I used to paint in the dayroom when I was in the band squadron, after duty, in tempera, on shirt cardboards.

I didn't mix colors but used the paint straight out of the jar.

I was experimenting with color, like Josef Albers.

I drew.

I had brought half a dozen records with me. West Coast jazz, mostly. Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank, Art Pepper, Shelly Manne. The soundtrack to The Wild One.

Bobby Bradford was in the band.

Ornette Coleman called Bobby Bradford the greatest trumpet player alive.

Bobby took me under his wing. He took my records off and traded them.

He brought back two records. Clifford Brown playing with Tadd Dameron's big band and the Sonny Rollins Quartet's Tenor Madness, with John Coltrane sitting in on the title song.

"Listen to these," he said.

I listened to them. Closely.

I realized that I would never be the musician that Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, and John Coltrane were, so what was the point of being a musician.

I didn't have it.

This made me look at my painting.

I would never be the painter Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning were, I was a dabbler. My drawings were doodles. My paintings were doodles with poster paint in the fields. My experiments with color were like a monkey trying to paint Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

But, since I wasn't practicing--I didn't practice because I knew practicing wouldn't make me a musician--I had a lot of time to read.

I read Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

This was an exciting reading experience for me, at 17 years old.

Kerouac made being a writer seem possible, to me.

He didn't make it seem easy--he went seven years between the publication of The Town and the City and the publication of On the Road--but he made it seem possible.

He went around having adventures. He wrote about them. His books were published. The old backlist-in-the-rucksack was, finally, published.

I would be a writer.

I could become a writer by practicing. That was the way you did it. You practiced.

So I knew when I was 17 years old that I was going to be a writer and I found out through a process of elimination.

Finding out I was not a musician or a painter were valuable lessons.

It saved me a lot of time.