He nodded at the autograph collectors on the sidewalk across the street from the studio gates.

I glanced over. Instantly, my soul flashed out of my body and ran back. It was 1934 and I was mulched in among the ravening crowd, waving pads and pens, rushing about at premiere nights under the klieg lights or pursuing Marlene Dietrich into her hairdresser’s or running after Gary Grant at the Friday-night Legion Stadium boxing matches, waiting outside restaurants for Jean Harlow to have one more three-hour lunch or Claudette Colbert to come laughing out at midnight.

My eyes touched over the crazy mob there and I saw once again the bulldog, Pekingese, pale, myopic faces of nameless friends lost in the past, waiting outside the great Spanish Prado Museum facade of Maximus where the thirty-foot-high intricately scrolled iron gates opened and clanged shut on the impossibly famous. I saw myself lost in that nest of gape-mouthed hungry birds waiting to be fed on brief encounters, flash photographs, ink-signed pads. And as the sun vanished and the moon rose in memory, I saw myself roller-skating nine miles home on the empty sidewalks, dreaming I would someday be the world’s greatest author or a hack writer at Fly by Night Pictures.

“The menagerie?” I murmured. “Is that what you call them?”

“And here,” said Fritz Wong, “is their zoo!”

And we jounced in the studio entrance down alleys full of arriving people, extras and executives. Fritz Wong rammed his car into a NO PARKING zone.

I got out and said, “What’s the difference between a menagerie and a zoo?”

“In here, the zoo, we are kept behind bars by money. Out there, those menagerie goofs are locked in silly dreams.”

“I was one of them once, and dreamed of coming over the studio wall.”

“Stupid. Now you’ll never escape.”

“Yes, I will. I’ve finished another book of stories, and a play. My name will be remembered!”