Meryl Streep, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Erich Segal, John Kerry, George W. Bush, Henry Winkler, Gary Trudeau—there were a lot of soon-to-be famous people hanging out at Yale during the late 1960s. And what did this embryonic celebrities have in common? That’s right … that they did NOT know me.
Laura and I married in June, 1970, right after graduation. Another couple, Jane and Michael Stern, were married in New Haven at that same time. They floundered about in the early 1970s before deciding on becoming writers, specializing in books on travel, food, and popular culture. Their first book “Road Food” was published in 1977, and they’ve built solid careers around this central core.
I, too, floundered about in the early 1970s, having vague notions of being a writer, but not having a clue what to write about. Laura did not flounder, because she was bright enough and personable enough that someone was always willing to give her a job, and, unlike me, she did not have huge ambitions to become a beloved, intergalactic celebrity.
In 1972/3 we lived in London, she being gainfully employed and me floundering, where I learned to make beer. Returning to the U.S. in the summer of 1973 I decided to pursue my new hobby, only to find that brewing your own beer in the United States was not only illegal, but a felony.
What? Something is screwed up here. How can it be illegal to make a product that has the same basic ingredients as bread? The seed for The Great Beer Trek, thus, was planted. I would become an expert on beer, and I would be the one to explain to the American public why, in a varied world of wonderfully flavorful brews. Americans were limited to a choice of bland, yellow, pissy fizz and bland, yellow, pissy fizz lite.
I was on a quest! I would be the savior of beer!
Meanwhile, life intervened. I had to get a job. From London we returned to Post Island, but summer ended, and the cottage needed to be closed up for the winter, so we shared a winter rental with college friend John Newberry, my ex-NROTC buddy, currently stationed in Charlestown, MA. The rental, a converted cottage near the beach in Scituate, MA. Laura immediately got a job working at an Italian bakery in Quincy while I started pounding the pavement.
My pounding led to a nearby company called South Shore Publishing, which actually did publish some local newspapers, but whose main business was printing circulars for grocery and discount chains. Well-l-l-l, it wasn’t exactly the publishing I had in mind, but printing is kind of adjacent to publishing, right?
I was hired for unspecified duties, the first of which as cleaning up the machine shop, a hodgepodge of tools and rags and discarded coffee cups. At the end of the first week the guy who had hired me (and who I had not seen since the initial interview) stuck his head into the machine shop and said “I’ve never seen this place so clean!”
In short order I became personnel manager, assistant platemaker, account executive, then customer service manager. It’s all a blur, but when the dust had settled I was in charge of a bunch of other people servicing national accounts for a fast-growing junk mail printer.
One of our most important customers was a New York regional chain called Spartan Atlantic. My boss, the General Manager named Mel Small, instructed me “Just make these guys happy. I don’t care what it takes, just make them happy.”
Once a week Spartan Atlantic released their circular to be printed. I would drive into Logan Airport to meet the Eastern Shuttle to pick up their Ad Manager and his flunky (i.e. assistant). I’d greet them, and the Ad Manager named Tony Portello would say “Never forget … I am the Client. I say, you do. Where are we going to lunch?”
I took them to a nearby restaurant in Boston’s North End to a restaurant named Polcari’s, which still exists but that, like many of the North End’s first generation residents, has since relocated to Boston’s North Shore. Tony entered the restaurant with a flourish and asked to be seated at a prominent table. Flunky and I slinked behind. He placed his order … stuffed lobster and a bottle of Verdicchio (an Italian white wine).
It didn’t take many visits for Tony to be greeted by name by the maitre d’ and fawned upon by the waitstaff. One day Tony summoned the maitre d’ and said “I would like my lobster stuffed with something other than breadcrumbs.”
“Whatever you’d like, Mr. Portello.” Tony chewed on this for a moment, then said “Then I would like my lobster stuffed with another lobster.”
“Of course, Mr. Portello.” Tony made sure I left I particularly generous tip that day. Later that afternoon I went in to sheepishly explain a ridiculously large expense account, and all Mel asked was “Is Tony happy?” Some months later, when I complained about a hard-to-please female clients, he said “I don’t care if you have to fuck her in the parking lot, just make sure she’s happy.”
