Irving Kravsow wasn’t wrong in his assessment of my skills at that time. It was the seeming finality of his words that made the message so cutting. I was a 19-year-old with one semester of journalism classes under my belt. He was used to dealing with seasoned, adult reporters who could better handle the unvarnished truth.

My dismissal from the Courant plunged me into a mental fog that shrouded my self-confidence for years.

I had figured my only above average skill in life was my writing. It was the only thing I’d ever been praised for in school. It was the only aspect of my life that I felt I had an edge in. My self-assessment was that I was an average face in the crowd when it came to everything else: athletics, arts, intellect, height. You name it. I was never picked first – or last – for anything. I always landed somewhere in the middle.

I dragged myself back to Boston for the spring semester but my heart was no longer in the city or the school. I had lost contact with my friends from freshman year and wasn’t involved in any school activities or outside political protests.  I only had a few acquaintances in my journalism classes and now that I had been told by a respected editor that I wasn’t going to succeed in my recently chosen field, I didn’t have much of a connection to them, either.

My roommates, not trusting me to find our next apartment, had signed us into a sterile, singles complex in a suburb about 20 minutes from campus. It further alienated me from the school and the city. It was a better apartment. Cleaner. And all the windows, doors and appliances worked. There were two bedrooms so we took turns getting the room with a single bed. However the walls were thin and one of the roommates snored like a saw mill and the other had a girlfriend that would often scream in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was the roommate doing the screaming. I charitably chalked it up to mutual nightmares.

I was either in class or back at the apartment. It was not the college experience I wanted. I was miserable.

Besides the sleepless nights, there are only a few things I remember from that semester. I went on another diet, this time a yogurt diet. Meaning I ate yogurt for every meal for a month. It worked. I lost weight. But to this day, I can’t stand yogurt.

Also, I dropped my reporting class for a creative writing class since apparently journalism wasn’t in my future. I didn’t realize the writing class was for seniors majoring in English. The professor thought I was too young and inexperienced for the course, and at first, tried to get me to drop it. But after hearing my comments during the first few classes and after reading my first short story, he decided I could stay. I’m glad I did. That professor’s positive feedback and encouragement were the first steps in the long road of rebuilding my confidence.

The semester, with my daily commute, lack of a social life, uncertain future, and the screams, moans and snoring coming from the next room, seemed like it would never end. Finally, when it did, Harry and John decided to throw a party, reserving the complex’s swimming pool. They invited some of their friends, including Tiny, the guy who had ripped off the door to our previous apartment.

At one point during the party, Tiny went back to our apartment to get more beer. While he was  there, the phone rang and he answered it. It was for John. The phone had a long extension cord so Tiny walked with it to the balcony and held it up.

“It’s for you,” he called to John. John was floating on a raft, beginning work on his summer tan. He did not want to get out of the pool.

“Well,” John said, “bring me the phone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Bring me the phone,” John insisted.

I was staring at Tiny to see how he would handle this directive. I was sure that even he could see the cord wasn’t long enough. But I wasn’t sure that Tiny could realize that John was half joking with him and half trying to provoke him to do something outrageous.  

So Tiny thought about it for a few seconds and decided to double check if John really wanted the phone brought to him.  

“You’re sure?” Tiny asked again.

“Yes,” John answered forcefully, with a bit of an exasperated laugh in his voice.

 Tiny then suddenly jerked the phone cord out of the wall and threw the now unanchored phone across the parking lot into the pool.

Everyone at the party thought it was the funniest, craziest thing they had ever seen. Everyone laughed. Except me. The phone was in my name.

I headed into that summer knowing I needed to make a life change. I couldn’t take another year like that.

When I got home, I went belt and suspenders as far as jobs go. I got two of them. During the day I worked as a laborer for a contractor, one of Doom’s customers. At night, I worked at the East Hartford branch of Lincoln Dairy, working the grill during the dinner hour and then spent the rest of the night scooping ice cream cones for Little League teams. It was a pretty good summer financially. I made good money and had no time to spend it, but it was terrible for my social life as I had no spare time.

