Choices in life got in way of being contender

“You don’t understand. I could’ve had class. I could’ve been a contender,” Marlon Brando tells his brother in “On the Waterfront.”

“Waterfront” was my favorite movie and not just because of Eva Marie Saint in her underwear. The “contender” line was perfect Brando and a perfect metaphor for my misspent life.

I could’ve been a contender.

The year was 1967 and I had decided that a career as an insurance underwriter was not my life’s calling. I couldn’t stay awake long enough to do the job (Not like now). So in the best traditions of Kerouac’s “On the Road,” I took off to find adventure.

The first stop was Mount Snow ski area in Vermont, where I got a job as a waiter, without a second of experience. Naturally, being a city kid, I had never even seen a pair of skis, let alone strapped them to my feet. Part of my morning assignment was to serve breakfast to the Austrian ski instructors. They were real pros with some Olympic experience. They kept offering to teach me how to ski, for nothing. They thought I was just a great project after they saw me falling down the slopes a few times.

Not me.

I was more interested in the night life as a ski bum. There were 100 places in the valley and they competed with each other to get the “ski bums” there on different nights. They offered cheap drinks, hundreds of women and endless rock ‘n’ roll bands. Who cared about skiing?

After a few months of the cold, I headed to Hollywood, Fla., and another job, waiting on tables. The Cubans were taking over the city and started with the hotel dining room at the Hollywood Beach Hotel. So I ended up working on the Patria, alias the Flying Cloud, the largest sailing vessel in the world. Some conglomerate had decided to rescue it after it sat dockside in Miami for a decade or two. The plan was to sail to Hong Kong for new decks, then to Sweden for new rigging, then to explore the rest of the world. The problem was first we had to take down the masts with virtually no experience and less equipment, all for about $20 a week and meals, if memory serves. But the boat was about to sail around the world, the chance of a lifetime!

Not me.

I decided this was much too dangerous, and paid much too little money, so I got a drive-away Cadillac bound for Los Angeles and ended up in San Francisco, right in the middle of the hippie madness when people were smoking everything but wallpaper to get high. I remember some people smoking bananas. Well, I think I do. Anyway, sitting around Berkeley one day, one of my long-haired new friends noted that I was a fair photographer and suggested that I look up his friends starting a new rock magazine. I had some experience with rock magazines in Boston, which were strictly cut-and-paste jobs of other lousy rock magazines. Besides, I had never heard of this rag, this Rolling Stone magazine.

Not me.

I ended up going back to Massachusetts and a job for $100 a week at the Attleboro Sun newspaper, my personal vision of hell.

One night, I was sitting around after attending the North Attleboro school board meeting, mulling over my lost opportunities of being taught to ski by international ski experts, sailing around the world or becoming the first Annie Liebowitz. The phone rang. It was my pal who stayed with the sailboat in Miami. Yes, in fact, he did sail around the world a time or two and he had the stories to prove it. Now he was working as an usher on “The Tonight show with Johnny Carson.” Did I want a job in New York City? A chance at showbiz?

Not me.

I had the North Attleboro school board to cover.

As Marlon Brando told his brother, Charlie, “I could’ve been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am. Let’s face it.”