Boomerang: Before + After Thumb Out spans the 1970’s. It tells the stories that led to me sticking my thumb out on Interstate 684 in Armonk, NY on July 10, 1973 and what became of me after I made it back 72 days later. Unlike the cinematic, present-tense storytelling style of the hitchhiking odyssey, Boomerang: Before + After Thumb Out uses a reflective, mature voice that recounts the turmoil, struggles and pivotal moments that turned me into a transcontinental yo-yo for over ten years, ending up back home again, finally free from my dream of making films for the big screen. If you’ve already read Surfing The Interstates: 1973 Hitchhiking Memoir this will give you context and if you haven’t, you’re gonna want to read it after Boomerang: Before + After Thumb Out.

Table of Contents

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PART ONE: BEFORE THUMB OUT

What led to my 1973 hitchhiking odyssey

• Chapter One: Purple Barrels - University of Pennsylvania (1969-71)

• Chapter Two: Fish Out Of Water - Park Avenue, New York City (1971-72)

• Chapter Three: The Band That Never Played Out - Greenwich Village, New York City (1971-72)

• Chapter Four: Finding An Escape Hatch - Ledge Acres (July 1973)

PART TWO: AFTER THUMB OUT

Chasing the wrong dream until the right one finds you

• Chapter Five: Caught In The Light — Coming home to a home that's already gone (September 1973)

• Chapter Six: Together Brothers — You can't put the genie back in the bottle (1974-75)

• Chapter Seven: The Grind — A fresh start with renewed energy (1976)

• Chapter Eight: The Rug — The pursuit and the betrayal (1977)

• Chapter Nine: Hitting The Big Time — Inside the gates, outside the dream (1977-78)

• Chapter Ten: The Factory Floor — Like putting hub caps on cars (1978-79)

• Chapter Eleven: An Entrepreneur Is Born — Working for myself makes me happy (1979)

• Chapter Twelve: The Summer Of S.H.I.T. — My father brings his three sons together (1980)

EPILOGUE

Coming to understand my complicated relationship with my father

The Man Who Had To Win — How Daddy became “Ducks Ass” and ultimately “Dux”

The book begins with a man who has nowhere to go and ends with a man who has nowhere to go. The story is everything that happened in between.

My father had sayings. He collected them the way other men collected tools — sturdy, practical things he could pull out and apply to any situation, whether they fit or not.

“You can accomplish anything you want in life. You just have to want it badly enough.”

He told me that one early and often. It was his core belief, the eng…

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Between 1974 and 1978, while I was chasing my film dream across California, our family’s world detonated in ways I only fully understood years later.

Nana died on St. Patrick’s Day, 1974 — a massive cerebral hemorrhage, found by Jacques on the floor next to her bed after a party at the neighbors’. She was seventy-four, the sa…

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My mother wanted to paint the living room.

I’d been back at her house in Pound Ridge for a couple of weeks, sleeping in one of three small bedrooms upstairs — ten by ten, all sharing one bathroom. Charlie had one, Anni had another, and I got the third. My mother was in the master bedroom. It was a full house. ZaZa was working…

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I lasted about four months.

I’d hitched back out to Sonoma County in December and landed at a cottage on Wilfred Avenue in Santa Rosa with two roommates — Susan, a twenty-year-old music student at Sonoma State who played guitar, piano, and flute and owned a Martin D-28, and Melody, twenty-four, an expressive arts major who li…

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The editors walked around like movie stars.

Golden tans. Open silk shirts unbuttoned to the sternum. Massive gold chains catching the fluorescent light — and sometimes, hanging from those chains, a razor blade pendant. An actual razor blade, gold-plated, dangling against a tanned chest. It was the symbol of the craft — editor…

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They put me in the ready room.

It was a glorified storage closet — floor-to-ceiling racks of 35mm film in a windowless room deep inside the editorial building at Universal Studios, Studio City, California. Each ten-minute segment of a TV show or feature film could generate a dozen or more reels. Picture reels, dialogue reels,…

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BOOMERANG - Table of Contents

I got a job at Westwood Camera and enrolled at UCLA, taking film courses at night. Always film. Always the credential.

Brentwood was a wonderful quiet oasis from the madness of most of Los Angeles. A fresh breeze off the ocean, palm trees, greenery. Santa Monica was close. It felt almost livable. But my night classes at UCLA …

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The biggest film I ever made, I made when I was seventeen.

And then I stopped doing it. Not because I lost interest but because somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that the path to becoming a filmmaker — a real one, like Peter Fonda, whose Easy Rider had rewired my brain — ran through college. Get the degree, get the …

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Mid-September, 1973. A blond kid from Pleasantville dropped me at the top of Oregon Road in Armonk. We’d just finished smoking a joint in his car. I took a pull off the bourbon Keith had given me in Little Rock, thanked the kid, and watched him drive away. Then I stood there looking south down the hill toward the house I’d g…

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I couldn’t take living with Grandmère anymore. A few months of her fossilized propriety and pointed silences about my future was enough. My father, in one of his rare acts of practical kindness, arranged for me to move into 158 West 11th Street — a micro townhouse in the heart of Greenwich Village that was being renovated. O…

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“A diseased girl, a drunk, a crazy woman, and a fool set sail.”

— Thea Ramsey, from her notebook (1982)

After my ten week 1973 hitchhiking odyssey, I spent a lost decade in California trying to become a filmmaker, chasing my father’s approval, and failing at both.

Check out my new memoir Boomerang: Before + After Thumb Out, now available here on my substack for paid subscribers. Also available on Kindle / Amazon Paperback and Hardcover / Audible.

Everything suddenly changed when I met a woman named Thea Ramsey in September of 1980. Three years later we escaped to the Caribbean, built a windsurfing school on a beach in Antigua, hired locals, taught tourists, lived in the trade winds. I became so consumed by the wind and the water and the building of it all that I didn’t see what was happening right in front of me.

I’m writing Sahara Dust live, one chapter at a time, right here on this page. The voice is mine at 74 — looking back at a life I built and lost on a Caribbean beach, telling it the way you’d tell it to a friend over drinks. Sometimes the memory takes over and you’re right there in the trade winds. Sometimes you pull back and see the whole thing for what it was. As each chapter is completed, it will appear below as a link. Subscribe now and you get to watch the book get written in real time.

