More Talk, Less Hock #2: Heywood Gould

A funny thing happened after I launched the new “More Talk, Less Hock” writer spotlight on my blog a few weeks back. Someone took me seriously. To be honest, I really didn’t think there was going to be a “More Talk, Less Talk #2.” #1 was going to pimp my buddy Russel D McLean, and that would be that. But then I got an e-mail from a publisher pitching an interview with another writer — a non-buddy, someone I’d never met — and I thought, “Why the hell not?” So I said yes.

 I’m glad I did. Heywood Gould is one interesting dude. I mean, how many writers have you met who’ve not only met Michael Keaton, they’ve directed Michael Keaton movies? The guy wrote Cocktail, for chrissakes — the movie and the book! (Yeah, I didn’t know it was a book, either.) Heywood’s newest novel is the wild chase-thriller The Serial Killer’s Daughter. Here’s what he and I had to say to one another.

Me: Back in the day, you wrote the screenplays for some pretty memorable movies. The Boys from Brazil. Fort Apache, the Bronx. Cocktail. So when I hear you’ve got a new thriller out, I get the sneaking suspicion it began life as a screenplay. How far am I off the mark?

[Aside: Quite a bit, it turns out.]

Serial Heywood: Writing a spec screenplay is like shoveling manure for three months and getting paid with a lottery ticket. I’ll never do it. The book was inspired by a story I read about how a suspected serial killer was caught by matching the victims’ DNA with his daughter’s Pap test. I had always wondered what happened to the families of these monsters. How did they live in a town where Dad had wreaked havoc? There was never any follow-up on the families of the victims. How were they dealing with this sudden intrusion of evil into their lives? Also, a la Hitchcock, I wanted to take an ordinary guy, in this case a nerdy movie buff, who lands the one girl he never thought he could get, and then has to run for his life.

Me: Whoa. Seeing as I was so incredibly off with my first guess, there’s only one thing to do — make another one. Is it safe to assume you can relate to “nerdy movie buff” types? You had quite a run in Hollywood as a writer/director. I can only assume you had the gumption it takes to make that happen because of a deep love of film.

Heywood: Busted! I am the original nerdy film buff. Movies were a rainy Saturday diversion until I was 15 and discovered a little theater in my Brooklyn neighborhood whose crotchety owner showed old comedies (Keaton, Chaplin, Fields, Marx Bros., Stooges, etc.) and Warner Bros. antiques (Cagney, Bogie, Edward G.) I was hooked. Still am. I can see the same movies over and over. It’s like reading the Bible — you always find something new. Manhattan in the ’60s had at least 10 theaters that showed old Hollywood or foreign films. It was the era of Fellini, Antonioni, De Sica, Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Reed, the Boulting Bros., Kurosawa, etc. Every week brought another revelation. The Apollo in Times Square showed triple features. We’d get meatball sandwiches and spend the night. You could see great films, wash your socks and score a little cheap weed. The balcony smelled of garlic, dirty feet and stale tobacco. Suggestive moans and groans came from the last seats. We kept our eyes on the screen. I read Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice. It all seemed so far away and glamorous that I never thought I could ever be a part of it. I wanted to be a cynical reporter like Ben Hecht or a suffering novelist like Fitzgerald. Tragic artist was my pimp. I thought a little alcoholism plus a touch of T.B. a la Orwell was just the ticket for getting the girls. Boy, was I wrong.

Me: So how’d you go from being a Brooklyn film nerd to a published author and a Hollywood writer/director?

Heywood: That’s War and Peace.

1947: A blizzard in Brooklyn. I’m 5. It’s warm in the kitchen. My mom does freelance typing at the table. She leaves a page in the typewriter and gets up to make lunch. I move into her seat and start to bang on the keys. It’s the first piece of clean commercial work I destroy.

