Networking with the Dead

And what I was always afraid would happen

There’s a direction to growing up, a sense of being conveyed toward something. That was the pressure I felt consistently from a young age: I had to do something to avoid that thing.

At nine years old, I was doing 100 swings in a row every night in the basement, with a donut weight on my bat. The weight bench moved in not long after.

Pressure winds up looking like ambition. Ambition looks like something else.

When I was 16, I stapled together manuscripts and sent them to publishers. I mailed poems off to The New Yorker and The Paris Review. When rejected, I sent new ones, under pseudonyms. A cleverer friend of mine cooked up some New Yorker stationary and wrote me a rejection letter in the voice of Tina Brown, explaining that while my poems were very nice, the magazine had decided to run a seafood recipe instead.

Hiring?

When I was 17, I was on the second floor of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, flipping through poetry books, when I bumped into Lawrence Ferlinghetti as he came out of an office. I was wearing cutoff sweatpants and very possibly a long-sleeve pajama top.

I approached this august man of letters, parts of whose Coney Island of the Mind I could recite off the top of my head, and asked if he was indeed the Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to which he responded, with a jaunty charm shading into unease, “sometimes.”

City Lights was a pilgrimage site to me. It looked like the Vatican with a FOR HIRE sign hanging on the throne. That afternoon, poor Lawrence may have been the first person I talked to in a day-plus. I’d come up to San Francisco from Redlands on an ill-advised, all-night combination of buses and trains. So while I like to think I introduced myself in a civil manner and shared my admiration for all that he’d done as a poet, publisher and stalwart champion of the literary arts for a half century, I may not have been quite so deferential and charming.

Once he’d copped to being the great man himself, I think I just dove in and demanded to know the status of a manuscript I’d sent in a few months earlier. Now Lawrence was on his heels.