Sept. 20. Dear Netflix:

You must have me mixed up with another Larry Feldman. I sent back all boxed sets of “Dirty Harry” eight or ten months ago. If you insist on charging me for someone else’s blunder, I will have no choice but to desist being a customer of yours and/or institute legal recrimination with no ado.

Sept. 21. Dear Nuvention Clearing House:

Thank you for your encouraging words. I do in fact have a new invention and one I think you can market to great advantage. Enclosed you will find the business plan for my latest proposal, as well as a personal check to cover the cost of registration. It is my belief that Fortune Rubbers, novelty condoms printed with Chinese cookie-style fortunes, could really strike pay dirt with the gay demographic as well as normal people.

Sometimes I can’t even tell which letters I’m writing for him and which I’m inventing, for sanity’s sake. Other times I forget where I am, sweating in the room where I’ve again risked life and limb to jury-rig extra sheets in the windows against the glare of smogshine that hurts his eyes. In the dim light punctuated by the Arabic gutturals from Al Jazeera that susurrate night and day, I muddle my Middle East geography and half think I’m hiding out with the Taliban in some Afghani cave. Only the periodic flocking of Chinese nurse-groupies relieves the desert mirage. (“Lar-ry! Lar-ry!” they chant when he makes an appearance in the hallway to hobble to the weight scale. He flashes them a V like Winston Churchill in his dotage.) That and the regular appearance of the KFC man, who has a double row of teeth like the keyboard of a harpsichord and who performs a high five with the patient each time he delivers a catered meal of Double Crunch with Honey BBQ sauce.

Artie to Larry: “Professor, look, both you same size now!”

Larry to Artie: “Yes, and that’s for the first time since my bar mitzvah, I believe. Look at Dan, he’s so skinny his shorts are falling off his hips.”

Or did I make that up? Daydreaming has become my only escape, a life-saving pressure valve that allows my brain to, among other things, revert to a time when the whole clan got along: Sam passing out silver dollars, Little Larry showing off his collection of switchblades, Burton patting him on the head, saying, “Aww, isn’t that cute.”

Sept. 23. Dear Florida Power & Light:

Know by these presents that I had 45 pounds of expensive beluga caviar in my freezer. If even one ounce of it is ruined due to you shut off the juice, this is to inform that I intend to seek financial relief in the amount of no less than $85,000.

Meanwhile the personal fusion between us, master and man, no longer even frightens me. I just accept it. That we’re indistinguishable from each other, one creature with borderline psychopathic tendencies, is accepted without qualm by the cashier’s office downstairs whenever I go to make a deposit of Larry’s money into his ever-ravenous account. When I borrow his camera’s memory card to back up his pictures into my camera, as he instructs, it feels like I’m being force-fed a brain implant. Entering his e-mail account to do his correspondence, I feel like I’m leaping into Larry’s body, like Patrick Swayze using Whoopi’s in Ghost. Is the merger almost done? Huwwo, have I really adopted his speech impediment as my own? I’m his lackey, what he might inexcusably call his personal coolie, captive to the mini-sagas that I can no longer orchestrate and which are more than ever like papal bulls, standing fully formed on their own outside the normal rules of discourse.

LARRY ON HIS OWN ETHNIC GROUP

Rarely met a Jew I didn’t respect. I didn’t say like, I said respect. Certain family members excepted. Oh, and except in Vegas, which is populated mostly by irrespectable Jews and irrespectable Italians, bofe wearing Hawaiian shirts.

LARRY ON SOLVING THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS

While we’re on the subject, I may as well give you my suggestion for achieving peace in the Middle East. If I were the negotiator, first thing I’d do would be greatly expand the city of Jerusalem. Ninety percent of the old city goes to the Jews. Ninety percent of the new city goes to the Palestinians. The new stuff can be a pile of dirt, they just need to claim some land, and the Israelis should be responsible for developing it for them. They want a homeland, let’s create it for them. It’s called Enlarging the Pie.

LARRY ON PRIVATELY TUTORING HIS STUDENTS

Just because I take my teaching seriously, does that mean I don’t avail myself of the opportunities that present themselves to Privately Tutor my students? I anticipated your curiosity on this point. And the answer is: I’m not beneath it. I mean, I don’t make a practice of it, but on occasion, especially with ones from Puerto Rico. For some reason they’re the ones who always come up to you after the first class to invite you to their rooms for extra help. The five roommates, each one cuter than the last, they know to clear out.

On and on go the disquisitions, as relentless as the clouds of ivorygray smog through the hospital window, velvety and choking. I am so powerless that when I occasionally make a sound of protest, I’m shot down with no attempt to control the sarcasm from on high.

Me: You want me to write another letter to Mary’s uncle buttering him up about chinesepridemall.com?

Larry: Yes, Dan, unless you’re suffering writer’s block again.

Me: But if I may, Chinese pride, Emerald Isle pride, all these Web sites you’ve concocted-do you actually believe in any of these things?

Larry: What do my beliefs have to do with it? This is business. Do I believe in Eskimo pride, just because I own a Web site called igloopower. com? Theoretically, sure, why not, but it’s not something I’m emotionally invested in. Am I invested in gay pride? I don’t want to mislead you, so I’ll have to admit: not that much. Nuffing against them, even though I once got stuck behind a gay-pride parade for four hours and had to wonder, do faggots have to be that proud? But Chinese pride could be the biggest haul of all, now that I’ve been here and see what these people require. Mary’s uncle is a man I feel I could work with. He doesn’t say a lot, but he knows where the bodies are buried.

Meanwhile the dictation goes on at any hour, recording the devolution of our life here.

Sept. 25. Dear Colleagues & Godchildren:

A major development took place yesterday that I am most unhappy about. I left the hospital on my own accord for a little stroll but apparently the powers that be thought I was trying to escape and they have insisted that my subordinate Dan pretty much move into the spare room of my suite to keep watch over me. It is true that I did fall in the street and sustained some fairly impressive scabs on my elbows and knees but I am irked that Dan has to now be here even more with me, taking up the good couch and watching every single thing I do with that upper caste accent of his, not that he can help it. If any or all of you would like to write the hospital to petition on my behalf I will not stop you.

Yes, it’s true, I am his hostage, as he is mine. I haven’t checked out of the Super 2, but I spend more time in the hospital suite than anywhere else, frequently crashing on the couch in his spare room, just as I did after college. My life is all Larry, all the time: smelling Larry in my clothes, dreaming Larry in my sleep. By night our heads rest against opposite sides of the same hospital wall, completing the mind meld. By day I sit in my molded-plastic school chair and type.

Sept. 26. Dear Candey Blossoms Candidate AZ418B:

Please be advised that I do not now nor ever did in the past request a romantic dalliance with you. You sound like a nice girl but I am satisfied with the one I got. Plus you are Korean and I am specializing in China right now, even though you point out rather convincingly that Koreans have more advanced fashion sense than China girls. I thank you for your consideration, but please no more mash notes.