From a very young age I was looking for male role models—men who were intelligent, strong, talented, brave, and successful. Men who were “cool” as I understood the word, who sought adventure, provided for their families, and who could face difficult situations. By studying their lives, I thought I could learn something about how they did what they were able to do.

In my boyhood Brooklyn neighborhood, there were no men who were any of those things. In fact, they were just the opposite: alcoholic and unsuccessful, bad husbands and bad fathers, bad brothers and bad sons to parents who were getting ready to die in their sixties. Many were unemployed. Others had abandoned their families. Most had little education; very few of my neighborhood’s residents had gone beyond elementary school. Some went to junior high for a year, were working by the age of fifteen, and married before they were twenty. Nobody I knew went to college. Even the nuns who taught me, most of them anyway, were not college graduates.

Though the term “role model” did not exist, the nuns taught us to model our lives on the lives of our parish priests, who were said to be the closest thing in this world to Jesus Christ. As an altar boy, I was able to see priests up close, and most of them were not what the nuns had taught me.

Let me say up front that I became an altar boy not out of any religious fervor but purely for the money. I needed to make money. I liked having money. And an altar boy could make money if he knew the system, was willing to work hard, and hustled. There was no money to be earned from serving daily or Sunday mass, but a determined boy could make good money from baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

An altar boy had to be present at baptisms to hold the blessed oil and holy candle and hand the towel to the priest to dry the infant’s head after it had been doused with holy water. The baby’s godfather always gave the priest an envelope at the end of the service or handed the altar boy fifty cents, or a whole dollar if he was lucky. There were two altar boys at weddings, and the best man gave each of us fifty cents—a dollar if it was an Italian wedding. Italians were the most generous. I won’t say who were the least.

At funerals, there were four altar boys to assist with the requiem mass, the burning of the incense, and the procession down the center aisle behind the casket. It was quite an impressive sendoff, and the funeral director gave a dollar to the lead altar boy, who split it four ways. 

To get on the list of altar boys for these money-making services, you had to work the six or seven o’clock masses year-round, never missing a day no matter what. So that’s what I did. I had a perfect record of serving the six a.m. mass every week, and I was rewarded. On my best week I made $4.75, equivalent in today’s money to about fifty bucks—big money for a ten- or eleven-year-old Brooklyn boy. But it was not easy money. It was hard work. And it was an education. As I said, I saw the priests up close, and they were not what the nuns thought they were. 

As an altar boy, I helped the priests get ready for the early morning masses, including helping them get dressed in their vestments. Many times, they would stagger into the sacristy hungover, often vomiting in the small sink without cleaning up after themselves. I was very familiar with the smell of alcohol on a morning breath, made worse by cigarette smoke—most of them were secret smokers, often in the sacristy. Many of them needed a bath. One in particular passed the worst smelling gas and never once said “excuse me.” We were often late coming out, and when the priests climbed the two steps up to the altar, they sometimes needed to be helped. Reading the liturgy in Latin could be challenging in their condition, and they would often mumble their way through the mass.

Many of these priests were rude, petty, and unhappy men. Many had other problems. Some had been forced into the priesthood by parents who wanted a priest in the family. They were not role models—I never found any of them to be anything like Jesus Christ, and as I got older, there was no way I was going to confess my sins to any of them.

Because the life around me offered no role models, I turned to books, which I borrowed from the Brooklyn Public Library, and the newspapers that were sold at my neighborhood candy stores: not the New York Times or Herald Tribune, but just the Brooklyn Eagle and tabloids like the New York News and Daily Mirror.

When I was seven my aunt Ella give me a copy of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin for Christmas. I read it several times. I loved that book, and Franklin became the person I looked up to the most. The man as he described himself was someone to be admired. And I admired him! For his unique intellect. His inventiveness, ambition, and charm. For his curiosity. There has never been anyone like him—I felt that way about him at age seven, and I still do.

Another person I admired was Mark Twain. I read all his works. He was someone who could create memorable characters, had a great understanding of people, and could take his readers to places and events in a way that nobody else could, then or now. I wished then and still do that I could write like Mark Twain. In my opinion nobody has come even close.