Last evening I delivered a talk to the Upper Hudson Phi Beta Kappa society, a collection of some very talented individuals whose goal, in part, is to support the advancement of college and university-bound students. My talk was originally to be centered around my search for the authentic in many different parts of the world, and then transcribing that authenticity onto the page. But instead, when preparing the talk, I found myself instead drawn to the subject of how I came to be a writer, and how difficult if not impossible it was for me to separate myself from a family business that was supposed to be handed down to me by my father, just like it was handed down to him (in a manner of speaking) by his father.
I'm also considering writing a memoir for writers and would-be writers based in part around the subject of this talk.
Here's the talk in its entirety (Please excuse any typos or parenthetical interjections):
The old joke goes something like
this: Three men are seated at a bar sipping on mugs of beer. Suddenly, just to
break the silence, one of the men puts his beer down and says, "I'm a
stockbroker. This year I'll bring in around nine hundred thousand
dollars." The second guy perks up, says, "I'm a lawyer. I'm gonna
make four hundred K this year, easy." But then the third guys nods, drinks
some beer, says, "I'm gonna be lucky to scrape together ten thousand
bucks." The other two guys immediately turn to him and say in unison,
"What kind of stories do you write?"
So you can imagine the horror that
painted my dad's face when, twenty-plus years ago , I told him I was giving
everything up to become a writer. The problem and the horror, didn't stem from
my choosing a definite direction in life necessarily (because what parent
doesn't want their child to have direction?). The problem stemmed from
something different. Something very personal and as ingrained as the veins of
rusted iron inside a chunk of granite.
By choosing to be a writer, I was not
only about to enter into a career that was financially risky at best, but to
make matters worse, I was giving up something that other people my age at the
time would have killed for: a successful, long established family construction
business.
All of my life up until I was 22
years old had been spent more or less in preparation to enter into a business
that my grandfather and father built from the ground up (no pun), beginning in the mid-1940s. Sure, I had
other interests like music, and in particular drumming (I'd been in and out of
rock bands since I was fifteen). But I also had taken to photography and
writing while still in college. As much as I loved these pursuits, however, it
was difficult to take them serious on any level. Because always, I understood
that without question, my future…my prescribed place in life…would be standing
beside my dad inside his business headquarters in Cohoes, NY. Which for me meant that, while my friends
hopped flights to Europe and Asia immediately upon graduation, I was told to
report to work ASAP (I was actually given two weeks off, much of which I spent
hiking in the Adirondacks).
Like the good son, I didn’t argue
with my father, nor challenge his wishes, nor toss a monkey wrench in what he
considered a very deep financial and emotional investment. But that doesn’t
mean I was conflicted over my career predicament from the get go. You see, even
though I kept quiet about it, I knew early on that the construction business
wasn't for me. Rather, I wasn't suited for it.
First things first.
The construction business doesn’t
require a degree in physics from MIT, but it does require a certain amount of
engineering know-how, and engineering know-how takes math skills, of which I
had zero. All my life I had trouble passing even the most basic of math
courses. That right there should have been a red flag for my dad. But still, he
persisted with trying to steer me towards taking over the helm of the Zandri
Construction Corp. Although I “technically” had a choice in what path to take
in my life’s pursuits, the choice was a very difficult one to make. If I chose not to
enter into the business, then I ran the risk not only of disappointing my
family, I ran the risk of ending what promised to be a three generation
business legacy. Add into the mix a strong Italian heritage and the powerful
concept of familia and you get the picture. Think, Godfather meets the Sopranos
meets The World According to Garp.
In other words, I basically had no
choice.
From the moment I started...and I
mean, from the moment I punched my proverbial time card...I was like wet paper
bag filled with glum sprinkled with despair. While I had spent many summers
working for the business in the field as a laborer, I was now expected to work
in the office as a project manager and estimator. My duties pretty much
revolved around reading blueprints and trying to determine how much a
prospective project would cost (You’ll remember that little math problem).
Price a project too high and you risk missing out on the successful low bid.
Price a project too low, and risk losing your financial shirt.
Other duties included managing the costs
on existing jobs. Also expediting them. Checking up on when the carpeting,
doors, and windows would arrive on site. Stuff like that. There was a lot of
time spent on the phone asking for lumber prices and delivery dates. For a guy
or a gal who’d just graduated Babson College or a similar trade school, whose
sole interest in life was building up a business….any kind of business…it could
be exciting stuff. Maybe even the most fun you could have with your clothes on.
But for me…the dreamer, the would-be Ernest Hemingway or Joseph Conrad, the
arm-chair traveler…the work was tedious, and as dry as work could get.
Still, I stuck it out, with the
understanding that much like a bad, pre-arranged marriage, I might learn to at
least like the job.
A few years went by.
