Failed Pilot

Screw this movie junk. I’m too tired and busy with other writing. You get a rerun

August 12, 2004
Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Seven
I’ve done some sitting down over the past decade. IT work and writing. Sitting down. Seven years ago, I noticed a side effect of this lifestyle: A hemorrhoid. Ever since, I’ve had either this original little friend, or its successor(s). They’re nothing to be ashamed of. Many of you have them. Many of you hide them. Some you can see. Mine, thankfully, have never been visable. Oh, but they make their presence known in other ways: pain, otherworldly itching, and the infrequent tendency to bleed a little. There are unnerving things, like people appearing out of nowhere and frantically waving down traffic. Unnerving. Passing a little blood during your special board meeting. Unnerving. It happened once, four years ago, and the escapist in me thanked it for not returning. Then, a year or so back, it happened again. “It’s just a hemorrhoid,” those trusted few would say. Makes sense. Without getting any more graphic, the occurrences do seem to be born of a more topical as opposed to internal, source. But I’m no doctor, and when it happened two weeks ago, I went to see one.

My new doctor is an older, jubilant, optimistic, Jewish lady. She talks faster than any woman I’ve ever met. After diagnosing a mild hernia on my front side, this older, jubilant, optimistic, Jewish lady commenced with the “bedside exam” - a sugarcoated way of saying that she had her entire hand in my ass. “Oh my god” is exactly what I said. Then I flashed through a series of great proctologic movie scenes, resting on the great M. Emmet Walsh (my favorite character actor) examining Chevy Chase in Fletch, though I can vouch for not getting the urge to do something stupid like sing “Moon River.” The exam registered a very faint trace of you-know-what, to which the Doc echoed the trusting few: “I feel pretty certain it’s a hemorrhoid, but I can’t be 100 percent sure with this exam. You need to get the gold standard of tests.”

The “gold standard of tests” is a colonoscopy, “the visual examination of the large intestine using a lighted, flexible fiberoptic or video endoscope.” So goes the helpful literature that was promptly sent to my mailbox. A very common test, I’m told. It’s scheduled for the 19th of this month. I moved it back from an original date of the 16th, the day after my birthday. Not that I have big plans, but those plans will not include consuming a bottle of Miralax, two tabs of Duicolax, a bottle of Gatorade, and then settling in for 12 straight hours of Democratic Republic of the Congo - style “preparation.”

The week prior (starts today) requires the following preparation: No Aspirin, Advil, Motrin, Ibuprofen, Aleve, Iron, Vioxx, Celebrex, or Aspirin products. They conclude with this childishly funny instruction: “No corn should be eaten.”

As usual, nothing alarming has occurred over the past 2 - 3 weeks. I’m probably in fine health, aside from my sizable neurosis. I’ve been regular and normal in appearance. This tempts me to cancel the whole ordeal - a foolish thought. This is ultimately a good idea. Things need to get checked out. I’m about to turn 31.

Every day leading up to the exam, I will write an entry about the procedure. I’ll discuss the drugs, the “induced amnesia”, my anticipation, my worries, and I’ll fish for things to say about the procedure. Then, I’ll end with an account of that day…the best I can manage, of course. No, this is not an attempt to woo the editors of Vice Magazine.

August 13, 2004
Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Six
“You’ll be given a cocktail drug that induces twilight sleep and amnesia.” This is the doctor talking. What’s troublesome is the mention of amnesia. It implies that I’ll be around for something I won’t remember later. I don’t want to be around at all. Ever. Everyone else I’ve consulted claims that it’s simply liquid Demerol. I tried to call the nurse today, but she was typically unavailable. A piece of advise to anyone expecting a future visit to the doctor, dentist, or a procedure of some type: It’s best to completely freak out in the presence of a doctor or nurse. Complain about fears, phobias, and pains. I mean, really, really complain. Roll around on the floor. Try to cry. This behavior can only result in positive things: Good treatment and better drugs.

August 14, 2004
Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Five
The nurse rang me back on my cell phone. I was driving, and caught off guard. Frantically, I told her how scared I was of the procedure. Then, I pulled into a parking lot, and for two whole minutes, loudly mock-vomited to prove to her my overwhelming fear.

“Sorry, I’m just really not looking forward to this.”

Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Three
Hey, while we’re at it, let’s just shoot that son of a bitch on through the small intestine, then maybe out through my right little finger.