Table of Contents

Chapters titles will appear below as they are published

PART ONE: EMOTIONAL RESCUE

1980-82 · Joy, fearlessness, and the door that opened everything

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PART TWO: JOLLY BEACH

1983–1985 · Building paradise on sand

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PART THREE: LORD NELSON

1985–1987 · The high wind kingdom

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PART FOUR: UNRELATED SURVIVOR

1987 · Castles made of sand fall in the sea

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The book begins with a man who has nowhere to go and ends with a man who has nowhere to go. The difference is everything that happened in between. That's why this trilogy is titled — The Spaces Between.

My grandmother’s apartment at 785 Park Avenue was a museum where all the exhibits watched you back. Every square foot filled with antiques, every conversation an interrogation disguised as concern.

“What exactly does a projectionist do?” she asked over breakfast, her tone suggesting she already disapproved.

Grandmère was my fa…

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I wasn’t ready. Everyone knew it except the one person whose opinion mattered.

I was thirteen when my father pulled me out of Whitby Montessori School and sent me to the Phillips Exeter Academy. A year early, to save a year of tuition — the kind of calculation that made perfect sense on paper and no sense at all inside the life of a boy who’d just begun to find his footing. Paul Czaja, who’d taught me to sit with a photograph and let words come from the silence, thought it was a mistake. My other teachers agreed. The boy needed another year. I had friends now, or the beginnings of them — girls in Greenwich I couldn’t see outside of school because they lived thirty minutes away and I didn’t have a car, but still. The architecture of a social life, just starting to take shape.

My father didn’t care. Exeter was Exeter. The name carried weight. The boy would adjust. He had gone from Choate to Harvard.

I didn’t, not really. I survived. Learned to perform well enough on tests, made a few friends, discovered marijuana and Bergman films and the liberating possibilities of a Bolex camera. Senior year I made a forty-five-minute film called “BWATUL” — prep school slang for going into the woods to get high — about a kid mesmerized by drugs and rock music, frustrated by the impossibility of integrating into institutional life. Shot it on 16mm black-and-white film, Gothic, clearly the work of someone who’d been watching “Persona” too many times. It won the school’s arts prize. My father never watched it.

That same year, my father drove me to West Point for an interview. I sat in the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile Delta 88, watching the Hudson Valley scroll past, saying nothing. West Point was his fantasy — the son as officer, serving with honor, embodying the martial tradition he romanticized from the safety of his study where he listened to German marching music and moved toy soldiers across maps. I had about as much interest in a military career as I had in dental surgery, but he hadn’t asked. He rarely asked.

The interview was a formality. I answered questions with the bare minimum of enthusiasm required to avoid outright rudeness, and we drove home in silence. Another box checked on someone else’s list.

What I wanted — the only thing I wanted — was film school. USC, UCLA, NYU. Places where people made movies, not war. I’d been making films since Paul Czaja put that Bolex in my hands, had felt something click into place behind the viewfinder that I’d never felt anywhere else. Cinema was the one language that made sense to me.

My father said no. Flatly. Absolutely. If I wanted tuition money, I would study philosophy. A real education. Something that built the mind, prepared a man for serious work. Film was a hobby, not a career. Not for a Saint Phalle man.

That summer, Woodstock happened an hour from Ledge Acres. I begged to go. The argument went on for days — not a discussion, never a discussion, but an escalating series of appeals met with escalating refusals until my father issued a flat decree. No. End of conversation. Half a million people gathered on a farm in Bethel to witness the defining cultural moment of their generation, and I listened to it on the radio in my bedroom, close enough to have ridden my bicycle.

The irony would take fifty years to become visible. My father was right about philosophy — just wrong about the route and the timeline. I’d get my philosophical education, but it would take the open road, not a lecture hall. The curriculum would be strangers’ cars and campfire conversations and a hundred hits of acid flushed down a dormitory toilet. But none of that was knowable yet. In 1969, all I knew was that the door I most wanted to walk through had been locked by the one person who held the key.

So I went to Penn. Not because I wanted to, but because Ivy League was the minimum my father would accept, and I was still, at eighteen, a boy who needed his father’s approval even as I was learning to hate needing it.

Steve Ferry showed up in my life the way most important people do — without announcement, sideways, through some ordinary door. We were both freshmen in the fall of 1969, assigned to rooms in the same corridor of the Quad. Steve was a year older, born in 1951, from Glenrock, New Jersey. His father ran an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. “Sells America to itself,” Steve said once, with a bitterness that suggested dinner-table arguments that had ended badly.

We recognized something in each other immediately — not friendship exactly, but a shared frequency. Both smart enough to be there, both suspicious of why we were. Both carrying fathers who’d mapped futures for us that felt like someone else’s life.

Steve had a collection of film canisters that he labeled with names from the old anti-marijuana propaganda film “Reefer Madness” — Murder, Insanity, Death. He thought this was hilarious. He kept his best weed in Insanity. He played guitar, argued about Clapton versus Hendrix, and had a cynicism about institutional life that I found both thrilling and slightly frightening. Steve had already decided that the system was broken. I was still trying to figure out whether the system existed at all.

The acid came early. First semester. I’d bought a hundred hits of purple Owsley from a connection — tiny barrels, supposedly the purest LSD on the market. The trip went sideways almost immediately. Whether the barrel-making machine had been faulty or I simply wasn’t prepared for what pure psychedelics could do to a mind that had spent eighteen years under my father’s rigid control, the dose hit like a freight train. Ego dissolution. Terror. The boundaries of self liquefying into something vast and incomprehensible.

Pete talked me through it. He was one of those people who radiated calm the way some people radiate anxiety — a natural steadiness that you didn’t fully appreciate until you needed it. Hours in a garden somewhere on campus, the world fractured into kaleidoscopic geometry, Pete’s hand on my shoulder, Pete’s voice cutting through the chaos: “You don’t need to hold on. Let go. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

I let go. And what I found on the other side was, for a few luminous hours, the most profound experience of my life. The universe as a single breathing organism. The boundaries between self and other revealed as illusion. A glimpse behind the curtain of ordinary consciousness that left me shaking and transformed and desperate to explain it to someone who might understand.

Looking back now, I understand that Pete may have saved my life that night. Not dramatically — no ambulance, no stomach pump — but in the quieter way of keeping a mind from tipping past the point of return.

The next morning, my father was at the door.

• • •

Knocking. Not a polite knock. The knock of a man who has taken the train from New York at dawn because someone has called him about his son.

The door opens. My father in a dark suit. Tie knotted. Face tight.

“Dad!” A surge of joy — irrational, leftover from the trip, the residue of cosmic love still coursing through me. “You’re here! I have so much to tell you —”

“Where are they?”