1951: I’m 8 1/2. A big, fat 10-year-old slob is bullying me, taking me into the stairwell of our building and putting me in a choke hold until I promise to bring him a dime, which I steal from my mom’s purse. Promises to kill me if I tell, and I believe him. I write a story about a machine that magically appears and helps a boxer win a big match. I disguise the characters so my parents won’t recognize the bully.

1956: I’m graduating from Public School 154. I write an essay about what the future holds for our class. Make a few jokes about my friends getting arrested, me getting drunk and falling off the Ferris Wheel in Coney Island. All my friends think this is uproarious. The teachers don’t agree. I don’t win the English medal.

1959: The high school literary magazine snubs me because I’m on the basketball team. I win a fountain pen in a citywide contest for writing an essay about They Came To Cordura and Northwest Passage, both of which became pretty good movies. I get the pen, but no respect. My English teacher asks me one day, “Are your parents immigrants?” When I ask why, he says, “All immigrants use too many adjectives.” He advises me to forget writing as a career. “The prize was an aberration,” he says.

1960: The college literary magazine rejects me. “I don’t have the time or the inclination to tell you all the ways that this is inferior,” says the editor. I have violent sex dreams about her. Still do.

1962: A newspaper strike lasts for seven months. When it’s over, the New York Post has no copyboys. I write a letter to the managing editor. I have just spent nine months in France trying to be Fitzgerald. I mention that I speak French. His wife is French. He has the personnel manager call me for an interview. “We’ll put you on a tryout basis.” My first day the managing editor yells at me across the tundra-like city room: “Apportez-moi un cafe et un bagelle avec fromage de creme.” [Translation: "Get me a bagel with cream cheese."] Ever the wiseguy, I answer, “C’est une bagelle.” [Translation: He corrected the managing editor's French.]  Thank God they like wise guys in the newspaper business. He laughs and I’m hired.

1963: Kennedy is assassinated. I work the whole weekend in the wire room. It’s a national tragedy, the country will never be the same. I’m thrilled to be working on the biggest story of the year.

1963: I’m given a three-month tryout as a reporter. I cover Mafia hits, civil rights, cool burglaries, gory murders. I’m sent to a Spanish class for police officers. Thirty red-faced Irish cops squirm angrily while a nice Puerto Rican lady teaches them rudimentary phrases so “you can communicate with the community.” All the six papers and three networks are covering this love fest. But I’ve been around cops for two years now. I know this is too good to be true. David Halberstam of the New York Times, back from being expelled from Vietnam by the U.S. Army, is covering, complete with clipboard and assistant. When he decides there is no story he leaves and is followed by the entire press corps. I make myself small in the back of the room. The cops reach critical mass. “Why do we have to learn Spanish? Why can’t they learn English?” “These people are animals. See the way they throw their garbage on the street?” “When some junkie pulls a knife on you, you don’t have time to pull out your dictionary.” I take it all down. Next day I scoop the city. I’m hired.

1963-65: I’m a 20-year-old with a press card that gets him in anywhere in New York City. I cover MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in D.C. Also the rise of Malcom X and the Nation of Islam. The anti-war movement, demos and sabotage. Harlem erupts in riots. Then Newark and Elizabeth and Paterson, N.J., explode. Break a story about rats infesting a Harlem housing project. Ride with civil rights activists trying to stall cars on New York’s highways to prevent the opening of the World’s Fair of ’64. Great idea, but nobody shows up and the fair is a big success. A California surfer breaks through the skylight of the Museum of Natural History, going under and around the electric eyes, and steals the Star of India, a huge sapphire, providing the inspiration for Topkapi. An epidemic of fat dentists drugging and raping their patients. Seems they have a club and a newsletter. A spoiled Park Avenue scion kills his girlfriend and rides around for days with her body in a blanket in the back seat of his ’56 Jaguar convertible. Mafia Don Frank Costello arrested for vagrancy. Flashes a wad of hundreds and the judge laughs as he dismisses the case. Occasionally on the 4 to 12 shift I’m a leg man, picking up quotes and items for Earl Wilson, a syndicated gossip columnist (604 papers around the world). I sit at the press table in the Copa, drink Chivas, smoke Camels and hear Sinatra, Nat “KIng” Cole, Vic Damone, Joe E. Lewis, Sammy Davis Jr. The Latin Quarter, another famous nightclub, has ten “leggy chorines,” 6 feet and taller. I’m tall, trim and 20, look good in my suit and have a fund of witty (at least to me) repartee. Plus, I’m making $95 a week. But they go for the short, fat and 50 guys, pinky rings and big cigars, look exactly like they do in every movie. Hard to tell who’s imitating whom.

