Gary taught English for sixteen years and quit to become a financial advisor so that he could pay the bills. Still, whatever he was doing on stage, he was writing in the wings. It had become his most satisfying work, born of the fact that he did not talk until he was five or read until he was fifteen. His schoolwork never suffered because it turned out he could remember everything. So, when he took his exams, he just gave the teachers back whatever they had given him in class. When he did begin to read and write it was at Kent School his fifth form (junior) year. His English teacher didn't know what to make of him. He could hardly write a complete sentence, no less an entire 400-word essay due each class period for the first two weeks he was there. Fortunately, after being accepted the June before, he had received a list from Kent's English Chair of "all the books a young man attending Kent has read by his fifth form year." Since he hadn't read any of them, with the prospect of attending Kent on the horizon, he happily spent the entire summer reading, eight hours a day, five days a week. At the end of each day, he would walk to Wantagh, take a bus to Jones Beach, and plunge into the Atlantic Ocean. So, he did a bit better at the reading than the writing for some time at Kent, but he got the hang of it well enough to pull him out of the fifth quintile by the end of his sixth form year. From there it took him four years at Cornell, three years as a Navy Journalist, two years at Oregon State, three summers at Bread Loaf School of English, and two summers at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, before he earned an "A" on all his essays, including his doctoral dissertation on Moby-Dick. All the while he was messing up sheets of paper writing stories and collecting rejection slips. Sixty-three years from the day his dad drove him across the bridge onto the Kent School campus, he published The Machination Trilogy: My Friend Billy, The Consummate Fix, and Repechage.
