For years, my father kept his family entertained with stories from his youth. Well, maybe not my mom so much. After all, she had heard all of them long before my brother and I came along. Well, maybe not my brother so much, as he really had little time for my father and his brand of semi-believable mishagas. So, in reality, my father kept me entertained with stories from his youth.
I have often mentioned my father's propensity to "stretch the truth" in nearly everything he said. He told great stories, but later in life, I came to discover that a good 95 to 99 percent of what he said was total fabrication. So the real difference between my dad and someone like Stephen King — besides the money and fame — is everyone knows the stuff Stephen King writes about is made up and he makes no effort to say otherwise. Well, that and the fact that Stephen King is a published author, many times over, as a matter of fact. Well, back in the early 70s, my father had hoped to change that.
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selections from the
Dad Pincus collection |
My father was a voracious reader, although his choice of reading material was questionable. He would go back and forth between nationwide best-sellers, usually purchased in paperback form from a bookseller in a nearby discount market who sold books months after their initial release at a huge reduction in price. I would sometimes get outdated comic books and
Mad magazines there, while my dad stocked up on an assortment of books that he would no doubt breeze through in the coming weeks. My dad read
The Godfather and a number of Ian Fleming books about super-spy James Bond. In between, he'd sneak in several thin tomes with lurid covers featuring scantily-clad, voluptuous
femme fatales pawing subserviently at the feet of some muscular, T-shirted hulk. They had slightly suggestive titles like
I'm for Hire and
Sinful Sisters and my dad tried to hide them from his impressionable sons — unsuccessfully, I might add.
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| Inspiration |
One of his favorite mainstream authors was the prolific Philip Roth. Roth was a best-selling author who wrote a book in 1971 called
Our Gang. Although Roth reminisced about his childhood in
other novels, I don't believe that was the topic of
Our Gang. Nevertheless, I
do think that
it was my father's inspiration. My brother had just received a manual typewriter as a gift. He hoped it would serve to help his schoolwork appear more impressive, but actually, my brother was a budding writer, and he eventually made it his chosen career. (A career, incidentally, from which he recently retired.) One day, my father announced that
he was going to write a book. Now, my father often made "announcements" and rarely followed through. He would announce "This weekend, we will paint your bedroom!" and, come Saturday, we'd go out to a local hardware store to purchase a few gallons of neutral-colored paint (we had no input into the color selection). So far, Dad looked as though he was "gung ho" on this project. When we got home, Dad would put on his "painting costume," which consisted of a paint-splattered shirt and pants (I have no clue where these came from and how they became paint-splattered) and a canvas painter's cap that he picked off the counter of the hardware store as we left. He'd parade around in his duds, announcing his plans on how to tackle this venture. Then, he'd grab a paintbrush, swipe a few haphazard brushstrokes in the middle of a wall.... and leave to go smoke a few dozen cigarettes. And read. He'd go read. My mom, my brother and I were left to cover his half-assed efforts and finish the room ourselves. So when Dad Pincus "announced" that he was going to write a book, we had heard it all before and were less than enthused. But, true to his word, he sat down at my brother's typewriter and, with no previous writing or practical typing experience, he began to bang on those keys, single finger style.
Among the tales my father liked to spin, were stories about growing up in West Philadelphia — decades before Will Smith's behavior sent him for a rehabilitative stretch under Uncle Phil's watchful eye in Bel Air. At the time, West Philadelphia was a working-class, predominantly Jewish neighborhood and the majority of my dad's pals fit into that category. He knew guys whose family ran the local candy store or car repair. My dad's father drove a trolley. But, despite their blue-collar lifestyle, they had their share of interesting adventures... according to my dad. There were scraps at school and antics on the playgrounds and trips to the nearby Jersey Shore. The stories would sometimes change details, depending on how my father felt during a particular retelling. Each one of his friends had a colorful nickname. There was "Sarge," so named because he dressed as a soldier for Halloween one year. There was "Hook," who had a rather prominent nose. My dad was given the nickname "Pinky," an obvious play on his surname. Sometimes it was lengthened to "Pinky McGee" for no apparent reason. I loved hearing about my dad's friends and the origins of their various monikers. And secretly, I was hoping to — one day — read my dad's completed book.
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| Inspiration |
My dad selected the perfect title for his memoir-in-progress. It was to be called "No Sand Tomorrow." This was a reference to an oft-told story about a group of my dad's friends spending a weekend in Atlantic City. While cavorting on the beach, one guy — who they called "Dopey," stemming from his reputation for being not-too-bright — pointed to a posted sign and questioned its wording. "Does the beach get regular deliveries of sand?" he asked aloud. His friends appeared puzzled and they asked their pal to elaborate. He pointed to the sign and read what
he interpreted as its message. "It says 'No Sand Tomorrow'," he stated. His colleagues approached the sign-in-question from the back. When they all silently read the sign, they simultaneously burst out laughing. The sign said "No Sand Throwing" and it confirmed tagging their friend as "Dopey" was right on the money.
A good portion of the day was spent typing and retyping this story. When my dad decided that he was able to properly convey this tale from his youth in a way that achieved both sentimentality and humor, he yanked the page from between the typewriter's rollers and read it to his family... over and over and over again... each time as though was reading it for the first time. Then, he retired to his bedroom to smoke and read.
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Another
inspiration |
Don't bother checking Amazon or Barnes and Noble or your favorite local used book reseller. You won't find a copy of
No Sand Tomorrow anywhere. It never made it to publication. Actually, it never made it past that single paragraph. The rest of my dad's book was puffed away in the smoke of countless Viceroys and forgotten in the jumble of the many chapters of some pen-named hack churning out erotic sagas in a dimly-lit room.
My dad was just a guy who liked to announce things he never intended on finishing.
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