Oh, so I didn’t post yesterday. It was my birthday, and for my birthday, I consumed banana pancakes with crunchy peanut butter syrup for breakfast, and a Belgium Waffle-sized steak for dinner. Hey, no corn! I know a couple of prescription laxatives that have their work cut out for them. Good luck, guys!

August 17, 2004
Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Two
Ok, I had a BBQ sandwich. Quality: Serviceable. I was pining for good Southern cooking, somewhere that would put the “ass” back in “casserole”, but was short on time. That’s entirely untrue; really, I was just looking for an excuse to make that casserole joke - one that’s had me giggling for the past hour. Just ate my last meal for almost two days. I’d prefer to keep it a secret.

Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Two
See, it gets a little boring when I post daily.

Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day Two
Today I eat, then on to 48 hours of clear liquids or nothing at all. I could stand to lose five pounds. After no food and a liquid Demerol hangover, Thursday afternoon should see me looking like a filthy junkie. I’m leaving for lunch RIGHT NOW…stay tuned!

August 18, 2004
Countdown To The Colonoscopy: Day One
Any former whiff of this being a “good idea” has long been squelched. An exchange from earlier today:

“The soup wasn’t good?”

“No, it’s just that I can only eat the broth, which was great.”

“We could have served you just the broth.”

“That’s ok, you don’t know how relaxing it is to sit here staring at a huge bowl of shrimp, crab, scallops, noodles, and green onions that I can’t eat.”

An hour ago, I couldn’t have told you the last time I vomited. I made it count with this one…through the nose and loud. Most of it was “the formula” (64 ounces of Gatorade Ice and 255 GM of Miralax), making me worry that not enough of “the formula” traveled in the right direction. I’m in no way to post right now. Stay tuned for ground zero reports.

August 20, 2004
Ground Zero
The good news and the good news: I’m clean. No problems; barring the roids. The miniature coma was a bit irritating. I didn’t gather my bearings until this morning. I don’t remember the lunch with mom that followed the procedure, though I remember having salmon, cottage cheese, and applesauce.

Mom: “I’m not ready yet, I haven’t finished my salad and I want to smoke a cigarette.”

Me: “I’ve gotta get home to bed…now.”

When you are administered a Demerol/sedative cocktail, you do not get to enjoy the Demerol. You do, however, get the painkiller hangover. I got fucked on that deal.

Prior to the colonoscopy, I was asking every prep nurse/tech in sight if I was “going to be away” during the bizness. They all said “yes”, and one went so far as to ask if I smoked weed. Huh?

Communion (1989) – Funny stuff, people. This is probably the quintessential Christopher Walken moment. Be it your co-workers or SNL writers, everyone has gotten a lot of mileage out of impersonating Walken. Watch this movie and understand why.

The Exterminator (1980) – Vietnam vet vigilante er…..horror. Police chief cooks hotdogs on his desk.

The Hills Have Eyes (1977) – Solid classic. Always enjoyable.

The Howling (1980) – Ditto the above.

Bloodeaters AKA Toxic Zombies (1980) – One of the many quickies with a sub-porn budget, a set location of rural Florida (it’s supposed to be Kentucky in the film), and the partial plot of hippie slaughter (in 1980?!?!). Not so much a so-bad-it’s-good experience as it is a so-bad-I-need-to-go-look-in-the-mirror-for-five-minutes experience. Like LSD, this movie shouldn’t be consumed by those over the age of 24.

I’m already getting sick of trying to help you people.

To count down the few days left before Mischief Night and it’s follow-up, Halloween, I will be posting a day-to-day guide to my favorite horror films. All are highly recommended. Most will date from the 70’s/80’s, as I’m less familiar with 90’s/00’s horror….or maybe I’ll turn that around, I just thought of some great recent horror, let’s just see how this goes, because it’s my world to control.

Sleepaway Camp (1983) – No spoilers. An absolute necessity. I once watched this with an earth-shattering hangover, and felt as if something was trying to yank my brain two feet to the right. Watch for the scene involving 1 – 2 year old toddlers being told to “FUCK OFF!!!!”