More stories. The South Bronx is a war zone. Drugs, street crime, grinding poverty. An occasional short, fat 50 guy is found in the back seat of a Caddy with a bloody hole in his head, cigar between his fingers. A Chinese crew mutinies on a docked Greek freighter. I sneak on board pretending to be a doctor. I will go anywhere, do or say anything to get a story. There are six newspapers in the city and I want to scoop them all. I live in a sub-basement on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village. Fifty-three dollars a month. I eat myself into a stupor in Chinatown for three dollars. (If you don’t believe me ask someone who was there.) It’s too good to last.

February 1966: I’m drafted.

1966-68: A roaring darkness descends over the world. I discover the “control class,” people whose only skill is to acquire power over others. I will spend the rest of my life scuttling out from under their hobnailed boots.

1968-69: I surface from a weird dream to discover I have a wife and a baby son. Somehow I convince IBM that I’m the head of a cutting-edge media company. (See Corporation Freak.) I play basketball on LSD and dominate. One of my teammates is the story editor of a TV show called N.Y.P.D. I tell him some of the stories I covered as a reporter. He brings me to David Susskind, the biggest TV producer in New York. Susskind is eating a corned beef sandwich and working three phone lines. “Sure, give him a script,” he says. I’m so green I put quotation marks around the dialogue. Nobody cares. I get loaded at  the Xmas party and puke all over Susskind’s desk. Next day, I slink in to apologize. “That was some party, huh?” he says. “Were you around when that hooker chased Jack [Warden, the star] around his trailer?” Ah, the good old days.

1970: N.Y.P.D. canceled. All the writers go to L.A. I stay in New York because I’m going to write The Great American Novel. I write for Stag, a men’s magazine. Make up news stories like “Diving for Nazi Gold Off the Florida Coast,” “Rabbi Officiates At Lesbian Wedding.” The editor-in-chief is Mario Puzo. I write porno novels, five bucks a page. Ghost write books on Swedish massage and college basketball. Write a biography of Sir Christopher Wren. A medical book called Headaches and Health. Anything that pays. I play poker to make the rent. Finally have a losing night and have to borrow from a shylock who lurks around the edges of the game like a jackal around the campfire. Can’t pay him back and the vig is mounting. He knows if he breaks my legs nobody will borrow from him so he gets me a job as a bartender in the Hotel Diplomat in Times Square. I discover cognac and ditch all the other drugs.

Fortapache 1970-73: Short stories rejected, novels rejected. I’m divorced. Hack work and bartending pay the child support. An agent needs a writer for a movie about two cops who work the 41st, or “Fort Apache,” in the South Bronx. The cops keep putting his candidates through an ordeal by fear and alcohol and they all quit. I go to the Bronx. “You took the subway?” they ask in amazement. We go to a mob bar. They try to get me drunk, but I’m in training. After a few hours they’re so loaded that I dump my drinks on the floor and they don’t see. They drive me to the Bronx Zoo. Hookers patrol the perimeter. They get the biggest, fattest hooker into the back seat with me. This time my experience as a reporter pays off. I know how cheap cops are. “Is this on you guys?” I ask. They throw her out. I get the job.

1973: I write the first draft of Fort Apache, the Bronx for $1,250. The producers can’t sell it. Susskind reads it and says, “I’m going to make this movie.” I file the script and forget about it.

