When I was about fifteen, I developed an obsession with the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It is a wonderful place that wraps around the back of the granite walls of the Brooklyn Museum. I would take the #2 train of a Sunday and stroll its grounds in a sort of fugue.

I wouldn’t see the old ladies with their walkers or the bearded hippies studying the vegetable garden or the Bangladeshi families in their Sunday best taking family photos with their Instamatics.

They didn’t exist because I was strolling the grounds of my estate.

I would listen to the birds, inhale the scent of wisteria, and gaze up at the walls of my manor house in the distance. For hours, I would just perambulate in my tweed suit, hands clasped behind my back, smiling to myself, whistling quietly.

I would slip a book from my pocket and sit on a bench to read a few pages of a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

Wodehouse provided much of the raw material for my fantasies. He wrote novels with essentially the same plot, comedies about the mishaps of neer-do-well members of well-connected families on weekends away in the country. He wrote 97 of them. I read them all, scooping them off dusty shelves at the public library or second-hand book shops.

I also devoured R.F. Delderfield, W.S. Maugham, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead, Frank Richard’s Billy Bunter books, The Forsyte Saga, Upstairs Downstairs, anything from the first three decades of the century that would transport me into an upper crusty fantasy of ivy-covered walls and elbow patches.

This was Brooklyn in the seventies, mind you, and what’s the first association you probably have with that place and era? Saturday Night Fever, right? John Travolta in a Qiana shirt and a white suit, gliding across the dance floor of 2001 Odyssey.

That was not me.

When I got to Princeton, a friend said, "Danny's grandfather made a deal with him: he'd pay his tuition if Danny agreed to wear his clothes." It was somewhat true — I did wear three-piece suits like those in the closet of my grandfather, the German-born doctor with the Pakistani tailor. Many of my silk ties were indeed his hand-me-downs, though I was six inches taller than the esteemed doctor and his actual suits had stopped fitting when I was twelve.

I went to Princeton because F. Scott Fitzgerald went there. I applied early decision, got in, and never visited another campus. Princeton had the ivy and the gothic buildings, so I spent much of my first few years there in the same reverie I’d attained in the Botanical Gardens, oblivious to the 1970s happening around me, intoxicated by history.

When I was invited to bicker at Ivy, the oldest, most exclusive, and stuffiest of the eating clubs (Princeton’s version of a fraternity), I slithered right into its formal parties and gentleman’s club ambiance straight out of Mayfair or Pall Mall.

It was only when I turned twenty that I discovered that most women couldn’t stand the bro-y atmosphere at the Ivy club and were confused as to why I was there. I resigned soon thereafter.

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But I wasn’t just a snob; I was a pedant, too.

When I was fifteen, I inherited my mother’s old manual typewriter. I began a catalog containing a detailed description of every book I read, the dates of publication, the page count, and a summary of its plot, all typed onto index cards and stored in a metal box.

I’d read about commonplace books in some Victorian novel and decided it was quite the thing a gentleman should maintain. So I inaugurated a volume of my own, in which I would copy out piquant quotes from all the books I was reading, festooned with marginalia (Well said! Rather insightful, what?).

My grandfather smoked a pipe and had a rack of them on his desk. I grew to love the smell of pipe tobacco, fresh or burning, and inevitably, I tried to become a pipe smoker myself. At fifteen. While my peers had bongs and rolling papers, I would sneak around with a hand-me-down pipe and a tin of Prince Albert tobacco.

Alone in my room, I would pull out my pipe cleaners and talk to myself. I would stand in the shower or stroll my estate grounds, talking in various accents. I’d jabber away through multi-character conversations, I’d read aloud from my favorite books, or concoct monologues or legal arguments or speeches to the House of Lords or inspiring calls to arms for soldiers on the eve of battle. Fortunately, I was rarely overheard by anyone who didn’t know me. I would have been mortified.

​

When I was thirteen, I found a mounted fox head in a relative’s attic. Thus began my taxidermy collection, one I added to for the next four decades until my house looked like a corner of the Adams family mansion. In college, I acquired a zebra foot lamp, a stuffed pike, two pheasants, and a toad playing the banjo.

Much of my inspiration came from the American Museum of Natural History and photographs I'd seen of the Explorers Club, that august New York institution where Victorian-era adventurers gathered to share tales of their expeditions, surrounded by mounted heads of exotic beasts. I fantasized about joining their ranks if only I could acquire a pith helmet and actually do some exploring.

