I had a dog with me, that first time I met Hornblower. It was not a big dog or a solid, reliable dog. It was a filthy and manic terrier named Muffin, a wheezy and neurasthenic old westie. Her owner, Cathleen Whittles, said the dog was six years old but I figured sixteen was nearer the mark. On her acting resume, Cathleen sliced ten years off her own age, so it seemed fair to do it for the dog.

I walked Muffin several days a week. I was supposed to be paid in cash for this duty, fourteen dollars a week, but I almost never was. Cathleen preferred to compensate me in other ways. I’d suddenly get comp tickets to things that her friends were putting on at the Theatre de Lys or Cherry Lane. Most of them ran only a week or two; one horrible little pocket musical called “Buy Bonds, Buster!” opened and closed the same night. Often she gave me nothing tangible, but would stroll alongside me and Muffin while reeling off friendly advice in life-skills management, based on her soap-opera and theater experiences. The big thing was, she let me sleep on her couch. I would have walked Muffin for that alone. It wasn’t a particularly clean couch but it was there when I needed it, and only a five minutes’ walk away. Another nice thing about Cathleen is that I never had to explain anything to her. She knew Pudge slightly, because once or twice they went to the same alcoholic chat group at St. Luke’s.

Once Cathleen gave me a friend’s screenplay and told me that if I read it and wrote a synopsis I’d get two hundred dollars. She had agreed to read it herself, as a favor to the friend, but you know how those things go. So she presented the script to me as this spectacular opportunity, one that any young person my age would kill for. Why, its author was a big celebrity! Or at least he had been in the 1950s, back when he was a juvenile movie actor. The script was brain-scaldingly lurid. It was about a soft-rock teen idol, a sort of cross between David Cassidy and Guru Mahara-Ji, the “14-year-old Perfect Master.” All the teeny-boppers in the world are supposed to be in thrall to this prodigy. However he is himself controlled by his wicked, Svengali-like manager, who overreaches in his plot to rule the world and, like a Bond villain, ends by being blown to smithereens amidst the video monitors in his vast control room.

It took me weeks to write that page of synopsis. I did not get my $200.