Remember the Rolodex? I started cleaning mine out the other day, putting the pertinent addresses and phone numbers remaining on mine into my computer. It’s an odd sort of trip down memory lane: there were the names of old shrinks and girlfriends, sources and editors I haven’t spoken to in in years, and the odd dead person.

Both of my parents were there — Dad’s address in Barstow, Mom’s last in Petaluma — sandwiched in between my living (as of this writing) siblings, as well as a few famous folk I’d had contact with. I’ve written of Chris Whitley, the guitarist I came to know when we first moved to NY. I wrote a magazine piece about him for Vogue and then a bio of the artist for Columbia records, the kind of two-page thing the label sends out to journalists in a press package. (It was heavily edited by Columbia, as I recall, for the usual idiotic reasons: The woman in charge of publicity at the time hated Lou Reed and dropped a reference I made to him; Chris himself had talked at length about Johnny Winter, which the label thought appealed to the wrong demo, and so on. It’s still out there on the web somewhere…)

Then there was Wendy Wasserstein, who wrote a piece about the joys of the Upper West Side for a now defunkt city site called Total New York that I was in charge of for a brief period, back when they were calling the Flatiron District “Silicon Alley” and content was supposedly king. As I recall, Wendy had actually written the piece as a favor for my boss, Guy Garcia, who seemed to know everybody, though there was some nominal fee involved. Her reaction to my edit of her piece was: sure, whatever, just send me the money. I’m not sure she ever saw the site.

And then there was an ancient card for Frank Conroy, the author of Stop Time. I was working at Parenting magazine, then in SF, in the mid-eighties and had persuaded the author to write something about finding himself a new parent, with grown sons from a previous marriage, late in life. It was an elegaic little essay, as I recall, and the author was such a pro that he didn’t even object when the illustrator depicted him as balding, despite his head of Peter Graves like snowy hair. I was such an admirer of Conroy, Stop Time still being my model for a memoir, that I was amazed that he consented to write for me. I wasn’t aware that famous writers (especially “writer’s writers” as he was often labeled) needed money, too. Sometimes more than the rest of us.

There are other names on that Rolodex I’m afraid to ask about — Saul Zaentz? Elaine Steinbeck? Though I think I might have heard if they had died, providing I was paying attention.