Three Dreamers by Lorenzo Carcaterra

Three Dreamers by Lorenzo Carcaterra

Author:Lorenzo Carcaterra [Carcaterra, Lorenzo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00


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Working as a copy boy was not quite what I expected it to be. I spent nine miserable months driving drunk editors home to Westchester in battered Daily News cars, making coffee and lunch runs, returning dresses from the women’s department, and sitting in a dimly lit closet sharpening boxes of pencils. It was a worthless, thankless job, but it did serve two purposes: It got me into a room at what was, at the time, the largest circulation daily in America, and I got to spend time with the two columnists who would prove to be guiding lights in my still-to-be-born career—Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin.

I had started freelancing for two new monthly publications and, thanks to an introduction from Hamill, the SoHo Weekly News, which was then a competitor to The Village Voice. The editor there, Al Ellenberg, gave me the run of the city and allowed me to pitch my own ideas. Assuming they passed his editorial smell test, he printed them. In return, I was paid five dollars per article. I even managed to get a few pieces into the Daily News, for free. But I wasn’t looking for money. I was looking for clips to show editors, with the idea that those published articles would lead to more assignments. Plus, I took some sound advice from Jimmy Breslin: “When you’re starting out, never look at what it pays,” he told me one day as I was waiting for him to finish one of his columns. “You need to pile up the clips. But if you turn out to be any good and you make it in this business, then you don’t even write out a Christmas card for less than ten thousand dollars.”

I was in awe of their talents, and they both will always have a special place in my heart. I would put copies of every article I had published on their desks and hope they would give them a look and offer feedback. They did more than that, much more. Hamill sat with me and broke down my story sentence by sentence, guiding me, a master taking a student under his wing. Breslin, as was his way, did not say anything until the articles piled up on a side of his desk. I figured he was too busy to read them and was about to give up any hope of getting feedback. Then, one late afternoon, we happened to be standing next to each other in a crowded elevator. “You’re ending too many of your sentences in ‘-ing’ words,” he said to me. “Those are weak. You need more words ending in ‘-ed.’ Those are stronger. Think of it like a musician. He always finishes his piece strong. Other than that, keep it up.”

At the end of my nine months as a copy boy, I was promoted to yet another thankless job. But at least this one came with a desk and a chair and, more important, a $100 raise, pushing my salary up to $234 a week.



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