1973-75: Rejections and general dissipation.

1976: I finally learn how to write fiction well enough to get a novel published. I think the screenwriting taught me how to structure a story.

Rolling thunder 1976-78: An agent circulates Fort Apache in L.A. I get jobs on Baretta and Kojak but fight with the producers and Robert Blake and never finish the scripts. I write a pilot for John Houseman, which later becomes The Paper Chase. Bill Devane prevails on Larry Gordon to hire me to rewrite Rolling Thunder. I spend six riotous weeks in San Antonio. The laws of God and man are suspended on a movie location. The producer of Fort Apache hires me to adapt Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil. Six more great weeks, traveling super-first class in Lisbon, London and Vienna with Peck and Olivier. Susskind sells his company and gets financing for three movies. He calls me. “I’m going to do Fort Apache,” he says. I finally think it’s safe to quit my bar job.

The rest is war stories.

Me: Wow — what a saga! So tell me what life looks like now.

Heywood: Life is trying to turn out as much coherent work as I can before they put me in the Old Hack’s Home.

Me: I’ve got a question about how you’re putting out that work these days. Lately, all writers seem to be able to talk about is e-publishing. Yet it looks like The Serial Killer’s Daughter isn’t available as an e-book. Is that a temporary situation, or are you making a bold one-man stand against the Kindle and its ilk?

Heywood: It’s part of my agreement with the publisher. I maintain e-book rights and I promise not to put the book on Kindle until it goes into remainder. Kindle has been a boon for me. It’s revived a lot of my books that were out of print. I sell between 20 and 30 a month, and the number is inching up. I’m publishing all my books and have started a company, Tolmitch Press, to put up other worthy, forgotten titles. So far we have five new titles and are acquiring more. There’s no real money in it, but it’s great to give good books a new life.

Me: Obviously, publishing has changed a lot since you got your start. What do you think of the state of the industry? Are you in the “We’re the orchestra on the Titanic” camp or are you more hopeful?

Heywood: It’s always been a struggle for me to get a book published, so that hasn’t changed. The publishers that were content to give writers like me a small advance, take a share of the paperback and foreign sales and make an incrementally increasing profit as I took the 10 years to build up an audience are now non-performing divisions of industrial conglomerates. Their structure is no longer geared to the modest earner. They need a mega-hit to cover their overhead and justify their existence as the poor relation. They publish best-selling authors only and insist that they replicate their previous success by writing essentially the same book every time out. Marketers don’t innovate; they repeat a formula until it no longer works. Thus, the same tired heroes labor through 20 or 30 iterations of the same story until even their fans cry for mercy.

I could not follow my career chronology if I were a young writer today. The hundreds of magazines and scores of paperback publishers who kept so many of us alive no longer exist. It’s almost impossible to break into the movie business the way I did. Studios don’t make the kind of movies I was hired to write. Success was always based on luck colliding with talent. Now success is just a happy accident.

For me the future is with the small independents. Everybody wants to make money, but these people are in publishing because they love books. I sold my last two books by e-mail. Never met the publisher of Leading Lady [a thriller put out by Five Star in 2008] and just met the publisher of Serial Killer at the book launch. If I were a young writer today I might never be able to quit my bar job. But I’d keep writing anyway.

Read more from Steve Hockensmith at

http://www.stevehockensmith.com 

It’s 1963 and the word is out: there’s a war on.
It’s in a small country I’ve never heard of—Vietnam. A former French colony in a part of Southeast Asia, formerly known as Indochina. Previously portrayed in Hollywood Geography 101 as a place where slit-skirt Eurasian beauties seduce world-weary Soldiers of Fortune at the behest of devious Oriental spies.

The French are gone now, worn down by a ten year insurgency , which ended in a humiliating defeat at a place called Dien Bien Phu by a Communist revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh. Ho rules North Vietnam and has launched a guerilla force called the Viet Cong to conquer the south.  All this is news to me.  And to the orators in Union Square Park. They’ve been so busy channeling Mao, Trotsky and Che they didn’t even notice this slight man with his wispy beard and black pajamas creeping out of the jungle.  

