Parents Tougher Than Publishers

In most blue collar families when I grew up wanting to be a writer is like saying you wanted to do nothing the rest of your life but lounge around. My parents had worked very hard to scrape together the money to send me to college. Typical Jewish parents back then, they wanted me to become a lawyer or a doctor. Me, I didn’t want to become anything. I wanted to stay in high school and have fun.

In today’s world, I would’ve just refused to go to college and found some kind of job. I had zero interest in college, especially because this one was an all-male school I was going to. Coming from the most popular clique in high school, always with a girlfriend, this was like being banished to monastery. The only girls around to flirt with were townies. But I went. It was not yet into defiance.

Since I didn’t have a clue at the time I was a writer, I took courses which would send me on the road to law school.  Being a doctor had never been an option from the time I went to the bathroom in high school and threw up after dissecting a frog in biology class.

It was during my junior year at Rutgers that through reading Fitzgerald I fell in love with writing. When I graduated, instead of going on to law school after getting decent scores in my LSAT, I announced to my parents I was going to be a writer. Dead silence. Then I added the killer: I had found a summer job as a taxi driver in South Orange, N.J. Needless to say the atmosphere in our tiny four room apartment was chilly that summer. With two parents and brother, there was no place to hide or find refuge.

Then a call came in the fall from a college buddy who was going to USC film school. He invited me out to L.A. to be his roommate. Second shocker to my parents: I was leaving home for a foreign land. The longest trip my parents had ever taken was to Atlantic City.

In L.A. I found a job as a social worker in Inglewood. I was given 50 cases in Watts, all mothers with dependent children and no men around the house, government rules. Unlike most social workers in my office, I did not go into women’s homes and search the medicine cabinet for men’s razor blades or shaving cream. I just asked them what they needed. A new refrigerator? No problem.  A new stove? You got it. Whatever they asked for I put in the necessary paper work, knocked off just after noon and went to Santa Anita Racetrack, where I worked very hard at losing my paycheck. Nights I put in time on my Great American Novel, which in reality was a reworking of J.P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man.”  Same kind of sentence structure, similar character. I imagine most beginning writers start out that way, trying to imitate a published author they like. I had no clue as to what my own style would be.

After nine months of this I came home, moved into my old room, sat on my father’s easy chair during the day and stared at the walls. Then a call came from my sister-in-law. She knew I liked to write and had seen an ad for a reporter for a weekly called The Nutley Sun. Thus began my newspaper career. It would take me on a journey to one of the larger papers in the country, The Newark Star-Ledger, where I ended up working 19 years as a sportswriter. During that time I'd get up at seven a.m., work on a novel, then run off late in the afternoon to Madison Square Garden to cover the Knicks, or in summer to Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium for the Yanks and Mets.

I finally published a book, a paperback original called “Stinger.” I gave a copy to the my mother. She read it. The only comment she made was: “You still can’t spell.” But every time I went to visit her, my book sat squarely on the coffee table, and I knew she was bragging to her friends and relatives that her son was a writer. My second book, “The Zukovka Experiment,” took its reserved space on the coffee table alongside my other book.  Getting recognized by my mother was probably more gratifying then than getting published, at least during those early years. Just part of the weird journey of being a writer.