Before the Pocket Books deal, I'd expected to build my career slowly but steadily on the stunning success of my first novel, not be catapulted into the financial stratosphere. Once the shock subsided, I celebrated having been chosen to be among of the few authors who make a living at their work. I felt Herb's faith in me as an awesome responsibility and made plans to produce a respectable body of work, year by year. I wanted a very basic sense of economic justice to be the theme that tied all my novels together. When I mentioned this ambition to Herb, half expecting him to gently constrain me, he grabbed me by the shoulders and bellowed, “Excellent!”

        With my first advance check from Pocket Books, Abe Friedman advised that I buy a couple of condominium units in the Dakota Building, where John Lennon and Oko would soon live. My orphan's complex reared its ugly head and I said, “I don't want to be a landlord.”
        “All right,” said Abe, with a sigh of frustration, “I'll get you a portfolio of blue chips.”
        Abe preached that too many artists and professional athletes, upon finding themselves suddenly with big incomes, wind up flat busted, wondering where it all went. He feared this could happen to me. I was so full of arrogance and ignorance, I thought there was no way it could happen to me.
        My celebration was cut short when Abe called late one night: “Grab your toothbrush and hop the first plane to Las Vegas. I'll have a divorce lawyer meet you there, help you get settled.” The wife I thought I had divorced in Pennsylvania had gotten wind of the Pocket Books deal, had again scuttled our Pennsylvania divorce and had hired a new lawyer in New York City. “If you aren't gone by tomorrow morning,” warned Abe, “they'll throw you in The Tombs.”        
        “The Tombs?”
        “It's a place you don't want to go. Grab your toothbrush and get out of town.”
        This came within a year after I'd fled Vero Beach because a group of right-wing racists were about to put me in a cement coffin and sink me to the bottom of Indian River because I'd written an article published in a New York weekly about how segregation was maintained in the Deep South. I had foiled those would-be killers by fleeing to New York City. Now I had to flee New York City to avoid being put in something called The Tombs, described as an ancient hellhole. Charles Dickens, in his American Notes written in 1842, said of it: “What is this dismal fronted pile of bastard Egyptian, like an enchanter's place in a melodrama?”
        Its official name in the 1960s was The New York Hall of Justice and House of Detention. It had originally been built in 1811 on a filled-in polluted lake in lower Manhattan. In the 1960s, a wife who felt wronged could have her husband consigned to this dungeon, and he'd languish there until she gave the word to release him. It was the best arm-twister any divorce lawyer in New York City ever had. I felt outraged that Millie would even think of slapping me into this den of poisoned vapors. What had begun as a friendly parting of the ways, before my first novel had been published, had escalated with the Elkins deal, and now again with the Pocket Books deal.

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