June 1–8, 2000

cover story

The Mayor of Hostile City, part 2

Unlikely pair: Knipfel with Derek Davis at the old J.C. Dobbs in a photo of undetermined vintage.

by Sam Adams

part 1 | part 2

There’s never been a shortage of angry young men looking for new ways to piss people off, and history is littered with the corpses of writers who never got beyond thumbing their noses at Mom and Dad. But over the years, Slackjaw developed into something more than a way for Knipfel to offend people he’d never meet in person. Knipfel continued to rant, but his screeds grew deeper, more poisonous, taking on an almost metaphysical loathing for the world around him. And the column’s autobiographical quotient continued to expand, especially once Knipfel moved to Brooklyn in 1991 and could no longer cover local arts. (The move also ended Knipfel’s Downscale Diner restaurant review column, although he did make the suggestion that he could continue to review restaurants in Brooklyn and simply not mention that they weren’t located in Philadelphia.) By the time he moved to the New York Press in 1994, Knipfel had gone from assaulting his audience to inviting them to bear witness to his unfailingly bizarre life. In Slackjaw, he writes, "As time passed I was writing about myself more than the things I was supposed to be reviewing. That was unfair, I thought, so I stopped talking about other people and things altogether, and just told stories about the adventures I’d gotten into that week."

"You can’t stay that angry that long," Knipfel reflects, "and if you do you get real, real boring. In my case, the anger burned itself out. I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s like speed. I did speed for a long time, but you reach a point where your body can’t handle it anymore. Your brain starts demanding that your body do things it simply cannot do: You can’t move that fast. It was the same thing with [writing]. I was still angry, annoyed, bitter, but it didn’t burn so hot anymore."

Knipfel says he’s "embarrassed" by those early columns, and cringes when I read him a brief passage; for him, they’re full of obvious influences (Charles Bukowski, Lester Bangs, Hunter S. Thompson) and typical early-20s angst. "I listen around the office where I am now," he says, "and I hear 23-year-old kids, so full of themselves, so confident of their own abilities, spouting exactly the same things that I was saying back then. That’s what embarrasses me, that I was no different. No matter how much I would like to think that I was, I was no different."

Davis disagrees. "I’ve had writers I agonized over for 10 years who couldn’t put a sentence together like [Jim]. He’s a natural talent. A lot of [his Slackjaw writing] was off the wall, a lot of it was shocking. It’s weird: It was deliberately set up to shock, but it worked anyway."

And despite the discomfort looking back at his old writing causes him, Knipfel still speaks with pride of the hate mail he got. "I’m always under the impression that people feel more if they’re angry than if they’re happy. I’ve never trusted happy people. Part of my thinking when I was trying to piss people off was, I’m showing them what it’s like to be alive. That was a very very small part of what I was thinking at the time, but it was one of my excuses. I was tickled pink with [hate mail]: the angrier the better. If you made somebody wanna kill you for something you think, that was Mission Accomplished."

By Knipfel’s account, he’d never thought about writing professionally until Greg Sandow suggested it. At the time, Knipfel was a grad student in the University of Minnesota’s Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society program, writing papers on Eraserhead, Elvis Presley and the Mentors (the sludge-metal band whose obscene lyrics were a highlight of Tipper Gore’s campaign against filth in rock) for a mostly unappreciative academic audience. But Sandow, one of his professors, also happened to be the new music critic for the Village Voice. After Knipfel decided to move to Philadelphia with his then-girlfriend — later his wife, now his ex-wife — who’d been accepted as a graduate student at Penn, Sandow suggested Knipfel try writing for the Voice. (He did publish several pieces there, but says working for the Voice was "a nightmare.")

Knipfel figured he might as well submit to Philly papers as well, since a quick look at the local alternative weeklies convinced him that he couldn’t be any worse than the people they already employed. "I hadn’t even considered [writing] before," he recalls, "but I had this one man’s opinion that maybe I was skilled at something in this world. I’d done a lot of weird things and told a lot of stories to people in bars, so I just sat down and wrote up a couple of those stories, and that’s what I ended up turning in, under the guise of being a record review."

