I had a very specific idea of what a writer looked like. During the fifteen years I spent producing film and television, I crossed paths with just about every kind of creative person imaginable, each carrying the equipment of their particular species. Directors arrived with storyboards and cinematographers debated lenses with the solemnity of men discussing religion, while engineers unfolded blueprints until there was nowhere left to put your coffee. Producers like me carried schedules, budgets, and the slightly delusional confidence that everything would be finished by Friday because we’d already made the unfortunate decision to promise the client it would be.

The writers carried yellow legal pads that looked exhausted before the meeting began, their pages covered with scratched-out sentences, arrows running into margins and handwritten additions squeezed into spaces where no further thought should reasonably have fit. While we worried about delivery dates, they could spend fifteen minutes deciding whether a man should look out a window or stare out a window, until an engineer finally pointed out that the words meant essentially the same thing.

The writer explained that they didn’t feel the same, which made very little sense to me then and considerably more sense now. But of all the writers who wandered through our production company, the one who permanently became a writer in my imagination was Kevin, and nearly forty years later I still see his ashtray before I see his face.

It was an enormous hand-blown bowl of dark glass with I ONLY SMOKE WHEN I DRINK written across it, a declaration usually accompanied by a crystal tumbler of eighteen-year-old Scotch. The bowl overflowed with Virginia Slim Lights Menthols, those impossibly long white cigarettes looking strangely delicate between the fingers of such a large man, their crushed remains collecting in a tiny burned forest on his coffee table.

One of his more recent girlfriends had assembled an entire cigarette tray so he would never be more than an arm’s reach from a pack or a lighter, a level of romantic preparedness I’m not sure I’ve encountered before or since. Between that tray and the ashtray, she had apparently identified the practical requirements of loving Kevin and organized them within reach.

His house smelled of menthol smoke, Scotch, old books, wool and paper, with years of cigarettes worked so deeply into the furnishings that opening a window would have been less an act of ventilation than an insult to the architecture.

Kevin was a big man with skin so pale it was nearly translucent, as though sunshine had been offered to him years earlier and he’d politely declined. His long red hair slipped into his mouth while he talked and every few minutes he’d blow it away without losing his place in the story, then reach for another Virginia Slim and continue. He shuffled between rooms with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, never appearing especially persuaded by anyone else’s need to hurry.

Once he started telling a story, you generally forgot whatever you’d been in a hurry to do. My favorite concerned his great-grandfather, whom Kevin swore had invented the escalator, and whether his family tree could withstand historical scrutiny hardly mattered once he had everybody leaning closer.

He could begin with machinery and somehow arrive at a person, which helped explain why Westinghouse, Respironics and MSA requested him by name. Engineers would sit across from him explaining equipment I barely understood while he smoked and scribbled until their specifications came back sounding like something a human being might care about.

Then one January morning ten Westinghouse engineers arrived at our production company for a script-development meeting, and Kevin failed to arrive with them.

Coffee steamed beside the blueprints and coats hung where we’d put them as nine o’clock became nine-fifteen and then nine-thirty, with the glances toward the conference-room door becoming increasingly directed at me. Apparently being the producer made the whereabouts of a missing writer during a Pittsburgh snowstorm another item on my list of responsibilities.

I smiled because producers become very good at smiling while internally calculating how many things are currently on fire, and announced that I was going to check with our chef about freshly baked croissants and an assortment of jams.

Then I grabbed my coat and ran to the car, leaving ten engineers temporarily in the care of breakfast pastries.

Snow softened Pittsburgh into shades of white and gray as I climbed the winding roads toward Mount Washington, the windshield wipers struggling while the seat heater attempted to restore feeling to my thighs. When I reached Kevin’s house, the snow was untouched, with no tire tracks coming out of the driveway and no footprints suggesting he’d attempted to leave.

I climbed the steps and knocked, waited, and knocked harder before trying the doorknob, which turned easily beneath my hand. Warm air met me as I opened the door, and the smell was so thoroughly Kevin I probably could have found the place blindfolded. Books stood in uneven towers along the walls and yellow legal pads occupied tables and chairs, their pages crowded with arrows and crossed-out sentences and handwriting considerably more energetic than their author.