“Where are what?”

“The drugs, Andre. The hundred doses.”

And still, still riding the afterglow, still lit up with the conviction that what I’d seen was real and important and worth sharing: “Dad, if you tried it, just once, you’d understand —”

He takes me by the arm. Down the hall to the bathroom. Forces me to tip the vial over the toilet. One hundred purple barrels swirl and disappear.

One flush. One hundred dollars. One conversation that never happens.

He checks his watch. “I have to get back to New York.”

And leaves. No discussion. No curiosity. No attempt to understand what I had experienced or why it mattered. Just disposal and departure. His only visit to Penn.

• • •

It would be easy to make this a story about a cruel father and a sensitive son. It’s not that simple. The man who flushed those hits was carrying his own damage — a childhood shaped by a father who had been taking amphetamine cocktails from Dr. Feelgood while preaching self-discipline to his children, a family where two siblings would eventually take their own lives, where his sister Niki would publicly accuse their father of sexual abuse. He’d learned early that feeling too much was dangerous. He’d put his heart, as his own mother once said, in the deep freeze.

So when his son stood before him radiating psychedelic wonder, talking about cosmic unity and dissolved boundaries, what he saw wasn’t revelation. He saw the family curse surfacing in another generation. He saw chaos threatening the order he’d spent his whole life constructing. He did the only thing he knew how to do: eliminate the problem and leave.

The irony was perfect. A family that had sought its own chemical transcendence through a Park Avenue doctor’s needle — socially acceptable, even fashionable among the powerful — condemning a son’s search for meaning through a different molecule. The divide wasn’t about drugs. It was about which consciousness expansion society sanctioned, whose revelations were legitimate, whose trip deserved respect.

I didn’t see any of this at nineteen. I just felt the door close.

But there’s another layer, one that took even longer to surface. What would I have done with a hundred hits of the most powerful LSD available? I’d already nearly lost my mind on what may have been a double or triple dose from a faulty barrel. I was nineteen, reckless, convinced of my own invincibility the way only nineteen-year-olds can be. I might have taken more. I might have ended up like Pete’s roommate, who took STP at a festival in Florida and ended up in a mental hospital.

I might have sold them and been arrested, a federal drug charge that would have followed me forever. My mind reels now, fifty years later, to think of how close I came to disaster — and to recognize that my father, in his clumsy and brusque way, may have saved me from it. Pete and my father. Two acts of rescue, neither one understood at the time.

• • •

On December 1, 1969, we gathered around the television to watch the first draft lottery since World War II. Representative Alexander Pirnie reached into a glass container and drew capsules, each one containing a birthday. Each birthday a fate.

Steve’s came first. July 9th. Number one.

The room went silent. Number one. Not figuratively bad — literally the worst possible outcome. First birthday drawn, first to be called, certain deployment. Vietnam.

I watched my friend’s face drain of color and understood, in a way I hadn’t before, that this was not abstract. This was not politics or philosophy or protest signs. This was my friend’s body being requisitioned by the government to go kill people or be killed in a jungle on the other side of the world.

Steve stood up and walked out. I found him later with a bottle of bourbon, already working on a plan. There was a psychiatrist on campus, a Dr. Frei, who was sympathetic. Steve would build a case for psychological unfitness. He would make himself officially crazy, because the alternative was officially dead.

It worked. Steve got his 4-F. But something shifted in him after that — a hardness, a suspicion of systems and authorities that would deepen over the years until it consumed him entirely. The boy who’d labeled his film canisters Murder, Insanity, Death had stared at the real versions and chosen a different kind of survival.

My lottery came seven months later, in July 1970 — the second lottery, for birthdates in 1952. I drew number 200.

Two hundred sounded high. It wasn’t high enough to be safe, not then, not when nobody knew where the cutoff would fall. For weeks, maybe months, I lived in a particular kind of limbo that no one who hasn’t experienced it can fully understand. Every time I tried to imagine myself in Vietnam — the heat, the rifles, the possibility of killing or dying — my mind simply refused the picture. It was like trying to visualize my own death. The image wouldn’t form.

I was 100 percent certain of one thing: I would not go. Not as an officer, which my father had pushed — “You might as well go as a lieutenant rather than some buck private in the mud” — and not as anything else. Canada. A psychiatric deferment like Steve’s. Whatever it took. The war was wrong, and dying in it, or killing in it, was not something I was willing to do for a country that couldn’t explain why it was asking.

When the final numbers came — they drafted through 160, stopping forty short of my birthday — the relief arrived not as joy but as a slow unclenching. A fist that had been closed for months gradually opening. I was safe. Steve was safe, through different means. But the experience left a mark on both of us, a shared understanding that the institutions we’d been raised to trust — government, university, family — would feed you into a machine without hesitation if the machine required it.

The last year at Penn felt like watching a building condemned.

The war kept escalating. Protests grew larger and angrier. Professors cancelled classes. Some joined the demonstrations. Others retreated into their subjects with a kind of desperate irrelevance — me sitting in a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason while outside the windows, students marched and chanted and occasionally bled.

• • •

One night, a commotion echoed through the labyrinthine hallways of the Quad dorms. I came out of my room and followed the noise, walking two hundred yards through the connected corridors toward whatever was generating that particular frequency of excited male voices. When I found the source — a line of at least six guys outside a door, some adjusting their clothes, some bouncing on their heels — I asked the nearest one what was going on.

“There’s a girl in there taking all comers,” the guy said, grinning. “No questions asked.”

I turned around and walked the two hundred yards back to my room. I did nothing. Said nothing. Filed no report, told no authority. The distance I’d traveled to reach that hallway and the distance I traveled back — carrying the knowledge of what was happening and my own paralysis in the face of it — measured something about that time and place that no protest sign or teach-in could capture. The girl disappeared from campus not long after. Whether she dropped out or transferred, nobody seemed to know. Nobody seemed to ask.

I stopped caring about grades. The classes my father had arranged — philosophy, French literature — felt like obligations from a world that no longer existed. The one course I’d chosen for myself, a film class, was the only thing that still engaged me. But even that seemed small against the scale of what was happening outside.

In the spring of 1971, the campus shut down. Anti-war protests had reached a pitch that made normal academic operations impossible. Finals were cancelled. Everyone passed. The administration essentially threw up its hands and sent us home.

I walked away from Penn and never went back. Not in anger, exactly, and not in triumph. More the way you leave a party that stopped being fun hours ago — quietly, without saying goodbye, already thinking about what comes next.

