Norman Green

Way Past Legal

On a street where I used to live, there was this kid down the block named Nicky. He was a beautiful kid, five or six years old, a born hustler, socialized way beyond his years. He had a father, I suppose, because somebody sired him, but I never met the guy. My impression of his mother was that she was a party girl, because she was rarely around. Nicky didn’t have a key so he was out on the street a lot, fending for himself. He used to come by my house, usually with some of the other neighborhood kids. ‘Hey, Norm! Can we play Intendo?’ What could you say? ‘Yeah, sure, knock yourself out. You had anything to eat yet? No? I didn’t think so. Let’s go ask Chris what she’s got.’ (Christine from Brooklyn. Kids follow her like she’s the Pied Piper.)

So Way Past Legal came from playing ‘what if’ with Nicky’s elusive progenitor. The book is written from his point of view. The guy is not a sympathetic character, not at first, but eventually you find out that he’s really just a regular guy who’s had a lot of bad breaks, and he’s doing the best he can.

The other lead character in the book is the wild Maine seacoast. I lived up there a couple of times, once in the early seventies and again in the late seventies. And I suppose it’s not the place that interested me so much as it was the people who lived there. The Downeast culture, at the time, was vastly different from what I had been exposed to in the other places I had lived. You could impress people in other places if you drove a Mercedes. You could impress a Mainer, maybe, if you had the means to drive a Mercedes but you chose to hang on to your ratty old pickup truck instead. Living up there changed my perceptions, and it changed the way I made value judgments.

I wanted to write about that gift that the people from the great state of Maine gave me. I don’t know if I did that effectively or not, but I do value what I learned in my time up there.

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