I was a good reporter, but more important than that, I was lucky. I started in Metro, like everybody else. I had been covering Long Island for two months when a black teenager was beaten to death in a white neighborhood. I was a twenty-one-year-old white guy from California—too new to New York not to ask everybody the obvious questions—and the minute you read my stories, you knew exactly what had happened. The folks in that neighborhood just hated black people, and they had pounded that poor kid until he was a bloody pulp. My stories ran on the front page for a week. There were more good assignments after that: a corruption scandal in Long Island City; a fabulous homicide in which a state court judge strangled his wife with a garter belt and nylons she’d gotten as a gift from her lover; a series about bad cops in the New York City police department.

And then in 1983, the paper needed someone to go to Beirut in a hurry, and I volunteered, and suddenly I was covering a war where they were putting pieces of U.S. marines in body bags. I was as lucky as those dead marines were unlucky. I was writing, doing, being—no gap between thought and action—and the paper was putting it all on page one. I was just twenty-four, much too young to be a foreign correspondent, but I was doing the job, and they let me stay. After four years in the Middle East, they sent me to Hong Kong, and four years after that to Paris. It wasn’t until I finally got to Paris—which was supposedly the great prize for having done so well—that I began to feel ordinary and bored. I was out of the zone, thinking too much about what I was doing. I had this feeling I’d already done all the French stories before: Algerian immigrants in Marseilles; trade wars with the United States; French politicians and their mistresses; the arrival of the Beaujolais Nouveau. It was a nonjob, really.

I missed the old days in Beirut and Hong Kong, where every morning there was the strong likelihood that someone completely bizarre would walk in off the street, unburdening me from the ordinariness of my life and introducing me to the strangeness of his or hers. That ever-present possibility of release had drawn me to the news business in the first place, and sustained me ever since. It was the perfect job: it offered a chance to consort with people at the far edges of life—people who broke all the rules—without actually having to break any myself.