Write me a Letter

cake with a file in it for a wayward chum on visiting day either. Prisons are prisons, are what prisons are, and they tend to be a little short on fresh coconuts, fish barbecues, free bananas, and all the clams you can dig.
    Morning thoughts, perched atop a porcelain bowl— mornings would be far more tolerable if they came later in the day, like just after Happy Hour... it was still strange not having Mom around, especially in the mornings, when we always had breakfast together.... Some people sing when they are happy; some when they are sad. When I was but a tiny, tiny tot, someone, I don’t know for sure who, used to sing me toward slumberland with the old folksong ”Down in the Valley,” from which ditty, you may already know, comes the hopeful plea ”Write me a letter.” Well, I hope it was my mom who’d been doing the singing, is what I hope, and I also hope ’twas not the blues she was singing....
    Actually, I’m not sure I ever was a tiny, tiny tot—I have the feeling that even when I was small, I was big.... Remember that philosopher, whoever he was, who claimed that you could never arrive at a finite point because every time you traveled half the remaining distance to your goal, half was still left, and if you traveled half that half, that still left another half, and so on. Which, as we all know, is foolishness, because you can get somewhere, like I managed to get to the john. But he almost had it right. If he’d used toothpaste as an analogy, he could have convinced me— there is no such thing as a completely empty tube of Colgate. There is always a weeny bit left, even if it means cutting the tube open along the bottom and one side with nail scissors. Yes, a.m. bits and pieces, which don’t seem to be that much different from late-night ones, come to think about it.
    John D. was waiting for me when I got to the office, sitting out front in his car. I opened up and he followed me in. John was a trim-looking six-footer, an ex-pro bowler who’d bought control of a bowling alley just east of where I lived, after he left the professional circuit. As far as I knew, he was doing pretty good; there was always plenty going on at the Valley Bowl whenever I dropped in, which was at least once a month, as I had installed and looked after his building’s security system for him. He looked a mite weary that Tuesday morning, though; he sank into the spare chair with a noise part sigh and part groan and rubbed his gray eyes tiredly.
    I got my checkbook out of the safe, wrote out one for a cool ten grand, and slid it across the desk toward him.
    ”Thanks, Vic,” he said, putting it away in his wallet without looking at it.
    ”Sure, pal,” I said. ”You helped me out with a modest sum once, remember?”
    ”I do.”
    ”You lent me your office once, too, remember?”
    ”I do.”
    ”And your car that time?”
    ”Guilty.”
    ”You even lent me yourself that time I needed a Marlboro man type.”
    ”I lent you a bowling ball once, too,” he said. ”Always wondered what you wanted it for. I figured it wasn’t just to drop on someone’s tootsies.”
    I gave him an enigmatic smile, but he wasn’t that far wrong, actually. He made no move to get up and go, so I figured he still had something on his mind, so I said, just making small talk, ”Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted to help, John, but how come you didn’t go to the bank? Your business is booming and God knows how much equity you’ve got in your plant and equipment.”
    ”My wife is an accountant,” he said. ”She does the books every quarter, along with our personal finances.”
    ”Ah,” I said, as if I understood. I did; partly, anyway. If he didn’t want his wife to know about it, it was either the ladies or gambling or maybe drugs, but I knew John didn’t gamble at all, ever, and he’d never shown any signs at all of being into drugs, or them being into him, so that left the ladies. To narrow it down still further, as we professional deducers like to do, John didn’t play around, and he had plenty of chances as he was a handsome man with a good line of chat and his place was buzzing night after night with lady bowlers from a dozen local leagues and many of them didn’t mind a drink or two during the evening, or a few in the bar afterward, either. To me, that left but one possibility— love. Some purple-eyed knockout had transfixed my friend John D., who was one of the last two surviving true romantics to be found west of