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Read an excerpt from JT's story, "Stuff," published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003:

I am high on an arrangement of cleaning solvents. All five of us are. We pooled our money to get a hotel room. It is a rare aligning of the supersensible regions when enough of us have the money and are willing to chip in for a hotel room instead of buying a bag of heroin. Usually the concord has been brought about by a freezing wet spell that just won't let up, but mainly coinciding with a most unfortuitous poverty of suitable street drugs. Crayon is the only one who looks 18, is in possession of a credible driver's license and has the prized credit card a trick let him keep. It has a $100 spending limit on it, just enough to get us into this hotel room. It ain't fancy -- they wouldn't think of trusting the regular folks that stay here with no honor bar. But it does have a 13-inch TV with HBO. After the one cleaning staff hauls off, Serenity uses Crayon's maxed-out credit card to jimmy into the supply closet. There, sitting in plastic buckets on the pressed wood shelves like croutons at Sizzler, are the cleaning solvents.

In our rented room we are sitting on the floor, small brown paper bags sealed to our facial orifices as if we are in a plane that did indeed run into an altitude problem and our seatbacks are definitely not in the upright position.

We mean to mine this room for all the opulence it has to offer. All the bleach-scented threadbare towels, stained inflexible sheets, even the cellophane-entombed plastic cups, will come with us after we check out. We each in turn will push in the little silver lock in the doorknob of the bathroom door and take extensively long hot showers; which we aren't able to take at the youth shelters. "Watch out world, I am an adolescent and there is a lock on this shower door!" is a phrase that is not bandied about in said shelters. We each will revel in the subtle pop the paper cigar like band around our individual cakes of soap makes. Serenity swiped all the milky shrunken shampoo bottles, crowned with knobby Santa nose caps, that he could grab. We switch on the bolted down TV, using the fastened down remote, right away to HBO, for this too is a paid for luxury, and we will use all of it, even if what we really crave the most is to collapse on a bed that is ours for the night, without any grownup rules or regulations, no fear of cops or social workers. But we all know that swindle. Sleep is the same as shooting drugs, as soon as ya inject it, ya nod, and next thing you know, it is over and you are out in the cold wet world again. Though a deep slumber is what we may really require, it is too painful to have this glorious opportunity wasted by being unconscious. And we know all five of us will not fit on the bed at the same time. Someone must take the floor and that debate has yet to be undertaken, and we all know at least one of us will pass out, making all haggling moot. It is an unstated battle of wills, of who will pass out first. So as we take turns in the shower, we sit congregated around our TV, HBO. They are showing George Carlin doing a comedy show. By the scattered laughter at inappropriate times in Carlin's routine, it is clear his words are being absorbed at various delayed intervals as if we were standing at a great distance from one another instead of huddled as if around a camp fire. Carlin is doing his "A Place For My Stuff" routine. It's all about folks' stuff, how we all need to store our stuff, our lives are about accumulating stuff, then ya gotta get a bigger house to put all your stuff in. I've heard it before; my mother had a trucker boyfriend who played Carlin tapes in his 18-wheeler as he drove. As Carlin spoke his outrage at our need to keep and store our stuff, the trucker announced with pride, "I own all my dang stuff in this here truck!" My mother did not like being categorized as his "owned stuff," and at the very next truck stop, she took our bag of stuff, and we became minus items on his stuff list.

My sinuses feel Brillo-padded out from the inhaled oven cleaner. I look though a pixilated haze at our backpacks spread out directly behind us. No one is very far from their stuff -- by habit it is situated so if we are the one to pass out, we will land on our stuff, we will be awoken if anyone tries to steal any of our stuff. I watch Gotti rise for her turn to use the bathroom, and realize none of us are insulted that she takes all her stuff with her. We all do the same. Carlin is saying, "That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time."

And man, I think, not having a house, living on the street, you kinda become stuff...

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From the forward of The Best Nonrequired Reading of 2003.

By Zadie Smith

James Joyce: "That ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia"

The ideal reader cannot sleep when holding the writer he was meant to be with. Sometimes you meet someone who is the ideal reader for a writer they have not yet heard of. I met a boy from Tennessee at a college dinner who wore badly chipped black nail polish and a lip ring, had perfect manners, and ended any disagreement or confusion with the sentence "Well, I’m from Tennessee." He was the ideal reader for J. T. Leroy and did not know it, having never heard of him. This was a very frustrating experience. Multiple recommendations did not seem sufficient — I wanted to take him at that moment, in the middle of the dinner, to the bookstore so he might meet the two novels he was going to spend the rest of his life with.

A cult book, of course, is one that induces the feeling of "being chosen as ideal" in every one of its readers. This is a rare, mysterious quality. The difference between, for example, a fine book like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain and a cult book like J. D. Salinger’s Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters is that no one is in any doubt that Roth’s book was written for the general reader, whereas a Salinger reader must fight the irrational sensation that the book was written for her alone. It happens more often in music: Prince fans thought Prince their own private mirage; all the boys who liked Morrissey thought he sang for each of them; I had the same feeling with the initial album of Marshall Mathers, and also the first time I heard Mozart’s Requiem. It is all of it delusional, probably, like simultaneous orgasm, but to think of oneself as the perfect receptacle for an artwork is one of the few wholly benign human vanities.

Ideal reading is aspirational, like dating. It happens that I am E. M. Forster’s ideal reader, but I would much prefer to be Gustave Flaubert’s or William Gaddis’s or Franz Kafka’s or Borges’s. But early on Forster and I saw how we suited, how we fit, how we felt comfortable (too much so?) in each other’s company. I am Forster’s ideal reader because, I think, nothing that he left on the page escapes me. Rightly or wrongly, I feel I get all his jokes and appreciate his nuances, that I am as hurt by his flaws as I am by my own, and as pleased when he is great as I would be if I did something great. I know Morgan. I know what he is going to say before he says it, as if we had been married thirty years. But at the same time, I am never bored by him.

You might know three or four writers like this in your life, and likely as not, you will meet them when you are very young. Understand: They are not the writers you most respect, most envy, or even most enjoy. They are the ones you know. So my advice is, choose them carefully so that people don’t roll their eyes at you at parties (this happens to me a lot).

The definition of a genius might be the reader who is ideal for multiple writers, each of them as dazzling and distant from each other as religions.

Maybe you are the ideal reader for a writer in this collection.