I was born in Washington, D.C. and spent most of my childhood in Takoma Park, Maryland, which is just outside D.C., near Silver Spring, Maryland, in Montgomery County.
My father was an electrical engineer and an attorney, and worked in the Patent Office, becoming chief of the Classification Division by the time he died, which was when I was nineteen.
My mother also had a law degree and had passed the Bar Exam, but she did not work until my father died. I had (and still have, for that matter) two brothers, and we lived in a perfect Leave It To Beaver household.
Some of the most important things in my life happened during my last year or so in high school and the following year. But I long ago stopped telling people about those important parts of my life. In fact, it became important for my future growth for me not to think about them too much. So for the moment, anyway, I'm very reluctant to write much about them here.
Suffices it to say that I met a very charismatic seventy-year-old man who was a writer who had an enormous influence on me. And because of him, I met two women. I've written about one of them, named Sheri, on various parts of my web page. The other one, named Nora, had an enormous and in large part destructive effect on my life and on my attitudes towards women, and is much harder to me to write about, even now. She was an enormously charismatic woman in a crazily irresponsible way. I guess if you look at the film Something Wild with Melanie Griffith, or maybe Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, you can get some idea of the sort of force Nora was in my life. I have to acknowledge, though, that in large part the destructive effect she had on me was because she tapped into a craziness inside of me which in large part was much greater than any craziness in her, and which at that time I was completely unable to control. To write about her much would require publicly acknowledging that craziness, and I'm not quite able to do that right now. (If a psychiatrist had known me at that time, he probably would have called me Borderline. But I never actually injured anyone, or caused any property damage.)
Strangely enough, about a year ago, totally by accident, I came across an obituary for Nora in a Mendocino County (California) monthly paper. It turns out that before her death, she had been living for many years in Provincetown (Cape Cod), where she was known, and apparently loved, as an eccentric old woman (well, in her sixties anyway), harmless but with a few odd quirks such as taking a piss anywhere outdoors she happened to be standing.
After I graduated from high school, I lived in Baltimore for a year, going to Johns Hopkins University. I couldn't stand Hopkins and didn't care much for Baltimore, which I found a very blue-collar town. About the only place in Baltimore I ever found to go was the Peabody Bookshop, which was actually a very small bar and had once been frequented by H.L.Mencken. A violist and pianist used to play Mozart and Schubert there in the evening, and they let me come and drink port wine without ever asking me for an ID.
More down by the waterfront there were strip clubs, but they wouldn't let me in because I was underage.
The Enoch Pratt Public Library was also nice.
I guess what I most remember about Baltimore was the two train stations: Pennsylvania Station and the B & O Station (Baltimore and Ohio). I once read a novel by John Barth simply because it started in the main concourse of Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore, and described it fairly well. I think it's the only novel by John Barth I ever liked. It was one of his early ones.
I remember the train stations because I frequently took the train back to Washington. Not to visit home, which I had no desire to do, but to see some friends, mostly my friends Nora and Sheri, who were living in Washington.
After a year at Hopkins, I decided to experience real life. So I bought a car and set off for the Midwest to get a job and live on my own. I went to Springfield, Illinois, because I thought I'd like to experience a small town, and also because it's the state capital. That was the year of the really bad Eisenhower recession. There were no jobs anywhere. I'd go to the employment office of a factory and people would be lined up trying to get their job back after having been laid off for several months. I tried selling health insurance to farmers, but I was no good at that at all.
After about a month, I went to Chicago. I knew a guy there, and he said that sometimes if he went down to the docks he could get work for one night. I had assumed that docks meant waterfront, but these were actually loading docks for trucks. I went there once, and nobody else had showed up. The guy said they had no loading that night, and the way he looked at me, I realized that I was not cut out for loading trucks in any case.
For about two weeks I lived at an incredibly dingy hotel on North LaSalle Street. Then I wented a room in a rooming house on the Near North Side -- 1830 North Orleans Street, in fact, just a few blocks south of Armitage and about two blocks from Lincoln Park, where I would go in the evenings and sometimes in the afternoons.
I registered with some employment agencies, who took some money from me and gave me a few dead-end leads. In the newspaper there were a number of jobs listed, promising ``$50 a week guarantee.'' In those days, $50 a week was not that bad. (I think the minimum was wage 50 cents an hour.) The only thing was, these jobs were door-to-door sales. They promised you $50 a week, but what happened was that you had to work a week, and then wait two weeks for the paycheck to arrive, so it was three weeks before you got a check. But if you weren't selling much, you couldn't afford to wait for three weeks, and the boss would rather strongly discourage you from sticking around, so you'd leave and never get any money at all.
The people I met in Chicago thought I was out of my mind, coming to a place where I had no friends and no family and no money. By the end of the summer, I was broke and had to phone my parents for money and come back home to Takoma Park.
That summer in Chicago was a very important period in my life, although certainly not a happy one. The guys I was working with on those hopeless door-to-door sales jobs were all blue collar types with a high school education at best, and they had very different attitudes toward life than anyone I'd ever known before.
But I'd discovered that at real life, I was pretty much of a failure.