What came next was the question. I was twenty years old, had no degree, no plan, no money of my own, and a father whose vision for my future — Harvard, graduate school, politics or the Church — had been so thoroughly rejected that the two of us could barely sustain a phone conversation.

I went home to Ledge Acres. But home, I was beginning to understand, was a word that had started to mean less and less. The house was the same. The people in it were coming apart.

→ Next Chapter: Fish Out Of Water

BOOMERANG - Table of Contents

BOOMERANG - Table of Contents

Chapter Four

Finding An Escape Hatch

I came home to Ledge Acres with nothing to show for my time in New York except an IATSE union card and the knowledge that the city wasn’t going to save me. No guitar, no band, no relationship, no plan. Just the same bedroom in the same farmhouse, the same father’s shadow over everything, th…

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Yesterday I wrote about the long road to finishing the audiobook edition of Surfing the Interstates — the gear, the specs, the four chapters with RMS and peak problems, the three-month abandonment, and Auphonic riding to the rescue. If you haven’t read that one, start there.

This is what happened next.

ACX has finally accepted all sixteen chapters. Then came the fine print: it will take up to two weeks before the audiobook goes live on Audible and Amazon.

Two weeks. I’m not good at waiting.

Here’s the thing I’d done right without fully realizing why — I hadn’t signed an exclusive contract with ACX. That decision, almost an afterthought when I was setting up the account, turned out to matter enormously. Non-exclusive distribution means ACX gets Amazon and Audible, but you keep the right to sell and distribute your audiobook anywhere else you like. Simultaneously. Right now.

So that’s exactly what I did.

The audiobook is now embedded directly into each chapter post here on Substack — read and listen at the same time, or just hit play and let it wash over you. It’s in my Ko-fi shop as a standalone purchase, bundled with the ePub edition at a discount. I’ve submitted it to Spotify, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books. By the time ACX flips the switch on Audible, the book will already be living in half a dozen places.

While I was waiting, I did something I’d been curious about.

ElevenLabs offers professional AI voice cloning — you feed it enough audio and it trains a model on your voice. I bought some tokens, uploaded two hours of my own narration, and let it work. The result was unsettling. It sounded like me. The timbre, the cadence, even some of my particular rhythms came through.

Surfing The Interstates - “Epigram”

Can you pick which is AI and which is my voice?

Then I had it read the memoir.

Flat where it needed to breathe. Pacing that steamrolled the pauses I’d spent weeks calibrating. And at moments — words I’ve said ten thousand times in my life — it simply mispronounced them, with complete confidence.

A voice trained on two hours of a man reading his own memoir could not read that memoir. What it couldn’t replicate wasn’t the sound — it was the understanding. Every pause in this book belongs somewhere specific. It marks a breath before something hard, or the beat after a joke lands, or the silence where a road stretched out and I didn’t know what came next. You can’t train a machine on that. It has to have been lived.

The working title for the full memoir trilogy is The Spaces Between. I chose it a while ago because the real story of a life isn’t in the events — it’s in the gaps, the silences, the weight between one thing and the next. Turns out the audiobook proved the title. The AI had my voice but couldn’t find the spaces. It didn’t know which silences were grief and which were wonder and which were just a man on a road with no idea what was coming. Those spaces are the book. They’re everything.

AI has a long way to go in this department. I say that with relief.

Something else happened while I was sitting in that chair, reading sixteen chapters into a microphone. I didn’t expect it. For a year I’d been on a treadmill — writing the book, publishing the book, promoting the book, formatting, uploading, redesigning, re-uploading. The machinery of getting a thing into the world. And now, finally, the machinery has stopped.

I’m beginning to feel like a field that’s been left fallow for a year. Quiet. Open. Something is coming up through the soil, and I don’t know its shape yet. I’ve stepped off the plan I’d made for Books Two and Three — the rigid trilogy treadmill — and instead I’ve created sections here on Substack named after each book, places where I can trial-balloon ideas, accumulate fragments, let the work find its own form. Maybe the next book gets written in a way I haven’t thought of yet. I feel it approaching. Not as obligation, but as duty — to myself, and to Thea Ramsey, my partner and lover, who died at thirty-seven. Sometime this summer I will have already lived exactly twice as long as she did.

Thea had a saying. Whenever something happened to us — something funny, something terrible, something so strange it could only happen on a small island in the Caribbean — she’d look at me and say, “There’s one for the book.” She always believed there’d be a book. She also knew she wouldn’t be here to read it, because she was born with cystic fibrosis and was already living on borrowed time.

I owe her story a voice. The only one that knows where the pauses go.

Surfing the Interstates is available now on Substack and Ko-fi. Coming soon to Audible, Amazon, Spotify, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble.

The road that started in 1973 finally has a soundtrack. In the only voice that could tell it.

Just for fun, here is “AI Andre” by Eleven Labs reading this post. It’s close, and yet so far away from sounding acceptable, at least to my ears.

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I just uploaded the final files for the audiobook edition of Surfing the Interstates to ACX — Amazon’s Audiobook Creation Exchange, the platform that produces and distributes audiobooks through Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. Sixteen chapters. Five hours and change of finished audio. All of it recorded, edited, and mastered in my home studio in Vermont. ACX is telling me it will be live on Amazon within two weeks.

I’m sharing this because if you’re an indie author thinking about narrating your own book, you should know what you’re getting into. Consider this a cautionary tale with a happy ending.

The good news first: I’m a musician. I’ve been recording at home for years. I already owned a Shure SM7B — a cardioid dynamic microphone that excels at rejecting room noise and reverb, so you don’t get that hollow, amateur sound. That runs about $400. I had a Zoom 32-bit interface feeding my iPad Pro — around $250. And I used an app called Ferrite Pro to record and edit — thirty bucks. So I wasn’t starting from zero.

But here’s the thing: even if you don’t have my background, you could put together everything you need for well under a thousand dollars, assuming you already have a computer or tablet to work with. Compare that to hiring a narrator, an audio engineer, and renting studio time. We’re talking thousands of dollars.

Now the bad news.

Two weeks. That’s how long it took to record all sixteen chapters. Two weeks of reading aloud, stumbling over sentences that looked fine on the page but turned into tongue-twisters at the microphone. Two weeks of stopping, backing up, re-reading. And then the editing — my God, the editing. Every pause. Every “um.” Every mouth click and breath in the wrong place. You don’t realize how many verbal tics you have until you’re staring at a waveform trying to surgically remove them.

But the real challenge wasn’t the recording. It was the specs.

