Mr. Malamud, Would You Be My Pen Pal?

To you absolute stockpile of splendor, you extraordinary master of glory, you gamma ray of brilliance shining brighter than a thousand splendid suns, in all your grandeur,

There are banana bushels of things I have to say to you, all of which are matters of my life and death, but which you would probably find very leastly important, should you still be alive to listen to my teenage problems. I’d like to sit you down and have a cup of tea, as you perform my teenage lobotomy. I’d like to write you a whole love poem about the angina your baseball bible The Natural caused me, as you ascertain my mental syndromes and cure my teenage coronary heart disease. The lullabies the haloed angels sing about Roy Hobbs tell me that Roy is a god, but they must live in a deprived fantasy world, because no, Bernard, you’re the god, more of a god than Anderson will ever be no matter how his snow-white hair gleams under the fluorescent lights of his story-telling studio. That fantasy life those singing angels live is the one Roy lives also, for Roy is but a god in the supernature. There and gone, a ghoulish ghost in a ghost town, is how Roy traveled through the city where the Knights decayed in the dugouts, surreally, but you, Bernard, you created him, bore him in a test tube from all the surreal psychedelics spinning around and turning cartwheels in your very real head, and you are a human being and nowhere near a ghost. Now, honey, I would never shrink a kid, but if I could acquire the shrinkage of my immune efficiency and die and go to heaven, could we rendezvous and compare the lard that the baseball drips to the lard on the backs of our thighs and its wings like a dragonfly’s to the winged apparatus I will invent and use to cheat my way into a job with Cirque du Soleil because I am not a contortionist or a hula-hooping body builder? The heaven you are in must be a heaven for kings, and since I am the filthiest of thieving peasants you will have to sneak me in under your kingly cloak. I know I have only read a single one of your books, but I am an obsessor, and it took only that one to spark my teenage fanaticism. Forgive me if, in two months, I think of your name maybe once a week instead of the current one trillion times a day, and if, in a year, I have no interest in reading about your Judaism instead of the current mild curiosity harbored in my quay of a heart, for I am of a million-track mind more intertangled than a metropolitan railway and trying to concentrate on one given thing for more than ten seconds could crack my teenage vertebrae.

The dearest of love to you, Hopelessly Devoted.