South Vietnam is ruled by a family of decadents, druggies, orgiasts and dragon ladies. Christians oppressing Buddhists. Despised by everyone, including its C IA handlers. But they are fighting Communists and JFK launches  an uncertain military adventure to prop up their regime.  His strategists  are anonymous for the moment—the  Bundy brothers, William and McGeorge; Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, Dean Rusk, William Colby. Soon their names will become anathema. They’ve been sneaking troops and dirty tricksters into Vietnam for over a year. Now the force has reached critical mass and gotten the world’s attention. Peter Arnett, an AP reporter, is  on the scene when American “advisors” suffer their first defeat at Ap Bac. When the dictator Ngo Dinh Diem invades a Buddhist pagoda, slaughtering a thousand monks and nuns. When a monk sets himself on fire to protest Diem’s persecution of Buddhists and sets off an epidemic of immolations across the country.

I’ve been a radical by style, not conviction. I’m good at alienation. I find the role of the disaffected rebel a successful romantic strategy; you can’t get laid waving a flag in Greenwich Village. But secretly I believe Americans are the Good Guys. We provided sanctuary for my grandparents.  Beat Hitler and freed Europe. We gallop to the aid of the oppressed.  Overthrow dictators. Restore democracy and freedom of worship. I get chIlls at ball games. when I hear the Star Spangled Banner. 

Now I’m confused. Are we supporting dictators who kill monks? Who torture dissidents and fix elections? Union Square is a circus, but suddenly, the clowns have become prophets. Morris Krieger, the ancient anarchist in the Florida shirt with alligators chasing bathing beauties, gumming his wife’s cheese sandwiches while he predicts that “Camelot will have its war.” Lonnie, the one-eyed wino in the fatigue jacket, guzzling Gallo sherry and talking about the “secret assassination missions” he undertook in Guatemala and Lebanon for the “Special Forces.” The Nation of Islam preacher who says the war is a plot “to keep restless black men under military control.” The twin brothers with deranged grins who walk through the park talking in tongues and brandishing signs reading USEFUL IDIOTS FOR THE CIA. 

The pimply kids at the Communist Party bridge table, who everybody says are really FBI agents, have a new speaker—a crew cut Southern boy with a US ARMY tattoo, coiling snakes, screaming eagles…

“Who is the most expendable person in the world?” he demands in a strident twang. “The common soldier. They give you forty days of trainin’, but most of that is learnin’ how to make your bed and about face and obey orders no matter how dumb. What good is marchin’ in step and havin’  a neat foot locker when you’re in combat against troops who have  spent years under arms on their own terrain? The Army’ll drop you in the jungle and hope you outnumber the enemy ’cause you sure ain’t gonna outfight him. Oh you’ll get good at it if you live long enough. But you can’t win. You ain’t  fightin’  human beings, you’re fightin’ history…” 

I’m  working as a copyboy at the New York Post. I come in at 8am, just as the trucks are pulling out with the Late City, the first edition. The lobster shift editors and rewrite men shuffle blearily past me  The city room is the size of a factory floor. It fills quickly as the day shift begins. The clatter of a hundred typewriters, the voices calling, the rumble of the presses bringing the news—and I’m part of it.

