The roll top desk was well worn and covered in patchy, faded royal blue felt. Office Mate 520 #2 pencil in hand, Dank sat himself down.

Dank Foster, actually christened Sherman Nathaniel Foster by his parents when he was born in 1930 in Detroit, positioned himself that rainy October eve to finish the last chapter of what he was convinced would be his final book. The project at hand was his first book not to be a novel.

No one who knew him recalled when he lurched from being called Sherman to Dank. The name-slip happened before his four-year stint at Georgetown University, beginning in 1948, whilst on a scholarship to the school. He immediately declared himself an English Lit major, wanting to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps and create great works. As a college freshman, he easily saw the name “Dank Foster” on the spines of books yet to be written.

Dank bypassed celebrating his sixtieth birthday a month earlier. On one level, he was pleased to have actually lived to reach the end of six decades. Within ten years of receiving his Georgetown sheepskin, he assumed life for him would have ended around forty.

The only three items Dank Foster had on his desk that evening, in addition to the pencil which he set down after a bit, were ten sheets of blank typing paper, a tall glass of icy cold water and a package of Slim Jim beef jerky chews.

Dank Foster’s first novel, published three years after Georgetown, was greeted with grand fanfare. Critics wrote positively about the work and, fortunately, readers snapped up copies quickly resulting in seven reprints in as many months.

Of course, Dank Foster was arrested for driving – really, careening – under the influence in the midst of the excitement over “Withering Vines and Five Roses,” that first novel.

The 1955 arrest proved painless to Dank. He served no actual jail time and vowed in court not to drink before driving. Indeed, he lied. The drink became a large part of his life. And, impatient from birth, he insisted on having his own vehicle at hand after visiting a tavern or pub. He wanted a quick dash-away should a good turn-of-phrase strike him while boozing.

Despite his habit, the twenty-something author churned out three more bestsellers before hitting thirty.

On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, after celebrating his very near birth anniversary at a pub in London, Dank determined that if he lived ten more years, it would be quite right, a pleasant amount of time. He felt that he could finish eight new novels by then and die, plain and simple.

Returning to the States in 1971, he bought a house in Boulder, Colorado, where he would reluctantly remain, more or less, for the next twenty-nine years.

Dank’s log and rock house was located on the west edge of the scenic town, just at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills, a short walk from a set of raw stone outcrops known as the Flat Irons.

During the 1970s, Dank Foster continued to write and continued to drink. He pumped out eight top sellers by age thirty nine, thus making death at age forty justified and permissible in his mind. In addition to writing prolifically, he drank inordinately, finding himself cuffed after driving under the spirits four more times in the decade of Nixon, Ford and Carter.

He spent all of 1978 behind bars at the Boulder County lockup. It was during this year that he wrote, in jail, what he believed would be his final book, number eight for the decade.

Famous as he had become by 1978, the guards were less than enamored by Dank Foster. They called him Drank Foster to his face, and refused to allow him more than one sheet of blank writing paper each day.

The pulp product restriction could have been enough to drive Dank Foster over the brink. He knew that writing would be the only method of maintaining some semblance of sanity while housed in a concrete cell for 365 days.

Within his first week, Dank Foster realized that for the duration, the sickly, plump guards were going to continue giving him upwards to a dozen sharpened pencils each day, but only one blank piece of paper.

Desiring to beat the guard-engineered pogram, but even more interested in keeping some sanity, Dank Foster devised what he thought was a swell scheme by which he finished his eighth book within eight months despite the spurious paper embargo.

Each morning he would hand the guards the single sheet of paper he received the night before on which he had drawn a beaming smiling face and a number directly under the grinning circle.

The number grew larger each day, yet the guards had no clue as to what the numeral was meant to indicate. They pretended to ignore the digits so as not to give Dank the least bit of satisfaction. When the number on the daily page reached 116,432, Dank ceased the ritual up short.

Upon his release, book eight of the 1970s was immediately published, much to the confusion and chagrin of the jailers.

Finally, the guards decided to buy a copy of the book to see how Dank Foster had managed to complete a novel whist locked, under their charge and bereft of the makings.

The preface to the novel indeed explained all. Toilet paper was in unlimited supply at the Boulder County Jail, even for Dank Foster. He wrote the entire manuscript on squares of toilet paper, carefully crafting phrases, pages and chapters with the soft lead pencils.

Each morning, Dank handed to the guards a smiling face on a piece of paper with the total number of words written on his new novel to date. The book finished at 116,432 words.

Dank wrote eight more novels in the 1980s, all fairing decently to excellently in the marketplace. With his jail experience, he abandoned his typewriter for a lead pencil.

He continued to drink throughout his forties, nearly being arrested an additional time for driving while blitzed. Being over forty years old, he elected to elude the would-be arresting officer in a car chase and somehow managed to win.

On his fiftieth birthday, Dank did two things: a) stopped writing; and b) stopped drinking. He’d had it with both.

He determined to withdraw from pen and bottle after using the restroom of a local Boulder, Colorado pub. A university student had visited the same urinal some time before Dank, a collegian apparently studying Dank’s writing in one of his classes. The student scrawled “Dank sucks” at eye level, a foot above the urinal flusher.

Several months before his sixtieth birthday, Sherman picked up the pencil to scratch off an autobiography. His lifelong publishing house had begged him for ten years to do the self-portrait. He objected, for a decade. He told them he had a reason but wouldn’t tell them what.

He finally succumbed.

Sherman’s book took several weeks.

Sitting at the roll top desk late that night, he went to work on the final chapter. Occasionally, he looked out into the night from the large window, but with no moon, he could hardly make out the outline of the Flat Iron peaks only yards from his house.

Shortly after midnight, he penciled the last paragraph: “Sherman Nathaniel Foster died not long after his sixtieth birthday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at his home in Boulder, Colorado. Dank Foster had died many years earlier.”

With the final paragraph written, Sherman Nathaniel Foster bundled up the manuscript pages in a box labeled with his editor’s name.

Then, looking out the window into the dark night, Sherman picked up the old pistol and did what he had to.

Dank would never have forgiven Sherman had he left a book unfinished.