ACX has stringent technical standards for audio. RMS levels, peak levels, noise floor — the whole nine yards. And even though I know my way around a mixing board, meeting broadcast-level specs is a different animal than laying down a guitar track.

I uploaded my sixteen chapters feeling pretty good about myself.

Four of them were rejected.

RMS and peak issues. I was discouraged enough to walk away from the whole thing for about three months. And while the project sat in limbo, I did what any restless writer would do — I went back into the manuscript itself. I shortened some chapters, fixed inconsistencies, caught typos I’d missed through a dozen previous reads. I redesigned the cover. I actually deleted the original KDP listing and replaced it with a new edition printed on cream paper instead of white. The book got better while the audiobook gathered dust.

But I was dreading the possibility that I’d have to spend another two weeks re-recording the whole thing from the revised manuscript. That thought was enough to keep the project on the shelf.

Then Claude pointed me to Auphonic — a service that analyzes your audio and adjusts the levels to meet ACX’s exact requirements. Eleven dollars for the tokens I needed. Game changer. If I could just fix the four rejected chapters and run them through Auphonic, I could upload the original audio and call it a day. The text differences between the two versions were minor enough that the audiobook could stand on its own.

It worked. All sixteen chapters accepted.

So here’s what I’d tell anyone considering this path: if you have decent gear, a quiet room, and the patience of a monk with a head cold, you can absolutely do this yourself. But budget your time honestly. All of it is hard. The recording demands real performance — you’re not just reading words, you’re acting them, finding the emotion in every sentence. Then you’re spending hours surgically removing every pause, every breath, every “um,” every false start. And after all that, the technical specs and the back-and-forth with ACX will test whatever patience you have left.

Worth it? Every minute. There’s something right about reading your own story in your own voice. Nobody else knows where the pauses belong.

My father wanted me to study philosophy. I wanted film school. He won. He always won. He made me read the entire Bible cover to cover. He sent me on retreats. He made me read Kierkegaard. He dragged me to West Point for an interview I never wanted. Six years later, after I’d worked my way into USC Film School on my own — the dream he’d vetoed when I was eighteen — he refused to help as promised. He said he was financially stretched, but he was also buying racehorses with his new wife. Philosophy, he said. The examined life. Know thyself.

I spent the next fifty years ignoring that advice. Hitchhiking. Windsurfing. Running from everything he represented. And then, as the 50th anniversary of my 1973 hitchhiking odyssey approached, I pulled out the falling-apart journal I’d somehow kept all those years — the one I’d carried every mile of that summer, the one where I’d written down my thoughts and feelings during the six months before leaving, the two months of the trip itself, and the month after I got back. The pages were soft and brown at the edges. The handwriting was mine but younger — urgent, unguarded, full of a certainty I no longer recognized. I’d kept it for half a century without quite knowing why, the way you keep a letter you’re not yet ready to answer.

I started writing. And I discovered that the old man had been right all along. Not about West Point. Not about Kierkegaard. But about the examined life — the idea that understanding your own story is the real work. I just needed fifty years, a falling-apart journal, and an artificial intelligence to prove it.

I posted the contents on an older Substack — now defunct — reading each entry aloud, transcribing it, embellishing the pages with photographs and maps I found online. It was an act of archaeology. But something in me was calling me to do more with the material. The journal was a skeleton. It needed flesh.

That fall I discovered Anthropic’s Claude, and I began interfacing the AI with my iOS writing app, Scrivener. I also started recording voice memos. Originally I wanted to write a screenplay — the old film school dream that life had rerouted but never quite killed. Funny how the thing your father blocks at eighteen keeps knocking at seventy-two. Over the months that followed I invested unbelievable amounts of time learning how to efficiently record my thoughts on a walk into my phone, how to transcribe them later with different software. I tried Aiko, NovelCrafter, Sudowrite. Each taught me something. None of them stuck. But the impulse kept pushing, and over the next two years I ended up writing the memoir that became Surfing the Interstates.

Along the way I discovered something about myself that I’d never named. During the course of my life, the typewriter and the blank page had been a huge obstacle. Not writer’s block — something deeper. The pressure of that blank page and the mechanical clacking of the keys carried a kind of judgment. Every word had to justify itself before it hit the paper. I was the kid who wanted to be a famous writer but was too shy to sing in front of people, too paralyzed by his own ambitions to actually make anything. I liked the idea of thought bubbles — loose, provisional, free to dissolve and reform.

And then ultimately I fell in love with voice memos.

Because all stories start with the human voice. The word for spirit comes from the Greek word for air — for breath. Pneuma. Before there was writing there was telling. Before there was telling there was breathing. And there’s just something about talking that unlocks me in a way that sitting at a desk never could. I walk through the Vermont woods with my phone in my pocket and the stories pour out — raw, unstructured, alive. I’m doing it right now.

This is where AI comes in. Not as a ghostwriter — as an editor with infinite patience and a memory that doesn’t quit. It takes out all of the ums and you-knows and conversational clutter, turning spoken thought into prose. But more than that — over time it begins seeing patterns and motifs that I was too close to see myself. Connections between moments separated by decades that only become visible when someone, or something, holds the whole story at once. Writing the memoir, I discovered that my lifelong compulsion to move — hitchhiking, windsurfing, overlanding — wasn’t freedom. It was addiction. I couldn’t have seen that without the writing. And the writing couldn’t have happened without the voice. And the voice couldn’t have become a book without AI. Each tool unlocked the next.

Not all AI is the same. After trying a handful of different apps I ended up with Anthropic’s Claude. I was particularly attracted to the project feature, which allows a much larger context — so the AI has a specific and comprehensive awareness of what you’re doing, who you are, where you’re going. It remembers what you said three months ago. It knows your characters. It knows that your aunt was Niki de Saint Phalle and your father read Kierkegaard and your teacher Mr. Czaja taught you to write from images when you were eight years old. Over time I trained Claude on how I liked to write. I developed a dual approach: cinematic staccato short phrases for action in the present tense, and flowing, introspective, sometimes poetic language for the mature voice looking back and understanding. Two speeds. Two lenses. The young man hurtling through the world, and the older man finally grasping what it meant.

One of the big things with writing is how you do it, and there are two basic schools. There are those called pantsers — they write by the seat of their pants, trusting the current to carry them. I am not one of those. I worked for a few years as a carpenter. I even studied architecture briefly. I’m a firm believer in having an outline — in knowing where the load-bearing walls go before you start hanging drywall. My goal is to not waste my time. At 74, time is not an abstraction.

