Three-Martini Lunch Read Free

West and the people out West were always looking to get into the city. Everybody felt like they were on the outside looking in all the time when really it was just that the hipster scene tended to turn everything inside out and the whole idea was that we were all outsiders together.
    I had always scribbled here and there but I didn’t try to write in earnest until I left Columbia and got cut off and moved to the Village and this was maybe a little ironic because My Old Man was an editor at a big publishing house. He had wanted to be a writer himself but had gone a different way with that and had become an editor instead, although he never said it that way to people who came for dinner. When people came over for dinner he mostly just told jokes about writers. It turns out there are lots of jokes you can tell about writers.
    I had a lot of funny feelings about My Old Man. On the one hand, there was some pretty lousy business he’d gotten into in Brooklyn that he didn’t think I knew about. But on the other hand he was one of those larger-than-life types you can’t help but look up to in spite of yourself. He had a magnetic personality. Back in those days My Old Man was king of what they called the three-martini lunch. This meant that in dimly lit steak houses all over Manhattan my father made bold, impetuous deals over gin and oysters. That was how it was done. Publishing was a place for men with ferocity and an appetite for life. Sure, the shy, tweedy types survived in the business all right but it was the garrulous bon vivants whoreally thrived and left their mark on the world. Lunches were long, expense accounts were generous, and the martinis often fueled tremendous quantities of flattery and praise. Of course all that booze fueled injuries, too, and the workday wasn’t really over until someone had been insulted by Norman Mailer or pulled out the old boxing gloves in one way or another.
    I was passionate about being a writer and My Old Man was passionate about being an editor and you would
think
between the two of us this would make for a bang-up combination, but my big problem was that My Old Man and I had our issues and I hadn’t exactly told him about my latest ambitions. He’d always expressed disappointment over my lackluster performance in school and now that I’d dropped out and was spending all my time in the Village, he thought I was a jazz-crazed drunkard. His idea of good jazz was Glenn Miller and it was his personal belief that if you listened to any other kind you were a dope fiend of some sort.
    But whether or not My Old Man ever helped me out, I was determined to make it as a writer. In fact, sometimes it was more satisfying to think about becoming a writer without My Old Man even knowing. I’d written a couple of short stories that, in my eyes, were very good and it was only logical that in time I would write a novel and that would be good, too. I thought a lot about what it would be like once I made it, the swell reviews I would get in the
Times
and the
Herald Tribune
about my novel, the awards I’d probably win, and how all the newspaper men would want to interview me over martinis at the “21” Club. But the problem with this is sometimes I got so caught up in my head writing imaginary drafts of the good reviews I was bound to receive, it made it difficult to write the actual novel.
    On days when I was having trouble punching the typewriter, I began to find little errands to run in the evenings that usually involved going down to the cafés in order to tell Swish and Bobby and Pal something important I had discovered that day about writing and being and existence. After I had delivered this message of course it was necessary to stay and enjoy abeer together and toast the fact we had been born to be philosophers and therefore understood what it was to really
be
. Sometimes Miles was there and sometimes he was not and I didn’t always notice the