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I used to invite people I didn’t know to send me e-mails. Sometimes I’d receive forty or more a day. They were something I craved. I’d published a book that had achieved “cult” status. Cults never end well, but you don’t realize that when you’re at the center of one, even a small one that mostly exists on the Internet. To me, the e-mails meant I was sticking in the collective consciousness of a subset of people unified only by the fact that they’d read my silly book, or knew my silly name. I enjoyed the mild electric charge that came from knowing I had a small amount of power over a few people’s minds. The e-mails watered that little seed of megalomania that lay in my gut, waiting for nourishment.

If I were to read those words today, I’d erase the e-mail immediately and return to whatever useful task I’d been pursuing before it appeared, writing or checking my rotisserie baseball statistics or eating lunch. But in those days, I was still pretty drunk with myself. I wrote him back immediately.

“Dear ____,” I said. “Thank you very much for the nice e-mail. I appreciate you taking the time to write. However, I’m disappointed that you didn’t spend more time explaining yourself. Do you really think I’m a ‘dick licker’? If so, why? What does it mean to be a ‘dick licker’ anyway? I don’t understand, so here’s what I want you to do: Take that initial sentence and turn it into a story. The story doesn’t have to be very long. In fact, I’d prefer if it were rather short. Call the story “Neal Pollack Is a Dick Licker,” for all I care. But make it a story. If it’s good, or even marginally coherent, I will publish it on my Web site.”

About three weeks later, I got a follow-up e-mail from the same young man. This one had a Microsoft Word document attached. To my delight and relief, the attached story was not called “Neal Pollack Is a Dick Licker.” Instead, it was a boxing melodrama. My spelling and grammar checkers detected no mistakes. So I sent it to my webmaster and immediately had him put it up on the site. A few months later, I actually read the piece. I’ll summarize it for you here:

A boxer named Jerry Rubbo snorts cocaine in a locker room. He talks to his trainer, a pug dog named Hooch, who is fluent in English, French, Chinese, and Esperanto. Hooch informs Jerry that he will be fighting me tonight. Well, not me, but rather “Neal Pollack,” an imaginary boxer who has “had 67 fights and he’s never lost, not once. Truly, just one man ever even managed to draw blood, and that’s only because he worked part-time as a phlebotomist.”

The story continues. Neal Pollack, apparently, also has a Dalmatian named Crazy Willie Spots for his trainer. Jerry enters the ring, where he sees Neal Pollack shooting heroin into his left eye. I quote directly from the story now:

Jerry stepped up onto the apron, which is the matted area just outside the ropes of the ring, as well as an invaluable piece of clothing, most often worn in the kitchen or by hookers dressed up to look like sexy French maids. It was just a matter of minutes before he had made his way onto the inner apron. Pollack, noticing the show, pulled the nail he had hammered into the palm of his hand out of his hand, used it to pick the shards of glass from out between his teeth, and then stepped into the ring himself.

The fight begins. Jerry throws his first punch. Pollack, on major drugs, freaks out because he thinks Jerry’s glove is a giant gopher that’s going to eat his face. From there, the story grows incoherent. Jerry wins the fight, but as the crowd swarms the ring, he dies of a brain embolism. Pollack is trampled by the crowd and also dies. The author reveals that this legendary fight has led to the banning of drugs from all major sports, “except for archery.”

My first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, was comprised of first-person satirical essays, loosely connected, about “Neal Pollack,” the “Greatest Living American Writer,” contemporary of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, acclaimed novelist and literary journalist, sexual adventurer and world traveler. The character bears my name, but other than that, no closer resemblance to my real self than to a talking pig. He’s a sort of blank slate for parodic buffoonery. The Anthology was the first volume published by McSweeneys Books, which at the time had a substantial Web cult of its own. After a few people had read the book, I began to receive fan fiction.

The first came from a guy in Seattle who imagined a world in which he attended a reading of mine and actually managed to pick up a woman there because of his association with me. It was a nice sentiment, so I published the piece on my site. Then I got an e-mail from an angry fellow, appropriately named Chris Kilgore, who said, essentially, that he wanted to kick my ass because I didn’t deserve the “fame” I was receiving. I wrote him back saying, essentially, that instead of wanting to kick my ass, he should write a story about how he wants to kick my ass. If it was reasonably good, I told him, I’d publish it. Then he’d be doubly blessed.

A few weeks later, I received “I Will Beat Neal Pollack to a Bloody Pulp.” In the story, a nameless narrator takes a charter plane to Los Angeles, but it crash-lands in Kansas instead. There waits “Neal Pollack” in a wheat field. He pokes out the narrator’s left eye and then proceeds to grind him bloody into the dirt, but not kill him. As the story ends, the narrator shouts out, “I’m alive, Pollack!” Then, “Somewhere within me there was a searing heat that Pollack’s Aura hadn’t smothered.”

