Please, sir, may I have some more?

On one memorable afternoon when you were between jobs and writing projects, the world seemed too open for comfort.  You found yourself amid a similar group of between-the-cracks writers, gathered at an idyllic and hospitable park just off Coldwater Canyon in the affluent fringes of L.A.'s San Fernando Valley.

The sun was still up, lunch was down, and so was your luck.  The most pressing need was the need of mid-thirties and forties men to play at baseball.  Before long, your group intentions broadcast themselves to others in the park.  You were joined by a group of younger players, in need of distractions from the angst and tug of their own generation.

Under most circumstances, having nine available players per team is its own grandness.  You recall being on a team that included not only the former President of the Writers' Guild (who reminded you the Volkswagen sunroof with a decadent FM radio you drove had been financed by the Credit Union), but as well a publicist who had only recently introduced you to a longtime crush from your earlier years, the actress Veronica Lake, by telling her of your amatory interests, and a writer whose screen play you had once attempted to acquire for a former employer who had authorized you to go as high as fifty thousand dollars for the rights to novelize the screenplay.  You were gently told by his agent, "Shelly, dear, Bob cannot afford to do anything for fifty thousand dollars."

These elements of the day and the game and the combined admiration and suspicions shared among the adults come to you across the years that are, themselves at the spine and heart of this essay.  "Don't fucking pitch inside to Irwin," for instance.  "Somebody has to fucking be catcher.  We could rotate; you know, take turns."  These and other forgotten voices are brought back from having been filed away in distant memory by yet another voice, one of the younger players, who was positioned at second base.  You had just made a routine catch of a fly ball in shallow center field.  The inning was still alive, with a runner at first, thinking perhaps to advance to second after your catch.  "Over here,sir,"  the young second baseman called.  "Throw it over here, sir."

It was the sir.  The advance guard of generational differences was closing in on you. You may have been a sir then but you did not feel like one, did not want to be recognized as one.  You wanted to be the young hot shot, able to sit at the table with the staff on sitcoms, contributing your share of ideas, then sneaking home after work to get at something truly solid such as a short story or a novel, working with real editors and publishers instead of producers who wanted girlfriends' dogs written into scripts.

It is somewhat of a leap to get from that game to the present-day activities.  The leap arcs over a gaping chasm in which you recall the storm of outrage Somerset Maugham drew down on himself when asked by a charming lady what advice she could give her son, who wanted to be a writer.  "Give him twenty pounds [which at the time was the equivalent of one hundred dollars] and tell him to go to hell."  You also recall individuals who were technical writers urging you to get a job with a defense company, allowing you to write technical manuals as a hedge against starvation.  You recall an earlier girlfriend urging you to take education courses because teachers had entire summers in which to write. You recall yet another chum who urged you to join him at the Department of Motor Vehicles, giving and grading drivers' license examinations, while a fraternity brother, after several miss-starts in careers, signed on with the post office and urged you to follow.  Think law, yet another urged.  You'd be good at law--you're argumentative.

You have in fact had any number of jobs, perhaps the one thing you have in common with your brother and sister writers.  You were a shill at a carnival, the manager of a Guess Your Age concession, a luggage repair person, and perhaps one of the best non-writing jobs ever, the manager of a parking lot at the corner of Wilshire and Dunsmuir in the Los Angeles Miracle Mile.  Even during the droughts between publication, even with such jobs as an auctioneer's assistant and a guard at a chicken processing plant, the word was out on you that you were a writer, that while others did things such as take vacations, have girlfriends, get married, follow career paths, you wrote, each page coming from a series of second-hand typewriters effectively burning a bridge in the conventional world.

If marginality had a crest, you could wear it sewn to your blazer pocket.  "If you had any money," the great trial lawyer, Melvin Belli once told me, "I'd sue you."  To which you replied, "If I had any, I'd let you."  It was over his failure to deal with edits you'd suggested for his book project.  You are in a real sense the kind of person written about in a play by William Saroyan, whom you knew, and Maxwell Anderson, whom you did not know.  You were the surfer of the sea of ideas, playing on your used typewriters with the abandon of the zither player in the sound track of The Third Man, all of which you confess not from some attempt at false modesty or any kind of modesty at all, but rather from the awareness that there is no true career path in the work you have chosen except the path of trying your damnedest to get things down as they come to you, take the consequences, and learn how to gauge the literary suspense needed in fiction from the suspense of gauging how to keep your check book balanced and alive.  Just the other day, a writing pal, Randy Weiss, who has worked his way well up the corporate ladder at Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, where you have indeed banked these many years. Randy gave you a green elastic bracelet of the sort you used to see worn by those commemorating Missing in Action service persons in the Viet Nam conflict and, later, on a happier note, the Lance Armstrong "Livestrong" campaign, which you were almost tempted to follow because you are now a few months from being seven years free of cancer yourself.  But the bracelet Randy gave you has more than a merry feel to it.  Placing on your wrist, he said, "Wear this and you will never bounce a check."  This was a joke.  Irony.  Magic.  You take it as recognition that you are one of a fraternity and sorority of greater meaning to you, those of the men and women who each as an individual has merely survived the process and continues in the process.  At this very moment, you have taken time from a job editing a truly dreadful project from a person who has goals and ideals every bit as lofty and grand as your own.  You can respect that just as you respect the splendid editor at a major house who this very day was so sorry she could not justify taking on and giving a home to a project of yours making the rounds like an actor going on audition call.

It is impossible to tell anyone how to make any progress or headway in this remarkable enterprise called writing without writing your autobiography because it is different for each of us, the paths slithering forth with every page we fill and sometimes even with every tap on the delete key.  Back in the day, typewriters did not have delete keys but they did have the ability to produce rows of X's.  A man in Los Angeles keeps sending me emails asking your advice about which school his son should attend and which courses he should take.  You think he comes back to you because you have a different answer each time.  Or maybe it is because of your writing style.

