I dropped out for lack of cash, worked three jobs, returned to school for a couple of years, dropped out broke again. When the friends I’d met as a freshman graduated to begin their careers in corporate finance and accounting, and my girlfriend left for a magazine job in New York, I mostly sat around drinking wine alone in the afternoons. I was as confused as I’d ever been, which is saying something. I’d sunk tens of thousands of dollars — much of it borrowed, some of it earned by my own labor, some of it a gift from my grandfather — into a journalism education, but my scholarship had been revoked when I didn’t finish my degree in four years. Internships at the Fargo Forum and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine had left me sour on the strictures of deadline hackery and service-mag pap. I didn’t want to be a cops and courts reporter; I didn’t want to be a mutual-fund guru, a blue-chip stock watcher. I wanted to be a novelist. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the first thing about writing a novel, and it was clear that even if I started tomorrow I’d be a long time in earning a dime from writing novels. I did what many before me have done in such circumstances: I became a bartender. This offered all the intellectual stimulation you’d imagine, which is to say none. The pleasures were other. I met party people. I drank on the job.

One night my telephone rang. It was the old man, of all people. He’d tracked down my home number. I never did learn how. The number was unconnected with my name, since I was living with my girlfriend’s gay uncle Charlie, who’d offered to put me up rent-free so I’d have time to write the great American novel, in compensation for which he merely asked that he appear, lightly fictionalized but still identifiable, as a demon lover with a giant cock in my great American novel. I’d overcome the residual homophobia of my Catholic boyhood by then, thanks in no small part to Charlie, whom I’m very happy to describe for posterity as one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, as well as a demon lover with an enormous and stunningly beautiful cock.