Five Things I Got Wrong in My First Novel, According to My Dad

My dad worked with kids for forty years, teenage boys mostly, who’d been in trouble and were committed through the state to live somewhere else a while in hopes of getting themselves together. They’d grown up without parents, surrounded by poverty and violence. They’d sold drugs. They’d stolen cars and robbed people.

Some had done worse. Other boys hadn’t really done much at all, but they didn’t have a home. They needed somewhere to go.

I grew up listening to their stories. Then, for a long time, I forgot them.

Diapers, Not Clothes
About seven years ago, for reasons I don’t exactly recall, though it might have had a lot to do with having my own son, I wrote a story set in a boys’ home. The setting came back to me vividly, and I found myself writing about a kid who embraces another kid and consoles him.

The teenagers I’d known didn’t really put their hands on each other. They were street kids and boys from nowhere, back in the 1980s—they were rough. But they could surprise you.

What I didn’t recall I was free to invent, and what I did remember I was free to ignore. Everything I wrote seemed to come from the same place, whether it had happened or not.

I imagined that one of them had a child he’d never seen. He was a teenage father, far from home, and when he embraces a chubby twelve-year-old who has tried to run away, I realized it was the closest he’d ever get to hugging his son. The story was called “Damico.” People read it and liked it. I sent it to my dad and he informed me that certain parts I thought I had imagined were real. There really was a boy who’d had a baby back home.

“But you got something wrong,” Dad told me.

I’d written a scene where the kid’s group members, knowing he wanted to provide for his son but could not, pooled their money and bought his child some clothes.

“That happened,” Dad said. “But it wasn’t clothes. It was diapers. The boys bought his baby some diapers.”

Too Mean
It was a small detail I didn’t see as a mistake so much as a sign that I was on the right track. Over the next year I began to write about other boys, and what began as a story became a novel. I sent my dad a chapter at a time. He delighted in those moments where fact and fiction convened. Again and again, kids I thought I had imagined were rooted in reality.

The boy who’d ordered a pizza and tried to rob the deliveryman? That kid who’d been shot in his feet? The one who wouldn’t stop running away? They were real, Dad insisted.

“All your characters have names,” he said. “You just don’t know who they are.”

But I knew a lot of them. Growing up, I was always around the home. I ate supper with the boys and sat in on group counseling and shot pool in the dayroom. If the group was headed somewhere, I’d hop on the van and ride along with them—to basketball games, softball tournaments.

All those memories seeded my imagination. What I didn’t recall I was free to invent, and what I did remember I was free to ignore. Everything I wrote seemed to come from the same place, whether it had happened or not.

I grew more confident in my ability to shape a world as I had also known it. The boys cared about each other, but they could be cruel too. I set a scene on our old Ford Econoline van, showing how they could invert the language of treatment and use the vernacular of the home against one another. They could tell a new peer to speak up, for instance, when they wanted him to repeat—louder—an embarrassing detail of his life. They could point out problems that weren’t problems, just to make a peer bring them up in group. Quietly, subtly, they could tell each other that they didn’t have anybody, that they weren’t ever going home.

“My boys were never that mean to each other,” my dad insisted.

But those old Econolines were huge, three rows of vinyl-wrapped bench seats divided by whispers and chatter.

“You were driving,” I reminded him.

“So.”

“You were up front. I was the one in the back with them.”

Tonyboy Was Not Crazy
Some of the boys were like brothers to me. Others were nuts. One kid had eaten a light bulb, but I didn’t write him or remember him the way my dad did.

“Why do you call him Tonyboy? That was William —— who did that. William ate the light bulb.”

“I remember him,” I said. “You got him out of the psych ward to play in a basketball tournament.”

“I did not.”

“He was six-foot-six, Dad. You wanted to win.”

“That wasn’t why I got him out.”

“Why’d you get him out?”

“Because he was a kid in a psych ward. I wasn’t going to leave him there.”

He was sixteen years old and had eyes bruised and sparkling. He’d been through some awful places, places worse than psych wards and group homes. After we won the tournament, beating the other boys’ homes, he grabbed me and lifted me high up onto his massive shoulders for a mad, celebratory dash around the court. I was eight, thrilled and a little terrified.

“Was he crazy, Dad?”

“He wasn’t crazy.”

“Why did he eat that light bulb?”

“He wanted everyone to think he was crazy. He wanted to go home.”

A Cadillac, Not a Rolex
Other boys did not want to leave. They didn’t have anything to go home to. Or they didn’t believe they could make it, being sent back into the very situations they had failed to escape in the first place.

A mother asked my dad once how long he was allowed to keep her son. Dad didn’t understand. He thought she was there to get the kid, to take him home, but she was asking how long he could stay.

“He’s safe here,” she said.

Sometimes kids graduated and went home, then called from prison.

Some came back to visit. You could tell by their shoes what they’d been up to. You could tell by the watches that slid up and down their wrists.

I put a nice watch on a kid in my book. He was a composite character, a product not only of the boys I’d grown up around but also the ones I’d worked with when I got older. Dad was pretty sure he knew him.

“Damian ——,” he said. “He came back to see us one time driving a Cadillac.”

Dad asked him, “Where’d you get the car, Damian?”

“Friend loaned it to me.”

This was a kid the other boys looked up to. He circled up with his old group and told them about the world, what all was out there. He was doing well. They were proud of him.

Other boys did not want to leave. They didn’t have anything to go home to. Or they didn’t believe they could make it, being sent back into the very situations they had failed to escape in the first place.

They said, “Where’d you get that Cadillac, Damian?”

“Friend loaned it to me.”

A couple of nights later the phone rang. Night shift picked up. It was Damian, sitting in jail somewhere for stealing the car.

“Tell peers I’m sorry,” he said. “Tell them I’ll come back and see them when I get out.”

Not Young Enough
I had all these boys I was writing about, but they needed a director and counselor, someone there at the home with them. I named the guy Mr. Watts. I put him in a scene with Tonyboy, and had Tonyboy headbutt him between the eyes.

The next day Mr. Watts comes to work with his eye blacked but somewhat hidden with makeup. He doesn’t want the boys to see how badly he was hurt.

“I wore sunglasses,” Dad said. “A kid punched me in the face. I saw the punch coming, but I couldn’t move. I was shocked I got hit. I wore sunglasses to work the next day to hide it.”

“Mr. Watts isn’t you, Dad.”

He was quiet a moment. “He drives a Chevette.”

“So.”

“That’s what I drove back then. He wears Reeboks and blue jeans. I wore Reeboks and blue jeans.”

“He’s based on you, but he’s not you.”

“His name is Rocky,” replied my dad, whose name is also Rocky.

It was hard on him to see a character he recognized as a younger version of himself, flawed but caring, surrounded by the boys he’d spent his career working with. There was pain remembering the kids he’d lost, the lives he’d had in his hands. But our conversations made the book better.

I read through it one last time before it was sent to editors—three hundred pages of teenage boys trying to get themselves together. I found a mistake. Mr. Watts was too young, I realized. I’d made him twenty-eight years old. It didn’t seem realistic that someone not all that much older than the boys themselves could be in charge of so many troubled lives.

“Joe,” my dad said. “I was twenty-six.”

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