The herd is thinning for us. This week we lost two members of the team.

My wife lost a long-ago, back in the nabe, friend, Bo. A great guy and talented musician from a neighborhood brimming with artistic achievement.

And just last night, we lost Uncle Petey. He wasn’t really our uncle. And he wasn’t really that old. But he was in bad shape for many years and, finally, he succumbed as the walls of poor health closed in.

He was a gentle Panda of a man who was like comfort food on two legs. In that sense, he was our “uncle.”

When I met the young woman who would become my wife, I was introduced to a world of energetic, creative men and women VERY unlike the meat-and-potatoes crew I grew up with, for I came of age in one of the bronxier sections of the Bronx. It was a place where you went to school, you joined the military, you got a steady job (Post Office, Board of Ed, Metro North — those would do just fine), got married, had kids, and retired at sixty-five. The “lives of quiet desperation” (thank you, Thoreau).

Not this crew. Nope. This new group was full of theater majors. At first, my opinion of theater majors was even lower than that of education majors. That is, “lazy, not-too-bright kids intent on securing their 2-S deferment and coasting for four years.”

I soon learned that these folks had energy, brains, ambition and talent up the wazoo. They pushed and pushed and became musicians, film directors, producers, and cinematographers, book publishers, disc jockeys, award-winning comedy writers, and actors, as was the case with Uncle Petey.

So many people give you the “woulda, coulda, shoulda” BS about their stillborn artistic endeavors. Here’s a typical one: “Yeah, I coulda written a book, but who has the time?”

Uncle Petey worked his butt off honing his craft, making connections, and pounding away on doors. It sounds corny but he was a “people person”, the kind of guy who methodically weaved webs of like-minded folks.

When I first met him and that post-collegiate crew, he held low stakes, nickel-and-dime, poker nights in his fan-conditioned, top floor walkup dump in the far East 90s, across from Knickerbocker Towers. It was Petey, me and my wife, and a rotating cast of their fellow theater majors.

I smile at the memory of those raucous nights. Lots of laughs in his cramped kitchen, back when we were in our twenties and giddy with good health. We barely had two nickels to rub together but our futures were before us. Through the adventures and achievements of Uncle Petey and that crowd, I found my own path out of my maze of mediocrity.

Uncle Petey was relentless in the pursuit of an acting career. No surprise, then, that over the years he got plenty of work. Work that took him to California where he became a beloved character actor who paired with bold-faced names. He got regular radio work. He came East and started a theater troupe. He earned his keep giving improv lessons to new generations of aspiring talent. From NYC, to London, to Indianapolis, a lot of people absorbed Uncle Petey’s passion and love of the craft.

Now he is gone but he’ll never be forgotten. He’s in my personal Hall of Fame, a pantheon of one-of-a-kind nut-balls, with others of blessed memory such as Uncle Kenny and Uncle Richie.

When I was a little kid, my sister and I would roll our eyes when my grandma would talk about life experiences and intone, in her heavy Yiddish accent, “…vell….as long as you have your health….” We’d snicker and laugh our bloody heads off.

Yeah, well who’s laughing now?

Alev hasholem, Uncle Petey. One of the good ones.

“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.” Wimpy! That’s the first thing I thought of when I read that a local bar, actually THE BEST local bar — An Beal Bocht — was using “cheeseburger” as a prompt in a Moth-adjacent Wednesday night event.

The second thing I thought of was my Uncle Arthur. Artie! My dad’s brother in law and the bane of my father’s existence. Arthur was a gratuitously cruel, uncultured arriviste.
Arthur sold home appliances. He was a commissioned clerk in a Fairfield County strip mall store. He and his family lived in my grandfather’s big old Victorian house in Bridgeport.

The kid that was me marveled at how Dad, uncharacteristically, would hold his temper as Uncle Arthur bloviated. Artie berated his wife, Dad’s sister, sponged off his wife’s family, and trolled my father in issues related to World War II (they were both in the Army, European Theater, but my Dad saw combat and Arthur toiled in Graves Registration), politics and business. “So Mort!” he’d taunt, raising a glass of Wild Turkey, as my father’s blood pressure rose. “You make it? You make it yet? I made it! You?”

