THE TENTH PAGE

The ticket out of the land of bondage had cost $500. A hundred had gone to American Airlines, so I was down to $400 to see me through the rest of my life. It was not my intention ever to return to the homeland, but I realized that you can’t go home again until you can pay for it.

There were no skills, including menial, which I might offer. A kindergarten rejectee, a failed teenager nurtured on pulp fiction, a campus slug, a virtually homeless person, I probably wouldn’t pass muster as slave labor.

I could read books, but I didn’t know at the time that people were actually paid money for such services. Little did I know that this was the way I later would make money for most of my life. God knows that the writing of same doesn’t pay; that became clear after I had attempted it myself.

I figured that if I could read books, I could sell books. All one needed to do was tell customers what books I had enjoyed and what I thought they might like to read. What could be easier?

It probably would be necessary to modify the way I spoke. Serious readers would not court the views of a drawling hayseed. If Edward R. Murrow and Douglas Edwards and Eric Severeid--Midwesterners all--had preserved the wheat and thrown out the regionalist chaff of pronunciation. I could, too, and in that process become a proper gentleman.