And my deep love and knowledge of cinema embedded me in present-tense narration — show, don’t tell. I knew that to write about my trip I had to make it engaging, and that only the key moments were needed to flesh out the true heart of the story. A memoir isn’t a diary. It’s a curated act of memory — deciding what matters enough to survive.

All of these things were just the beginning, however, of the long process that took me to today.

...

Let me talk about publishing, because that’s where the real education began.

Substack publishes sequentially — newest post on top. Which means the only way to serialize a book in reading order is to publish in reverse chronological order, building a table of contents that reads correctly from first chapter to last. It’s counterintuitive. You have to think backwards to move forward. Nobody tells you this. You figure it out at midnight, staring at your screen, wondering why Chapter 12 is sitting on top of Chapter 1.

Then there’s Amazon. Kindle Direct Publishing handles e-books, paperback, and hardcover, and each format has its own specifications. Cover art requires precise bleeds and margins that differ between formats. The interior text has its own formatting demands — font choices, line spacing, paragraph indentation, page size. Cream paper or white paper. Matte cover or glossy. Every decision cascades into three others. And typos. You think you’ve caught them all. You haven’t. You publish, you order the proof, you open it with the pride of a new parent — and there they are, staring back at you from page forty-seven. So you fix them and resubmit and wait and order another proof and find two more. It’s humbling. It’s also, in its own maddening way, deeply satisfying — because you are building something real with your hands, even if the hands are typing.

The audiobook was another education entirely. Recording the audio. Editing the audio. Learning that your reading voice and your speaking voice are not the same instrument — that one tells and the other performs, and the difference is everything. Making sure every file meets ACX standards for RMS levels and volume — specifications I didn’t even know existed six months earlier. I went through multiple approaches before landing on a workflow that actually produced professional results.

I don’t think I could have done any of this without Claude. When it came to writing, I’ve already described how that worked. But when it came to formatting, I spent multiple days with Claude solving the PDF challenges of cover art across different formats. Claude helped me get my final audiobook files to meet ACX specifications. It helped me develop my website, work out keywords and meta tags, set up subdomains. At every turn where I hit a wall — and there were many walls — I had a collaborator who never got tired, never lost patience, and never forgot what we’d already figured out.

If someone had handed me this syllabus three years ago — Scrivener, voice transcription, AI collaboration, narrative structure, KDP formatting, cover design, audio engineering, web development, search optimization — I would have said they were out of their mind.

...

So why did I do this? What’s the point?

The biggest surprise was that the motivations of an entire lifetime — to achieve, to perform, to be praised, to make money — had to fall by the wayside. All of them. Every one. I come from a family where nothing less than becoming a cardinal or a senator was considered acceptable for the eldest son. I wanted to be a famous writer. Then a famous director. Then a famous musician. Always famous. Always the validation I never got from the man who named me after his father and then spent my childhood trying to mold me into something I wasn’t.

Writing a book is like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean alongside three million other bottles tossed out there every day. If you do this expecting to be on the Today Show, you will break your own heart. If you do this expecting to roll in cash, you will break it twice.

But here’s what nobody tells you. The joy I feel right now — sitting in Vermont with a finished book on Amazon, an audiobook on Audible, a Substack archive that functions as a mausoleum of my creative life — surpasses anything I ever imagined fame or money could deliver. And I’m not saying that the way people say it when they’re pretending not to care. I mean it the way you mean something you’ve earned by doing the work.

The real payoff has been revisiting a transformative summer of my life and understanding my life better for having done the introspection, the recollection, the contemplation. Writing forced me to sit with moments I’d been running from for fifty years. It showed me that my perpetual motion wasn’t freedom — it was the thing that kept me from ever having to stay. And staying, it turns out, is where the actual living happens. I didn’t learn that from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I learned it from recording voice memos and writing my life in my own words. My father was right. You can’t really say anything worthwhile until you’ve really understood what you’re trying to say.

And the flip side of all that inner work is the activation and energization of the mind. Which is so important as we age. In 2019, I started having grand mal seizures in my sleep. Nine of them over the course of a year and a half — my body convulsing in the dark while Veronica watched and documented each one, helpless. I woke up each time not knowing what had happened, the bed soaked, my tongue bitten, my muscles screaming. The doctors wanted to put me on seizure meds which are really just heavy psychiatric drugs that also happen to throw a blanket over your soul. I looked at that road and saw where it might end for me — a defeated, medicated, sad vegetable sitting in a chair, waiting to die. I refused to comply. My neurologist abandoned me. I went on the keto diet, embraced CBD, and lost ninety pounds. I chose to fight with everything I had left. And then I started writing.

Thank God, I have been seizure-free since 2021.

Every single one of the technical challenges — Scrivener, KDP formatting, audio mastering, Substack architecture, AI collaboration — lit up a part of my brain that might otherwise have gone dark. Every wall I hit and solved was a synapse firing that hadn’t fired in years.

Nobody designs a curriculum like this. There’s no syllabus for teaching yourself Scrivener at 72, audio mastering at 73, and self-publishing at 74. My father wanted me to study philosophy — to live the examined life. He was right about the destination. We both just had the route wrong, and the timing off by about fifty years.

This was the degree I actually needed.

I remember the cough.

A little cough. Persistent. My mother had been feeling pretty good, actually—losing weight without trying, which she took as a bonus. But this cough wouldn’t quit. It reminded me of another cough, years earlier—Thea’s cough, the one that I soon learned was caused by her cystic fibrosis. None of us connected the dots when it came to my mother’s cough. She had just turned 65 and was excited to finally qualify for medicare and social security.

Her doctor said it had been a while since they’d done a lung X-ray. The X-ray led to the biopsy. The biopsy led to the diagnosis. Stage 4B non-small cell lung cancer. Six months to live.

It was the fall of 1996. I was with her at her house in Pleasantville, a simple place where she and Bill had lived for nearly twenty years. Bill had become like a second father to me. My actual father had been missing in action since 1973.

We were sitting at the dining room table. Just the two of us. Tea getting cold. And I said what seemed like the obvious thing: “I guess we should tell Dad.”

She didn’t hesitate. Absolutely not.

I asked why.

“Because he might take some pleasure in it.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sentence that rearranged me so completely. I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t even surprised, exactly. I was thunderstruck at her truth. At the depth of it. Twenty-three years after the divorce and this was what remained—not indifference, not even hatred, but the bone-deep certainty that the man she’d given six children would find satisfaction in her dying.

