Brief Bio: I have to say that, faced with the necessity of committing details of my too, too ordinary life to paper, I am inclined to embellish just a bit.The Short Bio:Born on a mountaintop in Chicopee Falls, Charlie left home at an early age to play saxophone in the Boston subway system. He played like an angel, but no one stopped to throw pennies. It quickly became evident that there was something more to life, and he scrounged a battered typewriter from a dumpster behind city hall. Slowly and painfully, he pounded out his visions of a half-remembered childhood. Many boxes of saltines were consumed, many beer bottles returned for deposit, but eventually he found a publisher. The rest, as they like to say, is history. Cheap booze and donuts caused his windfall to disappear like water down a drainpipe, and Charlie became a familiar figure among those sleeping on sheets of cardboard outside the Public Library. To this day, however, doctoral candidates often wonder, 'Whatever happened to that typewriter?And all like that. Not a word of the above is true, yet I frequently pass this screed off as legit. No, what really happened, was that at an early age I was told (a) you could achieve whatever you wanted in life, and (b) writing was nice, but you needed a real job. These divergent views, confusing enough to be totally useless, left me rudderless on the stormy sea of life, with no port in sight. Over the years, things have failed to improve.