Jack Frost (1997) – Not the Michael Keaton pants-accident about the benevolent snowman embodied by a dead-daddy ghost, but the rollicking pants-accident about exactly what you think. You may be saying, “I’m a little too old to be wasting my time with a killer snowman movie,” and well, I’m a little too old to be writing about a killer snowman movie, but I’m also a little too old to be eating meals that are all one color. Followed by Jack Frost II: Return of the Mutant Killer Snowman (2000), and surprisingly, both films were written/directed by the fellow that went on to write Identity.

Grizzly (1976) – Don’t rent this. I just felt like mentioning it, and if any readers have seen this movie, please get in touch. Again, scared the living shit out of me as a child…on TV as an afternoon horror/thriller (Channel 24 or 30…for Memphis people). Victims are squeezed to death and vomit blood, and one has an arm ripped off. Quite violent for TV/PG rating.

A Shivers/Rabid/The Brood triple feature of early (1975 – 1979) Cronenburg is a sure guest-pleaser.

John Carpenter’s ’82 remake of The Thing is an all-time fave. Whadda cast. Step off my Brimley!!!!

The original Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) – Also Carpenter, but pre-Halloween and not really horror. Shot before there were bans on depicting child death. I’ll leave you with that.

Currently listening:
My Guitar Wants To Kill Your Mama
By Dweezil Zappa
Release date: By 25 October, 1990

To count down the few days left before Mischief Night and it’s follow-up, Halloween, I will be posting a day-to-day guide to my favorite horror films. All are highly recommended. Most will date from the 70’s/80’s, as I’m less familiar with 90’s/00’s horror….or maybe I’ll turn that around, I just thought of some great recent horror, let’s just see how this goes, because it’s my world to control.

Alone in the Dark (1982) – Slasher formula gets skewed all to hell in this one. Donald Pleasance, Jack Palance, and Martin Landau do what they do best: Chew up that fucking scenery with some absurd overacting!! Inventive kill scenes (a hospital orderly is broken in half across another man’s knee) and a strange humanization of the villains shows some desire to go leftfield with what is otherwise a genre exercise. It’s as if the screenwriter had a minor stroke prior to the last three rewrites. Best scene: Jack Palance wondering into a punk rock club and becoming oddly captivated by the band, The Sic Fucks (who were real, I believe), doing “Chop Up Your Mother.’

PIN: A Plastic Nightmare (1988) – Legitimate attempt at ripping off Psycho or Flowers In The Attic, a lot of folks see this movie as a serious and engaging affair. I don’t. Terry O’Quinn (Stepfather and Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy, or as I like to call it, S2MRD) will always be a poor man’s Craig T. Nelson, but I must hand it to him for this one, a career definer/destroyer that required some grapes. Put simply, this is a “psychological thriller” about an anatomically correct medical dummy that a schizophrenic boy believes to be alive, due in part to his father using it as a therapeutic tool. There are plenty of “maybe it IS alive” scenes, and the sequences of Nelson (and the boy/teen lead) using ventriloquism through the dummy are blue-blooded, roll-in-the-floor gut-busters.

Rituals (1977) - A Deliverance rip that scared the living shit out of me as a kid, and this was the edited version on the Saturday night “Creature Feature” (Memphis’ horror showcase on regular TV in the 80’s…also where I watched Dogs, Frogs, and Ants). Still sort of creepy and worth checking out for the sheer alienation of the landscape shots and a few mildly disturbing moments. Has Hal Holbrook, so, walk fast, don’t walk. Maybe you shouldn’t rent this one. I don’t want complaints.

When A Stranger Calls (1979) - A classic. Could be in my top five horror films, or could be number one; I fluctuate. This is the original “the call is coming from inside the house” movie. Slow burning, with virtually no onscreen violence, but nonetheless manages to be super eerie. With Charles Durning as the obsessed cop/detective. He’s so fat in this film that he literally rips a set of swinging doors from their hinges during a foot chase scene. And why does Durning’s character chose “throwing nails” as his only weapon? Do “throwing nails” exist?

….I write seriously. It’s serious business, and stacked to the gills with truths.

“Can’t say I quite get the point of Andrew Earles’ vitriolic Where’s The Street Team? column in issue #68. Is this satire of some sort? I think not. Looking past the obvious points that it speaks wholly in generalities and literally dismisses/demeans the efforts and creativity of several thousand musicians and their supporters, what is this all about? Someone is love with their own icky voice and a forum to print it in, it appears. Printing the juvenile and tiny-minded blather of Earles, who apparently couldn’t get a date in Portland, Ore, seems like a pretty poor use of MAGNET’s limited editorial space. Simply put, his column is stupid.”

