Sea Street

The Portuguese Bakery

In the early eighties, I was playing at the Provincetown Inn on a show bill with Craig Russell, star of the movie Outrageous and Wayland Flowers, the Madame Puppeteer.  Some mornings I would jog along behind boxing champion, Marvin Hagler, who was training at the Inn.  Other days I would jog to the end of Commercial Street and back.  On one such morning as I came down Commercial Street, a short man turned the corner in front of me and we had a head-on collision.  I nearly knocked him down; it was Norman Mailer.

            "Imagine running into you like this," he said.

I had seen Norman many times on television and had witnessed his irascible  personality so I didn't know what to expect.  But he was quite friendly and we soon discovered we knew lots of people in common.  I had recently arrived on Cape Cod from L.A. where I worked for many years in the film industry.  Our conversation continued at the Portuguese Bakery, one of my favorite locations in Provincetown.  We spent some time eyeing the rows of pastry-Nata, Queijuda, Pasties de Coco and Malassadas; all of these wonderful edibles that later contributed to my diabetes.

Norman did most of the talking, much of what he said referred to concepts of religion and politics and human nature.  He was, I realized, more than anything-a teacher.  I tried to reconcile this with my earliest ideas of who he was.  As a boy I had seen The Naked and the Dead with Tab Hunter; and I had read several of Norman's works, my favorite being Fire on the Moon.  I loved the title but Norman didn't seem to think too much of the book; he said it got a lukewarm reception. 

I realized as I listened to him that he was a man of great enthusiasm.  His talkativeness was not egoism as some had suggested; it was simply enthusiasm.  I am guilty of the same sin and I often put people off because I "talk too much".

Norman and I were alike in this and in other ways too.  He was a Jew from Brooklyn and I was a Jew from a small farming town in southern Illinois.  If he was excited about something, and he was excited about everything, he had to talk about it, to tell you about it, to stroke your excitement also.  "You put people off," my wife often says to me and I could see how Norman could put some people off.  But he didn't put me off and he taught me a lot during the hour we were together.  One of the most important things he said was, "Don't talk about your books until they are finished and I knew what he meant all too well.  My early days in San Francisco were filled with coffeehouse chatter-all the writers, musicians and artists talking about what they were "gonna do" all the time.

This breakfast was the only time I ever spent with Norman, strangely enough.  He lived right down the road from Hyannis in the only brick house in Provincetown.  The house in itself was a testament to his individuality; it must have been a struggle to have it built-as a rule, New Englanders can't lay bricks.  But there it was on the left hand side of Commercial Street as you come into town, sitting impressively between the street and the sea.  There were a couple of times I felt like seeking his counsel relative to publishers and all the other bullshit that goes with being a writer but I never did and now I regret it. 

On a drive to New York I looked up his old neighborhood and found his new condominium near the bridge facing the Manhattan skyline; before its conversion it had been an old printing plant.  He was in residence, according to folks in the neighborhood, but I never got up the nerve to try and contact him.  Part of this is my upbringing.  I was taught to not impose and I'm a procrastinator first class.  I put things off, but thinking about it today as I write this I wonder why I didn't make more of an effort to avail myself of the knowledge and experience that Norman had to offer.

I have always benefited form great writers' advice.  Sitting in the 42^nd Street Automat, Isaac Bashevis Singer said to me in his Yiddish accent, "Remember, when you're the writer, you're the boss.  If you're writing about a bad man, just say, ‘he's a bad man,' don't get into lots of psycho-babble about it.  You're the boss and if you say he's a bad man, he's a bad man."

In my L.A. days, Will Durant and his wife, Ariel, taught me the importance of steady writing.  "There's no such thing as writer's block," Ariel said, "The world is full of things to write about and some of them are bound to relate to your project."

This couple, who spent their lives writing together, knew what they were doing.  Their masterpiece, The Story of Civilization, is the most comprehensive historical text ever written.

And of course there were all those nights in the early 60's spent in the Golden Ass Café, my coffeehouse in San Pedro, California.  Hunter Thompson and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were part of that scene and they had plenty to say. 

The last time I saw Norman was in front of the Portuguese Bakery.  "How have you been?" he said extending his hand as if we had talked recently rather than twenty years before.

Last weekend I went looking for his gravesite at the Provincetown Cemetery.  I was told by a Provincetown cabbie that Norman had been cremated.  He had taken a ride in the cab just days before his death.  "How did he act?" I asked.

"Well, he was just the same old Norman."

A few nights after Norman died I watched Charlie Rose who dedicated his entire program to clips of him interviewing Norman.  One clip from an interview right before the Iraq War Norman warned of the consequences of invading Iraq and laid out the reasons for his warning.  Everything he predicted came true.  I noticed that Charlie listened to him with a bemused expression on his face.  I don't think he knew that he was listening to a prophet.