My tongue. I can’t get it right. MAGIC Put a rubber band on it. KARCHY I never thought of that. Telling Lies in America THE FIRST BOOK I read was Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, set in the world of czarist Cossack horsemen. It had been a Christmas gift from my father’s friend, the novelist and poet Gyula Bedy, and had been on a shelf unopened for two years. Suddenly I found myself out in the Russian steppes, far from back alleys, juvenile caseworkers, and my mother’s loony laughter. I moved on to The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and The Count of Monte Cristo, books my father had read when he was a boy. I read either on my living room couch, if my mother was okay, or, if she wasn’t, in my nonbathroom sitting on my non–toilet seat with wadded-up Kleenex in my ears. Sometimes I told my father I was going down to the public library after school … and this time I really did, sitting in the Reading Room with the bums who came there to either warm up or cool off. I started to haunt a used paperback store on West 30th and Lorain, a front, I discovered, for a horse racing wire.
