The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano. PublicAf

Nuance and Nuisance, by Ed Park

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2024-10-01 05:00:08

The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano. PublicAffairs. 608 pages. $35.

Street art by Curtis Cuffie outside the offices of the Village Voice, 1990s. Photograph by Grégoire Alessandrini © The artist

At 7:32 pm on Wednesday, July 1, 1998, my co-worker Ron sent me a message over ATEX, the editing system we used at the Village Voice:

if you ever work here late at night, when there aren’t many people around, you will notice tiny little bugs flying around . . . they come out of the walls . . . (when i was young, my father owned a grainary . . . it is well known that the only way to truly “rid” grainaries of insects is to burn them to the ground . . . )

Ron had been at the Voice for twenty years, and like most of the old salts was somewhat mysterious to me. Perennially garbed in a dark windbreaker and a Raiders cap, he arrived at the office near the end of most people’s shifts, to assemble the Letters section in relative silence. Outwardly mordant, Ron could be downright goofy in his ATEX messages, with deliberate typos and odd punctuation, designed to keep me—a copy editor, four years in—amused. He usually addressed me as “edwidge,” a nod to the author Edwidge Danticat, or simply “ ’widge,” which in his more garrulous moods sometimes expanded to “ ’widgeworth.”