Remembering the iconic Norman Mailer
Florida Weekly reporter recalls interview with author
BY PETE SKIBA Florida Weekly Correspondent
Editor's note:

Pete Skiba

Author Norman Mailer died Saturday of acute renal failure. He was 84. Mailer won two Pulitzer Prizes for his literary work but was equally known for his larger-than-life personality and his combative, controversial and outspoken nature.

Florida Weekly correspondent Pete Skiba met Mailer in 1997 and interviewed him for a story for the Rutgers University newspaper. This is Skiba's memory of that interview.

Meeting Norman Mailer, archetype of the tough-guy authors, did not turn out the way my young dreams envisioned it.

COURTESY PHOTO Pulitzer Prize winning author Norman Mailer.

Back in high school I imagined the meeting in a New York bar. My novel would be published to critical acclaim and enter bestsellerdom.

In my late 20s, I'd be celebrating my good fortune with a brew when in would storm Mailer. I'd just knocked his latest book off the best seller list. At 50, he still had the pugilist's heart.

He wouldn't stand a chance. I grew up living over a shot 'n' beer bar. In my New Jersey blue-collar neighborhood a left hook was a sign of affection. I'd beat him on the page and in a bar brawl.

Instead, when Norman Mailer died Nov. 10 in New York from renal failure I remembered meeting him at the Gershman YMCA on Broad Street in 1997.

I had returned to school at Rutgers University's Camden branch to get a degree in journalism because the dream of a writing career had not died with my 20-year bar-ownership career.

I took the college paper assignment to cover Mailer's speaking appearance.

My first glimpse of him brought back the memory of when I discovered I was actually taller than my father. Here was this notorious, tough-guy author getting out of a limousine and he was short.

He was 74 at the time and used canes to help him walk. He looked lost as he entered the hall's lobby. I walked over to talk to him.

"Hi, I'm a student reporter for the Rutgers Gleaner newspaper. If you have a minute I'd like to talk to you."

There are people in whose presence you can feel the charisma. Mailer was one of them.

He laughed and looked at my middle-aged paunch. Then he said something about my being a little old to be a student.

"Second career. I used to own a bar in Jersey."

That connected us. He said he would talk with me at the book signing after he gave his talk on why he wrote "The Gospel According to the Son."

The talk went well and I waited at the end of the line to have my copy of "The Armies of the Night" signed and to do the interview. It wasn't long until one of the greatest American writers who ever lived would talk with me.

"You know when I was a kid I thought I'd write books and meet up with you in a bar. There, I thought, I'd kick your butt."

The laughter from Mailer rang deep.

He didn't stand up but he raised his fists and gave a still respectable left and right jab. I'd swear that he was ready for me. My hands fisted and went to defense.

"Hey, it was a kid's fantasy," I said, all smiles.

He asked me how good of a fighter I was. I owned up to not being anywhere near as tough as my dad.

"We never are," I remember him saying. "But, you know how to hold your hands."

He asked me about the bar business. He began interviewing me. I couldn't believe it.

We shared a mutual admiration for Hemingway. I complemented him on his much-overlooked book about the moon landing, "Of a Fire on the Moon." Only Mailer could start a book about space travel with ruminations on Hemingway's standing as the most romantic writer of the 20th century.

Mailer could be the last of that type. I left our meeting feeling that I had met greatness again. I say again because the real way one meets greatness in a writer is through reading the writer's work. I have read a ton of Mailer but I'll always remember his last advice to me.

He signed my book with boxing advice: "To Pete Skiba: Hold 'em high. Cheers, Norman Mailer."