By forty-five, I decided my collections were complete with the addition of a full-size, cross-eyed white coyote and a mountain goat head and a guest appearance on the reality TV show Oddities (season 2, Episode 8).

My fascination with the Explorers Club naturally led to dreams of my own expeditions. After Princeton, my plan was to move to Truk, a tiny Micronesian island where they used giant stones as money. I spent months researching the place, shopping for plane tickets, and only occasionally thinking about how I’d earn a living there. When I came upon an article about Truk's notably large and invasive insects, I decided to explore a different island: Manhattan.

Like all teenagers, I was very into music. One day in 8th grade, Cara Frank caught me stuffing my very first LP into my locker, freshly acquired. "What record did you get?" she asked. "The new Stones double album? Iggy Pop? Zappa?"

"No," I said proudly, showing her. "It's Vivaldi. Seiji Ozawa conducting the Boston Philharmonic. It just came out!"

"Oh," she replied, and we never spoke again.

But don't get me wrong, I didn't just listen to classical music. I also liked Rogers and Hammerstein, Noel Coward, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, and even a little Danny Kaye—a playlist that caused more than one person to make assumptions about me.

I wasn't gay, though it probably would have been easier to explain if I was. I was just odd. And now, fifty years later, I have a decent idea of what was really going on with me.

First of all, I had grown up in chaos. My mother had dragged me through three marriages, four continents, and a dozen schools in multiple languages. I'd spent a year and a half living with my grandparents in Pakistan. Nothing in my life was dependable or consistent.

Secondly, I was born in England to an English father and an English-educated mother, but we left England when I was three. So while I thought of myself as British, my only real connection to that identity came through books and movies. P.G. Wodehouse's England was more real to me than the actual country I'd left behind.

Third, I didn't really fit in anywhere. Every year I ended up in a new school in a new country with a new language, but one thing remained constant: I was always the odd new kid. People rarely noticed me in the back row with my nose in a book, and when they did, they didn't quite know what to make of me.

Fourth, I had spent at least part of my childhood in a big house with ornate gardens and a number of servants. When I lived with my grandparents in Pakistan, I was briefly accustomed to our having butlers and cooks and gardeners and chauffeurs and such. Of course, I went from there directly to living on a kibbutz in a communal dormitory with dozens of other kids and doing daily chores. Still, I did have that memory of being a little gentleman.

And finally, my family was a hodgepodge. My grandparents were German Jews who studied in Italy and settled in Pakistan. My mother was born in India and educated in England. My father was a Christian psychologist who vanished early on. Then came my stepfathers: a Long Island mathematician and a Michigan political scientist. They all had clear identities, but they didn’t share them with me. I was as much a mongrel as our buck-toothed dog Pogo.

I had a lot of freedom to be weird because no one was paying much attention. I don't know what my mother and stepfathers thought of me. They never really said anything as I pranced about with my suits and pipes. At school, I was pretty much invisible, though the local bully would inevitably discover me soon after I arrived in town. I got a few black eyes and bloody noses, but I took comfort in knowing that so did the characters in my favorite books.

But in my fantasy life, things were far more orderly. I was drawn to P.G. Wodehouse's world precisely because everyone in it knew exactly who they were and where they belonged. The scandals in his books always stemmed from people trying to escape their proper place in society. By the final chapter, order would inevitably be restored, with everyone settling back into their rightful position—a comfort I couldn't find in my own discombobulated world.

My imagination became my sanctuary—safe, familiar, and consistent. No one had power over me there, no one could make arbitrary choices. And because my interests were so obscure, no one tried to compete with me or question my peculiar passions. I was left to my own weird devices.

When I turned seventeen, the ground beneath my carefully constructed world began to shift. I started acting in plays, writing for the school paper, and publishing an underground magazine. I even made friends with some of the other oddballs.

In a move that would have horrified Bertie Wooster, I discovered Marxism and formed a Marx-Engels study circle after school. By college, despite owning two tuxedos and a monocle, I was writing my thesis about 1960s student radicals and interviewing everyone from Abbie Hoffman to Joan Baez. This wasn't inconsistency; it was just my oddness evolving.

Now, in my dotage, I retain my oddness. I stroll the grounds of the Biltmore, past ridiculous mansions and their attendant Rolls-Royces, back in my element. I mutter and whistle to myself and my dogs as I walk through my imaginary Arizona estate. I still talk in the shower, often in Punjabi, much to my wife's alarm. “Who’s in there with you?” she shouts through the door.

Just me and my weirdness. Quite happy. Still odd.

Your pal,

Danny