He brought out one of the epic letters I’d written to him and I cringed. I was always writing to him; they were a combination of love letter, storytelling, and just my general strangeness. I never knew if he actually read them or not (a couple of decades later he told me he’d read and kept nearly every single one), but I got a kick out of the possibility. I never wanted to talk to him about them; I liked the closeness of the words and distance of the pages.