“Why don’t you punch him in the nose?” I’d ask my Dad as he drove our ten-year old Pontiac home from Connecticut to our Bronx dump, back when I was a little boy.

“Ahhh. Empty barrels make the most noise.” That’s all my Dad would say.

But, back to cheeseburgers! The Connecticut contingency invited us poor relations up for a BBQ once in awhile. One time, Uncle Arthur popped some pre-formed patties on his charcoal grill in his — or, rather, my grandfather’s — backyard. He split open a bag’s worth of Wonder Bread buns and unwrapped a package of Kraft Singles.

And then, he began to bloviate, oblivious to his culinary duties. And, as he talked smack, trying so hard to “engage” my father, he absently flipped the burgers.

One by one, our meal slipped through the grill to die a Viking death in the fiery ashes below. Uncle Arthur began to curse. It was somehow his wife’s fault. It was somehow Weber’s — the grill’s maker — fault. Then, the haymaker:

It was my father’s fault!!! Yes, he flipped the switch; my Dad distracted him and thus the protein perished. And as he screamed, the buns ignited in Wonder-ous fury and burned to black.

Everyone laughed at the sight of this obnoxious heathen, this…this…EMPTY BARREL of a man, flail about after cluelessly setting the burgers ablaze.

Everyone but my father. And I’ll tell you straight up: never in my life was Dad one to give advice. In fact, one time, my sixth-grade self asked him to help me solve a weighty life-strategy question and he said, simply: “I don’t give advice.”

But in not laughing at Uncle Arthur, I learned something. There’s a popular old Kenny Rogers song, “Coward of the County” and the payoff line is: “Sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man.” But Dad held it in, because he knew the full extent of Arthur’s backstory. Hardscrabble upbringing on the Lower East Side. A brother who was, well, today we’d say he was “troubled.” Select your own descriptor. He took a razor sharp shears from his mother’s sewing basket and stabbed the kid that was Artie in the neck.

And it was downhill from there. So the amateur shrinks among us can think of defense mechanisms such as compensation and displacement. Whatever it was, Uncle Arthur had a lot of psychic scar tissue. Enough that even my Dad, the six-four dreadnaught with the hair-trigger temper, knew who and what he was dealing with.

Very damaged goods.

Inadvertently, my father gave me sage advice after all.

That’s my “cheeseburger” story, and I’m sticking to it.

I loved to go out to dinner, I love to cook, I love to eat. I’ve been going to restaurants since I was a zygote. My earliest dining experiences were at Tower Deli on Kingsbridge Road, Diana’s (Italian) and Hom & Hom (Cantonese) on Fordham Road, and Stella D’Oro on Broadway (yes, they used to have two restaurants next door to their bakery).

Over the years, I’ve spent a small fortune on restaurants. The bigger my job, the bigger the tab, as client entertainment grew in importance. So, yes, I loved restaurants.

But restaurants didn’t always love me back.

The Italian fave in Brooklyn that my dollars supported in its early years accounted for nada when I was told they were no longer taking reservations. Rather, it was suggested by the co-owner that I queue up in the street at around 5 p.m., for a shot at a 6 p.m. table. Ummm….no!

At some hot Manhattan restaurants, I was asked to wait for hours at the bar. I had reservations but there was no table for me. Other times, prices soared while service and quality sunk to “meh” levels.

Another issue: between the impact of age (and lower metabolism), eating out with friends and family three times a week, and client breakfasts and lunches. I gained weight like a sumbitch.

Then, Covid came. You may have read about it. Lockdown. No gyms. No more restaurants. I was cooking three meals a day for a long long time.

A funny thing happened. I had more money in my checking account. My blood pressure went down (way less salt in my diet). I started losing weight (like a sumbitch; 55 pounds since Covid, and counting).