In fact, the five-page review of the newest Rollins Band album was mostly devoted to recounting Knipfel’s memories of "schizophrenics I have known," a digression which was none too appealing to the City Paper editor who responded to Knipfel’s submission. ("They looked like they paid more, so I sent it to them first.") "Oh, she tore into me," he recalls with a smile on his face. "I was insensitive, the readers wouldn’t appreciate the attitude I took toward schizophrenics, and she didn’t either." Knipfel had better luck with Davis, who liked the review well enough to ask Knipfel to come by the office and talk about future Welcomat assignments. (Although not, it should be noted, enough to publish it.)

His Iggy Pop review was published shortly thereafter, and soon Knipfel was dropping by the Welcomat’s Ludlow Street office to chat with Davis nearly every day. "Most of the time when I was in Philly I was unemployed, and I had nothing to get me out of the apartment," Knipfel recalls. "So I would make up an excuse to go over and see Derek for a bit. He was not at all what I expected when I first met him. He was just this wise little man. The very first time I went up there, we sat down and talked about music for two hours."

From a distance, Knipfel and Davis couldn’t make a more unlikely pair: In his trademark fedora and overcoat, Knipfel looks like a seedy alley-sloucher straight out of film noir; Davis, who comes down the stairs of his Powelton Village house in bare feet and a "Save the Mountain Gorilla" T-shirt, seems every bit the ’60s holdover. (Knipfel describes him as a "troll," although given Davis’ wry sense of humor, "gnome" might be slightly more appropriate.) Despite their cosmetic disparity and the 30-year difference in age, though, the two have forged a friendship as profound as it is unlikely.

"Within a few months," Davis recalls, "we became firm friends in a way I’ve actually never been friends with anybody before. He would come in and we’d just sit and talk for 15 or 20 minutes; that would be the high point of both our days. I’m a depressive too, a depressive, anxiety-ridden person, and [I admire] how he’s dealt with that so much better than I ever have, that he can turn it into humor, that he can turn it into a way of making the world manageable."

Though Knipfel frequently mentions Davis in his Slackjaw columns, he’s not the type to wax poetic about the importance of their friendship, except in rare cases like the acknowledgments to Slackjaw, where he writes "Derek Davis, my dear friend and editor… stood up for me against maniacal publishers, accepted me as one of his family, and taught me how to write."

Going one step further, Quitting the Nairobi Trio is dedicated to Davis, "compadre and goofball, who always liked that story," though Knipfel didn’t breathe a word of the dedication until he sent Davis the first copy of Nairobi’s press run. When he found out, Davis says he was "touched beyond belief. I don’t think anyone has ever done such a kind thing for me before."

From recalling an out-of-place Davis waving his arms to Killdozer at a long-ago Khyber Pass show to reminiscing about the weekend they spent drunk in a Seaside Heights motel room covering a clown convention, Knipfel speaks of Davis with fondness and even reverence. It’s almost unbelievable that a man with such a sociopathic print persona could manifest such tenderness. But talk to his friends and a far gentler image emerges than Knipfel’s caustic self-portraits. As Worden, who’s known Knipfel since his "rant days," points out, "A lot of people who write like that are like that. They’re really acid-tongued and cynical and nasty, and [Jim’s] absolutely not like that. He’s just the most generous, sweet person."

"Underneath the tough-guy exterior and the cranky old man," says Strausbaugh, "there’s just a little softie."

According to Davis, Knipfel is as devoted to those inside his inner circle as he is hostile to those outside. "The thing is, he doesn’t like most people, but if he does like you, he is utterly loyal, loyal beyond anyone I have ever known. He’s somebody, for a good friend he would lay down his life; I have no doubt about it. But if he doesn’t like you, he doesn’t give a fuck."

(Those selective friendships have paid off, too: Hearing that he was moving, Worden introduced Knipfel to fellow New Yorker Laura Lindgren, the longtime designer of the Mütter Museum’s calendar. Lindgren, along with Ken Swezey, runs Blast Books, and introduced Knipfel to Strausbaugh, whose had several books published by Blast. Seems even if you hate most people, it’s still all about who you know.)

"Going blind hasn’t bothered me so much… It’s another thing to deal with, like madness or drunkenness or crime or poverty or the realization that I’ve hurt people around me over the years. All of those things, in one way or another, will be with me forever, near the surface. Going blind, curiously, has been my salvation from many of these things — or my karmic retribution." — from Slackjaw

In writing about someone like Knipfel, you become acutely aware how many of the terms we use to talk about writing are really visual metaphors; we talk about how writers "see" things, "the writer’s eye," their "gaze." It’s a fact that was hardly lost on Slackjaw’s reviewers, who conjured all sorts of cheap sight puns to praise the book, the most egregious of which was this gem from Entertainment Weekly: "Knipfel may be blind, but his artistic vision is as stunning as a sunset over the Brooklyn Bridge." (It’s not only insensitive but inaccurate, since Knipfel can still see well enough to cross the street or read type off a computer screen.) Still, it’s hard not to notice how vivid the visual detail is in Knipfel’s writing, especially given that Knipfel’s eyes have essentially been failing since birth.