“What did you do with my subscription money? Give it to Earles for tweak? Of did you use it to take the Fiery Furnaces out for a cheap lunch? Either way, it’s cool. I like being a subscriber to a magazine that sits on newstands for a couple of weeks before it arrives in my mailbox. I deeply appreciate MAGNET’s consistent inconsistency. In issue #68 critique of Portland, Earles really hit it on the nose. Wish he and I could’ve met up when he was in town. We could’ve shot up under the Burnside Bridge after a long day of anti-Bush rallies and a couple of pitchers of sloe gin fizz. Maybe you could take my $14.95 and put it toward a plane ticket, or you could just bum a train like the rest of us in the Northwest. But, if you do make the trip, pack a flannel and some mace, because grunge is back and there’s a black guy in my neighborhood.”

Also to be noted is the more recent letter writer from Canada, who penned that “it would be funny if Andrew Earles got hit by a car.”

…for making my week.

Now in the spotlight is a claim that I’ve been making (albeit extraneously and under the radar) for some time now. J.T. Leroy = Horseshit.

Before you read what I’ve pasted below, I’d like to state my position on the matter.

I obviously have no problem with hoaxes, especially a hoax on the exact people and organizations that have been hoodwinked in this particular situation - they deserve it tenfold. If the J.T. Leroy prank is for the sake of pure comedy, and the jury’s out (in my head) on this idea, it is a whopper. To use the Leroy persona as a tool to prove the spoon-fed fickleness and total lack of imagination/taste/discrimination of the intended targets…well, I harbor no bones about that. Of course they…”they” being, for instance, everyone from the NY art community to mainstream but accepted celebs (Madonna, Bono, Tom Waits) to a nice settling in the literary industry (agents, writers, and imprints…namely Da Capo - “Leroy” edited/approved the content of this month’s Best of Music Writing 2005 collection, which of course includes one of Dave Egger’s preciously awful Spin columns…I sincerely hope, though I’m not betting on it, that he was one of the fooled) would eat the abused/trailer park hustler/former drug addict/faux-Southern affectation up like it’s a last meal. But, as hinted at, I’m not convinced that this is a comedic hoax. I despise the voice with which this character addresses a readership…if there is in fact, the drive to sincerely appear authentic…or to make money. It actually puts me in a confused state. I want to point fingers and laugh at those that believed in J.T. Leroy. Conversely (sort of), I’m made intensely protective of my geographical setting and culture. And that makes me want to write a shortsighted, blanket statement that in no way accurately represents the whole of the addressed.

To all New York factory-wrapped douches, San Francisco cry babies, European fanny pack/body odor manner-less sycophants, and anyone in the margins: I hope the “real deal” continues to evade you.

And now, what this is all about…..

A Novelist’s Novelist
Is the Acclaimed JT LeRoy Just a Character Himself?

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 13, 2005; C01

There’s never been a literary enterprise quite like JT LeRoy. It’s not
just
his career, which includes an acclaimed novel, “Sarah,” a movie based
on a
short-story collection and credit for collaborating on early drafts of
the
Gus Van Sant movie “Elephant.” It’s not just his relative youth — he’s
24 — nor the long list of celebrities and authors that have hailed him
as a
wunderkind, among them Bono, Tom Waits, Winona Ryder, Melissa
Etheridge,
Michael Chabon and Mary Gaitskill.

It’s his life story. Raised by a drug-addicted mother, LeRoy got hooked
on
heroin in his early teens and worked as a “lot lizard,” a
cross-dressing
male prostitute at a truck stop in West Virginia. He survived that
ordeal
and wound up on the streets of San Francisco, where a social worker
found
him in a psychotic haze. She took him to a shrink, who suggested that
writing would be excellent therapy. He started faxing his handwritten
pieces
to well-known writers and literary agents. Before long, he had a book
deal.
Afflicted with a crippling shyness, he rarely met any of his admirers,
and
on the few occasions he appeared in public, he wore sunglasses and a
wig.

Amazing? No question. True? Mmmm, probably not.

