One day we got to telling war stories about publishing and I told him the nightmare about trying to publish my book then called "Bear Bob's Story" (which had nothing to do with Bob Sheckley except the coincidence of first names).

Within minutes Bob had offered to read it, and I suffered a total emotional collapse.  After all, here is one of the great literary heroes of my childhood offering to read my scummy little book.  Immediately I regretted bringing it up, but somehow went through with the whole thing, sick to my stomach, and dropped Bob off, manuscript in hand, at the Barnes and Noble coffee shop on 83rd Street and Broadway. He sat down quietly, without benefit of coffee, and read the whole damn thing cover to cover while I did errands.  And then, he said he loved it and wrote a jacket blurb for it.  I have not yet gotten over this, nor do I have any idea what it means except, perhaps, that destiny is sometimes very strange and even more rarely very, very kind.

The other is that we spoke often about people who wanted to make films of his books, because, after all, I had worked in a movie theater where I not only got to pop fresh popcorn each and every night, but I also got to see "The Tenth Victim" more times than any other human being ever born.