As I headed north on Fifth Avenue, the city felt deserted in these lost, snowbound days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Turning up the shearling collar of my coat to keep the cold off my neck, I was curious why I couldn’t stop thinking about my father and uncle, and then it struck me that they had been responsible for my meeting Glenna.

It was the summer of 1968. I was working in the public-relations department at Danzig because I had recently earned some of the lowest grades in the history of Brooklyn College and failed to graduate after four years, which led my father to insist that I get a real job. Since he was head of PR, and either traveling or in a meeting, Uncle Jerr showed me the ropes. Banging out press releases and proofreading direct-mail pieces was a cinch, and it was a gas working for Uncle Jerr, who took PR a little less seriously than the fate of the Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers. He wasn’t exactly a degenerate gambler, since he avoided money trouble, but in the mornings when I went to get my assignments from him, my uncle had several sports sections opened up on his desk, and we would spend an hour going over the day’s starting pitchers before he called his bookie.

Sometimes, my father would drop in to see me. Once, he stopped by while I was reading Bernard Fall’s Street Without Joy. Fall had been killed in Vietnam on patrol with the Marines, and evidently, from the concern on my father’s face, he was familiar with Fall’s obituary.

My father asked, “How’s the book?”

“Interesting.”

He eyed me suspiciously. “There’s things more interesting than war,” he said, lighting a Lucky Strike. “I thought you’d like coming to work here. It’s no great shakes. But we’d be together. And you gotta work at being something.”

A tremor of guilt rolled through me. I hated disappointing him. “I’ve been thinking about being a writer. Like those stories I wrote for the lit mags.”

“Gordon, that writing was fine for high school and college. But how you gonna support yourself?”

I shrugged. Truth was, I didn’t have a clue of what to write about. Nor did I have any knowledge of how one becomes a writer, and I was convinced that I had no experience worth recording, which partially explained my attraction to Vietnam. Even if the war was shaping up into a grotesque mistake, I still wanted to see it for myself, though I was enough of a middle-class kid to be ashamed of feeling thrilled by the idea of going.

My father crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on my desk. “We’ll talk about the writing,” he said.

We didn’t talk about it again until August. Aunt Lil and Uncle Jerr had been to another peace rally in the city, and afterward they drove to Brooklyn. We were at the redwood table in the backyard, and my father was barbecuing steaks and knocking back Chivas on the rocks when he said, “Gordon, this writing plan is bullshit. You got better things to do.”