These days, I go to restaurants once in awhile. Just modest local places. I no longer travel far and wide to chase the hot, new, must-go, boite. I no longer plan reservations weeks in advance and/or settle for off-peak dining times (if I wanted to eat at 10 p.m., I’d travel back to Barcelona). When I do go, I eat way less, for I’m no longer used to restaurant portions. I’ve become one of those who split appetizers — and sometimes even entrees. And I order more club soda, as opposed to two, three, four drinks.

At home, I buy more quality protein, veggies, and fruit from local purveyors. I shop at wine shops that offer quality. As a result, I no longer open a vein for three-to-four hundred percent markups, the restaurant alchemy that transforms a $15 bottle of serviceable-but-hardly-great Sicilian red into a $60 investment. As we used to say back in the day: “fuck that shit!”

So when I see an article like this, I can only chuckle. “Restaurants Aren’t What They Used to Be (and That’s a Good Thing)”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/20/opinion/restaurant-industry-shutdown-inflation.html?ref=oembed

I mean, boo-hoo. I get it. Rents are high and margins are low. Newsflash: every industry paradigm is in flux. Figure it out, but don’t expect me to cry for you. I gave you decades of hard-earned cash. In return, I got indifferent waitstaff, screaming babies at 9 p.m. in “nice” restaurants, and wayyyyy more sommelier shade than I ever deserved.

The pandemic gave us many life lessons. Don’t waste a minute of time. Keep your loved ones close. Jettison those who give you grief. Support your passions. Eat and drink merrily, for tomorrow….

But consider the joys of home entertaining, and of portion control. Find and frequent quality, local purveyors of protein and produce. Watch Jacques Pepin videos and learn some kitchen technique.

And for God’s sake: go easy on the salt.

A dear friend — a gifted consultant and writer — reminded me of Hemingway’s short stories the other day. “So, what are you reading?” he asked. I told him I can’t really read other people’s fiction while I’m writing because I go all “chameleon” and morph my style into the style of the person I’m reading.

“Do you like Hemingway?” he asked. Of course! He was my North Star back when I was a kid saving up for a manual typewriter of my own. (I got one, an Olympia, on 23rd Street’s Typewriter Row, back when that was still in existence. That typewriter was smooth as silk.)

“Listen to this, then,” he said, reading from a Hemingway story that described a brown trout quivering in the silty stream, turning this way and that.

The story was marvelous. I read the Hemingway story and ten others. I was catapulted into a reverie of fishing tales, for I loved freshwater fishing as a kid and on into my 40s. At that point, after moving to Brooklyn, I added saltwater fishing to my repertoire. There’s a photo of my son and his first striped bass, above. Saltwater fishing meant more stories; more cool equipment and accessories to learn about and purchase.

Herewith, after a head-soak into Hemingway-land, a few fish tales (tails?) from the old mental hard-drive:

— Grandma Mimi Catches a Fish: We are deep in the woods surrounding the Ashokan Reservoir. I am with my eight-year old son, my wife, and her mother, Mimi. Mimi has never gone fishing. I show her how to cast, where to cast, how to bait the hook (“Marty…YOU do it, please!”). Patience was not Mimi’s strong suit. We spread out and cast. Two minutes later, Mimi screams. “I GOT ONE, I GOT ONE!!!” Sure enough the red and white plastic float is way underwater and her rod U-bends. I show Mimi how to reel it in. With my left hand, I reach for my net. “SLOW!” I admonish. “SLOW!!!!!” Mimi didn’t do “slow” but this one time, she listens. We see the fish as it struggles. It’s a nice one. A largemouth bass. “I CAUGHT A FISH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Mimi screams as I carefully remove the hook from its lip. “CAN YOU BUST???? I GOT ONE!” she says, all the way home that afternoon. It was a very good day.

