Guts : Combat, Hell-raising, Cancer, Business Start-ups, and Undying Love: One American Guy's Reckless, Lucky Life

by NYLEN, ROBERT

• ISBN13: 9781400067763
• ISBN10: 1400067766
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-26
• Publisher: Random House

Summary

"This is a memoir: a package of boasts, false modesty, flawed memories, dropped names, outright errors, and embarrassing disclosures that I think are pretty neatbut may appall you, if you're squeamish or have an orderly turn of mind." Robert Nylen The thing is, Robert Nylen should have died several times in 1968. He was a goner in 2006, and 2007 as well, and yet he survived through a combination of dumb luck and sheer perseverance. Of course, as you read these words, he's already bit the dust. But let's not dwell on that. A self-confessed reckless jerk, Nylen spent the last four years of his life grappling with Big Diseases (cancer, diabetes), an astonishing twelve broken bones, and ten surgeries. His lifetime total is twenty-four fractures, most of which resulted from a flagrant refusal to act his ageor anyone's age, for that matter. And yetGutsis not a mere chronicle of injuries but a sharp and wry meditation on American Manhood. Growing up in suburbia in the '50s and '60s, with a father who had worked on the atom bomb, Nylen was an immature kid who was always eager for attention. In college he became a slovenly, hard-partying fraternity brother who barely graduated. Then came the realization that he was going to have to go to Vietnam. A dramatic tour of duty came to an abrupt end with multiple wounds, leading him to grow up fast. It was then that he started the real risky business: business itself. Some ventures succeeded and some failed. He exercised feverishly and often displayed a complete lack of common sense. And then he got sick, inevitably, with colon cancer. Hilarious, moving, and riveting, this is the life of a tough guy as seen through the scope of a national obsession with toughness. Whether he was facing Viet Cong as a platoon leader in Vietnam or doing battle with venture capitalists at home, Nylen never backed down from a good fightand he had the many scars to prove it. InGuts, Robert Nylen writes with humor and precision about the travailsand gloryof manhood.

Author Biography

ROBERT NYLEN is a media consultant. He cofounded New England Monthly and Beliefnet.com. He lives with his wife in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Black Ice	p. 3
Evidence that I'm No Tough Guy	p. 20
Back in Asia, 1968; Among Things Un-Carried: No Camera, Thanks	p. 38
More Jungle Trouble: Scrolling Down the Devil's PowerPoint	p. 47
Nervous, Frowsy Nancy	p. 65
What Crawls on Its Belly and Blows Us All Up?	p. 73
Big Blond Grunts and Little Brown Kids	p. 84
Two Sergeants-One Heroic, the Elder Not So Much	p. 92
Shamming: Happy, Kinda Safe	p. 95
Instead of Bursting Hearts with Bullets, Something New: Winning Minds	p. 98
Our Personal Charm Offensive	p. 104
Gunny: Lifer Gyrene	p. 110
Mom Saves My Life	p. 121
Mom: Farmer's Daughter Turned Flapper; Dad: Squarehead Turned Bomb Maker, Fall Guy	p. 126
Me, Back in the Land of the Giganormous PX	p. 135
After the War, a Job, Finally; What's Scarier than War?	p. 139
The Third Newsmagazine ... No ... Make That Number Four!	p. 146
Tough Bosses	p. 152
Starting Up, Cringing; Raising Money; Danger on the Roof	p. 169
Tough Yankees	p. 180
From Old to New Media	p. 186
Why Kit Manages Our Finances	p. 193
The Beginning of What Proves Not to Be the End	p. 197
The Spurious Cancer-as-War Metaphor; Some Un-Ironic Heroes	p. 206
Foolishness Continues; Backwards, to Infirmity	p. 222
Becoming a Little Bit Stoic	p. 234
Enduring, Singing Endtime Songs, Rating War Movies	p. 240
Remembering the Forgotten	p. 243
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One


Black Ice  

A warm day in late December 2007 proved me nuts, and an idiot, again. I was in a hurry. Had to drive 190 miles south from our western Massachusetts home to take a meeting in Manhattan and then go to a party. Hastily, I gassed my car at Neighbors convenience store. As I sped away, a pretty girl at the next pump was trying to tell me something...important. She waved Gasoline spewed sideways. My sweet Samaritan retrieved her barefoot toddler and ran away to avoid being blown up. Mortified, I tried to reconnect the line to the pump. It was like trying to cap Old Faithful with a saucer. Gas soaked me, making me a potential torch. One spark and I’d be a one-man Hindenburg. I raced inside to rinse my stinging eyes with tap water. Blearily, I watched volunteer firemen assess the risk. Mere seconds after my SS Valdez had breached on dry ground, they determined that therewasn’t much chance of an explosion. The dry air had sped evaporation. The damage: roughly five hundred dollars for the pump, four bucks’ worth of kitty litter to absorb runoff, and a day out of service for Neighbors’ regular pump.  

Went home. Threw away my parka, rabbit-fur hat, and mittens. Bathed. Sniffed. Bathed again. Changed into fresh clothes. Rushed to Manhattan, eyes oozing. The sublime Ta­conic Parkway blurred by, its lovely scenery unseen. Stopped a couple of times to slather ointment on my aching face. Dabbed tears every few minutes.  

Over tea in the Soho Grand Hotel, my face afire, I told a young woman that I usuallydidn’t look like a molting cha­meleon. Not knowing my baseline of ugliness—it was our first meeting—she lied, sweet Charlize Theron to my grotesque Hellboy.  

“You look fine!”  

Next, it was party time. Beliefnet’s directors and bankers nestled in a posh Greenwich Village restaurant to celebrate the sale of the company. Steven Waldman and I had started Beliefnet in 1998 (after wecouldn’t find money to start a print magazine). We changed the fledgling project into an online medium, got plenty of money, then even more money, and then we went bankrupt. I’d quit before the company declared Chapter 11 after discovering I was both irreligious and aspiritual. Long after I’d left, Steve had reorganized, raised more money, and led the pared-down company to success.  

On May 1, 2007, Beliefnet won a National Magazine Award for Online Excellence—despite never having published a real print magazine. Steve graciously thanked me before 2,300 hundred bejeweled, bedecked media mavens, John Waters, Edie Falco, and K. T. Tunstall in Lincoln Center. Meanwhile, I was attending to my busted ostomy appliance in themen’s room. Every unpleasantness is a learning opportunity. A double-breasted tuxedo and a big, wide cummerbund effectively disguiseone’s failed artificial plumbing system. (Perhaps I should wear a cummerbund everywhere: Whole Foods, Target, the Ashfield Hardware Store, and evenings with friends: festive!) Six months later, RupertMurdoch’s Fox Entertainment had paid us a pretty penny—tens of millions of pennies—for Beliefnet, but then again,they’d paid sixty-five times more for The Wall Street Journal.  

That evening, I explained my horrid face to seven fellow board members, one by one. Like young Charlize, they pretended not to notice my ruddy, scaling skin from a potion incendiary and toxic drugs that Estée Lauderdoesn’t sell. Alone, each ingredient makes you peel in red, scabby slabs. Mixed, you look insane, too.   Back in western Massachusetts the next week, I asked Neighbors’ proprietor, Phil Nolan, how much I owed him. He said:“It’s all taken care of, Bob.Don’t worry.”That’s whathe’d said when I pulled the s

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Excerpted from Guts: Combat, Hell-raising, Cancer, Business Start-ups, and Undying Love: One American Guy's Reckless, Lucky Life by Robert Nylen
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