Authors: J R Moehringer
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Personal Memoirs
I said good-bye to the gang from Publicans. In many ways it was harder saying good-bye this time than it had been years earlier.
When are you coming back? they said.
Not for a while, I said sadly.
Don’t disappear this time, they said.
I won’t, I said. I won’t.
I promised the Manhasset story to my editors by the end of the week. Before I let it go, there was just one more thing I needed to do. One last interview. A Manhasset man named Roko Camaj had been a window washer at the World Trade Center, and he was on the job when the planes hit. His twenty-three-year-old son, Vincent, still lived in Manhasset. Just behind St. Mary’s.
I phoned him and said I was writing about my hometown and how it had changed forever.
He wouldn’t talk. Reporters had already written about his father, he said, and most had gotten it wrong. They had even spelled the family name wrong. I promised I’d get at least that much right. I pleaded with him to meet me. He sighed.
“Okay,” he said. “Where?”
I mentioned a few restaurants in Port Washington. I suggested Louie the Greek’s. I named places near his house, places not so near. He was silent. I was silent. Finally he said, “There’s a place my friends and I like to go.”
“Name it.”
“Do you remember where the old Publicans used to be?”
Like its author, this book has been rescued many times by a number of extraordinary people.
First, Roger and Sloan Barnett. Their love and generosity at the outset made all the difference. When the book was just an unformed idea, they introduced me to Mort Janklow, the archangel of literary agents, who immediately understood the story I wanted to tell. He embraced me, inspired me—and commanded me to write a book proposal. More, he told me how. I’m forever in his debt.
It was Mort Janklow who sent me to Jeff and Tracy Smith, the Nick and Nora of Watermill. They clipped lines from Somerset Maugham for me to pin above my computer, and let me set up my computer in their empty Pond House, where I wrote a rough draft while watching their frozen pond thaw.
During my stay at the pond I did much of my reporting, visiting Manhasset countless times, interviewing most of the people who appear in these pages. My thanks to Bob the Cop, Cager, Colt, Dalton, DePietro, Don, Georgette, Joey D, and Michelle. They, and many others from Publicans, spent hours confirming or correcting my memory, and helping me piece together long-ago conversations. They also granted me permission to use their real stories and real names. (Only three names in this book have been changed—Lana, Magdalena, and Sidney.)
As drafts progressed I showed them to a group of careful and thoughtful readers. Jackie Griggs, Bill Husted, Jim Locke, McGraw Milhaven, Emily Nunn, Jim Newton and Amy Wallace each helped in unique and essential ways. I owe a special thanks to Harvard professor John Stauffer, who gave me a list of rare old memoirs to read, then sat with me in his campus office through long winter afternoons and explained to me the American memoir. Those were among the most pleasant hours of my life.
From the start my editors at the
Los Angeles Times
—John Carroll, Dean Baquet, and Scott Kraft—have been unwavering in their patience, support and interest, even granting me a book leave at a time that was very inopportune for them. I can never thank them enough.
At one particularly anxious moment I was fortunate to meet with Hyperion’s editor-in-chief, Will Schwalbe, who set me right with a brief tutorial in the “architecture” of story. Another pivotal meeting, with
Los Angeles Magazine
editor Kit Rachlis, The Master himself, helped me finish at last.
In the fact-checking stage, Yale spokeswoman Dorie Baker and Saybrook dean Lisa Collins were kind, gracious and tireless. They are what Yale is all about.
Through it all I was pushed, coached, charmed, needled, educated, dazzled and edited as never before by the miraculous Peternelle van Arsdale, my editor at Hyperion. As rare and symphonic as her name, she did two things no one else had ever been able to do: She made me believe in the story, and through the sheer force of her faith, she made me keep writing.
Finally, my mother. Though a private woman, she answered hundreds of my questions with honesty and astonishing recall. She let me write about some of her toughest days, and shared with me her decades’ worth of family diaries, photos, cassettes and letters, without which this book might not have been possible. Above all, when the way was lost, she was my beacon, calling me back to the words, the simple words. It has been my great fortune in writing this book, as in entering this world, to have had her as my primary source.
Contents
eleven | STRANGERS IN PARADISE
twelve | COLT, BOBO, AND JOEY D
twenty-one | THE DEVIL AND MERRIAM WEBSTER
thirty-eight | MICHELLE AND THE FISHER QUEEN
“What Kind of Fool Am I?”
From the Musical Production
Stop the World—I Want to Get Off
Words and Music by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley © Copyright 1961 (Renewed) TRO Essex Music Ltd., London, England. TRO-Ludlow Music, Inc. New York, controls all publication rights for the U.S.A. and Canada
“Blue Sky”
By: RICHARD BETTS FORREST © 1974 UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC. and FORREST RICHARD BETTS MUSIC. All Rights Administered by UNICHAPPELL MUSIC INC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Warner Brothers Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, Florida 33014
“Got to Go Back”
by Van Morrison
© 1986 by Essential Music, all rights in the United States administered by Universal—Songs of Polygram Int., Inc. / BMI. Used with permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2005 J.R. Moehringer
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.
First eBook Edition: September 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-8342-4