Category:

I also hope I succeed in answering the question of where my ideas come from. I'll start by talking about two people who were major influences on me, especially in my early life—two people without whom I would literally not exist.

I refer, of course, to Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty.

But seriously, it's time to meet my parents.

CHAPTER ONE

MOM AND DAD

Like so many members of the Baby Boom generation, I started out as a baby.

This happened in 1947, in Armonk, New York, a hamlet (yes, a hamlet; Google it) about thirty miles north of New York City.

Today Armonk is a prestigious address. IBM has its world headquarters there. It's a tony little town, a power hamlet, with high-priced real estate and an affluent population. Today you can't throw a rock in Armonk without hitting a hedge-fund manager.

It wasn't like that when I was growing up. My friends and I threw a great many rocks (we didn't have video games) but to the best of my recollection we never hit anybody affluent.

Back then Armonk was a village of around two thousand people, pretty much all of whom knew each other. There were some well-to-do residents and some who commuted to corporate jobs in the city. But there were also working-class families and tradespeople. Among our neighbors were two carpenters and two plumbers. This was fortunate for my father, who needed a lot of advice on carpentry and plumbing, because he was building our house.

My father wasn't in construction; he was a Presbyterian minister. The reason he was building our house was that he didn't have the money to hire somebody else to do it. So he did it himself, starting with the foundation, which he dug by hand.

Dad learned house-building as he went along, and it did not always go smoothly. I remember once he was trying, unsuccessfully, to hang a door for the better part of an afternoon. He finally gave up and sent me to our neighbors, the Petersons, to see if Henry Peterson might be available for a consult. Henry, an older Swedish gentleman, was a friend of my father and a master carpenter.

When Henry saw what Dad had done to the door, he shook his head and said, "Dave, Dave, Dave," which, with his Swedish accent, came out as "Dafe, Dafe, Dafe." Then he grabbed some tools and hung the door expertly in a few minutes. Which I imagine is what my father was hoping would happen.

(The Petersons were great neighbors. When I had to sell candy for Little League, I always went to them first, because Mrs. Peterson was really nice. I hated having to sell things. My sales pitch was "You don't want to buy any Little League candy, do you?" But Mrs. Peterson always insisted that I sell her some.)

So throughout my childhood, the Barry house was basically a working construction site, with unfinished walls and ceilings, building materials lying around and the occasional random electrical wire sticking out from somewhere. Dad spent many, many weekends and evenings working on the house, and although it improved over the years, it was never really 100 percent finished, at least not while I lived there.

Our house had quirks. We got our water from a well, and from time to time the water would stop running, which meant somebody had to prime the pump. This was usually my job, especially if Dad was at work. I'd grab a flashlight and go out to the pump house, which was a dank, low-ceilinged subterranean shack containing the pump and approximately four hundred trillion spiders. I'd climb down in there, unscrew the plug, pucker up and blow air into the pumpAnchor1 until it was primed, and we had running water again, at least temporarily. Over the years I primed the pump many, many times. The spiders would be like, "Oh, YOU again."

We lived on a one-lane dirt road, maybe a half mile long, with three other families. The town didn't maintain our road, so when it snowed, it was up to the families—the dads, really—to clear off the snow. For years the system they used was to put tire chains on somebody's car and use it to tow a homemade V-shaped wooden plow, which theoretically would push the snow off to the sides of the road. This was not a great system. The rope that pulled the plow was always breaking, and the car was always getting stuck. So the dads spent a lot of time pushing the car, shouting instructions to each other, getting red-faced, sometimes saying bad words, sometimes stopping to catch their breath and—as dads did back then whenever they had a spare moment—fire up cigarettes.2