take it.”
I hung up the phone and looked at the clock on the wall; there was still plenty of time before math to make another call. I dialed the second number on my list. Bernie Geis ran an eponymous publishing house, financially backed by the likes of Groucho Marx and known for putting out racy, popular titles such as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl. I knew the deal was good when I called S&S, but now I was doubly confident since I could tell Geis I already had half my quote from Snyder. It worked like a charm and Geis was practically pissed off that he could only unload 2,500 of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.
In math class, I tuned out the teacher’s voice and crunched my own numbers.
1.25: Bertelsmann payment per book
-.50: payment to publishers per book
-.25: average shipping cost per book
× 5,000 books
=$2,500 profit
In 1963, three thousand bucks was a fortune. It was the cost of a new car, two years of tuition at Harvard, or half the average annual American income. And the whole deal only took me an hour. Doing geometry problem sets and diagramming sentences couldn’t hold a candle to this. The feeling of mastery and accomplishment was astounding.
Bertelsmann was willing to do a similar deal with me, on average every three to six months, which meant by the time I was entering high school, I was drawing a serious salary. Especially for a fifteen-year-old. I was happy to have the money—really happy—not because I thought it’d change who I was as a person or prove anything to anyone else. Money for me was never about ambition. Even at fifteen, success for me meant not having to worry.
My dream was never wild opulence but rather the luxury of stability. The constant question mark that was my parents’ checkbook balance made a lasting impression. During my freshman year in high school, I set a certain standard of living for myself and tallied what it would cost. What were the needs of a teenager attending public school and living in his parents’ house in Queens? The answer was as urgent and direct as the desire behind it: girls.
My love of women started early. But even with my inflated sense of maturity, I was thrust into action earlier than I expected—eleven years old, to be precise. My family and I were spending the weekend at our second home in Colrain, Massachusetts, near the Vermont border, and had brought along the seventeen-year-old daughter of my mother’s German friend, who had also been in France during the war. Mara, a friendly girl with a box bob and reddish cheeks, had been living with my parents for about a month while she studied in the States.
The house in Colrain was truly a place of magical lawlessness. The charming but dilapidated farmhouse that my parents bought for $225 didn’t have running water or electricity for the first few years. Although our life in Queens was by no means confined, the country offered other freedoms. Pool halls and edgy friends were replaced by mountains and trees. My dad and the usual assortment of strays he collected did a lot of the construction work themselves with me and my brother helping out whenever permitted.
As the sun went down on a long Saturday of home improvements and getting lost in the woods during Mara’s visit, my parents and a few friends poured themselves cocktails in the living room while my brother suggested the three of us go up to his room to play strip poker. His interest was clearly seeing Mara undressed.
After enough rounds that we were more naked than dressed, Mara said she wanted a drink. Who could blame her? It was decided that I should be the one to fetch it. So I put on whatever I had taken off, went downstairs where my parents were hanging out, and stole a bottle of Teacher’s scotch. After I reentered my brother’s room with its two single, plywood beds propped up by books, we returned to the game and got drunk. Mara and I lost our clothes; my brother was more successful in keeping his. But of course in strip poker, depending on the circumstances, being the loser can also mean being the winner.
My brother wanted to win Mara, but for some reason she chose me, and the two of us, still naked, wound up in one of the beds in the cabin-like room. While my brother laughed from the other bed, Mara gave me instructions and we began to have sex. I lost my virginity while my brother cackled from the corner.
As if that wasn’t enough family involvement, there came a knock at the door. It was my mother.
“Go away,” I shouted.
But she kept banging on the door. “Open up!” she shouted back. “Open up!”
“No!”
My father, in bed and with no plans of getting up, shouted from the background, “I’m going to fine you five dollars a minute if you don’t get out of there!”
Finally, my brother got up to let our mother in; Mara and I bolted under his bed. My mother yelled and demanded to know what was going on. We couldn’t hide out there forever, so I decided to just go for it and ran out from under the bed and into my bedroom—totally naked. I got under the covers and prayed to die. Instead, I lived. The minutes felt like hours as I waited for my mother to enter my room and kill me, but she never came. I continued to live. Eventually I fell into a deep sleep aided by the drop in adrenaline and the Teacher’s scotch.
In the morning, though, I woke up petrified. My embarrassment from the night before was magnified a hundredfold. What was my mother going to say? My fixation on that kept me from thinking about the even more terrifying prospect of facing Mara. I had no idea what to do. Unable to deal with what lay in wait for me downstairs, I stayed in bed until noon, an eternity. But I couldn’t stay there forever, which seemed to come and go twice during that time.
After I headed downstairs, the first person I saw was my father lying on the couch. “You owe me for that bottle of scotch,” he said without looking up from the local newspaper he was reading. I slunk toward the kitchen, the sick feeling in my stomach growing as I neared. But no one was there after I pushed the swinging door open. Room after room, there was no sign of my mother or Mara.
When later they returned, chatting busily as they unpacked the groceries from their shopping trip, both women hardly seemed to notice me. That disturbed me almost as much as my fantasy of a Viscontiesque melodrama. How could my mother be being so friendly with Mara after catching us naked and guilty? I was more mortified than I had been upstairs in bed.
We returned to New York and that was that. There was no follow-up, romantic, punitive, or otherwise. It was like nothing had happened. A lesson in love. While it wasn’t the greatest sex in the world, in my book it was a perfectly fine start; I was pleased to have broken the ice.
I vowed, however, that when I had my first girlfriend things would be a little more romantic than doing it while my brother watched. I got my chance a little more than a year later when I met Marie. Like so many other things, she came through the agency—her mother was a literary scout for a Dutch publishing company. When we started dating, I showed Marie the town. I would travel into Manhattan, pick her up at her Upper West Side apartment, and then together we’d head to one of the places I’d noted from Ledig’s agenda of drink meetings when he came to town. I took her to the Grill Room at the Four Seasons and the Oak Bar at the Plaza because I knew that if the place was classy enough, they wouldn’t card a thirteen-year-old who looked more like seventeen, and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend who looked just that. Out of all our haunts, our favorite was Top of the Sixes, a restaurant on the very top floor of 666 Fifth Avenue.
Walking into the restaurant’s steely office building between 52nd and 53rd Streets felt important in itself. Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture Landscape of the Cloud,
