It happened pretty much by accident. Not that I wasn’t a reader, just that my choice of reading material was mostly comprised of comic books, Mad magazine, and TV Guide. In eighth grade we were assigned Moby Dick, and I recall being excited by the cover: a guy standing in a small lifeboat, harpoon raised, while a monster surfaced from the roiling sea. Wow! I thought. A horror story! I made it perhaps a quarter through—no confrontation with any giant white whale that I came across—before vowing to never again fall victim to another literary bait-and-switch.

And then came high school. The summer before freshman year, we were mailed a list of ten books and instructed to read at least four. Upon completion, our choices were to be summarized in a “writing journal” which would be collected the first day of classes. My older (and smarter) sister, knowing I wouldn’t bother on my own, dragged me to the public library and waited at the librarian’s desk like a prison guard during a conjugal visit.

Most of the listed books were there and I sought out the four thinnest volumes I could find. One of them was The Teahouse of the August Moon, not Vern Sneider’s novel, but the play adaptation by John Patrick. Maybe 120 pages including a generous smattering of photographs from the 1953 Broadway production. Looked like an easy read, so I snatched it.

In bed that night, scanning the selections I made, I discovered something about Teahouse that fascinated me. Several things, actually. It was a comedy. It dealt with the military, a place I pictured myself ending up after graduation. It hinted at interracial love, a subject I’d never given serious thought to, a topic I found very intriguing and somewhat taboo.

The plot, although I didn’t think so at the time, was rather formulaic. Following World War II, an army captain is sent to Okinawa in order to educate the native population in all ways American. A reversal takes place, and the man soon learns that other cultures, less driven, often offer a simpler and more satisfying way of life. (A theme repeated throughout literature and film. Everything from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love to the 1983 Scottish film, Local Hero.)

But Teahouse presented an experience foreign to me. It introduced me to the fact that a story could be told almost exclusively through dialogue. That the ethnocentricity of Captain Fisby, and the debilitating subordination of his concubine Lotus Blossom, were evident in what they said rather than what the author told us about them. Even their physical actions, dictated through stage direction, were minimal. (It’s one of the things—this ability to discover character through what she or he says rather than totally trusting narration—that I currently attempt to teach in my college writing courses.)

I felt both invigorated and saddened at the final curtain. Lovelorn. I was fourteen and foolishly tried to recapture the experience. I read No Time for Sergeants, and Stalag 17, and Bye Bye Birdie. I didn’t particularly care for any of them—I wanted Fisby and Lotus Blossom back—but at least I was reading. Maybe it was like a friend told me years later. “If you drink a bottle of wine on the French Riviera with someone you love, don’t expect to ever find that same wine again.”

Ironically, I’ve reread The Teahouse of the August Moon a couple of times. I now find the play dated, somewhat silly, a bit misogynistic. Pushed to the limit, I might even call it unconsciously racist and a shad xenophobic.

Or perhaps I’ve grown too old and over-educated.

But for a boy on Staten Island in the 1960’s, an introverted kid spending July and August doing nothing but sitting in his room or outside on his parents’ patio, it opened a portal. That summer I became Captain Fisby and, in my mind, rewrote the entire story. I imagined myself avoiding the mistakes he’d made, standing up to authority, allowing myself to fall in love with a woman unashamedly in love with me, and living together forever in a tropical nirvana far removed from the mundane suburbs of New York City.

It was corny and unrealistic, but I think it was also the time when I at least began to think of myself, if not as a writer, as a person with a story to tell.