This week, New York magazine ran a lengthy piece that strongly suggests
there is no JT LeRoy. There is, however, a woman named Laura Albert, a
Brooklyn-raised, 39-year-old mother and one-time rock singer, who seems
to
have been writing or co-writing the work attributed to LeRoy — and
possibly
playing him on the phone. The whole long affair appears to be one of
the
great literary hoaxes of our day, and it fooled a whole lot of people
as
well as media.

Including the New York Times, which last year ran a lengthy profile of
LeRoy. In it, the reporter meets a 5-foot-5 person with a “girlish
voice,
his conversation punctuated with childlike yelps when something pleases
him.” LeRoy is described as a sweet, traumatized and streetwise victim,
grateful to be alive and avidly networking with a welter of famous
fans.
Madonna, he said, had recently sent him a book on Kabbalah.

“I was feeling hopeless and she was really good at pointing out that if
someone is in a rip current the instinct is to pull the opposite way,
but
you need to just go along,” LeRoy tells reporter Warren St. John.

Who exactly showed up for that interview is an open question. In 2001,
after
rumors began to surface that there was no JT LeRoy, a diminutive
character
with a furtive smile and a black hat started to appear, every once in a
while, at assorted events held in the author’s honor. But the writer of
the
New York magazine story, Stephen Beachy, isn’t buying it.

“My theory is that it’s an actor playing the part,” he said on the
phone
yesterday. “I’ve heard it’s a relative of Laura Albert’s.”

Beachy, a San Francisco novelist, has been sleuthing this matter for
months.
His research found not a trace of evidence that someone named Jeremy
LeRoy — the T is for “Terminator,” allegedly an ironic nickname he
earned
as a hustler — lived in West Virginia, the son of a famous theological
writer, raised by a mom who stripped for a living, as LeRoy has long
claimed. In his piece, Beachy presents an impressive sum of
circumstantial
evidence — no, there’s no proof — that LeRoy was invented by Laura
Albert.

She’s an obvious suspect here. LeRoy supposedly lives with Albert, and
her
husband, Geoffrey Knoop, and the couple’s son, in an apartment in San
Francisco. It was Albert who discovered LeRoy in traffic back in 1993,
though according to the New York story, she did so under an assumed
name and
identity that she still uses — as an outreach worker named Emily
Frasier.

Beachy’s research found that Albert was most likely behind all the
faxing
LeRoy did in the mid-’90s, when faxing was LeRoy’s preferred method of
communication. Beachy traced one number on a LeRoy fax to a guy named
Paul
Falotico, who reports that he was a friend of Albert’s. Falotico at the
time
read some of Albert’s own writing, and it touched upon the very
subjects
that would make LeRoy famous — harrowing tales about neglect, broken
families and pornography. She frequently faxed her hand-scrawled
creative
writing assignments to Falotico and asked him to type them up. That’s
exactly what JT would do with writers and agents when he began
producing
stories.

There’s much more in the New York story and by the end, Beachy is on
the
phone with JT LeRoy/Laura Albert. “I reserve the right to grow and
change my
identity,” he/she says. It’s not exactly a confession, but it’s not a
total
profession of innocence, either.

Reached by cell phone yesterday, a person calling himself/herself JT
LeRoy
struck a nearly identical tone. Except more hostile. When the person
was
asked point-blank, “Are you Laura Albert?” there was a moment of
silence.
Then, “No. Are you?”

The voice on the line sure sounded like that of a woman, with a hint of
a
Southern accent in there, plus lots of profanity. According to this
person,
the New York story is the work of a jealous writer who has a “personal
vendetta.” Beachy, this person said, was dropped by LeRoy’s literary
agent
and resents LeRoy’s success. (The former is true, Beachy says, but not
the
latter.) “You can say I am anyone you think I am,” LeRoy/Albert said.
“I’m
not here to make you feel comfortable. I’m not here to make anyone feel
comfortable. I reserve the right to be whatever gender I want to be.
From
now on, if you ask me if I am Laura Albert, I’m going to say, ‘Maybe.’
”

He/She said that there were omissions in the magazine story and that
one
photo of him/her isn’t him/her at all, but the singer Pink. And he/she
added
that if this were a conspiracy, it would have to involve a lot of
people,
including the psychologist who saved his/her life. (The psychologist,
one
Terrence Owens of St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco, returned
a
phone call yesterday to say that it would be unethical for him to
comment.)
Still, if you are Laura Albert, you just pulled off something pretty
amazing, in its own way, didn’t you?