Every morning I sharpen a few hundred thick, black One H pencils. Make hundreds of “books”–three sheets of copy paper, two of carbon paper for the reporters. Run down to the luncheonette on the first floor for breakfast orders. Saul, the owner, knows everybody’s breakfast; all I have to do is say a name. Run stories from the city desk to the copy desk. Run page dummies to the printers in the composing room. Pick up the galleys from the proof readers. Run up to the mail room to get a stack of the next edition– fifty papers which I deliver to all the offices all over the building, ending up at the 15th floor aerie of the publisher, Dorothy Schiff. The paper changes eight times a day, stories added or rewritten, front page recast, until it is “put to bed” with the “Final Market” edition, which gives the closing prices on the Stock Exchange. On my first day I was told: “everybody in this room is your boss.”  I go on personal errands. Get clippings from the library or the “morgue.” Run last minute headlines or rewrites out to the composing room as a new edition is going to press.  I change typewriter ribbons for lady reporters who don’t want top get smudgy. Make liquor runs; get soda and ice for the editors’ cocktails. Get lunch orders: it’s amazing how these people eat the same lunch every day as well and Saul knows them all. I bolt a turkey sandwich with Russian dressing while I’m waiting. 

At 4:30 I leave work with a copy of the last edition still warm from the press. I’ve got carbon paper and graphite smears on my face, blisters on my fingers from the pencils. If it’s hot I sweated through my shirt and smell myself on the subway. I go to the Cube Steak House on Sixth Avenue for meat loaf with mashed potatoes and baked beans. Spread the paper on the counter and read every word. Then after rice pudding and light coffee with four spoons of sugar I hit the street. Within a half hour I run into someone I know—sometimes it’s even a female. We go to one of the four art houses in the Village to see an old movie. 

It’s not the war. It’s not the capitalist oligarchy. I just don’t want this life to end. 

Curt, the chief copy boy, got himself declared 4F, “permanently unfit for service,” which means they’ll never bother him again.

“Tell ‘em you’re queer,” he says. “My girlfriend gave me a good idea. Polish your nails and then scrape most  of it off so it looks like you were trying to hide it.”

I get the polish, but chicken out at the last minute. Ditto the eye shadow and the cheap perfume.

Selective Service Headquarters on Whitehall Street has  a fortress vibe. Broken pickets are scattered on the sidewalk, along with scraps of signs and a torn flag, the remnants of an anti-draft demonstration the day before. Two Shore Patrol guys (Navy MP’s) stand guard at the door checking draft cards. There are more  non-coms inside, walking up and down the line.

The first time there was silence. Now there is nervous talk in the ranks. One kid who enlisted says the recruiter told him to volunteer for the paratroops. “You get special treatment,” he says. “Plus 16 dollars jump pay the Sergeant told me.”

An older guy in gray-green Army underwear shakes his head. “You won’t make it, you’re too short.” 

Another kid says he and his friend are going in on the “buddy plan” where they’ll get to serve together.

“That’s just a come on,” the older guy says. “They’ll put you were they need you…”

“But they signed a contract,” the kid says. 

“You have no rights in the Military,” the older guy says. “You’re under the Military Code of Justice. Bend over, spread your cheeks and kiss your ass good bye…”

He is approached by two MP’s. “You back again?” He turns away.  “This is a public building,”he says. They tell him to step out.  He refuses. “I wanna see the OD,” he says. “I wanna speak to an officer. I have a right to express my views.” They grab him by the arms. He breaks away. “Don’t fall for their lies,” he shouts. Two more MP”s run down the corridor. They carry him, flailing and yelling: “Don’t give them your lives…Resist…Resist!” Then he’s gone behind a slamming door and we move on in uneasy silence. 

I had stared at “homosexual experiences” on the form for  minutes until a Sergeant prodded me, “let’s go” and then hurriedly checked it off. Every medic along the line sees it and gives me a quizzical look. 

They send me to cubicle at the end of the corridor. A kid brushes by me with his head down. An old man in a white coat, looks over my form, hands trembling. 

“You live in Greenwich Village?” he says with a slight German accent.

“Yes.”

“This is the homosexual quarter, no?”

“Yes.”

“They have special bars with code names, right? A color and an animal means it is a gathering place for homosexuals. Like Pink Pussycat. Or Green Parrot. Right?” He looks up at me with beagle-brown eyes.” Do you frequent these places?”

He’s trying to trap me. “I can’t afford to go to bars,” I say.

He nods, appreciating my answer. 

