Hello Dear Reader! Ever since I read that greeting in Charles Dickens I’ve always wanted to use it. Besides it’s true. I do have affection for anyone who reads my books, and I hope it’s returned. Before I take you on a ride with my Outlaw Journalistic Clan in New York (living on fast food, dope, and booze; catching planes at all hours of the night; battling with editors; making love on the fly; and generally having one hell of a wild time), please allow me a small digression, as I remember how I got into the freelance racket to begin with. After all, people have asked me to tell them how to get into the biz for years. More than one half-defeated wannabe has trundled up to me and said, “I guess I could never be a journalist because I didn’t go to any recognized journalist school.” My answer is always the same:
“Good for you. Neither did I.”
In fact, thinking back on it all, I doubt this book would even exist if I had. Schools teach you the right way to do things, the polite way, and that little lesson has ruined more than one writer, whether journalist or novelist. As for myself, originally, I had no intention of heading into the freelance game. No, no, this working-class kid from Baltimore, Maryland, was on track to live a perfectly nice, normal academic life as a professor of literature at Hobart and William Smith College in the frozen and picturesque Finger Lakes region of Northern New York. Yes, I had a gorgeous wife, named Bobbi (the Bob and Bobbi Show), her two kids from her first marriage, and in thirty years or so I’d be a full professor. I could wear a robe, fumble with my car keys, and act all confused when those darn, meddlin’ kids hid my eraser.
Yeah, Robert Ward, novelist and professor, was headed for Mister Chipsdom. Dead on.
Hell, it was only my fourth year of teaching and I’d already published a prize-winning novel called Shedding Skin, the wild, comic story of my escape from my drugged-out, dark, harbor hometown of Baltimore, across the fruited plains to the whacked-out, psychedelic, harbor town, San Francisco. To be more precise, a trip to wild and woolly Haight-Ashbury where I took every drug known to mankind; lived across the street from the Grateful Dead; attended be-ins, love-ins; saw the Hell’s Angels stomp a guy nearly to death out in front of the Head Shop; hung out with Bill Graham, the great rock promoter; saw Jimi Hendrix play on a flatbed truck in the Panhandle Park, the first time he’d ever played San Francisco (I was in the front row blasted out of my head on Purple Haze); met Janis Joplin and Al Owsley, the actual Purple Haze acid maker; had a total nervous breakdown; and came limping back to Baltimore half dead, seeing psychedelic demons flying out of the toilet.
After recovering, I finished grad school, got married, and ended up assistant professor of English at Hobart and William Smith. Shedding Skin came out, won a National Endowment Grant, sold maybe a thousand copies, and my editor, the great Fran McCullough, asked me what I wished to do next.
“Next, haha,” I said. “Say, Frannie, I’ve got a million freaking ideas.”
“That’s fine, Bobby,” Frannie said. “But really you need just one.”
“I know. No problem. I’ll get right back to ya.”
Yeah, a million all right. I took some Dexedrine, smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes, and set my mind a workin’. What would I write next?
Then, all at once, I knew.
See, after my Shedding Skin days I’d become friendly with many New Lefters, who had all convinced me that I had to get more serious. One of them, Sol Yurick, a then forty-nine-year-old novelist who had written a wonderful, very radical, Lefty novel called The Bag, told me that if I was going to be a real novelist I had to commit to The Revolution. He had liked Shedding Skin, but admonished me about my comic leanings. “You’re a hell of a writer. But you don’t want to end up where you are now.”
“Right,” I said. “Where’s that?”
“Bob, you lack seriousness. You’re just an existential clown. You skewer everybody but that’s not the real you. We’re in a serious revolution. Our work has to serve that.”
“An existentialist clown.” Oh, God, that was the worst thing in the world. All over the world young people were protesting the Vietnam War, fighting evil capitalism, trying to let LOVE flourish, and here I was an existential clown? Why, existentialism was a worn-out, exhausted philosophy for burned-out cases from the Second World War. I didn’t want to be associated with them. I wanted to be with my brothers and sisters of the new Revolution. I wanted (God help me) to change the world!
I loved Sol like the father I never clicked with, and decided then and there to write a SERIOUS LEFT-WING NOVEL, replete with evil capitalists, and shining-eyed Leftist idealistic bombers. I wrote and wrote and wrote… hundreds and hundreds of pages. The novel was called Baltimore. I aimed to show noble Lefties fighting the city government, changing working-class counterrevolutionary attitudes. Lefties would take over the fucking world. My book would be a giant sword of righteousness, stabbing the evil bosses in their fat, plutocratic guts.
The only problem was that most of the Leftist Radicals I’d met at Sol’s place in Brooklyn were kind of humorless assholes, rich know-it-alls who had never met a working-class person except maybe their father’s chauffeur.
Still, I recall it all fondly. Sitting in Sol’s warm, happy Park Slope kitchen we would argue about what the working class wanted. Some of the SDSers I met there were sure they knew. The working class, they said, wanted revolution, they wanted to own the means of production, but due to False Consciousness (Herbert Marcuse’s term for Capitalist and Mad Ave brainwashing in his lefty diatribe One-Dimensional Man) they didn’t yet know it. The left’s job was to raise their consciousness so they understood what they really wanted.