By the time I turned 25, I was a
Junior executive in a thriving commercial construction business. I had a house,
a company vehicle, a steady paycheck, a
country club membership, one week's paid vacation, the promise of wealth, a new
wife and a child on the way (did I mention I'd gotten married at the ripe old
age of 24?), and had more stability than anyone could ask for.
But I was suicidal.
Then something happened that changed
everything.
I'd seen somewhere that the Albany
Times Union newspaper was looking for stringers to cover local high school
football games on the weekends. I'd read in one of the many Ernest Hemingway
biographies that I'd been devouring in my spare time, that the master started
out his writing career as a cub reporter. So naturally I thought, what's good
for Papa might just be the right thing for me. It might also be my ticket out
of the construction business, at least inevitably.
That late summer and fall I covered
every game I could, often times writing the stories in the TU newsroom on a
Late Friday night or Saturday afternoon at a frantic pace. I became so
proficient at the job I was offered to stay on and write basketball stories in
the fall and baseball in the spring. In the meantime, I started freelancing
stories on all different types of subjects for several papers. I wrote about
fly fishing, bird hunting, honeymooning in Venice, book reviews, you name it.
It was after collecting a portfolio of clippings that I started freelancing for
some larger magazines like Hudson Valley, Game and Fish Magazine, New York
Newsday, and just about any rag that would take a story.
At the same time, I'd also started
writing short stories that for the most part were collecting rejections. But
every now and then, I would receive an acceptance by a journal the likes of
Negative Capability, or Orange County Magazine, or the University of Idaho's,
Fugue. When that happened, I would feel myself levitating from the earth, flying
as high as a kite with its string snapped off in a wind storm. I'd spend an
entire weekend celebrating. I wasn't making a whole lot of money, but I was
making something. Suddenly, I was a professional writer and I was building a
career that was all my own.
You’re expecting the big BUT here
right?
Then Monday morning would arrive.
Since I had a family to support, I
was still employed by the Zandri Construction Company. It was a strange
existence, because when I was writing, I was so very happy, so very determined,
so very inspired, so optimistic about my future. But when I was working in the
construction office, I was so horribly sad, depressed, and pessimistic.
There weren't enough hours in the day
to do both jobs.
I would wake up at four in the
morning to write my stories and then I'd put in an eight hour day or more at
the construction office. My dad could see the desperation that was painting my
face. Not to mention exhaustion. My coworkers could see it. There was very
little peace in my life and I was not easy to be around. Something had to give.
My dad and I started to fight.
He knew how much I was retreating
from the business, if not physically then mentally. My mind just wasn't in the
game. But then, my head had never been in the game. Our
arguments were vicious. My dad, a short but stocky, salt-and-pepper haired
intense man, took my retreat personally. But, as it turns out, there was a good
reason for that.
My dad, after all, was a gifted
musician. A skilled trumpet player who had given up all his hopes and dreams of
being full-time performer to take over what had become in the early 1960s, a
failing Zandri Construction Corp. from his father.
Although the details of the agreement
are sketchy to this day, my father made a promise to his father who, at the
time was literally in tears over his ensuing bankruptcy, that he would not only
make the business a success once more, but that he would pay back all his
debtors. My dad would do whatever it took, even if it meant giving up his own
personal dreams to make the most out of his God-given talent. That one decision
made by my father in his mid-twenties took strength, conviction, and
selflessness.
It also changed the course of his
life forever.
But here's the thing: As much as I
resembled him, I was not my dad.
And when it came my turn to step up
to the plate, so to speak, I could not give up what now had become a dream not
only to be a writer and freelance journalist, but to be a full-time novelist. I
felt that if I "wrote on the side" as so many people suggested I do,
that I would eventually give up the dream, succumb to the enormous demands and
responsibilities of the business, grow soft in the middle, hard in the
arteries, and angry, and unhappy with my middle age. In essence, what I foresaw
was living a very slow death. Nobody wants to be that guy who looks at himself
in the mirror at sixty and whisper, "I should have stuck to my guns. I
should have lived my life while I had the chance."
So the day came finally, when I decided to make
the official announcement to my dad, while he stood over a blueprint inside his
corner office. "Dad,” I said, “I'm going to become a writer."
“Good luck with that,” he said. But
the look on his face said, “Rest in peace.”
I applied to writing school and in
late 1994 I was accepted to the MFA in Writing program at Vermont College. It
was while writing and reading for two straight years that I came up with my
first novel. The book that would become As Catch Can or, in its most recent
form, The Innocent. That book would get sold to Delactorte Press less than a
year after my graduation from writing school for a quarter of a million
dollars.
