my mind.”
“You’ve what?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” he repeated.
“The night before you’re supposed to move, you change your mind?” I said in total disbelief. “We discussed this at great length. You agreed that the new office will be much easier to get to from your apartment. I already made a deal on the entire brownstone. And I bought all new stuff.”
“I just won’t be comfortable moving. I’m not going.”
Despite my incredulity, and disappointment, I knew it was pointless to argue. I’d need to summon Aristotle, Spinoza, and Lincoln to have a fighting chance in this debate, and frankly I didn’t have the energy; I had to move my entire office the following day to its new location in a town house on Lexington between 30th and 31st Streets. As I had gone over ad nauseam with my father, I rented the whole town house with the idea that the top two floors would be apartments, including my own, the beautiful parlor floor my father’s office, and the ground-level floor my office. While taking on a whole town house was quite a risk for a nineteen-year-old, I was ready for the challenge.
My first real estate deal, which happened purely by chance, was a complete success. Back when Hanna and I first split up, I found a new office on 118 East 59th Street. I had been on the fence about the place because it had two rooms and I only needed one. “So, find somebody else to sublet it to,” the landlord said to me. That afternoon I went over to Bernie’s bookstore to deal with our boating book business, and there in the back was Robert Parker, a distant heir to the Parker Pen fortune, who just so happened to be looking for an office. I paid $50 a month for each room, and rented one to him for $100 so he was essentially paying for my office and his. This is good, I thought. And easy.
So for the next couple of years, I went between my father’s office and mine, spending three or four hours in the morning at the agency and then dealing with my publishing interests at my office in the afternoon.
During that time, I continued to do the agency’s books, but I also started to function as a literary agent after I found my first client from the slush pile I had been reading on a regular basis. One day I came across a play as strange as its title, Stock Up on Pepper Because Turkey’s Going to War, which was written by some guy named Frank Zajac. It revolved around two bums, McKoater and McKeating, locked in a debate over the merits of the practical versus artistic sides of life. Very much in the vein of the Theater of the Absurd, it wasn’t at all obvious, but still I liked it.
I didn’t know anything about the author other than that he’d given a P.O. box on the Bowery as a return address. So that was where I sent a letter stating I’d like to try to sell Stock Up. Frank, who turned out to be a beer alcoholic in his thirties, carrying the plays he wrote on anything from napkins to newspaper in a brown paper bag from flophouse to flophouse, was thrilled.
Despite the fact that he was a Bowery bum, I went big with my first client and sent Stock Up directly to Joseph Papp. A theater dynamo, Papp had made a name for himself in the fifties by bringing Shakespeare to common folks through free shows at the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church on the Lower East Side and then at the 2,000-seat East River Park Amphitheater in the same neighborhood. He rarely directed modern plays and had never produced a completely new one before, but he had just taken over the old Astor Library on Lafayette Street for a new six-theater complex called the Public Theater, so I figured he’d need more material than Macbeth.
Even more absurd than the plot of Stock Up was the fact that Papp not only decided to produce Frank’s play but also chose it as the premier performance at his new theater. My very first literary sale was an avant-garde play written by a wino to one of the country’s most important theatrical producers! This was a cause for celebration. I called Frank and told him I was taking him out for dinner and drinks. “Meet me at Daly’s Dandelion,” I said, feeling pretty big.
Located in the shadow of the Queensboro Bridge on 61st and Third, Daly’s was a fancy drink-joint frequented by the beautiful people, including a lot of celebrities, thanks to its owner, Skitch Henderson, the bandleader who’d followed Toscanini as NBC’s music director before becoming the original conductor of the orchestras for The Tonight Show and The Today Show. Sitting at the bar, I thought Frank would appreciate my taking him to such a chic place.
Instead, he obsessed about the prices.
“I can’t fuckin’ believe how much this costs,” he said, going over the menu again and again while we drank several beers.
“Don’t worry about it. I’m paying for it,” I said, growing increasingly irritated. “You want to get some dinner?”
“Look. I’m just not comfortable. This is not my kind of thing. Can we go to a regular bar? Is there any place near here?”
There happened to be a Blarney Stone a block or two away, so we went to the cheapo bar where you could get beers for a quarter instead of the two dollars they were charging over at Daly’s.
Much happier now, Frank dove into our newest round of beers. At some point, not long after we’d settled in, a very flamboyant gay man walked in holding a fancy poodle done to the nines, and took the stool right next to Frank. It might have been a Blarney Stone, but it was smack in the middle of the interior designer district. We were just sitting there when, suddenly, I heard Frank say to the man, “You know what I would like?”
“No. What would you like?” the man asked.
“I’d like to have a big, fat dick in my mouth.”
I spit my beer all over the place and hardly had the chance to recover before Frank and the man began negotiating how much it would cost for Frank to go back to his place.
“Two hundred,” Frank said.
“Twenty bucks,” the man with the poodle countered.
They were very far apart in their valuation of the deal, so for the next half an hour they went back and forth.
“It’s worth it. I promise you won’t regret it.”
“I’m not going to pay that much.”
They haggled for what seemed like forever until finally the man with the poodle left. It was past midnight now, we still hadn’t eaten a thing, and I was extremely drunk. But just then, a couple of girls came in and Frank said, “Oh, let’s buy them a drink.”
It was his night. We sat down with the girls for a while before taking them back to my office, where Frank read his play out loud while they giggled. I was drunk in a way that I rarely got, and I’m not quite sure how, but I ended up going home with one of them. I had no idea what happened to the other girl—or Frank.
When I woke in the morning, my head reeling, the girl asked me, “What time is it?”
I looked down at my watch and said, “About eight o’clock.”
“Oh, I’ve got to go,” she said.
That sounded like a good idea, but in my perverse state, I asked, “What’s the rush?”
“My old man’s getting out of jail today.”
That was just perfect. She got up, dressed, and was headed for the door when, unable to help myself, I asked, “What was he in for?”
“Murder.”
