A year later, in Boston, I met The Guy on the Radio. I was just out of the army, back from West Germany. There was a blurb in the Herald Traveler that he was going to be a guest on a radio show in the city; he was promoting a book. I figured that if I could meet him, I could ask him some questions, the usual stuff, how to break in, could he point me in the right direction, that kind of thing. I waited for the show to be over at 10:00 p.m. and approached him as he was leaving the lobby. I remember I didn’t rush up to him, tell him my name, say I was a fan. I knew that wouldn’t get so much as a glance and that he’d never break stride.

Instead, as soon as I saw him, I took a kazoo out of my pocket and went into a rendition of his theme song, “The Bear Missed the Train.” So many times I heard him play that, it’s the phonetic English for “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” what Uncle Jake used to sing on our car rides.

“The bear missed the train, the bear missed the train, the bear missed the train, and now he’s walking.”

“I’m going to the Copley Square Hotel,” he said, not addressing me directly, “so you can be my guide to make sure I don’t get lost.” In a few minutes, we were at the bar. Here I was, at the literal elbow of someone who’d been successful, famous, for what I was thinking I wanted to do, I wouldn’t have this opportunity again, so I launched into a monologue of what happened to me in 1952, telling him about my brushes with betrayal, disease, gambling, death, bribery, persecution, kidnapping, war, politics, escape, loyalty, forgery, unconditional love, depression, marines, theft, girls, and a dog.

I could tell that he’d been engrossed, but not wanting to push it, I stood up and said good night.

He shook my hand and said, “Hey, kid, someday you, Steven, Noodge Mauer, Myandrew, and Frankie are gonna be as well-known as the gang in my stories.” He then added, “As important as it is that you remember your Mother, Dad, Papa, Uncle Jake, Auntie Rose, Old Uncle A, and all the other people who were central to you when you were growing up, you should embrace them more as an adult, especially as you get older and the distance between you and them becomes less significant.”

I hesitated, then asked, “Are all of your characters real? Are your stories based on stuff that happened to you when you grew up?”

“Does it matter? Would you decide, one way or the other, to listen or to tune in somewhere else if you found out if I made it all up? Or most of it?”

“No,” I answered quickly, “it actually wouldn’t make a difference.”

“If it’s just reporting on the events of the day it can be entertaining for a while, especially if there’s a lively way of retelling, but it’d get tiresome, and truth be told, I’d never have enough good material for a show that goes on most nights if I had to give a verbatim account of interactions I’d had with friends, family members, and others I’ve met.

“Fictional characters have lives as well,” he went on, “they inhabit our spaces and we interact with them; it’s still a give-and-take, just not in the same sense as what’s going on here, in our conversation tonight. But never forget that a made-up person can speak to us just as well as someone who’s here in the flesh. There’s no difference whether you hear something from the point of view of first person actual or third person fictional if it interests you, moves you, or gets you to think about things from another perspective.

“Look, kid, I don’t have a clue whether the things you told me are true or not. What’s important to me is that you’ve painted pieces of art that need to be displayed, and you know what? I don’t care if they’re fakes.

“For me, life’s usually better as fiction. Yeah, you heard me right, because that way, no one can disagree with, challenge, or sue you. Now there’s no harm starting with a kernel of truth, but make sure when you cook it up it turns into something that can’t be traced back to its original form, you know, so think in terms of omelets, they begin as chicken eggs, but tell me, would anyone looking at an omelet who’d never seen a chicken’s egg be able to tell you its origin?

“Let your characters speak to you, think of yourself as a translator, there’s a million ways to say the same thing, that’s why we have synonyms, after all.

“So don’t be afraid of going off on tangents or making distortions, and blind alleys are okay too, because no one but you knows what the outcome will be and you can always make an elision to something else to get you back to where you want to be.

“And by the way, kid,” he added as he was winding down, heading toward the elevator, “everyone is going to want to know who’s who, especially relatives and those with whom you’ve interacted; they’ll spend hours trying to determine if a character is all or partly based on them in disguise. Don’t give in to the temptation to discuss this with them. That’s all about their ego, pride, and neediness, and all that’s gonna do is drain you dry.”

He shook my hand, said good night, and disappeared.

He never knew my name, and I never asked him anything about how to get into radio. But this I’ll say for sure: what he told me is the advice I followed for all these years.