That deal, which was touted in
Publishers Weekly among other publications, hit my family with all the subtly
of a major seismic event. I was thirty three years old. I now had money in my
pocket, some pre-publication notoriety, the promise of a stellar bestselling
series, and even reads from major film production companies and talent like
Dreamworks, Robert DeNiro, and George Clooney. My dream was finally becoming
real. I had also achieved something else. Validation. Not only for my writing,
but for my convictions.
Ironically, the first person to
congratulate me was my dad.
I still remember the smile on his
face when I first told him about the deal. He laughed and then he told me something
I'll never forget. He said, you and I fought because you assumed I wanted you
to stay in the construction business. But that's not what it was all about. I
just wanted to make sure you were able to make a living for you and your
family. I took him at his word, but there was a little salt to be tossed onto
his sentiment.
Of course, as successful as that first deal
was, there were to be many more trials and tribulations to come. A first
divorce, contracts that went unfulfilled, depleted bank accounts. But also,
wonderful things too. Many of my books would sell hundreds of thousands of
copies. I was able to become a freelance foreign correspondent for RT and other
news services. Work that took me to Africa, Russia, Turkey, Greece, France, the
Middle East, Asia, ... so many places I've lost count. I've seen the sun rise
on Machu Picchu and I've seen the sun set on the pyramids in Giza. I've hiked
the Amazon jungle, been bitten by piranha, and nearly drowned last year in the Ganges.
I'm able to live in Florence, Italy for part of the year and I support it all,
not with paychecks from the construction company, but with royalties from my
twenty-plus in-print novels.
When I started writing those first
football stories for the Times Union newspaper all those years ago, I never
would have dreamed that I would hit the New York Times, or USA Today bestseller
lists, or that I would nail the overall No. 1 spot on the Amazon Kindle
Bestseller list. I never thought for a moment I would win the ITW Thriller
Award or the PWA Shamus award for the best paperback original with Moonlight
Weeps. I just wanted the chance to make
a living as a writer no matter how humble. I wanted to go my own way, forge my own path. To
have a life of adventure outside of a construction office in Cohoes, New York.
To be thrilled by a life that's admittedly unstable, but far more gratifying.
So gratifying in fact, that even now, at 51 years old, I feel younger than I
did when I felt I had no choice but to step foot into the construction office
each and every morning.
My dad stayed with his business long
after I left, working seven days a week, sometimes ten or eleven hours a day
even into his mid-seventies. While our relationship was strained over the years
because of my career decisions, we eventually became friends again and I think
he enjoyed seeing me off on my adventures. He'd often tell me to stay vigilant
or to watch my back, especially if I was entering into a country that was
particularly unstable at the moment.
I recall our last phone conversation
together. It was well after work hours, but he was calling me from the office
after everyone had gone home. He was more than a little stressed out over a job
he was working on in Troy, and the hard time the architects were giving him.
Young, up and coming architects schooled in contracts, digital know-how, and a
particular brand of 21st century business savvy that was as far away
from my dad’s philosophy of doing business with a handshake than Portland,
Maine is from Portland, Oregon.
He knew he was going to lose money on
the project but that wasn't the point. They were insulting his integrity and
that's what hurt the most.
"How are you doing?" he
asked. "How's the new publisher?"
You see, I'd just signed a new five
book deal at the time with Thomas & Mercer and it was for very good money.
"Did they pay you yet?" my dad pressed. Always the worrier, he was forever
looking out for my well-being.
I remember laughing and telling him
that yes, I had been paid and what a joy T&M were to work with as opposed
to Delactore of Dell. He also asked me about my second wife Laura. We'd become
estranged over the years and divorced, but had been talking again as of late.
"You two aren't done," he said. "I just know it."
“Time will tell,” I said.
We hung up then, and I never spoke
with him again. The next morning he died of a heart attack while putting his
work boots on.
But I can still recall the last time
I saw him in person before he died. I remembered seeing something in his tired
eyes. I can't quite explain it, but it was a look that exuded both pride in my
achievements, and a kind of sadness. A sadness that told me maybe he too could
have followed his dreams. That had he chosen to do so, his life might have
turned out differently. But much like the writing life chose me whether I liked
it or not, I think he felt deep down that the construction business snatched
him up in its claws, for better or worse.
My dad died a successful man, but I'm
going to be perfectly honest: I’m not sure how happy he was when death struck
him so very suddenly that bright December day. Even at 76 he still bore a
tremendous weight on his narrow shoulders. The responsibility of carrying on
the family legacy, even long after his own father had passed away.
But you see, my dad was a man of
integrity. The kind of man we see less and less of in this new 21st
century. When he made a promise, he kept it. Even with his dying breath. And
now, I no longer recall our butting heads, or arguing over my path in life.
Instead, I thank him for all the lessons he taught me about being a success not
as a writer necessarily, but at whatever path I chose.
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