If you like something well enough and long enough, you will in some way have it, either as a reality or a blazing memory.  Over your bed is a water color done by Henry Miller, who began to notice you looking at it each time you visited his home.  One day he said he thought you ought to have it and you said you did not believe you could afford it and he said you could.  Some times in your mind there are events, stories, circumstances that seem somehow to be a part of a fabric, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry of ventures and misadventures.  Some of them you are not yet able to afford but by looking at them with enough intensity and belief, you are able to find ways to bring them down out of your head and onto your note pad or your computer screen.  Then, with some shuffle of energy and expectation, you find that you are after all able to afford them.

Old School, L.A.--Style

You might think being an editor for a book publisher, having all those manuscripts to read, and subsequent reports to be written about them, would be sufficient activity for someone who then rushed home to spend time with his own short stories. Think away. It wasn't sufficient, and so, when Art Kunkin came by the office one day to suggest that I do reviews for him, yet another series of connecting lines between the dots was set in motion.

Kunkin, ruffled, bearded, given to outbursts of purple vests and wildly patterned shirts, was editor of The Los Angeles Free Press, an energetic weekly whose primary audience was those of us who lived on the margins. The legendary San Franciscan columnist, Herb Caen, called some of us--not me--beatniks. We were also known as protesters, malcontents, socially disadvantaged, and Democrats, the latter being the most damning designation of all because at the time, it was not easy being a Democrat. Republicans didn't want us to go out with their daughters, and their daughters wanted us to get a real job.

One of the Freep (Free Press) columns I read with some care was called The Wasp, the title a homage to Ambrose Bierce, its prose suitably scathing toward all those who believed they knew enough to get by in this world of such racial, social, and financial imbalance. He who called himself The Wasp was a short, nearly pudgy man who wore thrift store glasses and often wrote clad in a faux-Indian blanket bathrobe. He had some time ago written a book called The Holy Barbarians, an attempt to get down on paper the spirit, meaning,and intent of the Beatnik and the Beat concept.

The Wasp was not without humor and although much of it was ironic in nature, he was not above telling me, after we'd met the first time, to give him a buzz, some time. He also had a son of whom he spoke dismissively as pompous and self-serving, adding that the son probably inherited both qualities from him. He was Lawrence Lipton, his son now the principal force behind the Bravo TV series, At the Actor's Studio.

Lipton--Lawrence, not James--was impressed that I knew the work of John Fante, which meant that my wearing suits and ties and largely being a Democrat were not a sign of terminal illness. He was impressed that I knew he'd collaborated with a former wife on twenty mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Craig Rice. The fact that I was on the staff of a magazine along with Henry Miller and could actually authorize reviews and essays that paid in cash rather than the Free Press payment plan, which was often a chit for a pizza or a car wash, added to my panache. One of the bigger complements he ever paid me was, "For a guy who wears neckties, you take a hell of a lot of chances."

This was going to be a reflection of how my fondness for John Fante impressed Larry Lipton and Henry Miller, which it did, because they both used the same word about him, seminal. This was going to be about how the L.A. of that time, often overlooked by those who saw the legions of talent roaming the streets of New York, had a stunning group as well, including Charles Bukowski, of course Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury, John Sanford, Theodore Sturgeon, and one Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, along with a cadre of men and women who put up with the shennanigans at the motion picture studios.

But it has spoken, morphed, if you will, to being about that nearly pudgy man who often wrote in his bathrobe, and one of those remarkable works of art that has fallen between the cracks.

In time, Lipton trusted me to the point of offering me a look at what he thought to be his magnum opus, The Erotic Revolution, a book about the effects of sexual activity on the human race and the further effects its on-going repression had on society and the art it produced In its pages, he urged the repeal of all laws regulating pre-marital sex. Make marriage optional; repeal all laws making homosexuality illegal; repeal all the so-called unnatural laws regarding the sex act. Make contraceptives legal everywhere and free to low-income groups. Make all abortions legal and free to those unable to pay.

Once, wearing a suit and tie, I sat across the desk from the then Rush Limbaugh of the TV screen, Joe Pyne, who started the program by demanding to know how I could offer a platform to a dirty old man and sexual pervert, by whom he meant Larry Lipton. Different suit, different tie; I did a radio appearance with Bob Grant, who was still in L.A. and more of a friend than was Joe Pyne. Isn't this--publishing Lipton's book--something of a low-water mark for you? he asked on KABC Talk Radio.

Somehow one of us--it might have been the stunningly wonderful publicist Irwin "Promotion-in-Motion" Zucker--secured a reading for Lipton in UCLA's fabled Royce Hall.
Owl-like, blinking against the lights focused on the lectern, Lipton stepped forth to greet the filled hall. Standing along the rear wall were a number of professors I'd studied with as an undergraduate. "It used to be," Lipton intoned, "that a university was not only a place of learning but a place of sanctuary. Men and women, poets, theorists, and writers with unpopular ideas could apply for and be granted sanctuary from oppressive regimes and punitive laws. Will you grant me sanctuary?"

There was a long moment of embarrassed silence. Then came the most un-Zen-like sound in the world: two hands clapping. Timid at first, the clapping grew in tempo and intensity. To my great relief, I discovered they were mine.

When Lipton died, his widow, Nettie, sold his manuscripts and papers to the university where I am now employed. I wrote to the custodian, thrilled by the acquisition, describing my relationship with him, and offering to help identify and classify, for which I received a note thanking me for my interest in the archival process and wondering if I'd like to make a donation to the library.