— That’s One Sharp Knife: I’m a little kid with my dad and his friends. We are fishing in Putnam County. It’s a long time ago. I-684 wasn’t even a gleam in Rockefeller’s eye. We are stomping around the reservoir in search of a productive spot. We come upon a young guy. Army age. A local. We could tell. He has a beat-up pickup truck and wears work boots. rolled up dungarees and a red-checked flannel shirt. The guy is taking a break. He leans against his truck and whittles with a hefty fixed blade knife. I stare at the knife, for it is as big as the knife I’d seen on the TV show about Jim Bowie. “What?” he asks me. “Is it very sharp?” I stupidly ask. He rolls up his sleeve. He hocks up a loogy with a throat scrape that sounds like a road grader. He clams on his forearm. His other hand grips the knife. He shaves the hair clean off his arm and looks at me. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s sharp.” We soon find another spot to fish.

— Willie the Cop Beats the Crap Out Of His Son, My Friend Billy: Willie was a veteran fisherman. He took it seriously. So seriously that if rain came, he would open the trunk of his ’53 Ford and supply the gang with rain ponchos. The fishing would continue. On this particular day, me, my friend Billy, and my dad and Billy’s pop (Willie the Cop), had no luck. Willie puffed on his White Owl. He was getting pissed, for he picked this spot and swore to my dad that it was productive in past weeks. Me and Billy were little kids. And we got bored. We walked away from our dads’ casting spot and went downstream. We started kicking at a sunken log. For us, the fun of fishing was over for that morning. Finally, we managed to kick the log free. It floated onto the stream. We watched with horror as the current took it down to where a couple of other men were fishing. Our log tangled the men’s lines. They cursed. Willie saw what was happening. “DID YOU DO THAT???? WAS THAT YOU???” he screamed at Billy. He slammed his rod down onto the mossy shore. He ran to his son. A hail of punches pelted poor Billy. I backed up. After all, Willie was a cop. Billy started to snot-cry. Willie didn’t let up. My dad sauntered over. One eye was on his friend. The other was on me. “C’mere,” he said, motioning me towards him. “Get over here.” For once, he wasn’t enraged. He wanted to decouple me from the maelstrom. “It’s gonna rain soon. We’ll go and have lunch.” But it was not to be. It did start to rain. But Willie the Cop pulled rain ponchos from the trunk of his Ford. The fruitless fishing continued. Me and Billy were soaked, sad, and scared. Billy’s dad was out of control and even my giant father was loathe to stop him.

— Wake Up Maggie, I Think I Got Something To Say To You: It’s late September and we really should be back at school. I’m with college friends and the semester just started. Richie (alev hasholem) got his dad’s oxblood Chevy Impala and takes six of us fishing near Purdys, NY. To get to Purdy’s, you exit the highway when you see the sign for Plevka’s Grocery. We get Ring Dings, pretzels, coffee, and Twinkies at this little shop for breakfast. We find our spot near the East Branch. Richie pulls the big boat of a car off the road and glides to a stop on a canted pine needle carpet. It’s an unnecessarily precarious angle, parallel to the heavily wooded shore. I mention this to Rich. He shrugs. He is eager to fish. The last song on the car’s AM radio was “Maggie May”. The tune fit the cool, end-of-summer morning. We fish, and eat Twinkies. We drink coffee and pee on trees. In time, we give up our fishing, empty-handed. We joke about stopping to buy some fish to show our friends that we caught something. We pile in the car. Richie guns the engine. The car slides down the sloped shore. The rear flank of the car is headed into a pine tree. As one, we yell, “RICHIE!!!! STOP!!!!” We get out to survey the situation. It is grim. The car is his dad’s pride and joy. Richie gets back in the car and cuts the wheels. Again, he tries to rev his way out of ruin. No luck. I convince him to put the Powerglide in neutral, release the parking brake and steer, as we push the car out of danger and aim it uphill, at a suitable angle. Richie sees a pathway to the road. He starts the engine. “SLOW!!!” I scream, for Richie is curiously like Mimi. Patience is not in the lexicon. He feathers the gas pedal and coaxes the car up to the safety of the asphalt. We pile back in the Impala. Summer was most definitely over. Richie turns on the radio. This being the era of Top 40 playlists, the song that blares is “Maggie May”. Disaster averted. As one, we sang:
“I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school
Or steal my daddy’s cue and make a living out of playin’ pool
Or find myself a rock and roll band that needs a helpin’ hand…”

Oh, and that’s what happens when I read someone else’s fiction before I write. In this case, I got Hemingway’d. Worse things could happen, I suppose.

