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writing a book,” he said. “I should send you a copy.” He let those words hang in the air for a long minute, during which I did not say, “You? Write a book? You couldn’t write enough to fill a book of matches!”
    “Who’s publishing it?” I said, expecting to hear The Wisteria Press or Gerbil Books or The Fund for the Verbally Handicapped.
    “Random House,” he said.
    He said this the way you’d say, “Four-fifteen,” if someone asked you what time it is.
    I hadn’t seen the guy in years. I wanted to choke him. I wanted to give him a swift kick where the sun don’t shine. “That’s great,” I said. I wanted him to die a natural death but someplace where I could watch. “When?” I said. “In the fall,” he said. “Terrific.” He sent me a copy, of course. Signed, “To Larry, my friend and comrade.”
    I wanted him to choke on a bratwurst and fall down and hit his head so that he’d be in a wheelchair, steering it with a pencil between his teeth, and I could do a benefit for him, to raise money to pay for his colostomy, and he’d come up on stage to thank me, and sort of gurgle deep in his throat, and we’d be photographed together for the newspaper.
    FAMOUS WRITER HELPS OUT CRIPPLED PAL
    Nationally recognized author Larry Wyler, whose work appears regularly in the legendary New Yorker magazine, is a guy whose success hasn’t gone to his head. The two thousand St. Paulites who packed O‘Shaughnessy last night to hear Wyler’s unique blend of breathtaking story-telling and gut-wrenching hilarity can testify to that. The performance raised more than $100,000 to pay for an operation for Frank Frisbie, 29, of Summit Hill Care Center, who needs a new rectum. Frisbie, who suffered brain spasms in a bratwurst-related incident and lost his power of speech, as well of control of his colon, beamed in rapture from a front-row seat as Wyler held the crowd spellbound. Often compared to such New Yorker notables as James Thurber and S. J. Perelman, Wyler got a standing ovation from the audience when he announced that he is working on a book.
    Frank is a pleasant guy, basically a suck-up and a loser but not evil or anything, just one more dust bunny under the bed of life, and here he had gone and written a novel. This was a shock. Like seeing Ray Charles sink nine out of ten free throws.
    Fair Henry. A novel of 135 pages about an amnesiac deaf-mute who is beaten by drunken cowboys in a Wyoming tank town and befriended by Basques and hired to herd sheep, which he does over a winter and then the rancher’s black-haired daughter falls in love with him and he with her, but he knows he would only ruin her life, so he rides away one night and never returns and is assumed to have drowned himself in the river.
    That was it. End of story.
    Two months later, the rave reviews started coming. “Look at this,” Iris said and waved the newspaper at me—“has a lyrical luminosity that takes the breath away,” she read. Frank was interviewed in The Pioneer Press about the importance of storytelling in building a sense of community. They compared him to Wallace Stegner. Wallace Stegner! You mean Wally Ballou!
    This slack-jawed opportunist had parlayed his taste for pretentious crapola into a raging success—his little steaming turd of a book won the Mary L. Quimby Award of $50,000, a major pile of lettuce. It went into a third and a fourth printing. Frank bought a house on Summit Avenue. I could see his carriage house from our backyard. He was pictured in the Sunday rotogravure looking winsome and modest and thoughtful, a pipe clenched in his teeth, seated at an antique desk, pretending to write on a pad of paper, a shelf of leather-bound tomes behind him. I wished it would fall and squash the bastard like a June bug. I wanted to throw a dead raccoon in his yard. The thought that a pea brain could write a successful book was, to me, the handwriting on the wall and it said: GET BUSY.
    So I set out to write your basic