"I’ve had better days," I said, after I thought for a moment or two. "But I suppose I’ve had worse." I was hanging upside-down about halfway between the top and the bottom of a thousand-foot well. It was cold and it was still but mostly it was dark. Every once in a while someone at the top would shake the rope and a wave would come rippling down from a pinpoint of light above me, whacking my head against the stone walls. I would have shouted but I had a touch of the flu and didn’t want to lose my voice, that was my meal ticket.

I made up games to pass the time. I tried to play baseball in my head. Of course, the Cubs still lost every game, tragically in most cases. Sad, really. Leon Durham still couldn’t field the occasional slow-rolling ground ball. I swore to myself and jerked my head forward hard enough to give me a really good knock on the temple. Ow. I could feel the blood well up from yet another gaping pore, dribbling in reverse up my forehead and lodging in my hair, drip-drip-dripping into the water supply of this little country town, poisoning them with bitterness. Or cholera, actually, I’m pretty sure it was cholera.

It had been years since I had seen another human being. If you can call Paul a real human being. Paul was my agent. "Johnny," he said, "have I got a show for you." I was a singer, an old style crooner. Like Frank Sinatra only Jewish. Or Sammy Davis, Jr., only not black. "It’s halfway down a thousand-foot well," he said.

"A well?"

"You know, where they get the water out."

"I know."

"Well, then you know what I’m talking about." And he flashed that fakey grin he had and his ruby pinky ring glinted a little bit. "It’s in Albion, Wisconsin."

"Wisconsin? Paul, nobody ever heard of me outside of Chicago."

"That’s why we gotta start small, kid. Hey, at least it’s a thousand feet deep. They offered a four-hundred-footer." So maybe that was something.

Paul lowered me down slowly, talking the whole time. "Just take it easy, relax." His voice shrank off into the distance. When I got halfway down, he jerked the rope. I twitched back at him to let him know I got the message. The rope must have gotten tangled in his watch because it popped off his wrist and fell down the well. That was my first open wound. I got my second an instant later when Paul’s heel caught me on the ear on his way down. He reached over the edge trying to grab it as it dropped. "Good luck, kid," he said. "See you when it’s over."

Nobody came to the show. So I’m still stuck in the well. Twenty-six years in a thousand foot well, are you kidding me? No artist should have to put up with this kind of humiliation. Still, I guess today could have been worse. I had a nightmare last night, not that I can tell day from night down here. I dreamed that Jimmy hadn’t gotten 600 feet out of him, that I had to spend the rest of my life hanging halfway down a four-hundred-foot well.

That would have been humiliating.