It was all so heady. We were going to save the working class from their own brainwashed instincts.
All righhhhht! Righhhhht onnnnnn!
Except for one thing. I had grown up with all these working people in row-house Baltimore, and I was pretty sure most of them weren’t the least suffering from False Consciousness. Not only that but I was pretty dang positive that what they really wanted wasn’t Revolution at all but something a lot more tangible. Something like, well… boats. That’s right, speedboats. Which they could race up and down the Chesapeake and the swift rivers outside Annapolis. Yes, they wanted boats and country houses, and RVs, and snowmobiles. Just like the middle class. Okay, granted, maybe working guys wanted speedboats instead of sailboats, but I was pretty sure boats were at the top of the list.
I knew this as sure as I knew the sun was going to come up. So why didn’t I say so in Sol’s hothouse kitchen? Well, I was younger, and I hadn’t gone to Harvard or Berkeley or anywhere important. Unlike me, the clown, these people were committed. Their eyes burned with the passion of True Believers. In short, I was intimidated. Talking to all these Ivy League–educated folks made me doubt what I knew. Maybe I was suffering from False Consciousness my very own self!
So when I got around to writing novel number two, I tried. Oh, man, how I tried. I was going to write the great, the ultimate, the most radical of radical novels, stuff that would make Sol’s eyes pop. I would be Dreiser, Jack London, and André Malraux all rolled into one. I turned out page after page of Leftist fiction. Serious! Committed! I wrote of giant demonstrations, I glorified union guys and hippies and brave new women!
It was gonna be some kind of wonderful!
Except for the fact that I didn’t really believe any of it. My characters were cardboard, talking agitprops, lame knockoffs of Clifford Odets and John Steinbeck. I was never going to be a “good radical” because I didn’t believe in Socialism. Of course, I didn’t really believe in Capitalism either, which Sol attacked me for. “Which side are you on, Bobby?” he said. (“Will you be a dirty scab or will you be a man?”)
After writing about five hundred pages of horrific crap I tossed the book aside. What dreck. What horrific bullshit! My attendant rage from my own stupidity made me probably not the world’s best guy to live with at this time. I took speed to hide my depression and disappointment. But speed made me a little cranky. People would walk up to me on campus and say “Hi ya Bob!” and my response would be, “Hi ya Bob? Hi ya fucking Bob? How’d you like me to rip your head off and stick it up your ass? Hi ya fucking Bob that, asshole!” Soon, not only was the book finito but my marriage was too. The gorgeous Bobbi left me for an earnest rock ’n’ roller who was going to change the world through music. Together they opened a Leftist vegetarian restaurant known as The Coming Struggle. As I drove by the place I could see all our former friends hanging there. None of them bothered to call me anymore.
A month or so after flopping on people’s couches I found myself living in a little cabin on Lake Seneca, feeling like the ultimate loser.
It was all so true. Karl Marx help me, I was a mere existentialist clown.
God, the pain of that declaration! That all my earnest reading of Marx, Lenin, Paul Sweezy in Monthly Review, Marcuse, Fanon… had come down to this miserable, lonely existence. I had let the Movement down. I had thrown two years of deeply earnest, if god-awful, work away. I had lost my family. And what of my students, those who looked to me to do something deeply radical, something brave… something that would lead them over the threshold of stagnant bourgeois life to a new and glowing socialist humanism? Yeah, you got it. I’d failed them too.
Clown that I was, I picked up my guitar and played “I’m a Loser” and found myself laughing instead of crying. Bobby Ward, the Revolutionary. What a terrible, pathetic joke.
What’s more, I had real material worries too. I had about a thousand bucks in the bank. I was thirty-two years old. I had no future in academia… I had failed the Left… hated the right… God, what a mess I was.
There seemed to be nothing left.
But then, at the very Poe-like pit of despair, I found it.
Even through all the misery of my marriage breaking up, tossing out my book, the kids crying, I had always loved reading, and during those lonely, soul-searching days the only thing that kept me together was The New Journalism. Tom Wolfe was my God. I stayed up all night reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test again and again. It was, after all, much like my own novel, Shedding Skin. And I felt that Wolfe was nothing if not an existential clown. As were Hunter Thompson, Charles Portis, Joe Eszterhas (before he went Hollywood), Roy Blount Jr., and of course, the genius comic writer Terry Southern. It was impossible to guess which politics they endorsed. Thompson was sort of a Leftist, but more of an anarchist. Wolfe was possibly a hated Republican. But he spared no one his acid wit. Blount was a true comic and even something of a scholar, and Terry Southern found the entire world absurd.
And they didn’t have to worry about what subject to write about. America was teeming with change. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, politics, art… anything you could think of, it was all changing, morphing into something else new, both brave and absurd at the same time. And which novelists were chronicling all these changes and societal explosions?
No one. Not a one.