"His ability to paint graphic pictures is astonishing," Davis points out. "Especially for someone’s who’s never had good eyesight, his visual imagery is amazing. I used to walk down the street with him — his eyes weren’t as bad then — and he would pick up all this shit in the street, see things all around that I would miss."

Davis stops short of drawing a direct connection between Knipfel’s eyesight and his writing, but Knipfel doesn’t. "I think it’s because of that; I have to hang onto what I can. The thing about that whole period in Nairobi, in the nuthouse, is that things are burned into your memory when you come to extremes: extreme experience, extreme situations. I can still picture everything — every detail of that ward, those people. So I hang onto what I can. It’s getting harder and harder these days, and more recent writing, most of the details are oral."

There’s no question that losing his eyesight has affected Knipfel’s writing, and his life, and not all for the bad. "At a certain point," Strausbaugh recalls, "the one eye fritzed out on him, and since then he’s been writing a lot more about the blindness and how it affects his life. He’s been writing more about the nuthouse stuff, too, and I think he writes about it more sensitively than he used to. As a young guy, there was a certain amount of bluster there; now there’s more self-investigation in the stories."

"I honestly think that in some funny way that losing his sight — knowing he was definitely going to go blind —was almost comforting," Davis ventures. "It’s changed his outlook on life. He’s calmed an incredible amount. He’s still anxious, he’s still depressive and always going to be that way. But the ultimate panic went out of it. It’s like he wanted to stay alive because he’d be so fucking curious what it would be like to be really blind."

Strausbaugh echoes the sentiment with a dose of Knipfel-esque humor: "I think he’s become a more mature individual, and I think as he’s been physically challenged — not to give him any cripple credit — but he’s become a more introspective writer, as would anybody. All those things add up to he tells better stories in a better way."

According to Davis, he’s even cut back his drinking. "Last time I was up there, there was dust all over the Wild Turkey bottles. Everybody comes in and gives him a bottle of Wild Turkey, but they don’t know he doesn’t drink it anymore."

If Knipfel hasn’t softened, it seems he’s definitely slowed down. "I don’t think I’m any stronger," he says. "I think I’m weaker. It grinds you down. After years of whatever, it grinds you down and wears you out. I’m not suicidal anymore. I’m just tired." And success certainly hasn’t gone to his head. "Nowadays," he admits, "I look around both at what I do and what other people do, and have a much lower opinion of myself and a much higher opinion of hacks. About a year or two ago I interviewed Harry Crews, and he was giving me the boilerplate interview he gives everybody, but at one point he stopped, and said, ‘You know, I always thought I’d be better than I am.’ That very much holds true for me."

Friends who’ve read Quitting the Nairobi Trio seem to agree that Knipfel is poised for even more acclaim; it’s less glib than Slackjaw, flows better, and has a more consistent funhouse mirror tone. Of course, Knipfel can’t stand the success he has now: He never answers his phone, disconnected the buzzer to his apartment, dislikes having his picture taken or being interviewed, and especially hates being recognized on the street, mostly because it makes it near-impossible for him to observe from the shadows. "To this day," he laments, "I regret not deciding to pull a Pynchon or a Salinger when I was 21."

Who knows: Maybe someday Knipfel will vanish from the earth, living off his book proceeds on some remote island. He’ll slouch along the beach, the sun beating down on his black hat and overcoat, lashing out at coconuts and sand crabs and hating the waves for crashing on the beach. Maybe some castaway will wash ashore, spot the reclusive writer and yell, "Hey, Slackjaw!," and Knipfel will loathe the intruder with a passion that makes his ears ring. He’ll pour the poison out onto the page, and his writing will keep getting better, and we’ll keep reaping the benefits. Who knew a reclusive, half-blind sociopath could make so many people happy?

A selection of Jim Knipfel’s Slackjaw columns is available online at www.missioncreep.com/slackjaw.

part 1 | part 2