Working on construction sites that summer introduced me to adult men who were far different than any that I had encountered up until then. My experience had been with male teachers, Doom and his friends, my neighbors who were doctors, lawyers, ministers, insurance executives. Mostly educated and mostly refined. To put it mildly, the guys I worked with that summer were a bit rough around the edges. And they took it as their mission to roughen my edges up a bit. Especially the sheet rock guys, many of them French Canadians.

I worked on a crew that had an extended job sheet rocking an apartment building in Stamford, which was about an hour commute from our home base in Hartford. The beauty of this was that the union contract paid them for the commute.  The boss also paid me for the commute at double my hourly wage.  Not for carrying sheet rock up a narrow staircase, but for simply sitting in a car. I could do that all day.

We saved money by carpooling, but riding with that crazy crew, even at double my hourly wage, made me feel underpaid.

For one thing, they had a religious fanaticism about highway tolls. Like Catholics of the day refusing to eat meat on Friday, these guys refused to pay tolls any day. However, the toll road was the easiest and fastest way to the job site. So that’s how we went. The guys I rode with made it even faster because they didn’t stop at the tolls.

Each way, there were two tolls we passed and they were not that expensive. One cost 15 cents and the other was a quarter. Split four ways, it was only ten cents each. Even in 1971, that was not a lot of money.

Maybe it was the principle of the thing. But every morning on the way to the job and every evening on the way home, we would slow down at the toll plazas, but then the driver would stomp on the gas and we would speed through the toll. At that time, it was more an honor system and there were no cameras to catch who was going through.

After about a week of this, though, the toll collectors had called the cops and one night as we approached the first toll plaza on our return, we could see half a dozen state troopers surrounding the plaza waiting for the car. The good thing about us car-pooling is that we never used the same car more than once a week so the cops might have had a pretty good idea of what car we were in that day, they couldn’t be 100 percent sure.

Added to the worry of the cops up ahead was the beer in the car. We all had purchased a six-pack each or a quart for the ride home and were about a third of the way through our allotment.

While my friends and I had engaged in risky drinking behavior in high school, these guys were professionals. They worked hard putting up the sheetrock and taping it. My job was carrying the 4 foot by eight foot, ¾ inch thick sheets – two at a time – up four flights of back and forth stairs as quickly as I could to stay ahead of them. They were fast and good if somewhat unhinged. And after a day of walking around on stilts in an unfinished apartment building with the smells of drying cement, glue and new plastics with little air circulation, they wanted beer. I did too. At least a 6-pack. And that was just for the ride home. More would come later.

The crew would buy for me because I was underage. That I didn’t have to go looking for someone to buy me beer was about the only good thing about the whole trip. As soon as we were done for the day, we piled into the car of the day and drove directly to the package store that we had spotted the first morning on the way in town. These guys didn’t want to waste a lot of time, driving around after work, looking for a place.

As we approached the toll plaza with a car loaded with beer and lawbreakers, we knew we were cooked. At least I thought we were. I was already imagining Mom and Doom having to come to headquarters to pick me up. At least I could blame this on the sheet rockers. Doom knew these guys were crazy. They definitely weren’t his type.

The driver on this day, a guy who’s eyes seemed to be always spinning as if his brain could never settle down and think rational thoughts, spotted the cops first. Then the other guys saw the cops and there was a very brief, very loud and very animated conversation in French.

We were driving right into trap and certainly would be arrested. And, all the beer we had just bought would be confiscated. I don’t know which of those results would bother the guys more. 

Our driver broke into a slightly maniacal laugh. Then suddenly, he yanked the steering wheel hard to the left and for a second, we were sliding down the highway sideways. But then the sliding stopped and the spinning wheels took hold and we were off the highway, driving through the grass, dodging trees and ditches. We popped up in an adjacent neighborhood still going 50 miles per hour. All I could do was scream. So did the other guys. I was screaming in fear while the driver’s  compatriots were screaming with delight at the brilliance of his plan.