Okay, Updike sort of was with his Rabbit series, but his suburban generation barely felt the psychic earthquakes. Pynchon was still making up his mythic worlds, which bored me to death. His books seemed to exist solely to exhibit his high IQ. James Baldwin had moved to France and barely wrote anymore, though I still idolized him for Another Country and for his essays. The only one who still really mattered to me, Norman Mailer, had moved to journalism and done his best work in that form. More proof that journalism was where it was at.
This, I thought, could be the life for me.
The real world. After all, what was really good about my first novel, Shedding Skin, was that it was all based on things I’d lived through or knew about firsthand. I had known gangster teens in Baltimore. I had hitched all over the United States. I had lived in Haight-Ashbury. Yes, the chapters went off into madness and comic exaggeration, but what made them work was that at the core they were real. But all the Radical Political material I had worked into my five-hundred-page opus was second-hand stuff from books. I wasn’t a Communist. I didn’t come, like Sol, from the Brooklyn Jewish Left. I was a Baltimore boy from a town where your sense of humor was your main weapon in life.
And so I decided out there in my little lakeside cabin that I would start writing journalism. Fuck ’em all. I would make my worst attribute, my clown’s view of life, my strongest asset. I would become a New Journalist.
The question was how?
I did a little digging, asking around in New York and I found out my first Catch-22. To get an assignment you needed a clip from another article you’d written. You sent that clip, along with a written proposal, to the magazine you wished to write for. Since they didn’t know you and might not even read the clip, you should send your lead—the first paragraph of the piece—along with a few paragraphs of what the piece probably would sound like (I say “probably,” because since you hadn’t interviewed anyone yet, how the hell would you know what it REALLY sounded like?). The editors of the magazine would then read your clip and your proposal, and if they liked it all they would hire you to write the piece.
But who was going to do that for me? The only clips I had were from years ago, when I’d written for an underground newspaper in Baltimore (theBaltimore Free Press, which I had started with Jack Hicks and John Waters!). I became depressed, downhearted. I had to find something close by to write about, some subject I could drive to and observe. Then I’d have to write my lead, send it in, and hope that someone would read it.
I sent a query to my agent, Georges Borchardt. No answer. Fed up with Geneva, my new girlfriend—the gorgeous and brilliant Robin Finn (who later became a great sports journalist for the New York Times)—and I drove one weekend to Toronto just to get the hell away from town. While hanging around Bloor Street we saw this new movie called Dirty Harry, which blew us both away. The star, this new guy called Clint Eastwood, was the coolest actor I had seen since Steve McQueen. He played a manly killer of a cop: cool, tough, dug jazz, girls fell to their knees when he walked up to them. It was all ridiculous but great fun. Any guy would want to be Clint.
When we got back to depressoville, Geneva, we were both exhausted and famished. We pulled up to an Amy Joy’s on Route 5 and 20, and there were three real, live Geneva policemen, all of them the exact opposite of Clint. They were overweight local guys, laughing, drinking coffee, and eating a huge helping of doughnuts. They talked about their kids, sports, and the bad weather. Existentialist clown that I am, I started thinking of a story that would show small-town cops as they really were. I mean what did these guys do all day? Did they, like Dirty Harry, ever solve murders (I had never heard of any in Geneva). Did they have to battle drunks, gangsters on the lam, like in Hemingway’s “The Killers”? I had no idea. But I thought it might be fun to find out.
The trouble was I had no assignment, and I couldn’t get an assignment without having a lead paragraph to show an editor that I knew something about my story.
Catch-22, indeed.
I thought about it for a couple of days. Then I decided, what the hell, I’ll just drive down to the police station, reporter’s notebook and pen in hand, and ask them if I could cruise around with them for a few days. If they asked which magazine I was writing for, I’d have to fake it. I decided I would say something like “I have friends in New York who want me to do an article for Rolling Stone or this new magazine New Times, and if I could just drive around with you a little.…” It was the truth but by a nose. My friend in New York wasn’t an editor on any magazine but my own agent. A white lie, but a kid’s got to get going, somehow.
I shouldn’t have worried so much. I learned very quickly that when it comes to being written about most people are thrilled to get a chance to tell their story. Before I could get my request out of my mouth, the chief of police had assigned me to hang out with three teams of cops as they made their rounds.
I left the station house, deliriously happy. I couldn’t wait to get out there with the Geneva fuzz. I was back into real life again, finding out what actually happens. Suddenly, Geneva, New York, seemed a hundred times more interesting. Why? Because I would be seeing the place from the cop’s point of view, and they knew way more than I did about the world we both lived in. As an academic, high-classed NOVELIST I pretended to stand above the townies and small-town cops who protected me. An easy sense of cultural superiority (i.e., snobbery) kept me from actually learning anything about the very town I lived in. But that was ending now, and I was thrilled to get out and do legwork like a real journalist.
A day later I found myself in the backseat of a patrol car. I was excited, a little scared, but mainly thrilled out of my mind.
Notebook and pen in hand, I started on the ride that a few weeks later would turn into the piece that would be published in New Times magazine, under the title “The Yawn Patrol” (a title made up by Frank Rich, one of the founders of the magazine and one which would cause me more trouble than I could have ever imagined).
Here it is then, my first piece: “The Yawn Patrol.”