then, Discount Records and Books, right on Dupont Circle. The manager agreed to let me be the poetry buyer, and I started ordering all kinds of esoteric avant-garde books, chapbooks, and journals, which in turn started attracting poets to the store. One of those poets was Ed Cox, a soulful, gay navy vet from a dirt-poor Irish American family. He told me about an open poetry reading called Mass Transit that took place every Monday night just a block away in a big empty room over the Community Bookstore, a left-wing emporium on P Street.

On a Monday night in November, just after turning twenty-six, I headed off after work to check out this open reading. Ed was on the front steps of the building with twenty-nine-year-old Michael Lally, the man behind it all. Michael and I immediately clicked. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but the encounter felt somehow profound. It was the friendship equivalent of love at first sight. In fact, we became instant best friends and have remained so throughout our lives. 

                              Washington Post article, June 27, 1973, with my first name spelled wrong.

Meeting Michael was a pivotal moment for me in this most crucial year of my life. He has always been a catalyst—starting reading series, small presses, journals. He turned me on to the New York School poets—Frank O’Hara and Ted Berrigan in particular—and their work, not to mention Michael’s, reshaped my own. Michael left DC in 1975, never to return, but we have always stayed in close touch. 

A week after running my piece, the Village Voice sent me a check for seventy-five dollars. That was ten dollars more than my rent. After 1971 and until late 1977, my life was marked by continuous emotional and romantic ferment. Too many relationships, too many one-night stands, many memorable music gigs, great sex, terrible sex, too many cigarettes, joints, shots, and lines of coke. But I’m happy to have lived through it all. Back to William Blake: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” 

I extend grateful acknowledgement to the New Hibernia Review, where this piece first appeared in 2024. The version here has been edited and updated.

©Terence Winch  
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