The third weekly Torah portion — that’s Lech Lecha. It will come this year in late October, but I wanted to address it now.

My sense is that the meaning is “Go with yourself – your beliefs, your way of life, your faith.” So, “go forth from your land, from your kindred, from your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see” (Genesis 12:1). This cryptic call from God to Abraham begins the sojourn of a lifetime.

For me it’s as much about an internal odyssey as a physical journey.

Exactly thirteen summers ago, we moved from our Brooklyn home of 25 years to a leafy, quiet (ok, a little boring), safe, affordable section of The Bronx. From my high-floor aerie, I can see for miles, as The Who once sang.

We pulled our lives out by the roots, and it was difficult. But it had to be done, for a variety of reasons. We got more space, and way less agita, for a lot less money. It was the right place for us at this stage in life.

The week we moved was swampy-hot and filled with grief. Our twelve year old dog was dying, and finally had to be put down on our dining room floor just days before we moved, because he was too weak to even take to the vet. Our valiant dog fought the toxic injection before he finally succumbed. It was wrenching, watching him fail among the boxes of stuff that would be loaded onto the truck later that week.

Our Brooklyn no longer existed, for us, anyway. It was very pricey and populated by an army of self-entitled young nabobs from other parts of the country. It was hardly the demographic we sought back in ’85, when we got there after eight years in the cocaine-war shoot-’em-ups in Jackson Heights.

Just days ago, we learned that another of the few allies we had in the building moved, to a more balanced part of Brooklyn. She finally couldn’t take the grief anymore, remarking on the inability of other residents in the building to even say “hi” to her on the street.

In weeks, we had more friends here than after 25 years in Brooklyn. So, yeah, it’s less “cool” here. But everything we need is here. Including multi-dimensional diversity. We have artists, writers, photographers, musicians — and public school teachers, retirees, military vets, young and old — of every background and orientation.

Oh: the kids hold the door for adults and say “good morning” in the elevator, and behave themselves in stores! In Brooklyn, little kids were allowed to run amok.

Lech lecha. We heard the call and went forth, north and west, to our new land, where nearly every man, woman, child and dog wears some piece of NY Yankees apparel.

We learned about ourselves, and we learned about what really counts in a neighborhood. It’s not about the trendiest restaurants, or boutiques selling $1,500 pocketbooks. Over the last thirteen years, we’ve come a long way, far more than the 25 miles we covered going from Brooklyn to The Bronx. We’re on firm footing, surrounded by hard-working, decent, solid friends playing nicely in the sandbox of life.

Otto was helping the rabbi up on the bimah and I, a newcomer to the congregation, whispered to a lady seated in front of me, “Who is that guy?”

“Oh, that’s Otto,” she said. “He’s rabbi Judy’s husband.”

His wife, my new rabbi, was whip-smart in that crunchy, Oberlin way, and from their knowing smiles at each other, I knew they were gloriously in love. My wife, a fellow Poindexter and Birky aficionado, immediately bonded with her. Otto was a regular Joe, and we hit it off as well. My wife and I were brand new to the neighborhood, after decades of Brooklyn, and this couple made us feel right at home. Which was great, for we knew no one.

I soon learned that Otto was a kibitzer in the kindly, but wincingly-bad, dad-joke way. Nevertheless, he was a gitte neshumah. A sweet soul, who never failed to ask about our well-being and slap my back in bonhomie.

When asked, Otto would say that he was in the “underground novelty business”. Alright, he was a Manhattan funeral director. His wife told me that he was in the war, ‘Nam, like a lot of guys in my new nabe. In fact, three guys on my apartment building floor alone are vets of Vietnam. Like Otto, they are the nicest guys you ever want to meet.

