My friend Sheldon Tromberg, whose work occasionally graces the op/ed page, called the other day to pitch his latest prose. He inquired after my son the college boy, as he always does. When Shelly lived in Washington and David was considering a college there they met one wintry afternoon, and Shelly was full of advice.
Now Shelly lives in San Francisco, high on a hill with the city spread before him, and he is still full of advice. "Take this down," Shelly directed.
"Number one. Tell him to get into CD-ROM. That's where the future is." CD-ROM is one of the new information technologies. You can put an entire encyclopedia on a disk, or a symphony -- or a movie, which I guess was Shelly's point. He and my son share an interest in movies. Shelly thinks that pretty soon we won't go to movie theaters and we won't rent videos; we'll watch our movies from CD-ROMs.
"Number two," said Shelly. "Learn the technical end. He must know how to use a camera and how to edit film. Even if he's going to write scripts, he's got to know the technical end."
I don't know that David's future will be writing film scripts in Hollywood, but he is writing one this year in college. And he is learning the technical end -- sometimes with unforeseen results. When I visited David last fall I unwittingly became the angel who bankrolled $30 worth of plastic fish tanks, fish food, glow-in-the-dark aquarium decor and duplicate goldfish (in case anything happened to one). This was all for a movie he was making.
As the camera rolled, first the starring fish and then the understudy were placed in a toilet bowl, where the film's anti-hero was supposed to discover them and transform his life. But both fish bolted for freedom down in the plumbing somewhere, which considerably transformed the film concept.
"Number three," said Shelly. "When he graduates, he must go to L.A. Get a master's from either Southern Cal or UCLA." The degree, I understood, is less important than simply hanging out in Los Angeles. That's where all the present and potential geniuses of filmdom congregate, so of course David must be there too and go to their parties.
"And number four," said Shelly. "The SOBs are the ones who succeed. So he should become an SOB."
I protested that I don't want David to be an SOB, and have even taken some pains to expunge incipient signs of SOBness when I detect them.
"It's not a matter of what you want," Shelly explained. 'It's a matter of his success in his chosen profession."
So I asked my class -- oh, yeah, I forgot to mention I teach opinion writing to a class at Loyola College. Those who can, do. Those who can't, become editors. And those who haven't a clue, teach.
Anyway, I asked my class, do you have to be an SOB to succeed?
The question seemed to startle the students. Mostly they hoped not. Somebody suggested that it was a semantic issue: When I do what I know to be necessary, and you don't like it, you think me an SOB, but in fact I am exercising leadership.
A couple of days later Shelly called again to learn the fate of his op/ed submission. (Bad news, I had to turn it down.)
"Shelly," I asked. "Are you an SOB?"
"Why do you say that?" bristled Shelly. He had forgotten his advice to my son and thought I was calling him a name. I reminded him, and Shelly waxed philosophical.
He has two friends who are SOBs and two who are not. He named the not-SOBs -- reputable journalists, but not the kind who go on television and get famous. The SOBs are worth $100 million and $200 million, respectively. Back when they were all young, 35 or 40 years ago, Shelly says, you could not have predicted which friends would turn out to be SOBs.
Today, he says, the man worth $100 million whiles away his days sitting on a couch playing computer games. The $200 million man can't sleep at night, because he's afraid someone will take his millions away from him.
I took this information back to my Loyola students. We concluded that if success means being good at what you do, and enjoying doing it, you probably need confidence in your judgment and abilities, which is not the same as being an SOB. Beyond that, success is being a happy, stable, productive citizen who can sleep at night.
Sweet dreams.
Hal Piper edits The Sun's Opinion * Commentary page.