You really want to roll in the mud, don't you? Actually, this is kind of an amusing story. Do you recall David Karp? Fine writer. Won a Guggenheim back in '56. Nobody remembers that. Died just last year. Just down the road in Pittsfield. Wrote some good books. Hardman. Cry, Flesh. He was a Lion Books guy during the Arnold Hano glory days. Well, Karp got into TV writing and production when the paperback market went soft. He did some stuff for Playhouse 90 and The Untouchables. Won an Emmy, I'm pretty sure, for an episode of The Defenders. He wrote Sol Madrid. You ever see Sol Madrid? David McCallum? Anyway, back in 1970 he adapted his own novel, Brotherhood of the Velvet, into a TV movie for Glen Ford. It was a conspiracy flick. A little cheesy but still ahead of its time. I was 10 years old when it broadcast and, for whatever reason, it made a big impression. So I wrote Karp a fan letter and, shockingly, he wrote back. Can you imagine that? He's a big TV writer at this point and he takes the time to write to this pre-teen punk in a factory town back east. So we had a little correspondence going for a few months--I told him, I confessed, that I wanted to be a novelist. He sent me a mint copy of The Last Believers that I still have. Well at some point I started writing him a letter and I got a little sidetracked and began rambling about an idea I had for a dramatic television series. I had gotten hold of a little pamphlet written by D.C. Fontana, I believe, that detailed, essentially, how to write a pitch. Useful little document. So in this letter to Karp, I started pitching this notion I'd been cradling for a year or so. This idea I'd been hatching on long winter walks home from school. It was just nuts, really an off-the-wall thing. But what happened was the letter ballooned into this 60-page monster. I had to mail it in a manuscript envelope, right? About two weeks go by and suddenly I'm mortified that I wrote this thing to Mr. Karp, that I embarrassed myself so profoundly to a flesh-and-blood writer. And I'm brooding over this shame one afternoon in the rocking chair of my yellow kitchen, pretending to read a Treasure Chest comic book. And my mother is at the stove, you know, making a meatloaf. And the phone rings. So Ma wipes off her hands on the dish towel and grabs the phone and talks for a second. Then she covers the receiver with her hand and looks at me suspiciously and says, "It's a Mr. Karp for you." Can you imagine this? I'm ten, eleven goddamn years old. I almost dropped to the floor. I started shaking my head to refuse the call. But my mother, a stickler for doing the right thing and being polite, insisted I talk to this man. I think she thought it was someone's father or something. I remember this so clearly. So I take the phone and I sit down on the floor in the hallway and, terrified, I say hello. And Karp was just wonderful. Such a gentleman and quite funny. He said he'd read my series pitch and that he loved it and that he wanted to show it to some people. I swear to you, he even asked if I had representation. I didn't even know what that meant.

And you were ten years old? This is incredible?

Ten, eleven. I could check the date for you when I get home. It was the year Karp was writing for The Family Rico. You know--Ben Gazzara, Sal Mineo, Leif Erickson. God, what a cast. I still can't believe it tanked. And it was directed by Paul Wendkos, whose first feature was an adaptation Goodis's The Burgler. So there's a Karp-Goodis connection for everyone who wants to play "Six Degrees of Elliott Chaze."

So what happened with your pitch?

Here's the amazing thing. I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone. I kept the whole thing a secret. Didn't tell my parents or my brother or sisters. Honestly, the whole thing scared me as much as it exhilarated me. I mean just the notion of getting a phone call from an actual writer was miraculous to me. Getting a phone call from Hollywood was miraculous.

What happened to the pitch?

Karp was as good as his word. He showed the thing to some people. I guess some scripts were written. I know a pilot was written. To be honest, I don't know how far down the line things progressed. I was ten years old, for Christ's sake. I was a goddamn cub scout with a weird hobby for scribbling in notebooks.

You have to tell us--what was the series about?

It was a fairy tale kind of thing. It was adolescent surreal. I hung several different titles on it, but the one I liked was The Libraries of America. Karp told me, rightly, that this was death. That you can't sell a show with the words "library" or "leprosy" in it. Industry rule. The whole thing was really a child's dream, I can tell you that. Just loaded with all the archetypes. I've lost a lot of the paperwork, but what remains is still a kick to read. To me, anyway. It was sort of The Fugitive meets Huck Finn as rewritten by Matthew Lewis. It was very dark. Kind of noir. Kind of gothic. Kind of early Bradbury but without the nostalgia and romanticism. All shadows and dust. I recall in my mind's eye, as I was writing it up in the top floor of our three-decker, autumn rain pelting the little windows, seeing all the action in black and white. There was a solitary hero, a 12-year-old brooder, who gets separated from his family in the pilot. The family disappears and the boy ends up all alone, wandering through small town America trying to find out what happened to his clan. So there was this on-going mystery that carried over from week to week. And then there were these self-contained stories about the strange people the boy met in his travels. The hook was that in each forgotten little sleepy town he'd pass through, the kid would wander into the library in the village square. Do you know the kind of building I mean? Can you picture this idyllic little redbrick library? Or this neo-classical granite library with gargoyles? The kid would go in and find a quiet corner and pull down a book and wait. And sooner or later someone would arrive. Old men, strange women, other kids like himself. (Jodie Foster had just done an episode of Daniel Boone and I was hoping she'd do a guest shot.) And these people were always very furtive. And they'd confront the boy and talk to him in a very serious and stern manner. As if what they had to say were in code. And sometimes they'd supply bits of information regarding what had happened to the folks and where the family might be found. And sometimes that info was bogus. I remember that I wanted the audience to be unsure of whether each week's acquaintance was friend or foe. There was one treatment I did in which the kid finds his grandfather crucified in the middle of these pine woods. And a terrible storm blows up. And the kid takes shelter in a diner with a blind guy and his daughter. And when he gets back to the woods, grandpa's body is gone. So it was that kind of thing, you know, that weird, paranoid nightmare travelogue. That genre.

Wasn't anyone concerned that this stuff was coming from a ten-year-old?

I was 11, okay. Maybe even 12. And this material was seen by only a handful of people. Karp and some producer-friends of his. And it's not like anybody requested a birth certificate. I'm not sure they had any sense of how old I was.

Was that your only venture in the TV medium?