The Freaks Came Out to Write
Remembering Julie, when the fun was about to begin
At my second interview Julie says the first one “went OK.” In the polite and earnest way of job seekers – of beggars everywhere, always – I agree.
She taps her pen on the desk and lapses into silence. Outside, the midday traffic bustles. Horns. People yelling.
Julie seems less tiny in the elevated chair but I know that when she stands to shake my hand and walk me out, she will be the same five-foot creature I met last week. One hundred pounds max. I could lift her onto my shoulders for a ride around the room.
“Anyway,” she says, “Ray likes you, so we're making an offer.”
Ray likes me. The wording seems important, since I will be working not with Ray but with Julie: editor of the Riverfront Times, this left-leaning alternative weekly in St. Louis. Publisher Ray I'll see at staff meetings and pass in the hallway. Julie doesn't like me, then?
My first few RFT stories are met with nods of approval, but no whoops or cheers. I'm at the keyboard one day, struggling – backspace, insert. Cut, paste. Try again. Stare out the window at gargoyles on the church across the street, their stony grimaces.
I feel … or hear … something. Maybe she shifts from foot to foot, causing the rustle of her skirt (a thrift-store item like most of Julie's wardrobe). Maybe the light in our space changes ever-so-slightly, and I register this without consciously knowing. Anyway, I turn.
She can't have been standing there long. Julie’s rarely still. She is prone, in the midst of a dull conversation or pointless argument, to blurt “I don't have time for this” and stomp away. Julie could stomp.
Now she's outside my cubicle, arms at her sides. “Hey,” she says. Flips her hair back with one hand. “Will you go rollerblading with me tonight in Forest Park? I've never tried it. New skates.”
She's an avid bicyclist, her marathon rides the stuff of legend in the office. I can imagine her expertly knotting the bike-shoe laces, snapping shut the helmet’s chin fastener. Julie’s wee, almost stubby fingers look edible. But they’re quick and practiced when, in the composing room, she points to a layout problem or when she balls up a press release to thump into the trash.
It’s 1989. Inline skating has begun to gather momentum. Same with my marriage, which happened that year. Over the next decade, the skating fad will steadily dwindle. My marriage, too.
Julie is radiant. As much as she is tough, canny, even wise. With a smile that makes you doubt every previous decision. Eyes that slant downward at the corners almost undetectably, a hint of sadness.
Forest Park. My boss waits for an answer.
*
The Freaks Came Out to Write, a delicious new book by
, provides an oral history of New York’s Village Voice, mother of alternative weeklies, exemplar of the form. On Substack, Romano publishes . The Voice hired Julie in 1990. Which means that when we met, she might already have been negotiating with hotshots in the Big Apple.They put her on the slumlord beat. A perfect fit for the writer who spoke on the underdog’s behalf. Whose byline “J. A. Lobbia” the Voice would later describe as “enigmatic.”
For journalists, writers, artists – the Voice didn't distinguish much between such categories – the paper served as a haven. Scrappy weirdos flocked to the place. The introduction to Freaks starts with Michael Tomasky, a staff writer enlisted about the same time as Julie. “There were always people like me,” Tomasky says, “sitting hundreds of miles away in a small town in West Virginia, who identified with the Village Voice and said, ‘Wow. What a cool thing this paper is, and wouldn’t it be amazing someday to be part of it?’”
I was a person like Tomasky. Not in West Virginia but in Illinois – Julie's native state, it turns out. A morose kid trapped in the rural outpost named Byron, I subscribed to the Voice. From our big mailbox (metal flag and all) I would eagerly seize the latest copy.
Slid from its plastic mailing wrapper, the Voice was an inch thick or more, redolent of ink that had recently dried in a downtown hundreds of miles away. The pulpy edges of the newsprint felt softly ragged against my fingertips, and bits fluttered off as I turned the pages. James Wolcott. Laurie Stone, who has
on Substack. Nat Hentoff. Jill Johnston. Grainy images. The Letters column, where staff writers fought with each other over what was published the week before. (Sometimes they fought, the boys did – with their fists – before a story got published.)Nothing like the Voice existed that I knew of. A rumpus world, full of the strife that journalism is made of – from outside in every setting, but at the Voice from within as well.
Freaks captures the atmosphere. Joseph Jesselli recalls how Voice investigative heavyweight Wayne Barrett once made Julie cry. Barrett bothered a lot of people. Not in the book – who could get it all? – is that Julie met Jesselli at the Voice and married him. They were together for seven years. (Jesselli went on to become co-founder of The Smoking Gun website.)
The book mentions Julie twice in text and once in a footnote. After 9/11, as Voice editors argued about how they would cover the horror, Julie “walked through,” says a staffer. “She was getting her stuff and going to the hospital.” There, two months later, she would die of ovarian cancer at age 43. The world was falling apart as Julie started the shockingly abrupt process of leaving it.
Romano’s title is a play on the hip-hop Brooklyn band Whodini’s 1984 song, “The Freaks Come Out at Night.” The lyrics lament, “Discos don’t open ‘til after dark / And it ain’t ‘til 12 ‘til the party really starts / And I always had to be home by 10 / Right before the fun was about to begin.”
*
To Julie’s skate invitation I say no. In a polite and earnest way, with more ceremony than necessary. She wasn’t asking me on a date. I flattered myself to think so.
Forest Park is large with many pathways, unsafe at night. She only wanted a person beside her in that darkness as an escort or guardian. I was surprised that she didn’t have such a person at the ready. I’m glad she found him in New York.
Julie takes the turndown with a shrug. She goes rollerblading alone, and next morning arrives at work battered. Cuts and scrapes on her wrists, elbows, chin. She laughs with our copy editor, with an intern. I almost can’t look at her. She – studiously, I think – doesn’t look at me.
I don’t have time for this, I will hear Julie say on plenty more occasions before she departs to New York, and the crooked property owners that she will expose, and Joe.
William Bastone, Voice freak 1984-2000. He co-founded and edits The Smoking Gun alongside Jesselli. “On the wallet-sized memorial card that was given to those attending Julie’s wake, there’s a small black-and-white photo of her flashing a big smile,” he wrote. Below the image, a line that Julie said to a friend, days before her death. Life is full of wonder and joy.