We never know what other people carry. That moment at her table was like a glimpse into deep space. A void where I’d imagined some residue of love might still persist. That maybe time had softened things. But no.

• • •

Six months later, mid-January 1997. Her funeral mass at St. Patrick’s—the same church where I’d taken my first holy communion, where I’d served as an altar boy, where my brother would later be married, where his two daughters would one day be baptized. The whole arc of a family’s sacraments in one building.

My father attended. He was a peripheral figure, standing off to the side. The towering, scary man of my childhood now looked shrunken and frail. Whatever power he’d held over all of us had left his body.

After the burial at Middle Patent Cemetery, I walked over to him. Put my right arm around his shoulder and leaned in. Choked with emotion, barely holding it together, I said the thing I needed him to hear.

“She loved us all.”

I wanted to share with him the same fantasy my mother had shattered at that dining room table. I wanted it to be true badly enough to say it out loud.

He gave me a quick, sad look. Said nothing. We parted.

That was the last time I ever saw him in person.

• • •

Twenty-five years passed.

He died in Florida in June of 2022, at ninety-four. Only his second wife still in his life. None of his six children had been down much, if ever. She arranged for his body to be flown up to New York. One of my sisters was going to have him buried without any ceremony—just put him in the ground. But my youngest sister intervened and organized a full funeral mass at St. Patrick’s.

The invitations went out. Jacques, 3,000 miles away in California, didn’t come. He said it was too painful, though he’d made the trip to Florida a year or two earlier to sit with our father. I think he cared more about the man than the rest of us, in his own complicated way. ZaZa didn’t come because Charlie would be there, and she was estranged from Charlie over his daughters. My stepbrother Bob didn’t attend either.

So there I was. In the same church. At the same pulpit where priests had baptized us, confirmed us, married us. Delivering a eulogy for a man I hadn’t laid eyes on in a quarter century.

I’d told Jacques years before that I didn’t think I could attend my father’s funeral. That what he’d done to me was too much. I never dreamed the roles would reverse—that Jacques would be the one who stayed away, and I’d be the one standing at the microphone.

Charlie had helped me with the eulogy. He read my early drafts and told me they read like I had a chip on my shoulder. He was right. So I scrubbed it clean. Made it about the people in the pews, not the man in the box. I listed every one of the twenty living descendants by name. I gave my father the church, the faith, the horses and dogs, the wicked sense of humor. I closed with John Prine.

So if you’re walking down the street sometime and spot some hollow ancient eyes, please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare, as if you didn’t care. Say hello in there. Hello.

“So Dad—hello in there. And now, sadly, it’s time to say goodbye.”

Standing up there felt like I’d become the priest he always wanted me to be. It also felt like an out-of-body experience. I couldn’t connect the box in front of the altar with the man who’d blocked my dreams, slapped my mother against the washing machine, demanded control over every breath his children took. It was just a box.

• • •

Afterwards, the reception. Thirty or forty people. And this is the part that stays with me.

Nobody talked about my father.

Not one story. Not one memory. Not a single “remember when he...” It was a garden party. People catching up, making small talk, refreshments on a table. The man who’d loomed so large in all of our lives—who’d controlled everything, demanded everything, withheld everything—had become a void. An atomic crater that everyone walked around the edges of, careful not to look in.

I stood there holding a drink I wasn’t tasting, watching these people who’d come out of duty or curiosity or family obligation, and I felt the full weight of what a life adds up to when you choose control over connection. When you freeze the people who love you until they stop trying.

The last time I saw any of my siblings in person was that day. Four years ago.

• • •

Over the next three years I managed to write the first book of a planned memoir trilogy. It covers two months in the summer of 1973—the summer I hitchhiked across America at twenty-one. My father appears in the first chapter. Three pages in, there’s a scene where I witness him slapping my mother across the face. It’s brief. It’s factual. It’s what happened.

During the initial development, I reached out to my youngest brother and sister to ask if they’d be willing to share their memories. They both said no. My brother was especially adamant. The past is the past, he said. He’s focused on the future. My other brother asked that he not appear in anything I write.

I honored every request. The siblings barely appear. The youngest two weren’t even born yet in 1973. One brother is three years old in footie pajamas. I changed nothing, invented nothing, dramatized nothing.

It didn’t matter. I think if any of them even bothered to read it, they put the book down on page three.

Not because I named them. Not because I exposed their secrets. But because I broke the silence contract. Every family built on repression has one. You don’t talk about what happened behind closed doors. You don’t acknowledge what you saw. You move forward and you never, ever look back.

I looked back.

My mother told me not to tell my father about her cancer because he might take pleasure in it. That’s not bitterness talking. That’s a woman who understood exactly what twenty years of marriage to that man had cost her, and she was right enough about it to say it out loud while dying.

My brother medicates the same wound with opiates. My sisters married their way out or built careers sturdy enough to wall it off. I wrote it down.

Six kids, six survival strategies. None of us wrong. All of us damaged. And the man at the center of it—the one nobody talked about at his own reception—he died the way he lived. Surrounded by silence.

So why write this? Why share it?

Because of Paul Clement Czaja. My grade school teacher—my guru, really—who taught a room full of kids to close their eyes, go inside, and meditate. Then he’d pass around a tray of photographs. Choose one, he said. A frozen moment. Inhabit it. Go with the feelings. Pour your swollen heart into explaining what you see.

Our creative magazine was called Caedmon, after the first British poet. A seventh-century cowherd who couldn’t sing, until one night he dreamed a voice that told him to. And he did.

This is what I’m supposed to be doing. I know that now. My father wanted me to be a priest—to go beneath the surface, find out what it all meant. He was right about the calling. Just wrong about the collar.

Writing has become my priesthood. Not the kind he envisioned. But the kind Paul Czaja planted in me sixty years before I had the courage to answer it—standing over a tray of memories, learning that a single frozen moment, honestly witnessed, can break you open and inside that moment are the gifts of clarity, understanding and growth. Peace in my own heart, if not on earth.

Hello in there.

Some songs don’t enter through your ears. They enter through your chest.

Dorm room. Exeter. 1966. Thirteen years old in a blazer and a tie that’s been loosened since chapel. Transistor radio on the nightstand, dial locked to WBZ-AM. Homework untouched. The signal drifts in and out, and then the harmonies hit — McCartney’s voice climbing over itself, layered, insistent — and something locks into place that will never come loose.

