Well, when I was twenty-five I’d decided to write a novel in the first person, in which I would affect the air of an autistic snob and fool myself and the reader into thinking that I came from a good family and had suffered only from affluent neglect. Maybe it was supposed to be an affectionate caricature, with a dose of German Romanticism à la Eichendorff’s Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing and a dash of French humor à la Voltaire’s Candide. The first-person narrator, so, me, was supposed to like listening to the Eagles; I had cribbed that from Bret Easton Ellis. Actually, I—the real me, I mean, with my jodhpurs and hennaed hair and liquid eyeliner under my eyes and Airspun Soft by Coty on my face, smoking my Sobranies—thought the Eagles were awful, and not just the Eagles but the people who liked the Eagles, too. And so I had written this book, in the evenings, in my one-room apartment in Hamburg-Ottensen, subsisting on oven-crisped pizza baguettes and toast with Kühne mustard and ravioli from a tin. The same apartment I vacated, by the way, when I could no longer afford it, and which my friend Olaf Dante Marx then moved into, only to die of AIDS a few weeks later. Anyway, and now I’m getting to the point, either the character or his monologues—because there was no dialogue whatsoever in the book—were so believable that the readers of Faserland assumed the person writing like that was me.