There were certain neighbors of ours who always struck me as very sophisticated people and whose homes and daily lives were completely foreign to mine. One such family lived just around the corner, but I felt like I needed a passport when I entered their house. The father was a successful ad man in Manhattan, the mother an executive at a renowned psychiatric hospital in a nearby town. They had those framed Toulouse-Lautrec prints (Aristide Bruant, the Divan Japonais) on their walls before anyone else did. Miles Davis or bossa nova or Erik Satie played on a turntable. The mother was known as Big Lynn, a misnomer, as she was lithe and extremely stylish, always in black cashmere turtlenecks and slacks. They had three daughters, all of whom were blonde. Little Lynn, the eldest, was a stunning young woman who caused every boy in the neighborhood to gawk each time she left her house, as if she were Kate Middleton. My mother would stop by there, and Big Lynn would give her a box filled with last month’s magazines: Time, Look, Life, New York, Playboy, Penthouse, Cosmo, Psychology Today. Once home, my mother would skim through an odd copy here and there, normally falling asleep with the magazine at her side. I, however, took the box and read the issues cover to cover. Big Lynn got me hooked on reading.
I read a lot from seventh through tenth grades. Sitting in my bed at night, waiting for my dad to come home, or on weekend afternoons, there was a period when I simply could not stop reading. I liked Nick Pileggi’s crime reporting in New York magazine, and I laughed and winced reading John Simon’s theater reviews. My dad pointed me toward Hugh Sidey at Time and William Safire in the Times. I actually read Penthouse and its forum. I got hooked on Chris Miller’s writing in National Lampoon after reading crazy pieces like “Night of the Seven Fires.” Big Lynn included a lot of books in these boxes as well. I read The Godfather, Johnny Got His Gun, Salinger, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Exorcist, Leon Uris, Michener, Mailer, Ball Four, North Dallas Forty, The Valachi Papers. I read William Goldman’s screenplay for Butch Cassidy. I fell in love with Dickens and Twain and Poe. I loved biographies and the Playboy interview. In a 7-Eleven near my house, they displayed copies of Robert Sam Anson’s “They’ve Killed the President.” Staring in fascination and slight horror at Oswald’s autopsy photos gave me a lifelong obsession with the JFK assassination at the age of thirteen.
In high school I loved any subject that involved reading and barely tolerated everything else. I wanted to read what I wanted when I wanted to, which wasn’t the best recipe for academic success. I planned to go to law school eventually, because I was most comfortable with words and I suppose I wanted to finish something my father had started. My dad had attended Syracuse Law School for one year but dropped out because my mother’s father was paying the bill. My dad’s pride got the better of him, and he walked away to begin his teaching career the moment he was offered a job.
In my senior year, my parents’ discussion of my college plans was one of the more difficult ones they ever had. My mother’s well-worn argument that my father had to face reality and limit my options to what they could truly afford was restated ad infinitum. My father, however, continued to dream. I applied to the better state schools—Albany, Buffalo, Binghamton—and sent letters to a small list of good private colleges that appeared, on paper, to offer decent financial aid opportunities, like Muhlenberg and Colgate. My father’s goal, however, was for me to attend Columbia. He was still clinging to the hope that I would join a football team and actually play football. Columbia was part of an Ivy League “lightweight” program where the 158-pound limit had been raised to 165. The coaches in this league paired opposing players by weight, so that those over the limit were matched with someone their size. It was essentially a league populated by smaller athletes, some of them very quick, who weren’t big enough to play elsewhere. The skinnier version of me fell into this category. Once again, my father knew someone who knew someone, but it was to no avail. My grades were good but not good enough. Columbia made few, if any, allowances for athletes. You were either competitive academically, or not. My father tried to lessen the blow by telling me that the end of the Vietnam War in August of 1975 meant a flood of applicants and thus a more competitive field, but I nonetheless was frustrated and sad that a great opportunity had disappeared.
At that point, I thought about going ROTC. I could join the Air Force after graduation and learn to fly. Or work my way into the judge advocate general’s office of one of the branches and have the military put me through law school. However, once again, the end of the war cast its shadow. “They’ll probably train fewer pilots now that it’s winding down,” my dad volunteered. “The competition will get tougher and you won’t be guaranteed a seat in pilot training. You either earn that or you don’t.” I thought about how I would gladly give years of my life to the Air Force if it meant I would be trained as a pilot or get my law degree. But without either of those guarantees, I didn’t want to go into the military. When thick packages arrived from the schools that accepted me, my parents and I naturally went right to the financial aid section. If I left New York, I would lose some state-funded grants. But one school, which looked good on paper, seemed to make a mix of Pell Grants and TAP loans all add up to yes: George Washington University in DC.
I never visited the school before committing. I just drove down with my dad in August of 1976 and showed up. I was more than overwhelmed. Washington would be the first city I lived in, and I do believe that had I moved straight to Morningside Heights to attend Columbia instead, I might have packed up and gone home to Massapequa. When I arrived in DC, Foggy Bottom was still a sleepy corner of the northwest quadrant, with dingy row houses and pubs, sandwich shops, and laundry facilities catering to college kids. Washington in the 1970s was a quaint town. In the orientation course offered to entering freshmen, entitled “DC Culture and Politics,” I was introduced to JFK’s witticism that Washington was a city “of Northern hospitality and Southern efficiency.” This was before the city sprawled outward, and areas like Herndon and Reston were still covered with farmland. This was a post-1960s and pre-9/11 DC. Iranian students protesting the Shah of Iran burned him in effigy in Lafayette Square directly across from the White House. Mr. Capriotti patrolled in front of the White House fence, encased in his sandwich board sign, its illegible chicken scratch pleading with you to understand that the government was controlling his mind through his TV. If you attempted these kinds of things today you might be shot by the Secret Service.