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tell you where I am with water sports, Mr. Colby. At Camp Indianhead, I cracked the spine of a bark canoe by getting out of it the wrong way.”
    “Well done,” he said. “My people all sail—and they’re no good.”
    He told me he would let me know within twenty-four hours. I barely slept. He was eccentric but he was offering a real job, writing copy, not just working in a mail room, and in California, a place no one I knew had ever been.
    “You can’t take it,” my mother said. “It’s three thousand miles away.”
    “We’ll never see you, Stevie,” my father added.
    “It’s a real opportunity. And after I get some experience I can always come back.”
    “You’ve just been away,” my mother argued.
    “Mother, I can’t even get arrested here.”
    “Don’t talk like that. Next thing—you’ll get arrested.”
    My mother was a true fantasist.
    Colby called and offered me the position, all expenses paid to Los Angeles. “You’re a street kid. I like that. Give me the zip and I’ll give you the cash.” He may have been strange, but he hired me. I had a job. I was getting out of the neighborhood. I had wanted so desperately to find a job in advertising and could not—because of my background. Now I was being hired because of my background.
    My mother nearly went into a coma over the news. “California! Who do we know in California?” My father said, “Congratulations,” in a quiet voice. I flirted with the notion of asking Carla Friedman to marry me but I did not believe I loved her, and the idea of going to the frontier, traveling light, appealed to me. I told her the news and she cried. I thought I could have had her for the first time if I wanted to, but I did not take advantage. I left her crying. I felt like William Holden.
    Arthur came in from White Plains where he was living and we all had one last Chinese meal at Lu Wong. Jerry, Arthur and I took a long walk through the neighborhood. We were out until two in the morning, not wanting the night to end. We reminisced—the wonderful way the seasons would change, the marbles season, the touch football season, the stickball season, we talked about good times, growing up, girls. Then we stopped in front of the house on Morris Avenue. “I’m going to miss you,” I said to them, and we shook hands all around, and trying to be mature, we fought off our tears, knowing we were going in different directions and would probably never see each other again.

CHAPTER 4
    P ALM TREES AND NO subways. I could not believe I was in a place that had palm trees while the people in my office could not believe I did not know how to drive a car. “It never came up,” I said to my immediate supervisor. “If you can get a place close to the office, I suppose you could bike to work,” he told me. I did not know how to ride a bicycle either. I took an accelerated driving course, passed the test, bought a used Ford and managed to aim the car from my garden apartment to the office.
    The Colby Agency handled the advertising for retail stores, car dealerships, real estate developers and a few California-based household products. By New York standards we were understaffed by about twenty people and, as a result, all of us worked on everything. Within a year, when I might have still been in a mail room on Madison Avenue, I had written radio campaigns that had been on the air locally, advertisements in Sunset magazine and commercials for local television. I was very impressed with myself. I could ride to work and hear my commercials on the radio, “Don’t just wave at that housefly. It doesn’t want to know you. Slay it with Marvelspray.” I had a date with a beautician and I sweet-talked the poor girl not into going to bed with me, but in staying up until 2:17 A.M ., with her eyes closing, so we could watch my commercial of a ballplayer batting a plastic dinner plate past the pitcher without breaking it. “I thought of that,” I said, glowing. “Uh-huh,” she