We'd both swallowed the Kool-Aid, Irwin Isaac and I, both believed that writing elevated us above our backgrounds, making us more than guys hustling appliance parts like Meiselman's father or doing other people's taxes like my own. Writers were grander than that, mind-workers, artists. Meiselman, scribbling away, was of course kidding himself. What about me?

I made seven more trips to pick up Meiselman in front of St Francis and drop him off at his apartment. In my mind they all blur into the same trip. He would get in my car; scarcely say more than hello; fall asleep on the short trip to his Bell Avenue apartment; struggle up the stairs, leaning against me; flop on the white couch in his living room, mumble a thank you as I departed his apartment. The only difference is that after my third trip he began wearing a wool pea-cap, which he didn't take off in the car or in his apartment. The hat was there to cover up the loss of what little hair he had to begin with. He was notably thinner, and the look of terror in his eyes — a premonition of death? — seemed intensified. Because at fifty-six he was relatively young, they filled him with powerful potions of chemotherapy. "With pancreatic cancer," he told me, "they figure what do I have to lose, except for my sideburns, my appetite, and my energy?"

Three weeks later, Meiselman called to say that he wouldn't need to be picked up any longer. His oncologist at St Francis, a Dr Mutchnik, had determined that the chemo wasn't doing any good, and he would be checking him into the hospice section of the hospital. 

"Is there anything I can do?" I ask. 

"Yeah," Meiselman says, "you can find a cure for cancer. But in my case you better make it quick." I feel a tinge of relief when he doesn't ask me to run any errands or visit him in the hospice at St Francis. 

Truth is I didn't think much about Irwin Isaac Meiselman after that last call. I don't read a Chicago paper, and therefore had no exact notion when he died. In such matters, what difference does exactitude make? All I knew was that I would receive no more mid-morning Meiselman calls; have no more single-spaced manuscripts thrust upon me; with luck would for the last time in my life be called Ed. 

Then, one day, mid-morning, my phone rings, and my caller ID displays the names Freifeld & Berman. 

"Mr Kastell, my name is Sidney Freifeld, and I represent the estate of the late Irwin Isaac Meiselman. Mr Meiselman mentions you in his will."

"Really?" was all I can think to say.

"Yes," this Freifeld says, in a lubricious voice. "His will stipulates that you are to receive $30,000 in return for services to be rendered."

"What services?"