I didn’t fully grasp the lyrics. Didn’t care. The song wasn’t about words yet. It was about a sound that lived somewhere between the melody and the blood. Three voices braided together into something that bypassed the brain entirely and went straight to the body. You know the feeling — certain songs just move in. They don’t ask permission. They take up residence in a room inside you that you didn’t know existed, and they never leave.

I was thirteen. I would carry that song for the rest of my life, like a touchstone.

Certain music does this. It isn’t about taste or preference. It’s deeper than that — almost biological. The way Neil Young’s single distorted note at the opening of “Cinnamon Girl” can rearrange something in your nervous system. Or Donovan singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” — that wash of color and light that doesn’t describe transcendence so much as produce it, right there in your eardrums. These songs don’t represent feelings. They are feelings, compressed into three minutes of sound, and once they’re inside you, they become part of your operating system. You hear them at thirteen and they’re still running the software at seventy-four.

My father didn’t understand this. To him, the music I loved was noise. He was a classics man — structured, formal, composed. The Beatles were chaos. Neil Young was an assault. He couldn’t hear what I heard, and I couldn’t hear what he heard, and that gap between us was one of many that would widen for decades before it finally — slowly, improbably — began to close.

He had come home from New York one evening during the summer of 1964 to find me wearing genuine English leather Beatle boots, the ones my french cousin Edme had urged me to buy in the city. Too expensive, he said. Go back to New York tomorrow and return them. I was twelve. I took the train back and returned the boots. The boots weren’t the point. The point was that anything associated with that music — the sound, the look, the culture — was suspect. Dangerous. A distraction from the serious business of becoming the man he’d decided I should be.

What he’d decided was philosophy. I wanted film school — wanted it the way you want air when you’re underwater. I was going to be the next Peter Fonda, the next Ingmar Bergman. I had placed third in scholastic magazines, national short story contest and been published. I had the Ralph Bradley Prize for film from Exeter. I had talent. I had ambition. And my father looked at all of it and said no.

Not cruelly. Not even wrongly. He said: You can’t tell the world a story until you know what it means.

I hated him for it. Hated him for decades. Carried it like a stone in my chest — the father who blocked his son’s artistic life, who chose philosophy over film, who valued the examined life over the lived one. He wanted me to sit in a classroom and read Kierkegaard. I wanted to pick up a camera and go.

So I went. Not to film school. Just — out. Into the world. Thumb out on 684, eighty dollars, a guitar, a backpack. Ten thousand miles of American highway in the summer of 1973. Then California, then New York, then Antigua, then Maine, then Hollywood, then back. Decades of motion. Decades of running from that study where he sat with his index cards, handicapping horses, demanding I account for every conversation, every aspiration, every stray thought.

The music came with me everywhere. It was the one inheritance he couldn’t confiscate. The Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young, the Dead — they were the soundtrack to every departure, every highway, every rented room. When I played guitar in Tompkins Square Park with a drummer from Harlem and a rhythm player from Queens, I was speaking a language my father had never learned. When I played in Antigua with the trade winds coming through the open shutters, the music was still the same conversation I’d started at thirteen with a transistor radio on a nightstand in New Hampshire. My father heard noise. I heard a lifeline.

Here’s what fifty years teaches you.

He was right.

Not about the boots. Not about philosophy as a college major. Not about West Point or the priesthood or any of the specific ambitions he tried to graft onto me like branches onto a tree that didn’t want them. He was wrong about all of that, specifically and sometimes damagingly.

But the principle underneath — the insistence that you can’t tell a story until you understand what it means — that was exactly right. I just didn’t know it would take fifty years to understand it. He thought four years at Penn reading Kant would do the job. It took the open road, Antigua, Thea’s death, the seizures, a simple house in Vermont with two dogs and a guitar, and finally — finally — sitting down at seventy-two to write the book.

Not a film. A book.

The thing he’d been pointing toward all along. Not because he knew I’d be a writer — he didn’t. But because he knew that surface wasn’t enough. That the camera could show you what happened but not what it meant. That the music could make you feel everything but explain nothing. He wanted me to go deeper, and he was right, and I spent my whole life resisting the very thing that would ultimately save me.

The song came out in 1966. I published the paperback in 2025. Fifty-nine years between the boy hearing it on the radio and the man holding his own paperback.

McCartney’s character in that song is desperate. Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? He’s willing to change the style, make it longer, do whatever the publisher wants. He needs a job. He needs validation. He needs someone in a position of authority to say: Yes, this is worth something.

I know that desperation. I mailed twelve author copies to siblings, old friends, people I thought might care. Not one person responded. A boarding school acquaintance who became chairman of the board at Farrar, Straus and Giroux read the manuscript and told me it had no commercial appeal. He suggested I print copies for family distribution. The family, of course, being the very people who refuse to read it.

But here’s where the song and I part company. McCartney’s paperback writer is begging for permission. He’ll change anything — the story, the style, the length — to get a yes. He’s selling. I didn’t sell. I wrote the uncomfortable version. The version that names what happened in the laundry room. The version that cost me what was left of my family. I didn’t make it longer because someone liked the style. I didn’t change it round. I wrote what I saw.

The father who blocked film school, who tried to force me to study philosophy, who heard noise where I heard God — that man gave me the only tools that could have produced this book. Not the camera. Not the guitar. The depth. The insistence on meaning. The refusal to let his eldest son skate along the surface of a life without understanding what was underneath.

I’m sitting in a recliner in northern Vermont. The dogs are at my feet. The guitar is in the corner. The iPad is floating above my knees and I’m speaking these words into it — dictating to an AI that helps me find the shape of what I’m trying to say. My father would have had opinions about this. He would have called it noise.

But the book exists. The paperback is real. You can hold it in your hand. It took me fifty years because it needed fifty years — the hitchhiking, the windsurfing, the love, the losses, the long silence, the whole life lived before the story could be told. My father planted the mission: find out what it means. He just didn’t know the classroom would be ten thousand miles of highway and a Caribbean island and a woman who died too young and a lifetime of music that kept me alive long enough to finally sit down and write.

The harmonies are still in my chest. McCartney’s voice layered over itself, Lennon underneath, Harrison floating on top. Sixty years later and the song hasn’t moved. It’s still in the same room where it took up residence when I was thirteen — the room my father never entered, the room where I kept everything he called noise, the room that turned out to hold the answer he was looking for all along.

Dear Sir or Madam. There is no sir or madam. There is no publisher. There is just a man at seventy-four with a paperback and a long story about how the song and the father and the fifty years between them were always heading to the same place.

I just couldn’t hear it yet.