About j
I’ve always enjoyed feeding people, made my first biscuits when I was five. While most kids watched Hop-a-long Cassidy, I was riding sidekick with the Galloping Gourmet. (Cookin’ Away With j: the man who takes the ‘t’ out of diet)
By nine I discovered music, sax, blues of all things—strange for an Irish/Italian white boy—and realized it was another way to feed people. I flunked 9th grade English three times and figured academia was not in the cards, so with sax and thumb I headed out on the road playing music for the next twelve years. The road hit a dead-end in Lexington, Kentucky, broke and stranded. Disco had hit the scene; we were all out of work.
Somehow I passed a GED and a SAT and wound up in college where an English professor, Pat Kazaily, pointed out, “Your spelling sucks and your grammar is atrocious, but you can tell a hellova story.” She took me under her wing and convinced me to major in English composition, of all things. I soon discovered that writing is another way to feed people. Basically, all I did was figure out how to take a sax solo on a key board—same game, different name—although my spelling still sucks and my grammar is still atrocious.
After college, there I was, writer/musician—two non-jobs. But I did have the two most important tools for any writer, a passport and a backpack. So I left the USofA and went back on the road for the next eight years writing, playing music, and traveling through the UK, Europe, the Mediterranean, North Africa, down the Nile, over to India, up to Nepal—where I spent a year trekking the Himalayas (The Keepers of Himal) — after which, I explored Thailand, Malaysia, Bali, and then up to Hong Kong, with twenty-dollars. But I found work as an assistant editor for Asia Travel Magazine.
This quasi-prestigious position got me into China during the ‘Gang of Four’ trial, just before China was about to open to the outside world. British Hong Kong got old after six-months, so I asked myself, were haven’t I been? I hadn’t been to the South Pacific. For that I needed a sailboat, which I calculated would take about $30,000., twenty-nine more than I had.
The next day a knock on the door from another traveler turned me onto Engrish in Japan. With blue Thai-silk suit, white socks and portfolio, I left for Kyoto and found day work with Dentzu Advertising and evenings teaching Engrish . Two years later I had $35,000 and a manuscript. Time to see what had become of ol’ friends back home.
All my ol’ friends had haircuts, jobs, house payments, and kids. I missed that transition. So I got an agent for my manuscript, went to Annapolis, bought a thirty-two foot sailboat, a ninety-eight page book on ‘How to Sail’—since I’d never been on one in my life—and left the next day. Two years later after sailing the Bahamas and the Caribbean, I made landfall in Key West, Florida with fifty-cents in my pocket. (...The Twain Shall Meet)
What hadn’t I done, I asked? I’d never been rich. I decided to try it. A few days later a friend of my agent, a real estate wiz kid who had read my manuscript, flew down one weekend curious to meet me. In three days we bought two houses with no money and put ten-thousand dollars in our pocket. I had found my new career.
In a year and a half I “owned” five houses, a hotel, and a youth hostel, all 1.8 million dollars over-leveraged, with a bank prez taking me to lunch and wanting to know if I needed anymore money. And that, I learned, is what it means to be rich. The more you owe, the richer you are.
Four years of playing Donald Trump of the Keys, 24/7, I had an unjust lawsuit and an incurable disease. The Dream Team lawyers took my checking account, the doctors took my savings account, but the court case got settled and the incurable disease somehow got miraculously cured.
Life had given me a second chance. I was not about to waste it. I dug up what I managed to hide from the lawyers and doctors, and with a carry on 
bag I hopped the next flight to Costa Rica, bought a hectare of jungle on an isolated Pacific beach (From The Jungle) overlooking incredible sunsets, built a grass-roof house, installed seven solar panels and a computer, and then wrote and wrote for the next 8-years, while listening to what nature had to say. (Imagine To Be Free – coming soon).
I knew, thou
gh, that I could not have thirty-miles of white-sand beach, a reef, and nature’s HDTV Pacific sunsets all to myself, forever. Eventually the bridges got built, the roads got graded, the power-grid arrived, and the tourists found me. Paradise lost.
One day a stock broker with more money than sense walked up the hill, took one quick look around, turned to me and asked, “How much?” I gave him my price, he wrote a check, and I was gone that afternoon. On the road, again.
Somehow I ended up in the Philippines, ran into a few ol’ road dawg pros who still had some kick left, formed the all-kano (Flip term for Americano) Blind Pig Blues Band, and packed ‘em in. But we needed a female voice. After 60 auditions, we finally found Shen, a Filipina who could wail, and a smile that needed no spotlight. Blind Pig was fun, nice to know we still had it, but life had other plans. Blind Pig dissolved, as bands tend to do. In the meantime, nature took its course with Shen and me.
Shen, however, was a package deal—five feral rice-paddy urchins, ages 2 to 9. Never having raised kids, it was a challenge to feed, house, clothes, and home’s cool. And, anyone who thinks they’re not my own, best not say it aloud, for all five of ‘em would whoop your ass.
How grateful I am that life did not pass without this experience—family, the most challengingly creative, rewarding, exciting adventure of all. Can’t wait til they grow into their backpacks and passports.
On the road again.