Censorship? When Your Publicist is Afraid of Your Book

I was twenty, the beverage manager at the old Boston Garden, and I had just ordered forty-one cases of Budweiser instead of fourteen. My boss, whom I'll call Max, was a recent graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. He demanded to know how I could have made that mistake. With my back against the wall, I told him the truth: I'm dyslexic. I transposed the numbers. To my surprise, he didn’t know what dyslexia was. When I explained it, he looked at me with complete seriousness and asked, "Are you trying to tell me that you're kind of retarded?"

His question caught me off guard. Flustered, I told him no, it’s nothing like that, more like having bad eyesight. I assured him it wouldn’t happen again. Then I sat on a keg of beer in the rat-infested bowels of the Garden and made a decision that would run my life for decades. No one would ever know I was dyslexic again.