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.

A Writer’s Baptism

The first book you publish is like having your first child. Its publication sparks an air of excitement perhaps unequaled by all the subsequent novels that follow, no matter if they are bigger hits, made into a movie or top the New York Times bestseller list.

The first published novel entitles you, legitimizes you. No longer will you have to go through this conversation:

“What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

“What books have you published?”

“None yet but I’m writing one that is sure to be published.

Just another wannabe.

It was only in later years I realized a writer who works at it every day does not need validation. The simplest, truest definition of a writer is: “Someone who writes.”

My first published book was a paperback original called “Stinger.” It was a hard-boiled mystery, an homage to my beloved Raymond Chandler. The experience of its publication is not something I will ever forget.

One day without fanfare a box was delivered to my house by UPS. Inside were my contractual 50 copies of the book from the publisher. I picked one up, gently, reverently, as if it was a newborn baby. My name was right there in print on the cover. I got chills, my endorphins were running wild.

At the time I was a sportswriter for the Newark Star-Ledger and my beat was the New York Knicks. I traveled with the team all over the country to cover them. On my first road trip after publication I showed up at the airport to fly with the team to Utah. I came armed with copies of my book and handed them out like Christmas gifts to everybody. I felt like a celebrity, a feeling sportswriters rarely experience.

A columnist for the Boston Globe once wrote: “Sports writing is situated between two glamorous professions: sports and writing.” Although there was status in being a beat writer for a major New York team, truth is we always felt somewhat diminished by the fact we were in the presence of men making millions of dollars.

I once interviewed a player who stuttered and had only a rudimentary grasp of English, as if it was his second language. He was plain out dumb. But on the court he was a supreme artist, a genius, and was paid very well. I remember taking a shower in the hotel the team was staying at right after I did that interview. In the shower I had a moment of awareness: what this none-too-bright player was earning in one year would be more than I probably would in my lifetime.

When we checked into the hotel in Salt Lake City, the first thing I did was run out looking for a bookstore. I found one in a mall. Almost holding my breath, finding it hard to breathe, I walked down the aisles to see if they carried my book. I could have asked the clerk, but part of the joy of being a writer is discovery. If it was there on the shelves, I wanted to experience coming upon it.

Not only was my book on the shelves, stacked six deep, but someone had just picked up a copy to glance at it. My heart started racing. Would this person buy my book? He studied it for what felt like an eternity. I debated whether to tell him I was the author and introduce myself. Perhaps that would sway him to buy. Or I could have said, “That’s a great book. I read it the other day.”

But I said nothing. Unlike in writing a book where you are the master of all things, in this situation I surrendered to a process outside of my control. It was he who was going to decide. He wasn’t one of my characters, I couldn’t control him. Then the moment came: instead of putting it back on the shelf, which would have crushed me, he bought the book! He was going to read it. The journey from idea, to writing to publishing had now come to its rightful ending.

That road trip included stops in Seattle and Los Angeles. I went to bookstores there, bought multiple copies at each so the publisher/book store owner would know my novel was selling.

I later wrote a far better book, also a paperback original, called “The Zukovka Experiment,” and it sold 41,000 copies. I love that book, but it will always remain what it was: my second book. The first is always special.