It’s the kind of joy we felt when Dana Plato, the little girl onDiff’rent Strokes,got arrested, posed naked inPlayboy,and took too many sleeping pills.

 

 People standing in line at the supermarket, clipping coupons, getting old, those are the headlines that sell these people a newspaper.

 

 Most people, they want to read about Lani O’Grady, the pretty daughter onEight Is Enough,found dead in a trailer house with her belly full of Vicodin and Prozac.

 

 No crack-up, the editor tells me, no story.

 

 Happy Kenny Wilcox with his laugh lines, he wouldn’t sell.

 

 The editor tells me, “Find Wilcox with kiddie porn on his computer. Find him with dead bodies under his house. Then you got a story.”

 

 This editor says, “Better yet, find him with all the above, but find him dead.”

 

 The next week, my dog drinks a puddle of antifreeze. My dog’s named Skip after the dog onDanny-Next-Door,the dog little Danny used to have. My Skip, my baby’s white with big black spots and a red collar just like on television.

 

 The only cure for antifreeze is to pump the dog’s stomach. Then fill her tummy with activated charcoal. Find a vein and start the dog on an ethanol drip. Pure grain alcohol to flush out the kidneys. To save my dog, my baby, I need to get her dead drunk. This means another trip to see Dr. Ken, who says, Sure, next week is fine for an interview. But he warns me, his life’s not very exciting.

 

I tell him, Trust me. Good writing means you take the regular facts and deliver them in a sexy way. Don’t worry about your life story, I tell him, that’s my job.

 

 These days, I could use a good story assignment. Me, I’ve been writing freelance for a couple years. Since I got canned from doing entertainment features. That was good money, the press-junket stuff, puffing up quotes for movie launches, sharing a movie star with a tableful of media people for ten minutes, all of them trying not to yawn.

 

 Movie premiers. Album releases. Book launches. It was a steady stream of work, but give the wrong opinion and you’re off the gravy train. A movie studio threatens to pull their retail display advertising, and—abracadabra—your byline disappears.

 

 Me, I’m broke because one time I tried to warn people. One movie, I wrote that people might do better to spend their money somewhere else, and since then I’m out of the loop. Just one summer slasher movie and the power behind it, and I’m begging to write obituaries. To write photo captions. Anything.

 

 It’s a bald cheat, building a house of cards you don’t get to knock down. You spend all those years piling up nothing, creating an illusion. Turning a human being into a movie star. Your real payday is at the back end of the deal. Then you get to pull out the rug. Knock down the cards. Show the handsome ladies’ man cramming a gerbil up his ass. Reveal the girl-next-door shoplifting and stoned on painkillers. The goddess beating her kids with a wire hanger.

 

 The editor’s right. So is Ken Wilcox. His life is an interview no one will ever buy.

 

 For prep, the whole week before we talk, I surf the Internet. I download files from the former Soviet Union. Here’s a different kind of child star: Russian schoolboys without pubic hair, sucking off fat old men. Czech girls still waiting for their first period, getting butt-fucked by monkeys. I save all these files to one thin compact disk.

 

 Another night, I clip a leash on Skip and risk a long walk through my neighborhood. Coming back to my apartment, my pockets are stuffed with plastic sandwich bags and little paper envelopes. Squares of folded aluminum foil. Percodans. OxyContins. Vicodins. Glass vials of crack and heroin.

 

 The interview, I write all fourteen thousand words before Ken Wilcox even opens his mouth. Before we even sit down together.

 

 Still, to keep up appearances, I bring my tape recorder. I bring a notepad and pretend to take notes with a couple dried-out pens. I bring a bottle of red wine spiked with Vicodin and Prozac.

 

 At Ken’s little house in the suburbs, you’d expect a glass case crammed with dusty trophies, glossy photos, civic awards. A memorial to his childhood. There’s nothing like that. Any money he’s got, it’s in the bank, drawing interest. His house is just brown rugs and painted walls, striped curtains on each window. A bathroom with pink tile.