Since I’m in the mood for pretentious generalizations, let me say that you can tell a lot about a society by the stories it has in common. Our culture is so fragmented, our population so enclosed in its little shells of community, that the only real unifying thread, story-wise, comes from television, and, to a lesser extent, movies. Television characters live inside our minds as though they’re actual people. In fact, we know more about them then we do about most people in our physical lives. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that people piss away millions of words every year writing fan fiction.

Most fan fiction is terrible. Much of it is incomprehensible. Some of it is insane. The briefest Google search reveals extensive fan fiction sites for the usual dorky television suspects: Xena: Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Doctor Who, and any superhero you can imagine. There are also fan fiction sites for The Nanny, Nash Bridges, Remington Steele, and Party of Five, among many other completely forgettable items of popular culture.

To illustrate this point, I bring you a scene from “21 Jump Street—Fallen Angels,” by a Ms. Sarah Lubin, which probably makes sense to only the truly dedicated fan:

Tom walked down an alley without a flashlight and without his partner, Doug Penhall. He blew a piece of brown hair out of his face. A crunching of a can echoed in the alleyway. Tom thought it was Harry. “Harry?” asked Tom as he walked farther into the alleyway. He wished he had brought a flashlight. The moon was supposed to be a full one, except clouds were covering it. A gunshot echoed. Tom spun around, to be greeted by a rather large hand. Before he could scream out, the hand grabbed him and covered his mouth. Another hand grabbed the gun and pressed it against Tom’s face. “Hanson?” yelled Capt. Fuller. “Are you okay?”

The most popular form of fan fiction is “slash,” stories that posit gay relationships between pop culture protagonists. The Ur-document of slash is a Star Trek fanzine, begun long before the feverish subreality of the Internet, which documents the ongoing love affair between Captain Kirk and Spock. For reasons that cannot and will not be investigated here, women write the majority of slash fiction. Take, for example, the story “MacGyver: All Work and No Play,” by Meg Bruck. Here’s a telling sentence: “They kissed as passionately as they so often fought, while Murdoc pumped Mac to breathless completion. MacGyver came with a groan and melted into his chair in a boneless and satiated heap.” Oh, yeah. Oh, baby.

Obviously, these television, movie, and comic book characters have profound, even mythic, significance to the practitioners of fan fiction. Otherwise, why would the writers produce stories, some of which run into the tens of thousands of words in multiple chapters, especially considering that their work will be seen by, at the most, only a few dozen people with a similar kink?

These writers aren’t professionals, or if they are, they’re hiding behind several thick layers of pseudonym. But they have characters in their heads, even if they’re stock characters created by professional TV drudges sitting in windowless rooms in Hollywood. It’s a long way down the myth slide from Beowulf to Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. Still, fan fiction authors are perpetuating their characters, extending their universe, and they’re damn serious. I found one anonymous writer on the Web who discussed her craft as intelligently as anyone who contributes to the New York Times’ “Writers on Writing Column,” and with far less pretension:

Nearly 100% of my fiction was written before I tried to define what I would define as “good.” I did use spell-check and I usually rely on a beta reader. That’s about it. The truth is: I have some bedrock beliefs about writing, and about fanfic. Chief among these is that talent makes a difference. And that very few fanfic authors have any real talent for writing. On the other hand, attention to detail will take even an only marginally talented author a long way. Characterization, exposition, description—be careful with these and you can turn out some darned good stories.

I took this advice to heart as I started writing my first novel, Never Mind the Pollacks, a 256-page fictitious history of rock music starring a character named Neal Pollack. That fan fiction philosophy certainly applied to what I was doing more than, say, E. M. Forester’s Aspects of the Novel. My self-absorption was at its all-time height. I was now writing fan fiction about myself.

Let me tell you how far I descended into the madness. In March 2002, I announced a “Neal Pollack fan fiction” contest on my Web site. The three winners, I said, would receive a hardback copy of the Anthology, signed by me. I knew that anyone who would enter such a contest would more than likely already own a copy of my book. I had that figured into the cost.

I received forty-five submissions. Some of them were not, technically, fan fiction, since they didn’t feature a character named Neal Pollack. A few were just disgusting. But most were quite good. I put up thirty fan fiction pieces on my Web site. One was a James Bond-style thriller that took place in the Pyrenees. Another was called “An Excerpt from the Journal I Kept Whilst Neal Pollack and I Were Stranded in the Distant Past, on a Floating Island Made of Dinosaur Manure, Out of Smokes and Withdrawing Slightly.” There was a story featuring Neal Pollack as a character in The Lord of the Rings, and a script of “Pollack’s” appearance at the worst poetry open mike in history. There were also several slash fictions, including one cleverly called “My Love Affair with Neal Pollack.”