“Yeah, wait for the movie people to come around,” this person said. “If
they
offer me enough money, they can say I’m [expletive] Mickey Mouse.”

LeRoy/Albert also said that Beachy had failed to contact people who’d
spent
quality time with LeRoy. One of those people is Ira Silverberg, LeRoy’s
literary agent. Yesterday, Silverberg said that he had traveled to
Cannes
last year with LeRoy and remains convinced that he exists. Well, mostly
convinced.

“As far as I know, the little person with whom I’ve spent time is JT,
and
that is my truth and that is what I believe,” Silverberg said. He
echoed the
allegation that Beachy has it in for LeRoy, calling him a “poorly
published
novelist who’s worked the same turf.” But he hedges a bit.

“A year from now,” he acknowledged, “this could be a very different
story.”

If there is no JT LeRoy, Silverberg is just one of dozens of people who
have
been bamboozled. Last year, a gallery in New York City hosted an
exhibit of
art and a reading inspired by LeRoy’s most recent novella, “Harold’s
End.”
Among those who showed up to read aloud were Lou Reed and Tatum O’Neal,
and
the news release touted a quote from Tom Waits: “JT’s stories are like
stitches, like exit wounds, dispatches, dispositions. He is the
brilliant,
gifted and profound fly on the wall. You’ll need handkerchiefs and
novocaine
to get through this.”

Getting through this might take more than Novocain over at the New York
Times. Not only did the newspaper profile LeRoy, the travel magazine
also
recently ran a story by LeRoy about a trip to Euro Disney. In it, the
writer
recalls the time he spent in Orlando, where his mother stripped for a
time
and where it was his job to separate the Disney money from the real
stuff.

A spokesman for the New York Times said yesterday, “We have nothing to
add
to what we’ve printed.”

The LeRoy affair is eerily similar to the strange case of Anthony Godby
Johnson, also purportedly a lost child of the streets, who wrote an
“autobiography.” The book, “A Rock and a Hard Place,” achieved literary
liftoff after the social worker mother who adopted Johnson brokered
telephone- and online-only friendships with such writers as Armistead
Maupin
and Paul Monette.

If LeRoy is a figment of Laura Albert’s imagination, what were her
motivations? Success, for one. As a critical darling, LeRoy got
assignments
from other magazines and traded up in the publishing world. And check
out
http://Jtleroy.com . There aren’t a lot of writers out there selling
signed
whiffle balls ($8 postage paid) or raccoon baculum necklaces, which are
sexual amulets that turn up in LeRoy’s novel. (Those are $17.) Though
notoriously bashful, LeRoy — or the person playing LeRoy — hung out
with
such stars as Courtney Love and Winona Ryder, almost always accompanied
by
Laura Albert.

Then there’s another question: How? LeRoy ingratiated himself to a lot
of
people over the years, which, along with those well-received books,
might be
the character’s singular achievement, if a character is what he is. His
back
story was part of it — who could resist helping a charming reformed
junkie
with such a tragic biography, and with such laudable ambitions for a
drug-
and psychosis-free life?

But then there was the execution. By sheer coincidence, this reporter
began
an e-mail correspondence with LeRoy just last week. LeRoy has
guest-edited a
collection of essays for an upcoming book called “Best Music Writing
2005,”
and a piece written for The Washington Post appears in that volume.
LeRoy
put his e-mail address in the book and invited anyone to drop a line.
This
reporter sent a note to say, basically, “Thanks for choosing my story.”
Soon
after, a very warm, totally endearing reply was received. Another
e-mail or
two later, and LeRoy asked this reporter to give him a call, saying
that he
needed some help.

The conversation took place on Monday night, as LeRoy shopped at a
Trader
Joe’s. (”Should I get these cookies?” he wondered.) He wanted this
reporter
to read a new magazine piece he said he was writing. There was
something in
that voice that made its owner sound desperate for affection, but there
was
also a forwardness and ambitiousness that seemed pretty bold. He
basically
wanted a proofreader and editor.

“I can’t punctuate at all,” he said. “I never learned that. You can
tell me
how to do it and I’ll just come back the next time with the same
mistakes.”

It was flattering, in a way. This guy is famous and vulnerable and sad
and
triumphant, all at the same time. You could see why people would want
to
help him. He seemed like a character you could love.