Free Lucking Out by James Wolcott

what
I. F. Stone’s Weekly
was to the Washington lie machine—a caustic disinfectant. She thrived on feuds and court intrigue, her turf war with the political muckraker Jack Newfield resulting in huge shifts in barometric pressure inside the building when some vital piece of information was up for contention. It wasn’t her idea to hire me, and had I been a better butterer-upper, I might have schmoozed things over to the point where I wasn’t looked upon as an intrusive specimen, a bug found in an ear of corn. But I was too untutored in the art of deference, oblivious to the danger signs, and lackadaisical in the time-honored mime of looking busy when there was a significant lull in the action. It was about fifteen or twenty minutes before end of regular hours, and returning to the office when she would normally have been leaving, Nichols crossed in front of my desk, which had been cleared so that I could begin the next day with a clean slate (having stuffed everything I needed to do in the drawers), paused, surveyed my near-empty desktop, factored in my bland demeanor, which apparently contained a subcutaneous layer of insubordination, and asked: “Don’t you get bored sitting there all day doing nothing?”
    A question whose tone and implication I considered a trifle inconsiderate, since I hadn’t spent “all day” doing nothing, reserving relative inactivity for that brief interval before it was time to head out. Rather than defend or explain my idle appearance, I replied amiably enough: “I meditate.”
    Nichols blinked without actually blinking, looking stunned, and not in a delighted way. I’m not sure why I had replied as I had, since it would be another twenty years before I even took up meditation, enrolling in the Transcendental Meditation course in a class that included a Frenchman who later complained to the instructor that he wanted a different mantra from the one he had been assigned (“My mantra is working
against
me”), but whichever imp of the perverse activated my tongue didn’t matter: my blithe attempt at airy deflection proved to be more infuriating than any edgy comeback I might have made. I acted as if I were out of her jurisdiction, which no boss can countenance. It may have also confirmed Nichols’s (correct) suspicion that the world of hard-boiled politics was no place for a potted fern like myself. It was recorded in McAuliffe’s excellent history that upon hearing my insolence, Nichols snapped, “Then go meditate at the unemployment line.” Dramatically neat as that plays, the truth was klutzier, as it usually is. She got back into the elevator, hit the button for the fifth floor, and—so I was later informed—told the editor in chief: “I can’t do anything with Wolcott. I tell him to do something and he tells me he’s meditating.” Instead of firing me on the spot, she waited until I returned after a holiday weekend to send me on my merry way. I don’t recall the dialogue on that occasion being particularly snappy, only how compressed the air felt as I left her office, packed quiet with the knowledge shared by everyone on the floor that I had been axed. As soon as I walked in that morning I knew that they knew that I was a goner from the funny little fidgets their mouths made as they forked over the usual Monday-morning hellos. I was standing in front of my former desk with the hollow, bomb-struck feeling of the just fired when Tipmore, trying and failing to sound offhand now that the news was official, asked: “So, Jim, given any thought as to what you’re going to do with your office?”
    “Well,” I said, “seeing that I’ll no longer be working here, I don’t imagine I’ll get to
keep
it.”
    Which he knew full well, just as he knew that the logical next occupant of the office would be himself. With a cool twist of the swizzle stick he was letting me know that he had felt the office was rightfully his all along and now he was going to inherit it and too bad for