“So…Do you do fellation?” he asks. 

“What?”

“Do you take a big penis in your mouth?”

Say yes, what difference does it make?

I shake my head.

“Do you like a cock rammed up your anus?” he asks. 

Say yes, for God’s sake, you have to say yes to something.

“ I don’t…”

“Maybe a fist?” he says. “This was a popular practice in the Turkish forces…”

Can’t do it.

“Foreign objects? In the military hospital we found the most amazing things in rectums…”

“No,” I say.

“So,” he says, tapping his pen on the table. “Sado-masochistic? Devices of restraint and punishment. Whips…Cock rings? Very popular with the SS… Do you know what a cock ring is, Mr. Gould?”

“I uh, am not, uh…”

He looks past me, irritably. A small line has formed outside his door.

“What is the dream of many homosexuals, Mr. Gould…?”

“I really don’t…”

“To be surrounded by young men, correct? To train with them, eat with them, sleep with them, take showers with them. To be at sea with a thousand handsome young men in sailor suits. In other words, to be in the military…Wouldn’t it make sense that some homosexuals would pretend to be heterosexual so they could get into this wonderful paradise?”

“I don’t know…”

He cuts me off, impatiently. “Have you ever considered a career in the theatre? Don’t.”

I rise, sensing the interview is over. The old man writes on my form, saying: 

“The American military has a theory that any young man who is so anxious to avoid military service that he will pretend to be homosexual, should not be given the privilege of serving. So, anyone who walks through my door is automatically exempted. But soon there will be a need for manpower and so the theory will be modified to fit the necessity. In other words—” he waves his pen and says loud enough for the kids outside to hear:

“Next year this little trick won’t work.”

NEXT: A PERFECT JOB FOR A LIAR

Like a condemned man I’ve learned to savor my reprieves.  To relish that moment of bliss  before my misdeed is punished. 

The criminal knows he’ll be caught, but wants the champagne and dancing girls. As a kid I lied about my grades so my mother would let me go out on Friday nights knowing I would be smacked, shrieked at and grounded when I brought my failing report  card home.  I forged her signature on an excused absence note when I “played hooky” to go to “Forty-deuce” to see Madame Olga’s House of Pleasure and eat ten cent hamburgers  at White Castle. I did it on Friday so I would have a glorious weekend and a tranquil Monday before my 8th Grade teacher called on Tuesday to report  the forgery.

“Why was I cursed with such a lying bum for a son?” my mother would cry.

I was unmoved by her despair. The freedom of the “D” train  to Times Square, the taste of fried onions while watching buxom ladies disport in complex lingerie was worth anything she could do to me. 

Now I’ve connived a reprieve from Uncle Sam. I’ve been classified 1Y  by Selective Service, granted a whole year before the System turns it baleful eye back onto me.

A cultural revolution is taking place on MacDougal Street in clubs like the Cafe Wha and Gaslight Cafe. Folk music, jazz, comedy. Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Bill Cosby, Charlie Mingus, Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, even Joan Rivers: every major artist of the next thirty years is getting a start here.  At the San Remo Cafe, the stars of the Boho world are mingling. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs, John Cage,  Delmore Schwartz, James Agee, Tennessee Williams. Up the block on Bleecker, at the Bitter End,  Woody Allen is opening for Richie Havens. 

I am oblivious to this ferment. I sit for hours at  a window table  in the Cafe Figaro at Bleecker and MacDougal, nursing a hot cider with a cinnamon stick,  smoking Gauloises, playing chess, reading Notes from the Underground–watching the girls go by. Occasionally, there’s a flurry when Burt  the manager throws out a drunk. Burt was kicked off the Cincinnati police force for brutality, although Pierre, a black kid from Cleveland, says that’s next to impossible. “You’d have to eat a motherfucker to get kicked off the Cincinnati police…” Burt punches first, a looping right to the bridge of the nose and issues instructions to the slumping victim– “get the fuck outta my store”–later. 

