I never intended to be a celeb, I intended to be an important writer but I had a wife and child and needed to earn a living. So I did a radio show for forty years, not realizing what a beautiful thing it is to have people walk up smiling and say, “I know you!” and the doorman in the homburg at the Hotel St. Paul who asks how I’ve been and really means it or the woman in the lobby who walks up and says, “Would you mind if I give you a big hug?” and does.
Important writers don’t get this, unfortunately. They give readings of their work to college students who then try to ask intelligent questions about archetypes and allegory, but I take a walk around Rice Park and a man walks up like an old friend and we talk. He looks at the old federal courthouse with bell tower and turrets and tells me what he’s read about the trial — in that courthouse in 1936 — of Alvin (“Creepy”) Karpis, who’d been in Ma Barker’s gang who had kidnapped the local brewer William Hamm.