Otto handled Agent Orange. What I long-ago learned from the man-boys just back from their tour, back when I was a summer-job pup of a downtown “office boy” in the late 60s and early 70s, was that the soldiers were told that the powerful defoliant was harmless, totally safe, and that — given the oppressive jungle heat and humidity — it was ok to handle 55 gallon drums of it without gloves or other protective gear, and spray it out of their helicopters and C-123s. The idea was to defoliate the vegetation that gave cover to enemy soldiers, thus saving U.S. lives.

According to military.com, 300,000 U.S. soldiers died from exposure to Agent Orange, almost five times as many as the 58,000 who died in combat. Maybe you should Google “dioxin” if you want to learn more.

If you are lucky enough to live long, you come to grok this axiom: a large number of deaths is a statistic; a single death is a tragedy. Otto died of cancer from handling Monsanto’s chemical concoction. Today, July 16th, would have been his 74th birthday, according to Zuckerberg’s social media platform.

So easy would it be to veer off into rants about VA lies, political mendacity, and cancer care detail. Not today, for Otto was not into “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” Today, I prefer to think of a gentle giant of a Real New Yorker who had been through hell, found true love, gave kindness with a whole heart, and — OK — told some of the corniest jokes ever uttered on Planet Earth.

Happy birthday, Otto. I will never forget you.

It’s summer. It’s warm. TIme for fun in the sun, at the beach, the pool, at backyard bbq’s. Roll out those lazy hazy crazy days of summer. Those days of soda, and pretzels, and beer.

And I’m here stuck in a funk. Two-plus years of suspended animation took its toll. Physically, mentally, socially, economically, politically.

What did we lose? We lost family members, some dear, some reviled. But lots and lots of family and friends perished. The bodies piled up, like cordwood. And yet we (ok, I) hear comments from some along the lines of “oh, it really wasn’t that bad, was it?”

WELL WHAT FUCKING PLANET DO YOU LIVE ON????

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/bodies-750-covid-19-victims-new-york-city-remain-refrigerated-n1266762

We lost our minds. Cooped up for days on end, working from home, learning at the kitchen table, eyes burning out looking at screens, a 24/7 drumbeat of death.

We lost our jobs. We lost contact with our friends. Sorry, Zoom. The thrill most definitely was gone after a few months of “please mute” and morons fumbling with “share screen”.

We lost civility. (Maybe we never had it? I don’t know anymore.) We lost the notion of national “shared experience” — these days, it’s all a zero-sum game, isn’t it? For me to win, you have to lose, and vice-versa.

Some of us still struggle with agoraphobia. I tense-up before any sort of social gathering. I’m so accustomed to a solipsistic existence. I reflexively reach for a mask before opening the front door, even to take out the trash. I’ve been to the movies a few times. They’ve been nearly empty. And yet I wonder: should I don my N95?

Oh, and then there are the residual physical issues. I can’t get into details, but I think we’ve all got our share.

So, yeah. What we lost? For me, the ability to give a flying eff about summer. Because variants are coming. And new serums are being readied. Because despite what we think/hope/pray/”believe”/hear, this is not gone and it’s not going away.

On July 15, the Brooklyn Writers Space (BWS) will cease to exist.

The Brooklyn Writers Space was a co-working townhouse for those who made their art with words. I lived in Brooklyn for 25 years and mostly wrote my stories, songs, and poems from a tiny bedroom in my apartment, a 1926 Candela-designed residence. Back in the day, it was “the maid’s room”, with a mini-bathroom and postage stamp-sized windows that faced south, towards Union Street. It was dark, dingy, and dirty.

That is to say, the space was miserable enough to encourage myriad excuses to interrupt my writing. Tidy the apartment. Start dinner. Walk the dog. Take a nap.