One night Burt and his tipsy brother Tom, the owner, stand over my table, arms folded. I think I’m about to get the bum’s rush. 

“I guess we’ll  have to hire you if we want our table back,” says Tom. “You can be our new machine man.”

I give notice at the funeral parlor. They take me to Cookie’s Buffet on Avenue M for a farewell dinner. Owning an all-you-can-eat restaurant in Brooklyn is the closest thing to hara kiri the West has invented. People rush the buffet like it’s the end of Yom Kippur.  Veal cutlets parrmigiana are secreted in purses.  Drumsticks are shoved down pants. Steaks are passed through the ladies room window to confederates in the parking lot. The eponymous Cookie stands by the door, blanching under his Miami tan. The place is jammed and he’s going broke. A few months later Cookie’s  burns down after being hit by “Jewish lightning,” a peculiar phenomenon that only strikes businesses on the verge of bankruptcy.

I’m taking a thirty-five dollar cut from $75 to $55, but “machine man” is the the coolest job in coffee house culture. I make espressos, hot cider, cafe au lait in tall glasses, ice cream sodas and sundaes. I taste hazelnut coffee and herb tea for the first time. Plus I eat for free–cheeseburgers, BLT’s, Yankee bean soup, pie a la mode. 

I’m a member of the proletarian aristocracy. I have no money, no resume, but I have cachet. I’m greeted by the important customers, the NYU profs, the freelance journalists, the mysterious old guys at the corner tables who turn out to be blacklisted screenwriters.

Suddenly, I’m a trophy screw. French girls with a few days to kill in New York love my sub basement. “Oh formidable…”  NYU girls like walking the streets with someone under 40 who knows everybody.

I have months of joy. No drudgery, no need for lies or excuses. I’m the “machine man” at the Figaro. I can do no wrong.

One night there’s an awestruck girl from Brooklyn College. “Oh my God, are you actually working in the Figaro?” Her boyfriend wears a tweed jacket and an ascot. He takes off his gloves to shake hands. Very classy. 

He works as an Assistant Make up editor for the NY Post.  There’s been a 114 day newspaper strike and they lost most of their copy boys, he says. The strike is over and they’re hiring. It’s a good time to get in.

“But I dropped out of college to go to Paris,” I say.

“The Managing Editor’s wife is French,” he says. “His name is Alvin Davis. Write him a letter.”

It takes a whole day to write a four paragraph letter. I tell the truth. How I hated college and fled to Paris in the great tradition of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but  became so fluent in French I was terrified that I  was losing command of English. How I can think of nothing better than working for the paper I grew up reading.

A week later I get a reply. My letter has been jammed into a small envelope with a scrawled note: “Interview, Davis..”

I  put on my black undertaker suit and go to the NY Post building downtown at 75 West Street.  Leonard Arnold, the Personnel Manager  is in a cubicle at the end of the Classified Department.  He’s a gray-haired guy in a brown suit. “You read the Post?”

” Every day all my life,” I say. 

“Okay, give me the names of three sportswriters.”

I name the whole department. Even Jerry De Nonno who handicaps the races.

He gives me a one page application. “You’re on probation for thirty days,” he says. “If you’re hired the union will see it to you can make $50 a week for the rest of your life. The rest is up to you.”

“You mean I’m really working for the NY Post.”

“Al Davis liked your letter,” he says. He shakes my hand. “Come in Monday morning.”

I go out to Brooklyn to tell my mother. “I got a job at the Post.”

She gets a worried look. “A real job? Did you lie about college?”

My grandmother is rinsing potatoes at the sink. She stops to wave the peeler at me. “Look, he thinks he’s a big shot already…”

I’m taking a five dollar cut down to $50 a week. and losing my privileged status. No more French tourists for me. But it’s worth it. I’m going to be a newspaperman.

Next morning there is a letter from Selective Service… “You are ordered to report for your physical examination…”

My year is up.

NEXT: ANOTHER PHYSICAL