It would be Halloween. It’s always Halloween in my imaginary life. Even in my earliest years, the ones I never technically experienced but only heard about from my biographers, it was Halloween—Halloween a metaphor for donning a mask of “reality” and becoming a spy in order to expose the “real” world’s fictitious underbelly.

I can still see-feel-hear-smell-taste her, her maddest of bodies that made divinest sense to a parched and withered me. My mind swam like a drunk octopus with images of the two of us in a dizzying array of compromising--possibly illegal--positions.

Not that we were being insincere. Or maybe I should say we were being sincere in our insincerity.

One must appreciate life's little ironies, even at one's own expense.

Reading The Dark Knight Returns had woken up something or someone inside me. It had woken up my own Dark Knight, I suppose, the part of me that yearned to take on the universe, walk on the wild side, live dangerously, leap knowing full well the net would never appear, that its not appearing was precisely the point. Suddenly I craved to become a specialist in the Leap of Faith, to plummet headlong into my unknown destiny at twice the speed of death, to be a regular predator feasting for the duration of my short mammalian existence on fate’s tissues …

I was sick to the bone of disappearing by degrees, dissolving into library walls, playing my sad little violin of loneliness as time’s invisible ink wrote out my meaningless days even as it erased them. We imaginary people must live the Adventure passionately, set ourselves down with the liquefied marrow of Experience, or else lament the Moment’s passing with a whimper as our unrecorded voices are swallowed by silence.

My throat was parched and my entire body was leprous with cuts, yet my mind was exceedingly clear. I knew I was in deep s**t. I didn’t know how deep--just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.

Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and s**t-faced with your neighbor every now and then.

I’d never seen a leper before. To be honest I didn’t really believe in them. I’d always assumed they were just made-up Biblical characters like Jesus, God and Satan.

I adopted a begging posture that suggested genteel poverty combined with a certain affable nonchalance. People found this irresistible. They lavished money on me. Within days I exceeded ten dollars an hour. I began to save money and even, following Blue’s lead, tithed to the less fortunate. I became less pessimistic, thought less about how cruel the streets can be. I actually considered begging a legitimate career possibility.