Oh, hello! This is a Parnanin'in Charla and welcome listeners to another episode of Too Hot for Radio.

We appreciate you returning for another dose of oh so slightly smutty storytelling. And yes, hotheads,

to prepare myself for that ungodly sequence of S's, I did warm up with my favorite tongue twisters.

And yes, they were appropriately too hot. You know, Peter Piper poked a pack of peckers.

She smells sperm cells by the seashore. All the hits. Now they say, never meet your heroes. This is why I routinely shun Oprah's brunch

invitations. But when I was a child, well, hotheads, I did not play it safe. Risk was my

middle name, much to the surprise of the parents who did not give me one. I fostered one very special obsession.

Today we'd call it a parasycial relationship,

but in any case, I felt like I needed more.

So one day after years of pleading fan letters,

I did meet my hero, Thomas the tank engine. And, well, it was awkward.

I mean, I'm shy and he's a train. It was a lot of long silences punctuated by him tooting his own horn.

Anyway, after that encounter, I grew a little circumspect.

The reason I bring all this up, of course, is that today's story is all about what happens

when you become infatuated with someone you don't really know, and what strange or scary

things you might do in order to make real contact with that person.

The story is also about youth, love of language, and what you do with all your passion when

you have more energy than you know what to do with.

This story is by Jonathan Letham.

He's a writer known for novels such as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude,

as well as short stories recently collected in his book a different kind of tension.

While he's amazing at coming up with great narrative hooks, he's also quite good at

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