Piecework

Early on, I learned many things about craft from Jack Nessel, Clay Felker, and Milton Glaser, when they worked together at New York magazine. Nessel placed his loupe upon my texts (and those of others) and with humor and patience worked only to make them better. Felker was always bursting with ideas and discoveries and enthusiasms, but Glaser edited Felker; listening to their debates was essential to my education. Under a later regime at New York, I was fortunate to be edited by Peter Herbst and Dick Babcock; they maintained the high standards established by the founding editors.

In a long, varied career, there were many others: Steve Gelman, Ray Robinson, Bill Ewald, Don McKinney, Seymour Krim, Wayne Lawson, Myra Appleton, Barry Golson, Peter Moore, Harvey Shapiro, George Walsh, Richard Kluger, Linda Perney, Jeff Schaire, Peter Biskind, Harriet Fier, and, in a later enlistment at the New York Post, Jerry Nachman, Richard Gooding, Eric Fettman, John Cotter, and Lou Colasuonno. Even brief encounters with their skills have added to my craft. Directly or indirectly, their work is in this book too.

But across the years, one magazine editor has provided a special kind of continuity. Ed Kosner was assistant night city editor at the New York Post on my first night in the city room. He edited my first piece of copy. Later, as editor of New York magazine for twelve years, he assigned many of the articles in this book. A lifetime has passed, and we’re still working together, now at Esquire, where Kosner is the editor. Hundreds of thousands of my words have come under his pencil. With his efficiency, clarity, and intelligence, he has always helped make them better. We communicate in a kind of intellectual shorthand, a few words here, a note there, and then back to the typewriter or computer. In a trade populated by prima donnas, we’ve never exchanged a harsh word. More important, we’re friends. Un abrazo, Eduardo.

INTRODUCTION

For thirty-five years now, I have worked at the writing trade. Writing has fed me, housed me, educated my children. Writing has allowed me to travel the world and has provided me with a ringside seat at some of America’s biggest, most awful shows. Writing has permitted me to celebrate and embrace many public glories and to explore the darkest side of my own personality. Writing is so entwined with my being that I can’t imagine a life without it.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week, at the tradesman’s last. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety, my mood is irritable, my night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention. Because I write fiction and journalism, I follow no set routine. Struggling with a novel, I’ve spent months at my desk, a bore to those who live with me. But when laboring at journalism, the days are more jagged, the hours broken by telephone calls, interviews, research in libraries or newspaper morgues. The desk has its attractions, but I’ve also worked in parked cars, in a hotel lobby where the air burned with tear gas, in a tent under a mortar attack. In my drinking days, I wrote in the back rooms of bars, too. I’ve written longhand on yellow pads and restaurant menus. Feeding coins into a pay phone, I’ve dictated complete paragraphs from scribbled notes. I started with manual typewriters and now use a computer. The work does not get easier.

The older I get, the more I am humbled by the difficult standards of my trade. About many things, from the meaning of baseball to the nature of human beings, I was far more certain at thirty than I am at sixty. Each day I learn something new. This is not, of course, my hobby. It is my pride that I have been a professional from the beginning, paid for every published word, unsupported by foundation money or government grants. But although I’m a professional of my trade, I struggle each day to retain the innocent eye of the amateur. I do piecework, and with each piece, I’m forced to begin again, to try to find something fresh in the familiar, to look at my subjects as if they’d never been written about before.

What do you do? asks the stranger. I’m a writer, I answer. On some mornings, this reply can still astonish me. Like so many other writers, I wanted in my adolescence and young manhood to join an entirely different guild.