It could easily be the team troubles I’ve been hearing about. But more than likely this is just the way with all wheelchair victims: after you lift weights, eat a good breakfast, use the toilet, read the paper and bathe, what’s left for the day but news broadcasts, reticence and turning inward? A good sense of decorum can make life bearable when otherwise you might be tempted to blow your brains out.

“Listen, I’ll sure be glad to see you, Frank.” We have never laid eyes on each other and have talked on the phone only once, but I feel like I know him already.

“It’ll be good to see you, Herb.”

“You miss a lot of things now, you know,” Herb says. “Television’s great. But it’s not enough.”

“We’ll have a good talk, Herb.”

“We’ll have a time, won’t we? I know we will.”

“I’ll say we will. See you tomorrow.”

“You take care, Frank. Safe trip and all that.”

“Thanks, Herb.”

“Think metric, Frank. Hah.” Herb hangs up.

Whatever’s left to tell of my past can be dispensed with in a New York minute. At Michigan I studied the liberal arts in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (along with ROTC). I took all the courses I was supposed to, including Latin, spent some time at the Daily writing florid little oversensitive movie reviews, and the rest with my feet up in the Sigma Chi house, where one crisp autumn day in 1965, I met X, who was the term party date of a brother of mine named Laddy Nozar, from Benton Harbor, and who—X—impressed me as ungainly and too earnest and not a girl I would ever care to go out with. She was very athletic-looking, with what seemed like too large breasts, and had a way of standing with her arms crossed and one leg in front of the other and slightly turned out that let you know she was probably sizing you up for fun. She seemed like a rich girl, and I didn’t like rich Michigan girls, I didn’t think. Consequently I never saw her again until that dismal book signing in New York in 1969, not long before I married her.

Shortly after our first meeting—but not because of it—I quit school and joined the Marines. This was in the middle stages of the war, and it seemed the right thing to do—with my military bearing—and the NROTC didn’t mind. In fact, I joined with Laddy Nozar and two other boys, at the old post office on Main Street in Ann Arbor and had to cross an embarrassing protest line to do it. Laddy Nozar went to Vietnam and got killed at Con Thien with the Third Marines. The two others finished their tours and now run an ad agency in Aurora, Illinois. As it happened, I contracted a pancreatic syndrome which the doctors thought was Hodgkin’s disease but which turned out to be benign, and after two months in Camp Lejeune I was discharged without killing anyone or being killed, but designated a veteran anyway and given benefits.

This event happened when I was twenty-one years old, and I report it only because it was the first time I remember feeling dreamy in my life, though then what I felt was not so pleasant and I think I would’ve said I felt sullen more than anything. I used to lie in bed in the Navy hospital in South Carolina and think about nothing but dying, which for a while I felt interested in. I’d think about it the way you’d think of a strategy in a ball game, deciding one way then deciding another, seeing myself dead then alive then dead again, as if considerations and options were involved. Then I’d realize I didn’t have any choices and that it wasn’t going to be that way, and I felt nostalgic for a while, but then got sullen as hell so that the doctors ended up giving me antidepressants to stop my thinking about it altogether, which I did. (This happens to a lot of people who get sick at a young age, and, in fact, can ruin your life.)

What it did for me, though, was let me go back to college, since I had only missed a semester, and, by 1967, entertain the idea I’d been entertaining since reading the seafaring diaries of Joshua Slocum at Lonesome Pines—to write a novel. Mine was to be about a bemused young southerner who joins the Navy but gets discharged with a mysterious disease, goes to New Orleans and loses himself into a hazy world of sex and drugs and rumored gun-running and a futile attempt to reconcile a vertiginous present with the guilty memories of not dying alongside his Navy comrades, all of which is climaxed in a violent tryst with a Methodist minister’s wife who seduces him in an abandoned slave-quarters, though other times too, after which his life is shattered and he disappears permanently into the Texas oil fields. It was all told in a series of flashbacks.

This novel was called Night Wing, the title of a sentimental nautical painting that hung above the sweetheart couch in the Sigma Chi chapter room (I used a quotation from Marvell up front). In the middle of my senior year I wrapped it up and sent it off to a publisher in New York who wrote back in six months to say it “showed promise,” and could he see “other things.” The manuscript got lost in the mail back and I never saw it again, and naturally I hadn’t kept a copy. Though I can remember the opening lines as clearly as if I had written them this morning. They described the night the narrator of the story was conceived. “It was 1944, and it was April. Dogwoods bloomed in Memphis.