One day, a few years before I left Brooklyn, a new neighbor mentioned that he worked on his TV scripts at this new place on Garfield Place, to get away from apartment distractions. I called up Scott Adkins, who co-founded BWS with his wife, Erin Courtney. They were two playwrights who founded a safe place for other writers in the area. Scott and I met for a tour and I signed up immediately.

Members got a key, and access to a cubby with a power strip and desk lamp. The space had a “break room” with fridge and coffee machine. There was an area to lounge about, and a roof deck.

I would pack my laptop and my folders full of notes, and tell my wife, “OK, I’m going to the writing monastery.” I’d unlock the door, and a wave of good vibes would wash over my neurons. I’d find a cubby, plug in, and wait for the words to start flowing to my fingers.

Nothing.

But invariably, I’d hear the steady “click click click” of other writers banging away on their laptops and my competitive side would emerge. I’ll show YOU! I’d suddenly feel a rush of words and I’d start my story, or scene, or character backstories.

I’d return to my apartment mentally exhausted, and full of pride from the newfound productivity. There were no household distractions. Creativity wafted through the air, thicker than cigar smoke. I met other writers there, some of them famous. Several of them blurbed my first collection of short fiction, Home Front.

Scott organized group readings of BWS members at local venues. I worked up the nerve and volunteered to read at Union Hall.

The batting order that night had me reading my story right after the award-winning playwright Honor Molloy, who read with great proficiency and with a strong Irish dialect. I planned to read my story that night with dialect as well. I figured I was sunk.

Molloy killed. No surprise. She’s a master. I had to up my game. Good news. I, too, killed. Great applause. Great post-event feedback from the packed house. BWS did this for me. It helped me break through my self-doubt regarding my tales. My work resonated. My work belonged.

I kept writing.

After a few years, Brooklyn was no longer viable for us. We passed the baton to a new generation of residents and moved to a leafy quadrant of The Bronx. Thanks to BWS, the training wheels came off my writing. I no longer needed a dedicated space to find “the zone”. To this day, I simply look out the window of my home office and let my brain go off-leash. Et voila. The characters tell me what they want to say and I take dictation for them.

I don’t know why Scott and Erin decided to close BWS. Maybe their lives as gifted playwrights took them away from Brooklyn. Maybe the business model doesn’t work for local writers in a post-pandemic world.

All I know is that BWS introduced me to a gang of talented writers — and I’m still in touch with them to this very day. The space hot-wired my brain to the point where I’ve written Home Front, A Shoebox Full of Money, Robert’s Rules of Innovation (Book I and II), and where I’ve ghost-written three other books. Plus, I’m coming down the home stretch on my third short story collection, which should be ready for take-off in 2024.

Good luck to Scott and Erin, and to all the writers who harnessed the positive energy of BWS to sharpen their skills and share their stories with the world. It was a brilliant idea, and it midwifed a hell of a lot of super work. I’ll always fondly remember my long afternoons at the Writing Monastery. Good work, guys.

I have a picture somewhere. It’s in black and white. I took it with a used Konica Auto S2 I got for fifty bucks when I was 16. I was shooting Tri-X at 400. The photo shows my dad sitting at the window of our apartment in the Bronx. It’s raining hard outside. My dad is in a white tee-shirt. He is smoking a Philip-Morris cigarette. A can of Schaefer is on the windowsill. You can see the therapy swimming pool of the Kingsbridge Vets Hospital across the street. Wild scallions are growing against the gate. My dad is looking at me, all grumble-y, like “WHAT? What is it?” I don’t know where the physical photo is. But it’s scanned, in deep storage, inside my brain.

Laura Nyro and I go way back.

She and I were Bronx kids. She was an older woman, born with music in her blood. I was a wannabe bad boy in crepe-soled Playboys, alpaca knit sweaters, sunglasses with dark blue lenses, and a Donnie Brasco-style leather car coat (with a half-pint of Bacardi Light in the side pocket). Laura studied in Athens and I went to Sparta. That is, she was a Music & Art grad. Me? I survived the all-boys (at the time), sports-oriented De Witt Clinton High School. After three years, I graduated at the tender age of 16 and enrolled in the leafy, coed Hunter College (soon to be renamed Lehman).

