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decades of hemorrhaging wildly at the drop of a bucket?
    Then:
    I apologize for the strangeness, even the offensiveness, of my last letter. I am approaching you this way only because of shyness. We are connected, I know. Will you join me in the house of light? Alone in my apartment, I can occasionally hear your thoughts. You love me. Last night you had a nightmare involving a car accident. Is that true?
    I did lose two joints of my right ring finger in a minor car accident when I was eleven.
    Then:
    I will come to the eight o’clock showing of Sense and Sensibility on Friday. You will recognize me immediately. But if, for whatever reason, reasonable or not, you choose not to acknowledge my presence, I will resign myself to that fact, and stop bothering you.
    He gave me his name, in large block letters traced over several times:
    MY NAME IS VALENTINO
    There was also a pencil drawing enclosed. “Nude and Skyhook” was scrawled in an ornate, tilted script across the bottom. Tucked into the top right corner was a spiderweb-like basketball net, its rim pointed downward. Running from bottom right corner to top left corner was a long drainpipe arm holding a marble-size basketball between its middle finger and thumb. The basketballhad hair, eyelashes, growing on its circumference. The rest of the page was covered with a swirly pattern. There was no nude.
    Because people tend to go to the movies in pairs, there are no more than ten loners at each showing. I assumed I was looking out for a single man, between twenty and forty. To make light of a bizarre situation, I kept saying, over and over,
Bulletproof glass, bulletproof glass
.
10. Sense and Sensibility
    It was a Friday and I had a date with a girl I had just met. Her name was Patricia Potemkin. We were supposed to go the movies at eight o’clock. But I was sick that day and threw up several times during the afternoon. At five o’clock I took a nap and never woke up.
11. The Awakening
    The Federal Water Conservation Act of 1978 mandated that newly installed toilets release no more than one and a half gallons per flush, 40 percent less than before. Many consumers complained that this only necessitated an additional flush.
    Trish, however, applauded this new law. Why waste water? She was also keen on conserving electricity.
    In 1979 a three-year-old Val ran into a darkened bathroom to pee, and saw, lying at the bottom of the toilet, a one-inch-long gold specimen, half broken up, diffused. “It’s a ring,” he thought. “What are you doing?” his mother said, startling him from behind. She was standing in the shower. Behind the translucent plastic curtain she looked like a pink octopus.
12. Gas Conservation
    Trish was also keen on conserving gas. That’s why the house was always ten degrees too cold and meals were routinely under-cooked. Chewy spaghetti, bleeding chicken, and rice that tasted like pebbles. Once, after Trish had placed a plate of warm baked beans with cold hot dogs in front of a by-now five-year-old Valentino, he said, “This tastes like shit, Mom.”
    “Just eat it.”
    “I can’t, Mom.”
    “Just eat it!”
13. A Scat Singer
    All through puberty I was afraid I would eat shit. Any day now, I thought, I would bend down over the toilet, pick some shit up, and eat it. What would I be if I ate shit? I would be lower than the lowest animal, you might as well shoot me. My two fears growing up were (1) I was going to stab myself with the bread knife while washing dishes, and (2) I was going to eat shit.
    There is a word for this:
coprophagous
, meaning “feeding on dung” (dung beetle, etc.), from the Greek
kopros
(“dung”), derived from the Sanskrit
sakrt
(“dung”).
Kopros
in Greek means “dung,” as in
acropolis:
“house of dung.”
    The only thing clean about a human being is his skin. Inside, he’s filth. No, no, let’s start all over: The only thing clean about a human being is his clothing. No! No! No! No! No! No! No! Because his pants and