How do you spell “Failure”? I spell it “Blessèd.” (Part 1)

So Yeah. There’s a hole in the bathroom ceiling. When it rains 

we put down buckets and towels. You got a problem with that? 

We call it nouveau pauvre. And we’re fine with it. Fun, in fact.

There comes a time in a thinking man’s life when he asks himself how would I describe the story of my life? How do you count up the wins and losses? Did you win? Did you lose? Are you happy? Are you sad?  Did you make any difference by being here all these years? Any major regrets? Guilty thoughts? Un-atoned sins? Things you did you never ever thought you would do?

You know what? I have a hole in the bathroom roof and I have no regrets, no guilt, no twisting pains in my soul. But I am worried about how to care for my wife and stepdaughter during the next godawfully terrible year that awaits us. I am an old man, but in some curious way I am still an innocent.

My wife just said, “as innocent as Clint Eastwood.”

The easy way out for old white guys has always been this:

He did it his way. I didn’t. For 30 years he sang the same song. 

I didn’t. I changed the song year after year after year after year.

Okay. I went to see him one time. Before I ever knew there was such a thing as a bucket list. In Cincinnati, when I was living in Dayton. (Try it sometime…) My first wife didn’t want to. “He’s old. Done.” 

But I dragged her there anyway. An open-air concert in Cincinnati. People spread their blankets and coolers on the grassy embankment and the old man emerged from behind the dark curtain. And guess what? He was Sinatra. Fucking Frank Sinatra. Everybody spellbound.

My life. It’s always been like this…

For somebody who has never been famous, I have to say every single aspect of my life has been amazingly overdone. When I try to tell the tale, I am always driven to the making of lists, which are always long. Lists of  books I read before the age of 13 (hundreds), lists of vehicles I raced or rode in before I was 20 (dozens), lists of B&E crimes I committed at Harvard (a bunch), lists of things I had to learn to become a hugely successful management consultant — microprocessor technology, Just-in-Time manufacturing, chaos theory, complexity theory, information theory, quantum physics — yeah. I taught courses like “fake quantitative analysis.” The 50K a year tree-hugger professionals didn’t like me, but, you see, my life has always provided dividends at every age.

And, the whole time, I was working at being the best writer of all time.

So. What I got in return…

When I was interviewing at Mercersburg, they wanted to admit me as a sophomore. My dad said no (bless his heart). Then I had the defining event of my life, called the Chapel Walkout. Which changed my life forever at the age of 15.

War ever since. I graduated from Harvard at the age of 19, having been admitted as a sophomore. My dad didn’t know it, but at the Quincy House commencement, he was standing right next to the dictator of Nicaragua, Tacho  Somoza, whose son had stolen a girlfriend from me.

I took a year off. Still not even 20. Worked for a Harvard lawyer. He wanted me to go to law school, like everyone else in my life always had. Everyone. He contrived to find me an admission to Dickinson Law, where he had connections. All I had to do was submit a token application. The fact that I’d taken the LSAT when I was drunk and hungover didn’t rule me out. My score was still good enough. But I was still too much of a snob to go to a second rate law school.

He wasn’t the only competitor. There was a partner of the lawyer who talked me into graduate business school. So I applied to Cornell and Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School, who actually called me at home and asked me to submit my application. Being the president of a Harvard Final Club matters more than grades apparently. I went to Cornell. Which was important (*very*) but more about that later. I almost qualified for an architecture degree in my all-nighter hours, but that’s another story. When I realized I was on the verge of becoming an accountant or a banker, I dropped out, months from graduation but still in the top quarter of my class. What was wrong with me? Right. I was still just 22.

Then I proceeded to write and get drunk.

So I was writing. Proof. I was still just 22. 

I had a South Jersey friend who had always been my crazy side. And no longer a star on the make, I went nuts in cars.

The XKE Flip.

The Square Corvair

The Broad Street Race

I had this Chrysler convertible. 

Built-up 440 V-8, headers, true dual exhausts, cop brakes, cop 

tires, custom camber/caster alignment, Carter 4 bbl carb, 350

 brake 

horsepower, 0 to 60 in less than seven seconds, but much 

more 

beat-up looking than this. What we used to call a Q-ship,

I counted it a failure if I didn’t drive home every night at a hundred miles an hour over the Stow Creek Bridge. Wooden underpinnings. You could hear them rattle under you. As you passed over…

So my friend and I chased each other all over South Jersey, often bumper to bumper, NASCAR style. He had a 1980 Trans Am which quickly died on him, so he rebuilt it to specs, meaning he blueprinted it and made it a monster. It rattled until you got to 120 mph, when it became silky and somehow serpentine, quiet as a lurking cobra. But fast, fast, fast. Like a mamba.

Oh, we drove everything. Jaguars (three), a 1921 Type 27 aluminum-bodied Bugatti (spec’ed for 97 mph, delivered 97 mph on the Garden State Parkway), a 427 Cobra, a Rolls Royce Phantom, a 50 mph Boston Whaler, an honest-to-God functioning steamboat, home-made water skis, an airboat across the swampy Cohansey River, trucks, tractors, dead cars resuscitated with ether in his huge personal junkyard, a monumental 1969 Chrysler Imperial which slithered through Frog Ocean Road better than the movie depictions of Fast and Furious. Glorious. Four wheel drift, 4,000 pounds a’doing it. With white wall tires. And when that Carter carb opens its secondaries, there’s a howl that peels the soul.

And then it came time for me to grow up. 

Stay tuned for Part 2.