I also received something called “Talk of Important Things on a Summer Day,” by a guy from Brooklyn I’d met once at a reading. He told me I was the only person to ever publish his fiction, which made me feel good. Fan fiction might actually have some relevance, I thought. It’s a nice place for a young writer to start, a jumping-off point for the imagination. Why, I was inspiring people while maintaining my very own literary cargo cult! What writer could ask for more?

Along came “Her Dark Silent Cowboy,” written by a woman named Shannon Peach, which she assured me was not her stripper name. The main character was Trixie, a waitress in an all-night truck stop diner. . . . “She is not a skinny little thing,” Ms. Peach wrote,

but juicy; ripe for the fucking, her Uncle Hal used to say with a fond glimmer in his eye. She accessorizes with fishnet tights that reach mid-thigh and a pair of sturdy boots. She wears no panties, just in case. Just in case of what, exactly? Just in case a real cowboy ever walks in, a Neal Pollack, a road warrior with spray-painted on jeans and a package like a summer sausage.

HarperCollins published Never Mind the Pollacks in the fall of 2003. The book certainly has its moments, though the audience of people who can really get an Iggy Pop joke is pretty small. Despite a lot of hype, much of it generated by me, the novel didn’t do all that well. Reviews were mixed, and I do mean that there were some positive reviews. However, the New York Times ran a hit job that described me as “an ordinary humor dork, yet another 35-ish, doughy white man with a goatee and thinning hair.” A personal slam like that doesn’t belong in the country’s most widely read book review, but I have to say that the guy got everything right, except the part about the goatee. Enough of this “Neal Pollack” crap already, I thought.

I got really depressed, which tends to happen after five years of relentless self-aggrandizement ends and you’re left with nothing but an empty husk of what you once wanted to be. Then one morning I got an e-mail from someone I didn’t know. “Surprise,” it said. And there was a link.

An Internet humor site had, with the collusion of some of the many friends I’d made online, decided to throw me a “roast,” without my knowledge or my permission. Over the course of a week, dozens of Web sites were going to roast me, and I was powerless to prevent them. On the one hand, it was flattering that these kids, and they were mostly kids, thought enough of me to fling crap at me for a week. On the other hand, roasts can go terribly wrong, and we all know that the Internet can go terribly wrong. I knew I was in trouble when the illustration for the roast’s home page was a photograph of my face with the head of an erect penis grafted on top.

Most of the roast entries were harmless. My friend Dennis wrote a funny fake news story headlined “Neal Pollack Captured by U.S. Forces.” Another friend published some fake e-mail correspondence between us with the title “Where’d That Balding Jackass Pollack Go, Anyway?” There was a fake series of anti-Pollack insults by the deceased Henny Young-man. These were along the lines of stuff I’d seen before, maybe even a little bit better, and I enjoyed reading them.

The lead essay of the roast, written by someone I’d never met and had barely corresponded with, called me, ironically, “The Most Important Artist of Our Time.” I think the following excerpt speaks louder than any slash fiction could:

Where real artists reinvent themselves, Pollack simply paints his tired little gimmick a new color and pushes it back out there, foolishly confident that nobody will recognize it as the same old schtick in a different hat. Indeed, Real-Deal Neal has somehow consistently parlayed his far-reaching Genuine Suckiness into the self-aware Just-Pretend Suckiness of Pretend Pollack, by masquerading as a (terrible) pompous, intrepid journalist, as a (terrible) snarky, social-political-media pundit/critic/blogger, as a (terrible) rock ’n’ roll warhorse, and as a (terrible) performance artist. In the end, he’s a jack-of-no-trades: talentless, unoriginal, yet successful by way of his own incompetence.

Reading this tore at my gut, particularly since, again, there was some truth to what the guy was saying. I’d opened myself up to this treatment because I’d made myself so accessible on the Internet, and also by behaving like a braying ass for nearly half a decade. Still, upon rereading the essay, I think the guy who wrote it meant well.

Not so, I believe, a piece by someone I did know a bit, who wrote a scathingly critical essay that repeatedly referred to me as a “Jew bastard,” called me far less talented than any of the other writers I occasionally consorted with, and apologized to my then one-year-old son for the fact that he (the writer) was going to have to kick my ass.

I e-mailed the guy and humorlessly ordered him to immediately remove all mention of my son from the piece. Then I e-mailed a friend of mine, another writer, who the “roast” writer claimed I compared to unfavorably, and then my friend wrote the roaster an e-mail, tearing him a new one, and the resulting melodrama was as exhausting as it sounds.

The roaster ceased and desisted. He took the piece off his site, but not before asking my friend and me if he could publish our exchange, which he said had been “revealing.” We said no. Then he published a long apologia on his site, and yet another obscure Internet cockfight pecked its way toward a pointlessly melodramatic conclusion.