Right away, I spot this Alfred Damon Runyan for a cockroach with a golden pen. He is a lousy father, husband, Sugar Daddy. He is a toady for William Randolph Hearst. He lets one editor shorten his byline ("Only Protestants use three names") and another make an eternal typo in his last name. He imagines a broadway that never exists until we buy it and he leaves us to this day thinking gangsters are kind of cute instead of vicious scumbags. He dies broke and speechless from cancer, for which he is now best known, thanks to Walter Winchell's Damon Runyon Memorial Cancer Fund. He detests Winchell, who he satirizes as Waldo Winchester in some of the twenty-six short stories that become Hollywood movies, such as Little Miss Marker and Guys and Dolls.

He is also about to get hot again -- go bet on a movie, maybe a musical -- not only because he inspires me to write lame first-person present, but because he is lucky enough to pick Jimmy Breslin as his biographer, who says:

"I am about the only one who can do it because of the life I've lived. I must have heard a thousand conversations about the man and his times from all parts of town because I spend so much of my life, too much of it, in bars and police stations, in racetrack receiving barns, fight gyms, and political clubhouses. I don't think that anybody working New York today has been in more places or heard more, or has so many street memories. . . ."

And he says: "I was in my early twenties at the Journal-American and whenever anybody mentioned Runyon to me, I will tell you exactly what I said. I said to hell with him. I'm better. I'm J. B. Number One."

This is true, but more about that later. Also, J. B., which might stand for Jiggs Bluster if Runyon were making a character out of him, boasts how good his research is, but I will not touch that. Once, on television, I asked J. B., who I have seen take even more notes at a story than I did, why his quotes were different from mine and mine were accurate. He suggested we make another date; I would bring my notebooks and he would bring his notebooks and a baseball bat. That meeting is still pending.

Back to Runyon and the past tense. He was raised in Pueblo, Colorado, after his mother died, by a newspaper bum whose alcoholism and integrity hampered his success. Early on, Alfred Lee Runyan spotted George Armstrong Custer as a phony, and he wrote about it. Young Damon, who started as a reporter in his teens, and got press rates at local whorehouses, quit the booze early and was never hampered by integrity. He said, "I never bit the hand that feeds me," and he ate off any plate set before him.

At The Denver Post he was transferred to the sports department because of his drinking. By the time he got to Hearst's New York American in 1911 he was thirty years old and drinking only coffee. Even then, he wanted to write short stories, but there was easy money in the papers, especially if you didn't get hung up in facts. Runyon found better copy in a wacky relief-pitcher named Bugs Raymond than the rest of the pack got from straight-arrow star Christy Mathewson. J. B. writes: "Being a sportswriter was the same as being a welfare recipient, but without any supervision."

The essential Runyon, mean, cuckolded, without social conscience, crooked, is probably contained in a wonderfully involved story about his second wife, Patrice, which runs through the book like an underground stream. Patrice, some twenty-six years younger, takes up with the boxer Primo Carnera, among others. After Runyon muscles in on a promotion for the sensational youngster Joe Louis, he suggests Carnera as the opponent, knowing he will be destroyed.

Runyon was a small man with wire-rimmed glasses and tiny feet that did not dance. Columnist Arthur (Bugs) Baer echoed the consensus: "Runyon will throw a drowning man both ends of the rope." Runyon was known to go up to the composing room to trim someone else's story so his would fit. His newspaper prose seems dated now, but the twenties were electrified by his famous description of the first game of the 1923 World Series ("This is the way old 'Casey' Stengel ran yesterday afternoon, running his home run home . . . mouth wide open . . . warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride . . ."), and by the same-day scoop of Grover Cleveland Alexander summoned from a bar stool to pitch the final out of the 1926 World Series. It was an avid reader, the gangster Owney Madden, who made him a superstar by granting access to the demimonde of punks, rats, thieves, and killers who were thrilled to become Runyonesque, his glamorized repertory company.

J. B. does not moralize. The closest he comes to psychoanalyzing his subject is this: "In growing up on the streets of a western town, the edges of Runyon's conscience had been shot away and the center of the vessel left numb. A matter that others saw as plainly carrying only the words 'right' and 'wrong' was at best a blur to him."

This, of course, is not totally satisfying. But then, who knows why Runyon can look right through misery while J. B. is changed by it.

Which brings us back to Jiggs Bluster, who also was a sportswriter, unreliable but vivid, had his own media baron, Jock Whitney, and invented himself as he created characters who read cute and were later indicted. J. B. offered a world that often enraged other reporters, especially when readers told them that Breslin's world was truer than what actually happened because Jimmy saw through the facts to the essence.

This is tabloid noise. However, Breslin, unlike Runyon, was feeling, as well as taking notes. Breslin showed the great teacher's capacity to be taught by students. Jiggs Bluster may have piped quotes and gilded scum in his time, but in the long run Jimmy Breslin offered this city a gift: he made it clear that the true experts on life are not officials and academics, but those who live it every day.

Which is why, ultimately, Breslin is more interesting and more important than Runyon. Breslin believes this even more than I do, because this biography of Runyon clearly invites -- no, demands -- a comparison between the subject and the biographer. In diversions on Mussolini, City Hall, Prohibition, the city water system, and how medical greed fostered the drug trade, Breslin competes with and eventually beats Runyon. Why else would J. B. write this absorbing, intricate book that has no index or pictures? Between every line I hear Jiggs Bluster bellow: to hell with him. I'm better.

It's true. And who else can tell that tale but R. L.? I am about the only one who can do it because of the life I've lived. I must have heard a thousand conversations about the man and his times from all parts of town because I ...

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