Now you would think we’d be captured pretty easily as we were now racing through the side streets of sleepy Wallingford, Connecticut. And the cops would be looking for the car. But no, our genius had this mapped out ahead of time. He actually had an escape plan on back roads and we eluded the cops and the trip home only took about 5 minutes longer than the usual route.

It turns out that running from the cops was a regular occurrence for these guys and they had eluded the tolls for years. I don’t know if they ever got caught, but during that summer that I drove and drank with them, they never did.

The hardest part of that job, though, was hauling that sheet rock up those narrow stair cases. The reason I was using the stairs was because our boss didn’t hire union workers and the union electricians wouldn’t let us use the elevators. And they hated those guys I worked with. Since our crew spoke French and laughed a lot, the other guys on the job site were sure they were making fun of them.

Once in a while, an electrician would take pity on me and give me a ride up or down. But that was just once or twice a day a day. Otherwise I was carrying two sheets of the stuff up the stairs a hundred times a day.

It was really hard work because the sheet rock was heavy and above all, I was not supposed to let the fragile corners of the product touch the ground or the walls because then the tapers had to use more mud and it weakened the sheet. It would have been easier to bring one at a time because it would have been lighter and more maneuverable. I would have been able to get up the stairs faster.

But not fast enough. The guys would have hung that one sheet by the time I got back with the next one. So I had to carry two at a time to try to stay ahead of them. But any foolishness like going to the bathroom or pausing after lunch to let my food digest and these guys would be screaming my name and cussing me in French.

On other days, I installed ceiling tile standing on a 4 by 8 foot plywood platform on scaffolding some 25 feet in the air of a soon-to-be grocery store. Until then, I never looked up and realized how high the ceilings in grocery stores are. Nowadays, that’s about the first thing I do when I enter a store. I found I couldn’t move very fast when I was worried about falling. It was as if my joints were lubricated by 40-weight motor oil in winter.

Once in awhile, I got sent on jobs by myself, either to deliver supplies to a work site or to do clean up or prep work on other jobs. My favorite job was working in an elementary school in the worst part of Hartford. Deep in the bowels of the empty corridors was the only safe place in the neighborhood. The boss had won the bid to retile the school and it had to be prepped. I was to remove the glue gobs that had been used to stick the old tile to the ceiling. I liked it because the ceilings were only about 10 feet so while I was on a scaffold, it wasn’t very high and I was by myself. I would just report there every day and get to work. I wasn’t as fast as a pro, but I think I gave it $2.75 per hour worth of effort.

Still, I watched the clock all day.

When I was done with my day job, I raced home, changed into work out gear and went up to the fields behind Plant Junior High about two blocks from home, where I had gone to school. There I would run around the field until my high school buddy, Ernie – who I had gone to Boys’ State with – got there. Ernie was doing the same thing, working two jobs so we didn’t meet every day. But at least 3 days a week our schedules matched up and we’d work out together. After running, we’d spend a half hour kicking the soccer ball against the side of the building. We made it a game and got in some great workouts. Then we’d split and head home to take showers. Ernie was working nights at AC Petersons, another ice cream place in WH. Same as Lincoln Dairy, really, but a little higher class.

Then I headed across the river to the East Hartford Lincoln Dairy where I worked the 6-11 shift as night manager. I didn’t really have time to eat and that was good in a way as I lost a lot of weight and was probably in the best shape of my life. I would treat myself to a small bowl of vanilla ice cream topped with strawberries after the dinner rush was over. And I drank a lot of Tab. It was awful, but the only diet drink around at the time.

It was a good summer in that I worked a lot, got into great physical shape, made a lot of money and had no time to spend it. I had no idea of where I was going, but Irving Kravsow’s words … and his eyebrows … were always top of mind: Change your major.

Do something else.

Next time: Chapter 32: Southern Man