Cavagnaro’s Bar & Grill

In the summer of 1980—the summer I adopted Cavagnaro’s Bar & Grill as my local—I rented a house in the woods of East Hampton as a form of therapy. I hoped to recover the social skills I’d lost while writing my first book in near total isolation, in a dilapidated trailer in the Northern California wine country, where my only regular visitor was a seventy-five-year-old fishing buddy. Jack and I played cribbage for a nickel a point and drank Brown Derby beer with shots of Old Overholt back. I don’t recall either of us mentioning books or literature.