When I was thirteen, I had a yearlong correspondence by mail and over the phone with Rodney Bingenheimer. A peculiar icon of the sixties and seventies, Bingenheimer had opened a famous club on the Sunset Strip; he was a live-in publicist to Sonny and Cher, he accompanied David Bowie to London, and through his adjacency, his fandom, and his…

All summer long, we played checkers out on your front porch. The discs clinked under our fingertips, which shone with grease from the potato chips we licked but would not eat. This was our habit: to pop a chip under our tongues and lave the brittle flake, swallowing only the aftertaste of salt and sour cream. Earlier, you had dumped sugar-free…