Polcari’s today, but not the North End original
As I shot up the ranks in the junk mail business I attracted the attention of one of the companies co-owners, Irving Greenblatt. Irving and his wife, Helen, hosted champagne brunches on Sunday mornings. These were leisurely affairs that featured a coterie of colorful guests who were personal friends. Laura and I were invited and soon became regulars, which was odd, because no one else from the company was ever included. It didn’t become apparent why we were thus-anointed until later.
It was also during this time when I first had an article published. There is a sign on Route 3A in North Scituate for a waterway called Bound Brook. Everyone knows the sign, but no one knows anything about the brook. I proposed to the editor of the local paper that I write an article about a canoe trip down this little stream. I even suggested a visual of me portaging my canoe on my back over the busy Route 3A roadway.
A few weeks later the article appeared with the title “I Braved Bound Brook.” In it I detailed a frustrating, but ultimately rewarding, voyage down the trickle. And sure enough, there was the picture of the intrepid author, obscured by the canoe on his back portaging across Route 3A. The account as humorous and self-deprecating and generated a number of comments, all positive. I was finally a published author.
There was only one problem. The entire article was a lie.
I didn’t get the memo that was sent out about journalistic integrity. It turned out that Bound Brook was so overgrown and weed-choked that it was impenetrable. I had a tough slog making it more than a few feet at a time. It did give the chance to describe the wilderness that is not visible from the passing car, but the envisioned voyage of discovery was a figment of my imagination.
Even the staged visual of the author portaging the canoe across the road was fake. I took the picture of someone else, pretending to be me.
Nonetheless, I soldiered on writing the piece as originally envisioned, all the while asking myself, “Who’s ever going to know? Who else would be stupid enough to try to take a canoe down this worthless, little trickle?” And I was right. No one ever questioned the veracity of the story, and … no … one cared.
Thus, my writing career with hallmarks of laziness and lack of fact-checking began. Now, with some dozens of books and hundreds of articles to my name, and a member of the Author’s Guild for decades, the Truth is finally revealed. And the Truth is … (drum roll, please) … don’t take yourself too seriously (cymbal crash!), because no one else does.
Oh, The Great Beer Trek. I was making steady progress. I did more and more research, brewed more and more beer, and became convinced that this was my best idea ever. Unknownst to me, there were several other beer fanatics out there who also believe that the best days for the America were not in the past, but the future.
I started roughing out a voyage. My tact was to take an actual trip, learn the terrain first hand, and turn it into a book (like Bound Brook on steroids).
Irving had a plan, too. He wanted to sell South Shore Publishing and to use the money to buy an inn or hotel in the Caribbean. Laura and I would manage it while he shuttled back and forth while he shuttled back and forth between Paradise and Reality.
Irving’s resume as an entrepreneur was stronger than mine as a writer, yet things were not falling into place. Laura and I set a drop-dead date for going on The Great Beer Trek. In March I began writing letters and setting up appointments. Around that time Irving and I flew down to the island of Vieques, off the east coast of Puerto Rico to look at a promising place called Casa del Frances. I came back and gave my notice at South Shore Publishing.
On May 1, or thereabouts, we found out that Laura was pregnant, due at the end of November. The next week we took off on The Great Beer Trek, a 22,000 mile trip that would bring us to every operating American brewery—all 42 of them! We returned home in August. Irving was negotiating on Casa del Frances, but the prospects varied day to day. I wrote feverishly on the manuscript, but I knew that by October, I would need to get a job.
October arrived. Irving said the negotiations were going well; my New York literary agent said things were encouraging; but my deadline for job hunting had arrived. In November I applied to an employment agency for a job that turned out to be for a woodstove company in Vermont. On November 29, Jacob Carpenter Morris was born. In early December I visited the company, called Vermont Castings, in Randolph, Vermont. A job offer came a day or two later. I gulped hard, did a final check-in with Irving— no progress— and accepted the job.
The winter of 1979 was one of the coldest on record in Vermont. My first day on the job I walked to work on a morning when it was -24 degrees. I with my beard a solid block of ice. I went to my department and was given an empty desk. Everyone else was busy talking on their phones, but, oddly, they were all standing on their chairs. “That’s strange,” I thought. The offices for Vermont Castings were located in what had been an old foundry site on the banks of the 3rd Branch of the White River. The building had large, old windows, covered in plastic, leaky as hell. After a few minutes my lower extremities started to go numb. There was the equivalent of a 20 mph draft about 18 inches off the floor. Not being a dummy I dutifully climbed onto my chair.
There was no looking back.