The King of Autobiography (Short Story‪)‬

I wish I could write about whether I'm about to get prostate cancer, as a near friend of mine has, or about a score of flings I've been having with Miami transvestites since my forty-ninth, or about how I'm going to afford to buy my kids invisible braces and at the same time save for a Caribbean retirement, or I wish I could just sit down and complain about my wife no longer having an interest in sex with me while the whole family makes demands on my time and finances and why can't they all just see I'm fifty-one and worn out and POISONED? I wish I could write what I've come to think of as the normal, desired-by-the-mass-market sort of memoir, like the kind recently penned by Jimmy Flaps, who is here at this writer's conference, too, with me, with us all but somehow not with us at all, the biker-drug-lord knife-fighter who cleaned up his gangster act when he found Jesus and has now been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. I want to be the best God damn memoir/travelogue writer in the whole world even if I have to make things up, like saying I was born with three testicles--one of them POISONED--or that my preference for small people has transformed into a desire for really hairy old ladies, the kind of tawdry stuff that people love to read about on the subway or pick up on a coffee table, drifting through the pages randomly, scanning for alien abduction or radioactive therapy or the secret recipes of herbal medicine. I like these stories, too, like most people; I like and love their message of hope; I like the rubber-neckedness of them. I like the stories of advice from the greatest generation or from the dying man giving weekly tutorials about what life really means. I like the stories of fat people who get thin and anorexics who learn to eat and idiot savants who solve great mysteries. I wish I could write such a book, or one of those where I just couldn't stop having sex--oh, I tried, I tried, but everywhere I went I found a person was dying to have sex with me. I wish I could write such a book instead of a book about POISONS.