Piecework

The craft of cartooning first grabbed my heart when I was eleven years old, and that adolescent passion gradually evolved into a desire to be a painter. My first short stories and essays were written at Mexico City College in 1956, when I was studying painting there on the GI Bill. My first published words were two poems that appeared in 1958 in the literary magazine of Pratt Institute, where I was a student in the art school. The first words I wrote for money appeared the following year in a Greek magazine named Atlantis, for which I worked as art director; the story was in English, and I was paid $2.5. On the night in 1960 when I walked into the city room of the New York Post to try to be a newspaperman, I was working days as a commercial artist. I was twenty-five years old, a high school dropout from a poor family in Brooklyn.

A few years earlier, the desire to be a painter had been derailed by several factors: a failure of will and the need to earn a living. I was uncertain of my talents as a painter, afraid of committing to a vocation that might give me a life of prolonged poverty. So I found work in an advertising agency, and though I was proud to be making my way in the world, I didn’t much like the way I was doing it. There just wasn’t much romance in designing letterheads or laying out catalogs. But within months of sitting down at a typewriter in a newspaper city room, even with a substantial cut in pay, I felt exuberant and free. The graphic arts were set aside; I went to work at mastering the writer’s trade.

When I started writing for Dorothy Schiff’s wonderful afternoon tabloid, I had no plans for the future, no certainties about a career. The Post was seventh in circulation among the city’s seven dailies; we all knew it could fold the next morning, so it was imperative to live for tonight, for the next edition, even if that edition might be the last. I definitely wasn’t there for the pension plan. Newspaper people were flamboyant, hard-drinking, bohemian anarchists, with great gifts for obscenity and a cynicism based on experience. Or so I thought. I loved being in their company, in city rooms, at murder scenes, or standing at the bar after work.

For me, the work itself was everything. I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters, and one of their lessons was that the essence of the work was the doing of it. At twenty-five, I thought I had started late and therefore had to hurl myself into the work — and the life that went with it. In my experience, nothing before (or since) could compare to walking into the New York Post at midnight, being sent into the dark, scary city on an assignment, and coming back to write a story for the first edition. No day’s work was like any other’s, no story repeated any other in its details. Day after day, week after week, I loved being a newspaperman, living in the permanent present tense of the trade. I had no idea as a young man that from my initiation into the romance of newspapers would flow novels, books of short stories, too many screenplays, a memoir, and millions of words of newspaper and magazine journalism. I didn’t know that I was apprenticing to a trade that I would practice until I die.

This is not to claim that I’ve produced an uninterrupted series of amazements. Reading over a quarter-century of my journalism for this collection (my first since Irrational Ravings in 1970), I have often winced; if I’d only had another three inches of space, or another two hours beyond the deadline, perhaps this piece would have been better or that piece wiser. There were newspaper columns that I wish I’d never written, full of easy insult or cheap injury. There were many pieces limited by my ignorance. Too many lazily derived their energy from the breaking news to which they served as mere sidebars. Others were about figures who were once famous and are now obscure (and hence have been excluded from this collection — any footnotes of explanation would be longer than the originals). Sometimes I completely missed the point, or didn’t see the truth of a story whose facts were evidently there in my notebook. But this is not an apology. It is the nature of such work that it is produced in a rush; the deadlines usually force the newspaper writer to publish a first draft because there is no time for a second or third. Once that piece is locked up in type and sent to the newsstands, there is no going back; the writer can correct the factual error, but it’s too late to deepen the insight, alter the mistaken or naive judgment, erase the stale language that was taken off the rack. He or she can only vow never to make that error again and start fresh the next day.