I soon learned that the self-destructive study habits I honed in high school (“real men don’t study — only ‘Poindexters’ study”) had no currency in college. I was overwhelmed by reading assignments and distracted by substances. In short order, I was well on the way to flunking out.

But that disaster was years away (and ultimately reversed). Soon after my arrival at Hunter, I learned that the college radio station was interviewing for DJs. I was a big fan of free-form FM, especially WOR-FM, which was soon supplanted by WNEW-FM, with its core four of all-stars: Rosko, Alison Steele, Jonathan Schwartz, and Scott Muni.

I auditioned. To my great surprise, I got a slot, 8 to 9 a.m. on Mondays. The station manager gave me these instructions. “OK, listen,” he said. “Just play records and don’t fuck up.” Fair enough. I played Paul Butterfield. Miles. Jimi. Johnny Winter. Wilson Pickett. Aretha, Cream, The Blues Project. Since Hunter was a commuter school, I’d pack up vinyl from my personal collection, take the LPs up to the studio, and awaken the school.

And I took requests. One morning, a teary-eyed student knocked at the studio door, with an album in her hands. “Please,” she sobbed, proffering the LP. “Play ‘And When I Die’.” I had heard some Laura Nyro on WNEW, but I was not yet a fan. I looked at the album cover, which had a photo of a dark-haired girl who looked like a prototypical, Bronx-born Hunter student. Over the photo: “More Than a New Discovery.” I wasn’t sure how I could weave it into my morning mix that day, but even the 16-year-old doofus that was me knew not to refuse a woman’s tearful request.

So OK, I played it. Whoa. Also on that album, “Stoney End” and “Wedding Bell Blues”. And so much more quality music was to follow. “Sweet Blindness”, “Eli’s Comin”, “Stoned Soul Picnic”, “Save the Country”, “Time and Love”. I was hooked. On the music, and on the Laura Nyro vibe.

Shortly thereafter, I befriended an older woman of eighteen in my English Lit class. She loved Coleridge. Me too! And she was a Nyro doppelganger. The hair, the eyes, the clothes. It didn’t work out, though. I was not yet in her league. I lived in a crappy central Bronx tenement. She lived with the swells, in the brand-new Co-Op City, where residents ran the a/c with reckless abandon. I was into music, sports, and cars. She loved noir films and could quote from them all. She drove a stick. She smoked Chesterfields. CHESTERFIELDS! To me, she was a female Ferrari while I was still a three-speed bike.

My ill-fated relationship’s coup de grace came after dinner at Seven Brothers, a joyless Greek Diner on Jerome Avenue. Doused in Caswell-Massey patchouli oil, I gazed into Ms. Chesterfield’s eyes, and then froze. A roach made its way from the banquette onto her fetching muslin blouse. What to do? I gallantly flicked the bug off her sultry shoulder and into the next booth.

“What the fuck?” she said, her caterpillar fur eyebrows furrowed as she dipped a French fry into a pool of Snider’s catsup.

“Nothing.”

“Marty???”

I told her. That was that.

But I least I knew the type of woman I was looking for. Strong. Self-assured. A fresh mouth. Up on the arts. Musically inclined. Great sense of style. And, like Laura Nyro, a gifted wordsmith. Seven years later, I met that very person and we are still together, so many decades later. She checked all the boxes, except one. And once I taught her, she loved driving a stick.

It’s a partnership precipitated by a chance meeting in a tiny radio studio with a Laura Nyro “early adapter.” And I remembered all this just the other day, as I worked on my new story about “the world’s littlest shrink” ™. I have The Littlest singing as she descended the stairs of her Brooklyn brownstone to her garden-level office.

As I wrote, I asked myself: what would she be singing? And three words popped into my head. “Sassafras and moonshine.” And that was it. My protagonist is into Laura Nyro.

Who isn’t?