Kevin was asleep on the living-room floor with his bathrobe open at the collar and his long red hair covering part of his face, one arm stretched toward an empty crystal tumbler just beyond his fingertips. For a few seconds I stood there listening to a clock tick somewhere behind me while ten Westinghouse engineers sat downtown waiting for this enormous pale man to explain their company back to them.

I went into the kitchen for a glass of water and knelt beside him, saying his name and touching his shoulder until his eyes opened. He looked at me without recognition and then toward the window and the clock, allowing me to watch the pieces slowly arrange themselves until his face changed.

“Oh… shit,” he said, which spared both of us the need for a lengthy discussion.

He pushed himself off the floor and disappeared down the hallway while I waited among enough secondhand smoke to develop a habit of my own. A few minutes later he reappeared in a wrinkled corduroy jacket with his hair only marginally improved and the faint smell of Scotch still traveling with him.

On the way out he reached for his yellow legal pad and announced, “Give me a double,” before taking a double shot of Scotch, apparently satisfied that he now had everything necessary to conduct business. I’d left ten Westinghouse engineers waiting over coffee and croissants while their writer was fortifying himself for the meeting with eighteen-year-old Scotch, and somehow I remained the person responsible for making sure this all went well.

Within a week another Kevin script landed on my desk, and nobody at Westinghouse seemed especially concerned that its author had required retrieval from his living-room floor. They loved the pages and asked for him again, which may have been when I decided writers operated under workplace rules unavailable to the rest of us.

For years afterward the word writer brought me straight back to Kevin’s living room, where smoke curled above the ashtray, and red hair fell across his face while a pencil moved over yellow paper. I certainly never imagined myself occupying that position, particularly since I’d already seen what could happen when the producer had to come looking for you.

At fifty-eight, I sat down to write my first book with none of the equipment I’d associated with the profession. I’d given up cigarettes years earlier, and Scotch was unlikely to improve my manuscript, while my habit of waking before dawn eliminated any need for someone to retrieve me through a blizzard.

Recently I’ve been writing even more than usual, often beginning while the windows are still black and the house is quiet enough to hear the coffee maker working. A few weeks ago I found an old oversized sweater in my closet, soft with age and stretched enough to fit comfortably over my pajamas, and pulled it on before sitting down at the computer. I wore it again the next morning and the morning after that until it became the thing I reached for before dawn without turning on the closet light.

One morning Tom found me in my pajamas and that sweater with my curls doing whatever they’d decided to do overnight and coffee beside the keyboard. I’d been moving a paragraph around long enough to rewrite it, read it aloud and put it back, eventually questioning the emotional integrity of one completely innocent comma.

He stood there taking in the sweater and the hair and whatever expression a woman wears after spending two hours arguing with words before sunrise.

“I guess you’re officially a writer now with that Hemingway sweater,” he said, leaving me to look down at what I was wearing and consider how this had happened.

For a moment I was back in Kevin’s living room with the menthol smoke and the eighteen-year-old Scotch and the red hair falling over a yellow legal pad, while somewhere downtown ten engineers waited for a script meeting to begin.

Nearly forty years later, I was sitting in my pajamas before sunrise wearing an old sweater and refusing to move on until a sentence felt right, which meant Kevin had finally made his point about looking out a window versus staring through one.

God help me if Tom ever brings home an ashtray because I’m beginning to understand how a girlfriend might decide the most useful thing she could do was organize the equipment.

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Random Thoughts From the Shady Side 🌸

These are the stories that wander into my head while I’m drinking coffee, digging through closets, arguing with commas, or remembering people I haven’t thought about in forty years. Some become bigger stories. Some are simply thoughts I couldn’t leave alone.

If you’re new here and want to wander a little deeper into my life, the longer stories live here: Read more from The Shady Side → The Shady Side of Friendship

Fair warning: it gets considerably shadier from there.